The Best American Poetry

Tara Borin: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________

List of Duties in a Subarctic Dive Bar

 

If the temperature outside is twenty-five below

            or colder

leave all faucets running and flush the toilets

            hourly.

 

R. has a two-drink limit. A. likes a coaster. Remember,

            Mrs. O. takes a chilled pilsner glass

with her bottle of Blue. Never

            keep her waiting.

 

If someone reveals residential school horrors,

            listen with your whole body.

 

If a customer becomes unresponsive,

            and overdose is suspected,

 

call the nursing station, then administer the naloxone

            kept behind the bar.

Be sure to write everything down in the incident book.

            This is your therapy.

 

At the end of each shift, pour a kettle of boiling water

            into the ice well drain. It keeps down the bioslime.

 

Wrap your cash in the blue vinyl bag and feed it

            to the Snake.

 

You are entitled to one staff drink. Choose wisely.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tara Borin is a poet and writer living in the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Dawson City, Yukon. Their debut full-length poetry collection, The Pit, was published by Nightwood Editions in March 2021; their poetry has been anthologized in the League of Canadian Poets Feminist Caucus in Conversation chapbook (LCP Press, 2022), Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021) and Best New Poets in Canada 2018 (Quattro Books), as well as published in various literary journals both online and in print. Tara is the 2022 winner of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes Borealis Prize: Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

      Emily Rapport, Wednesday Night, 30x40, aqua-oil on canvas, ca. 2004. Used by permission of the artist.   

Four Amazing Quotes from Schopenhauer

Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

*
All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

*

For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

*

[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

>>>

The painting is by Gail Campbell, 2016.  
From the archive. First posted by The Best American Poetry on September 05, 2019 at 03:07 PM.

Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

*
All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

*

For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

*

[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

>>>

The painting is by Gail Campbell, 2016.  
From the archive. First posted by The Best American Poetry on September 05, 2019 at 03:07 PM.

The end of the semester: a farewell address [by DL]

Working with you has been a pleasure from start to finish. I’d like to leave you with a few thoughts:

-- You can do anything. When planning your future, do not limit yourself to the conventional career paths and to academic jobs dependent on advanced degrees. You can combine anything with poetry; you can be a poet and also a librarian, an advertising copy-writer, a corporate executive, a lawyer, a doctor, a computer specialist, a publisher, an arts administrator, or a journalist.

-- Keep trying new things in your poetry. And keep doing the same tried and true things. If you can, write every day, even if it is only a few sentences in a notebook. Collaborate with friends on poems and projects. If you’re in a fallow period, accept it; sometimes the brain needs time to absorb new experiences. If truly blocked, you can break it by assigning yourself a prompt that has worked for you (like a translation from a language you don’t understand, or an abecedarius, or a poem in imitation of A. R. Ammons). Sometimes a simple reversal of course is all you need to do; if you've been writing present-tense, first-person point of view poems, see what happens when you adopt a third-person POV and the past tense.

-- Read poetry. Be generous, but stick to your own lights. This may require some effort at diplomacy. But remember that you don’t have to love a person’s poetry in order to be courteous to and supportive of that person. Let posterity decide whose work will endure. We won’t be around anyway. Remember that another person’s success does nothing to diminish your own achievement. Don’t get hung up on prizes. They’re great to get; prestige is nice, money is nice; but you should spend your time on your writing, your reading, your friendships, and not on angling to get a lucrative fellowship. There will come a time when someone else will win the award you deserved, or the job you coveted, or the publication you were banking on. It might even be the person sitting next to you right now. And you will feel envy, you will feel resentment -- you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. But you cannot afford to give in to these feelings, because envy and resentment, if allowed to fester, can turn easily into bitterness and even spite, and these things are poison to a writer. To ward them off, you will need to go deeper into yourself, into your heart, into the sources of your poetry.

-- Your poems don’t have to change the world. They just have to give pleasure. Don’t feel you need to make sense all the time. Nor should you shy away from sentiment and feeling.

-- Figure out what you need from the world in order to continue as a poet. Sometimes all you need is one magazine editor who believes in your work.

-- Pay no attention to hostile reviewers. Many of them are classic bullies, sadists, who need know nothing about a subject to write about it. And when it is your turn to write about others, resist the impulse to give pain – it’s not good for your soul. And you do have a soul – otherwise you would never have committed yourself to the vocation of a poet.

-- When you read your poems aloud, do so with conviction. Read slowly and clearly. Read one poem fewer than the time allowed. Rehearse so you don’t stumble over your own words, the mark of an amateur or an academic.

-- L'chaim!

-- DL   from the archive; first posted 2008

Big Daddy Lipscomb (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.
I asked Jesus for a moment of his time,
We got together at the bottom of a mine
And when I asked Jesus for twenty bucks
He said ducks quack and chickens cluck
But Big Daddy Lipscomb feared no man
So be who you are to the best that you can,
Like Big Daddy Lipscomb was always mean,
He called me Jesus and I called him Gene
When we drove together on unlit streets
To a boom-a-lay boom-a-lay old time beat,
Big Daddy Lipscomb and little old me
Picking up chicks just being wild and free,
Big Daddy Lipscomb was always mean,
He called me Jesus and I called him Gene.

