The Best American Poetry

Dear David: : "What do you plan to do once you become a time millionaire?"

 

The cat's out of the bag.

I'm retiring.

The Best American Poetry 2025, edited by Terence Winch, will be the last book in the BAP series under my supervision. That's thirty-eight annual volumes since 1988 plus two "best of the best" retrospectives, for a grand total of forty BAP books. Scribner has also published two anthologies I edited (Great American Prose Poems and The Best American Erotic Poems) and seven individual collections of my poems, including Valentine Place, The Daily Mirror, and When a Woman Loves a Man. It's been a great run.

People ask: "What do you plan to do once you become a time millionaire?"

Hard to answer that hypothetical, but I can affirm with some confidence that my staff and I will continue our BAP web site, our archive, our blog, and our weekly newsletter. An editor's job is never done. Besides which, I will continue to write poems and to play shuffleboard in warm weather. -- DL

The Party (a poem from 1992)

The Party

Everyone started talking about the drama critic

As soon as she left. "Did you see what she

Was wearing?" The Presidents of Harvard, Brown, and Duke

Were quoted deploring recruitment practices current

On their campuses. Would you say that these gentlemen

Are sincere? I would unhesitatingly do so!

I happen to know them and can vouch that each

Is an honorable man, and is married to the mother

Of the eye-turning theater critic whose power

To make or break a play is unparalleled in New York --

Lovely to look at, quick with a quip, easy to love --

Yes, but none of them has the backbone to stand up

To the power-hungry yahoos who want to destroy

The written word in the name of personal liberation!

 

(DL, 1992)

pictures by DL 2023

photo by Elaine Equi

 

 

 

 

Three Uplifting Poets: Denise Duhamel, Virginia Konchan, and Peter Krumbach [by Nin Andrews]

I doubt I’m the only one who has been under the weather, under a cloud or a looming feeling of dread and doubt and disbelief. I’ve had a lingering cold for weeks that’s made my head feel twenty pounds heavier. This morning the doctor prescribed various medications for me, but I fear the cure is not in a medicine bottle.

In my logy state of mind, I’ve been dipping in and out of books and poems and podcasts, and I have come across a few uplifting discoveries.

First, Denise Duhamel's wonderful poem,"How It Will End," was featured on my favorite poetry podcast, Poetry Unbound last week. Everyone should listen to it. It's fabulous. 

Second, I came across this wonderful gem of a poem from The New Yorker by the brilliant Virginia Konchan. She beautifully captures my hotel experience--meaning the ick of hotels-- while playing off of Hopkins "Pied Beauty." I am a huge fan of Konchan's poetry.

Gloria Patri

By Virginia Konchan

Glory be to god for septic tanks, drainage pipes:
for conversions thermodynamic and of the soul.
Glory be to god for this quiet, cheap hotel room:
only music the mini-fridge’s vibratory drone,
creaky plumbing groaning through the walls.
We underestimate the perfect peace of objects.
Before me was another traveller: after I leave,
hundreds of others will arrive, anonymously,
drink sink water from disposable plastic cups,
recline on bleached sheets, stare into the void
of a generic landscape painting across the bed
while contemplating the disaster of their lives.
And, when the alarm wails hours before dawn,
human cusses of angry protest join the chorus
of budget appliances failing before their time.
Why even look at a clock? It’s never good news.
It takes the time it takes, my estimated deadline,
which is likely why no employer would trust me.
I’m at an age where everyone around me is dying.
I’m at an age when the recited script isn’t enough.
Glory be to god for logjams, the antediluvian dark,
for being a supply of goodness outpacing demand
because so many prefer their egos’ endless ranting
to the suggestion of a different narrator or narrative.
Me, I am so clearly incapable of leading a brigade.
I’m glad to accept help in whatever form it comes:
hour of privacy within these semen-sprayed walls,
deadbolt securing my safety from the chaos outside
and the strivings of the people which are everywhere.
I can’t point to you on a map: don’t know your name
or from whence you came. But flames lick the canvas
and I acknowledge my poverty of being and my need.
Glory be to god for this unforgiving mirror, this soap,
this Gideon Bible tucked away in the bedside drawer:
whoever dwells in the secret place of the most High
will abide under the shadow of the Almighty, I read.
A freely given gift whose only precondition is belief,
it was put there for safekeeping, for salesmen like me.

And finally, I recently discovered a new and wonderful prose poet, Peter Krumbach, who makes me laugh. Like this poem from New World Writing:

 

First-Grade Substitute

Good morning, children. Don’t raise your hands yet. That’s right, I’m filling in for Mrs. Davis. Can I share a little secret with you? Yes? Well — I stayed up late last night. That’s right, very, very late. Why do you think I did? Take a guess. No… No… No… You give up? Okay. I was smoking, watching my wife bake a cake. And we both had a taste of what’s called a single molt Scotch. You know, my little hearts, there’s a thing Mrs. Davis probably hasn’t brought up to you yet. It’s called affection. Remember the word. It’s what the moon’s gravity does to the goo in our hearts. Like a tummy ache, but higher in the chest. Just ask your parents when you get home. And while you’re at it, ask them about disappointment, unease, addiction and the happiness of the dead. Now, if you promise not to tell anyone, we’re not going to read anything today. And we’re not going to write anything either. Can I hear you say Yeah? I can’t HEAR you! Say YEAH like you mean it! There you go! Okay, who’s hungry? Guess what’s in that box on my desk? It’s called Medusa’s head — my wife’s work of art. The eyes are maraschinos. The snake-hair is marzipan. Pass along those paper plates. And feel free to eat with your hands.

