The Best American Poetry

A Question from Emily Dickinson [by David Lehman]

I have a great fondness for two-line poems.

Robert Frost's poem "The Span of Life" is a perfect couplet, enacting the life of a dog as if in a diptych representing youth and old age:

The Span of Life

The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.

– Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Many of the best two-line poems perform a verbal feat of some kind. The form is an invitation to the maker of epitaphs, including irreverent ones. From John Dryden:  "Here lies my wife. Here let her lie. / Now she's at rest, and so am I."

Stacey reminds me of Howard Nemerov's masterpiece of succinctness:

Bacon & Eggs

The chicken contributes,
But the pig gives his all.

Some two-line poems act like object lessons in montage technique, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" being the most famous example.

Rarer is the two-line poem that asks a question, a rhetorical question in a sense, but not in the sense that it asserts a self-evident proposition as when Yeats concludes "Among School Children" (not a two-line poem) by asking "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

Emilt Dickinson's #1095, without a title to help direct us, qualifies as such a question:

To whom the Mornings stand for Nights,
What must the Midnights – be!

The poem ends with an exclamation, rather than a question mark, and what is signified is wonder. But I maintain that the ratio deserves to be completed. If mornings are nights, what, then, are midnights? And whaty causes the poet to utter he exclamation? Think about it.  -- DL

– Emily Dickinson, (1830-1886)

Yeats & Paul Violi

<< Last evening, when listening to Paul Violi's friends and colleagues and students and admirers read his poems, I thought of the last two lines of Yeats's "The Municipal Gallery Revisited,"  and recited them in my capacity as MC of the memorial. Here are the culminating lines of Yeats's multi-part poem. DL

You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends. 

William Butler Yeats >>

From the archive; first posted December 2, 2011

Athena Sonnets (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'What are words that you hate, Athena,
'And what are the words that you love?'
Until now I had never called her Athena
But here was born a delicate intimacy 
Between us and moreover I really was
Curious re Athena's word preferences.
She hung fire for a moment then said
'Tantamount! I hate that word which
'Only the assholes speaketh. Words
'That I love? Hm, hm. Well, nosegay 
'Is dear to me except nosegay is rarely
'Heard since the old Victorian times.
'Wait, why did you call me Athena?
'Wait, I LOVE the word antimacassar.' 

Another Athena sonnet >> 

Read in my face a volume of despairs,
The wailing Iliads of my tragic woe,
Drawn with my blood and printed with my cares
Wrought by her hand, that I have honor'd so.
Who, whilst I burn, she sings at my soul's wrack,
Looking aloft from turret of her pride;
There my soul's tyrant joys her in the sack
Of her own seat, whereof I made her guide.
There do these smokes that from affliction rise,
Serve as an incense to a cruel Dame;
A sacrifice thrice grateful to her eyes,
Because their power serve to exact the same.
Thus ruins she, to satisfy her will,
The Temple where her name was honor'd still.

                           -- Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) 

 

 

Noir City Festival (Oakland, CA, January 2023)

Interstellar Theme Park [poem by Jack Skelley]

Photo by Gary Leonard

(Ed note: Ever since we posted the conversation between poets Jerome Sala and Jack Skelley we've been fielding requests for their poems. Here is Jack Skelley's Interstellar Theme Park, from his book of the same title. You can find it here.)

Interstellar Theme Park by Jack Skelley

Based on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s lost epic, Dune

I want whore-ships

And I want these whore-ships to dock in orbital flesh

I want ruby-throated ornithopters sipping the nectar of dwarf stars

I want Emperor Dali on a toilet throne of dolphins

I want drones that say Yes Daddy

I want H.R. Geiger mausoleums for the 27 Club

I want quasi-suspended animation (genital arousal optional)

I want a planet of toys

I want a jihad of joys

And a gulag of Karens

I want Rimbaudian grammar police

I want woke Stormy Daniels balloon rides

I want light-rail Stations of the Cross

I want Picasso’s pajamas 50% off in all emporia

I want Vibrators by Dre standard

I want Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd to levitate the Tomorrowland Terrace

I want 50-foot Miley Cyrus mourning her Dead Petz on Dog Star Sirius

I want time itself to eddy and unhitch from its turntable of deception

I want Moon Juice cougars – see them jump-start adaptation, anointed with next-gen Kardashian lips and hips