2.
There goes Big Daddy tooling 'round the bend;
He used to play for Baltimore, I knew him when
Him and Artie Donovan drank before the games
There in the locker room without any shame
About it either, and Big Daddy sure loved his car 
So when they played in NYC he drove way too far
Off of what used to be called the scenic route,
Picking up girls in Delaware and other ones to boot
In Philadelphia simply by saying that his name was
Big Daddy Lipscomb and he nearly missed the game
But he distinguished himself in a goal line stand 
And when last seconds ticked away he said hey man
To Artie Donovan, you want to shoot horse with me?
Artie said you go ahead, I know how the end will be.

3.
Big Daddy didn't play no college ball,
The Marine Corps was pretty much all
The experience he had on defensive line
Till he joined the Rams but then he signed
With the Colts and took his car for a whirl 
All by himself except for picking up girls
In towns where girls just want to get out
And go to New York City or how about
Memphis or Chicago, or anywhere is fine;
Nights by the motel pool drinking wine
Big Daddy wonders if maybe he'll quit
Football before the start of all that shit,
Two a day practices out in the sun  
Is plain old work but girls are fun.

Richard Wilbur at the Y (in 2009) ([by David Yezzi]

Richard Wilbur gave a splendid reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y last night. After a knockout selection of poems new and old, he capped the evening with a bit from his forthcoming translation of Corneille's The Liar, which will be out in August in a volume that also includes his new translation of Le Cid. Dorante's long speech from Act Two absolutely killed!

I had the priviledge of introducing him, which was a bit like your little brother's garage band warming up for Radiohead. The audience was patient, and I tried to keep it short. Here is what I said:

<< Richard Wilbur makes it look so easy. His poems are as close as we are likely to come to teasing out of our contemporary speech a classical poise. But don’t be fooled. As T. S. Eliot said of the poems of Ben Jonson, their “polished veneer . . . reflects only the lazy reader's fatuity.” Which is to say his surface tensions span shadowed depths, if we have eyes to see them.

Yet so close do Wilbur’s poems come to seamless utterance, to perfect expression – in their music, argument, energy, wit, and sense (which in Wilbur’s case also means “good sense”) – that one could almost forget that they are hard-won and do not shrink from challenging their own formal elegance. The poems convince us that they have achieved their ideal form, that they could not be written any other way. But their pleasing air of inevitability is by no means inevitable.  Wilbur’s poems are the mysterious product of the poet’s lifelong mastery over the momentary: they are stays against transience. 

Here’s how the poet Philip Larkin once described the purpose of poetry. “Most people say that the purpose of poetry is communication: that sounds as if one could be contented simply by telling somebody whatever it is one has noticed, felt, or perceived.” “I feel,” Larkin said, that “it is a kind of permanent communication better called preservation. . . . Of course, the process of preservation does imply communication, since that is the only way an experience can be preserved.” Larkin wants to put the emphasis on language-as-preserver rather than language-as-means-of-communication, because, he says, “it makes it sound harder, which it is!” As Robert Frost knew well, “to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of” is the poet’s ultimate ambition. And Wilbur has lodged with us an extraordinary number of poems, indelible and unforgettable.

The teaming list of “moments” that Wilbur has preserved will be different for each reader, since all of his poems perform the function in some way: The bibulous mind-reader at the café table in Rome comparing a sun-hat wafting from a parapet to a thought being forever lost. (The mind-reader, like the poet, is a preserver of moments.) Or the bird that has flown in at a window, “humped and bloody,” making its way, finally, back out to freedom as a father and his daughter look on. Or, outside another open window, a clothes line that fills the morning air with angels, some in bed-sheets, some in smocks. Then there is the marriage of true minds that Wilbur likens to a rose window or the firmament. Indelible moments, unforgettable.  

How does he do it? It’s a mystery. Howard Nemerov once proposed an ideal for poetry based on mystery. Good poems posses three indispensable qualities, he believed. “1) a poem must be very mysterious, 2) but it must have an answer (in other words, a meaning) which is precise, literal, and total; that is, which accounts for every item in the poem, 3) it must remain very mysterious, or become even more so, when you know the answer.” Wilbur pulls off this essential bit of wizardry again and again. Take as only one example his classic poem “The Ride”: a journey on  horseback “Through shattering vacancies / On into what is not,” which becomes a dream that the poet wakes from and yet inhabits long into waking. Wilbur’s mysterious states of consciousness – in poems such as “The Ride,” “The Mind-Reader,” “A Digression,” “This Pleasing Anxious Being,” are among the clearest views we have of these shadowed depths. As Randall Jarrell once wrote of Wilbur’s work, he “obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing.” Wilbur sheds light on the mysteries of experience, preserving these mysteries by finding the exact words for them for the first time. >>

from the archive; first posted May 22, 2009

Woman invisibility: Ann-Eva Bergman, Glinda the Good Witch, ruby slippers, Gretchen’s Faust, Emmy Klinker and the fate of woman painters, etc., etc.

