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On Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) [by Jamie Katz]

Nine years ago, on October 26, 2012, we received a few comments in response to David's post about Jacques Barzun,  the great Columbia professor, who once graced the cover of Time magazine. Jacques died on October 25th at the age of 104. 

Suggesting that we re-post the piece, David recalls meeting Barzun in 1974, at the suggestion of Lionel Trilling, whose research assistant David was. "I approached him on the subject of the prose poem, which I had chosen as the subject of my PhD thesis. This cordial, cool, elegant man of letters, in his impressive office at Low Memorial Library, amazed me with his eruditon -- he was speaking off the top of his head, in which many ideas and facts were active, but it was as though he had just that week made a preliminary study of the precursors of Baudelaire's prose poems. Years later, when I embarked on writing a book about murder mysteries, and approached Jacques for advice. He wrote me a two-page, single-spaced letter that I still consider the best such memorandum that I have ever received. I love Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence, a magisterial work, and his Catalogue of Crime, an annotated catalogue of his and his collaborator Wendell Hertig Taylor's immense reading in the literature of crime, detection, and espionage.

"Trilling and Barzun were professors of the old, nearly obsolete kind. They really knew their stuff, took ideas strongly, understood the social ramifications of art and the humanities, and could converse on important books from Plato to Freud with wit and charm as alums can attest who took the Colloquium on Important Books that Trilling and Barzun taught jointly for many years at Columbia."

Here's a piece by our friend Jamie Katz, who had the honor of toasting Barzun on the occasion of his 100th birthday. 

The Barzun Touch

On the day we learned Lionel Trilling [right] had died, in 1975, I was the very young editor of the alumni magazine Columbia College Today, and we were right on deadline. Obviously, we wanted to include a piece worthy of such a distinguished Columbia figure, but we needed it overnight. “I’ll call Jacques,” offered our formidable and almost-as-young college dean, Peter Pouncey. It seemed like a moon shot to me. But when I arrived at Hamilton Hall the next morning, I found a brown inter-office envelope bearing a beautifully crafted essay on Trilling, at precisely the specified length, initialed JB.

It was the first of many instances of Professor Barzun’s loyalty and just-right helpfulness I would experience over the years. He encouraged our project of making the magazine more than just a house organ; he contributed essays and talks for publication; he kindly and patiently shot down every one of my ill-considered editorial suggestions. Through all, he projected a degree of consideration and decency that glows warmly as I continue to learn from him — most recently by reading From Dawn to Decadence. I’m halfway there, strolling a few enlightening pages a day. It is a fine thing to be taught by Jacques Barzun.

In his work I am struck, not just by his erudition and elegant prose, but by his acknowledgement of fluidity, chance and human agency in culture and history. It is a liberating conception, giving weight to both daring leaps of individual genius and the smaller gestures and habits that form the tissue of society. He gives respect to our innermost selves, too. Speaking of Descartes and the split between rationalism on one side and impulse and intuition on the other, Barzun refuses to take sides: “The more science proves its worth, the harder it is for ‘nature’ or ‘the heart’ to feel free. Reason should guide — all moralists agree — but, as others point out, mind is not separate from heart. The astute Chinese have a character for heart-and-mind. They perceived that the urge to reason is itself a drive from the heart, which explains why rationalists are often fanatics.”

There is a keen sense of proportion, a dancer’s grace, in Barzun’s thought and action. Some have mistaken this for aristocratic haughtiness. I see it as poise. I had a piano teacher long ago who would occasionally lean hard on my forearms as I played for her. The point was for me to develop a finer touch — a Barzun touch, you might say — by balancing downward force with upward lift, so the hands could float comfortably above the keyboard.

One day in the late ’80s, Professor Barzun was invited to a luncheon gathering the editors of the various alumni publications on campus, from Columbia College, the law school, the medical school and so forth. My colleagues were thrilled to have such an eminent authority on writing, editing and publishing in our midst, and they peppered him with questions about gender-neutral pronouns, serial commas and other inside-baseball stuff. I then sought his perspective — as former university provost, dean of faculties and alumnus-of-more-than-one-division — on a suggestion then current in the university’s councils, namely, that the various Columbia periodicals be somehow organized to “speak with one voice.” He shook his head. “I don’t believe it’s possible for an individual to speak with one voice, let alone a university,” he said. “What we should aim for is a polyphonic effect.”

At that moment, I detected a trace of a grin — not a smirk, but the twinkle-in-the-eye of a man who knows he has found the mot juste.

Cent’ anni, Jacques!

Jamie Katz, editor-at-large, Smithsonian Magazine
More on Jacques Barzun by Jamie Katz

"International Experts" by Pamela Brown [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

With the recent announcement to open Australia's international borders next month (or as the Prime Minister Scott Morrison calls it on his official website, "taking steps to reopen to the world", which sounds more like a chapter from a self-help manual than government policy), I thought it would be a good moment to share Pam Brown's "International Experts".

Brown is a central figure in the formative period of contemporary Australian poetry which took place in 1970s Sydney. With Anna Couani, Ken Bolton and Sal Brererton, she helped put together the iconic Magic Sam magazine, which published some of Australia's most important poets. Brown has published more than twenty books of her own poetry and prose, including Dear Deliria: New and Selected Poems, which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 2004. She has also served as the poetry editor for Overland and an associate editor of the brilliant and too-short lived Jacket magazine.

 

 

"International Experts" cleverly appraises the appeal of a place with its current cultural output. Both London and Paris have "had it", while "the americans / are doing / all the writing / these days". The speaker settles for a trip within Australia, and, based on her criteria for choosing a destination, why not? With Brown and her coterie, Australia just might be the most appealing destination of the lot.

 

 

International Experts

                                                        
when we get restless
we talk about
where we could go

we decide
london has had it
except for music.
madness.
marianne faithfull.
the selecter.
paris has had it
except for a few memorable spots.
paul eluard.
gertrude stein.
statre. semiology
and plastic bertrand
from belgium.

of course
we mention 
new york.
the americans
are doing 
all the writing
these days.

asia and india
are out of the question.
no package deal ashrams.
although japan
is interesting
comics and posters.

really though 
berlin
is the place to go.
fassbinder. brecht.
a politically 
complex past.

experts.
micky met
sumo wrestlers
in japan
before america
and europe.
jill saw paris
and london 
last year.

down in sydney
the air goes bad
and I fill up with gases,
go to the movies,
by books, a record
and a train ticket
to queensland.

