The Best American Poetry

"Australian Tourists" by Peter Murphy [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Peter Murphy (1945 - 2024) was a playwright, author, librettist, photographer and poet recognized for his accomplishments in various forms of the genre, including concrete poetry and sound poetry. His visual and written works are notable for their wit and ability to accentuate life’s everyday absurdities. The breadth of his talent was remarkable. A glowing review of his debut short story collection, Black Light, in the February-March I980 issue of Australian Book Review opens with the line, “Peter Murphy is one of the very best poets under forty writing in Australia today.” 

 

 

 

 

"Horrible" by Peter Murphy

 

“Australian Tourists” takes aim at Australians’ uncanny habit of holidaying in places very much like the ones in which they live. Growing up in Sydney, a coastal city with beaches aplenty, I always found it curious that the entire metropolis seemed to resettle just a few hours up the coast each summer, to beaches not too dissimilar from the ones left behind. For me, the most impressive feature of the poem is its economy of language, made possible by Murphy’s deft line breaks. The poem’s idiom, overtly ordinary, evokes the monoculture it describes, and is lubricated by Murphy’s use of one word lines, subtle repetition and some really clever rhyme (“transfigure,” “St Kilda,” “mirror”) that occasion a flow so effortless, the effort required in reading the poem is “to persuade yourself /  you’ve moved.”

 

Australian Tourists

 

travelling in Australia 

 

have to be particularly 

sensitive 

to difference

 

if they're to believe 

they’re somewhere else

 

or that warmer climates 

or denser cities

 

in which they're introduced 

to people like themselves

 

can transfigure

what looks like home 

into the exotic

 

when palms in St Kilda 

mirror

those in Cairns.

 

And though there's no debate 

about distance

or change

 

it's paradoxical

that effort is required 

to persuade yourself 

you've moved.

 

 

Elegy for the Matador

For theToreador . . . this is your reward

The Matador of Metaphor

The grapefruit in the tropical orchard
has ripened into a globe in Hartford
for him to look at, not to eat.
If he had a tin can, he would beat
it as a drummer in a band beats
his drum and steadily with a swish
and sometimes a gong. It’s his wish
to escape from gray walls and sky
into a Denmark of the inner eye
or a bullring south of the border
or a sky espied from the trenches
of a battlefield in Flanders. Wenches
wander into his wonderland. Order
is disorder squared. We are nowhere
else but here, yet live we do in metaphor
like that elegant square-shouldered matador.

-- DL

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-One): Paul Violi [by Angela Ball]

EXTENDED SHORTAGES

I must remind you how serious I’ve become,
Almost grave (though still immensely likeable).

Love threatens to carry me off
Like a dancer in a trash heap storm.

Counterweight! I need a counterweight.
I read history late into the night,
A scavenger, loading up
On high deeds and disillusionment,
Treachery and hope, until I am unable
To hop over a footnote.

An ashtray crowning a stack of Gibbon,
A scotch and soda atop the King James,
Eventually a whiff of pity comes my way,
Not for me but for that sad Titan,
The dim-witted one who has to bear
The weight of heaven and earth*
Gravity and exhilaration, on his back.
Then I can snooze, snicker at my own
Grief and shortcomings and snooze.

When I wake and rise and slowly dress
With dust motes whirling madly around me
In that lovely solemn light, I do not risk
Even thinking about you until I feel
The weight of all I recall sink to my feet
And then in a bow to Philetus,**
I reach for my shoes.

                                   -Paul Violi   (First published in Mississippi Review's Poets of the New York School issue, 2003)

*Thirteen trillion trillion tons.

**Philetus of Cos, poet, teacher, famed for his love lyrics, admired by Ovid and Propertius, tutor to Ptolemy of Philadelphus, so small he had to wear lead shoes lest in the desert wind he be blown away.

 

Paul Violi

1944—2011

Paul Violi was an avant-garde poet. Waterworks, a short selection of his early poems, appeared in 1972, and In Baltic Circles was published the following year. He authored eleven books of poetry, including Harmatan (1977), Splurge (1982), Likewise (1988), The Curious Builder (1993), and Fracas (1999). After receiving his Grants to Artists award in 1999, Violi released Breakers (2000), a selection of his longer poems, and Overnight (2007).

The expanded text of Violi's first collaboration with printmaker Dale Devereux Barker, Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes (2002), is a collection of non-fiction prose. Violi and Barker's art books, including Envoy; Life is Completely Interesting (2006), have been acquired by many libraries and museums.

Subsequent to his 1999 Grants to Artists award, Violi was given The Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001) and a John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award (2004).

Prior to his 1999 FCPA grant, Violi had received grants from the Ingram Merrrill Foundation (1979), The New York Foundation for the Arts (1987), and The Fund for Poetry (1988, 1992). He was also the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowships (1980, 1986).

Violi was managing editor of The Architectural Forum from 1972 to 1974 and worked on freelance projects at Universal Limited Art Editions, researching correspondence of poets and artists and assisting Buckminster Fuller while he wrote the text to Tetrascroll (1982). As chairman of the Associate Council Poetry Committee, Violi organized a series of readings at The Museum of Modern Art from 1974 to 1983. He also co-founded Swollen Magpie Press, which produced poetry chapbooks, a poetry magazine called New York Times, and Broadway: A Poets And Painters Anthology (1979), edited by James Schuyler and Charles North.

Violi graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in English and a minor in Art History. At the time of his death he was teaching in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and in the graduate writing program at The New School. He also taught at New York University, The Dalton School, Sing-Sing, Stevens Institute of Technology, Bloomfield College, State University of New York at Purchase, and Scarsdale Teachers Institute.  (The Foundation for Contemporary Arts)

I am indebted to Ann Violi, the poet’s widow, for the biography above, for this photo, and for permission to republish the poem, which first appeared in Mississippi Review’s Poets of the New York School in 2003.

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-One):  Paul Violi

 

Paul Violi’s gregarious and self-effacing “Extended Shortages,” shares James Schuyler’s poetic domesticity, creating landscapes of the indoor, the close at hand.  He greets us with a humorous disclaimer of humor: “I must remind you how serious I’ve become, / Almost grave (Though still immensely likeable).

But suddenly he warns of impending danger: “Love threatens to carry me off / Like a dancer in a trash heap storm.”  We are reminded of contemporary dance’s fervent moments of extreme buoyancy, when flying costumes seem almost to mate.

Then comes a welcome solution: “A counterweight!”  The one that chooses him is history, that weighty discipline, that he reads “late into the night / A scavenger, loading up on high deeds and disillusionment, / Treachery and hope.” The reading lasts until the buzzardized speaker can no longer “hop over a footnote.” How many times have current events made us think ‘Who am I in the face of all this’? How much more so the past.

