The Best American Poetry

"Letters to Dead Editors" [by Tom Disch]

On July 1, 2008, at 11:16AM, Tom Disch revealed God's "other" Big Idea of the day. He called it "Letters to Dead Editors."

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Another were-there-but-world-enough theme anthology. It was to have been a whole collection by yours truly, and the first letter would have been sent to Mrs. Gaskell, who inmho should be included with the great Victorian novelists, along with the woman she wrote the biography of, Charlotte Bronte. Recently the BBC has given Mrs. G. some of the attention she merits. So much so that she doesn't really need me beating the drum for her, tho my letter would have been written in response to her great novel about the urban underclass, Mary Barton. What she brought to bear was a humorless (but perceptive) Moral Earnestness and a patient trompe l'oeil realism about the daily life of the miserable-most poor. By comparison Dickens comes across as lazy and/or sneeringly cruel.

I've tried writing such letters to real-life good writers but they are too busy trying to grab the brass ring or otherwise advance up the ladder, or else simply think me pushy or wicked or dumb and don't write back or just say thank you, goodbye. Maybe it would be different now in the era of blogs and email, but back then my epistolary charms had no effect on the likes of Louise Erdrich et al. As indeed, they shouldn't have. There are too many possible venal reasons why we don't write to our favorite celebreties. But to those safely dead and in their vaults--why not? The idea would be to address them as though they were real people, not statues swathed in marble togas and bronze crinolines, and as though they'd been keeping up with the things they had usually been interested in.

If anyone wants to give it a try, you could post a specimen letter here, but this should not be the usual Anything Goes comment. Mere japery on the order of "Shit happens" as one's whole letter to Dale Carnegie would rate a quick dele from God's red pencil. But I do think, and so does God, that it might be a nice book. Indeed, He often writes such letters Himself and sends them poste restante to the big post office on high.

-- Tom Disch  >>>

from the archive; first posted November 1, 2008

Splash, splash [by Mitch Sisskind]

When I told Joe about how Sam Giancana

Punched Sammy Davis Jr. in the stomach

At Frank Sinatra's house Joe looked at me

And said, "I am like a frog that's been sitting

"Quietly on a lily pad until splash, splash,

"It jumps back into the water not because

"It wants to but because it must or else

"Everything will go right straight to hell.

"Sam Giancana hasn't been the same

"Since 1954 when Angeline passed on.

"She was an angel. Hey, I'd like to punch

"All of them in the stomach, Giancana,

"Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford,

"Not Dean Martin though. He's fabulous."

"In night when colors all to black are cast": Fulke Greville's Great Sonnet

In night when colors all to black are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;
The eye a watch to inward senses placed,
Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offense,
Doth forge and raise impossibility:

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,
Proper reflections of the error be,
And images of self-confusednesses,
Which hurt imaginations only see;

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.

Now read it a second time. The key word appears to be "inward." What governs the "inward sense"? Let's take it one step at a time. It is possible to have the power to see and be blind; that paradox we can figure out. But who has "placed" the eye there as "a watch?" Is there an appeal to a belief system the reader is presumed to understand and identify on the basis of the language and probable date of composition? The second stanza raises the possibility that "the inward sense" singular may be different from the "inward senses." And both are corrupt and susceptible to panic and fear. The eye can at least give a "proper reflection of the error." What's there is nothing, "the nothing that is," as Wallace Stevens would have it. And the news confirms the neuroses. The devil is a manmade expression of "inward evils" based on illusory images. And yet, saying all this, one feels one has left out something crucial to the poem: the darkness, the night, and the power of sight to see error or to see erroneously.

The late Edward Tayler, professor at Columbia, did his best to promote the English Renaissance poet Fulke Greville, Tayler believed that Greville's importance was on a par with that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. For a final paper Tayler had us analyze this sonnet. A piece of cake it ain't.

Aldous Huxley chose the following lines by Fulke Greville as the epigraph for the 1928 novel Point Counter Point:

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound,
Vainely begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws –
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

-- DL

Now read it a second time. The key word appears to be "inward." What governs the "inward sense"? Let's take it one step at a time. It is possible to have the power to see and be blind; that paradox we can figure out. But who has "placed" the eye there as "a watch?" Is there an appeal to a belief system the reader is presumed to understand and identify on the basis of the language and probable date of composition? The second stanza raises the possibility that "the inward sense" singular may be different from the "inward senses." And both are corrupt and susceptible to panic and fear. The eye can at least give a "proper reflection of the error." What's there is nothing, "the nothing that is," as Wallace Stevens would have it. And the news confirms the neuroses. The devil is a manmade expression of "inward evils" based on illusory images. And yet, saying all this, one feels one has left out something crucial to the poem: the darkness, the night, and the power of sight to see error or to see erroneously.

The late Edward Tayler, professor at Columbia, did his best to promote the English Renaissance poet Fulke Greville, Tayler believed that Greville's importance was on a par with that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. For a final paper Tayler had us analyze this sonnet. A piece of cake it ain't.