 

Kierkegaard on systems

<<
In relation to their systems most systematizers are like a man who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack close by.
>> 

Elsewhere Kierkegaard says that people correspond to parts of speech. "How many people are merely adjectives, interjections, adverbs; and how few are substantives, verbs, etc. . . .There are people whose position in life is that of the interjection, without influence in the sentence." Think about it.

From the archive. Posted on The Best American Poetry on July 02, 2011.

 

Elsewhere Kierkegaard says that people correspond to parts of speech. "How many people are merely adjectives, interjections, adverbs; and how few are substantives, verbs, etc. . . .There are people whose position in life is that of the interjection, without influence in the sentence." Think about it.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventeen): Hannah Dow [by Angela Ball]

Another Summer Without Classical Music

I haven’t lived in Southern California
very long but every summer that I do
it occurs to me
only after the summer has ended
that I should go see “Mozart
Under the Stars” or some other
classical music concert at the Hollywood Bowl
because I should get out more
I should get more culture
at least that is what my lover tells me
and it occurs to me that culture
is not a bowl of spaghetti
or anything that can be twirled on a fork
and wiped up with a hunk of bread
then abandoned for days in the fridge
like most of the new plans I make—
cancelled, because—as the actor
in my poetry workshop used to say:
we have a new realization every one to two seconds
and I’ll believe just about anything
if it sounds interesting enough
which is why the only ghost I believe in
is that of a 1930s Hollywood actress
who jumped from the sign’s H
and is sometimes seen wandering
below and maybe I believe this
because H is the letter I would choose
or because I don’t believe the explanation
given for her death (learning
that her role in her first film
had been cut to four minutes)
because Thirteen Women is a film about manipulating
women into killing themselves or one another
and I believe this too-easy coincidence
this culture I cannot digest
is proof that men have always wanted women
to hate one another and ourselves
so we will love them more

--Hannah Dow

Hannah Dow is the author of ROSARIUM (Acre Books, 2018). Her poems have recently appeared in Shenandoah, Image, and The Southern Review, among others. She received the Cream City Review Summer Prize in Poetry, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and has received awards and scholarships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and Bread Loaf Orion. Hannah is the editor-in-chief of Tinderbox Poetry Journal and an Assistant Professor of English at Missouri Southern State University.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventeen): Hannah Dow [by Angela Ball]

In its casual self-criticism, Hannah Dow’s “Another Summer Without Classical Music” has something in common with James Schuyler’s rueful attitude toward the self; in its fascination with Hollywood, something in common with Frank O’Hara. Dow engages with “Hollywood” culture via the 1932 horror film Thirteen Women and its cast member, brand-new film actress Peg Entwistle, who jumped from the famous sign’s letter “H,” possibly in response to her supporting role being edited down to a bit part. Entwistle divorces herself from “Hollywood” both actually and symbolically in the most graphic way possible. Entanglement between art and life is at the heart of this deft poem.

The tissue-thin plot of the hour-long Thirteen Women involves a “half-caste” mesmerist played by Myrna Loy who plots revenge on the alumnae of a fancy finishing school who excluded her from their sorority. She has the unwitting participation of her associate, a “swami” who has promised to send horoscopes to all the women of the group. Loy’s character forges replacement horoscopes predicting death and mayhem. The film begins with a statement (endorsed by two prominent professors of psychology) that the human mind is vulnerable to suggestion. Indeed, the scenario consists of one instance after another of suggestion inciting action and/or accident to produce death, each marked by a ‘special effect’ that resembles an exploding star as drawn by a novice artist. In a sense, Entwistle’s suicide functions to extend or complete the movie as it simultaneously culminates her life. On one level, her death is pathetic. But on another, it is tragic. Her suicide note pleads cowardice. There was certainly plenty to fear in Hollywood—not from “half-caste women” but from men--priapic studio execs, rapacious agents, and actors skilled in date rape (a concept yet unknown). The penalty for non-participation was often exclusion. Suicide pre-emptively excludes the world, and its invocation marks an increase in the poem’s complexity:

     as the actor

     in my poetry workshop used to say:

     we have a new realization every one to two seconds

     and I’ll believe just about anything

     if it sounds interesting enough

     which is why the only ghost I believe in

     is that of a 1930s Hollywood actress

     who jumped from the sign’s H

     and is sometimes seen wandering below . . .

Hannah Dow’s engaging and disturbing “Another Summer Without Classical Music” is a poem about the difficulty of making sense of culture, Hollywood or otherwise, and of finding a coherent place within it—more particularly, the continuing difficulty for women who want to “digest” culture rather than be digested by it. In other words, a problem of agency. The explanation proposed at the end of the poem,

     . . . Thirteen Women is a film about manipulating

     women into killing themselves or one another

     and I believe this too-easy coincidence 

     this culture I cannot digest

     is proof that men have always wanted women

     to hate one another and ourselves

     so we will love them more

is provisional at best, asserted as belief by a speaker who earlier says, “I’ll believe just about anything / if it sounds interesting enough.” The poem’s missing period indicates that the speaker’s stabs at belief, along with our own, will continue, as unquiet as the ghost who frequents the sign, shadowed by its thirteen fifty-foot high letters.

--Angela Ball

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reginald Dwayne Betts. Photo by Mamadi Doumbouya

______________________________________________________________

Blood History

 

The things that abandon you get remembered different.

As precise as the English language can be, with words

like penultimate and perseverate, there is not a combination

of sounds that describe only that leaving. Once,

drinking and smoking with buddies, a friend asked if

I’d longed for a father. Had he said wanted, I would have

dismissed him in the way that youngins dismiss it all:

a shrug, sarcasm, a sharp jab to stomach, laughter.

But he said longing. & in a different place, I might

have wept. Said, once, my father lived with us & then he

didn’t and it fucked me up so much I didn’t think about

his leaving until I held my own son in my arms & only

now speak on it. A man who drank Boone’s Farm and Mad

Dog like water once told me & some friends that there is no

word for father where he comes from, not like we know it.

There the word father is the same as the word for listen.