We next see the items that furnish the poet’s home: “An ashtray crowning a stack of Gibbon, / A scotch and soda atop the King James”—the poem plays with heft as trivial objects top massively important tomes: The Decline and Fall, the King James Bible—their permanence dominated by temporary pleasures.  Our enthralled speaker seems released by the “whiff of pity” that arrives,

 

     Not for me but for that sad Titan,

     The dim-witted one who has to bear

     The weight of heaven and earth

     Gravity and exhilaration, on his back.

     Then I can snooze, snicker at my own

     Grief and shortcomings and snooze.

 

His empathy for a mythical lifter of “thirteen trillion trillion tons” saves the speaker/poet from sinking under history’s heft—in the same way, I think, that savoring the name, “Korean Mums,” saves James Schuyler from anonymous despair.

The rest of Violi’s poem, instead of dispensing with the past, invokes it with serio-comic lightness:

 

     Even thinking about you until I feel

     The weight of all I recall sink to my feet

     And then in a bow to Philetus,

     I reach for my shoes.

 

All at once, we realize that the “you” in the poem is the source of the wilding inflicted by love in the second stanza. We feel poundage countered by the uplift of poetry and love. Paul Violi’s transformative “Extended Shortages” is really a consortium of abundances  ending with a physically slight but mentally immense poet, Philetus—a poet named for love, who must wear “lead shoes” to keep from being blown away, who paradoxically cues the abundance inherent in history and poetry and also the moment of ordinary life when we prepare ourselves for the outside world as love and words and world gloriously take each other’s weight. -Angela Ball

 

On The New York School [by Michael Tyrell]

<<<
O’Hara’s famous poem "Why I Am Not a Painter" begins with the poet yearning to be a painter. O’Hara reports the process of Mike Goldberg applying the word "sardines" to a canvas as O’Hara crafts his poem "Oranges." Eventually, Goldberg’s painting is "just letters" hanging in a gallery, but O’Hara’s poem has not "mentioned orange yet"; twelve poems are the result, but "there should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life." The poem cleverly inverts the materials of the painter and poet (Goldberg works with the word as a physical object, O’Hara with a color), and demonstrates how the final products of both differ from their original, ostensible subjects. Though O’Hara "would rather be / a painter," he honors the close, productive bond between the visual and the verbal, while celebrating himself as that enigmatic, generative figure, the "real poet."

David Lehman proposes that this collaborative, prolific period lasted from 1948 to 1966, when O’Hara died. Of his subjects, O’Hara is often regarded as the undisputed star of the group; commanding and flamboyant, he was as un-self-conscious dashing off a poem during his lunch break from the Museum of Modern Art as he was posing nude for Fairfield Porter and Nell Blaine. . . .

Lehman illustrates the poet’s nearly selfless concern for his peers, pointing out that dozens of people emerged after the poet’s death, each claiming to be his closest friend. Lehman closes his discussion of O’Hara with a provocative reading of "The Day Lady Died," the stunning elegy for Billie Holliday, convincingly placing the poem in the company of the great elegies of the English language:

As the detractors of "Lycidas" were wrong, so the critics of "The Day Lady Died" misjudged the poet’s conversational ease and seemingly self-centered stance…. [It] is a moving elegy not in spite of the poem’s preoccupation with the poet’s self but because of it; the death of the great singer at the age of forty-four occurs as an interruption, a shock that the reader is invited to share…. To the charge that O’Hara is too ironic to be sincere, I would borrow the distinction Lionel Trilling made between sincerity and authenticity: O’Hara’s suspicion of sincerity as a rhetorical mode is paradoxically what makes his work more authentic…. [I]f all that survived of 1959 was "The Day Lady Died," then historians a century hence could piece together the New York of that moment in the same way that archaeologists can reconstruct a whole extinct species of dinosaur from a single fossile bone.

• • •

Each of the remaining three poets receives equally extensive and relevant biographical and critical treatment. Lehman fills us in on Ashbery’s childhood as both a lonely boy growing up on an upstate New York farm and a precocious contestant on a radio program, his friends’ reaction to his early poems ("like falling in love with some thrilling young person from Mars," according to Koch), the impact of his decade in Paris on his life’s work, his contributions as an art critic, and his present position as the most frequently imitated and parodied poet in America. Few seem to remember that his place in the firmament was secured precariously over decades, beginning with Auden’s grudging selection of Some Trees for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

The price of comic ingenuity, Lehman observes, has somewhat affected the literary success of Kenneth Koch. As both an admirer of Koch’s brilliant catalogues and innovative one-line poems, Lehman is perhaps the most enamored of this poet. Koch is a lauded teacher (his antic assignments have become something of a legend in academic circles) yet is presented here as an under-appreciated writer in an era when the lyric was considered alpha and omega. Perhaps more ignored in the poetry world, in spite of a Pulitzer, is James Schuyler, whose life and deceptively transparent, scrupulously particular poems are thoroughly investigated here. In terms of both its form and neglected status, his work stands apart from the others. Often making use of the literal rather than the symbolic, he creates in his "Hymn to Life" a kind of "laundry list" that, as Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan discovers, has the power to make life worthwhile. We learn about his complicated, influential friendship with Auden, as well as why he was the last of the four to publish a book. He was renowned as the best editor of the group, and his poems attracted notable admirers such as Elizabeth Bishop, yet he did not give a public reading until 1988, three years before his death. Dazed at times by heavy dosages of antipsychotic medications, he spent a great deal of his later years in squalid hotel rooms.
>>>

From Michael Tyrell's review of The Last Avant-Garde in Boston Review, December 1, 1999.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/michael-tyrell-review-last-avant-garde/

"Love Me or Leave Me" with Doris Day (1955) plus Jack Sheldon ("How About You?") & special guest Judy Garland

l

 

Ralph Freed's lyric for Burton Lane's tune as sung by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Babes on Broadway

When a girl meets boy
Life can be a joy
But the note they end on
Will depend on
Little pleasures they will share
So let us compare

I like New York in June, how about you?
I like a Gershwin tune, how about you?
I love a fireside when a storm is due.
I like potato chips, moonlight and motor trips,
How about you?
I'm mad about good books, can't get my fill,
And Franklin Roosevelt's looks give me a thrill.
Holding hands at the movie show,
When all the lights are low
May not be new, but I like it,
How about you?

I like Jack Benny's jokes.
To a degree.
I love the common folks.
That includes me.
I like to window shop on 5th Avenue.
I like banana splits, late supper at the Ritz,
How about you?
I love to dream of fame, maybe I'll shine.
I'd love to see your name right beside mine.
I can see we're in harmony,
Looks like we both agree
On what to do,
And I like it, how about you?

 

John Koethe: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

_______________________________________________________

The Divinity Within

Sometimes I write to try to figure something out

I hadn't understood before, that somebody else has said.