Aldous Huxley chose the following lines by Fulke Greville as the epigraph for the 1928 novel Point Counter Point:

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound,
Vainely begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws –
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

-- DL

"Thursday" [by Mark Ford]

When I began writing poetry many moons ago, for some reason I deemed allusions infra dig, unbecoming. I suppose like all young poets I wanted my stuff to be anti-academic, to be a breath of fresh air – and I was mindful of Kenneth Koch’s poem on the subject, ‘Fresh Air’, in which he imagines a strangler dealing mercilessly with any poet he surprises alluding to Orpheus, Cuchulain, Gawain or Odysseus. Accordingly, my first collection, Landlocked, is largely allusion-free, though there’s a stray reference in one poem to Charlotte Brontë, and another borrows its title from a song by Olivia Newton-John. No casual dipping of my young and fevered hand into what Philip Larkin once derisively called ‘the myth-kitty’.

Then I began to brood – particularly on the oeuvres of 20th century poetry’s giants, on the careers of Eliot and Pound and Lowell and Olson and co., and on the vast quantities of criticism their work had inspired. Much of this criticism focused on their deft use of precisely the resource I had forsworn; throwing in a bit of Dante, quoting a line of Pope, furnished just the sort of grist the critical mill craved, and without appreciative criticism, what hope of immortality? None

I decided, therefore, that to be taken seriously I needed allusions, and plenty of ‘em; what’s more I decided to remedy matters in one fell swoop by writing a poem that would consist almost entirely of allusions. But I also wanted this poem to do more than just make up my allusion-deficit. It had often occurred to me that no one had ever written a poem addressing a faux pas we all occasionally make, particularly when attempting to appear more knowledgeable than we really are. I’m talking about mixing up famous people who happen to have the same surnames, like Rod and Jon Stewart, or Marianne and Michael Moore… Surely such mix-ups, often harmless, occasionally amusing, deserved a poem of their own. Enough, you might think, and yet I wanted more, still more from this poem. For again brooding on what went into the kind of verse that achieved celebrity and critical acclaim for its author, it struck me that mention of foreign locations always went down well. References to Locarno or Kyoto or Aix-en-Provence make one look cosmopolitan, Byronic, au fait with the treasures and history of civilization. Though I’d done my fair share of travelling, indeed grew up many different countries, I’d so far made pitiful use of the places I’d visited. And even if I hadn’t visited them, who would know?... And what about, come to that, all those films I’d seen, often ones in foreign languages?... Anyway, here is the result of these weighty cogitations, and only the most sober and industrious of critics, one who is early to bed and early to rise, is likely to do justice to it:

            Early to Bed, Early to Rise

It was in Berlin you mixed up John and J.J. Cale,
And we found ourselves watching Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past
           yet again.

I, on the other hand, confused Teniers the elder and Teniers the
            younger
In Amsterdam, where I saw Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys on my own.

On the outskirts of Moscow we failed to distinguish clearly between
            Charles and Burl Ives:
Our punishment was to sit though Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible,
            Parts I and II, twice.

I met a man in New York who couldn’t tell the difference between
            George
And Zbigniew Herbert; his favourite film was Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu
            Monogatari, which he insisted we see together.

In Cardiff I confounded Edward, Dylan, and R.S. Thomas;
To get over my embarrassment I went to a performance of Jean-Luc
           Godard’s Alphaville.

People continually mistake the work of Antoine Le Nain for that of his
            brother Louis, even in Los Angeles,
Where most films are made, including Doug Liman’s Swingers, which I
            recently saw for the first time, and really enjoyed.

(Mark Ford)

from the archive; first posted Thursday, June 16, 2008

Poets and Jobs [by John Foy]

All jobs seem real to the people who have them, but poets like to make distinctions. They refer typically to “real” jobs when talking about employment outside of academia (illogical though that may be). I’m a poet, and I’ve been told that I have a real job. I work as a senior financial editor at a Brazilian investment bank. Despite an urge early on to enter the teaching profession, for which I had some talent, I went down another road. I had to support my family in Manhattan. By the year 2000, my black beret and cape were gone, but the calling was still with me, so there was nothing for it but to change my way of thinking about the literary life. Over the years, through friendships with many poets and writers, I’d come to see that the only thing that mattered in a so-called literary life was generating literature, and in this case, writing poems. No surprise, then, that I’ve been fiercely interested in major poets who lived “unliterary” lives. We all know the usual suspects.

Wallace Stevens (pictured left) was trained as a lawyer and spent most of his working life as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. The guy won a Pulitzer Prize in 1955, and he was offered a position at Harvard, but he turned it down. He chose to stay at his job. He liked being a vice president. He was often seen walking along the leafy suburban streets of Hartford in a suit, mumbling to himself. We know what he was doing.