The blunts we passed around let us to abandon the English

language. Not that much though. But what if the old

        head knew something? & if you have no father, you can’t

hear straight. Years later, that same friend asked about

longing, wondered why I named my son after my father.

       You know that’s the kind of shit turns the rest of your life

into a prayer no dead man will answer.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Reginald Dwayne Betts is the founder and director of the Freedom Reads. A poet and lawyer, he is the author of four books. His latest collection of poetry, Felon, was awarded the American Book Award and an NAACP Image Award. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and a Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. [For more about Reginald Dwayne Betts, click here.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                     William H. Johnson. Man in Vest. Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

"Stick" [by James Cummins]

It was intra-squad, not a real game,
But teenage boys don’t know the difference;
And to the pitcher who’d just thrown
An adrenaline-powered fastball at my head,
I was a pretender he could intimidate.
When the next pitch nearly took off
The top of my left knee, I knew,
With all the force of a mystical vision,
This talented boy, this ace of the staff,
A senior expected to bloom after showing
Such promise last year, such grit, such
Competitive fire, would fail.  I saw it
In his eyes when I got back up; I saw
The momentary hesitation, the confusion.
I knew the next pitch would be right
Down the middle of the plate, and as fast
As all the pride in his body could muster.
And he knew I knew; that was the key.
He didn’t know how, but he knew;
And it scared him, this giant of a boy,
That a stick of a kid he could break
In half in study hall, or a parking lot,
Would stare back at him as I stared back.
You never know who’ll relish the arena;
Who won’t care what he looks like,
As he approaches the game from his side,
Watching you watching him as he steps up.
The pitch was pretty, a beauty of a pitch,
But it depended on my believing what
Had transpired between us the last two.
His arrogance became my coldness;
I’d done this before, and he hadn’t.
The pitch was pretty, a beauty of a pitch,
And a few seconds later it hit a limb
Of a sycamore behind the left field fence.
“You’re going to have a bad year,” I yelled
As I trotted down the first base line,
Even then disliking myself for shouting it;
But something will rip out of you
In those moments, both you and not you;
It's not just triumph.  Bullies, sociopaths,
Narcissists—you have to demarcate—
You have to spell out a moment’s meaning
For them, in words they can’t mistake,
Because to them others have no outlines—
Other people are just blurry shapes
At the edges of their self-absorption.
And facts aren’t facts; you have to replace
The voice in their heads with a new voice:
I glued that home run to a voice
That jeered like the voice of his father,
Perhaps, or his mother, or a brother;
A voice that said this is your stupid soul
Flying over the fence after being struck
By the oldest weapon in the world,
A wooden stick.

From Recalcitrant Actors (2021, Dos Madres Press) by James Cummins,

Three Poems (by Mitch Sisskind)

Hold Onto Your Hat

 

We learned how if the ship goes down you

Can make a life-preserver of your shirt

By taking it off and slamming it down onto

The water with the air inside so the shirt

Bubbles up and then you can hold onto it.

 

If you don't have a shirt you can do

The same thing with your pants by

Taking your pants off and then you

Trap the air in your pants as described

Above to form the pants life-preserver.

 

If you have neither shirt nor pants

You can make a life-preserver out of

Your hat by slamming your hat onto

The water as described above to

Make yourself a hat life-preserver.

 

They said if you fuckers are going

To grab for your crotch we want you

To do it here and not when the ship

Is burning and actually a few fellows

Did end up grabbing for their crotches.

 

Feh! Feh! Feh!

 

Just as there are names we mustn't speak,

Questions to remain unasked, proscribed

Mentations, even downright hilarious jokes

That ought never be told whether at the

Water cooler or in a duck-hunting blind,

Yes, that's all well and good but when

You slip up (as you will) bite your tongue,

Spit three times over your shoulder and

With whatever heartfelt sincerity you can

Possibly muster say, "Feh! Feh! Feh!"

Is it a perfect solution? No. But at least

You'll not be cast into outer darkness.

 

 

Mitzi

We never missed You Bet Your Life,

Groucho's quiz show, my father and I

Awaiting the secret word no matter

How week after week that word was

Unspoken until at last the $100 duck

To spontaneous applause descended.

But enough of that. The strange part

Was one night riding with Groucho

In an elevator, he in a French beret

And accompanied by a much younger

Woman, how as Mitzi the dachshund

Approached him he was so frightened

With none of the sarcastic aplomb

We associated with him, Lou and I.

 

 

 

The Last Word on Napoleon [by David Lehman]

The last word on Napoleon has not been written. More than 600,000 books have been published about the military genius who crowned himself emperor of France in 1804 and united the rest of Europe in fear. Does the world really need another book on Napoleon? Yes, if only because our fascination with him endures.

As Alistair Horne points out in his cogent and highly readable account of “The Age of Napoleon” (Modern Library, 219 pages, $21.95), every era refashions Napoleon in the image of its own aspirations. But there are constants. For generations since he lost his final gamble at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon personified courage, leadership, ambition. Only heroism or madness can account for some of his gambits, and so he tends to be popular among professional soldiers and inmates of loony bins. The diplomacy assuring European peace for the ninety-nine years preceding World War I resulted directly from the British and continental reaction to Napoleon, whose image takes a body blow when authoritarian dictators bent on world conquest come to power.

On the other hand, Napoleon represented – not only in France but in all of Europe – the triumph of an idea made possible by the French Revolution but realized only in the meteoric career of the Corsican-born artillery captain who, at age twenty-four, saved the day for the French army at the Siege of Toulon in 1793. Two years later, he dispersed a Paris mob with a “whiff of grapeshot,” as historians have termed it, and thereafter rose irresistibly to power, replacing the anarchy of revolution with order and military ardor.

To Ralph Waldo Emerson, champion of American self-reliance, Napoleon was the model of a “self-made man.” To other illustrious observers it seemed that the spirit of Romanticism and Rousseau culminated in him. But he was as much a despot as a liberator, capable of cruelty, some of it gratuitous, and full of an overweening arrogance. Beethoven composed the Eroica symphony in Bonaparte’s honor but withdrew the dedication in disgust, ripping up the title page, on learning that the French republic had terminated in Napoleon’s imperial coronation.

