The Best American Poetry

Available Now: The Best American Poetry 2020

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. The 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” according to the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

The Best American Poetry 2020 is available for pre-order here.

--sdl

"G-D in a Cup" [by Loren Goodman]

The “o” in G-d
In “G-d in a Cup”
Is like the mouth
Of the universe
Into which G-d
Has from this world
Disappeared. This
Absence of the “o”
Is also like the coffee
That has been from
The cup faithfully sipped
The “u” in “cup” is like
The cup that holds the
Coffee while the “c”
Before the “u” is like
The handle you hold
Me with. The “p” at
The end is like the
Cup tipped to pour
Into you me. I went
Inside G-d in a Cup
Only once. It was
Empty and dark; the
Owner was as
Quiet and mysterious
As G-d and like the
Son of G-d, had long
Hair. Like G-d these
Days, he also looked
Sad. I didn’t go there
To drink coffee—
Just to cheer him up

from The Common (July 2020). Three other poems by Loren appear in this issue of The Common: "Dear Jeremy," "Due to the Light," "Dolphin Facts"

Loren Goodman was born in Kansas and studied in New York, Tucson, Buffalo and Kobe. He is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A professor of creative writing and English literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he chairs the department of comparative literature and culture and is creative writing director.

Just In Time For Rosh Hashana: The Jewish Food Society Podcast [by Stacey Lehman]

One of the highlights of 2017 was the opportunity to participate in Schmaltzy, a Jewish Food Society live storytelling event where celebrity chefs, grandmas, tech entrepreneurs and culinary mavens tell personal stories about when food, family and tradition converged in their lives.Before what seemed like an audience of hundreds, I told my tale of learning to cook for my husband following his cancer treatment and diagnosis of celiac disease. If you want to read about and listen to the event, which took place on November 6 in Greenwich Village, New York, you can do so here. It was fun! 

Naturally the Jewish Food Society has figured out how to flourish in this time of hardship. You can find lots of fantastic recipes on its website and now you can listen to its podcast, which launched this week. The podcast revisits live stories from past Schmaltzy events, and dives deeper into the storyteller’s experience of family, identity, and of course… food. I can’t wait to listen to the first episode featuring baker Zoe Kanan in preparation for Rosh Hashanah. And I'm looking forward to episodes from Adam Richman and Jake Dell, and more!

L'Shana Tova! 

--sdl

In Burlington, Vermont, September 2018

When we went to Burlington, Vermont, in September 2018, as guests of Major and Didi Jackson, we discovered Barr Hill gin (sublime), sipped a drink that a local cafe owner concocted in Major's honor, went to a party, chatted with Dan Fogel, got photographed with a US senator, and drank coffee in the window on Sunday the 17th, our last day, with a newspaper in my pocket and Stacey's camera capturing the moment:Photo credit: Stacey Lehman

"Too Much Information" [by Tony Towle]

As we are sitting down to lunch,
I observe that Poetry saved my life in 1960
and ”might be doing so again at this very moment” —
even though I wasn’t actually writing. While that
is being digested, I add that, although my “official”
name is Anthony, the intent was for it to be Tony, but Tony
wasn’t considered a “real” name — which has caused identity
and authority problems ever since, but on to another subject:

in Torrid Zone, with James Cagney and Ann Sheridan,
Rosario, Cagney’s wicked adversary, coolly splits an infinitive 
in mid-film, the same verb form that Cagney had voiced correctly
half a minute before. Thus Rosario mocks both the hero
and English grammar, while he stirs up unrest among the workers
whom, in an admitted faux-pas, I have invited to join us here for lunch.
Portrait of Tony Towle by Alex Katz.

"There she is, the woman. . ." [by Jill Bialosky]

There she is, the woman who once inhabited
these rooms, drank tea from this cup,
her shape in the cushion, isn’t that hers?
Those shelves filled with books from the bookshops
of her youth—Rilke, Plath Akhmatova, Stevens, Strand,
afternoons spent in worn leather chairs beneath
the dim yellow lamplight by the window, slow-motion
of curling leaves heralding a fallen season.