In 1917, when he was 29, T. S. Eliot (pictured above) signed on with Lloyd's Bank in London as a clerk in the Colonial and Foreign department. He would stay for eight years. The writer Lisa Levy, in her article called “A Peaceful, but Very Interesting Pursuit” (The Rumpus, January 31, 2012), notes that Eliot thought himself very fortunate to have found this job, and she quotes from a letter he wrote to his mother in 1917:

“I am now earning £2 10s a week for sitting in an office from 9:15 to 5 with an hour for lunch, and tea served in the office… Perhaps it will surprise you to hear that I enjoy the work. It is not nearly so fatiguing as schoolteaching, and is more interesting. I have a desk and a filing cabinet in a small room with another man. The filing cabinet is my province, for it contains balance sheets of all the foreign banks with which Lloyd’s does business. These balances I file and tabulate in such a way as to show the progress or decline of every bank from year to year.”

It’s both riveting and appalling to hear Eliot speak with such affection about his filing cabinet. Yet in the midst of such a life he conceived The Waste Land, which was published in 1922. Eliot didn’t leave the bank until 1925, when he went to join the publishing house Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber). Granted, this new job was all rather literary, but it was also corporate, and he became a director and went about, happily, in a three-piece suit.

There are other examples. The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda labored as a diplomat. Philip Larkin worked for 30 years as a librarian at the University of Hull. During these years—more deprivation, perhaps, than daffodils—he wrote most of his glum, bilious and brilliant poems. William Carlos Williams, a doctor, delivered 3,000 babies in the grimy industrial zones of New Jersey. Are there other major poets who’ve delivered even 30 babies? Or 3? If so, I would  like to know. We’re talking 3,000 here. I verified this arresting fact with Herbert Leibowitz, whose masterful biography of William Carlos Williams, Something Urgent I Have to Say, was published by FSG in 2011.

Then there is the louche and sublime C. P. Cavafy (left) In 1892, at the age of 29, he took a job as a low-level clerk in the Irrigation Department of the Ministry of Public Works in Egypt. He would stay for 30 years! According to the Official Website of the Cavafy Archive, when he “was finally able to gain employment… at the Ministry of Public Works, he was hired as a temporary clerk, since his Greek citizenship excluded him from any permanent position. Being an assiduous and conscientious worker, Cavafy managed to hold this temporary position (renewed annually) for thirty years. He was always mindful of his finances, both out of necessity and out of vanity… He started working at the Alexandrian Stock Exchanges early on, and was a registered broker from 1894 to 1902.”

The most “poetic” side of Cavafy’s life—aside from his poems—were his wanderings about the streets of Alexandria after he left the office. We know what he was doing.

I’d like to conclude with James Merrill’s affectionate and counterintuitive thoughts on dear Elizabeth Bishop (left), who for most of her life never had any job at all, real or otherwise. The quotation below comes directly from the famous Paris Review interview that Sandy McClatchy conducted with James Merrill (Summer 1982, Issue No. 84). This is Merrill speaking:

“Oh, I suppose I’ve learned things about writing, technical things, from each of them [Stevens, Auden, Bishop, a few others]. Auden’s penultimate rhyming, Elizabeth’s way of contradicting something she’s just said, Stevens’s odd glamorizing of philosophical terms. Aside from all that, what I think I really wanted was some evidence that one didn’t have to lead a “literary” life—belong to a ghetto of “creativity.” That one could live as one pleased, and not be shamefaced in the glare of renown (if it ever came) at being an insurance man or a woman who’d moved to Brazil and played samba records instead of discussing X’s latest volume. It was heartening that the best poets had this freedom. Auden did lead a life that looked literary from a distance, though actually I thought it was more a re-creation of school and university days: much instruction, much giggling, much untidiness. Perhaps because my own school years were unhappy for extracurricular reasons I didn’t feel completely at ease with all that… It was du côté de chez Elizabeth, though, that I saw the daily life that took my fancy even more, with its kind of random, Chekhovian surface, open to trivia and funny surprises, or even painful ones, today a fit of weeping, tomorrow a picnic. I could see how close that life was to her poems, how much the life and the poems gave to one another. I don’t mean I’ve “achieved” anything of the sort in my life or poems, only that Elizabeth had more of a talent for life—and for poetry—than anyone else I’ve known, and this has served me as an ideal.”

I sign off today on that happy note.

from the archive; first posted by John Foy on July 08, 2013 at 02:13 AM 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty): Dean Young [by Angela Ball]

Chaos Magic for Beginners

Don’t we all love when the announcer
gets choked up? When the roller coaster
gets stuck, that an octopus can eat
one of its own hearts when stressed enough
and aren’t we all? Don’t you like to know stuff?
Sperm leaves the penis at 28mph,
in many countries being bird-pooped-on
is considered lucky, Goya’s skull is still missing
although the last thing my mother said
no one understood and I’m okay with that.
Let’s try to take pleasure in the contradictory
heavy footfalls on the roof, whatever
the dog’s dug up. Let’s appreciate
the pyramid’s false floors, trap doors,
the detective who’s yet to realize
he’s stalking himself. It’s okay
to be a demon, to be a thrown angel
on the spectrum. Maybe you just feel
too much, too much serotonin so
even swans make you crazy, anyone
talking on their phone in the elevator.
Nothing needs a reason to happen,
the cause of all this has yet to occur
if it ever will. Often it’s like being fed
to raptor hatchlings or trying to get
information from a corpse, possibly
your own. Almost everything doesn’t work.
I like when the lovers can somehow
stay together. I like when the tower
collapses, that sense at the end
that it’s never over