Horne, the author of two previous books dealing with Napoleon’s military career, devotes this little tome to his social and cultural impact. “The Age of Napoleon” is rife with arcane details (that, for example, matches were invented in 1809) and ironic asides. The cemetery of Pere Lachaise was Napoleon’s monumental solution to “the urgent problem of creating space for the grateful dead of Paris.” If Josephine showed too much cleavage, Napoleon would tear off her dress and throw it into the fire or spill a bottle of ink on it. “She put up with a lot,” Horne comments.

To Josephine, the love of his life, Napoleon wrote hot passionate letters from whatever front he happened to be on. “Arriving home in three days,” he instructs her after the battle of Marengo. “Don’t bathe.” He loved Josephine hopelessly, despite her infidelities. “She had the prettiest little ----- imaginable,” he told a confidant. But that didn’t stop him from divorcing her in 1809. Needing a male heir, Napoleon married the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, the Grand-Duchess Marie-Therese, a nubile nineteen-year old said to have had a bovine expression, who dutifully bore him a son.

Legendarily capable of inspiring his troops to overcome bigger and better-equipped opponents, Napoleon inspires or haunts the heroes of great novels. The battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon’s greatest victory, figures in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Waterloo does the same in Stendhal’s “Charterhouse of Parma,” which opens with the declaration that the French army’s triumphal entry in Milan in 1796 “taught the world that after so many centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor.”

Not that the Napoleon complex is always or even usually benign. Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s other masterpiece, “The Red and the Black,” comes to a bad end following the Corsican’s star. Raskolnikov, in Dostoyevski’s “Crime and Punishment,” suffers under the delusion that he is a type of the Napoleonic man, who is exempt from all laws except those of his own making. As a result he murders two harmless old women.

Napoleon exalted glory higher than all else, and the glory he craved came at a steep cost. He was, said a contemporary, “the kind of general who needed a monthly income of ten thousand men.” In twenty years of warfare more than a million lives were lost in France alone. What should frighten us most about Napoleonic hero-worship is that he serves as the primary role-model not only for lunatics in asylums but for genocidal maniacs. It is possible to consider Adolf Hitler as precisely a perversion of the Napoleonic ideal. Like Napoleon, the Nazi dictator was expert at manipulating public opinion and ruthless in the exercise of power. Both aspired to world domination, and both tasted defeat at the hands of a Russian winter.

But the Fuhrer had none of the French Emperor’s saving virtues. No war criminal, Napoleon instituted major civil reforms and imposed, in the Napoleonic code, a coherent legal system on the whole of the continent. An early proponent of a Jewish homeland, he restored freedom of worship in post-revolutionary France. He began the reconstruction of Paris that turned it into the world’s most magnificent city.

Above all, Napoleon embodied – in his own example as much as in his edicts and decrees – the radical idea that careers should be based not on birth but on merit. He proved that a poor boy from a remote island could, through the sheer force of his personality, intelligence, energy, and will, vault higher than kings and popes and, in his words, “push back the boundaries of greatness.”

written for Bloomberg, 5 / 14 / 04

On Kenneth Koch, "Dr. Fun" [by Melanie Rehak]

"May I tell you how much I love your poems?" Frank O'Hara crowed in the first stanza of a tribute to his friend Kenneth Koch in 1953. "It's as if a great pipeline had been illicitly tapped/along which all personal characteristics/are making a hasty departure. Tuba? Gin?/...O Kenneth Koch!" Koch's memories of his writing methods at the time, which he described with typical exuberance in a poem of his own, confirm O'Hara's impression that he drew inspiration from nothing less than the entire world. "I'm excited I'm writing at my typewriter it doesn't make too much sense," he gushed, so thrilled to be putting words to paper he didn't even have a moment to spare for punctuation. Assuming his usual carefree poetic persona combined with just a dash of bemused self-mockery, Koch wrote about his creative process with the breathlessness of a man wholly in love with the universe.

At the time of all this rampant delight, Koch had just returned to New York City from a Fulbright year in Paris, joining O'Hara and their friends John Ashbery and James Schuyler in the merry band that would eventually be known as the New York School of poets. Though they were writers first and foremost, the four were also deeply immersed in the art world and entangled, both personally and professionally, with much of the emerging talent of the moment--painters like Jane Freilicher (who lived upstairs from Koch in the East Village), Larry Rivers and Willem de Kooning. Together they formed a little cosmos where intimacy and self-expression reigned. "We poets and painters hung around a lot together, showed each other our works, and were made by this camaraderie very (or more than otherwise) ambitious, envious, emulous, and, I think, lucky," Koch recalled, trying to capture the fertile, passionate bohemia of New York City in the 1950s. In a poem from the 1970s, he sounded a more sentimental note, making it clear those years had also been a time of great romance. "My friends...meant almost more than anything to me," he reflected. "Their names alone bring tears to my eyes."

Under the influence of Abstract Expressionism and basking in the possibilities of language, Koch and his poetic cohorts were determined to subvert the dominant New Criticism of the 1950s, of which, Koch wrote, "Eliot was the Great Dictator.... One hardly dared to wink / Or fool around in any way in poems." Koch, on the other hand, wanted to have fun (and was actually nicknamed Dr. Fun by Ashbery, whom he had befriended for life when both were undergraduates at Harvard), and he went about it with a seriousness of purpose tinged with hilarity. He had come home from France with the idea that poetry was a language unto itself, and that it needed to be indulged as such. As he explained in a preface to his first book, Sun Out -- the poems in which were written in the early 1950s but not published until after his death in 2002--he had been plunged into a happy and productive linguistic soup as he attempted to get by in French, "which I understood and misunderstood at the same time.... Words would have several meanings for me at once.... Once I began to hear them all together, [they] constituted a way of using the language that was very stirring to me and seemed to mean a lot. It gave me a strong sensation of speaking the truth."

Koch's attempts to render this multiplicity of meaning in straight English, and thereby get to the essential nature of human existence, yielded some rather odd products over the next few years. The opening lines of the title poem in Sun Out, for example, read like a burst of surrealist insanity: "Bananas, piers, limericks/I am postures / Over there, I, are/The lakes of delectation." What on earth is he talking about? "I wanted to keep my subject up in the air as long as possible," he explained in his preface--to which one can only respond, Job well done.

