The Best American Poetry

On Coming to America [by Anne Lehman (1915-2009), as told to David Lehman]

David and Anne Lehman, in Vienna, 1998

When I was born the third child to my parents, they were not overjoyed, since they already had a daughter and a son. But my mother told me I was so pretty that they didn’t mind too much.

We lived in Vienna, in the 16^th district. It was not a very Jewish district. Jews lived mostly in the 2^nd and 20^th districts. And in my class in school were only three Jewish girls, out of thirty students. Of course from an early time we were made to feel different. Yet I had many gentile girlfriends and I remember one of them I was pretty close to. Her parents had a little garden with a hut in the outskirts of Vienna and she invited me to sleep over. Yet when Hitler came to power and I met her on the street, she acted funny and held her hand over her bosom until I found out she was wearing a swatstika! This was years before Hitler overran Austria—she must have been an underground member in order to have the swastika. This gave me a real shock.

The police came one day and asked for Adolf [my brother]. They had orders to take him to the police station. Why, we asked. We need him as a witness, they said. He was present at an accident, they said. We told them: as soon as he comes home we shall send him to the police station. But of course when Adolf came home he told us there had been no accident. He was on a list. The Nazis wanted to send him to a camp. You see, Adolf was the president of some idealistic university organization, a good socialist. And from that day on, he went underground until he got a visa to go to America.

It was a nightmare to live in Vienna at that time. Every time the doorbell rang, we were afraid—they’re coming for us!

A friend of mine got me a permit to go to England as a mother’s helper. This way I got out of Nazi Germany. These people, Wright was their name, lived in Southsea. He was a shipbuilder and she was a dentist. They treated me very well, and he gave me English lessons every day. But I was lonely there so after a few months I went to London, where I had some friends from Vienna. My friend Trude and I found work in the home of an English theater producer by the name of French. Trude was supposed to be the cook and I was the parlor maid. Once Rex Harrison came to dinner. He was very friendly, a real gentleman.

I was in England when the war started and we all received the gas masks and instructions for the air raid shelters. The American consulate closed and we had to move to a refugee home. When I saw how bad the situation was and my parents were still in Vienna, I tried to get them out to England. For America they had to wait too long, their quota was very small, since my parents were born in Poland. And we did not know when Hitler came how important it was to be registered in the American consulate. In March 1938 Adolf went to register himself and in April Bert [my younger brother] went. I only went in June to register, but at least while I was there I also got the papers to register my parents. Later I found out that each month meant one more year to wait for the visa. But it took even longer if you were born in Poland. So I asked the French people and they filled out a lot of papers which would have enabled my parents to come to England. Everything took so long, when I finally got everything together England was at war and my parents couldn’t come. I had no way of getting in touch with them. [Later, we learned that they were murdered by the Nazis.]

“But the American consulate finally opened its door again and I received my visa to go to America. How happy I was. Naturally I was worried to travel on an English ship, so my cousin from America sent me additional money and I changed my ticket to an American ship, the President Harding. I think it was the last Atlantic crossing it ever made. It took us ten days of the most terrible shaking. Everyone on board was sick and wanted to die. We were so sick that we weren’t even afraid of hidden mines, and as in a dream we did all of the safe drillings, etc. The last day was Thanksgiving. We had, and for me it was the first time, a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and all the trimmings, they played “Oh, say, can you see,” and when I finally saw the Statue of Liberty, I was really grateful to God, that he let me live and see America.

"The Joy of the Gamble: A Conversation with David Lehman" [by Aspen Matis]

Here are excerpts from Aspen Matis's piece "The Joy of the Gamble: A Conversation with David Lehman" that the Los Angeles Review of Books published on Saturday, November 27:

ASPEN MATIS: Congratulations on The Morning Line. What would you like to share about the origins and creation process of this newest collection?

DAVID LEHMAN: The Morning Line is really a gathering of the best and most ambitious poems I’ve written (or completed) in the last five years, which has been a particularly fruitful period for me, perhaps because it followed my bout with cancer and brush with death. The book consists of poems (and a prose poem) that represent a range of my interests — everything from love to lunch, gambling to stamp collecting, music and martinis. I am inspired — to the point of writing poems — by the lives and works of Villon and Mayakovsky, Talmudic tales, jazz standards, Schubert’s Rosamunde overture, verse forms and word games, puzzles, wisecracks, big philosophical questions, the life of the mind versus what the French call la vie quotidienne. In college and since, I took seriously what we used to call a “liberal arts education,” the idea that an educated person should have an active relation with art, music, literature, history, and philosophy.

Some poems come easily, some take forever. It took me 20 years to write “The Complete History of the Boy,” which is a sort of biography-in-progress of a 15-year-old poet.

