The Best American Poetry

“Where Ignorance Is Bliss, Tis Folly To Be Wise”: David Lehman on Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”

from SLATE 

JAN. 22 2013 9:19 AM

“Where Ignorance Is Bliss, Tis Folly To Be Wise”

David Lehman on why Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” is an overlooked poetic masterpiece.

By David Lehman

 

Favorite examples of poetic endings include the interrogatives of Shelley (“If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”) and Yeats (“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”), the declarative Milton (“They also serve who only stand and wait”), the ecstatic Coleridge (“For he on honeydew hath fed/ and drunk the milk of paradise”), the reiterated premonitions of Robert Frost (“And miles to go before I sleep”).

In this company belongs Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (written in 1742, published five years later), an overlooked masterpiece from the most underrated century of English verse. Gray’s ode ends, “Where ignorance is bliss,/ Tis folly to be wise,” an assertion that has attained the status of a proverb and can be discussed for many fruitful hours on its own or in relation to the Garden of Eden in Chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis.

In his Short History of English Literature, George Saintsbury says Gray was “probably the best-read man of letters of his time in Europe.” What he lacked in originality and inspiration he made up for in fastidious craftsmanship. His poetic output was small but choice. He subscribed to the idea, popular in the century of Alexander Pope, that excellence of expression trumped originality of concept. Gray felt, too, that true poetry was incompatible with the discourse of the tribe, and it is his artificial diction that earned him an attack from Wordsworth in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth quoted the whole of Gray's sonnet mourning the death of his friend Richard West saying that only five lines were worth keeping. Gray’s best-known poem remains his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” which even Samuel Johnson, no fan of the poet, praised: “The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

The “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” in its general contours, is a romantic poem of return, with some similarities to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”  In both poems the poet returns to a place after an interval of years; he feels the change as a loss; he recollects the past and looks to the future. Wordsworth’s poem travels from melancholy at the passing of youth to the compensations of maturity. But Gray’s poem is more radical, the poet less willing to talk himself out of his gloom.

I have read Gray’s “Ode” many times and it has never failed to astonish me. It begins conventionally enough with a description of Eton seen from afar. “Happy” are the hills, “pleasing” is the shade. We anticipate an idealized evocation of the life of boys on the playing fields of Eton (where, 70 years later, the Duke of Wellington would say that the battle of Waterloo was won). But even as Gray summons up the image of the boys at their games, we get hints that Eton remembered is what Frost called a “momentary stay against confusion.” The boys “snatch a fearful joy,” we learn in the fourth stanza. The fifth stanza states the enviable condition of youth: “the tear forgot as soon as shed.” But nothing prepares us for the change in intensity signaled by the opening of stanza six: “Alas, regardless of their doom,/ The little victims play.” At the sound of the words doom and victim, the reader is in the position of a batter who had expected a fast ball and looks in amazement and dismay as an off-speed pitch curves over the heart of the plate. [on left: illustration by William Blake]

There follows an unrelenting list of pains, grievances, ailments, and sufferings—a catalogue without parallel in English lyric poetry. The vision of the life of man is grim, as grim as in Hobbes (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”), but the writing is so controlled and has such authority that one finds it delicious despite the dispiriting content. The balanced clauses reveal a subtlety of distinction—between, for example, the tender-hearted who feels “another’s pain” while “the unfeeling” is mired in his own.

Do we agree with Gray’s conclusion? Do we want to know the doctor’s bad news? Do we cherish our illusions rather than choose what Freud prescribes as “an education in reality”? Would Eve and Adam have been “wise” to reject the fruits of knowledge? These are different questions—not variants of the same question—and their urgency speaks to the epigrammatic power of what Gray wrote.

"Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College"

By Thomas Gray

Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy Shade;
And ye, that from the stately brow
Of Windsor's heights the expanse below
Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among
Wanders the hoary Thames along
His silver-winding way.

Ah happy hills, ah pleasing shade,
Ah fields beloved in vain,
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales, that from ye blow,
A momentary bliss bestow,
As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.

Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race
Disporting on thy margent green
The paths of pleasure trace,
Who foremost now delight to cleave
With pliant arm thy glassy wave?
The captive linnet which enthrall?
What idle progeny succeed
To chase the rolling circle's speed,
Or urge the flying ball?

While some on earnest business bent
Their murmuring labours ply
'Gainst graver hours, that bring constraint
To sweeten liberty:
Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry:
Still as they run they look behind,
They hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy.

Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed,
Less pleasing when possessed;
The tear forgot as soon as shed,
The sunshine of the breast:
Their buxom health of rosy hue,
Wild wit, invention ever-new,
And lively cheer of vigour born;
The thoughtless day, the easy night,
The spirits pure, the slumbers light,
That fly the approach of morn.

Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond today:
Yet see how all around 'em wait
The ministers of human fate,
And black Misfortune's baleful train!
Ah, show them where in ambush stand
To seize their prey the murtherous band!
Ah, tell them, they are men!

These shall the fury Passions tear,
The vultures of the mind,
Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear,And Shame that skulks behind;
Or pining Love shall waste their youth,
Or Jealousy with rankling tooth,
That inly gnaws the secret heart,
And Envy wan, and faded Care,
Grim-visaged comfortless Despair,
And Sorrow's piercing dart.

Ambition this shall tempt to rise,
Then whirl the wretch from high,
To bitter Scorn a sacrifice,
And grinning Infamy.
The stings of Falsehood those shall try,
And hard Unkindness' altered eye,
That mocks the tear it forced to flow;
And keen Remorse with blood defiled,
And moody Madness laughing wild
Amid severest woe.

Lo, in the vale of years beneath
A grisly troop are seen,
The painful family of Death,
More hideous than their Queen:
This racks the joints, this fires the veins,
That every labouring sinew strains,
Those in the deeper vitals rage:
Lo, Poverty, to fill the band,
That numbs the soul with icy hand,
And slow-consuming Age.

To each his sufferings: all are men,
Condemned alike to groan;
The tender for another's pain,
The unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/classic_poems/2013/01/david_lehman_on_why_thomas_gray_s_ode_on_a_distant_prospect_of_eton_college.html

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

Ozymandias:
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

Emily Dickinson
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html

Tintern Abbey
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/06/a-trip-to-tintern-abbey-by-david-lehman.html

To His Coy Mistress
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/08/seizing-the-moment-on-andrew-marvells-to-his-coy-mistress-by-david-lehman.html

Ben Jonson's "My Picture Left in Scotland"
https://marshhawkpress.org/commentary-by-david-lehman-ben-jonsons-my-picture-left-in-scotland/

Baseball Quiz [by Alan Ziegler]

Which one does not belong with the others?