I want Fruity Pebbles vaccination bars, with stalactites nippling jelly babies, but without the jingle-jangle crash

While we’re at it, I want fingers that are 17 trillion light-years long, probing asteroids & healing hemorrhoids

I want Aristophanes’ tranny-globe beings, rolling around & layered with eyes – day and night, without ceasing, they sing

Don’t forget: I want on-demand K-holes mouthing the words “now” & “wow,” drooling and dripping with ahegao

I want rings, blue rings, and rings around rings of Berlin-blue orbs

Get me Stanley Kubrick, I want him to edit all humanity to grunts and symbols

On gas-giant Neptune I want Hello Kitty to be Hell Kitty

I want fresh-baked hosts branded with the Holy Ghost

Oh, and I also want bio-feedback donuts that induce satori

I want 12 Lady Gagas to perform “Lady Madonna” – each one is pregnant and haloed with 12 stars

I want drunk-surfing on a river of anti-gravity

And into this river I want a comet called Wormwood to crash with cold fire nightly at 9

I want Kali the Destroyer decapitating Parvati from Survivor

I want to occupy octopi to learn their language of shape & texture

I want a sunken palace where the spirits of lost lovers murmur

I want thick, chewy anarchy in a candy-colored shell

I want to live-stream Apocalypse Dreams

I want universal chaos

I want the abyss

And, when the Singularity finally arrives, and dumb matter rises to gaze upon itself and remember who it always was, I want everyone to defragmentize into their star-child, co-mingle dimensions, and upload into each other’s arms

 

"Midston House" [by David Schubert, 1913-1946]

      What is needed is a technique
Of conversation, I think, as I put on the
Electric light. But not the limited
Vocabulary of our experience, the
Surface irritations which pile up,
Accumulate a city, – but the expression,
Metamorphosed, of what they are the
Metaphor of; – and their conversion into light.

      On the bus toward Midston House
I survey the people in their actions. Placid
And relaxed are they; this is the humdrum
Claptrap costume of girls and food, men
And work and house. The insurance
Of habit is circular, as
Democracy has interlocking duties,
Circular obediences.

      Yet how to transform
The continual failing clouds of
Energy, into light? The vital
Intelligence of the man whom I am
Going to visit – does he know? I
Think how the sharp severing of
My life's task – severed associations,
Produced in me almost a
Lypothymia of grief and a hiatus of
Days, which grew fangs of anger, my
Lycanthropy – thank god, it's over!

      I am fired from my job by flames, big
As angry consciences; I can do
Nothing; I have not one ability! This man
Whom I am waiting to see in the lobby – 
All my life I am waiting for something that
Does not eventuate – will he
Exist?

      The law of life, like an abstract
Rigorous lawyer, passes a terrifying judg-
Ment on poor little me, in a strange foreign
Syllogism. He is cheating me! He will not
Keep the appointment!

                                    His probity
Rebukes my suspicion. What can I say, that
I love him; that I am un-
Worthy? My doubt makes me feel,
– Even as we discuss another's dishonesty –
Ugly, irate, and damned avid, a cunning
Rascal, like that ugly bird of the White
Nile.

      But the poem is just this
Speaking of what cannot be said
To the person I want to say it.
I am sleepy with subtlety; the room strikes me as
Dark, so cold, so lonely. There is
No one in it. I will put on all the lights.
I wish I could go
On a long, on a long long journey
To a place where life is simple and decent, not
Too demanding.

No! On the vehicle, Tomorrow, I will see
That man, whose handshake was happiness.

Click here for Ron Horning's essay on David Schubert.

Three Poems from the Ukraine [by Slava Konoval]

The Ukrainian poet Vyacheslav ("Slava") Konoval sent us these three poems for publication. A member of the Geer Poetry Group (Wales) and a member of the Federation of Scottish Writers, Slava lives in Kyiv and is determined to weather the Russian military storm. He tells me he has devoted much energy to address "acute social problems, such as overcoming poverty, ecology issues, the relationship of people with the government." I mean to ask him whether he wrote these three poems in English or translated them. Do they not read like translations? On the theory that there is a certain charm in poetry as a second language, and in respect of the embattled nation for whom Konoval would speak, I present them here even before I find out more.

