"Tea for Two"
music by Vincent Youmans
lyrics by Irving Caesar
"Tahiti Trot": Shostakovich's take on"Tea for Two"
John McGlinn and the Ambrsiua Chorus ("Broadway Shostoppers")
Art Tatum (1933, 1939, 1953)
Nat King Cole (1957)
Doris Day (1950)
Frank Sinatra and Dinah Shore (1958)
Yuja Wang (2023) pictured above
To talk about Angela Ball's brilliant poem, "Hares," which appeared in the Paris Review last winter, I really have to begin with a look at the voice of the speaker in the first six lines. It's a very cunning sleight-of-hand that sets up the poem top to bottom. The very first words "Not mine—" imagine a world the speaker is outside of, a world the speaker approaches almost apologetically, reassuring the gatekeeper of that world—whoever he is or they are—that although she's going to take "some" of it, she promises she won't take much, just a "part." And "not the best part," she claims. Those words end line three.
But then, in line four she completely upends this "hat in hand" assurance: "it could be the best, though." There is "no way of knowing," the implication being that the assessment of value in that world might be askew. She might bargain for a smaller part, but what's made available to her might include the best part because the ones who've got it might not know what they've got. By mildly speculating on the ultimate value of what's at stake, she's undermines the authority of those who guard that world. There's social humility at work here ("knowing one's place"), and social humility is an agreed-upon mask; but true humility recognizes the worth of the self. The custodian of the world the speaker will take "a part" of is, finally, a gatekeeper to the wider philosophical world the lyric is going to traverse.
After the initial obeisance is paid—almost like a fare or an admission charge—the speaker lists a catalogue of "specific abstractions" (my term) of what she will "take" a part of, the whole of which amounts to what I'll call life itself, or on the individual's part, the reclaiming of a life. Synecdoche is an age-old rhetorical device loved by poets. Here, Angela's magic has turned it into another effective tool that makes our footing a little bit shakier than when we started. Synecdoche, of course, substitutes part for whole, or vice versa. Angela doubles its effect in the following way. Take the first example. The "blue part" is a "whole" that is itself broken into blue things (and the blue thing selected to be "taken" by the speaker from this category is a cantilever bridge). But this blue "whole" is "part" of a larger whole that I'm calling "life" or "world." So the cantilever bridge is part to the larger blue whole; but the blue whole is part to the whole of life, the smorgasbord, carnival, boxing match, of life. The longest part of "Hares" is a catalogue of these synecdoches.
Synecdoches that are parts of greater wholes include colors (of experience--subdued colors, I might add, which speaks to personality type and character), roughness of life (teeth marks, halter), deliquescence and dis-integration (failure, death), unflinching art, attempt at prophylaxis (vaccination), people who understand things, people who don't, ecstasy (endorphins—if swimming, it might be 'endolphins'), rebirth, reincarnation, Nature, Beauty—and much else. Then the last six lines envelope the poem and focus in on the particulars of the part she takes that IS the larger whole: life, lived with another "part," who "rests close against me" and watches the boxing hares with her. These last six lines come back to the micro, zero in on particulars ("parts") that make up a whole personality, being, who watches with her the spectacular presentation of dawn. I would say the boxing hares are the last part-to-whole, but they're not. The image of the mysterious presence resting close to the speaker is the last synecdoche of the poem.
Whitman's catalogues, often part of an ecstatic whole, can't be ignored here. Angela is an American poet working in an American vein: you can't produce a new catalogue without calling to mind the Cataloguer of catalogues--not if you're "part" of a tradition. Whitman moves from the micro to the macro and back in 'Song of Myself'—in a more modest way, Angela does the same. We return to "Not mine—" --the words that begin the poem. Why isn't "it" hers? Why does Whitman proclaim "Myself" while Angela says "Not mine"? I'm not going to make an argument about "male ego" vs. a woman's "place" (especially since that place is usually defined by men); or about the idea that no one of sensibility would want to identify with America these days; but the puns surrounding that Manifest Destiny century--the 19th--are a lot of (dark) fun. Originally, "manifest" meant "caught by hand," or even "seized." The sense of entitlement that Whitman took for granted is not just shied away from in Angela's "Not mine"--but is in fact debunked. Whitman, Emerson, the whole 19th Century, was about power, American 'exceptionalism,' identity through strength; and it produced great work. Angela's poem is a much more modest 21st Century acceptance, even quiet celebration, of a more human-sized part-for-whole. "Hares," I would offer, is a sturdy, tough-minded expression of what affirmation we're capable of these days: an acceptance of our "part" in the scheme of things, and the resting close to our "part"-ners as we watch the amazing spectacle of it all.Angela Ball is professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she directs the Center for Writers. She is the author of five previous poetry collections: Kneeling Between Parked Cars, The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits, Possession, Quartet, and Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds. Angela curates the "New York School Diaspora" for this blog. Find her selections here.
James Cummins is the author of Still Some Cake (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2012); Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2005), with David Lehman; Portrain in a Spoon:Poems (The James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series) and Then & Now (Swallow Press, 2004), among others. His honors include an Ingram Merrill grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council.
Here's Part One of "The Skaters," John Ashbery's
700 line poem that appeared in his book titled
Rivers and Mountains (1966.) The complete poem
is available at this link:
John Ashbery, "The Skaters"
The Skaters
I
These decibels
Are a kind of flagellation, an entity of sound
Into which being enters, and is apart.
Their colors on a warm February day
Make for masses of inertia, and hips
Prod out of the violet-seeming into a new kind
Of demand that stumps the absolute because not new
In the sense of the next one in an infinite series
But, as it were, pre-existing or pre-seeming in
Such a way as to contrast funnily with the unexpectedness
And somehow push us all into perdition.
