The Best American Poetry

Anne Harding Woodworth: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________________

Looking Homeward

 

Bill Waldron spared my mother and father agony

by teaching me how to drive a stick in a cornfield.

 

Think of it as an H, he said of the lever that came

out of the steering shaft of his two-door Dodge,

 

which my mother called a coupay. We were on the two-rut road

around the field that the tractor took to get in and out

 

at planting and harvest. The grassy hump sometimes hit the underside

and Bill would say, Oh m'god, downshift, girl, easerup,

 

which wasn’t hard as long as I remembered to clutch—

or the car would stutter over itself

 

and on the passenger side, Bill would get thrown around

almost to bumping his nose on the dash.

 

He had a big nose, talked as if he had a cold,

and his eye was on my older sister, who dreamed of boys

 

and going to Africa. I felt pretty important as the vehicle

to her heart, though I knew Bill didn’t have a prayer.

 

My sister married a Rhodes Scholar and went to Uganda

for Uhuru. Bill married the daughter of the town monument maker

 

and took over the business

before he even had a chance to look away.

 

He marked my father’s, then my mother’s grave,

so they won't ever be forgotten in that town I drove out of.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Anne Harding Woodworth’s seventh book of poetry, Trouble (Turning Point, 2020), includes her persona cycle, “Hannah Alive,” which became a one-woman play in verse that was a finalist at the Adirondack Shakespeare Co. festival in Essex, New York. Harding Woodworth’s poetry, reviews, and essays appear in anthologies and journals, both in print and online, such as Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, Women & Language, Crannog, Gargoyle, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. She is a co-chair of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library and a member of the Board of Governors at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.

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Poetry and the Movies: Daily Double [by Mindy Aloff]

Question: What is the greatest feature film ever made about a poet? Give the title of the film and the name of the poet who served as its subject.

Answer: The Color of Pomegranates (image, above), 1966, dir. by Georgian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, about the 18^th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova, who wrote exclusively in the Georgian language. (Paradjanov [1924-1990] employed an extravagantly imagistic and magical style of filmmaking, sometimes compared to Pasolini’s, which went against the official style of “Soviet Realism.” When he was sentenced to five years at hard labor in the gulag during the 1970s, leading filmmakers of France and Spain lent their voices to the worldwide outcry of protest. However, in a 1988 interview with Ron Holloway, Parajanov credited his early release to the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon and Aragon’s wife, Elsa Triolet; the novelist John Updike; and the English actor Herbert Marshall. “Sergei Parajanov Speaks Up,” Kinema: a journal for film and audiovisual media, 1995.)

Question: What is the second greatest feature film ever made about a poet?

Answer: Bright Star, 2009, dir. and written by Jane Campion, about John Keats. (Campion’s screenplay was inspired by Andrew Motion’s 1999 Keats biography.)

from the archive; first posted June 2, 2014

The Great B-Sides [by David Lehman]

I just heard Bobby Darin sing "Beyond the Sea" -- wonderful song translated from the French of Charles Trenet -- followed by Sinatra's "Summer Wind." It seems worth pointing out that neither song was on the "A side" of its 45 rpm record. For 200 Monopoly dollars and the pleasure that goes with being absolutely right, identify the songs on the A sides of "Beyond the Sea" and "Summer Wind":

1) "Love Me Tender" and "Witchcraft"
2) "Splish-Splash" and "Hey Jealous Lover"
3) "Mack the Knife" and "Strangers in the Night"
4)  "Dream Lover" and "High Hopes"

from the archive; when first posted, on May 12, 2015, the correct answer was 3) "Mack the Knife" and "Strangers in the Night"

Charles Baudelaire's "Le Vin Des Amants" [translated by Sandra Simonds]

I Love Wine!

 

Today, omg, I’m just so spaced out and splendid,

           as I walk this earth without death, without an apron,

without being a wife and so my heart becomes the nostrils of a winter

        workhorse whose exhalation breaks through the iced, tulip sky.

 

Why does everyone want to torture me?

          All people care about are calendars, clocks, wallets

to time the flesh; Well, I can’t take it!  