Marianne von Werefkin, Herbst (Schule), "Autumn (School)", 1907. Photo Courtesy Wikipedia

It’s Glinda, Good Witch of the West, who says the solution to a problem is as simple as closing your eyes and clicking together your personal pair of ruby slippers. I took Glynda at her word almost every day of my army career, hoping to wake up and out of it, safe and free, with soldiering an ugly, but fading, dream. It didn’t work.

The ruby slippers, Glinda’s estate lawyers say, are essential to the effectiveness of her hollow positivism... It won’t work for people in street shoes, let alone combat boots.

Glinda-style solutions come up because I’ve been thinking about why artistic retrospectives that feature woman as painter, such as the ongoing Anna-Eva Bergman exhibition at Paris’ Museum de l’Art Moderne (MAM-Paris), are so rare.

I say “’woman’ (singular) as painter” to imply that gender is an external force in a painter’s experience.

Emmy Klinker, "Landscape", 1918. Photo Courtesy Berlin 1918 - 1933

Closing my eyes – despite the harsh truth from Glinda’s estate mouthpieces, I still close my eyes when I scour my memory –  I remember only a 2014 Sonia Delaunay retrospective that included more than 400 (!) works, also at MAM-Paris. The show did a lot to show her paintings but nothing memorable in respect to her as painter.

I also remember that Delaunay featured in the 2015 Schirn art museum exhibition STURM-Frauen. Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde in Berlin 1910–1932 (“Storm Women. Women avant-garde artists in Berlin 1910-1932”), curated by Ingrid Pfeiffer in, as it turns out, appropriately, Frankfurt-am-Main, the birthplace of Goethe and, thereby, of Gretchen.

The set up for STURM-Frauen returned the mostly fragmented oeuvre of its featured artists to their native scene, using as guides the notebooks and catalogs of the legendary gallerist, editor, promoter and painter Herwarth Walden, as well as the archives of the famous Sturm magazine.

I understand that most of the documentation was conserved by Nell Walden (1887–1975 - also featured in the exhibition). Luckily for us, Nell Walden had a Swedish passport, settled before the second big war in Switzerland, was able to weather her couple of husbands. When you look at it, she was also co- founder and -editor of the Sturm magazine and gallery. In addition to suggesting the name Herwarth Walden as a professional handle, Herwarth was her first husband.

It also seems that STURM-Frauen picked up on a 2012 exhibition called Sturm - Zentrum der Avantgarde (“Sturm - Center for the Avant-Garde”) in Wuppertal, Germany – by the way, home and performance space to Pina Bausch, the contemporary dance ur-choreographer. This exhibition, in turn, seems to have benefited from Germany’s late-post-war efforts to pick up the cultural pieces.

The STURM-Frauen exhibition bowled me over.

I was a man who suddenly discovers he has a long-hidden, parallel family of magical sisters, all of ‘em obvious blood plus spiritual relations.

I even met a previously unknown favorite sister among them, a certain Emmy Klinker (1891-1969). I noticed her because she painted people I have known along with a lot of my emotional color and landscape.

Klinker’s eye has Franz Marc color fluidness in it; her hand makes me think of Marc Chagall, but seems less emotionally contrived, more esthetically nuanced, than the great man’s stuff. She struck me as a pure painter in the same way as Emily Dickinson is pure poet: staying out of the way and to let me look.

The Herwarth-Nell Waldens represented European artists active in the Expressionist, Cubist, and Constructivist movements. Visual artists in the Sturm gallery stable included then- and now-renowned artists such as Kandinsky, Marc, Kokoschka, Klee and Chagall as well as the 30 woman artists presented in the STURM-Frauen exhibition.

In addition to Sonia Delaunay, wife of painter and color theorist Robert Delaunay, and the single and childless Emmy Klinker, the better known among these artists included Natalja Gontscharowa (1881–1962), Gabriele Münter(1877–1962) and Hilla von Rebay, ((1890-1967), respectively, wife of Mikhail Larionov, “founder” of Russian abstraction; first wife of Wassily Kandinsky; and  co-founder of the Guggenheim. 

Artists less- or un-known to me were Vjera Biller (1903–1940), Marcelle Cahn (1895– 1981), Marthe Donas (1885–1967), Alexandra Exter (1882–1949), Helene Grünhoff (1880−?), Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876– 1923), Sigrid Hjertén (1885–1948), Magda Langenstraß-Uhlig (1888– 1965), Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), Lavinia Schulz (1896–1924), Maria Uhden (1892–1918), and Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938).

Because I had been so moved by STURM-Frauen and the work I had discovered there, until recently I had been closing my eyes at least once a week and wishing the exhibition would show up here in Paris.

Yesterday, Monday, I was having a pint with a dear friend of mine, a man of wit and talent from Germany. I mentioned Anna-Eva Bergman and STURM-Frauen and all that. He said, “Really? Interesting. Bergman’s the wife of Hans Hartung, isn’t she?” Then he asked the server for more chips.

So, there it is.