Ed. note: Chosen by Major Jackson for Harvard Review (#56), "There she is, the woman.  ." is the first poem in Jill Bialosky's 102-part lyric sequence Asylum. Excerpt from ASYLUM  by Jill Bialosky. Copyright © 2020 by Jill Bialosky. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

 

Stanley Moss Remembers Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, and Stanley Kunitz

<<<
Hard years. I learned to disguise myself to earn a living. Wherever I went I carried my desperately thin production of poems and Wallace Stevens. I was sure Hitler was anti-satyr. I joined the Navy at seventeen. A sword wound and the G.I. Bill got me through college in style. I had a recurring nightmare that, like the satyr Marsyas, I was flayed—just for being a satyr, for no reason at all, not for challenging Apollo at music. I leapt around graduate women’s dorms, broke windows and doors. Police were called. I was expelled for “subversive activity.” Now history: I was hired by a detective agency to spy on organizing workers. I became a counterspy for Local 65. I sang in a band, played the bass, waited on tables; I was a sailor on a Greek merchant ship (I got the job through Rae Dalven, the translator of Cavafy); I grazed a while at New Directions; for mysterious reasons, Dylan Thomas and I became passionate friends—I loved his poetry and his deep-throated Christianity. I remember his saying “the truth doesn’t hurt.” He could and would talk intimately to anyone, regardless of class or education, not a habit of American or English intellectuals. He drank, he told me, because he wasn’t useful, which I understood to mean he could not relieve human suffering. Anyone who really cared about him knew how profoundly and simply Christian he was. Dickens was a favorite teacher. He gave away the shirt off his back. The turtleneck sweater Dylan wore in that picture was mine, knitted for me by my Aunt Tilly. We discovered an Italian funeral home on Bleecker Street where, after the bars closed at 4 a.m., we drank whiskey on a gold and onyx coffin. He introduced me to Theodore Roethke, his second-favorite living American poet. His favorite was e.e. cummings—“he can write about anything.” Dylan, Ted and I spent an evening with townspeople from Laugharne, trolls who whitewashed the town. What a concert of Welsh accents and laughter. Dylan had his boathouse, Roethke his greenhouse, I had my apartment house in Queens.

*

I met Ted Roethke again in Rome when I was munching on the review Botteghe Oscure. We both had passed dangers. We hit it off. We met again two years later by chance at a Pinter play in London when I was heading back to the States after Rome fell. We joined up to see Hamlet and Gielgud in The Tempest (we did not drown our books). Eight seasons passed. Ted and Beatrice came to stay with me at 57th Street at a barn I was living in. I gave Ted big breakfasts and my homburg, he gave me his famous raccoon skin coat. He liked my fish and turtle tank in my small dining room. He told me he was once in love with a snake. Ted brought me to dinner at Stanley Kunitz’s. I remember that first long, long, long evening. Thinking back, I didn’t quite know how lucky I was. They were in their fifties, Stanley had almost fifty years to go, Ted had six. Dylan had crossed the Styx a handful of years before. On still another evening, Roethke came with his not-quite-finished manuscript of The Far Field. He went off one evening to show it to Stanley Kunitz. He put on a blue serge suit and my homburg for the occasion. Just before dawn, he rolled back in.

“What did Stanley say?” I asked.

“He liked it a lot.” Then a look of pain crossed his face and I knew that Ted, who had been in the mood to be crowned heavyweight champion and nothing less, was disheartened. I thought Kunitz had found something not quite right, that he had been demanding and not just celebratory. Suddenly, Ted said, talking half to me and half to the world, “Stanley Kunitz is the most honest man in America.” I told this story in an introduction to a book of Kunitz conversations. More years. Roethke long dead, after a formal Roethke celebration at which Kunitz, an aged ex-Roethke sweetheart and I were the only three people in the room who knew him, Kunitz asked me to repeat the story at dinner to a young poet. I was pleased my story had touched Stanley.
>>>

from "Satyr Song" by Stanley Moss. Click here for the rest of this autobiographical piece. Stanley is now 95. Here he is as a young man:

Bill Nevins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

photo (detail) by Tony O’Hara

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

No Prisoners

What can I say?
We met in Santa Fe.

She’s got everything she needs,
She’s an artist
And she knew John Berryman.

Poets
are worse
than lawyers
she said
worse
than mosquitoes
Like those big flying cucarachas
down south
they get in your hair

Poets!
Poets tell you stories!
Stories about
anarchist painters
who won’t take cash
from the cruel corporate state
so
they live in boxes
made of cardboard
under bridges
without berets
without brushes
without canvas stretchers
without grants
without patrons

without brushes

Poets
she said
are like syrup
on a pancake
they soak in
until they wipe out all the taste
of the pancake itself
and fill it in with words
words
words
sweet, sticky
words!
Poets make everybody else
taste
what they taste
she sighed.