Learning you had just defeated cancer makes the vitality of the poems in The Morning Line all the more stunning — thank you for sharing about that difficult fight. This context makes the book all the more triumphant. Why, I wonder, is the period following devastation so often beautifully vital? And how, in your experience, might death’s presence in our lives contribute to our greatest awakenings and birth our truest work?

Your questions cut to the quick, Aspen. I guess if I could put it in one prosaic sentence, I’d say: All the things you usually take for granted, whether driving past a field of corn or admiring the nobility of your dog standing guard at the door, well, you take them less for granted. Okay, I can be less prosaic. I’ve come into contact with death and as a result I have wounds but also strength I never knew I had.

In a clear-eyed and familiar voice, The Morning Line paints a nostalgic impressionistic masterwork that at once entertains the imagination and illuminates the big questions we’re now facing as a society. The book embraces, in John Hennessy’s words, “subjects ranging from the perfect martini and accompanying jazz recording to profound questions of faith.” In your mind, what inquiry or exploration unifies the work? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

Good questions. What unifies the book, I think, is the poet’s sensibility and craft and a certain quantity of joie de vivre and heartfelt happiness despite the uncertainty, noise, ugliness, and even misery that threaten to defeat the impulse to celebrate, an impulse fundamental to all creation. As to what the reader is left with, you’re in the best possible position to answer that question.

In the book’s eponymous poem, “The Morning Line,” you write of gambling as an aspect of human nature — and of human folly. With intensity and grace, the speaker evokes a seductive picture of chance as “abstract art,” observing how “the gulf / is sometimes wide between the odds / set by the handicapper for the morning line / and the betting public at the track / when the horses reach the starting gate.” Why do you suspect that — as the speaker expresses — “[g]ambling is a natural human instinct”? Are you yourself a gambler, in some sense of the word?

Life is a gamble. Even when you don’t realize it, you are making a wager. Crossing a busy city street, you are betting that motorists are rational and sane, undistracted, and obedient to a system of alternating green and red lights. That’s a trivial example, but think of the choices we make when it comes to colleges, companions, relationships, and careers.

When I quit the academic world to become a full-time freelance writer, I took a huge gamble. It worked out, though at the time the odds were long. I feel like my life is a gamble, and perhaps that is why I don’t gamble in casinos.

In the same poem, the speaker draws a stunning connection between instability and religion, evoking God in “the risk you feel / when you are so deeply involved with another person / that you cannot imagine living your life without her.” That powerful stanza concludes: “The inevitability of loss, a much-misunderstood aspect / of gambling, is not a deterrent but an attraction.” Why, in your view, is instability so compelling? Why is risk-taking (such as risking love) a joyful high?

Life without risk, even if possible, wouldn’t necessarily be desirable. What makes a baseball game exciting to a fan is that the outcome is unknown. It is happening, it is real, and it can go either way. If love came with a lifetime guarantee, would it still be love? Would it be love if it didn’t have the fear of loss?

Graham Greene once said that he went to Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam, Haiti, Africa not “to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity” to which the London blitzes had addicted him. That makes sense to me.

For the entire piece, please click here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-joy-of-the-gamble-a-conversation-with-david-lehman/
Photo credit: Stacey Lehman. Cover art by Ricky Mujica. The Morning Line was puiblished bby the University of Pittsburgh Press in September of this year.

The Assignment [by Walter Carey]

“The only virtue in life is survival,” Sanders said with his typical swagger and thick irony. “There is nothing heroic about the ‘survival of the fittest,’ a blasphemous notion and not a democratic one. Business is business. Television killed not only the radio but the movies, too. The movies had already taken care of Broadway. Messages with multiple syllables went obsolete. All that and the downsizing too had already gone down. Only one commodity retained its inflation-proof value."

And now? Now he was making a big bet on cloud computing. “As alternating current was to the rise of electricity, so fiber optic technology spelled out the death of the p.c.”  He smiled arrogantly. “Can you make a story out of that?”

The job was to write up the story in a one-line poem of one hundred words or less with lots of pictures, actors, women crying, men going out of business, a brutal election campaign going down to the wire, a scenario no stranger than reality but better-looking and happy-seeming as the faces in the ads for Miss Subways in the 1950s. You hung at the straps at seven in the morning, closed your eyes, married your secretary and kept her in fur from Fred Leighton with an occasional bracelet from Harry Winston. A man accompanying a woman to such a place was a hero. 

But now we do not have heroes. We do not have secretaries, let alone marry them. We have assistants and we have business associates and some of them are making big bets on Bitcoin or on disruptive technologies while I toil on my one-line poem of one hundred words or less to advertise a fake reality.

November 2011

Ed. note: Walter Carey is at work on a cultural history of the 1960s.

Reuben Jackson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________

November Poem

 

It’s the first cold November evening.

I am out driving

And there is a hitchhiker 

Bearing a sign

At a quiet intersection.