As far as I know, STURM-Frauen has not traveled, been reproduced or been picked up on or otherwise copied anywhere. The catalog, STURM-Frauen. Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde in Berlin 1910–1932 by Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein(ISBN : 9783868322774), is out of print. STURM-Frauen has tumbled, perhaps, into a ruck of positivist solo retrospectives of those woman painters with sufficient remaining oeuvre to highlight painting by women in the past.

I now reckon the void and failure of my STURM-Frauen wishes comes faute de ruby slippers – I have no power and money to make it otherwise.

In my wishing, I should have remembered that Gretchen, as earlier noted, born in Frankfurt with Goethe, is obviously the subject and hero of Faust.

But I was about as attentive to that fact when first I heard it as my friend was to me yesterday. It may even have been this friend who had made the remark .

Anyhow, it is just so difficult to pay attention to woman stuff when it comes to art, is it not?

Thinking about Glynda, Good Witch of the West and hollow positivist, Gretchen’s Faust, Anna-Eva Bergman as painter, Sonia Delaunay and her 400 works, the disappeared STURM-Frauen exhibition, me and my inattentive friend and the paintings of Emmy Klinker, has made me think that the dearth of woman painters is owing to woman “invisibility” more than anything else.

Invisibility is the tool of consciousness that enables groups and individuals to selectively blank out categories of real things, people, deeds, feelings and ideas, according as a given structure of consciousness requires.

Invisibility is the perceptual mechanics behind “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” Cutting is its short form.

Invisibility does not interfere with the actual physics of reality. Say, building explosive spy drones.

The fate of Emmy Klinker and her works and days is a good example to help in understanding how woman invisibility works. It shows that there is a sort of rippling traffic light, a trinary flicker, that selects her out of consciousness even while leaving a “biography” of materialized traces of a life lived or just later projections by others.

Emmy Klinker’s creative and social lives were suggestive, novel- or Netflix-like, both showing real genius and fine character.

Klinker, they say, began painting at 16 – youthful interest apparently being a prime legitimating factor for woman painters. She was good enough to attract Kandinsky’s attention and became a part of that man’s famous Der Blaue Reitercircle. She was represented by Herwarth and Nell Walden, was particular friends with people such as fellow-creators Gabriele Munter, Der Blaue Reiter co-founder Franz Marc and the American “witness” to the period, Albert Bloch …

Apparently single, Klinker was also apparently wed to her creation. She was quite normally productive as we can deduce from her experience in Germany’s 1933-45 Bully-Boy Zeit. Klinker was culturally prominent, as well as a principled mensch.

The boys apparently saw enough of her to make Emmy Klinker a suitable whipping girl. She was named, along with her friend Franz Marc, already dead (killed in the First World War) and many others, including, just for instance Kokoschka and Matisse, a degenerate painter.

Klinker’s work Weiss Pferde (“White Horse”), for example, was original and popular enough to merit destruction to enthusiastic public contumely. Klinker’s cultural notoriety was such, I read someplace, as to merit a warning visit from indignant “Brown Tide” stalwarts.  

Because Klinker had courage enough to hide a Jewish friend at her house, she was sent to Dachau concentration camp for a three-month warning visit.

Although fairly soon after 1945 Klinker seems to have won prizes for her past work, it is unclear if she was producing and showing new work. Her work, from before 1936 or after, I can’t determine, but I think not, has featured in a few collective retrospectives in the past 20 years.

Why does painter Emmy Klinker touch me so? Because her self-portrait makes me think of Rimbaud reassuring his mother as to his respectability? No. It’s the woman invisibility that brushes out contexts and connections. For instance, I can think of no mention of Klinker in any Wikipedia entries for her painter friends and colleagues … All that is left of her is a lonely curriculum vitae, the CV isn’t the person who did that painting and the woman who did the painting is not my secret sister.

Worst of all, I’m as implicated in woman invisibility as anybody else. I’ve also cut people.

Invisibility is Glinda, Good Witch of the West: positivist solutions that really address a problem don’t really exist.

Invisibility is how Gretchen creates and shapes a book that even the author called Faust. Invisibility is my friend’s and my slip-slide attention to subjects that concern us.

And the STURM-Frauen painters?

A good, solid case study in how woman invisibility works. And that’s why STURM-Frauen, like woman painters generally, has slipped and slid down into an entry on its very fine curator’s CV.

Still, in the same way as the Waldens’ Sturm notes made the STURM-Frauen, the exhibitions’ 30 painters, can take you on a course in invisibility mechanics. No matter what the number of works on show and the esthetic and cultural merit, taken together, each “biography”, from Vjera Biller, euthanized, to Hilla von Rebay, philanthropist, to Marianne von Werefkin, stateless noble, to Maria Uhden, dead in childbirth, tells a story the mechanics of woman invisibility.  