I
hate
fucking
poets
she said

First,
she hissed,
after the revolution
we’ll kill
all the poets!

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Bill Nevins has two books of poetry from Swimming With Elephants Publications: Heartbreak Ridge and AWE. Bill is an Iona College graduate who has lived in New Mexico since 1996. He is profiled in the 2007 film Committing Poetry in Times of War. He is also a widely published cultural journalist. He may be reached at bill_nevins@yahoo.com.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mitch Sisskind's Collected Poems, 2005-2020

From the book, this poem, which we first posted on February 8, 2015:

Balzac Speaks of Salvation Through Sexual Intercourse

How else to keep alive the spirit
Of sans souci, the flame of youth,
But with sexual intercourse?
That sphere of glowing delight
To which, once I acceded to it,
The luminous channel has never
Closed to me – as all my work
Is wrought there, charity obliges
That I advertise its pleasures and
Fairly attribute the curious vitality
Derived there that each night
Invents names and faces for me
As if my heart were still a boy’s
And my pen were the prick of one.

You can order Mitch Sisskind's Collected Poems, 2005-2020 here.

How else to keep alive the spirit
Of sans souci, the flame of youth,
But with sexual intercourse?
That sphere of glowing delight
To which, once I acceded to it,
The luminous channel has never
Closed to me – as all my work
Is wrought there, charity obliges
That I advertise its pleasures and
Fairly attribute the curious vitality
Derived there that each night
Invents names and faces for me
As if my heart were still a boy’s
And my pen were the prick of one.

Lt. Pete Campanelli, NYFD [photograph by Bill Hayward]

lt. pete campanelli, nyfd

photo(c)Bill Hayward

"Letter from American Airspace" [by Elizabeth Powell]

Today is the pub date for Elizabeth Powell's excellent new book Atomizer by Elizabeth Powell (Louisiana State University Press). Here is "Letter from American Airspace," a poem from the book:

The end of romance was what the teenage girl
was telling you about on a bench in the Jardin
in San Miguel de Allende, giving you T.M.I.,
but you realized she might need a Father who is not in heaven.
She gasps: Tinder is even sleazier in Mexico, how could it be
nostalgic? You listened the way your poems do when you write
them down in the cafes of Kerouac’s time here. You are Angelico
Americano with Instagram-troubled children of your own back home.
You are the only man I know who seriously loves his wife. Dios mio.
Right now this makes you the best Volta in any sonnet. Yearning
is a kind of loss, a desire that’s never filled. It is the drunk to his drink.
Never enough. Victim or victorious? Chasing yearning, I have discerned,
is like chasing a kind of poison.  The Popol Vuh says in the beginning
there were corn people here and love was a YES at every turn against
death. The end of romance knows this, no love letters, no mysteries,
holding out for another swipe, like a pull at the casino. The sun texts
its setting over the city. Back home children shoot other children
Screens in every face. Savagery in the invisible, the Holy Ghost
weeping over new desires. My young female friend told me how nuclear
her hook ups are, how they like to choke and shag. Isn’t it not romantic.
My hairdresser confirms the same story. I think I am lonelier
than lonely, for which there is no word or Proustian reference.  I drown
and swoon in Mariachi music with no relief. May tenderness deliver
us. Maybe the only recall I have is this, my other friend home safely
from Afghanistan, telling me of the surgical tents where the world is
like triage and you order the grunts to lay it down, those who are
the chorus screaming: unfuck it, unfuck this.

Performing by ear, Paris venues open doors, point the sky [by Tracy Danison]

“Cold Blood”, state-of-the-art live performance by Michèle Anne De Mey, Jaco Van Dormael and Kiss & Cry collective, La Scala Paris, 2019. Photo©Julien Lambert

Here comes the sun, do, dun, do, do/ Here comes the sun, and I say/ It's all right Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear/ Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here/ Here comes the sun, do, dun, do, do/ Here comes the sun, and I say/ It's all right - Here Comes the Sun – George Harrison, 1969

France just reached nine thousand daily infections again, I hear. There are uncertainties but, under rational government, a bit of risk, even delicately calculated risk, is a reasonable bet – especially in something as important as the performing arts.