 

So here ich bin, all balanced and delirious,

                tapping into some long forgotten intelligence—

 

Oh sister, let’s go to the Oregon coast

           and relax inside the boxed wine paradise of our dreams. 

 

—© 2014 Sandra Simonds

From the archive; We first posted this highly imaginative translation of Baudelaire's "Le Vin Des Amants" (*literally 'the wine of lovers') on January 17, 2014. Pictured above: Charles Baudelaire.

Haiku Exchange 1/22/03 [David Lehman and David Shapiro]

DL to DS
NY Unstuck Exchange (Hi, koo!)

Three drops of blood on
a hill of snow: signal for
rebellion to start.

Two snakes intertwined
around a tree: signal for
couple to have sex.

One touch of Venus
and I will marry the world
with my stiff penis.

I know you knew that
was coming. Of planets I
can’t resist Venus.

How about a new
school of poetics? OK,
but what to call it?

Do you suppose these
haikus will be published and
read on a glad day? [DL, 1 / 20 / 03]

DS to DL

I have one reader
in mind, but probably she
will be glad elsewhere!

this is my haiku
to the addressee slipped way
beyond the world's wake!

Call Poetry Mind
Call all else stupidity
Call squirrel there squirrel!

To pronounce squirrel squirrel
In last stanza change accents
Squirrel is still same squirrel!

Oh nominalist
Oh Zeno halfway there, let
her read us one day!

Here I am at school
In front of blue computer
Fairly serene Fool—         [DS, 1 / 21 / 03]

DL to DS
Monocle, Mon Oncle

Good afternoon, my
friend. Um, how would you define
nominalism?

To define the word
in one haiku seems a task
worthy of your skill.

What did Stevens mean
by writing the “clashed edges
of two words that kill”?

This is my haiku
to the world that never sent
one to Emily:

In January
I always think of David
Shapiro’s first book.   [DL, 1 / 21 / 03]

DS to DL
Haiku no explanation but a vision of Wally and the Liberty Dime (coldsnap)

Only the word lives
for the nominalist -- words
clash: no cold ideas!

Just two words breaking
in Stevens' cave, no fire --
just words -– fireflies -–

Thanks for the memries --
the buried 15 yr old
now lost in old years —

Near Plato's highway
Wallace walks with his wife, but
only words they say!

They go opposite
each other and are happy
Pigeons stay indoors!

That's what the Times sez!
Pigeons indoors! Spouses! Crimes!
Criminals! Ideas!

Well, David, this is
not the complete Clash or edge
just nominal fee --- !

I know that words kill
Because blind History taught
blind Homer they will----

But haikus could be
little consoled birds inside
warm ferries flying--!      [DS, 1 / 22 / 03]

DL to DS
Time for one more haiku

In my sleep I wrote
haiku of wonder but then
the bird flew away.

Nor raven nor crow
yet that blackbird made circles
in the sky and snow.

No nominalist,
That bird was lordly, a sir,
Yes: Sir Realist.

Stevens and wife walked
to end of street and he turned
left and she turned right.

Two swords that kill do
so with greater skill than two
words that kill, n'est-ce pas?    [DL, 1 / 22 / 03]

Photos: (1) top left David Lehman in Washington Square park / photo credit Brian Adams  (2) David Shapiro beside poem beginning "I have one reader."

Happy 233 Birthday Bad Boy Byron

I WANT a hero: an uncommon want,
  When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
  The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
  I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan--
We all have seen him, in the pantomime
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time,  

       -- Don Juan, Canto I

--sdl

Three Poems [by Mitch Sisskind]

The Girls Began Speaking Pig Latin

When the girls began speaking Pig Latin

On the school bus I saw the pleasure

Women discover in a secret language

And more importantly I understood how

Learning Pig Latin could be a shibboleth

Opening the door to love! Yes, love,

Whereas sex such as it was existed

Only as the Playboy pictures furtively

Hidden under a mattress until one day

Torn up and flushed down the toilet for

The awful shame of it. Ethay answeryay

Asway igpay atinlay andyay ohyay odgay

Iyay iedtray. Oh God, I've tried but I failed,

Andyay isyay ityay ownay ootay atelay?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eWlAkAJUOc&fbclid=IwAR2ObTAEZ-03EkhT8d9xX9Ak76EPR3sVNFcvXorJlHmrGLrHxEZ45rWvvMs