How does a human fly? Dilo Paulo knows [By Tracy Danison]

Dilo Paulo dances his solo piece, “Ekesa Sanko”. Photo courtesy June Events 2025 © Dilo Paulo

Dilo Paulo, born in Angola but now working from Brazil, did a solo dance show called Ekesa Sanko for June Events 2025. “Ekesa Sanko” is a man who has lost his past. He decides to wander and, as a wanderer, renew his sense of where he comes from, understand his present and decide his future. A story with just enough irony to makes sense.

Strong and frankly beautiful African body glistening with thick white greasepaint tattoos – pips like pearls arced over large eyes, Fibonacci spirals on the breast, a thick arrow up the spine, long lines streaked down the arms – Dilo Paulo dances inside a mix of stirring ballads and Martin Luther King’s I-have-a-dream speech. I remember that speech, remember watching it on TV, remember some of us heard a unusual wave slop on the hard sand of a faraway beach – Times They Are A-Changin’.

 

Dilo Paulo dances his solo piece, “Ekesa Sanko”. Photo courtesy June Events 2025 © Dilo Paulo

Dilo Paulo makes his body the sinew of perception. Every tick of the man, every kick, every reach, every crouch uncovers new views, reveals. That man can dance! I think, choreographer Amala Dianor should make Dilo Paulo Christ in the former’s hip hop shot at Carlo Gesualdo’s darkly baroque Tenebrae Reponsoria (Passion of Christ). Then – just a second has passed since I wandered – Dilo Paulo breaks in. Out on the meadow, he is showing how he flies.

On the strain of his powerful muscles, Dilo Paulo rises off the yellow-green grass.

In the force of Paulo’s elegance, I see how a human does it.

They plunge against the air, plunge against the grasp of the earth. There’s no hope of teasing the sun, let alone of breaching the stars. They stay aloft not even the blink of an eye, yet a human’s flight is clean, clear and, especially, right. As Dilo Paulo’s feet slap the earth, how perfectly, perfectly true, a human may fly.

_______

I saw Dilo Paulo’s “Ekesa Sanko” inside the Atelier de Paris performance space on 7 June and again on 10 June 2025 from a picnic table in the meadow in front of the Théâtre de l’Aquarium. Both places are part of the Cartoucherie grounds in the Bois de Vincennes. “Ekesa Sanko” was part of the June Events 2025 program and jointly produced with Saison Brésil-France 2025, an international culture program that features work from one of 100 countries every two years.

Dilo Paulo performed “Ekesa Sanko” assisted by Lenna Siqueira, artistic director of the dance troupe Corpus Entre Mundos, and producer Sergio Bacelar of Movimento Internacional de Dança et Instituto Bem Cultural. Along with Lenna Siqueira, Dilo Paulo – in 2011 named best dancer in his native Angola – is founder of the dance exchange program Intercâmbio de Dança Angola e Brasil. He today lives in Brasilia, where he manages the dance platform Ngangu Dance.

Other June Events 2025 performers

Click on the name to know more: Habib Ben Tanfous, Julie Botet, Jeanne Brouaye, Puma Camillê, Gilles Clément et Christian Ubl, Victoria Côté Péléja, Rosalind Crisp, Florencia Demestri et Samuel Lefeuvre, Simon Feltz, Geisha Fontaine et Pierre Cottreau, Cassiel Gaube, Yan Giraldou et Amélie Malleroni, Linda Hayford, Rémy Héritier, Marie-Caroline Hominal, Mohamed Issaoui, Rebecca Journo, Wanjiru Kamuyu, Daniel Larrieu, Joanne Leighton, Candice Martel, Ikue Nakagawa, Alban Ovanessian, Dilo Paulo, Pierre Pontvianne, Manuel Roque, Nina Santes, Liz Santoro et Pierre Godard, Jéssica Teixeira, Vânia Vaneau, Louise Vanneste

Expect, suppose or avoid: the novel's universal gambit? [By Sean Ashton]

Cover, "Massive Massive Oil Slick". Courtesy Sean Ashton

To anyone who has never tried to write one, novels might seem like they are conceived whole: a glittering prize that the author just had to reach out and grasp. In reality, it’s more like starting fire with a flint.

A novel can be sparked by a tiny detail: a remark overhead on a train, the wording of a public announcement.

Massive Massive Oil Slick is the second of what will eventually be a trilogy of novels written to constraints. The first was Living in a Land (2017), a fictional memoir written in sentences constructed only in the negative.

Massive Massive Oil Slick consists entirely of sentences that begin with the verbs “expect”, “suppose” or “avoid”. It first took shape when I was coming down the motorway and saw this electronic sign:

EXPECT DELAYS

Something I’d seen a hundred times suddenly glowed with literary potential. I pictured a string of scenarios, all conveyed in the same imperative mood:

EXPECT DELAYS

Expect major delays and minor delays: three-mile tailbacks, slow-moving traffic,

temporary lights on the outskirts of Norwich.

Expect an accident,

an accident approaching Welwyn Garden City,

a chemical spillage over all three lanes, speed restrictions between junctions seven and twelve.

In theory, you could programme that electronic sign to say anything.

I imagined what might happen if a fiction writer was at the helm, spewing out thoughts to passing motorists:

Expect anger.

Expect joy, joy interspersed with anger,

anger with joy,

anger and joy in equal proportions,

 till joy is eclipsed by anger, or anger by joy.

Expect decline.

Expect steady and sudden decline,

in fortune and wellbeing,

a decline in wellbeing in places as far afield as Corby and Inverness,

London, Manchester, and Yorkshire.

I found I’d segued directly from traffic to human emotion, as though they were part of the same spectrum.

I continued, broaching social unrest, love, relationships, weather, all in a generic, automated voice that had now become unaccountably human. To accentuate the voice’s authority, I moved the ‘action’ to an institutional setting, a seminar room called ‘411B’, addressing my audience in a continuous monologue that was beginning to sound like a prophecy.

How the audience got there, why they came, is a mystery. All I know is that the reader of Massive Massive Oil Slick is one among them.

At some point, the voice became less generic. I started hearing the words in a Liverpool accent. A female voice, tangy, strident, like disinfectant cutting through grease.

It was Josie Jones’s voice.