Here a scarf flies, there an excited call is heard.
The answer is that it is novelty
That guides these swift blades o'er the ice,
Projects into a finer expression (but at the expense
Of energy) the profile I cannot remember.
Colors slip away from and chide us. The human mind
Cannot retain anything except perhaps the dismal two-note theme
Of some sodden "dump" or lament.
But the water surface ripples, the whole light changes.
We children are ashamed of our bodies
But we laugh and, demanded, talk of sex again
And all is well. The waves of morning harshness
Float away like coal-gas into the sky.
But how much survives? How much of any one of us survives?
The articles we'd collect-stamps of the colonies
With greasy cancellation marks, mauve, magenta and chocolate,
Or funny-looking dogs we'd see in the street, or bright remarks.
One collects bullets. An Indianapolis, Indiana man collects slingshots of all epochs, and so on.
Subtracted from our collections, though, these go on a little while, collecting aimlessly. We still support them.
But so little energy they have! And up the swollen sands
Staggers the darkness fiend, with the storm fiend close behind him!
True, melodious tolling does go on in that awful pandemonium,
Certain resonances are not utterly displeasing to the terrified eardrum.
Some paroxysms are dinning of tambourine, others suggest piano room or organ loft
For the most dissonant night charms us, even after death. This, after all, may be happiness: tuba notes awash on the great flood, ruptures of xylophone, violins, limpets, grace-notes, the musical instrument called serpent, viola da gambas, aeolian harps, clavicles, pinball machines, electric drills, que sais-je encore!
The performance has rapidly reached your ear; silent and tear-stained, in the post-mortem shock, you stand listening, awash
With memories of hair in particular, part of the welling that is you,
The gurgling of harp, cymbal, glockenspiel, triangle, temple block, English horn and metronome! And still no presentiment, no feeling of pain before or after.
The passage sustains, does not give. And you have come far indeed.
Yet to go from "not interesting" to "old and uninteresting,"
To be surrounded by friends, though late in life,
To hear the wings of the spirit, though far....
Why do I hurriedly undrown myself to cut you down?
"I am yesterday," and my fault is eternal.
I do not expect constant attendance, knowing myself insufficient for your present demands
And I have a dim intuition that I am that other "I" with which we began.
My cheeks as blank walls to your tears and eagerness
Fondling that other, as though you had let him get away forever.
The evidence of the visual henceforth replaced
By the great shadow of trees falling over life.
A child's devotion
To this normal, shapeless entity....
Forgotten as the words fly briskly across, each time
Bringing down meaning as snow from a low sky, or rabbits flushed from a wood.
How strange that the narrow perspective lines
Always seem to meet, although parallel, and that an insane ghost could do this,
Could make the house seem so much farther in the distance, as
It seemed to the horse, dragging the sledge of a perspective line.
Dim banners in the distance, to die.... And nothing put to rights. The pigs in their cages
And so much snow, but it is to be littered with waste and ashes
So that cathedrals may grow. Out of this spring builds a tolerable
Affair of brushwood, the sea is felt behind oak wands, noiselessly pouring.
Spring with its promise of winter, and the black ivy once again
On the porch, its yellow perspective bands in place
And the horse nears them and weeps.
So much has passed through my mind this morning
That I can give you but a dim account of it:
It is already after lunch, the men are returning to their positions around the cement mixer
And I try to sort out what has happened to me. The bundle of Gerard's letters,
And that awful bit of news buried on the back page of yesterday's paper.
Then the news of you this morning, in the snow. Sometimes the interval
Of bad news is so brisk that... And the human brain, with its tray of images
Seems a sorcerer's magic lantern, projecting black and orange cellophane shadows
On the distance of my hand... The very reaction's puny,
And when we seek to move around, wondering what our position is now, what the arm of that chair.
A great wind lifted these cardboard panels
Horizontal in the air. At once the perspective with the horse
Disappeared in a bigarrure of squiggly lines. The image with the crocodile in it became no longer apparent.
Thus a great wind cleanses, as a new ruler
Edits new laws, sweeping the very breath of the streets
Into posterior trash. The films have changed-
The great titles on the scalloped awning have turned dry and blight-colored.
No wind that does not penetrate a man's house, into the very bowels of the furnace,
Scratching in dust a name on the mirror-say, and what about letters,
The dried grasses, fruits of the winter-gosh! Everything is trash!
The wind points to the advantages of decay
At the same time as removing them far from the sight of men.
The regent of the winds, Aeolus, is a symbol for all earthly potentates
Since holding this sickening, festering process by which we are cleansed
Of afterthought.
A girl slowly descended the line of steps.
The wind and treason are partners, turning secrets over to the military police.
Lengthening arches. The intensity of minor acts. As skaters elaborate their distances,
Taking a separate line to its end. Returning to the mass, they join each other
Blotted in an incredible mess of dark colors, and again reappearing to take the theme
Some little distance, like fishing boats developing from the land different parabolas,
Taking the exquisite theme far, into farness, to Land's End, to the ends of the earth!
But the livery of the year, the changing air
Bring each to fulfillment. Leaving phrases unfinished,
Gestures half-sketched against woodsmoke. The abundant sap
Oozes in girls' throats, the sticky words, half-uttered, unwished for,
A blanket disbelief, quickly supplanted by idle questions that fade in turn.
Slowly the mood turns to look at itself as some urchin
Forgotten by the roadside. New schemes are got up, new taxes,
Earthworks. And the hours becomes light again.
Girls wake up in it.
It is best to remain indoors. Because there is error
In so much precision. As flames are fanned, wishful thinking arises
Bearing its own prophets, its pointed ignoring. And just as a desire
Settles down at the end of a long spring day, over heather and watered shoot and dried rush field,
So error is plaited into desires not yet born.