Now I have found out more:

<<< Yea, I am writing in English to promote my compatriots and show the thick skin of the Ukranian soul.

Translation of anything cannot guarantee the precisely, especially in art activity, so I do original form writing in non-my native language.

Yea, I live in Kyiv and haven't leave my city from time of the overwhelming Russian invasion till nowadays. >>>

Don’t be a freak

I can’t be a freak,
I can’t play it,
I have nothing to speak.
From thought about it
I want only to spit.

I’m not a freak,
I haven’t millions on account,
I’m not strong as beek,
which stands firmly on the ground or on the mount.

I was brought up with my mother’s milk,
it is precious like silk,
hey, artificial behavior is bilk.

Richard’s Castle

On the sprawling mountain of Usypalnytsia,
the neo-Gothic wind built
a castle for the Lion Heart,
below St. Andrew's Church.
The castle's a marvel of art!

An unknown architect
loved the pages of Walter Scott,
having built pointed Spires,
laid his heart.

Moody mountain, sharp descent,
she let the towers in
through philanthropic help, maybe cent,
neither royal funds, no sin.

The royal castle shines,
in yellow colors,
in the graceful contours and lines.

Night Singer

Where missile strikes hit,
where the borders with Belarus are close,
I am asking for Your consent, please, permit
to tell about the Ukrainian company,
I honor her, raise a glass, and toast.

In days of turmoil, in stormy days,
IKOC like a weapon took a thread and a needle,
IKOC has will, courage and actions,
not empty phrases.

Weavers, mechanics, accountants,
they are bees, buzzing in workshops,
IKOC flaunts its image and patents
sewn shoes and uniforms for the military,
sketches in laptops.

With style, taste, and quality
IKOC cares about defenders,
who grind the enemy in a meat grinder,
and like blenders.

May the company prosper
that IKOC had a pre-war profit,
an investor is waiting for him in line, a sponsor.

Ed: Re "Night Singer": Diligent Internet searches of IKOC turn up many a cul de sac. Other poems of his are posted here. Other of Slava's Engish-language poems, such as "Painful condition," can be found here.

Painful condition

Once on Thursday, I woke up weak,
having been covered with a warm quilt,
with a merciless temperature,
I am dying, and I am bleak.
Like a pendulum,
hearing the run of strikes in the clock’s click.
Laying in bed, I had exhausted from the undead,
I am similar to a sickly chick.
Contemplate on the white pills,
that had become the color of capitulation.
Please, God, stop all human ills,
overcome the pains, and be a healthy nation.

Or click here.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: NOVEMBER 30, 2022

Edward Hirsch’s 100 Poems to Break Your Heart hurts so good, as John Mellencamp once sang.

This anthology collects poems from Wordsworth (1815) to Meena Alexander (2018) in order to showcase grief in its many manifestations. Hirsch provides mini-essays following each poem to contextualize the work, including information on the author’s life and the social/political times in which it was written. Hirsch includes not only poets who write in English but translations from the Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Turkish, German, Portuguese, and Arabic. It is estimated that as of today the world has lost 6.62 million to Covid-19—and the real number is likely higher. We all are grieving someone or something, a tradition or a pre-Covid ritual now gone. 100 Poems to Break Your Heart is in line with Hirsch’s poetry advocacy, a continuation of his How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (Ecco, 2000) as well as his own stunning elegiac Gabriel: A Poem (Knopf, 2014). Included in 100 Poems to Break Your Heart is one of my favorite poems by Muriel Rukeyser:

 

Poem

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

 

I lived in the first century of these wars.

 

How Much? [poem by Jerome Sala]

Jerome Sala

(Ed note: Ever since we posted the conversation between poets Jerome Sala and Jack Skelley we've been fielding requests for their poems. Here is How Much? by Jerome Sala, from his book How Much? New and Selected Poems. Watch this space for a poem by Jack Skelley)

How Much?