 

 

F. Compton R. Buzzard

 

Apropos my field of ancient Egypt

I refer to her as Queen Nefertari or

Mut The Sky Goddess in my texts

When the colloquium brings me

Down to New Haven each week

And she replies with her cutesy Bear

Moniker as in Missing You Now Bear,

Loving You Bear, Lonely Tonight Bear,

Or Horny & Bare Bear which gives me

A laugh but oh my goodness we have

Such a paucity of common ground:

That is to say, I more or less inhabit

The 19th Dynasty while she is purely

This lively and delightful quotidian girl.

Sigh! Recently she has downloaded

Hieroglyphs for Complete Beginners

From Amazon -- but for goodness' sake

That will never get her through a papyrus.

 

 

 

Helen of Starbucks

Hi everybody! Let's look at that scene in

The Iliad where some old Trojan warriors

Passing time on the city wall gaze upon

Helen, the world's most beautiful woman.

She won't even give them the time of day

And the old war horses wax philosophical

Because what the hell else can they do?

Goddamn it, if you get past the age of 75

Or 80 it's like you don't even exist anymore

In the eyes of the young gal serving coffee

At Starbucks so when you tell her you knew

Milton Berle it's like speaking Chinese!

God forbid you mention the names of

Ben Blue or Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom!

 

An Interview with Major Jackson [by Aspen Matis]

January 19, 2021

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

MJ: Fascinating catalogue, all of which I have experienced over the years in reading and teaching poems, that in fact, are not mutually exclusive. Political poetry that I love, for example, pushes me toward a greater consciousness of complicated issues that point to imbalance of power and injustice, and many of them I’ve also found to be exact and beautiful in their lyricism. Yet almost always, with the best poems, I am awakened to language (its palpable presence in the body and mouth) and thus, too, sensory experience. I’ll add to that a growing sense of wonder that marks us as human beings. The best poems are multidimensional and multimodal in that way.

Your most recent book of poems, The Absurd Man, confronts the struggle for meaning in a technological world and ponders the value and nature of creation in the face of meaninglessness. What, in your view, is the meaning of your life?

Of course, on any given day I could answer this differently. You’ll have to forgive the lack of clarity as I truly believe the answer is far more complex than what will land here. In the past and today, I have talked about challenging the precincts of meaning, which takes a great dosage of critical intelligence and, believe it or not, love. I find meaning in the passionate pursuit of the “real” as Milosz phrases it. In writing poems, I am strongly committed to the possibility of uttering something that cracks and breaks through the veneer of my insecurities and fears, that pierces the armor I’ve built up that disconnects and alienates me from humanity. 

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

We are bound, regrettably, by the strictures of language; meaning is its own prison, and thus, our lives become faint replicas of outdated ideas and what was previously discovered. No matter how beautiful the garden evoked in language, if it merely alludes to some biblical origin story then it is valueless, and quite possibly redundant. We rarely discuss the ethical imperative of “making it new.” Understandably, it is a weighty responsibility to put on poetry, a tall order as we say. Yet still, out of relevancy and quite possibly a spiritual urgency, a poet has to discover radical ways of picturing and sounding out this moment. That’s pretty far-reaching to me. In this way, poetry speaks to the living fact of being alive today. For example, some in our country believe it is 1776; I have been saying lately that we need a new image of patriotism so that we do not fall victim to a vision of the past that constrains us.

What, in your view, should that new image of patriotism look like?

My favorite image of patriotism is new Americans taking the oath of allegiance which I had the pleasure of witnessing once during a friend’s naturalization ceremony. There was not a dry eye in the room. It made me hopeful about the future of our country, and the bedrock foundations of freedom and opportunity. Scraggly hordes of men pretending we are in colonial America carrying weapons is the stuff of history books that exploits political divisions and frankly stokes the flames of populism that seem aimed at the worst of our humanity. Every American is a patriot and no one group can claim greater right to that label than another. 