Josie Jones was one half of the band Big Hard Excellent Fish, best known for their 1990 song Imperfect List, in which she narrates a litany of her and bandmate Pete Wylie’s most hated things:

Fucking bastard Thatcher…the Poll Tax…the sending off of Len Shackleton…

Scouse impersonator…massive, massive oil slick ...

“Massive, massive oil slick” seemed to describe the torrent of mind fluid that my “expect" constraint had let loose, so I chose it as a title for whatever it was I was doing.

 

Oil slicks on Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela. The image’s water and land components were processed and stretched separately then “stitched” back together into one image. On land, the red colour indicates vegetated areas, the bluish areas show paved surfaces and the browns are bare land. Image courtesy NASA Earth Observatory

Josie Jones’s voice would cut in only now and then, like an intercepted transmission. I heard it when I got angry and welcomed it as a counterpoint to my own somewhat guarded delivery. That voice must have lain buried in my subconscious for 30 years, dormant until I embarked on a project that had a paratactic affinity with Imperfect List.

When the verb “expect” got too monotonous, I introduced “suppose”, a milder imperative that was perfect for smuggling in non sequiturs:

Suppose

there is no more snow.

Suppose

there is no snow at all

but a substantial increase in misogyny…or

a decrease in misogyny

and an increase in violence.

“Avoid” came later.

Avoid

cider

was the first injunction.

Avoid

artichokes

was another.

Why “expect”, “suppose” or “avoid”?

I wonder if it’s because these three verbs comprise the basic overture that all novels make to the reader?

A novel raises our expectations by setting a scene. But suppose these expectations aren’t met? Why has the author avoided them? Probably in order to tell a different story from the one that first seemed to be unfolding.

Massive Massive Oil Slick has no plot. Not in the sense of a sequence of events that happen to people.

But things do happen – just not to any characters.

In the absence of characters, the reader becomes the protagonist, invited to participate in various imagined scenarios, thought experiments that encompass themes both profound and mundane: homelessness, drug trials, extra-terrestrial intelligence, Brazil nuts, carveries, social exclusion…

As with Living in a Land, the first novel in the trilogy, the intention of Massive Massive Oil Slick is to portray how a mind gets from one thing to another. The more idiosyncratic the moves, the more tenacious the logic.

This second novel’s tropes are borrowed from stand-up: call-backs, repetition, the rule of three, and – above all – the observational comics’ tendency to appoint themselves official investigators of social phenomena.

But Massive Massive Oil Slick is only intermittently funny. Much of the time it is menacing.

And the entity doing the monologue – part-official, part absurd; part-automated, part-human – doesn’t know when it is being funny and when it is being menacing. It cannot read the crowd. It barely looks up at them.

Except when someone arrives late to 411B.

_________

“Massive Massive Oil Slick” (ISBN 978-1-7385079-5-5) is the second in poet and novelist Sean Ashton’s projected trilogy of novels "written to constraints”. Published by Ma Bibliothèque, it is now available on-line. An official launch of the book will held at South London Gallery on 23 July 2025. Other recent works by Ashton include “The Way to Work” (2023) and “Sampler” (2020).

Earlier “The Best American Poetry” essays on literary creation by Sean Ashton include “Performance art meets literary étrangeté: Lina Lapelytè’s “The Mutes” makes my uncanny familiar” and “On the ideal novel: Latent in every sentence is an alternative”. Sean Ashton lives in London.

NYSP::IOU – Elinor Nauen / David Beaudouin

NYSP :: IOU is a series devoted to exploring a single question: how has the New York School of Poetry (NYSP)—its aesthetics and shenanigans—influenced contemporary poetics in general and certain poets in particular?

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Elinor Nauen

 

This month, we are chatting with poet Elinor Nauen, who landed in New York City in November 1976 on the advice of another poet, Joel Oppenheimer. They had met through a chance encounter in Maine, where Nauen was then living. “Joel told me I should move to New York and be a poet. So, I did! There wasn't any thought. There wasn't any planning. I had a hundred dollars and a car. What else did I need?” Almost 50 years later, she still lives in the same East Village apartment she found soon after her arrival.

 

DB: Can you talk about those first few months in New York City?

EN: The first thing that happened a week after I arrived was that I attended a reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. The occasion was to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Frank O'Hara. And the only reason I went was because the one name I recognized on the poster was Allen Ginsberg. Soon after, I started signing up for poetry workshops at the Project. My first one was led by the poet Jim Brodey, who would play Debussy or Chopin, then we'd write poems and read poems. It was there I met my lifelong friend and fellow poet Maggie Dubris.

 

Allen Ginsberg reading - the Frank O'Hara Memorial Reading at the Poetry Project, November 1976

 

DB: How did your own sense of poetry, and your own poems, evolve from there?

EN: In an essay I wrote for a 2012 conference at the National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine, on “Poetry and Poetics of the 1980s,” I said this:

“We weren’t—or felt we weren’t—under scrutiny. So here was a freedom that fueled a lot of poetry. We weren’t distracted by career possibilities. We didn’t imagine a career in poetry—even those with great ambitions didn’t see how that might work out. There was definitely the feeling that you had to choose between poetry and a ‘straight’ life.”

A good example of that was in 1977, when Maggie, her roommate Rachel, and I began calling ourselves the Consumptive Poets League. We decided to do a group reading, so I put an announcement in the Village Voice and added, “KOFF Magazine will be available,” which I made up on the spot. When I told Maggie and Rachel that we had to do a magazine, they were like, oh, okay, we'll do a magazine!

I often tell young poets to start a reading series and invite somebody you want to read with and who you want to hear your work. Then do a magazine and publish people you like, along with your own work, so they get to know you. Very quickly, that's exactly what we did.

DB: It sounds like what you learned right away was not so much an aesthetic as an attitude!

EN: In a way, yes, not an aesthetic but: anything goes, everything goes. if I had any aesthetics about poetry, it was that I really liked having a posse, having a party. And to feel like this is fun and exciting and worthwhile. If you start out with an assumption about how a poem is going to work, you're doomed to fail. You can start out with that assumption, but you have to pretty much leave open the very plausible chance that it's going to write itself quite differently. Whoever writes a poem and gets to the end and goes, yep, that's exactly the last line I was expecting, they’re just reciting Tennyson or something.

DB: You have mentioned that the poetry scene then was tilted, with more men than women poets at the time. Was that an issue?