Gwénaël Morin’s Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies opens Atelier de Paris’s ten-day wonder Indispensable! program, heavy on new creation, with performances in open and closed space until mid-September. Indispensable! is my foot in the post-pandemic waters but also opens the 49^th annual Festival d’Automne, the Paris theater, film, music, dance and visual and tactile arts program – which runs into February 2021.

Over the coming week I’ll be seeing, among others, artists who should have been featured in the Spring, at the Atelier’s June Events or the Printemps Arabe programs, or that, like Gwénaël Morin’s piece are also part of the Festival d’Automne. Performers on the Atelier’s Indispensable! program include  Noé Soulier (at the Conciergerie); Thomas Hauert, Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard, and Carolyn Carlson, who proves that dance makes getting old unnecessary at any age. In late September, if all goes well, I’ll be seeing new circus performance by Bartabas, who demonstrates better than anyone the links of potential between species, dance by choreographers such as Jérôme Bel and Boris Charmatz. Charmatz is this year’s Festival d’Automne. I’m looking most forward to the psycho-perceptual genius playwright Nathalie Béasse new work Aux Eclats, a work she introduced as a WIP last Fall.

Perennials like Atelier de Paris and annuals like Festival d’Automne are not alone in opening in spite of different health-safety, programming and box-office challenges. Only under my hand here, among many other interior-only spaces, the privately-run La Scala Paris’ sophisticated contemporary performance space; the Palais de Chaillot’s Art Deco experience inside an esthetic experience and the gemütlich garden party atmosphere of Le Monfort in its nice little park way down south. Nathalie Béasse’s will open the 2020-21 program at Théâtre de la Bastille, intimate and polyvalent, a theater’s theater’s typical theater, with a nice little bar, too.

Right now at Chaillot you could see, free, among the expressionist splendor, Jann Gallois and Emmanuel Gat rehearsing absolutely new performances. At end of September, there’s the Echelle humaine dance-performance program in the tight and very unconventional space of Lafayette Anticipations. Echelle Humaine is also part of the Festival d’Automne’s performance program. There’s also the reprise of Micadanses with its Bien fait! program of new and in-progress work in the dance-school’s Arthaud-type basement space.

And there’s more quality work in quality venues starting up outside Paris such as the Ballet de Lorraine in the lovely 18^thcentury town of Nancy. The eclectic intelligence of a program of Tharp, Tokugawa and Cunningham – For Four Walls, Flot, Transparent Monster, Plaisirs inconnus, The Fugue… – tells you all you need to know about the Lorraine ballet.

The return of the mountebanks to Paris: the imperative pleasure of live performance [by Tracy Danison]

A mountebank tries her hand for the Compagnie Gwénaël Morin’s “Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies” performance, which opened the post-lockdown season in Paris. Photo©Emile Zeizig/mascarille.com

Yeah baby, I like it like that/ You gotta believe me when I tell you/ I said I like it like that/ You gotta believe me when I tell you/ I said I like it like that …  - I Like It by Cardi B, Bad Bunny & J Balvin, 2018                                                      

The brakes on Karine’s electric bike squeak abominably as I twist nervously through Vincennes and Montreuil, pedaling back from the Atelier de Paris, behind the Parc Floral in the Bois de de Vincennes. The morning is still grey. It’s about 8. Poor thing. The bike, I mean. I’ve taken it because it’s an advantage when I’m up early, feeling old and living in a city humpy and made narrowly but with broad ideas, like Paris.

Compagnie Gwénaël Morin open Atelier’s season with a dawn performance of his Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies (my guesses : “One bizarre moment more” or, maybe, “In one brain, many moments bizarre”). The performance knits together Ajax, Antigone and Heracles. Distraught, determined, destined, each was responsible for their own death.

Dawn is just the right note to open on in the Covid-era; there’s a new day between sun up and sundown –  anything is possible. I think “rosy-fingered dawn”, Odyssey, Odysseos. I laugh, remembering swotting Greek. I remember that every single day begins all on its own… Live Dance does that, too – I think of Morin’s piece as “Dance”, for instance, because I’ve concluded all “performance” grows from the fundamental art of Dance. Dance begins and proceeds and beginsunique, like the days of our lives, like remembering, like the reincarnating soul is said to do.