Therefore the post must be resumed (is being falsified
To be forever involved, tragically, with one's own image?).
The studio light suddenly invaded the long casement-values were what
She knows now. But the floor is being slowly pulled apart
Like straw under those limpid feet.
And Helga, in the minuscule apartment in Jersey City
Is reacting violet to the same land of dress, is drawing death
Again in blossoms against the reactionary fire... pulsing
And knowing nothing to superb lambent distances that intercalate
This city. Is the death of the cube repeated. Or in the musical album.
It is time now for a general understanding of
The meaning of all this. The meaning of Helga, importance of the setting, etc.
A description of the blues. Labels on bottles
And all kinds of discarded objects that ought to be described.
But can one ever be sure of which ones?
Isn't this a death-trap, wanting to put too much in
So the floor sags, as under the weight of a piano, or a piano-legged girl
And the whole house of cards comes dinning down around one's ears!
But this is an important aspect of the question
Which I am not ready to discuss, am not at all ready to,
This leaving-out business. On it hinges the very importance of what's novel
Or autocratic, or dense or silly. It is as well to call attention
To it by exaggeration, perhaps. But calling attention
Isn't the same thing as explaining, and as I said I am not ready
To line phrases with the costly stuff of explanation, and shall not,
Will not do so for the moment. Except to say that the carnivorous
Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving
Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves presence, but still.
Nevertheless these are fundamental absences, struggling to get up and be off themselves.
This, thus, is a portion of the subject of this poem
Which is in the form of falling snow:
That is, the individual flakes are not essential to the importance of the whole's becoming so much of a truism
That their importance is again called in question, to be denied further out, and again and again like this.
Hence, neither the importance of the individual flake,
Nor the importance of the whole impression of the storm, if it has any, is what it is,
But the rhythm of the series of repeated jumps, from abstract into positive and back to a slightly less diluted abstract.
Mild effects are the result.
I cannot think any more of going out into all that, will stay here
With my quiet schmerzen. Besides the storm is almost over
Having frozen the face of the bust into a strange style with the lips
And the teeth the most distinct part of the whole business.
It is this madness to explain....
What is the matter with plain old-fashioned cause-and-effect?
Leaving one alone with romantic impressions of the trees, the sky?
Who, actually, is going to be fooled one instant by these phony explanations,
Think them important? So back we go to the old, imprecise feelings, the
Common knowledge, the importance of duly suffering and the occasional glimpses
Of some balmy felicity. The world of Schubert's lieder. I am fascinated
Though by the urge to get out of it all, by going
Further in and correcting the whole mismanaged mess. But am afraid I'll
Be of no help to you. Good-bye.
As balloons are to the poet, so to the ground
Its varied assortment of trees. The more assorted they are, the
Vaster his experience. Sometimes
You catch sight of them on a level with the top story of a house,
Strung up there for publicity purposes. Or like those bubbles
Children make with a kind of ring, not a pipe, and probably using some detergent
Rather than plain everyday soap and water. Where was I? The balloons
Drift thoughtfully over the land, not exactly commenting on it;
These are the range of the poet's experience. He can hide in trees
Like a hamadryad, but wisely prefers not to, letting the balloons
Idle him out of existence, as a car idles. Traveling faster
And more furiously across unknown horizons, belted into the night
Wishing more and more to be unlike someone, getting the whole thing
(So he believes) out of his system. Inventing systems.
We are a part of some system, thinks he, just as the sun is part of
The solar system. Trees brake his approach. And he seems to be wearing but
Half a coat, viewed from one side. A "half-man" look inspiring the disgust of honest folk
Returning from chores, the milk frozen, the pump heaped high with a chapeau of snow,
The "No Skating" sign as well. But it is here that he is best,
Face to face with the unsmiling alternatives of his nerve-wracking existence.
Placed squarely in front of his dilemma, on all fours before the lamentable spectacle of the unknown.
Yet knowing where men are coming from. It is this, to hold the candle up to the album.
I am alive -- I guess --
The Branches on my Hand
Are full of Morning Glory --
And at my finger's end --
The Carmine -- tingles warm --
And if I hold a Glass
Across my Mouth -- it blurs it --
Physician's -- proof of Breath --
I am alive -- because
I am not in a Room --
The Parlor -- Commonly -- it is --
So Visitors may come --
And lean -- and view it sidewise --
And add "How cold -- it grew" --
And "Was it conscious -- when it stepped
In Immortality?"
I am alive -- because
I do not own a House --
Entitled to myself -- precise --
And fitting no one else --
And marked my Girlhood's name --
So Visitors may know
Which Door is mine -- and not
-- Emily Dickinson
(December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)
_____________________________________________________________________________
My Mother Says There’s Beauty Even in the Midst of Loss
but I am no longer listening, I am no longer looking
out of the car window & into the outside & all
its flowers, cheap party favors stacked up at the funeral
that the world is. As if a violet were God’s sign
that pain will be worth it someday. As if
on that someday God will make it all worthwhile,
living in a world where worth is based on pain.
If I could make the trees listen. If I could make them
understand, make them throw down their leaves & raise
arms bare as any human agony to the sky where
my mother says God is, where God stuffs his pockets
with our prayers like he’s hoarding candy, where sometimes
he unwraps a wish & decides that his answer is no.
It hurts me more than it makes me angry, the trees’
insistence on green. And after all beauty is nothing
like reason, nothing like a reason to believe the things we cannot
change are the things we have to accept. My mother drives,
the car moves over the asphalt some city put down to pave a way,
to roll its people forward despite what the ground had to say,
& above the sky gathers its blues like the face of a boy
refusing to breathe until he gets his way.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage (Soft Skull Press), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and such journals as Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, the Bennington Review, and Shenandoah. She currently serves as an editor of Screen Door Review.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Wizard tree, Cathedral Woods, Intervale, N.H. 1900.