I've no idea what "the divinity within" might mean,

And yet I've heard it said so often that it must mean something

Everyone recognizes, whether they know what it really means or not.

It could mean we're created in God's image, if there were one,

Though I think it makes more sense the other way around,

Which is what I hope that Emerson and my mother had in mind.

It's not just that the supernatural makes no sense, and that the world

Is real enough without it. It's that each ordinary life seems at the same time

So miraculous it has to be divine, whatever that divinity might be.

 

Why do we think we're something other than we are? Look at the stars,

Or else don't bother, since there's nothing there to see. You realize

They're there, and yet you can't imagine what the worlds that they sustain

Could be like, or if those worlds exist, though there must be billions of them.

How could those lives be anything like ours, with its private sense of time

And memories that speak to me alone, like Sally's hair? Of course the inability

To feel them doesn't mean they can't be real, but what does real even mean 

When it's applied to things we can't begin to understand? I understand this life,

At least I think I do. But how can a life that doesn't have this sense of self

Or the past or poetry, even if it's written in the stars, be one that speaks to me?

 

Perhaps instead of being part of something too immense to understand

Or inhabiting an expanding multiverse in which every possibility is realized

And equally real, each person's life might be in some sense all there is,

Whatever that might mean. I know it sounds absurd, but it isn't any more

Ridiculous than all those narratives of God I grew up trying to believe.

What makes a life divine isn't its perfection or its power, but its estrangement

From the world and the reflection of itself in all it sees. I wish I understood

What people mean by an eternal life. I only know that mine is singular,

Complete and coextensive with the transitory universe that it contains---

As though it were like God's and comprehended everything, but small.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

John Koethe's most recent books are Beyond Belief and Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016, both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth (Bloomsbury).  “The Divinity Within” will be included in a new book, Cemeteries and Galaxies, to be published by FSG in April, 2025. [Author photo by Tom Bamberger.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                              William Blake, Albion Rose, ca 1794

 

“Visitation" by Tony Hoagland (1953-2018)

Now when I visit Ellen’s body in my memory,
it is like visiting a cemetery. I look
at the chiseled, muscular belly
and at the perfect thirty-year old breasts
and the fine blond purse of her pussy
and I kneel and weep a little there.
I am not the first person to locate god
in erectile tissue and the lubricating gland
but when I kiss her breast and feel
the tough button of her nipple
rise and stiffen to my tongue
like the dome of a small mosque
in an ancient, politically-incorrect city,
I feel holy, I begin to understand religion.
I circle around to see the basilica
of her high, Irish-American butt,
and I look at her demure little asshole
and am sorry I didn’t spend more time with it.
And her mouth and her eyes and white white teeth.
It’s beauty beauty beauty which in a way Ellen
herself the person distracted me from. It’s
beauty which has been redistributed now
by the justice of chance and the temporal economy.
Now I’m like a sad astronaut living
deep in space, breathing the oxygen of memory
out of a silver can. Now I’m like an angel
drifting over the surface of the earth,
brushing its meadows and forests
with the tips of my wings,
with wonder and regret and affection.

for The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008, I asked Tony to name his favorite erotic book or author, and he replied:

<<    Some of the most exciting erotic writing I know is ninth of Rilke’s famous Duino Elegies, in which the poet queries,  demands, praises, promises and then swooningly yields to be entered completely by earth—“Earth, isn’t this what you want? An invisible re-arising in us? …What is your urgent command, if not transformation?” (translation Spender / Leishman)

The extended passage is unmistakably the address of an ardent lover to the beloved, and Rilke’s athletic, tremulous syntax, in its urging, falling back, swooping climaxes and surrenders, is thrillingly sexy in its brilliant performance of both masculine and feminine roles.  Rilke reminds us how dramatically, heroically, erotic spiritual life can be, and his enactment of inner life sweeps through categories in glorious encounter and catharsis. It’s hot stuff, and it always makes me want to pray harder.
>> 

from the archives; posted October 02, 2019

Virginie Roux-Cassé (re-)discovers the sainted woman [By Tracy Danison]

Sainte Jeune Fille à la Licorne © Virginie Roux-Cassé

Carnets pour l’exile: According to tradition, every exile needs to wander aimlessly from time to time, not so much to find a shard of home at the next whiskey bar but to see what there is to see when the city has become your life to live.

Also, a good-hearted exile should think about year-end presents for those at home who have not yet been arrested.

 

Sainte Embrasée © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I ran into Virginie Roux-Cassé‘s painting, and Virginie herself, quite by accident some years ago now. Her latest exhibition, called “Les Saintes”, she says, is inspired by an encounter with the Roma holy patron Sainte Sara la Noire, repudiated African Queen of King Herod and servant to holy patrons Saintes Marie-Jacobus and Marie-Salomé*.

 

Sainte Marthe 1 © Virginie Roux-Cassé

“The people pray to [the saints’ icons], venerate them, adore them,” she told me during her opening cocktail the other day, “They dress them, they cover them with, they pile on them, various-patterned, many-colored, golden, ornamented scarves, tunics, coats, crowns, jewels, crosses, rosaries…The beauty, divinity, humanity just bowled me over”.

 

Sainte Sara La Noire © Virginie Roux-Cassée

From that experience, she decided to investigate the lives and deaths of woman Catholic saints: more than a year of portraits in tempera and engravings on the theme is the result.

 

Sainte Marthe, engraving © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I have two paintings by Virginie Roux-Cassé. The one, acrylic or water-based housepaint on fiberboard, is a tilted dry sink (?), a tray (?) of apples hanging just over my dining table. Somebody picked these impish apples from an untended tree in (Virginie’s?) back garden.

 

Sainte Marthe 2 © Virginie Roux-Cassé

The other picture –  I call it “Bird Cage” –, in clotted acrylic with smudged newsprint collage, perches above my talk-on-the-phone-red-overstuffed-armchair (since my mother died mostly used with my Son, who lives far away, and Karine, with whom I like to touch a word when she’s away).

 

Sainte Solange © Virginie Roux-Cassé

The Bird Cage is, I think, a lamp or lampshade in crinkly paper (flame-resistant crinoline?) and thick structuring wire with, set alongside it, a small vase. The vase has a big twig of (cherry?) blossoms jammed in it, too big for it. (‘Though you’d not guess it to see her walking home in the evening, Karine sometimes tears off flowering twigs or plucks up flowers and brings them home to make a “found bouquet”. It shocks me. Please don’t call the cops.)

 

Sainte Véronique © Virginie Roux-Cassé

In the foreground of it all I’ve described is a triplet of round fruits. One of the fruits is a distinctly different color than the other two, set slightly but distinctly behind. I sometimes try to make out the smudged newsprint but I’ve never succeeded.