The portraits, on the left, from top to bottom, are from the Schirn Museum's Sturm-Frauen and Flikr. From top to bottom, Emmy Klinker, Selbstbildnis ("Self-portrait"), 1918; Natalja Gontscharowa, Selbstbildnis ("Self-portrait"), 1908 © Tate, London, 2015 ; Lavinia Schulz, Selbstbildnis ("Self-portrait"). Photo Courtesy Wikipedia; Maria Uhden, Frau mit Vogel "Woman with bird") 1917; Emmy Klinker, Bildnis einer jungen Frau (“Portrait of a young woman”) 1921; Marianne von Werefkin, "Self portrait". Photo: Google Art

 

"Trigger Warning" [by D. A. Powell]

Trigger Warning

I dated an x ray tech
But he never saw me
Dated a magic act
But he never sawed me

Had a lover who was a painter
He drew everyone around him
And he claimed he’d drawn me too
But where were my sketches

I went out with amphetamines
We couldn’t sleep with each other
I had a fling with a boomerang thrower
Didn’t see that coming

And then there was the date with destiny
Who stood me up
Till he couldn’t stand me no more
Didn’t see that coming either

Endings suck
Better duck

 

D. A. Powell

from the new issue of Literary Matters

Aphorism of the Day: Anthony Trollope

"There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood.”                            
       -- Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: May 24, 2023

For today’s post I offer this exquisite poem “Bicycles” by Paul Hostovsky, first published in Body. If you haven’t checked out this superb literary magazine, please do!

BICYCLES

Now I would rather remember life than live it.
I would rather imagine life than live it.
I would rather watch life going on from the sidelines
in a comfortable chair than stand in the midst of life
living it. And maybe that strikes you as sad
or perverse. And maybe I’m kind of a perv
because I’d rather watch some young people making love
than make love myself. And I would rather
read a poem about bicycles than ride a bicycle — I am done
riding bicycles. I am done making love. I am,
sadly, too old for that shit now. But I will never
be too old for the memory, or the thought, or the idea
of making love. Or the word bicycles, which is
as good a word as any, and better than most. In fact,
I want bicycles to be my last word, my dying word —
not I love you, or bless you, or God forgive me,
but bicycles. And the people standing over me —
if there are any people standing over me at the last —
will look at each other and ask if they heard me right — 
“Did he say bicycles?” “Yes, it sounded like bicycles” —
as I lie on my deathbed remembering or imagining
riding our bicycles in a summer rain, then abandoning them
on the edge of a wheat field, and taking off all our clothes
because it was raining and we were already soaked
and hot and young and sweating–and running
naked through that field in the rain, and then, breathless,
sinking down in the field and making love. I don’t
want to be in the field, in the rain, with the bugs and spiders
and rodents, the roots and stalks digging into my skin,
the itchy stems and leaves, a rat snake slithering past
and me freaking out and losing my erection–I just
want to remember or imagine those two overturned bicycles
abandoned on the edge of a field, in which we were young
and soaked and happy and making love, kickstands
pointing randomly up toward heaven.

https://www.bodyliterature.com/2023/04/06/paul-hostovsky/

 

 

 

"Sperm Heaven" [by Henri Michaux, trans. David Lehman]

Sperm Heaven

                             -- a translation of Henri Michaux's “Le Ciel du Spermatozoide”

A man’s sperm bears a curious resemblance to the man himself – to his character, I should say.

A woman’s egg bears an astounding resemblance to that woman’s character.

Both sperm and egg are tiny. The sperm is very long and totally single-minded. The egg expresses ennui and harmony in one stroke. Its shape is nearly that of a sphere.

Not all sperm are like a man’s. The sperm of a crab and even more so that of a crayfish resemble the corolla of a flower. The supple radiant arms seem to reach out not to a female but to heaven.

Given the regularity of crab reproduction, you might well suppose that these decapod crustaceans know what they’re doing. 

In fact, we know nothing about the heaven of the crab, although there are people who catch crabs and dangle them by the tentacles, the better to observe them. We know even less about the heaven of the sperm of the crab.

(trans. David Lehman, who notes that Michaux, born in Belgium (1891-1984) , celebrated his birthday on May 24th. )

Czeching 1, 2, 3, 4 ... [by Lewis Saul]

Four Czech New Wave films

Invention for Destruction (1958)

Karel Zeman (1910-1989). A master of stop-motion animation, he based the film on the Jules Verne patriotic novel Facing the Flag. Using miniature effects and matte paintings, his real-life actors had to act in an unusual stylized manner to match the animation.

Loves of a Blonde (1965)

You probably know Miloš Forman (1932-2018) from his Hollywood work, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus.

This is his second major film [after Black Peter (1964)]. The Communists were not pleased, but since it won a top prize at a film festival, they allowed him more freedom, and this film explores subject matter that must have made a few heads explode (the Communists don't come off well) ...

 

Closely Watched Trains (1966)

Jiří Menzel (1938-2020) had the gift of portraying startling humanism with a bit of satire and cutting-edge cinematography. This film is funny and sad, beautiful and dark -- but always keeps your attention. The Hollywood Code wouldn't have permitted the medical problem of the male lead, Milos (Václav Neckár) whose object of desire is the beautiful Mása (Jitka Skoffin).

 

Marketa Lazarová (1967)

František Vláčil (1924-1999) spent six years making Marketa. Set in the 13th century, the outer framework of the film concerns the friction between paganism and Christianity. The plot is extremely difficult to grasp in one viewing, and therefore repeating viewings are satisfying (Marketa was voted the best Czech film of all time in a 1998 poll).