But even in his early work, there are amid the linguistic experiments flashes of pure, everyday ecstasy--that "delectation"--and in them one finds the heart of Koch's work, the immediacy that makes it irresistible. "The land is coughing, 'Joy!'" he wrote in a 1950s poem called "Highway Barns, the Children of the Road." "Hey, pavements, you charmers, / When are you going to bring me good news?" Koch was always looking for good news, and as a result he discovered it everywhere. How many other poets could write "A Poem of the Forty-Eight States" and find something to love in each and every one of them? Who else could have spun, much less thrilled to, the line: "Oh railroad stations, pennants, evenings, and lumberyards!"? His extravagant revels are infectious.

This palpable, ceaseless enthusiasm for both writing and life itself sets Koch apart from a pantheon of poets who too often forget the pleasure principle. Perhaps most important, he generously invited all of us into his neighborhood, even providing instructions for living there on occasion. "Making love must be everything," he advised in "The Art of Love." "A city, not a street; a country, not a city; the universe, the world--/Make yours so, make it even a galaxy." This bountiful tide crashes through Koch's Collected Poems, which comes in at more than 700 pages and is dense enough at times to be daunting to even the most dedicated reader. Still, when one considers how much Koch struggled to exclude, it's hard to hold a grudge against him. His life was a whirlwind of influences and reactions and actions and the mad rush to figure it all out. As he wrote in a long, marvelous poem called "Days and Nights":

There are very few poems
Compared to all the thought
And the activity and the sleeping and the falling in love
And out of love and the friendships
And all the talk and the doubts and the excitement
And the reputations and the philosophies
And the opinions about everything and the sensitivity
And the being alone a lot and having to be with others
A lot and the going to bed a lot and getting up a lot and seeing
Things all the time in relation to poetry

And just when you think you want to stop the ride and get off, Koch chimes in with a revelation so sweet and so calm that you stay on. "I want spring, I want to turn like a mobile/In a new fresh air!" he wrote in an early poem called "Desire for Spring." "O breeze, my lovely, come in, that I mayn't be stultified!"

Above all else, Koch was a poet of charm. He was so mesmerized by the world that no one can fail to be enchanted by his vision of it, not least because it rarely comes without a good dose of irony and appreciation for just how ridiculous the position of the "artist" can be if it goes to your head. While he took his practice very seriously, and spent many years teaching poetry and the value of artistic expression in venues from nursing homes to elementary schools, Koch never gave up on the idea that verse is based, ultimately, on life. In a tiny poem called "AESTHETICS OF BEING GLORIOUS," he argued, simply, for the pleasures of beginning from one's rightfully earthbound spot: "To be glorious, take off your wings / Before you fly." In a series of poems called "In Bed" that explore, with varying degrees of sobriety, the role of this central piece of furniture to human existence, he wrote first a one-liner called "BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN BED": "Why I am happy to be here." He followed it up with a singular, deeply comic contribution to the genre of worshiping one's lady love that reminds us how silly such flights of romantic fancy can be. Marvell has nothing on the jovial spoof "OTHER POETRY BED": "Shall I compare you to a summer's bed? / You are more beautiful."

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Koch was more than a poet of comic verse, a label that dogged him throughout his life. At its best, his work captures the deep pleasures of being alive and of being fully conscious of one's own luck. There is a gentleness to his joy that in no way diminishes its force, a rare combination that reverberates in anyone fortunate enough to be open to it in all its possibility. Here is Koch, in "To My Heart at the Close of Day":

At dusk light you come to bat
As Georg Trakl might put it. How are you doing
Aside from that, aside from the fact
That you are at bat? What balls are you going to hit
Into the outfield, what runs will you score,
And do you think you ever will, eventually
Bat one out of the park? That would be a thrill
To you and your contemporaries! Your mighty posture
Takes its stand in my chest and swing swing swing
You warm up, then you take a great step
Forward as the ball comes smashing toward you, home
Plate. And suddenly it is evening.

How mournful to lose such a wellspring of loving energy. O baseball! O balmy nights! O Kenneth Koch!

This article can be found on the web at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060123/rehak

Ed. note: "Doctor Fun" was Ashbery's jovial nickname for his friend. Kenneth didn't like it as I learned when I published an essay on him with that title in the American Poetry Review. He made me promise not to use it as the title for the chapter on "Vitamin K" in my book The Last Avant-Garde. But Melanie Rehak liked it, and it fits her tribute to KK. -- DL

Said Disraeli to Gladstone. . .

 

 

At a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli, "I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease."

Disraeli replied, "That all depends, Sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

Disraeli replied, "That all depends, Sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

Flying Into the Unpredictable: Publishing During a Pandemic [by J. Chester Johnson]

(ed note: We checked in with J. Chester Johnson to find out how he's fared over the course of the last 18 plus months with the publication of his timely Damaged Heritage. Here's his update. sdl)
My latest nonfiction book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation (publisher: Pegasus; distributed by Simon & Schuster), was released on May 5, 2020 in the midst of a raging covid pandemic that relentlessly and unmercifully brutalized New York City. Those of us who reside in the City and who could do so clung to the interiors of our homes, going outdoors with much fear and trembling.

Into this environment, Damaged Heritage had been published. In turn, a book launch, scheduled for the New York City Harvard Club, was kyboshed, and both my agent and publisher told me to “cool” my expectations on book sales, for Damaged Heritage would be flying into the unpredictable, but clearly adverse headwinds of covid with bookstores everywhere then being shuttered for indefinite periods of time. So, I then chalked up my new book as just one more learning experience to be encased among others that friends and relatives suggest should make me stronger; however, I was getting too old to make much use of such learning experiences. . .I thought.

Nonetheless, there were obviously new paths to be conquered in response to the pandemic. Zoom-type presentations and book plates replaced traveling for in-person gatherings and face-to-face signing of personal inscriptions. On-line interviews then prevailed. At the same time, accommodations were now made possible as a result of new ways of reaching the public. For instance, on Sunday, June 28^th, 2020, I conducted a zoom appearance at 8:30AM before a congregation of the Episcopal Diocese of Florida that lasted an hour; just three hours later, I made another zoom presentation on the book before the Washington National Cathedral in the District of Columbia.