November tourist, muscling my way through
the mistral, guidebook in hand, I turned into
a wind-tunnel alley, looking for 22
rue du Roi René, which as I knew
no longer marked the cloister of St Clare.
Fitting, I thought, they’d built a theater
in its place, pleasing us arty types who’d care
Petrarch recorded he first saw Laura there.
And recorded and recorded. So many rhymes
and plays on her name, lauded so many times
as the sun and sum of all being, here she seems
solid as the church bell that now chimes
thrillingly on cue, only a block
or two away. I’m standing before the plaque
on the theater’s stone façade; it says that back
in 1327, when he took
one look at her that Good Friday, he was gone.
What does it really mean to love someone?
Am I serious, asking this? I’m sixty-nine,
the age he died, I understand convention,
crave it in fact. This one’s courtly love,
the beautiful bow to beauty set above
all others, the de rigeur frustration of
desire, his pining even for her glove
which of course she denies, and despite the birth
of eleven children and a ghastly death
(at thirty-eight, of the plague), her perfect youth
surviving, the least mortal thing on earth.
She’d married, or some scholars say she had,
an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade,
or maybe hadn’t. Old archives are so bad
when it comes to women, sometimes you’re just glad
there’s a tale to tell, however apocryphal.
And Petrarch’s children’s mother—whom no legal
tie ever bound, whose name’s illegible
to time, of whom no fact is known at all?—
I see her bring him candles he will light
one on another, staying up late to write
what she couldn’t read but heard about, and might
well star the peerless Laura, who tonight
again he’ll fall for, here, and at first sight.
from the current issue of Commonweal.(November 2024)
Photo: Mary Jo Salter flanked by David Lehman and Mark Strand, September 2012. Photo copyright Gabirel Don (c) 2012
When we were kids, we believed in magic movements – I don’t know where we got that from but we got it; I myself remember using one to see off a troublesome priest. As adults we haven’t lost the belief, though we stay discrete about it and sometimes, thanks to academic psychology, even think such movements mere brain flubbery.
Aurélien Dougé’s wonderful solo dance performance, Aux Lointains, that is to say, Dougé’s body and will in the low hum of an organ continuo and the shifting dark and light over the about 100 square meters of stage, shows that we kids were right to believe and adults are, too.
Magic movements do exist, there are people skilled in them and they work just fine in the real world, stimulating pleasure, understanding and Imagination – things we can’t really get enough of.
Aux Lointains (“In the distance” or “Remembrance”), is intended as a choreography of remembrances and its 45 minutes or so of precise and deliberate movement reveals to the spectator how to find a body’s place not just in past-time, but, strikingly, in space. “Reveals” because it uses movement magic and “find”, because the movement proves (as it must) that space is a thing as well as a property, like gravity or light. So, as with light or gravity, a body has to negotiate it, find its place within it.
For this spectator, the movement magic goes something like this:
Dougé establishes “space” by nonchalantly appearing suddenly in the stage area, from left, as I recall, from behind the seating. He then moves a hand, then both, then both hands along with his feet, then his legs and arms. Seemingly simultaneously, he shows all this mobile body in light of his torso and head. This movement defines the form and shape of Dougé as a body and, at the same time, through the defining movement, points the form of himself as a will. As he defines his body and will, he is also moving into the stage, which I am perceiving from his body and will. It is making room for him. I see that it defines and shapes itself around Dougé, in and over his wake.
At some point along the 45 minutes of Dougé’s performance, I am convinced that space is not occupied but fit into; that a body finds a place, a body does not take it. Remembrance, but also identity and culture and so much else, is exactly this: making into, finding and fitting into a thing that appears so vast as to be void. And with this sense of things, I recall the experience of elegance and poise, feel here and alive, remember the Zen notion of presence.
____________
I saw "Aux Lointains" by Aurélien Dougé, cie Inkörper, at Atelier de Paris CDCN, 29 November 2024. The performance was produced for the Atelier de Paris CDCN and part of Swiss Dance Week 2024, sponsored by the Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris. Creation, set and performance by Aurélien Dougé with assistance on choreography by Cindy Van Acker and assistance in lighting by Luc Gendroz and live sound by Rudy Decelière.
There are still two hours left before the sixth
of December gives way to the day of infamy
enough time to mark the birth of Ira,
George's older brother, and what better
way to honor the lad who wrote the words
than to quote some whch should I choose
"Embraceable You" (you irreplaceable you)
or "Someone to Watch over Me" or maybe
"But Not for Me" one of the greatest (for me)
a brainy boy who outlived his genius brother
born the same year as Yip Harburg
and Howard Dietz a very good year for lyricists
was 1896
well, Ira, no use complainin', the odds were
a hundred to one against you,
a stranger in the city, yet
you're with her who wanted
to add your initial to her monogram
-- DL (frem the archives; December 6, 2009)
Peter Murphy (1945 - 2024) was a playwright, author, librettist, photographer and poet recognized for his accomplishments in various forms of the genre, including concrete poetry and sound poetry. His visual and written works are notable for their wit and ability to accentuate life’s everyday absurdities. The breadth of his talent was remarkable. A glowing review of his debut short story collection, Black Light, in the February-March I980 issue of Australian Book Review opens with the line, “Peter Murphy is one of the very best poets under forty writing in Australia today.”