 

Sainte Phanie © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I bought the impish apples and Bird Cage because Virginie Roux-Cassé’s take on the world around is not mine but is accessible to me, opens a garden gate for my feelings and my imagination. What’s that poem about the path not taken?

 

Sainte La Vierge Stephanie © Virginie Roux-Cassé

Like everybody else, contemporary artists such as Virginie Roux-Cassé have to come to grips with the increasingly vast pile of past and present and their infinite substacks:  artists, oeuvres, esthetics, theories, concepts, approaches, materials and techniques. Most triangulate their hands at a point between story-telling and radical expression of a reality uniquely within them and what I think of as "esthetic life extensionism".

 

Sainte Mariam © Virginie Roux-Cassé

For story-telling, put somebody like, say, “post-black” painter Rashid Johnson, who did, notably, the interior “Broken Nine” mosaic at the New York’s Metropolitan Opera. For unique reality, think, say, of Jorinde Voigt, who paints the bio-quantic reality that undergirds our ordinary here-below. For esthetic life extensionism, an artist called Leon Loewentrautsprings to mind. Loewentraut has mastered a certain "Picasso signature style" that enables him to target an Audi-driving market that won’t pay for one of Picasso’s many thousands of second-rate squiggles, can’t afford the real thing, but, nevertheless, aspires to class and taste. 

 

Sainte Blandine © Virginie Roux-Cassé

Virginie Roux Cassé's triangulates someplace between all three. Her distinction is that when I look at her work, I feel her standing looking with me. She's not whispering as an other artist might; sharing the experience of visual emotion is enough.

 

Sainte Jeanette © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I once visited the upper-story greenhouse that serves as her workshop. I was taken aback to see - some unfinished, some painted over with other styles - in recognizable painterly styles lopped about the place. They were well done, too!

 

Sainte Ecervelée © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I was taken aback because for me the thing that has marked for me Virginie Roux Cassé's work is that it reminds me of nothing else that I've run into as I look around the world. Among the many excellent painters active today, Virginie Roux Cassée is my very own Le Douanier Rousseau.

 

Sainte Marthe (leading her monster) © Virginie Roux-Cassé

 

Later, it struck me that the discarded “style” paintings did not represent a search to produce an effect or a search for a technique or for a style but rather represent her effort to understand, maybe to find and isolate, an effect on an (herself as an) onlooker. Doing that, she brings out my "emotion of seeing": in dance, I would say that the choreography has enabled the "sensibility" that enables the experience of dance performance.
____

*Saint Sara la Noire is patron of the Roma (or "Gypsy") folk. Many of them claim an origin in India, an, indeed, Wikipedia identifies Saint Sara with the goddess Kali. Saints Mary-Salome, Mother of Saint John, author of the Apocalyptic gospel, Mary-Jacobus, Mother of Saint James the Apostle, along with Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ companion in love, were among the original disciples of Christianity’s Messiah. Most were witness to Jesus Christ's Resurrection. All are mentioned in the canonical gospels. Fleeing Israel in a rudderless boat sometime in the third decade of the present era, these woman disciples of Jesus providentially washed up on the French coast. They were long believed to be the founders of Christianity in France. The pilgrimage site for Saint Sara is at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a village in the Camargue.

Contact Virginie Roux-Cassé through her website: virginierouxcasse.com

"Thanksgiving" [by Terence Winch]

Thanksgiving

Later, after dinner, we examine your uncle’s photos
of trees, flowers, waterfalls, birds
until I just can’t stand it another second.
I am not at one with nature.  Never was.
Some of the people can be fooled all of the time,
even when you yawn right in their faces.

Guests, or ghosts, have taken over the house,
lounging in the living room, watching t.v.
Ugly images of war and politics are all I see.
Cancel the rest of the holidays, please, until this
knot can be untied and our hearts released.

-- Terence Winch

An acrostic spelling out the name of a poet who has written memorably about the family romance, Terence Winch's "Thanksgiving" works rather like a sonnet in thirteen lines. The point of departure is the sort of holiday get-together that many of us secretly (or overtly) dread, though unexpected epiphanies do occur ("I am not at one with nature") as guests consort with ghosts and watch "images of war and politics" on t.v.

  -- DL

from the archive; first posted November 27, 2014

Fifteen Glorious Minutes

 

"Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- Great Poems of the World, episode 15, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

 

Kubla Khan

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
   Down to a sunless sea..

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

 

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

   The shadow of the dome of pleasure

   Floated midway on the waves;

   Where was heard the mingled measure

   From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

 

   A damsel with a dulcimer

   In a vision once I saw:

   It was an Abyssinian maid

   And on her dulcimer she played,

   Singing of Mount Abora.

   Could I revive within me

   Her symphony and song,

   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Godwin's Law [by Joe Lehman]

“As an online discussion or argument grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.” So says Godwin's Law, coined by author Mike Godwin. It's like "six degrees of separation" applied to political conversations (or rants), all of which reach their apex with Hitler. I personally attest to the validity of Godwin’s Law applied not just to online arguments but to discussions between and among friends, whether in person or on the phone.

Case in point: I was riding in the passenger seat in a car with my friend  Diane in the driver’s seat. This was close to a decade ago. We were discussing an Iraq War veteran’s impassioned speech before her church group, where the embittered vet called into question the reasoning for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was, he contended, a grievous mistake. The speech did not go over well with the audience. The consensus was that it was an inappropriate choice of venue for the speech. Diane and I mulled over the incident. She said the vet should have chosen a venue more congenial to antiwar advocacy. I countered that an "acceptable" locale or event wouldn’t be playing host to the audience the vet was targeting . He had selected the church group for a reason.  If he had spoken at an official anti war rally, he would end up preaching to the choir. Therefore, I said, it was more politically effective to speak to people not predisposed to agree your position.. Diane blurted out, “Well, would you say that the things Hitler and the Nazis did were politically effective for them?” I said that from Hitler’s standpoint, he was very ‘effective’ in advancing his own agenda. Of course, the discussion deteriorated from then on.

Hitler remains the trigger word, the invitation to the ultimaate unsafe space, that the 20th century left us. I challenge everyone to comment about his or her own experiences dealing with Godwin’s Law in a discussion or argument you may have had in the past.

"In Reprise: Next Line, Please" -- 3 new prompts

<<< Last month, I announced the return of my “Next Line, Please,” column, which ran on The American Scholar's web site from May 2014 to September 2019. In that first reprise (read it here), I proffered up 15 quotations from books, plays, and movies, challenging readers to identify the source of the quotations. Here are the first three identified, plus a prompt to go with each. Choose one prompt and enter your effort in the comments field.