I ignore the Cecil Taylor on the radio

To read it.

Perhaps they are bound for some

Exciting destination,

Or a place that I have been.

 

As I drive closer, the words become legible.

DESTINATION, REUBEN JACKSON’S ARMS.

OH, HOW I MISS THEM SO.

 

I am jubilant, flustered.

I squeal to a stop. It’s Donna!

I thought she was married and happy in Philadelphia.

 

We do not speak, but embrace.

I produce tears, she produces a butcher’s knife

And quickly accomplishes her deed.

 

She is careful to wipe the blood

From the seat covers,

And places each finger in sanitary gauze.

I still love you, she cries.

A final kiss and that still potent smile.

 

She still loves me, I moan before dying.

She is still neat and considerate as ever.

My pupils lock on her lovely thumb pointing northward

Across the avenue.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Reuben Jackson is the Archivist with the University of the District of Columbia’s Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, Fingering the Keys (Gut Punch Press, 1991) and Scattered Clouds (Alan Squire Publishing, 2019). His poems have been included in more than 40 anthologies. From 2012 to 2018, he was host of “Friday Night Jazz” on Vermont Public Radio, and currently co-hosts “The Sound of Surprise” on WPFW in Washington, DC.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Rest in Poetry and Peace, Robert Bly (1927-2021)

Robert Bly died last week. He was 94. I heard the news on November 22, 2021 and wrote:

Yesterday was Robert Bly’s last morning.
It was he who gave me the idea of
writing a poem each day, which is what he was doing
in January 1996, the coldest January in years
at Bennington College. He wrote first thing in the morning,
before coffee (if he ever drank coffee)
while curtains remained drawn.
He would sit up in bed, in close contact
with what he called his reptilian brain, and write when
travel across the Maginot Line of consciousness
went both ways on uncongested highways
and took unpredictable turns --- not a metaphor
Bly would have liked, by the way, not only
because he didn’t go to history for his rhetoric
but also because, dreadful as it was,
the world did not face what France faced in May 1940.

Robert liked images, a turtle, a spear, an onion, a castle,
and wishes, like the desire to travel far or
to be in Paris on a Thursday on your last day alive.

A big man, the author of “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,"
among other aresting titles, 
Robert was said to be cantankerous but I found him generous,
loyal, an excellent teacher and raconteur,
and it was a joy to work with him on The Best American Poetry 1999.

On publication of Robert's Morning Poems, the product of his practice of writing a poem a day first thing on the morning, I wrote,

<< Morning Poems is a sensational collection — Robert Bly's best in many years. Inspired by the example of William Stafford, Bly decided to embark on the project of writing a daily poem: Every morning he would stay in bed until he had completed the day's work. These 'little adventures / In Morning longing,' as he calls them, address classic poetic subjects (childhood, the seasons, death and heaven) in a way that capitalizes fully on the pun in the book's title. These are morning poems, full of the delight and mystery of waking in a new day, and they also do their share of mourning, elegizing the deceases and capturing the 'moment of sorror before creation.' Some of the poems are dialogues where unconventional speakers include mice, maple trees, bundles of grain, the body, the 'oldest mind' and the soul. A particularly moving sequence involves Bly's imaginative transactions with a great and unlikely precursor, Wallace Stevens. The whole is a fascinating and original book from one of our most fascinating authors. >>>
— David Lehman, January 1998

"The Tempest" [by Alexander Lazarus Wolff]

Each shock and shudder pummels the ship
as it cleaves through the waves. The updraught
billows the sail, and combers flood
the storm-struck deck. Our crew, flayed by spray,
squint ahead through the onslaught,
making way to that island of isolation.
The ocean begins to batter again:
a pulsation reverberates throughout the ship,
causing the wood to creak and bend.
Lightning strikes the water like a damnation.
Not a single place of solace for our crew to crawl into.
Yet again, the ship ripples and pulses, and the wind
rips the spindrift from the crest of each wave.

The captain beaches the hull.
Rain and wind weaken,
giving way to night’s mist.

The crew steps onto the island before them.
In the distance, they hear a song swimming
through the night, and into their view comes
a winged figure, its song unwinding from a rock.

(Ed. Note: The image above is "The Tempest" of Giorgione.)

Making an Inventory [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Bruegel's Sky - Fragment [Photo by Lera Auerbach]

To live, one must make an inventory:

Item 1: The sky. It is everywhere.

 

Item 2: People. There are many of them.

 

Item 3: It is hard to believe, but there are still birds. They occupy space between people and the sky. Sometimes they touch the heavens; sometimes they touch the earth.

 

Item 4: Conceptual thinking.

 

Item 5: Garbage cans. Discarded objects, personal treasures no longer loved such as broken limbs of dolls.

 

Item 6: Cars. Be aware of them.

 

Item 7: The rest of the world.