        -- by Jerome Sala

How much is it worth —
the actual copy of
Poems by Pierre Reverdy
Frank O’Hara had in his pocket
when he wrote, “My heart is
in my pocket, it is
Poems by Pierre Reverdy
                                Probably not
as much as Duchamp’s chess set
or urinal: that’s because O’Hara
was not a painter but a poet,
and you know what that means:
while the other arts add value
to their objects, conspiring
with the world of commodities
to nurture the enrichment economy,
verse makes its objects worse
relieving them of their worth
casting them out into the world
beyond the cave of moneymaking
into another place that we do not
yet understand and cannot name.
                       How much is it worth,
the actual heart of Frank O’Hara,
the one stripped of its metaphors?
Can his heart actually be divested
of such accoutrements,
or must we be forever lost
in the moist mist, on the brink
of the heart in itself,
an irretrievable object?
                        When Shelley was
cremated, his heart refused to burn.
Mary Shelley carried it with her
for years wrapped in a silk shroud
inside a jar.
          When revered Tibetan Buddhist
teachers die, their hearts become relics
and are said to bestow blessings—
the greatest of which
is the knowledge of emptiness.

[Originally appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Dec. 18—Jan. 19, 2019 issue.] Now available in How Much? New and Selected Poems by Jerome Sala (NYQ books). 

"Private Eye" [by Ron Horning]

Private Eye

For some reason I think Ghirardelli Square is Aquatic Park
and walk to the end of Columbus one Sunday off. Pretty bad,
so it must have been a lot different when Spicer came here—
with his transistor and a young poet he wants to sleep with—

to bake off a hangover left from drinking and writing to dark.
All you see now is a brick mall full of tourists about to be had.
There’s the Bay, OK, but that’s the beach? Where’s one queer
to bring to life ghost stories so much better now than a myth?

Hard to imagine someone as real as Jack Spicer here for hours,
and so, after managing to avoid what’s happened to the place,
I head back to the Dante and another dinner of pork and beans.

But first I cross Broadway and, in City Lights, buy Flowers,
poems by George Stanley whose lines read like a small face
that starts to glow as this room darkens. Maria, in our teens.

-- Ron Horning

from the archive; first posted November 2, 2013. Photo above, left to right, Ron Horning, David Lehman, Steven Silberblatt, Jamie Katz.

Guillermo del Toro: The Devil's Backbone (2001) [by Lewis Saul]

 

108 minutes
Color

5.1 Surround

in Spanish

1:85:1 aspect ratio

 

“What is a ghost?”

 

Answer: almost every character in this masterful film.

 

Del Toro plants a terrific red herring early on — which make repeated viewings so pleasurable and rewarding!

 

Set during the chaos of the Spanish Civil War, we observe the arrival a big 30’s car driving down a dusty road to an orphanage in the middle of nowhere, depositing a young boy, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), and his injured tutor. Casually, we also see Jacinto (an exceptional Eduardo Noriega) — an orphan who is now a grown man, acting as the caretaker, and his gigantic sidekick, The Pig (Paco Maestre).

 

The war is everywhere, but unlike Del Toro’s Spanish Civil War companion pic Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), we never see any actual fighting. We see a bomb drop from a plane — it lands unexploded in the orphanage’s courtyard, apparently subsequently defused.

 

We meet Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi) and Carmen (Marisa Paredes), the headmistress. We meet Conchita (Irene Visdeo), Jacinto’s lover and the boys, headed by a bully named Jaime (Íñígo Garcés) and the story takes off.

 

**

 

Del Toro is the kind of filmmaker who not only thinks through every single frame, but is such a polymath that he is able to draw on hundreds of varied sources to bring his material to life (see Commentary below). He was planning this screenplay even before he made his debut film, Cronos (1993) [starring Luppi] …

 

Produced by the Almodóvar brothers (Pedro and Agustin) and featuring an excellent subtle score by Javier Navarrete. Also incredible sound design by Salvador Mayolas.

 

Not a boring or inconsequential frame in 108 minutes.