1. “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.” This is the opening sentence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover—perhaps a surprise to readers expecting something racy. The prompt: write a one-paragraph narrative prose poem that surprises the reader by ending with this sentence.
2. “It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.” Thus concludes Virginia’s Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The prompt: write a one-paragraph narrative prose poem that begins with these two sentences.
3. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life”: This may be the most memorable sentence uttered by the title character of Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The late Maggie Smith spoke the line in the brilliant 1969 movie adaptation. The prompt: write a short elegy for Maggie Smith, or a poem about either the book or the movie, quoting this line.

Please remember that, as a loquacious fellow once said, brevity is the soul of wit. It is also kinder on the eyes of the reader. There will be intangible prizes not only for the best entries, but also for the shortest.

The next post will reveal the winning entries—and will announce a new prompt.

Deadline: Monday, December 2nd,2024
>>>

See The American Scholar for official rules  A collections of prompts and poems from Next Line, Please was published under that title by Cornell University Press in 2018. 

Mary Jo Bang: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

____________________________________________________________________________

A Film in Which I Play Everyone

 

In scene two, silence is a sleeve, I’m an arm in it.

In an outdated Hollywood magazine, I found a photo

 

of someone wearing my hair. How can that be?

Now I can’t stop thinking about the synaptic sparks

 

over which no one has any control. Or, they have some

control but not enough to count on in a crisis.

 

I’m making sense all the time of all the senseless endings.

A day is as long as the time it takes

 

for the mind to consider life and death countless times.

Which must make a day plus a night a highway

 

we’re only vaguely aware of since we’re busy

sitting in a chair or lying on a bed

 

with a floral-print bedspread or walking to the store

past someone with a dog on a leash and a phone

 

in their hand, into which they seem to be saying,

“That is not what I meant blah, blah, blah”

 

to an absent ear. Home, you unpack the items

you bought, crease the bags flat, stack them out of sight.

 

All without saying a word. This is a non-speaking part.

You’re an extra. That day you were filmed

 

on the steps walking into the school dance,

the costume you wore was pure you.

 

The set for the scene where everyone disappears

was painted Parisian sky-blue. The air burned

 

like a curtain on fire. The fire kept going out,

then being relit, a trick candle on a cake made of clouds.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems, including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in November 2024. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.  [Author photo by Carly Ann Faye]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
    Dorothea Tanning, Self-Portrait, 1944, oil on canvas. [This is the cover image for Mary Jo Bang's book, A Film in Which I Play Everyone.]

On Hoagy Carmichael's Birthday: The Best Years of Our Lives

Dana Andrews ("Fred") left, and Teresa Wright ("Peggy"), steering the wheel, in The Best Years of Our Lives.

 Born today (November 22), Hoagy Carmichael plays the wounded sailor's Uncle Butch, the piano player who performs  "Among My Souvenirs" as Al (Fredric March) and Millie (Myrna Loy) dance and Fred meets Peggy at Butch's bar in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)..

https://youtu.be/L20LQTrUgUo

And he's thinking: if only I could get a good job. 
And she's thinking: when I think that he's married, I sob. 
And he's thinking: I married a stranger.
And she's thinking: a divorce would be a game-changer.
And he's thinking: wait till my friend gets married and I'm the best man, Okay?
And she's thinking: Okay.
Well, it's been a long war. . .

[dialogue as rewritten to the tune of Frank Loesser's "Been a Long Day:" in How to Succeed]

See, too, this piece in The American Scholar.

Hoagy Carmichael's songs include "Stardust," Skylark,""Baltimore Oriole," and "How Little We Know," which Lauren Bacall sings while Hoagy plays piano and Bogart watches in To Have and Have Not.

Patriotism (after Mishima) [by Mitch Sisskind]

Okay, the people of Westhaven were angry that the presidential election
would get rigged against R.L. Greene. 

R.L. Greene himself often said how an election is a right of free speech
and interfering with free speech is treason against the constitution. 

As an example of free speech, R.L. Greene was the only candidate for
president who ever said the word fuck during a campaign. He liked to say,
“I let the fuck out of the bag.” 

He also said you can’t put toothpaste back in a tube so the establishment
shouldn’t try to put the word fuck back. 

Okay, Trig Coleman was called Bub. Bub knew he would be arrested if he
took up arms against the rigged election. Maybe his friends planned to take
up arms but Bub was trepidatious to join them. He was enraged about the
infringement on the constitution but he was also hopeless. The fix was in.
Nothing he could do would have any positive effect so he shot himself in
the head the night before the election. Heidi, Bub’s wife, also shot herself
in the head.

Okay, Bub was twenty-nine years old when he passed on and Heidi was
twenty-three. Their last moments occurred less than one year after their
wedding ceremony in the snow-covered yard of the Brethern church. 

Bub and Heidi loved snowmobiles so they arrived at the church in a
snowmobile. They were smiling and waving. All the onlookers were
struck by the happiness of the couple. 

The wedding was open-carry. Bub’s right hand rested on his holstered
.45 as he said his I do. Heidi was not packing although in her snowsuit
her sexual hotness was obvious and she was wearing a FUCK hat.

Months later at the joint funeral of Bub and Heidi the pastor of that same
Brethren church mentioned that maybe their happiness on their wedding
day had attracted the attention of the devil. 

The devil is always attracted when things look to be going well in people’s
affairs. 

The devil probably saw how Bub’s snowmobile repair business was starting
to take off. 

And the devil most likely also noticed how Mr. Dykstra at the bank helped
Bub and Heidi get set up in their house on Baseline Road.

Okay, it was a two-story, four-room house on Baseline Road with a yard
and a garage in the back where Bub worked on snowmobiles. The
downstairs living room and the dining room didn’t get much sun so the
young couple was often in the sun-kissed bedroom upstairs. Next to
the bedroom Bub converted the other upstairs room into his man cave. 

Bub and Heidi agreed to skip a honeymoon. There was nowhere in America
to go considering the shape America was in and they had no intention of
spending their money in a foreign country. Instead of the honeymoon Bub
got an antique S&W .38 Special revolver for Heidi which still worked. 

Okay, after they fucked on their wedding night Bub presented Heidi with
the .38 after which she sat on the edge of the bed with the .38 in her lap
like a baby. 

Bub went and got his .45 from the man cave. He then sat down on the floor
with the .45 and explained how it was a 1911 that had belonged to his Uncle
Reed who had shot himself in the head with it. 

Bub continued, “My Uncle Reed was a veterinarian but right after he got his
license he was drafted for the Korean War. There was a litter of pups he was
raising and the day before he left for the war he shot the pups with this gun
right here. When he got back from Korea he shot himself with it like he did
with the pups.” 

Bub was silent for a moment and then said, “Do you see what I’m getting at?”

Heidi came down off the bed and sat on the floor next to Bub. She said,
“Well, nobody was going to take care of those pups while your Uncle Reed
was gone. They would probably have starved to death. And when he got
back from the war who was going to take care of him if he was all messed
up in the head? It sounds like when things got bad enough he just decided
to end it all.”