This apprehension of its one-time-only quality is why live Dance is as universally sacred as it is profane. The Catholic Mass is a Dance of Remembrance, Passion and Resurrection; the Passion is the mother of plays and all true mountebanks. Playing Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies as the sun rises is a natural homage to the Dance in ourselves.

We onlookers are masked-up, raggedly distanced, flopped or tailor-legged or leant against the bigger trees in a trampled little meadow just outside the doors of Cartoucherie’s Aquarium theater. Local families often gather here for soccer and impromptu picnics. The rain this morning hesitates often enough that, playing or looking on, the performance stays outside throughout, damp but not soaked.

Fat grey clouds roll above as we look on. Lit by one giant globe lamp, the stage is carved from onlookers by a circle of reddish DayGlo spray paint, dimensioned by a big board on which somebody has written “AJAX ANTIGONE HERAKLES”. Twenty-something mountebanks in jeans, one cream molding-sack dress, sneakers, some in ponchos, one bare-chested, chorus, fall on their own sword, just say ‘no’ to wrongness and finesse their own pyre, all with pomp and style that wouldn’t surprise Sophocles or Molière.

The house offers coffee and croissants after.

Back on the e-bike, I am wondering, Is Gwénaël Morin’s piece suggesting we are responsible for our deaths as well as our dreams, bêtises and attendant guilts?

Wishing to get around a delivery truck in a narrow street, I take the curb too much lengthwise, take unwingèd flight, bang and abrade brow ridge, knee and nose. My good old left hand doesn’t stop the pavement from recreating me an old, has-been Palooka, but she does save me. She’s throbbing like a bastard but fully mobile. Likely just a strain. I’m not ambidextrous, but I lead left, often. Karine responds to Palooka’s post-beating selfie: “Bist du zuuuu schnell gefahren?”, a variant of an offhand “Bist du sicher?”. Then she asks after her e-bike.

The incident is worth every bruise, however. I’m hysterically glad to get back in among the mountebanks in spaces that were uncomfortable before fear of getting this viral salopérie gave us all these experiments in national lockdown, masks and social distancing.

With little exceptions, like a particular music-dance video or two (for instance, Philip Chbeeb & René Kester) and a drowsy appreciation of TV butt, cleavage, bump and grind as I stretch along Karine as she watches her Saturday-night ballroom dance TV contest, Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies is the first live performance I’ve set eyes on since 15 March 2020.

And, if the pandemic has proved one thing to my satisfaction, it’s that, even snuggled up to my honey-squeeze and drowsily appreciative of the family-rated content, un-live and un-in-person, audio-visual reproduction of Dance-performance can’t work for me. It’s physical and also intellectual – “moral”, in the French sense of the word.

Not by accident or even disdain, I haven’t had a TV since I left home for good in 1972. The flicker rate of TV and films make me feel weird – in the old days an “alienist” would have said “alienated”, like one feels in the first few moments of an acid trip. I have to steel myself to see a film. This may seem to you “odd”. It probably seems “unusual” but not “odd” that I also taste all sweeteners but sugar as bitter, hear very high-pitched sounds like dog whistles, am 65 years old and do not need glasses, though I can’t spontaneously tell my left from my right.

For me, the long and short of the effects of audio-visual technology on people is that people are naturally very variable and sensitive to the movements and evolutions of the world around. It stands to reason that the variability and sensitivity would extend to the technological environment. For the rest, a brother of mine was in a rocket attack that blew out his ear drums, burned his skin and drove a bone splinter from a comrade deep into his body. The experience left him permanently “nervous”. When it came to compensation, there was much ink exchanged over whether his was mental or physical disability. I’ve concluded that when we say “unusual”, we mean we don’t want to say not much is known about humans or the rest of the natural world and “odd” when a we don’t want to know about it.

I like the content of the recorded and reproduced performance as much as I do live performance content. Sometimes, even more. But, intellectually, reasoning from experience and values, not only do I suspect that audio-visual reproduction technology is the source of a number of psychic ills subtler than my own marginal schizophrenia, I also feel certain that the technology does not reproduce, but rather produces a thing quite different from the once-and-only that is the soul of Dance performance.

Physically – psychically, intellectually – morally, live Dance-performance is just not the same as recorded or reproduced performance. In the future, we need to better value that difference.