Magda Vásáryová is extraordinary in a severely demanding role. This film will confuse you, which is a good thing.

 

P.S. American, but so Czech-related:

The Joker's Wild (Happy Birthday, Novak Djokovic)

J. Tarwood: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________________________________

A Pause in Our Divorce

 

Tomorrow, we start again,

those leaflets on the blood of the lamb

swirling about my blockade of shot glasses.

Like a coffin with its lid kicked open,

our trailer will shake

when I blast out the door,

stuffed tigers tumbling from crooked shelves

to claw the carpet bought at Goodwill.

Apple tea in hand,

you will watch me tramp that gravel path

smeared with snow, my breath

a fist trembling open

once my back’s to you. But tonight

is a butterfly on our bayonet,

you in the rocker, wet black hair hanging

like a nun’s habit; and me wedged

in the easy chair, a whiskey-stained Othello

in my lap. We wonder how we’ll end,

like those enemy soldiers in World War I

who played football in no man’s land before Verdun.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

J. Tarwood has been a dishwasher, a community organizer, a medical archivist, a documentary film producer, an oral historian, and a teacher. After a life spent in East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, he currently lives in China, and has published six books: The Cats in Zanzibar, Grand Detour, And for the Mouth a Flower, What the Waking See, The Sublime Way, and The World at Hand. 

  ____________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                  A re-enactment of the 1914 Christmas Truce

Vive la Différence [by Somerset Maugham]

“Have you never thought of divorcing Gray?”

“I’ve got no reason for divorcing him.”

“That doesn’t prevent your countrywomen from divorcing their husbands when they have a mind to.”

She laughed.

"Why d'you suppose they do it?"

“Don’t you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.”

-- Somerset Maugham, "The Razor's Edge"

Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828) [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O be with me! How dear I am,

Flinging myself from chair to chair.

Hello, I am Lady Caroline Lamb.

Would you like a witty epigram

Or a discreet snip of my pubic hair?

O be with me! How dear I am!

For Byron I made pleasing shams

Dressed as squires or Scots lairds;

Hello, I am Lady Caroline Lamb.

But what now avails such flimflam

As we played, our unchaste dares?

O be with me! How dear I am!

For my novels I was also slammed

By vain unlettered aristo types. How unfair!

Hello, I am Lady Caroline Lamb.

Reader, let's meet among the damned

And do as we please, they won't care.

O be with me! How dear I am!

I'll write only paeans and dithyrambs

In hell, I'll be such a good girl there!

O be with me! How dear I am!

Hello, I am Lady Caroline Lamb!

                                ***

Some notes:

Stanza 2: Lamb sent this snip to Byron

on August 9, 1812.

Stanza 3: Lamb liked to cross-dress

to amuse Byron or to gain access to

him when he was trying to hide from her.

Lamb was a vastly more interesting and

talented person than I've been able to

convey in this poem (sniff, sob.) There's

an excellent biography by Paul Douglass.

"Prayer" [by Philip Metres]

Philip Metres
Prayer

Wither me to within me:
Welt me to weal me common again:
Withdraw to wear me weary:
Over me to hover and lover again:

Before me to form and perform me:
Round me to rill me liquid incisions:
Behind me to hunt and haunt me:
Down me to drown indecision:

Bury me to seed me: bloom me
In loam me: grind me to meal me
Knead me to rise: raise me to your mouth

Rive me to river me:
End me to unmend me:
Rend me to render me:

from Poem-a-Day (2015)

"Lufthansa" by John Tranter [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

"Lufthansa" is one of Tranter's best and most anthologised poems. The poem is mimetic of one of its early lines: it seems "struck by an acute feeling of precision" which leaves little room for interpretation or "meaning" that extends beyond the surface of its language. Michael Brennan has astutely drawn comparisons between the poem's "unity, precision and momentum" and a passage from Susan Sontag's 'Against Interpretation': "Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be… just what it is."

 

Lufthansa

Flying up a valley in the Alps where the rock
rushes past like a broken diorama
I’m struck by an acute feeling of precision –
the way the wing-tips flex, just a little
as the German crew adjust the tilt of the sky and
bank us all into a minor course correction
while the turbo-props gulp at the mist
with their old-fashioned thirsty thunder – or
you notice how the hostess, perfecting a smile
as she offers you a dozen drinks, enacts what is
almost a craft: Technical Drawing, for example,
a subject where desire and function, in the hands
of a Dürer, can force a thousand fine ink lines
to bite into the doubts of an epoch, spelling
Humanism. Those ice reefs repeat the motto
whispered by the snow-drifts on the north side
of the woods and model villages: the sun
has a favourite leaning, and the Nordic gloom
is a glow alcohol can fan into a flame.
And what is this truth that holds the grey
shaking metal whole while we believe in it?
The radar keeps its sweeping intermittent promises
speaking metaphysics on the phosphor screen;
our faith is sad and practical, and leads back
to our bodies, to the smile behind the drink
trolley and her white knuckles as the plane drops
a hundred feet. The sun slanting through a porthole
blitzes the ice-blocks in my glass of lemonade
and splinters light across the cabin ceiling.
No, two drinks – one for me, one for Katharina
sleeping somewhere – suddenly the Captain
lifts us up and over the final wall
explaining roads, a town, a distant lake
as a dictionary of shelter – sleeping
elsewhere, under a night sky growing bright with stars.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: May 17, 2023