After another silent moment Bub said, “Heidi, in the not too distant future I’m
probably going to shoot myself in the head. It’s because R.L. Greene will run
for president and they’re going to rig the election against him.”

Heidi said, “Yeah.” 

She too was silent for a moment but eventually she said, “I’ll do it too.”

"You sure you want to?”

 Heidi nodded yes and Bub returned to his man cave. He came back
with a box of .38 Special 158 grain Buffalo Bore ammo. He gave the
box of ammo to Heidi who placed it beside the gun which she had placed
on the floor when she got off the bed. 

No words were spoken. A silent agreement came into existence between them. 

Okay, they were horny again. There was a TV in the bedroom. They watched
porn on the TV with the sound off. They smoked weed. They drank wine.
Ultimately in the exploding union of their bodies the porn, the weed, the wine,
the .45, the .38, the ammo, the snowmobiles, R.L. Greene, and even the
rigged election kind of vaporized. Then they fell asleep with the porn still
playing on the TV with the sound off and with the guns and ammo on the floor.

Okay, as the months passed leading up to the election Bub’s inner circle of his
friends was starting to get paranoid and stuff. Bub and his friends decided to
spend the last weekend before the election at a motel in Ludington. This was
in order to get the lay of the land and decide what to do and what not to do.

On Friday afternoon Bub told Heidi that he would be going to Ludington
until Sunday night or maybe Monday.

Heidi did not ask for the details. Bub and his friends sometimes liked going off
on their own for a few days as was now the case during football season which
was also hunting season. Heidi did sense that something was amiss but she
kept her own counsel. Bub fucked her before he left and then Heidi was in
the house by herself. 

Okay, before she got married Heidi worked in an old people’s home in Muskegon.
She ran the bingo games of which there was a game in the morning and another
one in the afternoon. 

The old geezers were sort of addicted to bingo. Even though there were no prizes
for the bingo games there was excitement when the winners of a game stood up
and they got their round of applause. 

A few of the geezers were more than one hundred years old. The staff knew
who they were however their ages were kept secret from the other old geezers.
At the beginning of each month there was always a group birthday party for
whoever was born in that month but without the ages being revealed. 

Heidi’s mind drifted to the geezers as she found herself wandering back to the
garage where Bub worked on the snowmobiles late at night while Heidi sat there
and watched him as loud music played. Now in the garage Heidi noticed a sharp
contrast between the brightly colored snowmobiles and Heidi’s memories of the
geezers in Muskegon. 

The snowmobiles represented the youth and sex that Heidi and Bub now had. 
The geezers represented what was inevitably coming down the pike. It was
not only in terms of getting old but of everything in general, like how the election
was rigged against R.L. Greene. 

Okay, the weekend passed swiftly. Lying in bed and watching TV on Saturday
morning and Sunday morning Heidi observed R.L. Greene holding his rallies
all over the country. With the election coming up on Tuesday there were two
or three rallies per day where R.L. Greene was so energetic as he sang
and danced. How did he do it all?

He was fat but he was still full of vim and vigor. 

He referred to New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles as toilets.  

Sometimes he twerked!

He said “hell,” “ass,” “crap,” “shit,” “bullshit,” and when he said “fuck,” or
“fucking,” or “how in the fuck” the crowd cheered him. It brought a smile
to Heidi’s face as she lay there in bed. 

Okay, around four in the afternoon on Monday Heidi was puttering around and
she heard Bub’s truck pulling into the driveway. Then the front door opened
and Bub walked in. 

He looked the worse for wear so after kissing him hello Heidi got a can of beer
from the refrigerator and gave it to Bub. 

Bub sat down at the little table in the no-man’s-land between the kitchen and
the living room. 

He took a swig of beer and said, “Hunkpapa is a rat.”

“What!” 

“You heard me. He told the state police that we’ve got gun violence planned for
tomorrow. As soon as I heard that I got the hell out of there.”

Heidi hurriedly sat down across the little table from Bub. She took a drink from
his beer can and said, “How did you find out Hunkpapa is a rat?”

“He confessed it to us himself. His conscience got to him and he started blubbering.”

Furrowing her brow Heidi asked almost in a whisper, “Did you beat the shit out of him?”

“No. There wasn’t time for that. I got the hell out of there. Hunkpapa had went to the
state police barracks in Muskegon and had gave them everybody’s address and told
them we were planning on violence.”

After a moment of silence he added, “The cops are going to be here before long.
I promise you that.”

They stared at each other. They knew what they had to do. The time had come.
They went upstairs for one last fuck. 

Okay, after fucking they were laying there on the bed for a period of time like two
lumps on a log. No words were spoken. 

While they had been taking off their clothes they had each paused long enough to get
their guns and place them on the floor next to the bed where the guns now lay equally
quiescent as their owners.

During the coitus it occurred to Bub and it stuck in his craw that a man named
E. Talbot R. Gilmore would incredibly enough become the president of the
United States because the fix was in. Somehow that knowledge sexually
supercharged him along with the knowledge that they were going to blow their
heads off. He gave it everything he had in coitus and then he just lay there like
a whale washed up on the beach. 

Heidi just lay there too except there was a paradoxical aspect to it. While they
were fucking she had felt like it was all too much, he was too big, too powerful.
It was how she usually felt. But now that it was over she paradoxically felt that
the coitus had been too powerful but it had also not been powerful enough.
This too was how she usually felt. It had seemed too big and powerful but also
at the same time it had not been big and powerful enough. 

Okay, as the minutes passed Heidi’s body stayed perfectly still even though her
thoughts began racing. What if Bub had been a bear that tore her apart with its
teeth? Or what if she was the one who tore him apart with her teeth? What if they
ripped each other apart like maniacs and ate each other up? She wasn’t the least
bit repulsed by that, on the contrary in fact.

Eventually Heidi lolled her head over to look at Bub. 

She said, “Hun…”

He said, “Yeah, I know.”

Okay, they put a few clothes on as if it would matter to them when their bodies were
found by the state police after they were dead. No words were spoken. Heidi put
on a simple house dress. She wore no bra. Bub put on a black t-shirt and his sweat
pants that he wore while working on snowmobiles. He also held a sweatshirt in
his hands. 

They went and got their guns which Heidi got from her dresser drawer and Bub
got from his man cave. 

They sat on the floor. 

Bub said, “If you don’t mind I’ll go first.” 

Holding his gun in one hand he started to put the sweatshirt over his head
with the other hand. 

Heidi said, “What are you doing there?”

“Well, there’s going to be a mess so I’ll use the sweatshirt over my head.”

“But I want to see it. I want to see the inside of you,” she protested somewhat
seductively and with surprising vehemence. 