 

A few influences which Del Toro mentions in his “rambling commentary":

• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
• Luis Buñuel
• Tom Thumb
• Thumbelina
• Hansel and Gretel
• Giovanni Battista Piranesi

 

• Carceri d’invencione (Imaginary Prisons)
• M.C. Escher
• Symbolist painters
  • Isle of the Dead
  • Death and the Grave Digger
• Arnold Böcklin
• Caspar David Friedrich
• Carlos Schwabe
• Odilon Redon
• Surrealist painters
• Salvador Dalí
• Giorgio de Chirico
• Lord Byron
• “If you cannot move them emotionally or intellectually anymore, just shove them.”
• Roger Corman
• William Castle
• The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• Charles Dickens
• M.R. James
• Arthur Machen
• The Willows by Algernon Blackwood
• Robert McKee [negative connotation]
• [in case you didn’t notice]: All the “good” characters’ names start with “C” (Carmen, Casares, Conchita, Carlos) and the “bad” ones with “J” (Jacinto, Jamie)
• The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffman
• Mark Twain
• Beauty and the Beast by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve
• Alfred Hitchcock
• Pedro Infante
• Deep Red by Dario Argento
• The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan)
• The Eye (Pang brothers)
• The Ring (Hideo Nakata)
• The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu)
• May (Lucky McKee)
• Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez)
• The Searchers by John Ford
• Mario Bava
• Sergio Leone
• Honoré Fragonard
• Horseman of the Apocalypse
• 
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• In Memoriam A.H.H.
• Juana Inés de la Cruz
• The Wild Bunch by Sam Peckinpah
• Marquis de Sade
• Ann Radcliffe
• Goths
• Tango

"What Hath Gable Got?" Rhett Butler in "It Happened One Night" [by David Lehman]

I could have called it "Hail to the King" or "Odysseus Hitches a Ride," but I went with "What Hath Gable Got?" for my American Scholar piece on the actor who played Rhett Butler & won Claudete Colbert's heart in "It Happened One Night":

As a college student, I watched Gone with the Wind at a Times Square theater where the 1939 film was enjoying a revival. At the first appearance of Clark Gable-as-Rhett Butler standing at the base of a spiral staircase and looking up, the woman sitting next to me, who was old enough to be my mother, blurted out, “God bless him.” At one of the film’s climactic moments, Rhett Butler mounts that spiral staircase with the indomitable Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh at her most ravishing) in his arms.

No male actor exuded as much confidence and devilish sex appeal as this six-foot-one fellow with the best pencil mustache in the business. In his other movies, Gable frequently plays a variation of Rhett Butler. He is the take-charge guy, the born winner, whom it is impossible to dislike—unless you’re Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who characterized Gable as a “well-tailored roughneck.”

Gable is the American male as he would like to be: crafty, capable, sure of himself, equal to any situation. Born and raised in Ohio, he loved literature and used to recite Shakespeare’s sonnets to friends. Devastated by the loss of his wife, the actress Carole Lombard, who died in a plane crash, he joined the U. S. Air Force in World II and flew operational missions over Europe in B-17s. Undershirts went out of style when Gable took off his shirt to reveal a bare chest in Frank Capra’s sublime 1934 comedy, It Happened One Night, in which Gable plays a brash newspaperman who wins runaway heiress Claudette Colbert’s heart—much to his surprise, and hers.

It was in It Happened One Night that Gable established what we today would call his brand. When we first encounter him, he is on a public phone, getting fired, and his boss hangs up on him. Several of his journalist pals are listening, and Gable doesn’t let on that he has lost the phone connection, let alone his job. With a show of bravado, he declares that he wouldn’t come back even if his boss begged him to, “and let that be a lesson to you.” He hangs up, and his chums hail him as “the almighty king.” The character’s real name is ordinary, Peter Warne, but he is more kingly than the patrician “King” Westley (Jameson Thomas), a stuffed shirt to whom the mixed-up Ellen Andrews (Colbert) is engaged. Ellen expresses her ambivalence about the nuptials by running away from her upper-crust home to the buses and trailer parks of the common folk.

Gable is a hero on the model of Odysseus. Luck favors him. On the bus from Florida to New York in It Happened One Night, he takes the one available seat, which happens to be the seat next to Ellen. She wants nothing to do with Peter, but after much disputation, they join forces. To scare the dickens out of a pest who has recognized Ellen from a newspaper photo, Peter assumes the identity of a gangster. As if to proclaim his destiny, he presents himself at a motor lodge as the husband of this chic woman with the wide eyes, the semi-circle eyebrows, and effortless charm.