EN: Not really. At that time, nobody particularly cared if they went to college and had a career. So, the women of my generation found this really sweet spot of doing whatever we wanted, and nobody was paying much attention to us. It had that drawback of, you know, if you wanted a career, but it also gave us the freedom, as O’Hara wrote, to go on your nerve, and on your whim! As women poets, we could resist, hang out with friends, and take chances. 

DB: What about influence? I’m sensing that everyone was influencing everyone else.

EN: I feel like there's 50 answers to that question, because each one was important. Everyone and everything served as an influence. We all were collaborating, listening to, and competing with each other. In the early 80s, the atmosphere of poetry in our scene was at least as important as any particular poem—that we were all poets, doing poetry all the time. My poem, "Hooray to Poetry" speaks to this. If we had a theory, it was that everyone was a poet, or could be and should be, and that art was produced by the many, not the individual. It's the "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” kind of thing. Once you make it yours, it becomes yours.

I feel like I've collaborated with people who don't even know who I am. By writing 600 stanzas of ottava rima in my book, So Late into the Night, I've collaborated with Byron. Maybe that's what influence is, whether you use the word or not. It is figuring out how to continue.

---

 

Hooray for Poetry

 

Poetry is a great big party

            for all your friends.

As you know them all by name

            you put them in the poem.

Hi Maggie Hi Rachel Hey Greg Hi Ei Hi.

The New York poets should play musical

            lives with the rest of the world.

                        Then everyone would have a penpal.

Poetry is golden oldies

            let’s go to the hop

                        have dinner & take a walk with you

                                    steamy August, with thighs & eyes to match

Poetry is a home movie

            of your mouth & fingers & heart

Poetry is talking till 4 a.m.

            hanging up having accomplished a great deal

going to the movies

            sitting in the front row

                        turning round to see who you know that’s there

hanging out at the bar

            talking about everyone

                        who isn’t there or who is & balling

                                    all the rest

running into people on the street

            telling them to tell someone else to call you

wearing a terrific reedy shirt from 14th street.

Poetry is a great big party.

            I think we should invite as many people

                        as know my name.                                                       

 

         - Elinor Nauen  [1981]

 

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Elinor Nauen’s books include The Alphabet’s Dilemma, Now That I Know Where I’m Going, Snowbound (a dos-à- dos book with Stephen Willis), My Marriage A to Z, So Late into the Night, CARS & Other Poems, American Guys and, as editor, Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women writers on cars & the road and Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women writers on baseball. Her work has appeared in New American Writing, FICTION, Exquisite Corpse, The World, KOFF, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Aethlon, Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, National Endowment for the Humanities Magazine, American Book Review, and other magazines and anthologies. She edits Julebord with Maureen Owen and for 12 years co-hosted, with Martha King, the reading series Prose Pros. Elinor hails from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and for many years has lived in New York’s East Village with her husband, the novelist Johnny Stanton, and their cat Lefty, who recently advised her in a dream that when they are out in public she should refer to him as Mr. Money.

* * *

Julius Jaffe: Three Poems [by Mitch Sisskind]

Julius Jaffe and the Angel of Death

Julius Jaffe was carrying a box of bricks.
The day was hot. Too exhausted to go on,
Julius Jaffe dropped the box and called on
The Angel of Death to rescue him from
This life. Instantly the Angel appeared
And said, "Can I be of service to you?"
Now trembling in fear, Julius Jaffe said,
"No, but how do you like them Cubbies?"
This shows the foolishness of Julius Jaffe!

Plotkin

When Plotkin died Julius Jaffe said,
"Plotkin was a great businessman
"Except he never made any money."

Julius Jaffe added, "He was in the
"Junk business except he was
"Never in the junk business."

Fishman asked, "Can this be?"
Julius Jaffe answered, "Yes and no."
He added, "Maybe and maybe not."


Esther Tabachnik

Julius Jaffe married Esther Tabachnik.
He said in the name of Rav Rabinowitz,
"If a man is alone in a room -- feh, feh --
"Lilith tempts him at the midnight hour
"But my wife’s price is above rubies;
"My heart doth safely reside with her
"Nor doth she tempt me in all her days."
Fishman said, "Feh! I mean, mazel tov."

Wordplay with George Bilgere and John Donoghue

I can't help it. I've been stressed out lately. Partly, thanks to the political climate we are living in. And partly, and I know this is silly, but because I have a new book out, and I am a true introvert. Even social media exhausts me. So many wonderful things have happened around my book, including reviews and readings and interviews like this one with Women's Quarterly, and I am grateful. So grafeful. But I am also filled with dread. I think about the fact that I might even go to AWP next year! I know that's months away, but just the three letters, AWP, puts me on edge. 

When I feel anxious, I have a few antidotes. High on the list is listening to Wordplay with George Bilgere and John Donoghue, two brilliant Cleveland poets. Everyone should listen to it.  It's one of the most enjoyable podcasts out there. I could listen to these two men chatting and laughing and reading poetry forever. The poems they pick, the commentary, the insights . . . it's  uplifting, entertaining, inspiring.  It's better than a glass or two of Chardonnay. And you can enjoy it any time of day. 

On one of the recent podcasts, John Donoghue reads this gem by Paul Violi, which is even funnier when John reads it:

Counterman

By Paul Violi

 

What’ll it be?

 

Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.

 

Whaddaya want on it?

 

A swipe of mayo.

Pepper but no salt.

 

You got it. Roast beef on rye.

You want lettuce on that?

 

No. Just tomato and mayo.

 

Tomato and mayo. You got it.

…Salt and pepper?

 

No salt, just a little pepper.

 

You got it. No salt.

You want tomato.

 

Yes. Tomato. No lettuce.

 

No lettuce. You got it.

…No salt, right?

 

Right. No salt.

 

You got it. Pickle?

 

No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo.

And pepper.

 

Pepper.

 

Yes, a little pepper.

 

Right. A little pepper.

No pickle.

 

Right. No pickle.

 

You got it.

Next!

 

Roast beef on whole wheat, please,

With lettuce, mayonnaise and a center slice

Of beefsteak tomato.

The lettuce splayed, if you will,

In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,

And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded

In a multi-foil arrangement

That eschews Bragdonian pretensions

Or any idea of divine geometric projection

For that matter, but simply provides

A setting for the tomato

To form a medallion with a dab

Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.

And—as eclectic as this may sound—

If the mayonnaise can also be applied

Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll

And as a festoon below the medallion,

That would be swell.

 

You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?