"Horrible" by Peter Murphy
“Australian Tourists” takes aim at Australians’ uncanny habit of holidaying in places very much like the ones in which they live. Growing up in Sydney, a coastal city with beaches aplenty, I always found it curious that the entire metropolis seemed to resettle just a few hours up the coast each summer, to beaches not too dissimilar from the ones left behind. For me, the most impressive feature of the poem is its economy of language, made possible by Murphy’s deft line breaks. The poem’s idiom, overtly ordinary, evokes the monoculture it describes, and is lubricated by Murphy’s use of one word lines, subtle repetition and some really clever rhyme (“transfigure,” “St Kilda,” “mirror”) that occasion a flow so effortless, the effort required in reading the poem is “to persuade yourself / you’ve moved.”
Australian Tourists
travelling in Australia
have to be particularly
sensitive
to difference
if they're to believe
they’re somewhere else
or that warmer climates
or denser cities
in which they're introduced
to people like themselves
can transfigure
what looks like home
into the exotic
when palms in St Kilda
mirror
those in Cairns.
And though there's no debate
about distance
or change
it's paradoxical
that effort is required
to persuade yourself
you've moved.
For theToreador . . . this is your reward
The Matador of Metaphor
The grapefruit in the tropical orchard
has ripened into a globe in Hartford
for him to look at, not to eat.
If he had a tin can, he would beat
it as a drummer in a band beats
his drum and steadily with a swish
and sometimes a gong. It’s his wish
to escape from gray walls and sky
into a Denmark of the inner eye
or a bullring south of the border
or a sky espied from the trenches
of a battlefield in Flanders. Wenches
wander into his wonderland. Order
is disorder squared. We are nowhere
else but here, yet live we do in metaphor
like that elegant square-shouldered matador.
-- DL
EXTENDED SHORTAGES
I must remind you how serious I’ve become,
Almost grave (though still immensely likeable).
Love threatens to carry me off
Like a dancer in a trash heap storm.
Counterweight! I need a counterweight.
I read history late into the night,
A scavenger, loading up
On high deeds and disillusionment,
Treachery and hope, until I am unable
To hop over a footnote.
An ashtray crowning a stack of Gibbon,
A scotch and soda atop the King James,
Eventually a whiff of pity comes my way,
Not for me but for that sad Titan,
The dim-witted one who has to bear
The weight of heaven and earth*
Gravity and exhilaration, on his back.
Then I can snooze, snicker at my own
Grief and shortcomings and snooze.
When I wake and rise and slowly dress
With dust motes whirling madly around me
In that lovely solemn light, I do not risk
Even thinking about you until I feel
The weight of all I recall sink to my feet
And then in a bow to Philetus,**
I reach for my shoes.
-Paul Violi (First published in Mississippi Review's Poets of the New York School issue, 2003)
*Thirteen trillion trillion tons.
**Philetus of Cos, poet, teacher, famed for his love lyrics, admired by Ovid and Propertius, tutor to Ptolemy of Philadelphus, so small he had to wear lead shoes lest in the desert wind he be blown away.
Paul Violi
1944—2011
Paul Violi was an avant-garde poet. Waterworks, a short selection of his early poems, appeared in 1972, and In Baltic Circles was published the following year. He authored eleven books of poetry, including Harmatan (1977), Splurge (1982), Likewise (1988), The Curious Builder (1993), and Fracas (1999). After receiving his Grants to Artists award in 1999, Violi released Breakers (2000), a selection of his longer poems, and Overnight (2007).
The expanded text of Violi's first collaboration with printmaker Dale Devereux Barker, Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes (2002), is a collection of non-fiction prose. Violi and Barker's art books, including Envoy; Life is Completely Interesting (2006), have been acquired by many libraries and museums.
Subsequent to his 1999 Grants to Artists award, Violi was given The Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001) and a John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award (2004).
Prior to his 1999 FCPA grant, Violi had received grants from the Ingram Merrrill Foundation (1979), The New York Foundation for the Arts (1987), and The Fund for Poetry (1988, 1992). He was also the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowships (1980, 1986).
Violi was managing editor of The Architectural Forum from 1972 to 1974 and worked on freelance projects at Universal Limited Art Editions, researching correspondence of poets and artists and assisting Buckminster Fuller while he wrote the text to Tetrascroll (1982). As chairman of the Associate Council Poetry Committee, Violi organized a series of readings at The Museum of Modern Art from 1974 to 1983. He also co-founded Swollen Magpie Press, which produced poetry chapbooks, a poetry magazine called New York Times, and Broadway: A Poets And Painters Anthology (1979), edited by James Schuyler and Charles North.
Violi graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in English and a minor in Art History. At the time of his death he was teaching in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and in the graduate writing program at The New School. He also taught at New York University, The Dalton School, Sing-Sing, Stevens Institute of Technology, Bloomfield College, State University of New York at Purchase, and Scarsdale Teachers Institute. (The Foundation for Contemporary Arts)
I am indebted to Ann Violi, the poet’s widow, for the biography above, for this photo, and for permission to republish the poem, which first appeared in Mississippi Review’s Poets of the New York School in 2003.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-One): Paul Violi
Paul Violi’s gregarious and self-effacing “Extended Shortages,” shares James Schuyler’s poetic domesticity, creating landscapes of the indoor, the close at hand. He greets us with a humorous disclaimer of humor: “I must remind you how serious I’ve become, / Almost grave (Though still immensely likeable).
But suddenly he warns of impending danger: “Love threatens to carry me off / Like a dancer in a trash heap storm.” We are reminded of contemporary dance’s fervent moments of extreme buoyancy, when flying costumes seem almost to mate.
Then comes a welcome solution: “A counterweight!” The one that chooses him is history, that weighty discipline, that he reads “late into the night / A scavenger, loading up on high deeds and disillusionment, / Treachery and hope.” The reading lasts until the buzzardized speaker can no longer “hop over a footnote.” How many times have current events made us think ‘Who am I in the face of all this’? How much more so the past.