Diane Ward: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diane Ward, McGinty's Pub, Silver Spring, Maryland, Oct. 2018. Photo by T. Winch

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Never Walk Out of Your Life

 

consumer, you are biologically

natural and acceptable

 

and I am imitating a man

imitating a toddler’s attempt to walk

 

there are tiny white shoes that

fit my fingers – yet they’re useful to me

 

I am the armchair spectator as my life

collapses under the weight of desire, one deepest level

 

the flight circumnavigates my bed,

my table, my toilet, my self

 

your one syllable is sentence to me

your no-more-forgetting, a world

 

the lap is lost when you stand – a joke

until the body’s consumed by lap when it’s down

 

there’ll come a time: no amount of

bracelet enhances the arm devoid of content

 

there’ll come a time: to mention the name will be

proof of no claim to its object

 

I am bound by doors so seriously, to enter your

apartment is to enter the creation of your life from your body

 

in anticipation of the burst declaring movement

imperceptively portrayed, we, for one, can wait

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Diane Ward was born in Washington, DC, and currently lives in Oakland, California. She attended the Corcoran School of Art in DC and earned a doctorate in geography at UCLA. Her publications include a collaboration with Tina Darragh and Jane Sprague, #8 in the Belladonna Elders series; No List (no list) from Seeing Eye Books, Los Angeles; Flim-Yoked Scrim, Factory School; and When You Awake, New York: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. Several of her poems have been set to music by the Los Angeles composer Michael Webster, including “Fade on Family,” which was performed in 2005 as part of The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound series at the Schindler House in West Hollywood. “InHouse,” a constructed poem, appeared in Kindergarde, the first avant garde anthology for children.

"After Love" [by Jack Gilbert, 1925-2012]

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
The having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.

-- Jack Gilbert (The New Yorker, July 7-14, 2009)

 

Tim Dlugos [by Terence Winch]

The last time I saw Tim Dlugos was 30 December 1989. We met for dinner at Kramer Books & Afterwords, the first bookstore/café in the land (as far as I know). It’s one of the few independent bookstores still going strong in DC, but probably more because of the food than the books. Tim had been battling AIDS for a while, and I remember being a little apprehensive about seeing him, wondering to what extent the disease might have changed him. So his arrival came as a relief, a cause for optimism—he looked better than ever, and seemed full of energy and purpose.

Starting in the early 1970s, Tim and I were part of a group of poets who participated in an open reading every Monday night in a room over the Community Book Shop in Dupont Circle in DC. The readings, called Mass Transit, were started by Michael Lally in 1971.  Mass Transit was a poetry lab, where all experiments were welcome, or at least tolerated. Many poets came up through Mass Transit, and became friends—Ed Cox, Lee Lally, Beth Joselow, Tina Darragh, Pete Inman, Liam Rector, Lynne Dreyer, Phyllis Rosenzweig, and Bernie Welt, to mention a few. We hosted a reading series at the Pyramid Gallery, bringing poets like John Ashbery to town to read with local poets. We also started a publishing venture called Some of Us Press, bringing out chapbooks by everyone from Ed Cox to Bruce Andrews. Michael left for New York in 1975, and I think Tim left town around the same time. Fortunately, Doug Lang appeared on the scene and, in his capacity as manager of Folio Books, also in Dupont Circle, became the same kind of catalyst that Michael Lally had been. Doug’s Folio readings featured Ted Berrigan, Tom Raworth, Ray DiPalma, Barbara Guest, Maureen Owen, Susan Howe, Fielding Dawson, Ted Greenwald, and dozens of others, each usually paired with a DC poet. Doug, who started a small press called Jawbone and was part of another called Titanic Books, also hosted a number of workshops, whose participants included Diane Ward, Joan Retallack, and others.

In fact, Some of Us Press published High There by Tim in 1973, which I believe was his first book, and in 1977, Jawbone brought out Tim’s chapbook For Years. In New York, Tim seemed to flourish. He became editor of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project newsletter for a while, his magnetism and openness as a person always drawing people to him. He also partied hard in the big city. Later, in poems like “Powerless,” he would write with great passion about getting sober.

Tim’s masterpiece is the poem “G-9,” named after the AIDS ward at Roosevelt Hospital in NYC. I’m not an expert in the literature to come out of the AIDS epidemic, but it’s hard to believe there is anything in that body of work more vivid and powerful than this poem (here's the text of "G-9"). In November of 1989, Tim sent me a fat envelope of poems—“Here are the fruits of my hospital stay and my first week out.” I was blown away the contents, which included “Powerless” and “G-9.” He was doing his best work in his final year of life.  “G-9” was accepted by the Paris Review not long before Tim died, of complications from AIDS on December 3, 1990, at age 40. He never lived to see the issue (#115) come out, but he was delighted to know that it would be in the magazine.