 

Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette

At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

 

You got it.

Next!

 

We miss you, Johnny!

In Memory of Johnny Dog Lehman (2007 [?] -- June 18, 2024)

June 19, 2024

---

Posted by The Best American Poetry on June 19, 2024 at 11:03 AM 

 

Happy birthday to the late Donald Keeene, born June 18, 1922

(1)  [The late] Donald Keene’s approach to teaching and writing bears the imprint of his freshman Humanities instructor, Mark Van Doren ’21 GSAS. “He was a scholar and poet and above all some­one who understood literature and could make us understand it with him,” Keene writes in Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan. “Van Doren had little use for commentaries or specialized literary criticism. Rather, the essential thing, he taught us, was to read the texts, think about them, and discover for our­selves why they were ranked as classics.”

The experience of taking the College’s general education cours­es was “incredible,” Keene says, and he fondly remembers the great teachers he encountered as an undergraduate. Among them were the “learned and gentle” classicist, Moses Hadas ’30 GSAS; Lionel Trilling ’25, ’38 GSAS and Jacques Barzun ’27, ’32 GSAS, who led Keene’s Senior Colloquium; and Pierre Clamens, a French instructor “who was very stern, but gave everything to his stu­dents,” Keene says.

His chief mentor, however, was cul­tural historian Ryusaku Tsunoda, a pio­neer of Japanese studies at Columbia whom Keene often refers to, simply, as Sensei. “He was a man I admired com­pletely,” Keene says, “a man who had more influence on me than anyone else I can think of.”

As a senior, Keene enrolled in Tsu­noda’s course in the history of Japa­nese thought. Fifty years later, in a CCT interview (Winter 1991) with David Lehman ’70, ’78 GSAS, Keene remem­bered: “The first class, it turned out I was the only student — in 1941 there was not much pro-Japanese feeling. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a waste of your time to give a class for one student?’ He said, ‘One is enough.’  >>>  -- Jamie Katz

(2) Donald Keene ’42, a distinguished professor of Japanese at Columbia, was awarded the Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation — a career achievement award — by PEN, a fellowship of writers, at the PEN Literary Awards at Lincoln Center on May 20. David Lehman ’70, an accomplished poet, author and contributor to CCT, was asked to compose the citation, which was engraved on the back of the medal. Lehman said, “Eschewing a conventional prose testimonial, I decided to use a Japanese verse form that I learned about from Professor Keene. These are linked ‘tankas,’ a form combining a haiku stanza with a two-line stanza, with strict syllabic requirements.”

To Donald Keene we
owe much of what we know of
Japan’s verse and prose.

In shadow of rising sun
stood the tree unobserved.

Then Keene could be heard:
in accents lucid and keen
he rendered the scene.

And the bare branch of winter
burst into cherry blossom

from Columbia College Today:(July 2003)

George Bilgere sings Paul Violi's praises

Here’s a poem for today, June 17, 2025

On an Acura Integra

by Paul Violi

Please think of this as not merely a piece Of writing that anyone would fully Appreciate, but as plain and simple Words that attempt to arouse whatever Appetencies you, especially, depend Upon language to fulfill; that drench you In several levels of meaning at once, Rendering my presence superfluous. In other words, welcome this as a poem, Not merely a missive I’ve slowly composed And tucked under your windshield wiper So that these onlookers who saw me bash In your fender will think I’m jotting down The usual information and go away.

__________

I’d recommend Paul Violi’s Selected Poems, 1970–2007, Rebel Arts, 2014.

Why I Chose This Poem This actually happened to me a few years ago. I came out into the parking lot to see a big bash on my rear fender. Under the windshield wiper was a note that said, “Everyone watching me thinks I’m providing you with my insurance information. But I’m not.” I’ve held onto that note. -- George Bilgere

"Caress" [by Ron Padgett]

In a dream I caressed you
and when I woke up
I caressed the memory
of the dream.
I never caressed you
in “real life.”
I never even wanted to
though I was close
to liking the idea of caressing you.
If I had caressed you
I would remember it,
which is what I did last night.

first posted September 29, 2023

In a dream I caressed you
and when I woke up
I caressed the memory
of the dream.
I never caressed you
in “real life.”
I never even wanted to
though I was close
to liking the idea of caressing you.
If I had caressed you
I would remember it,
which is what I did last night.

first posted September 29, 2023

On Ron Padgett's "Collected Poems" (Coffee House Press) [by David Lehman]

This painting of Ron Padgett by Fairfield Porter adorns the cover of Ron's book Blood Work

I had the happy chance to review Ron Padgett's Collected Poems (Coffee House Press) for Publishers Weekly. Here it is along with a link to the piece.  -- DL

<<<
Long a mainstay of the New York School’s second generation, Ron Padgett—the self-styled “Tulsa Kid,” as the title of one of his books has it—left Oklahoma to attend Columbia University and become a big city poet. He studied with Kenneth Koch, met Frank O’Hara, made the pilgrimage to Paris, read and translated Reverdy, Apollinaire, Cendrars. From the start his poems had a joyous nonchalance about them—the Renaissance term for it is sprezzatura. Five decades fuel his Collected Poems, a tome teeming with Padgett’s trademark traits: comic energy, good humor, alert intelligence, constant curiosity, and the determination to put it all into poems.

Padgett is prolific, buoyant, confident that the day will yield its poem, nothing forced. He has written affecting memoirs of Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard, two close friends from Tulsa days. His Collected highlights an array of New York School strategies. But though he mentions his wife and friends in poems, even ending a poem with the phone number of one of them (Larry Fagin), Padgett’s poems are not crowded with people and events in the O’Hara manner. If there is a consistency of purpose it is Padgett’s devotion to an esthetic path, his trust in the imagination and the associative logic that powers it. In “My Room” the logic leads quite naturally (and hilariously) from a lamp that Ted Berrigan once took from a hotel room to the value of studying Latin.

The tone is conversational, and the subjects and approaches are various. There are fine prose poems (“Light as Air,” “Essay on Imagination”), poems in the form of pseudo-translations from the Italian (“Fiat Ode”), a poem based on sound translations of Reverdy (“Lash Larue is Rio Grande and Tristan comma a bully fardle”), directives that all creative writing students should read (“Poetic License”), spontaneous aphorisms (“When I first looked in the mirror, I had always been there”), a caustic comment on cosmic irony (“The Joke”), poems in praise of humble pleasures (chocolate milk, an old typewriter, the use of “cordially” as a complimentary close), even a guide on “How to Be Perfect.” There are also one-of-a-kind stunts that somehow retain their freshness after repeated readings. An early poem called “Nothing in that Drawer” consists of that phrase repeated 14 times.