--Dean Young

I think one of the most important lessons and permissions I have tried to absorb from the originals of the New York School is the sense that anything language can do can be in a poem, be it cri de coeur or blunt information, if the poem and the poet's receptivity is open and playful enough. –Dean Young

Dean Young's most recent book is Solar Perplexus.  His poems have appeared a dozen times in Best American Poetry.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty): Dean Young

The title of Dean Young’s “Chaos Magic for Beginners,” is a welter of contradictions—“magic,” as a skill, depends on utmost precision—what is “Chaos Magic” and how begin to impart its principles? Perhaps the way is demonstration, and “Chaos Magic for Beginners” is wonderfully demonstrative.

The poem’s outer subject is expressed in its title, its inner one in the pattern of its imagery: things being blocked or unblocked, expressed. Bird poop turned awkwardly proverbial, a famous skull on the loose. Extractions, ingestions. Its method is not so much “ultra talk” as ultra thought—expression so swift as to almost precede formulation.

The poem begins with schadenfreude prompted by a broadcaster’s fallibility. The late Jon Anderson once said, “The secret of poetry is cruelty.” It may also be the case that chaos is its secret. Who can explain the wonder of reading Young’s list of comic frustrations and striking oddities—the stuck rollercoaster, the heart-eating octopi (that we resemble), the speed of sperm, the great artist’s cranium, ending with the scalding mystery of a mother’s last words--lines that might also be read, as I did at first, as the mother saying, “No one understood. And I’m OK with that.”

With “Let’s try to take pleasure,” the poem turns to its teaching mission:

     Let’s try to take pleasure in the contradictory

     heavy footfalls on the roof, whatever

     the dog’s dug up. Let’s appreciate

     the pyramid’s false floors, trap doors,

     the detective who’s yet to realize   

     he’s stalking himself. It’s okay

     to be a demon, to be a thrown angel 

     on the spectrum.

Chaos is magic, is both question and explanation, and must be appreciated—celebrated, in fact—because it is what we have. Disorientation orders the day. We are reminded, perhaps, of T.S. Eliot’s overly-friendly April hound; and of Oedipus, old swollen-foot, the classic “detective yet to realize.” In a pop-psychology gesture, we learn that it’s ok to be expelled from heaven, afflicted by a malady that allies us with every color. Most of all, we learn the wonders of disorientation—a state celebrated by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Kenneth Koch, struck smart by a meaningful sign: “One Train May Hide Another.”

Our guide through a series of unpredictable occurrences, the poem primes us to enjoy how contemporary physics interprets the cosmos: the unknown unknown surrounds us. The unseen cat in the box is simultaneously dead and alive. The lines “Nothing needs a reason to happen, / the cause of all this is yet to occur / if it ever will” posit a retrograde world of reversals in which we are neophyte interpreters, and the corpse we interrogate may be our own.

The poem ends with two vastly different enjoyments, both owned by an “I”: The first, homely in its generality, “I like when the lovers can somehow stay together,” invokes pleasure at seeing cinematic and/or real-life romance grow durable. The second springs at us, its generality giving way to the nightmare of the World Trade Center attack, to schadenfreude recombinant with sorrow, its magic a startling kinesthetic image, specific and encompassing: “that sense at the end / that it’s never over” (period omitted).  Dean Young’s “Chaos Magic for Beginners” schools us not just in chaos, but in the tragicomedy and comic tragedy of our unbreakable fall.

--Angela Ball

"Girl Reading a Letter" [by William Carpenter]

A thief drives to the museum in his black van. The night
watchman says Sorry, closed, you have to come back tomorrow.
The thief sticks the point of his knife in the guard's ear.
I haven't got all evening, he says, I need some art.
Art is for pleasure, the guard says, not possession, you can't
something, and then the duct tape is going across his mouth.
Don't worry, the thief says, we're both on the same side.
He finds the Dutch Masters and goes right for a Vermeer:
"Girl Writing a Letter." The thief knows what he's doing.
He has a Ph.D. He slices the canvas on one edge from
the shelf holding the salad bowls right down to the
square of sunlight on the black and white checked floor.
The girl doesn't hear this, she's too absorbed in writing
her letter, she doesn't notice him until too late. He's
in the picture. He's already seated at the harpsichord.
He's playing the G Minor Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti,
which once made her heart beat till it passed the harpsichord
and raced ahead and waited for the music to catch up.
She's worked on this letter for three hundred and twenty years.
Now a man's here, and though he's dressed in some weird clothes,
he's playing the harpsichord for her, for her alone, there's no one
else alive in the museum. The man she was writing to is dead -
time to stop thinking about him - the artist who painted her is dead.
She should be dead herself, only she has an ear for music
and a heart that's running up the staircase of the Gardner Museum
with a man she's only known for a few minutes, but it's
true, it feels like her whole life. So when the thief
hands her the knife and says you slice the paintings out
of their frames, you roll them up, she does it; when he says
you put another strip of duct tape over the guard's mouth
so he'll stop talking about aesthetics, she tapes him, and when
the thief puts her behind the wheel and says, drive, baby,
the night is ours, it is the Girl Writing a Letter who steers
the black van on to the westbound ramp for Storrow Drive
and then to the Mass Pike, it's the Girl Writing a Letter who
drives eighty miles an hour headed west into a country
that's not even discovered yet, with a known criminal, a van
full of old masters and nowhere to go but down, but for the
Girl Writing a Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer
in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love.