Campbell McGrath’s Fever of Unknown Origin was published on May 9 by Penguin Random House. The title poem takes place as the speaker fights a long illness and is in a hospital right before Christmas. Here is an excerpt:

The bad news is that I am periodically blind
in one of those otherwise excellent eyes, which flickers 
between darkness and light, like poorly connected cable TV.
It’s terrifying, that darkness. Enveloping. Confounding.
Immediately, all thought flows toward the remaining eye—
may it never falter, dear lord, may it guide me 
through the corridors of your mansion forever and ever, 
amen….

That love of vision—and that urgency it could be lost— infuses McGrath’s chockablock poems as he records the present, aware of the perilous future. The eye is a metaphor, a rush against the unknown—in terms of the political landscape and environmental devastation. McGrath documents the lush world with ecstasy and grace—the animals, the humans, and manmade structures all getting their due. He even turns the eye inward in the startlingly beautiful “Bukhara,” a dream poem in which he unites with his friend Tony Hoagland. “Nostalgia is time’s/ double agent,” McGrath claims, and though many of his poems drift to the past (to understand the present and the future) we are never mired in sentimentality. Fever of Unknown Origin is a mature, intimate, and wise collection.

For a sneak peek, you can hear McGrath read part of his poem “At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium” here.  You’ll see what I mean with all that intense imagery:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714295/fever-of-unknown-origin-by-campbell-mcgrath/#:~:text=Fever%20of%20Unknown%20Origin%20opens,reframes%20our%20perception%20of%20modern

Congratulations, Campbell!

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty): Tyrone Williams [by Angela Ball]

Border Clashes

 

We stroll out of El Zocalo

to find a world turning white

with snow. Not more than an hour ago,

or so it seems, it was still just a neighborhood

of homemade heaps and small dark houses

huddled against the single-digit skies

of southwest Detroit.

Kim plods to his Escort. I fire up the Tempo,

turn on the wipers.

1-75 to the Lodge,

I pretend to follow the north star

but pull off at the Warren-Forest exit

and pull into the Third Street Saloon.

I take out a five for a Stroh’s

and take a look around

at the only other patrons,

a table of students,

one of whom I know, a poet.

She catches my eye, looks away,

carelessly laughing as I recall

*

Christmas night at the Detroit-

Windsor border. I sat alone

in the back of an Accord

being driven by Mary, Katie

beside her, two sisters,

nearsighted, brown-haired, blond.

The guard bent down, jerked his head

my way, and sneered, “You gals

bringing anything across?”

Flashing licenses and teeth—

“Is—that--all?”—

Katie, enraged, swore for hours,

but how could I, I who have always

lived between countries,

between that night and another night,

thirteen years before,

when my girlfriend and I

found ourselves detained by Customs

because I was said to resemble

a West Indian brother

twenty years my senior?

Later, back in the U.S.A.,

Katie and I danced our asses off.

Sweat flung from the sprinkler

our figures cut, twinkled like icy

stars on the stage

lit unlit by slo-mo strobes.

I could smell the sweat of a hundred

worlds, the sweet and sour stench

of cheap perfume and bargain-brand soap.

It was the hot sauce and garlic of Hamtramck

and Highland Park, Rayis Brothers

and Brothers Barbecue, Eastern Market

and Lafayette Coney, an ethnic festival

teeming with bloods.

When the lights came up, we filed out,

stunned, as though the places

to which we had to return--

Plymouth and Detroit--

had been found dead

in each other’s arms:

murder-suicide.

*

Last call, and I’m just fine.

I stumble to my car, spin out

of the lot in a spray of sleet and mud

and hit the northbound Lodge at sixty.

Not a few of these vehicles are harboring drunks

like me. The world is still turning white.

The white dotted lines are useless now.

We weave our ways home,

as best we can,

in lanes of our own making.

-Tyrone Williams

About the poem: It was written during, and about, the year I returned to Detroit (1986-1987) after spending three years in Cincinnati (1983-1986). For me it evokes that year I was trying to decide if I'd stay in my hometown or return to my job in Cincinnati (which I did) .-Tyrone Williams

Tyrone Williams is the David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of several chapbooks and seven books of poetry: c.c. (Krupskaya 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press 2011), Howell (Atelos Books 2011), As Iz (Omnidawn 2018), washpark (with Pat Clifford)(Delete Press, 2021)and stilettos in a rifle range (Wayne State University Press, 2022). A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving edited an anthology of critical essays, Inciting Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2019). His website is at https://www.flummoxedpoet.com/

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty): Tyrone Williams

Every border is a question, a passage from one state of being to another. Tyrone Williams’s compelling poem of passage negotiates straightforwardness and peril: the evening of a man-about-town á la Frank O’Hara, the decay of towns and their possibilities, and the danger of passing between worlds when trolls and their questions guard the bridge.