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

Probably the Metaphysical Poets, chiefly Andrew Marvell and John Donne. Donne’s poems “The Ecstasy” and “The Good-Morrow” are favorites. I like poems that are intellectually demanding yet aim for a single argument about love and life, not to mention the transcendent aspects of sex. Also, someone who reads my poems closely knows that I hinge quite a bit on metaphor and its ability to order thought and give it shape.

You edited the 2019 edition of The Best American Poetry. What was that experience like for you? How, if at all, did editing the anthology affect you? Are you proud of the book? How do you feel about the process—and the product of your labor—in retrospect?

As I write in the Introduction, editing the book had me fall in love again with poetry; after many years of teaching and editing, I was becoming cynical and dispassionate. The experience was akin to standing on a beach for a year and deciding to plunge into a series of crashing waves; the richness of life in American poetry is stunningly humbling. Human beings transcribe as much joy and love in poetry with great relish and embodiment as they do their pain. Such inner musings authentically rendered in language deeply impacted my spiritual life. I only wish I could have doubled or even tripled the anthology in size. So many other poems would have found their way into its pages. I read all of the previous Best American Poetry introductions, which was its own education. Also, too, I was reminded of the importance of magazine editors whose curating is so underappreciated. It was a joy to work with series editor David Lehman. One gets a sense of his and others’ huge contributions to literary culture.

Ed note: For Aspen's interview with Mitch Sisskind, which we posted last Thursday (Jan 14, 2021), please click here.

"I Took a Creative Writing Class" [by Molly Arden]

 

Everybody wanted to sleep with
On one side
Each line had to

And embrace

For example a cup
Equals
A pearl necklace means

Where can I go when
Why did you think I didn’t

Toys

If you left on the last

Three straight times
He didn’t love
He loved
Her
Me

 

art by Nelina Trubach-Moshnikova

 

"What Trumps Vain Boasts": The Wizardry of "Ozymandias" [by David Lehman]

 

Impromptu poetry competitions were not uncommon among the English Romantic poets. The poets would be given a quarter of an hour or so to turn out a serviceable sonnet on a chosen theme. In December 1816 John Keats and Leigh Hunt wrote sonnets on “the grasshopper and cricket.” Hunt’s effort holds up pretty well, but you’d have to say that Keats won with the poem that begins “The poetry of earth is never dead” and ends “on a lone winter evening,” when “to one in drowsiness half lost” the cricket “shrills” and wakens an echo of the grasshopper’s summer song “among some grassy hills.”

In 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Ozymandias,” perhaps the greatest of his short poems, when he and his banker friend Horace Smith sat down to compose dueling sonnets on a passage from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus. The passage concerned Rameses II, the Egyptian pharaoh who squared off against Moses in Exodus. A massive statue glorifying him proclaimed on its pedestal that he was the “king of kings.” The poets used this phrase and called the ancient pharaoh, whose statue lay in ruins, Ozymandias.

Horace Smith’s “Ozymandias” has some fine lines about a hunter in a future age beholding “some fragment huge” in the wilderness “where London once stood.” But genius went into Shelley’s poem:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

One reason “Ozymandias” is so often anthologized is that it conveys a message dear to poets. Time mocks emperors, particularly boastful ones. The sculptor’s “hand that mocked” is a brilliant pun, for the word “mocked” in 1817 signified not only ridicule but also imitation, as in painting from a model.

Fragments fascinate us, because they bear witness to the devastation of time.

Shakespeare’s sonnet #55 argues in favor of poetry, which shall outlive “the gilded monuments/ Of princes,” because marble and stone are inevitably “besmear’d with sluttish time,” while language, being immaterial, can theoretically live forever. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley, the brash idealist, argues against tyranny itself – “the frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” – in the course of presenting the evidence that time defeats despots with their monumental vanity.