Reading these poems you can’t help feeling how much fun it was to write them. Consider here how the lining contributes to the magic of the mood: “First day of spring/ or last of winter./ My legs run down/ the stairs and out/ the door, my top/half here typing.” That is Padgett at his most joyful. But this exemplar of the gloriously zany, this champion of comic-book characters, turns out also to be a fount of wisdom and good sense: “It’s not embarrassing to be sentimental/When the sentiment equals/ Seeing things just as they are here now.” David Lehman is the founder and editor of the Best American Poetry series and the author of the just-published New and Selected Poems (Scribner).

>>>

from the archive; first posted October 31, 2013. See, too, Locus Solus

 

Edward Salem: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_____________________________________________________

My Aerodynamics

As I fell from the sky, I smelled fish.

The fish was in my mouth.

My eyes were fish eyes, bulging, bugged out.

I fell like this for years,

in the fishy air. I stopped panicking.

I could think as I fell.

I missed spaghetti.

I was a model, hair blown back

in the wind. I was thirty-five.

I was fifty-three. The sun

winked at me like bar light

through a shot of whisky.

Nights were easier. I actually

fell, harhar, asleep. Five minutes

here, ten minutes there.

Open sky, open darkness.

I drank. I pissed myself.

I stripped my clothes off in the sky.

I was very cold. I hugged myself

and it changed my aerodynamics.

I began spinning out of control.

I vomited clear rain.

I refused water.

Refused breath.

I missed my daughter.

I missed my wife. I missed our home.

I missed smoking. I accepted

I’d never leave this blue prison.

How quickly my mind adjusted,

but I was dangerously bored.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Edward Salem is the author of Monk Fruit (2025), the winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and Intifadas (2026), the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. 

________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                     Family-owned painting by unknown artist        

"The Manchurian Candidate" [by Elaine Equi]

The Manchurian Candidate

Laurence Harvey: he of the glazed eye,
who could stay under hypnosis
for the length of an entire film.

Who turns playing solitaire
into a dangerous game.

A below the surface kind of guy.

More intense than Dirk Bogarde,
less mannered than James Mason.

A bit of a Hamlet

The quiet type who ends up murdering
his scene-stealing, scheming mother
and her sleazy boyfriend.

Who points even with his name
to another assassin –
the Lee Harvey Oswald yet to come.

-- Elaine Equi

Rhode Island is Famous for You [for Denise Duhamel, on her birthday]

Rhode Island is Famous for You
By David Lehman

for Denise Duhamel

The blue forest, chilled and blue, like the lips of the dead,
show life when brought to the public eye in June,
the month of twins who divide their lives in two
or spend hours pursuing the ghost of a lover. Stacey
and I drive to the swimming pool and Blossom Dearie
sings “Rhode Island is Famous For You,” which always
makes Stacey think of Denise Duhamel, born this day
in Woonsocket, R. I.  Other children of June 13 include
Yeats, Pessoa, and Tony Towle, each of whom is a cousin
of yours, Denise, pursuing the arrow of greatness, but of none
of them is it true that Rhode Island, smallest
and possibly most underrated state, is famous for you.
And the lips that were cold and blue when this poem
began have the warmth of June and the charm of a kiss.

6/13/23

from The Common, March 2024

“Ommi Sissi”, Mohamed Issaoui dancing, death by speeding and theory of memory [By Tracy Danison]

Mohamed Issaoui performing “Ommi Sissi”, 3 June 2025. Photo © Patrick Berger

I have false memories about real I-refute-you-thus things.

I mention this because dance creator Mohamed Issaoui wrote a 20-minute dance performance he calls Ommi Sissi, recalling a North African folk tale. I saw it just the other day at Atelier de Paris, as part of the June Events 2025  festival. Mohamed Issaoui has one of the most expressive bodies I have ever seen.

After Ommi Sissi it took me a while to catch up my wits again.

I know from bitterest experience that everybody I’ve ever run into has false memories, too. Between the fact of experience (or perception), the space/time that passes between experience and use of memory there’s a great deal that goes on.

Then again, perhaps personal experience bears an uncertain, not false, relationship with the-refuted-thus-things and memories are not false but just different.

There’s surely that. I don’t hear certain sounds that others hear, but I hear some sounds where others hear nothing. Karine, my partner, and I do not see the same color shades. I may see blue where she sees green. But never white where she sees black or vice versa. We’re agreed there.

My eldest brother, Steve, died of AIDS in Spring 1989. He drowned in the Potomac river. His car flew off a bridge at very excessive speed. Family records show a taste for reckless driving among siblings and parents. I’ve myself racked up thousands in fines over the years, most spectacularly in what I shall always remember as The Traversée der Schweiz, when I thought somebody else would pick up the tabs. I was wrong about that. I speed because I hate driving and want to get the trip over with.

 

Mohamed Issaoui performing “Ommi Sissi”, 3 June 2025. Photo © Patrick Berger

Steve kicked out the window to get out of the car that had flown into the river and rolled over. He was probably unsteady on his feet when he sprang out the broken window and on to the surface. My brothers and I agreed that he must’ve been too weak and too shaken to wade to shore in the Potomac’s lazy current. He must’ve fallen and then let exhaustion lead him to watery death.

I just learned for the first time from The Washington Post archives that Steve’s body was found on the shore. And learned also that he died not Spring 1989 but in October 1990. The autopsy – I still have the papers somewhere – show that Steve had several large tumors in his brain. These tumors were killing him well before the cops found his corpse on the river bank.

In those days before his death we talked on the phone frequently. I even made it my business to make a personal visit at least once. I learned he had AIDS from a frightening dream of The Iron Buddha. I woke up, called Steve up, asked him as soon as he picked up. He confessed, though it were no crime to be sick; it was ma wanted to hide it.

I remember that he was very worried for his partner, who was HIV positive, would have to die alone, he said. He didn’t think the boyfriend would be able to stay sane – my eldest brother put great store in remaining rational, cool and collected at all times. He was very proud of his combat experience in Vietnam, which was intense.