For the rest of this piece, click here to reach the current "Talking Pictures" column on the web site of The American Scholar.

Kathleen Rooney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________

Western

 

My favorite flavor of Western is revisionist; my second favorite flavor, spaghetti.

Unforgiven is the best Western of all time; don’t at me.

An acidic landscape, accelerated, unstructured. How long before no vestiges of wild country remain?

The Best Western motel chain began in California in the 40s, but can now be found all around the nation.

I really liked The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but I could not stop thinking how all three of those guys needed to drink a lot more water. The sun above a red-hot poker, stoking greed, stoking wrath.

One of Custer’s many nicknames was Old Iron Butt.

Fistful of dollars, fistful of fists. The best revenge is not living well; it’s simply not wanting revenge to begin with.

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” said a minor character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Entertaining for sure, but bad for democracy.

The noun meaning “a book or movie about the Old West” is first attested from 1909.

I like when a character lays his ear to the rail to listen for the heartbeat traversing the train tracks.

Bemused fatalism may be the most effective bravado.

The sun may be unforgiving because we are unforgivable.

According to Evan S. Connell, the early Mandans believed “there was not only a benevolent spirit but an evil spirit which came to earth before the good spirit and whose strength was greater.” Seems pretty accurate.

Abolish the Second Amendment.

For the notorious Mexican standoff scene in the cemetery, Leone told Morricone to compose a track “like the corpses were laughing from inside their tombs,” and that’s what it sounds like. It sounds exactly like that.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, has just been released by Texas Review Press and her next novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in Fall of 2023.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mountain Chief, Blackfeet War Leader by Terrance Guardipee, Siksika (Blackfeet), 2008

Borges: "Translators have impoved my stories"

Jorge Luis Borges said: "I respect translators, and my stories have sometimes been greatly bettered by them. One of them told me so himself. Besides, I am so fond of English that I like anything better in English than in Spanish." While the relevance of this quote to "No R" is not obvious, people of good faith can figure it out. Borges also declared unequivocally that Robert Louis Stevenson "is the most wonderful writer of all English writers, after Shakespeare."

Homage to "Laura" [by John Harbourne]

Diptych by John Harbourne. Copyright (c) 2022 by John Harbourne. All rights reserved.
John Harbourne has made similar drawings of many other noir figures. www.johnharbourneartist.com

Laura

Then the doorbell rang.
Time for one more cigarette.
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
He is not in love with a corpse

Time for one more cigarette.
The venomous drama critic insinuates
He is in love with a corpse.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.

The venomous drama critic knows
He is sane.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.
He thinks she is dead and she thinks he is rude.

Is he sane?
Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
He thinks she is a ghost and she thinks he is rude
When the picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman.

Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
It hasn’t stopped raining.
The picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman:
Gene Tierney in Laura.

It hasn’t stopped raining.
“Dames are always pulling a switch on you,”
"Dana Andrews says in Laura.
There was something he was forgetting.

“Dames are always pulling a switch on you.”
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
There was something he was forgetting.
Then the doorbell rang.

-- David Lehman

"Laura" is taken from David Lehman's book The Mysterious Romance of Murder, pubished by Cornell University Press in 2022. Copyright (c) 2022 by David Lehman.

"Tea for Two" & other duets with Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Bing Crosby et al

Happy Thanksgiving!

Doug Lang, 1941-2022 [by Terence Winch]

My very dear friend Doug Lang, brilliant poet and beloved teacher, passed away at around 11:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 22 Nov. 2022, in his apartment at Springvale Terrace, the assisted living building in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, where he had been a resident for the last five-plus years. His health had taken a turn for the worse in the past month or so, and his legendary resilience failed him this time around.

Doug Lang was born in the town of Swansea in Wales, part of the United Kingdom, on 11 April 1941. His first years on the planet were thus spent as WWII was raging. He had one sibling, his sister Synde, who was about four years younger than Doug. The two were very close, and Synde’s death in 2013 in England affected Doug deeply. The two were raised by their mother under the harshest and most difficult of circumstances. There was often little to eat and, during one particularly rough time, Doug had to miss school for several weeks for want of a pair of shoes.