 An unusual rhyme scheme, with three rhymes occurring three times each, contributes to the power of “Ozymandias.” But the magnificence of the poem’s conclusion goes beyond rhetoric.  The disjunction between “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” and the curt sentence that follows, “Nothing beside remains,” is a breathtaking example of how a poet can use the line-break as a meaning-making mechanism.

The phrase “colossal wreck,” a near oxymoron, is as landlocked in the poem’s last three lines as the ruined statue in the endless desert. The alliteration – “boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away” – smoothly conveys a sense of the vast continuous distance covered in that “stretch.”  The image is haunting, as is the framing device that Shelley employs. We are left wondering about the mysterious “traveler from an antique land” who is said to be the author of the poem.

“The New Colossus” (1883), Emma Lazarus’s stirring sonnet about the Statue of Liberty, borrows a rhyme from “Ozymandias” (stand, land, command) and invites us to read it as a rejoinder to Shelley’s sonnet. The statue in Lazarus' poem is a replacement for the Colossus of Rhodes, “the brazen giant of Greek fame.” The great bronze monument to the sun god, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, stood in the harbor of Rhodes. (It crumbled in an earthquake in 226 BC.) Not as a warrior with “conquering limbs” but as a woman with "mild eyes" and "silent lips," the new colossus will stand as tall as the old, honoring not a god but an ideal that will make it a wonder of the modern world. Welcoming immigrants and refugees, the legend in Lazarus' poem could be construed as the opposite of a tyrant's imperial vanity:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she,
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

-- David Lehman

from the archive; first published as a "masterpiece" column in The Wall Street Journal (June 23, 2017 1:04 pm ET).

"The Definition of Gardening" [by James Tate]

Jim just loves to garden, yes he does.

He likes nothing better than to put on

his little overalls and his straw hat.

He says, "Let's go get those tools, Jim."

But then doubt begins to set in.

He says, "What is a garden, anyway?"

And thoughts about a "modernistic" garden

begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve.

He stands in the driveway a long time.

"Horticulture is a groping in the dark

into the obscure and unfamiliar,

kneeling before a disinterested secret,

slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,

birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and

destroy, pull out and apply salt,

hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,

where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,

the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love,

into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,

through the nose, the earsplitting necrology

of it, the withering, shriveling,

the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder

and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,

wireworms are worse than their parents,

there is no way out, flowers as big as heads,

pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently

at me, the me who so loves to garden

because it prevents the heaving of the ground

and the untimely death of porch furniture,

and dark, murky days in a large city

and the dream home under a permanent storm

is also a factor to keep in mind."

 

James Tate, "The Definition of Gardening" from Shroud of the Gnome (The Ecco Press, 1997)

"Links of Snow" [haiku exchange by David Lehman & Shapiro, Jan 13-19, 2003]

Subj:    Re: A little group to compensate for senior miscounting; more on KK
Date:    1/13/03 9:42:35 AM Eastern Standard Time
From:    DaJoShap
To:    DCLEHMAN

Let the breeze of So What
Blow through you, said the masters:
Now it does: And so?

Kenneth liked the Rules:
But preferred smashing them Smash!
Why count? Huh? Go Fish!

If I could love all
The way I worshiped Her once
I'd be a Saint Paul!

If I loved each Thing
The way I adored that Girl:
Spinoza would sing!

That's my Father---there!
No, just a butterfly re-
turning to its branch!

Op illusions
Are not haiku? What say you?
Everything's haiku

Black holes, flat screens:
Is a new word poetry?
Old snow falls slowly--

Don't tease me, young Dave!
Let's plop like Ken into pond
Make happy sound wave!     

-- DS, 1 / 13 / 03

Haiku Heaven

Date: 1/13/03 7:15:47 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: DCLEHMAN
To: DaJoShap

Even the master
of So What has off days, days
off, days of fire.

O for a muse of
fire on this green lake of
snow in the mountains.

We no can count but
why keep account of our
haiku transgressions?

A bird's eye disturbs
this winter landscape of hills
like white short stories.

On the other hand,
one thing's left to do, to say:
I've forgotten what.