“Ha ha, suit yourself, babe,” said Bub. He eschewed the sweatshirt and racked a
round into the chamber of his .45. He put the barrel into his mouth and pulled
the trigger. There was a huge roar with blood and brains sprayed everywhere. 

Heidi put her index finger into some of the blood and tasted it. A lot of people
think that when a dog licks its master’s blood who has died that this is a sign
of insensitivity on the part of the dog but it may actually be the opposite, as
when Heidi tasted it affectionately.

Heidi even thought of tasting Bub’s brain but she hesitated and touched it
but did not taste it. 

With her .38 in her hand she got up and walked to the window of the bedroom.
She looked out into the night. 

Across Baseline Road a gigantic fruit processing plant was being constructed.
It was almost finished. Heidi got down on her knees and opened the window a bit.
As the cold November air rushed in she said fuck and took a couple of shots at
the fruit processing plant. She probably missed but it didn’t matter now. 

When she put the barrel of the gun into her mouth like Bub had done it occurred
to her that what if she shot herself but didn’t die? She would be a vegetable.
But anyway she pulled the trigger with her thumb.

Except R.L Greene won the election! 

Carnets pour l’exile: Aina Alègre, “Réverbérations - Etude 8”: the drummer or the drum? [By Tracy Danison]

“Révérberations - Etude 8”, Aina Alègre: “Girl, I have a lot of uncontrolled movements”. Photo © Martin Argryroglo

As the days go by on pretty much the same dull plan, an exile, as is well known, may get le bourdon, “the bumblebee” or “dull vibes”: up, coffee, listen to the bad news and lies from home, wait for noon, petit blanc, shot at six, carafes of piquet for the rest of the evening, especially if politics comes up.

An exile already with or expecting le bourdon would do well to search out all-round performer choreographer Aina Alègre – I’ve written about her here as a first order energy weaver fitter and genre-breaker: Fitting the right energies instead of matching genres may not be an act of love and resistance but it works well.

Start with her 45-minute solo R-A-U-X-A to get the blood up and moving. As Ry Cooder put it: Folks, it’s a sight! Alègre grabs a body up and shows them how human movement works within the material world -  light, sound and things - to create rhythm, dance and place. To use genre to get at the experience: the difference between Alègre’s dance and, say, the Flamenco gestural from which she picks the most power-infused movement, is that Alègre’s tradition is herself and that she is the movement that animates the world around, not the instrument that plays out an esthetic.

“R-A-U-X-A”, Aina Alègre. Photo © Guillaume-Fraysse

At all times, as her R-A-U-X-A solo shows, Aina Alègre’s creativeness is a universal antidote to the saddening buzz of exile’s existential bagpipe, but her Reverberations 8, because analytical, just one phrase of a series of in-situ performances called ÉTUDES (built around the movements, gestures, dances, figures and narratives associated to tapping or hammering), seems specially designed as therapy for it.

The word “réverbération” points both glimmering light and echo of sound.

Reverberations - Etude 8 takes place, with two exceptions, in silence or, better, in Silence, where all sound comes from. No sound track. No talking. As a set, it is, left-toward center, a handsome full set of drums and full right to center, a projection of meditations or strictures or pensées on a bright-white parking garage breeze-block back wall … – Enter, from far left space, Maenad-like – … setting out, on a repeating loop of commentary and anecdote, Aina Alègre’s ontolo-graphy as a drummer drumming-drum.

The drum set features a clicking metronome clipped to the cymbal stand, which just does not compass Aina Alègre’s moving, moving, moving inner energy, which opens, sustains and closes the show.

 

“Révérberations - Etude 8”, Aina Alègre. Photo © Martin Argryroglo

As I switch my eyes between her energy dance and the ontolography scrolling on the wall, her ontolography speaks of an early fascination with drums… She was born in 1986… Drums as a thing to hide behind and drumming as a thing to put her in contact with the world… In 1992 she was drumming for a band called Gambas, of coming to drumming through an act of will… It is not beating of the drum that creates sound and rhythm but the nimbleness of the energy flow beating it; women with ears, hear … And more that gets beyond me…

When she – Finally! About half-way through the performance – briefly starts rhythming one of two toms mounted on the kick drum  – all of a few minutes – the metronome has disappeared, is notably absent. She riffs with sticks that start with clicks which turns rapidly into drumming, personal verve and then to simple, resonant, pure sense. Later on, she taps the snare. I think then she’s not drumming: she’s looking for the glimmer and echo of her movement on the drum.

I forget how Reverberations 8 ends.

As people were leaving I was sitting looking at the stage hearing the echo of Alègre’s words and I heard many praise her drumming skill. We’d all been enchanted.

____

I saw “Réverbérations - Etude 8” on 8 November at Ménagerie du Verre, which continues strong after the death of Marie Thérèse Allier, its founder and proprietor, on smaller productions of contemporary dance performance. See Beyond Words: “Marie-Thérèse Allier, literary talk, dance-performance criticism” and “Marie-Thérèse Allier’s Ménagerie de Verre: forty years enabling dance otherwise queerly”. I most recently saw “R-A-U-X-A” on 13 November 2024 at Carreau du Temple in the Marais. “R-A-U-X-A” wears very well.

“R-A-U-X-A” places & dates, 2025

29 March 2025 – Conde Duque, Madrid, Espagne

22, 23 & 24 May 2025 - Chaillot – Théâtre national de la danse, Paris, France

Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom) [by David Lehman]

Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom)

          When Charles said that Paul McCartney was “the Perry Como of the 90s,” he meant to disparage McCartney, but I took it as a knock on Perry Como.

          John Ashbery said you didn’t really like pop culture unless you liked “Mairsy Doates.” I make the same claim for “Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom),” Perry Como’s big 1956 hit: America’s answer to Emmanuel Chabrier's 1883 composition, España.

        “ Hot diggity dog” was, by the way, a phrase Al Jolson came up with to express his pleasure in an audience’s approval: “Hot diggity dog! Hot kitty! Hot pussycat! Didn't I tell you you'd love it?”

Grace Cavalieri's Interviews [by Nin Andrews]

NA: I thought of you, Grace, when I attended an interview with Amore Towles, conducted by Jim Ryan, the president of the University of Virginia. The interview was such a disappointment. Ryan’s questions were so generic and uninspired, I wondered if he had even read Towles’ work. I kept thinking, if only Terry Gross or Grace Cavalieri were doing the interview. You are the Terry Gross of poetry.

Afterwards, I began to think about what goes into a good interview. How much research do you do for your interviews?   

GC: I read everything the U.S. POET LAUREATES have ever written before interviews, and for other poets, I know their latest book(s) thoroughly.

NA:  It’s remarkable, this skill you have as an interviewer. What is the secret to conducting a good interview? 

GC: I taught a course on radio once in Foxhall College and the whole course was based on one thing: Only ask questions if you REALLY want to know the answer. Nothing else works.