-- from The Best American Poetry 1995 edited by Richard Howard

Why People Go To College [by W. Kirschberg]

"If the universities demolish the humanities by undermining their relevance or their validity, the immediate effect is to promote ignorance and laziness among students; the long term effect is to put into question the very idea of the centrality of college, which people attend for many reasons (alcoholic, athletic, sexual, psychopharmacological, fraternal) but not to learn about Western Civilization." -- W. Kirschberg, from his Salutatorian  Address (1972), Churchill College, Cambridge University, the first Cambridge college to admit women as undergraduates.

Thomas Mann:  " A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth." 

Thomas Devaney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Devaney. Photo by Patrick Montero.

_________________________________________________________________________

Oregon Ave

 

You can’t find a place to smoke anymore

Ro says, smoking and rifling

through her handbag looking for a number.

She sits in the backseat with Meg.

They’re not singing.

The ballgame’s on inside and outside

the game is always on.

Actually, sometimes they do sing.

What year is the car, a ’98?

A Ford? A Focus?

They always tip too.

 

There is dust, always; and terrible dirt;

but if that’s what you see you’re hardly looking.

We believe in the front stoop.

We believe in banging pots and pans and honking horns.

We believe that in the heat of day shadows come back.

Trashcan on fire says Things are hotting up.

The street’s a mix, water, water ice, LIVE CRABS,

jumbo jets, firecrackers.

Summer days are huge and often overlap late into fall.

Seriously, when you have a good spot, why move the car?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thomas Devaney is the author of You Are the Battery (Black Square Editions, 2020) and Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press, 2019). He wrote and co-directed the film Bicentennial City (2021) about the 1976 Bicentennial in Philadelphia. He teaches creative writing at Haverford College.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Philadelphia Muses by Meg Saligman. Photo by Steve Welnik.

"Cats" [by James Cummins]

When Eliot wrote his thesis at Harvard,
He said philosophers doing philosophy was “ridiculous”—
That two thousand years of this insanity had gone on
Because they tried to explain existence
From the point-of-view of a platform outside it,
Which didn’t, and couldn’t, exist.  One has only
One's sightlines; and wherever you find yourself,
You're in the middle; and your sightlines
Are better or worse depending on the intelligence
You bring to whatever it is you’re looking at.
Avuncular language-riddles infuriated him,
And he made his disgust quite clear in his thesis.
Harvard offered him a chair on the basis of these ruminations;
And after he said no, Bertrand Russell screwed his wife.

From Recalcitrant Actors by James Cummins (2021). Published by Dos Madres (www.dosmadres.com). T. S. Eliot is pictured above. 

Ant and Clown (by Mitch Sisskind)

The Ant

You could not call him the Ant to his face
And you would be dead if you made the
Mistake of calling him the Ant to his face.
Or what if you called him the Ant except
Not to his face, like you called him the Ant
To somebody and he only heard about it?
He wouldn't care. It meant nothing to him.

The Clown

It was the same way with Joey the Clown.
They called him the Clown because he 
Liked to clown around but you yourself
Could definitely not ever clown around. 
Or just like how he felt about the suburbs.
A lot of them moved to the suburbs but
His basic attitude was fuck the suburbs. 

Philip K. Dick [by Mitch Sisskind]

  

No telling what time it was

As he woke in darkness with

The sleeping cat’s warmth,

 A gift from God, on the back
 
Of his neck and, weeping,

He willed himself to perfect

Stillness lest the cat leave.

But wait. Here was a thought,

Here was another possibility:

He was dead and, willfulness

Be damned, could no more

Stir himself than trisect an angle!

Yes, that might be it --

And this was paradise!

from the archive; first posted June 23, 2014

Clare College, Cambridge, and John Berryman

Twice a day I crossed you. . .

Among the Columbia College graduates who attended Clare College were John Berryman (left), Norman Podhoretz, Morris Dickstein, and David Shapiro.  Much of Berryman's Love & Fame addresses his time at Columbia and Clare. The late Clive James tells some of the facts in this wrongheaded 1972 review. Perhaps the most curious thing about James's comment is that it regards ambition as morally offensive.