We next see the items that furnish the poet’s home: “An ashtray crowning a stack of Gibbon, / A scotch and soda atop the King James”—the poem plays with heft as trivial objects top massively important tomes: The Decline and Fall, the King James Bible—their permanence dominated by temporary pleasures. Our enthralled speaker seems released by the “whiff of pity” that arrives,
Not for me but for that sad Titan,
The dim-witted one who has to bear
The weight of heaven and earth
Gravity and exhilaration, on his back.
Then I can snooze, snicker at my own
Grief and shortcomings and snooze.
His empathy for a mythical lifter of “thirteen trillion trillion tons” saves the speaker/poet from sinking under history’s heft—in the same way, I think, that savoring the name, “Korean Mums,” saves James Schuyler from anonymous despair.
The rest of Violi’s poem, instead of dispensing with the past, invokes it with serio-comic lightness:
Even thinking about you until I feel
The weight of all I recall sink to my feet
And then in a bow to Philetus,
I reach for my shoes.
All at once, we realize that the “you” in the poem is the source of the wilding inflicted by love in the second stanza. We feel poundage countered by the uplift of poetry and love. Paul Violi’s transformative “Extended Shortages” is really a consortium of abundances ending with a physically slight but mentally immense poet, Philetus—a poet named for love, who must wear “lead shoes” to keep from being blown away, who paradoxically cues the abundance inherent in history and poetry and also the moment of ordinary life when we prepare ourselves for the outside world as love and words and world gloriously take each other’s weight. -Angela Ball
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O’Hara’s famous poem "Why I Am Not a Painter" begins with the poet yearning to be a painter. O’Hara reports the process of Mike Goldberg applying the word "sardines" to a canvas as O’Hara crafts his poem "Oranges." Eventually, Goldberg’s painting is "just letters" hanging in a gallery, but O’Hara’s poem has not "mentioned orange yet"; twelve poems are the result, but "there should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life." The poem cleverly inverts the materials of the painter and poet (Goldberg works with the word as a physical object, O’Hara with a color), and demonstrates how the final products of both differ from their original, ostensible subjects. Though O’Hara "would rather be / a painter," he honors the close, productive bond between the visual and the verbal, while celebrating himself as that enigmatic, generative figure, the "real poet."
David Lehman proposes that this collaborative, prolific period lasted from 1948 to 1966, when O’Hara died. Of his subjects, O’Hara is often regarded as the undisputed star of the group; commanding and flamboyant, he was as un-self-conscious dashing off a poem during his lunch break from the Museum of Modern Art as he was posing nude for Fairfield Porter and Nell Blaine. . . .
Lehman illustrates the poet’s nearly selfless concern for his peers, pointing out that dozens of people emerged after the poet’s death, each claiming to be his closest friend. Lehman closes his discussion of O’Hara with a provocative reading of "The Day Lady Died," the stunning elegy for Billie Holliday, convincingly placing the poem in the company of the great elegies of the English language:
As the detractors of "Lycidas" were wrong, so the critics of "The Day Lady Died" misjudged the poet’s conversational ease and seemingly self-centered stance…. [It] is a moving elegy not in spite of the poem’s preoccupation with the poet’s self but because of it; the death of the great singer at the age of forty-four occurs as an interruption, a shock that the reader is invited to share…. To the charge that O’Hara is too ironic to be sincere, I would borrow the distinction Lionel Trilling made between sincerity and authenticity: O’Hara’s suspicion of sincerity as a rhetorical mode is paradoxically what makes his work more authentic…. [I]f all that survived of 1959 was "The Day Lady Died," then historians a century hence could piece together the New York of that moment in the same way that archaeologists can reconstruct a whole extinct species of dinosaur from a single fossile bone.
• • •
Each of the remaining three poets receives equally extensive and relevant biographical and critical treatment. Lehman fills us in on Ashbery’s childhood as both a lonely boy growing up on an upstate New York farm and a precocious contestant on a radio program, his friends’ reaction to his early poems ("like falling in love with some thrilling young person from Mars," according to Koch), the impact of his decade in Paris on his life’s work, his contributions as an art critic, and his present position as the most frequently imitated and parodied poet in America. Few seem to remember that his place in the firmament was secured precariously over decades, beginning with Auden’s grudging selection of Some Trees for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
The price of comic ingenuity, Lehman observes, has somewhat affected the literary success of Kenneth Koch. As both an admirer of Koch’s brilliant catalogues and innovative one-line poems, Lehman is perhaps the most enamored of this poet. Koch is a lauded teacher (his antic assignments have become something of a legend in academic circles) yet is presented here as an under-appreciated writer in an era when the lyric was considered alpha and omega. Perhaps more ignored in the poetry world, in spite of a Pulitzer, is James Schuyler, whose life and deceptively transparent, scrupulously particular poems are thoroughly investigated here. In terms of both its form and neglected status, his work stands apart from the others. Often making use of the literal rather than the symbolic, he creates in his "Hymn to Life" a kind of "laundry list" that, as Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan discovers, has the power to make life worthwhile.
We learn about his complicated, influential friendship with Auden, as well as why he was the last of the four to publish a book. He was renowned as the best editor of the group, and his poems attracted notable admirers such as Elizabeth Bishop, yet he did not give a public reading until 1988, three years before his death. Dazed at times by heavy dosages of antipsychotic medications, he spent a great deal of his later years in squalid hotel rooms.
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From Michael Tyrell's review of The Last Avant-Garde in Boston Review, December 1, 1999.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/michael-tyrell-review-last-avant-garde/
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Ralph Freed's lyric for Burton Lane's tune as sung by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Babes on Broadway
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The Divinity Within
Sometimes I write to try to figure something out
I hadn't understood before, that somebody else has said.