Choreographer and performer Mohammed Issaoui is from Tunis. He now works in France. The Ommi Sissiperformance has this little story line: some time in the late teens or 20s, I expect, a sex friend gets diagnosed with HIV. Mohammed, Mo, was there for the diagnosis and the medical person in attendance tells him he, Mo, ought to do the test, too. And, after a while, Mo decides to get his own positive test, and get his own positive diagnosis, too, ‘though he’s alone with the medical person for it.

 

Mohamed Issaoui performing “Ommi Sissi”, 3 June 2025. Photo © Patrick Berger

The “Ommi Sissi” of the performance title is the name of a mother with a daughter. Ommi Sissi’s story is that, one day, she finds a silver coin and buys her daughter a nice piece of fresh fish for a treat. When she returns from the fish market she puts the fish on the kitchen table. She goes back to scrubbing her house.

The neighbor’s cat comes by to borrow a knife. Because she’s busy, Ommi Sissi sends it into the kitchen to fetch the knife itself. The cat sees the fish, can’t resist and eats it. The daughter comes home, not find the fish and she and her mother are sad. When Ommi Sissi realizes what’s happened, she cuts off that cat’s tail. She tells the cat she’ll restore its tail if it gets some butter from a shop. This is not a straightforward task.

To get the butter, the cat has to get milk to churn it. It then comes to find out that it has to find a cow to get milk. Then it has get a meadow for the cow to graze. Then the meadow has to have grass. Grass needs water. And time. The cat finally brings back the butter.

As promised, Ommi Sissi restores the cat's tail.

As he moves in space, Mohammed Issaoui’s hip is a flywheel.

The flywheel slips around him like a planet around the sun. I keep feeling that the planet will break out and fly off as it reaches its aphelion on the oblique plane. Fly into some other belt of transmission, just find another orbit, even change into some other figure. It goes on to the end just as it began.

______

I saw "Ommi Sissi" (2024), a solo dance performance created by Mohamed Issaoui in collaboration with the choreographer and performer Selim Ben Safia, in the rehearsal studio at the Atelier de Paris CDCN, 3 June 2025, with sound by Houieda Hedfi as part of the June Events 2025 dance performance festival.

______

Other artists on the June Events 2025 program

Click on the name to find out more: Habib Ben Tanfous, Julie Botet, Jeanne Brouaye, Puma Camillê, Gilles Clément et Christian Ubl, Victoria Côté Péléja, Rosalind Crisp, Florencia Demestri et Samuel Lefeuvre, Simon Feltz, Geisha Fontaine et Pierre Cottreau, Cassiel Gaube, Yan Giraldou et Amélie Malleroni, Linda Hayford, Rémy Héritier, , Marie-Caroline Hominal, Rebecca Journo, Wanjiru Kamuyu, Daniel Larrieu, Joanne Leighton, Candice Martel, Ikue Nakagawa, Alban Ovanessian, Dilo Paulo, Pierre Pontvianne, Manuel Roque, Nina Santes, Liz Santoro et Pierre Godard, Jéssica Teixeira, Vânia Vaneau, Louise Vanneste.

Software Sonnet [by Mitch Sisskind]

Software Sonnet

We say that he or she does not have
The software whenever he or she
Is physically, mentally, or emotionally
Incapable of performing some task
Like if he doesn't have the basketball
Software to play in the NBA or if
She can't speak French she lacks
The French software of if he or she
Cries a lot and has bad insomnia
And in old age is preoccupied
With all the missed opportunities
Then he or she needs to download
Some new emotional software
Unless it may actually be too late.

from The Bonus Round

Yetzirrah Conference: June 23-29, in Asheville, NC

The New York School Diaspora: New Series (Part Two) Maureen Bloomfield [by Angela Ball]

Anchises

It was far away, not long ago,
As if time were a concurrent series of durations.
Pick the one you want; the others will be dragged
By the cursor to the space beyond the outlined page.
It was planned, like a book design,
The templates were in order.
“Don’t mess with the boxes,” the designer said.
“I forget what I did and then I have to redo it.”
O.K., I said. I understand.

Allegory was a legitimate vehicle
For the recovery of ancient images, the art book said.
Pallas Athena, goddess as Madonna,
Encounters the centaur who recoils. Unrebuffed,
She winds around her finger a lock of his unruly hair.
In the dark wood there are mists that descend and
Rise again and the creatures seen there are slow-witted
And wend among the vapors slowly
So mortals can follow the pan shots of the dream.

My father does pretty well on his Alzheimer’s test.
He gets the month but not the year.
When he has to write a sentence, it’s one of praise
Of his doctor’s delicate beauty, ethereal and gold
In the style of Fra Lippo Lippi or Sandro Botticelli.
In the car on the way home, he tells a story
Then folds his hands, becomes animated,
And tells it, altering the emphasis, again.
They’re characters, the characters in all his stories.

From the Angle, Cleveland’s West Side Irish ghetto
Where his Achill-Island mother Lizzie made a bootlegger
Of his High-Church-from-Plymouth pa. Home was a business:
The lower floor a restaurant; the upper floor
A bar. Hale fellow, well met, the designated greeter,
A snappy dresser promenading along Lorain street
Hailing High Pockets, Shimmy Patton, Spuds Malloy, all
Right-off-the-boat greenhorns whose mothers, in the winter,
Walked the streets with blankets—searching for their sons.

On the eve of Saint Nick’s Day, the Salvation Army Lady
Is peeling the rind of a pomegranate with her teeth.
Her latticed fingers are stained red on the bell.
In one of Botticelli’s variations on a theme, the virgin
Holds a pomegranate, or is it the son, though cherries
Are the fruit of paradise, I’d have to tell you,
If this were a quiz. I remembered the father but not
The eponymous son. I remembered that he held his father,
Once a goddess’s lover, bundled like a packet on his back.