 

The dead are watching the shadows caused by light. 

Inside of each shadow, a small invisible death is practicing the art of dying.

 

Performing time present - Petter Jacobson’s Ballet de Lorraine [by Tracy Danison]

Petter Jacobson’s “Air condition” opens the Nancy Opera’s “Ready Made” 21-22 season. Photo©2021 Emilie-Salquebre

Originally laid out to impose rational charm on what I get the impression was a rather higgledy-piggledy daily reality, there is a lot to be said for 18th-century provincial cities such as Nancy. That rational charm remains hard at work in our topsy-turvy 21^st century. From the (tidy, practical) rail station to the picture-postcard place Stanislaus, the French take on “appreciate” comes to mind: the eye weighs without judgement, our sensibility pleased but not teased by well-kept and commodious Art-Nouveau buildings added into, around and within the softened but well-ordered lines and stylized gorgon-medallions of the little city’s Age-of-Reason-style baroque.

Inside and out, Nancy’s opera house, on the place Stanislaus, the destination of my walk and where I was to see Petter Jacobson and Thomas Caley’s brand new Air Condition dance performance for the Ballet de Lorraine, recalls this same rational charm. Reconstructed with the new materials and methods developed and used by Art Nouveau and with its place in the urban environment as esthetic baseline, the turns on spectator experience and performance needs seriously: it calls attention to itself only as its design, space and decoration lend themselves to experience and need. Nice place, Nancy!

In the mix of wider cultural themes – the Baroque, Art Nouveau – it seems to me that Nancy enjoys a continuity of local intentions and perspectives that create the city’s present moment. Nancy is its own unique place. And without my being able to put my finger on exactly why, this sense of continuity needs the breaks and punctuations of the randomly preserved fractions of mine-worker housing and randomly-sited contemporary metal-plastic-glass-on-asphalt-in-grass residence-asteroids glimpsed from the train. Also the fashionable clothing in the shop windows, the people on the streets and cafés and the unexpected surge of people coming into the opera house to see the show. Maybe the continuity needs pointing so we can make sense of it as a “present moment”.

As I went in the door of the opera, got my tickets and looked around, I was actually thinking: Is continuity of intention a continuity of place and people shaping each other over time?; is “past” a pastiche of intention that consciousness automatically orders to keep me sane?; is past therefore a retroactive simulacrum of present?

By synchronicity, as I lounged in my seat and went over the program, I learned that “Ready Made”, the 2021-22 thematic for the Ballet de Lorraine’s four performances and Air condition, the first of the four, turn around “movement of the visualized world”. In other words, the pieces explore qualities such as “continuity”: “time”, “duration”, the “present”, “past” or “time” with bodies in movement.

Air Condition starts up Ready Made’s exploring of the time theme with a production based on Yves Klein’s 1954 unproduced ballet, La Guerre (de la ligne et de la couleur). Klein wanted La Guerre to materialize in bodies and movement the immateriality of his work on line and color. Which Jacobson’s does with aplomb.

Tomás Saraceno sets Klein’s concern in a peculiarly imperfect white-grey flicker of what might be a pre-1960s movie. The flicker is bisected by a black line that projects enough visual umph to make a spectator imagine “line of horizon” but recalls “separating” rather than actually separating or distancing anything. Saraceno’s setting is well-washed with a deliberated soundscape composed by Eliane Radigue. Like line of horizon, the composition has just enough music umphto determinedly lead up to some brilliant apotheosis without ever bumping triumphantly (tumbling disconsolately away from) into it.

“Air condition” picks up Yves Klein's war against color and line. Photo©2021 Emilie-Salquebre

Dressed in shades and facets of the set’s lights by Ballet de Lorraine costumer Birgit Neppl and her team, Air condition’s twenty-four bodies in movement eventually collide, provoking emotional shape and substance in the process.

With a body pressing into an elastic horizon as multi-point of reference, bodies suddenly spin into the air and disappear from the roiling movement up and down the stage. Once recovered from the first, unexpected, plunge into the void, I’m asking, Losing grip or willing to go? and editorializing, All that separates the living and the dead is time?

Meanwhile, the horizon transforms from line to space to surface, the set from black sun to white light setting – could be vice versa, too – from an inside to an outside.

As a meticulously conceived and executed choreography, Air condition is a great success.

But it owes its success as a performance to the individuals of the Ballet de Lorraine. That’s because Jacobson’s vision of how to perform turns on encouraging diversity, turning away  the old idea of unity embodied in “one from many” toward a new type of unity: ‘many ones” in which performers in movement find each other again and again in the movement of each and then of all.  The sense of the choreography articulates and projects itself through performer diversity – the expression of an individual’s quality as a body, a personality and a flow movement.

So I came away from Jacobson’s  Air condition as I came away from the Jacobson’s Plaisirs inconnus: a bit stunned by the strength of feeling “many one” deploys.