I've no idea what "the divinity within" might mean,
And yet I've heard it said so often that it must mean something
Everyone recognizes, whether they know what it really means or not.
It could mean we're created in God's image, if there were one,
Though I think it makes more sense the other way around,
Which is what I hope that Emerson and my mother had in mind.
It's not just that the supernatural makes no sense, and that the world
Is real enough without it. It's that each ordinary life seems at the same time
So miraculous it has to be divine, whatever that divinity might be.
Why do we think we're something other than we are? Look at the stars,
Or else don't bother, since there's nothing there to see. You realize
They're there, and yet you can't imagine what the worlds that they sustain
Could be like, or if those worlds exist, though there must be billions of them.
How could those lives be anything like ours, with its private sense of time
And memories that speak to me alone, like Sally's hair? Of course the inability
To feel them doesn't mean they can't be real, but what does real even mean
When it's applied to things we can't begin to understand? I understand this life,
At least I think I do. But how can a life that doesn't have this sense of self
Or the past or poetry, even if it's written in the stars, be one that speaks to me?
Perhaps instead of being part of something too immense to understand
Or inhabiting an expanding multiverse in which every possibility is realized
And equally real, each person's life might be in some sense all there is,
Whatever that might mean. I know it sounds absurd, but it isn't any more
Ridiculous than all those narratives of God I grew up trying to believe.
What makes a life divine isn't its perfection or its power, but its estrangement
From the world and the reflection of itself in all it sees. I wish I understood
What people mean by an eternal life. I only know that mine is singular,
Complete and coextensive with the transitory universe that it contains---
As though it were like God's and comprehended everything, but small.
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John Koethe's most recent books are Beyond Belief and Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016, both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth (Bloomsbury). “The Divinity Within” will be included in a new book, Cemeteries and Galaxies, to be published by FSG in April, 2025. [Author photo by Tom Bamberger.]
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William Blake, Albion Rose, ca 1794
Now when I visit Ellen’s body in my memory,
it is like visiting a cemetery. I look
at the chiseled, muscular belly
and at the perfect thirty-year old breasts
and the fine blond purse of her pussy
and I kneel and weep a little there.
I am not the first person to locate god
in erectile tissue and the lubricating gland
but when I kiss her breast and feel
the tough button of her nipple
rise and stiffen to my tongue
like the dome of a small mosque
in an ancient, politically-incorrect city,
I feel holy, I begin to understand religion.
I circle around to see the basilica
of her high, Irish-American butt,
and I look at her demure little asshole
and am sorry I didn’t spend more time with it.
And her mouth and her eyes and white white teeth.
It’s beauty beauty beauty which in a way Ellen
herself the person distracted me from. It’s
beauty which has been redistributed now
by the justice of chance and the temporal economy.
Now I’m like a sad astronaut living
deep in space, breathing the oxygen of memory
out of a silver can. Now I’m like an angel
drifting over the surface of the earth,
brushing its meadows and forests
with the tips of my wings,
with wonder and regret and affection.
for The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008, I asked Tony to name his favorite erotic book or author, and he replied:
<< Some of the most exciting erotic writing I know is ninth of Rilke’s famous Duino Elegies, in which the poet queries, demands, praises, promises and then swooningly yields to be entered completely by earth—“Earth, isn’t this what you want? An invisible re-arising in us? …What is your urgent command, if not transformation?” (translation Spender / Leishman)
The extended passage is unmistakably the address of an ardent lover to the beloved, and Rilke’s athletic, tremulous syntax, in its urging, falling back, swooping climaxes and surrenders, is thrillingly sexy in its brilliant performance of both masculine and feminine roles. Rilke reminds us how dramatically, heroically, erotic spiritual life can be, and his enactment of inner life sweeps through categories in glorious encounter and catharsis. It’s hot stuff, and it always makes me want to pray harder.
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from the archives; posted October 02, 2019
Carnets pour l’exile: According to tradition, every exile needs to wander aimlessly from time to time, not so much to find a shard of home at the next whiskey bar but to see what there is to see when the city has become your life to live.
Also, a good-hearted exile should think about year-end presents for those at home who have not yet been arrested.
I ran into Virginie Roux-Cassé‘s painting, and Virginie herself, quite by accident some years ago now. Her latest exhibition, called “Les Saintes”, she says, is inspired by an encounter with the Roma holy patron Sainte Sara la Noire, repudiated African Queen of King Herod and servant to holy patrons Saintes Marie-Jacobus and Marie-Salomé*.
“The people pray to [the saints’ icons], venerate them, adore them,” she told me during her opening cocktail the other day, “They dress them, they cover them with, they pile on them, various-patterned, many-colored, golden, ornamented scarves, tunics, coats, crowns, jewels, crosses, rosaries…The beauty, divinity, humanity just bowled me over”.
From that experience, she decided to investigate the lives and deaths of woman Catholic saints: more than a year of portraits in tempera and engravings on the theme is the result.
I have two paintings by Virginie Roux-Cassé. The one, acrylic or water-based housepaint on fiberboard, is a tilted dry sink (?), a tray (?) of apples hanging just over my dining table. Somebody picked these impish apples from an untended tree in (Virginie’s?) back garden.
The other picture – I call it “Bird Cage” –, in clotted acrylic with smudged newsprint collage, perches above my talk-on-the-phone-red-overstuffed-armchair (since my mother died mostly used with my Son, who lives far away, and Karine, with whom I like to touch a word when she’s away).
The Bird Cage is, I think, a lamp or lampshade in crinkly paper (flame-resistant crinoline?) and thick structuring wire with, set alongside it, a small vase. The vase has a big twig of (cherry?) blossoms jammed in it, too big for it. (‘Though you’d not guess it to see her walking home in the evening, Karine sometimes tears off flowering twigs or plucks up flowers and brings them home to make a “found bouquet”. It shocks me. Please don’t call the cops.)