The good news is that Tim’s friend, the poet David Trinidad, is working on the first complete poems of Tim Dlugos. I’ve looked at a chunk of this manuscript, and I very much believe its publication will be a landmark literary event, bringing back to public attention an amazing and important writer. Like Whitman, Tim, through his poems, seems to be with us still. (Wikipedia entry on Tim: click here.)

In his research, David came up with a poem by Tim that I had no memory of, but was very grateful to have. I think the poem is from 1973, when I was the poetry book buyer at a shop called Discount Books:

THINGS I MIGHT DO
for Terry Winch

Might write a letter to Jim Carroll
this p.m., I finally found his address.
Might get an answer; probably not.
Might start crying when Joey calls
tonight. Might wonder if he slept
with Michael; probably won’t ask.
Some time might remember the name of
the star that the statue on the fountain
at the Circle resembles: not Leslie Howard,
but that’s pretty close. Might quit
work today, might dream about my job
again tonight, the 4th night in a row.
Might lose something if I keep on
working. Might forget to cash my check
again. Might go out dancing
with Billy whom I might call this afternoon,
and might go to bed with when parents split
for West Coast in just two weeks. Might
look for an apartment. Might make
a tremendous break and move to New York City

Might do the streets. Might get crabs.
Might be missing the world’s most beautiful
boy by writing now. Might get a sunburn.
Might go bald. Might fall asleep on the bench
like some old bum. Might leave the Circle.
Might check the poems out at Discount Books,
find Joe Brainard, find Geraud. Might wave
to Terry as I just walk past, his waving back
a p.m. highlight and distinct possibility.

Ed. note: From the archive; we first posted this piece on July 28, 2008.

"Ode to Weird" [by Elaine Equi]

Emily Dickinson was weird.
Fernando Pessoa was definitely weird.

All poets are weird
even when their poems
try to appear normal.

Macbeth’s weird sisters
stirring up trouble’s
unsavory soup:

“Just be yourself
and you’ll be king.”

Weird always wins and loses in the end.

Ed note: "Ode to Weird" is from The Intangibles by Elaine Equi (Coffee House Press, 2019). The poem's conceit is fresh and witty, a wonderful "poetry idea." The stanza breaks are critical -- delete them and see what you lose. The lesson is that in her rejuvenation of minimalism as a strategy, Equi makes maximum meaning-making use of spacing and lining. -- DL

The Virtual Poetry Conference [by Nin Andrews]

I’ve been daydreaming about the magic wand I kept under my bed as a child.

If my sister or I were sick, I waved it in the air. “Go away sickness. Now!” I would lie back in bed, imagining the gods were listening. I can hear my father’s voice advising me, “Don’t worry. This too shall pass.” He’d hand me a pill—aspirin or penicillin and sometimes Sominex so he could get some rest. For himself he kept a cabinet full of Demerol. 

My son has been seriously ill this summer. And a friend has become mentally ill, so ill she believes she can never leave her apartment again. When I talk to her, I think of that Henri Michaux poem, “Teaching a Statue to Walk.” It’s as impossible to get her to open her door as it is to teach a statue to dance. But people tell me my friend makes sense in this time of Covid. A lot of crazy things seem to make sense now.

After reading the news, I sometimes wonder if the entire nation has become mentally and physically ill. Before this year I didn’t realize the fragility of our minds and bodies. And our democracy. How quickly health can decline! I keep waving my imaginary wand, wishing we could all attain some level of normalcy. But what does that mean? I don’t want to ask for grandiose or political answers here, though they might be merited.  

As a writer, I define normalcy simply as the ability to write in a coffee shop, meet friends for a drink, go to a non-virtual reading where I can peruse books at my leisure, have them signed, and hear the audience laugh and applaud. I wouldn’t mind attending a writers’ conference again, just to feel some sense of literary excitement and camaraderie. It’s lonely—this life of writing at home, far from my poet and writer friends, and it’s scary and heartbreaking to think about all that has happened this year, not to mention what might lie ahead.