The Sunday afternoon I saw Air condition, Petter Jacobson was named to the Ordre des arts et lettres for his contributions to dance performance. Though the citation named many of the choreographer’s admirable qualities, doings and deeds, it didn’t mention achieving a “many ones” performance team among them.  For my money, it should have been at the top of the list.  

Poets on Thanksgiving: A Roundup [by Stacey Lehman]

Some favorite Thanksgiving poems, starting with this one by Terence Winch:

Thanksgiving

Later, after dinner, we examine your uncle’s photos

of trees, flowers, waterfalls, birds

until I just can’t stand it another second.

I am not at one with nature.  Never was.

Some of the people can be fooled all of the time,

even when you yawn right in their faces.

Guests, or ghosts, have taken over the house,

lounging in the living room, watching t.v.

Ugly images of war and politics are all I see.

Cancel the rest of the holidays, please, until this

knot can be untied and our hearts released.

-- Terence Winch

 

Happy Thanksgivukkah from Over Here [by Moira Egan, 2013]

"I'm already sick of turkey" (by Karen Resta, 2012)

Boxed in, Blue Humorous and Bleary Eyed (Bildungsroman Holiday by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

How to Chop a Fuckton of Onions (more Bildungsroman Holiday, by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

Bildungsroman Holiday (by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

Thanksgiving, 1977, Albany NY (by Stacey Harwood, 2010)

A Poem for Thanksgiving (by Martha Silano, 2009)

Happy Thanksgiving (by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2009)

A Poem for Thanksgiving Week (by Laura Orem, 2009)

Venerdi Nero (?) by Moira Egan (2009)

Happy Thanksgiving (2009 - photograph)

"We Gather Together" (2009 - video)

A Thanksgiving Post (by Laura Orem, 2008)

Thanksgiving and Black Friday (by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2008)

Your Brain on Turkey and Fixings (by Martha Silano, 2008)

Live Poetry Blogging on Thanksgiving (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

(Not so) Live Blogging, 10:54 pm [(by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Live Thanksgiving Blogging 12:26 pm (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Happy Spanksgiving, from the flarflist (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Pre-Thanksgiving Emergency Narrowly Averted (by Martha Silano, 2008)

https://theamericanscholar.org/addressing-the-universe-or-one-aspect-of-it/

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2019/11/the-best-thanksgiving-ever-by-jennifer-l-knox.html

from the archive; first posted November 25, 2015

The Heart Has Reasons [by John Skoyles]

And I wrote those reasons 
on the ruled grid

of an index card
to preserve the moment, Madam,

when the panels of the hotel
elevator closed,

leaving just us.
A sigh and a kiss

did nicely, Lady,
but when the doors

opened again,
you were again nowhere

near, and now
the file card’s lost too,

with its logical
numerical slate.

I’ve misplaced this and that 
over the years, Dear,

but the things I miss most, Miss,
are listed on that card.

from Yes and No by John Skoyles (Carnegie Mellon University Press)

"Voyage" by Bella Li [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Bella Li has published three collections of poetry, Maps, Cargo (2013); Argosy (2017), winner of both the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards 2018 for poetry, and the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2018 for poetry; and Lost Lake (2018). Born in China, Li emigrated to Australia at the age of three. Her work is often a unique assemblage of collage, poetry and photography, and, as the titles of her collections suggest, often deals in themes of exploration and loss—the shadow of Australia’s colonial history always looming near.

 

“Voyage” calls to mind Baudelaire, whose own “Voyage” trails Li’s as a kind of ghost ship. “Sullen days”, as Li’s poem opens, is just one of the bitter truths Baudelaire thought our travels brought us, not an opening up of perspective but a realization that the world is “tiny and monotonous” and we are but “oases of fear in the wasteland of ennui”. Or as Li phrases it “my eyes reeked of distance”. Baudelaire’s themes take on new stakes in Li’s writing, as she pitches her work against a national history of exploration leading to dispossession and her own migratory past.

 

 

The Most Underrated Poet in America

<<< 

I remember a poet's writing to me several years back, You are the most underrated poet in the country. But then, he added, that's better than being the most overrated poet in the country. I was and remain impressed by the short distance between the two extremes.

-- Howard Nemerov, Journal of the Fictive Life (1963)
>>>

On the other hand, keep in mind what R. G. Collingwood wrote in 1924:

". . . in art, a school once established normally deteriorates as it goes on. It achieves perfection in its kind with a startling burst of energy, a gesture too quick for the historian's eye to follow. He can never explain such a movement or tell us how exactly it happened. But once it is achieved, there is the melancholy certainty of a decline. The grasped perfection does not educated and purify the taste of posterity; it debauches it. The story is the same whether we look at Samian pottery or Anglian carving, Elizabethan drama or Venetian painting. So far as there is any observable law in collective art history it is, like the law of the individual artist's life, the law not of progress but of reaction. Whether in large or in little, the equilibrium of the aesthetic life is permanently unstable."