In the foreground of it all I’ve described is a triplet of round fruits. One of the fruits is a distinctly different color than the other two, set slightly but distinctly behind. I sometimes try to make out the smudged newsprint but I’ve never succeeded.
I bought the impish apples and Bird Cage because Virginie Roux-Cassé’s take on the world around is not mine but is accessible to me, opens a garden gate for my feelings and my imagination. What’s that poem about the path not taken?
Like everybody else, contemporary artists such as Virginie Roux-Cassé have to come to grips with the increasingly vast pile of past and present and their infinite substacks: artists, oeuvres, esthetics, theories, concepts, approaches, materials and techniques. Most triangulate their hands at a point between story-telling and radical expression of a reality uniquely within them and what I think of as "esthetic life extensionism".
For story-telling, put somebody like, say, “post-black” painter Rashid Johnson, who did, notably, the interior “Broken Nine” mosaic at the New York’s Metropolitan Opera. For unique reality, think, say, of Jorinde Voigt, who paints the bio-quantic reality that undergirds our ordinary here-below. For esthetic life extensionism, an artist called Leon Loewentrautsprings to mind. Loewentraut has mastered a certain "Picasso signature style" that enables him to target an Audi-driving market that won’t pay for one of Picasso’s many thousands of second-rate squiggles, can’t afford the real thing, but, nevertheless, aspires to class and taste.
Virginie Roux Cassé's triangulates someplace between all three. Her distinction is that when I look at her work, I feel her standing looking with me. She's not whispering as an other artist might; sharing the experience of visual emotion is enough.
I once visited the upper-story greenhouse that serves as her workshop. I was taken aback to see - some unfinished, some painted over with other styles - in recognizable painterly styles lopped about the place. They were well done, too!
I was taken aback because for me the thing that has marked for me Virginie Roux Cassé's work is that it reminds me of nothing else that I've run into as I look around the world. Among the many excellent painters active today, Virginie Roux Cassée is my very own Le Douanier Rousseau.
Later, it struck me that the discarded “style” paintings did not represent a search to produce an effect or a search for a technique or for a style but rather represent her effort to understand, maybe to find and isolate, an effect on an (herself as an) onlooker. Doing that, she brings out my "emotion of seeing": in dance, I would say that the choreography has enabled the "sensibility" that enables the experience of dance performance.
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*Saint Sara la Noire is patron of the Roma (or "Gypsy") folk. Many of them claim an origin in India, an, indeed, Wikipedia identifies Saint Sara with the goddess Kali. Saints Mary-Salome, Mother of Saint John, author of the Apocalyptic gospel, Mary-Jacobus, Mother of Saint James the Apostle, along with Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ companion in love, were among the original disciples of Christianity’s Messiah. Most were witness to Jesus Christ's Resurrection. All are mentioned in the canonical gospels. Fleeing Israel in a rudderless boat sometime in the third decade of the present era, these woman disciples of Jesus providentially washed up on the French coast. They were long believed to be the founders of Christianity in France. The pilgrimage site for Saint Sara is at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a village in the Camargue.
Contact Virginie Roux-Cassé through her website: virginierouxcasse.com
Thanksgiving
Later, after dinner, we examine your uncle’s photos
of trees, flowers, waterfalls, birds
until I just can’t stand it another second.
I am not at one with nature. Never was.
Some of the people can be fooled all of the time,
even when you yawn right in their faces.
Guests, or ghosts, have taken over the house,
lounging in the living room, watching t.v.
Ugly images of war and politics are all I see.
Cancel the rest of the holidays, please, until this
knot can be untied and our hearts released.
-- Terence Winch
An acrostic spelling out the name of a poet who has written memorably about the family romance, Terence Winch's "Thanksgiving" works rather like a sonnet in thirteen lines. The point of departure is the sort of holiday get-together that many of us secretly (or overtly) dread, though unexpected epiphanies do occur ("I am not at one with nature") as guests consort with ghosts and watch "images of war and politics" on t.v.
-- DL
from the archive; first posted November 27, 2014
Kubla Khan
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea..
“As an online discussion or argument grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.” So says Godwin's Law, coined by author Mike Godwin. It's like "six degrees of separation" applied to political conversations (or rants), all of which reach their apex with Hitler. I personally attest to the validity of Godwin’s Law applied not just to online arguments but to discussions between and among friends, whether in person or on the phone.
Case in point: I was riding in the passenger seat in a car with my friend Diane in the driver’s seat. This was close to a decade ago. We were discussing an Iraq War veteran’s impassioned speech before her church group, where the embittered vet called into question the reasoning for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was, he contended, a grievous mistake. The speech did not go over well with the audience. The consensus was that it was an inappropriate choice of venue for the speech. Diane and I mulled over the incident. She said the vet should have chosen a venue more congenial to antiwar advocacy. I countered that an "acceptable" locale or event wouldn’t be playing host to the audience the vet was targeting . He had selected the church group for a reason. If he had spoken at an official anti war rally, he would end up preaching to the choir. Therefore, I said, it was more politically effective to speak to people not predisposed to agree your position.. Diane blurted out, “Well, would you say that the things Hitler and the Nazis did were politically effective for them?” I said that from Hitler’s standpoint, he was very ‘effective’ in advancing his own agenda. Of course, the discussion deteriorated from then on.
Hitler remains the trigger word, the invitation to the ultimaate unsafe space, that the 20th century left us. I challenge everyone to comment about his or her own experiences dealing with Godwin’s Law in a discussion or argument you may have had in the past.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