But then I reason: at least we have our virtual community. Our virtual readings and perhaps our virtual conferences. I was hesitant to fill out the AWP form and to answer that question: Should the conference be virtual in 2021? The obvious answer is yes. Why risk our health? The obvious question is how? And what would that look like? Will people attend? Books sell? What about all those panels, readings, tables of the latest poetry collections, and random conversations with other writers? What about the dinners and long walks in distant cities? Is there a virtual replacement? What does a virtual conference look like?

I don’t know the answers, but I thought I might try one out. I’ve been eyeing a few virtual conferences  including Lit Youngstown’s small and intimate Fall Literary Conference,  Poets on the Coast, led by the fabulous poets, Kelly Russell Agadon, Susan Rich, and Laura Da’, The San Miguel Writer’s Conference, and  The Brooklyn Book Festival.

Maybe if I attend one, I will be able to answer these questions. Who knows? Maybe I’ll prefer the virtual event to the real thing. The virtual experience could be superior in many ways. I won’t have to stress about my appearance or where I will get my next meal. Or if I can afford the airfare or the conference hotel.  Perhaps the virtual life will be better than the real one. I’ll become a virtual poet, proclaiming the virtues of my virtual existence.

I am beginning to understand my friend a little better.

Judith Hall's Prospects

Announcing Judith Hall's new book Prospects (New from LSU Press), which includes this poem:

            Natural / Work  Hard / Ability

Done in stain-obscuring dark pants pulled on for work 
Tossing out the one last second-hand self-help book 

Help yourself to hard work is not the half of it 
Work hard will never be distinctly natural 

Natural is not a camouflage of hard work 
Not the plucked waxed dyed in private lines learned

Sensible shoes will open doors the boring doors 
Check out the body language of competitors

Jokes at you at your expense required about now
The one about your ow designer shoes ow ow 

Supposed to blend in a joke right without the laugh 
Resentment is supposed to harden you in life 

When laughing at yourself is not a living wage 
You can live on for long without a brain-dead brain 

Judith Hall is the author of four earlier poetry collections and a collaboration with David Lehman, which she also illustrated. She has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She taught for many years at the California Institute of Technology, and, after moving to New York, she taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts. She is poetry editor of Antioch Review.

"Few poets have written so incisively of worldly ambition; few have viewed power dynamics with such whiplash intelligence. The pursuit of happiness, the tragedy of war, the exploited environment are central to this book that considers survival in all its guises. Judith Hall's unsparing poems fracture lyric desire into edgier components—including money, what it takes to earn it, the "zany can-do grovel" of job seekers. Prospects is one of the richest, smartest books I've read by anybody—I think ever. One close reading wasn't enough, and as I reread, the poems continued to open up. This infinite reach is for me one of the prime joys of poetry."

-- Alice Fulton 

W. H. Auden's "September 1, 1939"

Here it is again: September 1, 1939, eighty-one years later. Can you picture Auden at The Dizzy Club, that "dive" on Fifty-Second Street, (aka Swing Street) on that terrible day when the Germans invaded Poland and quaked the earth? One of the best stanzas is a metaphorical description of that bar and others like it.

Click here for the poem and here for the program that Michael Braziller and I did in fall 2008 on this and other of Auden's poems written after Wystan moved to New York City from England in 1939. 

Quiz of the day:
WHA disliked the last line of the penultimate stanza because he felt it was "dishonest," by which I think he meant "untrue."

He changed it to
(1) We must love one another and die
(2) We must love one another or die
(3) We must love one another or diet
(4) One must love mother nature or die
(5) If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Light up a Winston and think of dear Wystan. Bragging rights go to the winner!

"Half of an Epic Simile not found in Hesiod" [by A. E. Stallings]

As at the winter solstice, when a faded blonde
On the brink of middle age, goes to the salon
To brighten up her outlook and her spirits
(Warm water on her scalp, the rich shampoo
That breathes of almond-blossoms), to submit
To another’s expert disinterested caresses,
While outside the plate-glass window, people push
Against the dwindling year, and lean into
The wind, their foreheads pinched with doubt and debt,
And it’s afternoon, but night comes chattering down
Like the shutters of a shop in a recession,
And all she asks for is a color adjustment,
For rays of honey to eclipse the grey,
And for the light to lengthen just a little.

The poem is from A. E. Stallings's justly celebrated book of poems Like (Farrar Straus & Giroux; paperback 2019).