Didn't Paul Valéry say poetry was language beyond paraphrase, language so vital it is irreducible?

Therefore, I shall return to thee, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "  poem is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.”

The New York School Diaspora (Part Nineteen): Amy Gerstler [by Angela Ball]

Night Life

How can this equal rest or peace, this garble of gasps, snuffles,
and horse-like snorts? His lips flutter as though he’s blowing
bubbles, his moans so choked he must be drowning…or are
his legs being sucked in by quicksand, the way a restaurant
critic sucks the bones of her osso buco? In my overheated,
night-gowned silence I watch him flinch in a puddle of bedside
light. A range of ages and plights wash over his face. Who is
this sleeping, unshaven male, this slab of snoring meat, this
leaky ship of divinity? I stare across the chasm which divides
each waking or sleeping creature, whether they’ve touched
each other or not. He’s a magician who made an orchard
disappear, an unhinged shooter from St. Louis, a plum
colored shadow, a handful of chameleon teeth, one of god’s
toboggans, a tree denuded of leaves bleeding beads of amber.

--Amy Gerstler (from Index of Women)

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. The most recent is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts CD Wright Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her previous books include Scattered at Sea and Dearest Creature. She is currently working on a musical play with composer/arranger/actor Steve Gunderson.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Nineteen): Amy Gerstler

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Biograpia Literaria of 1817, draws a signal distinction, declaring that “the objects of fancy are fixed and dead”; whereas the objects of imagination are imbued with “esemplastic power.” In Amy Gerstler’s humorous and revelatory poem, “Night Life,” the object of her imagination, her sleeping partner, is anything but “fixed and dead.” In fact, the poem embodies a rare quality I’ll call “logo-plasticity,” in which a poem’s images, made of words, rise from the page to model a sculptural and kinesthetic likeness. The poem’s speaker watches in “overheated, nightgowned silence” as whole swathes of human and animal peril are enacted to appalling dramatic effect: “. . . or are / his legs being sucked in by quicksand, the way a restaurant critic / sucks the bones of her osso buco?” With the speaker, we grow transfixed as “a range of ages and plights wash across his face,” and wonder “Who is / this sleeping, unshaven male, this slab of snoring meat, this / leaky ship of divinity?” Coming after what may be the poem’s most hilarious comparison, “this slab of snoring meat,” “this / leaky ship of divinity” announces a turn in Gerstler’s free-wheeling sonnet. The partner’s disordered repose becomes an entrée into mystery, “the chasm that divides / each waking or sleeping creature, whether they’ve touched / each other or not.” What a direct, modest, and thus effective way to describe the isolation in which we move. Observer turned sculptor, the speaker cycles the dreaming man through deeds and identities, including the astonishing, tragi-comic “God’s toboggan,” shifting him to shapes that contain us all: murderous, yet powerless; decaying, yet primordial in beauty: “a tree denuded of leaves bleeding beads of amber.” Amy Gerstler’s “Night Life” is the work of a poetic magus.

--Angela Ball

A Woman's Laughter [by Charles Coe]

On a recording of the Bill Evans trio,
Live at the Village Vanguard,
late June '61, during a slow, haunting version
of "I Loves You Porgy," at the quietest moment,
in the background, soft but clear, 

a woman's laughter.

At first the sound seems jarring, even sacrilegious.
But then again a jazz club's not a concert hall,
listeners in polite rows, knees together,
waiting to cough in the space between movements.
Jazz is cash registers and clinking glasses
and chairs scraping the floor.

And besides it's a pleasant laugh, full of promise.
Easy to see her hand reach out to rest on her
companion's arm. Easy to catch the whiff of lilac or lavender . . . 
Always, so many worlds within worlds.

In one world,
A man who follows Evans from gig to gig
sits at the bar alone, transfixed,
ice melting in the forgotten drink.

In one world,
The bartender counts his cash
while dreaming of the waitress's embrace.

In one world,
A woman's laughter.

In one world,
Evan's leans over the keys, oblivious to all
but the slow heartbeat bass,
the splash of brushes on cymbal and snare,
fingers poised for what seems like forever
before they settle gently over the final chord. 

                               -- from Memento Mori: Poems by Charles Coe

In addition to Memento Mori: poems, Charles Coe is the author of two previous volumes of poetry, both with Leapfrog Press: All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents (2013) and Picnic on the Moon (1999). He's also the author of Spin Cycles, a novella published by Gemma Media. Charles is the winner of a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and was selected by the Associates of the Boston Public Library as a "Boston Literary Light in 2014." He teaches poetry in the MFA programs at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, and Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Coe is a jazz vocalist who has performed and recorded with musicians throughout New England. 