[DL, 1 / 13 / 03]

Links of Snow

from David Shapiro to David Lehman

Snow to me, I say,
Is what bananas are to
Gabriel Marquez!

I thought snow useless
Until I saw a book sez:
Economic Snow.

A physicist cried:
Wake up, David, you never
Thought snow was useful!?

No, no, no., never
Have I ever thought that snow
Was useful! To skis

trees, warming flowers,
giving symbolists white hours--
SNOW IS NOT MONEY!

A snowman blinks, War.
Time of the empire, fat whore!
On the lawn, new snow!

*****
As if pardoned from
death by the Czar of all Rus:
he received her note!

Swifter than haiku,
deeper than Prospero's book,
E-mail like snow...Look!

--DS, 1 / 17 / 03

Music of Poetry, and Ginsberg’s Box Remembered

Violin on floor --
Haven't practiced in months now--
Hear planes in the air!

Mute violin there--
No more sound than Al's squeeze-box--
Practice haiku more-!

-- DS, 1 / 18 / 03

Breakfast at Noon

from David Lehman to David Shapiro

Greetings from my hut
in Manhattan where I slept
late this cold morning.

Breakfast at noon, no
strings but a piano plays
"Shall We Dance" (Rodgers).

Yes, I still live back
in the fifties in Brooklyn
cheering the Dodgers.

-- (DL, 1/ 18 / 03]

Borges: Baseball is a metaphysical game because it need never conclude

And I in NJ
I make the snowy commute
Over the nude bridge!

How I've ended there!
Baseball metaphysical--
It may never end!

I walked Weequahic Park ("wekwak”)
Now my family is gone---
Let's take mental walk! 

-- DS, 1 / 19 / 03

Jane Freilicher, "Parts of a World" at Kasmin (Jan 21-Feb 27, 2021)

 

 

"The Master of the Gamblers": Omnia Vincit Amor

The "Master of the Gamblers" is how art historians, curators, and auctioneers refer to the 17th-century Italian painter (Rome, maybe Naples), otherwise unnamed, who painted, in the main, gamblers playing cards and shooting dice. "Omnia Vincit Amor" ("Love  Conquers All") is unusual among his works. -- DL

John Yau: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Eve Aschheim

__________________________________________________________________________________

Things I Should Tell You Before It’s Too Late

 

Princess Sitting Duck isn’t my real name

I am not one of the ones marred

 

By inexplicable outbursts of an obstreperous nature

Most times I am a curtain of conviviality

 

Don’t make friends with my dog

I used to collect ideas until I realized

 

I don’t have any of my own

Learn to shirk your duties

 

With dignity I always say

I used to dress in a squirrel suit

 

and play in the forest

where it flanks the railroad tracks

 

leading to the haunted mines

I never reached the rank of colonel

 

You can hold my hand

as long as you don’t lose it

 

I serve drinks in tall blue glasses

I am never sure which principles are mine

 

Sometimes I get glassy-eyed

and pee on the neighbor’s porch

 

I no longer throw stones at children

I bow whenever I see a high-ranking dignitary

 

stop to tie his shoes

or zip up his fly

 

Princess Sitting duck isn’t my nickname either

____________________________________________________________________________________________

John Yau has published many books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. He has a book of poems, Genghis Chan on Drums, forthcoming from Omnidawn, and a monograph on the Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong, from Lund Humphries (both fall 2021). He is the publisher of Black Square Editions, and his reviews of art and poetry appear regularly in the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He lives in New York City and teaches at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University). [For more information on, and work by, John Yau, click here.]

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

                  John Yau, 1983. Oil on canvas by Robert Berlind

 

 

 

"Witness to a Murder" [by David Lehman]

Witness to a Murder

                                                                   -- Barbara Stanwyck (1954)

She saw a murder.
She bought all the papers.
She pocketed the murdered woman's earrings.
She called the police.
She smoked a cigarette.
She told her story and was not believed.
She deduced that the door had been tampered with.
She answered the doctor's unreasonable questions reasonably.
She heard the woman say one thing: “Show Mr. Peabody into the library, please.”
She didn't back down.
She insisted she saw the ex-Nazi, author of Age of Violence, kill the girl, “Joyce Stewart.”
She didn't write the threatening letters that were typed on her machine.
She didn't get ticketed, just scolded, for speeding on a scary mountainous road.
She took the elevator down.
She ran in the street.
She hurried up the black and white steps pursued by shadows. 