Such a tandem would not have been possible in the absence of zoom or its equivalent. Indeed, I’ve already given nearly 90 presentations, including interviews, on Damaged Heritage. I found that zooms allowed me to reach more people and to participate in more places. Moreover, podcasts represented not an insignificant part of the book marketing effort. Zoom-type appearances will undoubtedly be with us for future “book tours”. One cannot predict an experience like the covid pandemic affecting the way future practices will be conducted; however, speaking as one, I found the results from new approaches of marketing books often quite effective and satisfying.

Damaged Heritage had three, main messages. First, it told of a terribly murderous massacre of African-American sharecroppers and their family members – known as the Elaine Race Massacre – on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta; too few people knew anything about this event, which was conceivably the worst attack against African-Americans in our country’s history. Second, the new book told of my maturation process in discovering that my favored grandfather participated in the Massacre; in addition, notwithstanding my having grown up in a racist family in the very racist region of the Massacre, the process also led this erstwhile white Southerner to the embracement of both Black liberation and a progressive, structural format for racial reconciliation between Blacks and whites.

Third, Damaged Heritage tells the story of racial reconciliation and deep friendship that developed between Sheila Walker and me for seven years and extended to family members on both sides. Sheila was a descendent of victims of the Massacre, granduncles who were shot numerous times by white posses and left for dead, but survived. For several years, Sheila and I talked publicly in numerous forums about our reconciliation. She died in March of this year, and I was requested by her family to give the eulogy.

The torture and murder of George Floyd occurred only three weeks following the release of Damaged Heritage. I simply had no idea how much the racial reconciliation and deep friendship that existed between an African-American woman (Sheila Walker) and a white man who grew up in the South along the Mississippi River (namely, me), as described in this book, would resonate with people following the death of George Floyd that resulted in public outpouring of grief and horror by both Blacks and so many whites, together with consequential confrontations between citizens and law enforcement, including, on occasion, federal troops. Sheila and my racial reconciliation and friendship, combined with the disclosure of this unknown event, the purposefully hidden story of the Elaine Race Massacre, seemed to galvanize readers to Damaged Heritage.

For example, in late July, 2020, two months following release of the book, I was informed by my publisher that Damaged Heritage stood at #3 on a significant Amazon Best Seller list for books sold through Kindle. More recently, I found that the book had been included in Goodreads’ multi-year list of Best Nonfiction Books of Horrifying Events, alongside The Diary of Anne Frank, Hersey’s Hiroshima, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago – admittedly, my book is down the list, but nevertheless on the list.

The ole saw that “timing is everything” has its use, but I prefer to believe and adhere to a terse epigram I discovered that had been written cryptically in small, printed letters and incongruously on the gray walls of a New York City latrine located in a writers’ hangout: “Just keep writing”. Part of this book had been written as far back as 2013; filling in the blank spaces between the lip and the cup meant years. One shall never know, and one should never guess. Just keep writing.                                                                                                                                  

Chester Johnson is a poet and nonfiction writer. In addition to Damaged Heritage, he has written three, other books, recently published: St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems, Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems, and Auden, the Psalms, and Me. Find out more about Chester Johnson here.

Greg McBride: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________

Sizes

 

My sister found our father’s ring,

turquoise faded, sullied silver-plate.

 

It stopped my breath. Thirty years ago

I took it from his cold hand.

 

A big man, he never took it off,

not when he dug or swung or swam,

 

or smeared on huckleberry jam,

or held a cribbage peg, or gripped

 

a favorite pitching wedge, then fudged

his score again. With feeling,

 

she placed it on my palm,

we his keepers. I slipped it on.

 

It hung, slack, wanting more.

It stung. Once, the shoes. Now this.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Greg McBride spent a year as an Army photographer in Vietnam, then thirty years practicing law in Washington, DC, before discovering contemporary poetry in his fifties. It changed his life. In 2005 he became founding editor of the Innisfree Poetry Journal. At the age of 63, he won the Boulevard emerging poet prize. His book Porthole won the Liam Rector First Book Prize. ["Sizes" first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mickey McBride and his son Greg, ca. 1984.

Silent Notes [by Lera Auerbach]

Silent Notes. Photo by Lera Auerbah

 

When pianos are not played,
they become very sad,
they collect silent notes.
Unplayed music floats –
invisible dust of overtones.
The dead are waiting expectantly:
so many keys – 88 – all untouched. 
The day of silent music
sheds the signature of uncaptured Time.

(“What are you practicing now?”
my mother asks me quietly.
Her eyebrows raised. I shrug.)

 

You Choose: Two Versions of “Autumn Song” [by W. H. Auden]

Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last,
Nurses to their graves are gone,
But the prams go rolling on.

Whispering neighbours left and right
Daunt us from our true delight,
Able hands are forced to freeze
Derelict on lonely knees.

Close behind us on our track,
Dead in hundreds cry Alack,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.

Scrawny through a plundered wood,
Trolls run scolding for their food,
Owl and nightingale are dumb,
And the angel will not come.

Clear, unscaleable, ahead
Rise the Mountains of Instead,
From whose cold cascading streams
None may drink except in dreams.

-- March 1936 

Posted by  Stacey on November 03, 2013 aComments

Auden was not an American poet--and this version of "Autumn Song" is the better one.

Autumn Song

Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last;
Nurses to the graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.

Whispering neighbours, left and right,
Pluck us from the real delight;
And the active hands must freeze
Lonely on the separate knees.

Dead in hundreds at the back
Follow wooden in our track,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.

Starving through the leafless wood
Trolls run scolding for their food;
And the nightingale is dumb,
And the angel will not come.

Cold, impossible, ahead
Lifts the mountain's lovely head
Whose white waterfall could bless
Travellers in their last distress.

Posted by: James Obertino | September 30, 2014 at 03:48 PM

I prefer “able hands”, and “lonely” to “derelict “.
Also, the “thes” in these two lines can be omitted.

Posted by: Annette D'Arcy | October 06, 2018 at 06:59 AM

I, too, vote for "able hands," and I guess "lonely," while not ideal, is superior to "derelict." But I would contest the view that Auden was not an American poet. True, when he wrote this poem he had never been to America. There were two main periods, and there are those who feel that the English Auden of the 1930s is the authentic voice. But he came to America in 1939, settled in New York, wrote a couple of his greatest and most ambitious poems in the US (the Freud elegy, "Sept 1, 1939," "Under Which Lyre). He became a naturalized US citizen (in 1946, I believe). He is nearly as American as St. Louis native T. S. Eliot is English. -- DL

Posted by: The Best American Poetry | October 06, 2018 at 10:10 AM

I feel like the last two lines are much better in the first version. "From whose cold cascading streams None may drink except in dreams." conveys a sense of privation and bleakness that is in line with the rest of poem, and it's a much more powerful ending.