Der Blaue Reiter [by Wassily Kandinsky]

Cover of Der Blaue Reiter by Wassily Kandinsky (1911)

The blue rider rode on the blue horse
Franz Marc painted in 1911.
World War I killed Marc and returned Kandinsky to Russia
until 1921 when Walter Gropius summoned him
to the Bauhaus in Germany where he worked
until 1933 when the Nazis nixed it and he went to France,
painted and died just as the Battle of the Bulge was about to begin,
sparing a thought for Franz Marc and his large blue horses.

Emily Jungmin Yoon: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Say Grace

 

In my country our shamans were women

and our gods multiple until white people brought

an ecstasy of rosaries and our cities today

glow with crosses like graveyards. As a child

in Sunday school I was told I’d go to hell

if I didn’t believe in God. Our teacher was a woman

whose daughters wanted to be nuns and I asked

What about babies and what about Buddha, and she said

They’re in hell too and so I memorized prayers

and recited them in front of women

I did not believe in. Deliver us from evil.

O sweet Virgin Mary, amen. O sweet. O sweet.

In this country, which calls itself Christian,

what is sweeter than hearing Have mercy

on us. From those who serve different gods. O

clement, O loving, O God, O God, amidst ruins,

amidst waters, fleeing, fleeing. Deliver us from evil.

O sweet, O sweet. In this country,

point at the moon, at the stars, point at the way the lake lies,

with a hand full of feathers,

and they will look at the feathers. And kill you for it.

If a word for religion they don’t believe in is magic

so be it, let us have magic. Let us have

our own mothers and scarves, our spirits,

our shamans and our sacred books. Let us keep

our stars to ourselves and we shall pray

to no one. Let us eat

what makes us holy.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018), winner of the 2019 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize. She has also translated and edited a chapbook of poems, Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019). She is the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD candidate in Korean literature at the University of Chicago. 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Mansindo_(萬神圖), early 19th-c. Korean shamanic painting.

Professor Frake [by Molly Arden]

Professor Frake

Is a hard-ass; takes pride
in the low grades he gives; 
publishes essays; gives offense;
carries the lamp of a seeker of truth
in a benighted age of compulsory bullshit;
but, hell, this guy’s a fake, and it’s irritating
that he’s so goddamn calculating. 
I don't believe a word he says.
The more he insults the more praise
he covets and seems to get
from the poetry-hating propeller set.

(adapted from Catullus by Molly Arden)

Brueghel's Icarus and Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts" [by David Lehman]

Landscape With the Fall of Icarus’ (c. 1560s), by Pieter Brueghel the Elder—the focus of Auden’s final stanza.
ROYAL MUSEUMS OF FINE ARTS OF BELGIUM

By David Lehman

Published in The Wall Street Journal under the heading “Art’s Lessons, Filtered Through Verse”
May 13, 2016 12:00 pm ET

Of the many memorable poems about paintings and sculpture—“ekphrastic poems” is the technical but ugly term for them—my favorite is W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Named for the Brussels museum of fine art that Auden visited late in 1938, the poem begins with a stanza about two emblematic if generic paintings, one that depicts the birth of Christ (lines 5-8), the other depicting the crucifixion (lines 10-13)—the two most solemn moments in the Christian year:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

The poem’s opening statement is guaranteed to stop you in your tracks. To appreciate the artistry, imagine a more conventional way of saying the same thing: “The old masters were never wrong about suffering.” Though virtually identical in language, the sentence loses all its power. There may be no better demonstration of a crucial lesson in the rhetoric of verse: that word order—combined with the strategic pause at the end of the line—is crucial in arousing and sustaining the reader’s attention. Note, too, the staggered rhymes in the stanza, which approaches prose but turns back to verse at each line’s end. Not until line four of this 13-line stanza do we encounter the first rhyme, and the last word of line six does not meet its mate until the stanza’s end.

If the point is that regardless of circumstance, people go on with their daily lives, oblivious to the “miraculous birth” or the “dreadful martyrdom,” the most crucial adjective appears in the final line: “innocent” meaning both “ignorant” and “guiltless.” People in general are like the children skating on a frozen pond, the dogs that bark and run and chase and fetch, and the “torturer’s horse” that scratches its backside. It is not so much that the “human position” is callous. Rather, it is that a world-historical event rarely announces itself as such—and that we are so wrapped up in our lives that we wouldn’t notice in any case.