Doug received a basic education in England, but one of the most remarkable aspects of his biography is the extent to which he educated himself. He was known for his voracious appetite for learning and for his nimble and penetrating intellect. He fell in love with books, movies, and music when he was a boy, and wound up becoming incredibly knowledgeable in these areas and others.

After marrying an American poet Andrea Wyatt in London, Doug settled in the U.S. in 1973. His appealing personality and genial temperament gained him a wide circle of friends, most of whom were deeply impressed by the extent of his knowledge of fiction, poetry, film, music (especially jazz and rock ‘n’ roll), and the visual arts. He had an encyclopedic mind and photographic memory.

When the Corcoran College of Art in DC was looking for a new writing teacher in 1976, Doug was a natural choice. He had taught at an art school on a Greek island in the late ‘60s and had a natural gift for teaching. The Corcoran was also looking for a practicing artist, and Doug had already published two novels by the early ’70s. He was known as a catalyst on the Washington poetry scene.
An accomplished poet himself, he also ran a nationally celebrated poetry reading series in DC at Folio Books in Dupont Circle, attracting many of the leading poets of the day, who were usually paired with a local poet.

The Corcoran hired him, and Doug stayed for the next 37 years, becoming the most loved and respected member of the Corcoran faculty. His colleagues and his thousands of former students felt a tremendous debt to Professor Lang for his prodigious ability as a teacher and his generosity of spirit in all his interactions. In the literary world, he was known as a poet of fierce linguistic energy and technical skill. To his friends, he is an irreplaceable man of wondrous talent. A new selected poems of Doug Lang’s, called In the Works, is slated for imminent publication by DC’s Edge Books.

Doug Lang is survived by his close personal friend Sandra Rottmann, several nieces, nephews, and grand nieces and nephews in the UK, and by his many devoted friends and fellow writers.

A memorial event, in conjunction with the publication of Doug’s new book, is planned for early in 2023.

I talked with Doug every day on the phone & visited him once a week. Even while struggling with short-term memory loss, he remained the best of company---wise, funny, deeply knowledgeable, unpretentious, and charismatic. It's a much more barren world with him not in it.

 

Let's Talk Turkey

"Buffalo" [by Tom Disch]

He knew how he would die. We all know that.
Some day the same as any other he'd be chewing his cud
And ruminating about the larger weather patterns
The clouds spoke of when Whump! like the trump of Doom
He would be stampeding to his death
With the whole country around him, their pounding
Hooves sounding like the drums you sometimes
Heard when the herds of horsemen camped
In some canyon close by, the very canyon it might be
In which he was destined to die.
Aiee! they would cry, or words to that effect,
As they sat by their fires beating on the stretched skin
Of one's relatives, which was their way
Of saying We won! We won! They were
An intolerable presence and he prayed
That someday someone would come, someone
Even nastier, someone even worse than the wolves,
And kill them, level their smelly villages
And cover them with rocks, like the rocks
He would lie on and rot when it came
His time to join the great stampede and die.

May 1, 2008

"Under the pink house" by Misbah Wolf [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Misbah Wolf is a Melbourne based poet. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of QLD. Her most recent collection of poems, Carapace, was published by Vagabond Press earlier this year. "Under the pink house" first appeared in Overland journal, along with another of Misbah's poems, which you can find here.

 

 

Under the Pink House

 

It was pornographic science fiction inside you. You stretched yourself onto the bed

and I was casually stationed as a headless fog. You undressed in the afternoon—the

chimerical atmosphere where chatting women turn into chittering insects. I felt you

scrape your tongue against my chin, the moment of vanishing inside you where I

could leave the forms of your different faces and hear the conversation you really

wanted with me. Your tits sent out whips that lassoed me to the bed, and your

pussy adopted the same penetrating gaze, a cabalistic cipher where occult forces

dimly sounded. Our lips strayed towards edges, idols and fiction, experience and

fruition. The room was pinned with veils, resounding with lengthening shadows

sweating through each syllable, each bluish charge against the inner thigh and 

neck,

accepting that I was not the gentleman you wished me to be. In the centremost

labyrinth of your labia, I unintentionally scried your future and saw echoes of tall

trees in gentle winds, fingers turning pages of burning books with images of hungry

baby birds that would be unlikely figures of your liberation.