Balanchine Quiz [by Mindy Aloff]

Question: In the Igor Stravinsky score for the 1928 Balanchine ballet Apollon Musagète, today known as Apollo, which 17^th-century French poet’s treatise, L’Art poétique—as the dance scholar Lynn Garafola has written—“sparked Stravinsky’s conception” and called for poets to practice which poetic meter, built by Stravinsky into the variation for Calliope?

Answer: Nicolas Boileau, Alexandrines.

Question: Name three ballets or ballets within other musical works in which Balanchine included the figure of a poet, immortal or mortal, anonymous or named.

Answer (choose any three): Apollo (or Apollon Musagète, 1928, Stravinsky score, Ballets Russes), Orphée aux Enfers (Comic opera in three acts and nine scenes, 1931, Jacques Offenbach, Les Ballets Russes de Georges Balanchine), Les Amours du Poète (Comedy with music in five acts: Act III song “Le Pauvre Pierre,” 1932, Robert Schumann, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo), Waltzes of Beethoven (1933, Les Ballets 1933), The Bat (1936, Jacques Offenbach, American Ballet Ensemble), Orpheus and Eurydice (Opera in two acts and four scenes, 1936, Christoph Willibald Gluck, American Ballet Ensemble), The Song of Norway (Operetta in two acts and seven scenes, 1944, Edvard Grieg, dancers from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo), The Night Shadow (later retitled La Somnambula; 1946; Vittorio Rieti, based on themes in operas by Vincenzo Bellini; Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo), Orpheus (Ballet in three scenes, 1948, Stravinsky, Ballet Society), Orpheus und Eurydike (Opera in three acts and five scenes, 1963, C.W. Gluck, Ballett der Hamburgischen Staatsoper. N.B.: The “Chaconne” of this production served as the basis for the 1976 ballet Chaconne at the New York City Ballet), Don Quixote (Ballet in three acts, 1965, Nicholas Nabokov, New York City Ballet). (From George Balanchine’s catalog raisonné, www.balanchine.org )

Question: Who answered as follows off the top of his head in response to a question during a 1983 interview with Richard Philp for Dance Magazine?

“Recently I was reading a collection of poems and felt a sudden shift, which at first I couldn’t identify. In a very modest, unemphatic way a simple “it” had been slipped in which had the effect of changing the whole sense of the four lines before and the three or four lines which followed. In just one sentence everything had been changed as a result of the placement of one two-letter word. You enjoyed the feel of that, sensed the correctness. The same is true of the shifts in Balanchine’s dances. As subtle as they may be, they are essential to the life and meaning of his work. Few choreographers have known how to do that.”

Answer: Edwin Denby (from “Balanchine’s Poetics,” Dance Writings, ed. Robert Cornfield and William MacKay, first pub. 1986 by Alfred A. Knopf, reprinted by The University Press of Florida.

from the archive; first posted June 2, 2014.

Rudy Burckhardt's Photos at Tibor de Nagy (part two) [by Vincent Katz]

How Rudy Burckhardt photographed on the move is something of mystery. He did it, so we know it’s possible, but try to put yourself in his position. He must have moved with a dancer’s speed and precision, or, cat-like, lain in wait before pouncing on his unsuspecting prey. He regularly captures head-on in close proximity the precise moment at which or just before someone looks at him and says, “Hey!”

In addition to tableaux frozen from the city’s gyre, Burckhardt could compose images that seem snatched from a Renaissance picture-making textbook. Such a one is V-Back, from about 1985. There are two versions of this moment. In the first, Rudy has come up close behind a beautiful woman, her hair carefully styled and held back by a clip, a slender chain around her neck, a purse hanging from her left shoulder, her sweater turned backward, so that its V reveals her upper back. We can see the spinal cleft as it travels down, widening to a darkness in between her delicately flaring shoulder blades. We see a man in a suit in front of her, waiting to cross the street. We catch a glimpse of the traffic as it rushes past.