Overall, I feel like there are moments when the first version is better, and other moments in which the second version is better.

Posted by: Valerie Yip | November 29, 2020 at 11:27 AM

"Autumn Song" is a poem that shows Auden at his most British American or the other way around.

Posted by: William Barnes | January 28, 2021 at 10:39 PM

The second of these 2 versions is the one set to music by Benjamin Britten, in his song cycle, "On this Island." Britten and Auden knew each other.

Posted by: Frances Brock | September 10, 2021 at 06:58 AM

from the archive; first posted November 3, 2013

Listen: Tracy K. Smith Reads and discusses Kamilah Aisha Moon's "Irony" and Louise Erdrich's "Stone Love" from The Best American Poetry 2021

 

Louis Armstrong in 1934 & in Australia c. 1956 & on the Edsel Show

"I Cover the Waterfront" .  .

Now you has jazz. . .

with Crosby  & Sinatra & Rosemary Clooney: On the Sunny Side of the Street

An Introduction to Martin Johnston (Part 2) [by Thomas Moody]

Martin Johnston died in June 1990 at the age of forty-two having published three books of poetry: Shadowmass; The Sea-Cucumber; and The Typewriter Considered a Bee-Trap; a novel, Cicada Gambit; and a collection of translations of Greek Poems, Ithaka. His short life was marked by tragedy: his mother committed suicide in 1969 when Johnston was 21, and almost exactly a year later his father died in his sleep of tuberculosis. In 1974, Johnston's sister Shane committed suicide. A year before Johnston's own death his half-sister, Gae, died, also in tragic circumstances.

 

 

"The Sea-Cucumber" is an elegy Johnston wrote for his father, ostensibly dedicated to the painter Ray Crooke. Crooke, best known for his dust-colored landscapes of the dry Australian outback, ironically won the prestigious Archibald Prize for portraiture in 1969 for his painting of Johnston's father, George. "The Sea-Cucumber" details an evening in which Crooke shows George Johnston one of his new works in which the painter has "floated / a sfumato background almost in front of the canvas". Johnston's father is "garrulous as ever" but the young speaker knows there is something forced to his father's performance, as he presses "every word-drop, like the wine of a harvest not quite adequate." 

 

Ray Crooke North Queensland Landscape

The poem speaks to the limitations of art and centres on the metaphor of the sea-cucumber who, when touched, "spews up its entrails / as though that were a defence" to capture the futility of the writer who knows his work cannot save him. "The Sea-Cucumber" also gives us a taste of Johnston's eloquence, his erudition (which creates no impediment to a genuine intimacy), and brings to the fore a haunting melancholy which lurks in the corners of many of the poet's works. 

 

The Sea-Cucumber

                                                        for Ray Crooke


We'd all had a bit too much that night when you brought out
your painting,
the new one, you remember, over Scotch in the panelled kitchen,
and my father talked about waiting. Well, he was doing that,
    we knew,
or it could have been the dust you'd painted, the way
    you'd floated
a sfumato background almost in front of the canvas
so your half-dozen squatting dark figures couldn't see it
that moved him in that moment softly, in damp stone,
    outside time.
He was as garrulous as ever, of course, but somehow
in a time of his own, it seemed that he was pressing
every word-drop, like the wine of a harvest not quite adequate,
to trickle in brilliant bridles across the stained table:
what sorts of eucalypt to plant—so that they'd grow quickly—
art dealers, metaphysics, three old me he'd seen
at Lerici, playing pipes and a drum under an orange sky.
Memory finds a nexus, there in your image,
people just waiting, not even conscious of it,
or of ochre and sienna pinning them in an interstice of hours.
None of this, you see, will really go into writing,
it takes time to leech things into one's sac of words.
The bloated sea-cucumber, when touched, spews up its entrails
as though that were a defence; my father's old friend
the gentle little poet Wen Yi-tuo, who collected chess sets
and carved ivory seals in his filthy one-room hut,
is gutted one night and flung into the Yangtze.
The dark river runs through your dusty pigments.
Ferns, moss, tiger-coloured sun beat at the window with banners
but the dust ripples between trees, and among the waiting
glints of each an meta are wiped from the fading hand.
This people of yours, Ray, they are that evening
when we first saw them, or the other one when my father 
planted nineteen saplings in our backyard, or when you looked
    at them
later and said, They're coming on, and his fingers
drummed a long nervous question on the table, though 
    he agreed.
And we were all waiting, though not in your style of art:
more of a pointillism in time, disconnected moments,
a flash of light over an empty glass, a half-finished volume 
    of Borges,
the cabbage plan stooping at dusk into the chimneys,
certain paintings, Corelli, or a morning like the fuzz
    of a peach,
all bright and disparate. But I think, remembering that painting
of yours, that if one could step away, ten yards, or twenty,
    or years,
at an angle perhaps, a frame would harden into cedar
and through a haze of dust we would see all the brilliant dots
merge into a few figures, squatting, waiting.

 

Berlioz & the music in "The Shining"

From Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," the music in "The Shining" by Stanley Kubrick:

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixteen): Elaine Equi [by Angela Ball]

FOR YEARS, I SUFFERED FROM A STRANGE MELODY

I couldn’t knit thistles into sweaters for swans,
nor spin straw into gold records.

I didn’t have a gingersnap or bluebird to my name.

The oven overheard me tell my story and called it
rumpled, stilted, and half-baked.

Then a dirty stinky fog came and sat down next to me.

But the moment I kissed its slobbering mist,
it turned into a handsome prince who dropped
the glass slipper he’d been carrying onto the floor

where it shattered into a million princes,
each more handsome than the last,

and everyone shouted, “L’chaim!”