The land of the dead is reached by water.
They are restless, queuing on the miasmic shore.
From the kitchen window my five-year-old father
Watched as his favorite uncle, Johnny Mancuso, was gunned down.
What is this life but the intersection of two texts.
“Ain’t this the biggest mix-up that ye have ever seen:
Mi father he was Orange and mi mither she was Green.”
The swamp is foul; the sky plain; the neo-Platonic verdure,
Intricate and artful, for Reason illumines and casts away,

Allowing for precision in a context that’s barbaric.
He chose the ivory gate of sleep, forsaking false shadows.
He chose to wend backward through the gate of horn.
He was singing, the father, the true vision,
The one that he made up. From Lake Erie’s poisoned banks
The flaming city, oracular and perishing,
Kept vanishing. The time had come to wander.
Irish Sea, English Channel, Atlantic Ocean, Ohio River—
The hero’s task is always to find home.
                                                                --Maureen Bloomfield

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Maureen Bloomfield grew up in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida.  Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Paris Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, The Nation, Southern Review, and many other journals.  Her poem, "The Catholic Encyclopedia," was selected by Paul Muldoon for the Best American Poetry volume in 2005; her book Error and Angels was published by the University of South Carolina Press in the James Dickey Poetry Series.  She was for many years the editor of The Artist Magazine; her art reviews and essays have appeared in artforum, Art News, New Art Examiner, and Sculpture, among other venues.   She edited and wrote the introductory essay for Daniel E. Green Studios and Subways: An American Master His Life and Art (North Light Books, 2017).  Ms. Bloomfield has two daughters and three grandchildren; she lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Maureen Bloomfield’s “Anchises” performs an audacious feat: it deftly and resonantly joins her personal origins with Western civilization’s. More crucially, it demonstrates and celebrates how ancient stories inform ordinary life, joining the exalted and the quotidian—certainly an aesthetic priority of the New York school of poets as a whole and particularly of Frank O’Hara, for whom construction workers’ silver helmets were objects of desire and a casual louse was not only worthy of a name but of its own poem.

This poem is informally formal, its blank verse a coat not buttoned but casually thrown over the shoulders; its rhymes serendipitous. Its beginning is a case in point, at first impersonating a stock story-telling set-up, but immediately confounding any such easy invocation of the primordial: “It was far away, not long ago, / As if time were a concurrent series of durations.” In our cyber world, it turns out, where we are depends on the whereabouts of a blink. Patterns are pre-determined, “templates . . .in order,” and we shouldn’t mess with them. We rely on format the way the designer relies on her boxes.

But the second stanza tells us we may still resort to ancient shaping devices, like allegory, to reconstitute experience. No less an authority than “an art book” tells us so. And gives us a deathless scene in which the cerebral Pallas Athena encounters the instinctual centaur—who, though he recoils, finds himself attached as she “winds around her finger a lock of his unruly hair”—the line’s deliberateness mirroring the action as it’s performed. Stanzas enact scenes, and this stanza’s scene is completed in mists, its “slow-witted creatures” “wending slowly” so we dense mortals can follow the “pan shots of the dream.”

The poem we are inside is pan-ekphrastic, collaging painting and film, legend and family story.

The third stanza cuts to a vignette as ordinary as the second is extraordinary. A father is being tested for cognitive impairment. Neither completely in his time or out of it, he does “pretty well,” but is a genius at associating his doctor’s “delicate beauty” with that of women painted by “Fra Lippo Lippi or Sandro Botticelli.”  In fact, the painting referred to in the preceding stanza might well be Pallas and the Centaur, painted by Sandro Botticelli in 1452 and dramatizing the eternal struggle between intellect and instinct.

Like the great Tony Bennett, who in his final years returned to his classic self when singing, the poet’s father, a true Irishman, returns to vitality by telling stories: “They’re characters, the characters in all his stories.” This line reminds us of the link between the meanings of the word “character,” variously denoting liveliness, the possession of definite qualities; and, at its root, a mark conveying meaning.

The fourth stanza tells us the father’s (the allegorical Anchises) story in everyday, demotic speech. He’s “from the Angle, Cleveland’s West Side Irish ghetto / Where his Achill-Island mother Lizzie made a bootlegger / Of his High-Church-from Plymouth pa.” In this marriage, disparate, warring cultures collide and join. Intellect meets instinct again. The characters in this world have names that pronounce them unforgettable: “High pockets, Shimmy Patton, Spuds Malloy.” Though presumably tough guys, their mothers must seek them at night (possibly passed out on the streets) with blankets to keep them from freezing.

In the poem’s next vignette, a very unPersephone-like Salvation Army lady peels “the rind of a pomegranate with her teeth. She’s juxtaposed directly with “the virgin / In one of Botticelli’s variations on a theme,” and the poet jokily seems to confuse the fruit with her son.  They seem engaged in a cognitive quiz: “I remembered the father but not / The eponymous son. I remembered that he held his father, / Once a goddess’s lover, bundled like a packet on his back.” The ancient tale remembered is Anchises’ rescue from the burning Troy. His rescuer is Aeneus, his son with Aphrodite.

As we know, Anchises fathered Aeneus, founder of Rome, after Aphrodite saw Anchises grazing cows on the slopes of Mount Ida; seduced him; and bore a child.

Here I’d like to mention someone who has nothing to do with the poem except that he is another Ohioan: a comedian popular in the 50’s and 60’s named Cliff Arquette. His success came with the formulation of a cornpone character, “Charlie Weaver,” who became his permanent public face, a personification of a disappearing character, the down-to-earth country bumpkin who loves telling stories. Weaver’s stories came from a mythical “Mount Idy”—perhaps named for the Mount Ida where Aphrodite and Aeneus fell in love. Whatever the case, this town produced the ideal that gave dimension to Arquette’s character, the myth he needed to contrast with his here and now. Like “Anchises,” Weaver was a story that told stories—both a satisfier and a mystifier.

The poem’s next stanza fuses the Land of the Dead with the Angle, as the poet’s “five-year-old father / Watched as his favorite uncle, Johnny Mancuso, was gunned down.” Here the poem asks the rhetorical question that characterizes all experience: “What is life but the intersection of two texts.” This breathtaking statement is followed directly by dialogue showing Anchises/father as the character he is: “Mi father he was Orange and my mither she was Green.”  Orange, of course, is Protestant and British; Green, Catholic and Irish—the marriage a microcosm of the whole of Ireland. The stanza’s last two lines seem to revert, like the end of stanza two, to unsolvable mystery made of two texts in conflict: the real and the ideal.

Cleveland, with its once-burning river celebrated in a Randy Newman lyric, is an apt place for life to meet death and the underworld to meet remnants of heaven. It’s the father’s time to sing “the true vision, / the one that he made up.” But, like this poem and its story that encompasses the eternity of art and the constant vanishing of human life, the father finds himself through wandering. All waters the same: “Irish Sea, English Channel, Atlantic Ocean, Ohio River.” Maureen Bloomfield’s masterfully storied and immediate amalgam resolves itself in a simple statement that endows her father and all heroes with a straightforward, impossible purpose that transcends all others: “The hero’s task is always to find home.” -Angela Ball

Make Believe [by Frederica von Stade & Jerry Hadley]