In the second photo of this moment, Burckhardt has quickly and adroitly turned his camera from a vertical to a horizontal format. He takes advantage of a moment of urban serendipity. A large white delivery truck is passing. In Burckhardt’s horizontal frame, we now see, in addition to the man in the suit on the left, a man in a long-sleeved striped shirt on the right. These two men frame this remarkable woman, each one turned slightly toward her, without actually looking at her, in two different gestures, diffidence and deference. And in that split-second, the woman has suddenly become aware of something behind her, some heat of energy, some thinking, something stretching back to the galleries of European museums, kindled on the stages of New York’s ballet. She turns, looking at Burckhardt, and now at us in the photograph, her beautiful face caught in that glance, the whole picture given a timeless quality by the pure background of the white truck passing, such that, for a split-second, Burckhardt has taken the city completely away, and we are enveloped in this moment of observation, two people seeing each other for the first time.

The exhibition of these and other chance encounters of New York City residents immortalized by Burckhardt’s eye and body is punctuated by a sequence of three films shown on a wall-mounted monitor. In these three films — Default Averted  (1975), Cerveza Bud (1981), and Ostensibly (1989) — Burckhardt takes three different approaches, all showing his complex approach to cinema. Default Averted refers to the moment when New York City almost went bankrupt; Burckhardt takes a typically wry approach to the topic, choosing to show a building being demolished over time. This is a favorite motif of his in his films; he loved the way New York was built, and also knocked down, sporadically, without municipal oversight. Cerveza Bud focuses on one of New York’s great pleasures — public joy, in this case in the form of outdoor dancing, music playing, and roller skating. As usual, Burckhardt is drawn to the city’s black and Latinx populations. Ostensibly uses a poem by that title by John Ashbery, and in fact Ashbery appears in the film, in red suspenders, recording the poem. So many events and images fly by in these films, balanced by moments of calm, that I like to try to document them as they pass. I’ll end with my notes from the films.

Default Averted (1975, 20 minutes, black and white, music by Thelonious Monk and Edgar Varèse)

Architectural emblems, details, demolition, smoke and fire
Fireman grins
Boards dropped from roof
T Monk big band sound to sped up b/w city traffic
Shakespeare-like head all that remains: preserved relic in antic sweep of wreckage-remake (the New York mantra)
Earl Hines reflections in wet pavement
Walls fall, classic Burckhardtism

Cerveza Bud (1981, 30 minutes, color)

Endless bodies of color, dancing, roller skating
Public displays of love: bodies, gay couples dance Hustle to Kool & The Gang
Reclining in summer grass à la La Grand Jatte but more relaxed, more openly sexual
Open embrace of Twin Towers, part of that cityscape with street light suspended in front
Seagull soars against dirtied blue

Ostensibly (1989, 16 minutes, color, poem by John Ashbery,)

piano music by Alvin Curran)
JA reading poem
Kia Heath nude poses in front of Rudy’s De Kooning then dresses, walks in snow
Nice family hops backward up steps
Maine log-throwing competition
A woman (Rochelle Kraut?) reads same poem
Shots of pond details of trees
Man jogs shirtless on Maine road
NY intersection (23rd & Broadway?) in rain reflection
Dancers at party (Skowhegan?)
RB pushing garbage to gutter (NY) and trees to ground (Maine)
Lichen details
NY walkers, skylines, water towers, sped up clouds

Ed. Note:  for part one of Vincent Katz's piece on the new Rudy Burckhardt show, click here. 

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 11 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side
Tel: 212 262 5050. | Web: www.tibordenagy.com | Email: info@tibordenagy.com
The show is up from December 21, 2020 until January 23, 2021.
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday to Saturday 10-6pm

"The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered" [by Clive James, 1939-2019]

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

A Culture in Crisis: Jason Shinder on "Howl" [film by Bill Hayward]

"A culture in crisis..." from bill hayward on Vimeo.