<< The first half of the book, before the suicide-laden poems and the exhausted addresses to the Lord, is a portrait of the artist as a young man at school, Columbia and Cambridge. It bears a startling resemblance to Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, not just in its itinerary (Phi Beta Kappa, Clare New Court) but in its psychological outline. The relish for the literary horse-race is exactly the same, except that Berryman raises it from relish to positive mania. Throughout his work since the early Dream Songs, Berryman’s ambitions for major status have been nakedly confessed and played off against his equally intense ambitions to be the poet maudit, like Ginsberg or (more relevantly) like Tristan Corbière, to whose memory Love & Fame is dedicated. Corbière has been called une chienlit permanente, and Berryman for a long time sought the same title. But even in the Dream Songs, where the interplay of these two ambitions is at its most successfully complex, the determination to spill the beans about the dark side of his nature was compromised by unjustified readiness to forgive himself in the name of art. In this way his ambitions served each other to produce a self-serving poetry: he would complicate the account of his drive towards artistic greatness by revealing himself as a slob, and take the edge off that revelation by justifying his behaviour as the experience necessary to artistic greatness. Berryman was a highly introspective poet, alive to many things going in his own mind, but he was never aware of just how consistently he worked this trick. It is the reason why the Dream Songs, which at their best offer a convincing poetic recreation of the mind’s plurality, lapse finally from dialogue into monologue — the pride at the mind’s centre heaps humiliation on itself but remains obstinately intact. >>

On the other hand, this is how Stuart Davis summarized the poet's reputation in the Harvard Crimson in 1966:

<<<
Rarely anthologized, sympathetic to many literary camps, but with a foot in none of them, John Berryman is as close to being sui generis as anyone but Blake, Trotsky and Christopher Smart. New York has adopted him only since the mid-fifties, for although his poems appeared in the Nation and the New Republic since the thirties, much of his earlier work and most of its critical acknowledgment were published in Chicago's Poetry. Today he is regarded by many as one who threatens the language and endangers the conventions it clings to.

That very reputation has made him a poet's poet, "that forlorn phrase," in William Meredith's words. And his role as an innovator relates directly to his role as a teacher and scholar. For better or for worse, Berryman is an academic--that once-unpleasant label that generated such a fuss in the late fifties. Most of his life has been spent in colleges and universities. Born in Oklahoma, in 1914 he was educated at Columbia, Clare College and Cambridge; since then he has taught "just about everywhere but the South," including Grinnell, Wayne (Detroit), Princeton, Minnesota--where he is now Professor of Humanities, on a leave of absence--and Harvard, where he was for two years an Instructor in English, with a Warren House office and an Appian Way, later a Beacon Hill, address. A student in his Freshman Composition course in 1941 remembers him as a cold and vigorous teacher who invited his students to his apartment, gave them drinks, played music and told them what and what not to like. >>>

In 2004, the Library of America published John Berryman: Selected Poems, edited by the poet Kevin Young. In Poetry magazine

Here is the poet's "Dream Song" #13:

God bless Henry. He lived like a rat,
with a thatch of hair on his head
in the beginning.
Henry was not a coward.  Much.
He never deserted anything; instead
he stuck, when things like pity were thinning.

So may be Henry was a human being.
Let's investigate that.
… We did; okay.
He is a human American man.
That's true.  My lass is braking.
My brass is aching.  Come & diminish me, & map my way.

God's Henry's enemy. We're in business… Why,
what business must be clear.
A cornering.
I couldn't feel more like it. —Mr. Bones,
as I look on the saffron sky,
you strikes me as ornery.

 

And here is Dream Song 121:

 

Grief is fatiguing. He is out of it,

the whole humiliating Human round,
out of this & that.
He made a-many hearts go pit-a-pat
who now need never mind his nostril-hair
nor a critical error laid bare.

He endured fifty years. He was Randall Jarrell
and wrote a-many books & he wrote well.
Peace to the bearded corpse.
His last book was his best. His wives loved him.
He saw in the forest something coming, grim,
but did not change his purpose.

Honest & cruel, peace now to his soul.
He never loved his body, being full of dents.
A wrinkled peace to this good man.
Henry is half in love with one of his students
and the sad process continues to the whole
as it swarmed & began.

Tuesday: A Day in the Life [by Mark Ford]

5.37. Awakened by squalling of youngest, aged three, who’s convinced it’s morning. Six hours sleep is plenty, isn’t it?

8.51-9.26. Battling through London traffic on my sturdy hybrid, without incident other than the usual jarring from pot-holes. Last week I was menaced by a geezer who looked like an aging associate of the Kray Twins. ‘Did you spear me?’ he demanded, advancing threateningly from his silver hatchback. ‘You speared me!’ ‘I don’t even know what “spearing” is,’ I expostulated. After a long hard stare he allowed me by, but hurled at my fleeing back a pleasingly Pinteresque epithet: ‘You watch it, you two-bob c***!’

9.30-11.00 Marking and administration – chiefly beginning to set up a conference on the work of Stephen Spender for the end of February (it’s the centenary of his birth next year). Open package of books on Milton to be reviewed – another centenary – it’s 400 years since his birth . One is a lovely edition of Paradise Lost with reproductions of 12 engravings from the first illustrated edition of 1688. ‘While I abroad / Through all the coasts of dark destruction seek / Deliverance for us all.’