At the start, “we stroll out of El Zocalo”—a Detroit bar channeling a Mexican bandstand—“to find a world turning white / with snow.” We feel the pleasant shock of transformation that ennobles “homemade heaps and small dark houses,” but at the same time can’t avoid the ominousness of “a world turning white”—a world in which the poet-speaker’s presence is at best, questionable; at worst, dangerous—seemingly unlike the cityscape O’Hara strolls in “The Day Lady Died,” its material choices so rich that he almost falls asleep with “quandariness.” Yet mortality and injustice are at large in both poets’ worlds. As a Black performer and drug user, Lady Day has been targeted by law enforcement and forbidden to sing. She triumphs through a whispered performance so powerful that her audience stops breathing—as she herself will do, before long. The poem, steeped in this retrospect, carries both exhilaration and chill.

This poem’s “I do this, I do that” moment, “Kim plods to his Escort. I fire up the Tempo,” conveys massive information with a glancing touch. This is a familiar scene; the cars basic, their upbeat names ironic. The poet, after pretending “to follow the north star” finds himself diverted to another drinking spot—whose specific highway exit and name, along with “Stroh’s”  and “a five,” sink us into the scene the way O’Hara’s “New World Writing” and “Strega” do in “The Day Lady Died.”

The poet sees students, including “a poet I know,” whose laughter shades into a memory of “Christmas night at the Detroit- / Windsor border,” and an incident featuring a border guard who “jerks his head” in the speaker’s direction, asks the white women in the front seat, “You gals / bringing anything across?” His friend Katie swore for hours after this, but the poet, all too familiar with such scenarios, who “has always lived between countries,” remembers a worse incident, a time he was falsely detained on suspicion of being someone else.

The mood changes to manic festivity as, “back in the USA,” Katie and the poet dance frenetically: “Sweat flung from the sprinkler / our figures cut, twinkled like stars. . . ,” a moment eloquent with joy—human precipitation joins the poem’s snow and sleet-spray. The stanza throngs with place names—a sign, we have come to understand, that the poet is at home:

     It was the hot sauce and garlic of Hamtramck

     and Highland Park, Rayis Brothers

     and Brothers Barbecue, Eastern Market

     and Lafayette Coney, an ethnic festival

     teeming with bloods.

But the section ends with a darkly comic image of “The places to which we had to return-- / Plymouth and Detroit-- / . . . dead / in each other’s arms: / murder-suicide.” In its fatality, the poem reminds us that the border between place and people is permeable, that places determine lives, and that these are places that manufacture death.

The last section heads the poet home. “Just fine,” he stumbles to his car, spins out “in a spray of sleet and mud.” The highway’s milieu resembles the bar’s, except snow blinded: “The white dotted lines are useless now.”  Some borders are crucial to all.  We remember, perhaps, O’Hara’s statement, early in “The Day Lady Died,” that he will get off the train and go “straight to dinner / and I don’t know the people who will feed me,” this trivial uncertainty pointing toward an existential one, an uncertainty much more radical in Williams’s poem. Its “I” has become “We,” and we are left, in William Stafford’s phrase, “travelling through the dark”:

     We weave our ways home,

     as best we can,

     in lanes of our own making.

What is a free-verse poem if not “lanes of our own making”?  Tyrone Williams’s masterful poem recreates a complicated dystopia in which living while Black generates endless “Border Clashes.” Williams’s lines (or lanes) string tight, summon the tension between knowledge and mystery, safety and danger. Making of it a sort of song. -- Angela Ball

I Am Trying to Understand -- by Lynn Saul

 

2017

 

My big sister, Lynn, passed away in 2019. I think about her every day.

She was a lawyer, but gave it up to become a poet. This one's about our great-aunt, Annie.

I Am Trying to Understand (1997)

 

I am trying to understand a woman
who chose handmade lingerie
over America
who returned to her husband
to a place where their son
would be shot

Whose hand sewed the yellow star
onto her coat?

I am trying to understand how, four years after
they returned from the camp
a man and a woman are smiling at the lake
they are there with her cousin and their friends
Seven people
enjoying their vacation

What have the healing waters at Héviz
been able to wash away?

I am trying to understand
what a woman who has lost her son can think
when she plants four-o-clocks and daisies
in her garden
where they once sat, reading

I am trying to understand how a woman like that
can plant any garden at all
how she could tend her grapevines

The Communists allowed them one room in their house
that had been a wedding present from their father
the house confiscated in 1944
"Jewish owner: title cleared"
Which room did they receive?
Had anyone kept
the lace cloths, the crocheted bedspread?
I am trying to understand --
Did she want them back?

I am trying to understand
how they told her that her son was dead
Did it happen at his school?
Were they taken to the camps the same day,
or the next?

I am trying to understand
why I am standing in Annie's courtyard
Why I bend down to smell the tarragon
and chervil growing among rocks
Why I photograph bunches of fat grapes
Why I think this could be mine

 

-- Lynn Saul