NA: One thing I love about your interviews: there is often this moment when you are telling the poets something they don’t know about their own poems. You surprise them. In your interview with Lucille Clifton, for example, you tell her that jazz influenced her work. And how. She responds that she loves jazz but has never thought about it. She asks you to explain. And you do, of course, so brilliantly. In that interview and others, I felt the bond you have with the poets/poetry. There is a similar moment in your recent interview with A. B. Spellman, when you correct him about the quality of his early work.

 GC: Thank you. So very much.

NA: What was it like to interview Lucille Clifton?

GC: Lucille, one of the GREATS of our generation, yet, always acted as if she were being noticed for the first time—although she had been an icon early on. Her poetry was very important to her, and its inclusion in “the Canon” was something she was vigilant about. Her life had been one overcoming racial obstacles; so anyone paying attention to her work was always rewarded with her warmth and generosity, and a complete giving of “self.”

NA: Then there’s your interview with Louise Glück. I imagine she was more difficult to interview. I felt as if I understood her better after reading your interview.  I loved this exchange:

 Grace:

I have often said you do something no other poet does as well . . . You can take the emotion, the very fragile feeling, and you build a scenario around it. You build a house around the feeling. Now that sounds like something everyone does, but no one does it exactly as you do. It is misunderstood as autobiography sometime, but it is fiction, except for the feelings. Where did you get your confidence in story?

Louise:

Well, that’s a quite curious question.

Grace:

It’s like fairy tales for adults.

Louise:

It’s actually a rather profound question, and I fear I will not do it justice. It’s immediately starting my thought. But, I think that it’s, in saying to write, you’re going to write that which most concerns you, which most quickens your mind, and then to turn those subjects over with as resourceful and complex a touch as possible.

NA: Can you talk about interviewing Louise Glück?

GC: It is Glück's only radio interview extant (other than the NOBEL) and I know why! The only reason she agreed was because she was one of four Poets Laureate for the Library of Congress Centennial, and the other three agreed. Halfway through the talk she said “I’m tired. I’m stopping.” Knowing this was expected by public radio as a one-hour “Special.” I panicked – but hastily scrambled to ask her a question about Ararat. In that it was early work, she perked up and forgot herself and answered—from there I kept coaxing her up to the hour with questions from early books that got little notice. I love her work.

NA: What is one of your favorite interviews?    

GC: David Keplinger. We just seem to jive some sort of way and it felt like riding on a moonbeam.

NA: I can see that, or rather, hear that. Yes, I love how you aptly defined him as a poet of mercy. During the interview, he reads this beautiful poem from his book, Ice. 

NA: How did The Poet and the Poem come about?  

GC: I was teaching poetry at Antioch College 1970-75 and thought it was fine to have twenty in a class or 200 in a lecture hall, but what if poetry could reach 200,000? Then, I heard a new station going on the air--a JAZZ station--WPFW-FM, perfect for poetry, so I quit Antioch and raised funds for two years as WPFW core staff. Then poetry was prime time every day! After 20 years on-air, I took it to the Library of Congress for national distribution, once again raising the funds for it.  (Do you see a $$ pattern?)

NA: So, you continually raise funds for poetry? You do this on your own?

GC: I am a line-item in no one’s budget, so I write grants every year for THE POET AND THE POEM (47 years so far). Now, I am initiating a new reading series at St John’s College of Annapolis; and I’m raising money to fund that enterprise. No one can really help, because all I have is my passion for the project—and no one else has that.

NA: How many interviews have you done? 

GC: About 3,500. Hard to say but I’ve presented that many for sure. Once a year on WPFW I had
“live” poets and jazz on for 12 hours straight, so lots got presented. And this “Ribbon of Song”
won the CPB silver medal.

NA: You interviewed for 12 hours straight?  

GC: Apologies: I presented for 12 hours straight, producing live poetry and live jazz without interruption. It was a massive preproduction, production and postproduction, organizing all those wild spirits. I think WPFW broadcast it one day a year, for 10 years. Dinner was always late that night.

NA: We poets of the world are so grateful to you. And to Ken. I don’t want to forget to mention your beloved husband, Ken. Did he take part in the interviews when he was alive?

GC: You are making me cry. You, above all, seem to know what Ken was in my life. He was always sitting in the front row; always bankrolling my projects with his Navy salary (he called it ‘government funding for the arts.’) He kept a roof over my head while I played in the sandbox that I loved. Thank you, Nin, for remembering the time you met at the L of C , and now In Memoriam.

NA: Let’s close with a poem for Ken.

Safety by Grace Cavalieri
For Ken Flynn

When you were in the 9th grade and I was in the 7th, you were
a crossing guard keeping order at Junior High School Number 3.
No one
was disobedient when you wore that wide yellow strap across
your chest—
no one bruised another, caused trouble, or so much as threw a
stone—
no one cracked a joke about you, a man in uniform. How did
that yellow vest feed your soul to let you know someday you’d
fly a plane just to feel the power of a strap across your chest.
What
liberation— to know how to be in charge— strong and capable—
flying through gunfire and lightning again and again to come
back to me.
Although we were young, you were 15 and I was 13, since then,
I’ve never
known the world without you. Now I must be 12.

 

"To the Fugu" by Debbie Lim [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Debbie Lim’s “To the Fugu” takes the carnal intimacy of eating to its perilous limit with the seduction of the world’s most lethal delicacy. The poem is in the comic, erudite and slightly unnerving spirit of Donne’s “The Flea,” and here again the act of consumption is associated with the pursuit of love. In “To the Fugu,” however, the risk of failure is life-and-death. Seduction of the coy fish, then, must be undertaken by a master of the craft, and Lim’s speaker is a culinary Casanova, basking in the precariousness of the chase, knowing that one false move will likely end up in fast-moving paralysis. Bon Appétit.

 

 

Debbie Lim received the 2022 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Her chapbook is Beastly Eye (Vagabond Press) and a full-length collection will be published by Cordite Books in 2025. She was born in Sydney, where she lives on Darramuragal land.

To the Fugu

 

I cannot see her tonight

I have to give her up

So I will eat fugu

              – Buson
 

To kiss you is to mimic your own stunned face:

small-mouthed, teeth slightly bared.

But you refuse to flirt, giving nothing beyond

that slope-headed stare: not even girlish aspirations.

And yet, such potential within that provincial body!

This could bloom into something beautiful:

a chrysanthemum or crane.

Eight chances I will give you, for what’s love

without uncertainty, those few tingling doubts –

a growing numbness in the throat.

 
Fugu: Japanese for pufferfish (literally translating to ‘river pig’), which has neurotoxic properties.

Also refers to the notorious dish made from the animal which, if not prepared properly, can cause death by asphyxiation.

 

"To the Fugu" originally appeared in Cordite Poetry Review 50: JACKPOT!