11.00-12.00 Lecture on Tennyson: Mariana’s sheds still broken, still sad and strange. Her life still dreary, she still wishes she were dead. Lecturers get older, but the poems lecturers lecture on don’t. Nor does the audience – I briefly refer to Margaret Thatcher, for reasons I can no longer recall, forgetting that most of my audience had only just been born when she fell.

1.00-3.00 Tutorials – Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Antony and Cleopatra. ‘Thou yet beholdst me, Eros?’ I borrowed this line, without the ‘Eros’, in a poem called ‘Hooked’, collected in Soft Sift. When I did so, for some reason it seemed like a breakthrough. It doesn’t now.

4.00-6.00 Staff meeting: impassioned discussion of this and that.

8.22. Children in bed. ‘Dusk has fallen / like a stone / quipped the prince / of the quotidian.’

(Mark Ford)

97 Reasons to Celebrate Stanley Moss on June 21

Because you stand still long enough to gather the finest moss.

Because you stand.

​Because you roll.

Because you rolled 197 topping​ all competitors at Neptune Lanes.

Because you're Stan the Man.
Because we had lunch at Lupa on Thompson just off Houston.

Because you know Irwin Shaw and forgot to tell him.

Because you are a bronze satyr.

Because of Wystan.

Because of César Vallejo

Because one Stanley deserves another

Because if you're Stanley I'm a living stone

Because of Kunitz and Moss

Because the angel was wrong but angelic 

Because it's better to be angelic than right

Because when you were 82 it was fifteen years ago. Just think of it.

Because of European painting.

Because of Rome and Barcelona.

Because there are ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall.

Because I'm just getting started.

Because God breaketh not all men's hearts alike.

Because I believe in God.

Because 81% of Americans believe in god.

Because of what happens if you put "only" before "81%": in that sentence.

Because I capitalize the God I believe in.

Because of the history of color.

Because of the intelligence of clouds.

Because you speaketh the truth.

Because of your stance, Stan.

Because of Yale and the Navy.

Because very few poets were born during the summer solstice.

Because your ideal age is 32.

Because I could devote 65 more lines to celebrate your birthday.

"The Judgment of Paris" [by Peter Paul Rubens]

Peter Paul Rubens's Judgment of Paris hangs in
1) The Louvre in Paris
2) The National Gallery in London
3) Nuremburg
4) Le Bateau ivre

The painting refers to 
1) The origin of the Trojan War
2) A competition among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite
3) Hector's brother
4) The golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon

Peter Paul Rubens's paintings are taught not only in art histoiry classes but in
1) Classes on body shape
2) The Waning of the Middle AGes (Huizinga)
3) Modern dance
4) Greek mythology

Carmen Giménez Smith: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

___________________________________________________

No Apology: A Poemifesto

Isn’t there a line by Yusef Komunyakaa, “I apologize for the eyes
in my head.” Maybe what I am trying to say is that I apologize
for the sight in my eyes. Susan Briante

I would love to make a proposal, and it is out of love,
not patronizing love but true revolutionary love, and it won’t
upset the orbit tomorrow. So here’s where I’d like
to begin, and this might be the hardest thing you’ve tried to do,
or maybe you already do it and I’m grateful for you
because you’ve inspired me. I know it’s the hardest thing
for me because I haven’t done it consistently (not at all, sorry),
but I want to recommend that we stop apologizing.
Today I counted and I said I’m sorry approximately 22 times.
I apologized for my setting my stuff down on the counter at Kroger.
I apologized for being behind someone at a copy machine.
I apologized for someone else bumping into a stranger.
I apologized for taking longer than a minute to explain an idea.
Suffice it to say I am sorry all the time.
I won’t tell you what to do because that makes me
an implicit solicitor of sorry. Personally,
when the word comes into my mouth, I’m going to shape it into
a seed to plant in another woman’s aura as love. I only ask
that we get started. This is our first step toward world domination.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, Her forthcoming book. Nostalgia Has Such a Short Half-Life, will be published in 2023. A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, she is a Professor of English at Virginia Tech. She has served as the publisher of Noemi Press since 2002.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                      Roberta Levitow, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 2020.

 

Louis Sisskind, around 1958 (by Mitch Sisskind)

Are a few observations.

Although he was right handed, he wore his watch on his right hand, which is slightly unusual. Also, he did not take his watch off when he went to bed at night.

Although he was almost completely bald, he got a shave and some sort of scalp treatment every Friday at the barber shop in the railroad station. He did have some hair around the edge of his head, which also got cut.

His tie, with a Windsor knot. I went to a grade school where we wore ties every day so he showed me how to do that knot. Once it was tied, you still had to pinch it. One of the few things I can remember him criticizing me for was if the knot didn't look right.

Although he did not finish high school and I never saw him read a book, he had an excellent vocabulary. Once when I was about ten years old I said I would say a word and he should try to define it. He agreed. The word was impetus.