--Elaine Equi

Elaine Equi’s most recent book is The Intangibles from Coffee House Press. Her other books include Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and on the short list for The Griffin Poetry Prize; and Sentences and Rain. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, and in many editions of the Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The New School.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixteen): Elaine Equi [by Angela Ball]

Its title, "For Years, I Suffered From a Strange Melody," suggests the piece was prompted by a spoonerism— a goofy felicity. The poem goes on to conquer all frustrations in its path with deliberate and delicious mistakes. One of its ancestors may be a cartoon show called Fractured Fairy Tales (1959-64), also based on the notion that the way to fix things—make them more fun—is to break them.

The speaker starts out feeling bereft, unable to “spin straw into gold records.” No “gingersnaps,” no “bluebirds” (of happiness or anything else). But the mysterious conjunction of confection and flight is a fine thing in itself; as is the oven talking smack: a slumgullion of anagram and idiom.

In this liquid atmosphere, tales survive as waking dreams that shelter the childlike: “Then a dirty stinky fog came and sat down next to me.” Words like “stinky” and “slobbering” are notably absent from traditional fairytales, with their low threshold for effluvia. At the speaker’s spontaneous kiss, the “slobbering mist” becomes the “handsome prince” of “Cinderella” fame, who drops the glass slipper of the foot test, and it becomes mother of many princes, “each more handsome than the last.” Elaine Equi’s “For Years, I Suffered from a Strange Melody” is word alchemy: a fertile muddle in which pieces become princes; and breakage, celebration; a climactic union in which “everyone” arrives from nowhere to deliver a final, life-affirming shout.

--Angela Ball

Perils of the Poetry Reading [by Katha Pollitt]

Am I the only person who finds it hard to follow an unfamiliar poem when I hear it read out loud and don’t have the text in front of me? Even when reading to myself at my own pace, I might have to go over a poem several times to really get it,  but  at a reading,  the poems whizz by  unstoppably-- no chance of a second hearing, and all the helpful visual cues of print , like punctuation, italics, quotation marks, and even line breaks,  are absent.  A stray thought enters my head --  I wonder why they painted this room turquoise? -- and in seconds I’ve lost the thread.  (I’m speaking of what you might call “literary poetry” here,  poetry written primarily to be read silently, not spoken word, which is intended for the ear from the outset.)

  I often find that the poems I’ve enjoyed most at a reading  seem oddly flat on the page when I hunt them down in a book.   What made the poem seem striking and fresh was  the poet’s performance: the energy and especially the humor was in the voice and manner and gestures, not the words themselves.  Or it was the story the poem told: the poetry reading as a series of anecdotes, with the poet placing and embellishing each one in his introductions: My uncle ran a chicken farm in Iowa,  and when he ran off with the Methodist minister’s wife my aunt killed all the chickens and  gave them to the nuns, and out of that comes this next poem, “Saint Rooster and the Holy Choir of Hens.”  it’s been suggested, in fact, that the proliferation of poetry readings, and their importance to a poet’s career, has actually changed the way poets --  “literary poets” -- write, encouraging verbal simplicity, talkiness, easy emotions, simple narratives, and punchlines. It’s the poet as stand-up comedian/tragedian. 

    Still, you can see why poets would try to shape their art to please their audience -- and notice how we now commonly speak of  poetry’s audience rather than poetry’s readers, which tells you something right there.   It can be painful and embarrassing to stand up before a small group of  miscellaneous strangers who expect you to entertain them and instead offer poems they might find bewildering, or remote.  I've given readings  at which I just want to say, oh well, never mind, let’s just go have a beer and talk about health care reform. 

      Wislawa Szymborska’s “Poetry Reading” (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)   may be the definitive account of a reading at its awful,  humiliating worst.  To paraphrase the old Jewish joke about the Catskills hotel (“The food is terrible!” “Yes, and the portions are so small!”), the audience is not only tiny, it’s not even listening.  And yet, Symborska disperses her pity, her warmth and her satirical humor so evenly among poets and audience members and even the muse, poor thing,  that what in lesser hands would be just another complaint about the world’s indifference to art becomes a gesture of understanding, forgiveness, love.

POETRY READING

To be a boxer, or not to be there
at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? 
Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare --
it's time to start this cultural affair.
Half came inside because it started raining, 
the rest are relatives. O Muse.

The women here would love to rant and rave, 
but that's for boxing. Here they must behave. 
Dante's Infemo is ringside nowadays.
Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.

Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet, 
one sentenced to hard shelleying for life, 
for lack of muscles forced to show the world 
the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists 
with luck. O Muse,
O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.

In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore: 
he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more, 
she's making him that tart she used to bake. 
Aflame, but carefully--don't burn his cake!
we start to read. O Muse.

-- by Wislawa Szymborska 
                (from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems Harvest Books, 1996)

from the archive; first posted August 19, 2009

    Still, you can see why poets would try to shape their art to please their audience -- and notice how we now commonly speak of  poetry’s audience rather than poetry’s readers, which tells you something right there.   It can be painful and embarrassing to stand up before a small group of  miscellaneous strangers who expect you to entertain them and instead offer poems they might find bewildering, or remote.  I've given readings  at which I just want to say, oh well, never mind, let’s just go have a beer and talk about health care reform. 

      Wislawa Szymborska’s “Poetry Reading” (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)   may be the definitive account of a reading at its awful,  humiliating worst.  To paraphrase the old Jewish joke about the Catskills hotel (“The food is terrible!” “Yes, and the portions are so small!”), the audience is not only tiny, it’s not even listening.  And yet, Symborska disperses her pity, her warmth and her satirical humor so evenly among poets and audience members and even the muse, poor thing,  that what in lesser hands would be just another complaint about the world’s indifference to art becomes a gesture of understanding, forgiveness, love.

POETRY READING

To be a boxer, or not to be there
at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? 
Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare --
it's time to start this cultural affair.
Half came inside because it started raining, 
the rest are relatives. O Muse.

The women here would love to rant and rave, 
but that's for boxing. Here they must behave. 
Dante's Infemo is ringside nowadays.
Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.

Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet, 
one sentenced to hard shelleying for life, 
for lack of muscles forced to show the world 
the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists 
with luck. O Muse,
O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.

In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore: 
he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more, 
she's making him that tart she used to bake. 
Aflame, but carefully--don't burn his cake!
we start to read. O Muse.

-- by Wislawa Szymborska 
                (from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems Harvest Books, 1996)

from the archive; first posted August 19, 2009