The poem segues, in its second and final stanza, to “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus” (c. 1560s) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, a painting about an incident culled not from the Christian calendar but from Roman myth as recorded in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” To escape from a labyrinthine prison, Dedalus, the craftsman, fashions wax wings to permit him and his son Icarus to fly to safety. Father instructs son not to fly too near the sun, but to no avail. The wings melt, the boy falls to his death, and the incident illustrates the principle about the Old Masters and their understanding of human suffering:

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Unlike mediocre writers, who rely on modifiers to do the work of verbs, Auden chooses his adjectives and adverbs with great care. Consider the work done by “the forsaken cry.” Does this not link the falling Icarus with the dying Christ, who, expiring on the cross, is said by St. Matthew to utter the words “My father, why hast thou forsaken me?” The linkage suggests a universality of experience transcending the differences between the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman worldviews.

Even better is “an important failure.” The adjective is devastating. It is not enough to have failed; the failure is not even deemed worthy of notice. So transitory is the glory of the world that the ploughman in the foreground of the painting and the “expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,” take no notice. They have “somewhere to get to,” and life goes on.

I teach poetry in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York. A favorite prompt of mine is to read “Musée des Beaux Arts” and other poems about paintings. Then I suggest that the students visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and write about Brueghel’s sublime depiction of summer, “The Harvesters.” Try it—not in competition with Auden (you can’t win), but with Auden’s marvelous poem as your model.

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

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

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

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

"Virginity" [by Amy Gerstler]

Virginity 

Lying down on the rug with someone and getting dust
bunnies in your hair. The eloquence of long pauses.
Passing notes rather than speaking. A basement fogged
with pot smoke. Trying to read another body via its breathing.
The idea that if you kiss someone you can taste what they
just ate. Refusing to eat what your mother cooks anymore,
which hurts her feelings. But you can't stand dead sautéed\
animal inside your mouth now, so you have to spit it out.
The myth that innocence is protective. The idea of not
being able to stop. Reading secret magazines a cousin stuffed
in the bottom of his sleeping bag. The idea that someone
curious about your body isn't interested in the private theatre
of your mind. Theories that there might be a kind of
violence about it. How mother insists that without true love
it's just worthless humping, and the idea that for the life
you aspire to, she's probably wrong. What your body has
promised for so long. The idea of your disastrous premiere.
The idea of someone laughing at you after. The idea of
hoofprints, stampede damage, stuff crushed underfoot.
The idea of keeping all this hidden as you slowly lotus open.

From Index of Women by Amy Gerstler (Penguin)

See also this interview with Amy Gerstler
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/roll-call-a-conversation-with-amy-gerstler/

and this poem by Amy Gerstler selected and discussed by Angela Ball
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/11/the-new-york-school-diaspora-part-nineteen-amy-gerstler-by-angela-ball.html

Theme Music: Schubert's Rosamunde Overture

from "A Good Week for a Birthday" (in The Morning Line by David Lehman):

What would I choose as my theme music
if I were the classical music disc jockey
maybe Bernstein’s overture to Candide
or Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Cakewalk”
or Schubert’s overture to “Rosamunde”
in honor of John Scheuer
I have my Tolstoy to look forward to
and if music can stand for peace (the food of love)
today’s poem is a little tribute to the novel
summarized TV-Guide style:
Pierre loves Natasha and Napoleon invades Russia.

 

John Ashbery's Typewriter

John Ashbery's typewriter -- a wonderful title for a poem, methinks -- has turned up at Harvard. As the Harvard Gazette reports:

<<<
John Ashbery [pictured left with Jane Freilicher] dove head-first into poetry after arriving at Harvard in 1945. His biographer Karin Roffman described him as “a constant presence” in the Woodberry Poetry Room (formerly at Widener Library until 1949), where he would discover the works of W. H. Auden, the eventual subject of his thesis.

As a student, Ashbery attended readings of the works of W.H. Auden, Morris Gray, and Marianne Moore, discovered local bookshops, and befriended fellow poets, including Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and V.R. Lang. “The great modernist poets were the poets he was imbibing,” Roffman said in an interview with the Gazette. “He was really thinking about the given canon that he was getting in classes at Harvard and then the personal canon he was making for himself.”

The experiences were formative for Ashbery, who died in 2017 at the age of 90, and Harvard has become the center of study on the celebrated poet. The University acquired his papers over a period of years and his reading library — donated by his husband, David Kermani — in 2018. Last month Ashbery’s typewriter, also a gift from Kermani, was installed in the Woodberry Poetry Room at Lamont Library, which will host an event, “Lunch Poems: Adventures with John Ashbery’s Typewriter,” featuring Roffman and Ashbery’s former assistant and editor Emily Skillings, on Wednesday, Nov. 17.

Much of Ashbery’s poetry throughout his career, was written on typewriters, but his love affair with the machines started after graduation. The budding poet didn’t have access to one during his studies likely due to the expense — he even got his thesis typed by someone else who did have one.

Class portrait and information on John Ashbery from the freshmen register during his days at Harvard. "A Sermon: Amos 8:11-14" by John Ashbery.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo
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For more: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/11/john-ashberys-typewriter-installed-at-harvard/