Before he went to work one day he gave me some money and asked me to buy a small pack of Perfecto Garcia cigars. I was also about ten years old at that time. That night he asked about the cigars. I said I had forgotten. He quietly but very seriously said that if I asked him to do something, getting it done became the most important thing in his life. That made a huge impression on me. Somehow it was really scary. The next day I got the cigars.

He was at the Jewish Orphans Home in Cleveland until he was 14 years old. When I asked if he ever tried to run away, he seemed surprised. "Never! We played indoor baseball every day."

This picture was take at his office with a tiny "spy camera" called a Minox or something like that, which was briefly a fad in the 1950s.

No Wrong Time To Write Right [by Alan Ziegler]

            John Milton felt that early in the morning was the friendliest time for the Muses. He would have a stock of verses ready to dictate by the time his amanuensis arrived, and if his amanuensis was late, Milton would complain that he “wanted to be milked.”  Charles Darwin was also a morning writer and might announce with satisfaction around noon: “I’ve done a good day’s work.” Anthony Trollope’s practice was “to be at my table every morning at 5:30 a.m.” and “complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast.”

            Others write while the Miltons, Darwins, and Trollopes sleep. Gustave Flaubert might start at 4 p.m. and work deep into the night. Kafka had a day job (which he probably thought was something-esque) and also wrote surrounded by darkness. On the night he wrote “The Judgment,” he last looked at the clock at 2 a.m.; when the maid arrived—with the bed “undisturbed”—he stretched and declared, “I’ve been writing until now.”

            Some writers claim—contrary to visible and auditory evidence—to be working all the time, like Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining, who points out to his wife (rather crudely) that he is working whether or not she hears the typewriter. Others constantly bemoan their lack of productivity yet somehow turn out the work; the writing grows almost imperceptibly, like hairs on the head. One day they’ve finished a story and need a haircut.

            The married writers Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller had contrasting work styles. Hazzard on Steegmuller: “He goes straight to his desk in the morning and stays there. I wander around. I need a lot of silence in my head to find out what I think.” Steegmuller on Hazzard: “I peer in the room and I think she’s free; but it’s reverie . . . I’ve had to learn that Shirley’s writing when she doesn’t look it. She can be tidying up around the house, but she’s working.” (As far as I know, Hazzard never told her husband, “I’m working whether or not you hear the vacuum cleaner.”)

            With some writers, you might not only hear that they are working, you might hear what they are working on. Allen Ginsberg composed “Wichita Vortex Sutra” into a tape recorder on a car trip, and Richard Powers has written out loud, using voice-recognition software. 

            Sustained writing sessions are to be coveted but, just as catnaps can be more efficient than nighttime sleep, so can flurries of writing be refreshingly productive. I often take catwrites during the day: a few minutes here and there with no warm-up. When inspiration invites, you may need to steal time from something else. Ginsberg delayed going to a party for 20 minutes to write “Sunflower Sutra.” He noted: “me at desk scribbling, Kerouac at cottage door waiting for me to finish so we could go off somewhere party.”

            While I was in graduate school, one of my strangest and most felicitous writing sessions came out of sheer shyness. My roommate at the time was visited by a musician whose work I admired. From across the room, my roommate introduced me as his “poet friend.” Too shy to join the conversation, I reached for my notebook and pen and pretended to be writing. The poem I pretended to write came out almost complete in one draft (in less time than it took Ginsberg to write “Sunflower Sutra”). The poem’s central metaphor is self-disappearance; although it is surrealistic, I wrote from experience as the experience was occurring.

            Give yourself a modest minimum goal. It can be quantity: Early in his career, Stendhal assigned himself “Vingt lignes par jour, génie ou pas” (“Twenty lines a day, genius or not”) to guarantee progress as he worked on a book. The novelist Harry Mathews “deliberately mistook his words as a method for overcoming the anxiety of the blank page” for his collection 20 Lines a Day.

            Or, it can be time: Block out thirty minutes a day minimum for writing—any words on any page—four days a week. That’s two hours a week; 104 hours a year. The key is to block out time when you have nothing scheduled afterward. On most days you will do more. On any given day you can do less, but you have to make up that time before the end of the week.

            The poet David Ignatow wrote in his journal: “I am tired and I would like to lie down but deliberately I keep myself seated here to write, no matter what. The idea is to write to make the gesture, to say something worth saying that can send me to bed happy.” With this in mind, many years ago I created the Tonight Show Approach as a way to send myself to bed happy. After Johnny Carson’s monologue, I would mute the sound as Johnny swung his invisible golf club, then write until Johnny thanked his guests. These days, Law and Order reruns work well. I start writing with the discovery of the body, and stop with the verdict. If I am pressed for time, I can end my session with the arraignment.

adapted from The Writing Workshop Note Book

from ther archive; first posted December 18, 2014

The title sequence of "Ocean's 11" (1960) by Saul Bass

 

The greatest title sequence by the master, Saul Bass.