The Great Chevalier Tour: trough of inspiration for USA folklore ballet? [By Tracy Danison]

"The Great Chevalier Tour", reaching for the sky for Luxemburg, Le Grand Chevalier. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

As part of the premier of The Great Chevalier Tour, M. Chevalier chose the Vanves, France, City Hall salle du marriage for his historic homage to Ballet National Folklorique du Luxembourg the iconic Danse du Pigeon, the trembling heart of the legendary ballet’s founders’, sisters Joséphine and Claudine Bal’s, signature ballet, Josiane la Paysanne (“Josiane the female Peasant”).

The Danse du Pigeon sequence of Josiane is today recognized as the paradigm of Western folklore ballet, was developed and premiered 50 years ago to the very day and under the very same gaze of the very monumental bust of Marianne mounted on today’s back wall.

 

Detail of panel, “Owl with Minerva”, Vanves City Hall, salle du mariage”. Note the clouds. Photo © Tracy Danison

The Bal sisters are said to have been inspired to the Danse du Pigeon choreographic riff by the symbolic owl in the emblematic Minerva figuring on the marriage salle’s central ceiling vault, painted there by the same 19th century artist who did the original cityscapes still decorating the walls, most of which are recognizable today, the city’s mayor said during his opening allocution. The sisters Bal, while native Luxemburgers to the core, worked in nearby Brussels, Belgium. The Vanves mayor, a strikingly attractive man, said his southwest Paris suburb had welcomed the celebrated sisters when devastating floods had temporarily destroyed their more northerly dance atelier, raising some sympathy among the evening’s spectators.  

Dancer (and remarkable prancer) M. Chevalier, dit “Le Grand Chevalier”, also co-director of the National Ballet Folklorique, performed Danse du pigeon upon the parquet between the salle’s antique oak Magistrate’s Bench and a rapt audience.

Le Grand Chevalier’s aplomb, in addition to the elegant en tête bobbling, sidewise en pointe stepping and abruptefancy flights that characterize the celebrated fortress nation’s most renowned dance, included a dramatic evocation of the history and national plomb of the celebrated dukedom.

 

Position #3.5 from celebrated “Wings high” sequence, Le Grand Chevalier, “Danse du Pigeon”. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

The multi-talented co-director was able, through states of undress, including modestly bare shoulders and breasts, a family-style codpiece, multiple revisions of the Iconic dance’s bobbles, pointes, grand jetés, along with enthusiastic audience participation in the symbolic gestures of skyward national ambition, to well characterize the Luxemburg spirit: “Growing like grass, blooming as buds”, as he might well put it.

In the air of the salle, as that truly throbbing Le Grand Chevalier made his final emotional, deeply personal salute, wrapping himself in a magnificent rug of many horses and thus pointing the many grand Chevaliers or Ritters or Horse Soldiers that have pockmarked the little fortress nation’s history, was a growing feeling, in warmer patriotic hearts, that the USA too must have their own Danse du Pigeon written into their iconic ballet, Winning Karen Winning.

Unfortunately, USA pigeons, are now extinct by necessity as well as national right and nature’s red-toothed law. They became, as historians note, the delicious squab that enabled my ancestors to build the limitless farms, factories and penitentiaries that have so long welcomed the rest.

 

Under Marianne's gaze, Monsieur Le Maire de Vanves, Bernard Gauducheau, in presence of co-director Simone Mousset, pays homage to sisters Joséphine and Claudine Bal, founders of Ballet National Folklorique du Luxembourg. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

Reminded that “squab”, “a nestling tumbling to the ground, fat and flabby, a richly slapping sound” reminds of those iconic offerings emblematic of true American contribution, that are, as Lord Byron has put it, “soft, yet cohesive, neither rashly swift nor insolently slow”:  The Turd.

Thus, as spectators filed pensively out of this salle of homage in Vanves, France, they thought, with love and pride, of course, of production values much bigger and better than diminutive Luxemburg could ever offer, for the USA: Dance of the Turd… With its own historic music, Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives… A modernist composer, yes, but also, and in his actual lifetime, a bigly successful salesman and insurance entrepreneur. 

Simone Mousset, does that eminently American “The” in the English title, The Grand Chevalier Tour, suggest that M. Chevalier himself might be tempted, munificently, as so many others, to perform the sure-to-be-a-classic Great American Dance of the Turd?

___________

Performance Detail

I saw the premier of “The Great Chevalier Tour” – billed as the “Occasion for Monsieur Chevalier to visit all the places which have contributed to the success of the Ballet National Folklorique, with this love letter, tender and intimate, addressed as much to the people of Vanves as to Luxemburg, and danced by one of its most talented prodigal sons” – 7 March 2025 at Mairie de Vanves, in presence of Monsieur Le Maire de Vanves, Bernard Gauducheau. “The Great Chevalier Tour” is the brainchild of choreographer performer Simone Mousset, written by Lou Cope
with historic music composed and recorded by Maurizio Spiridigliozzi and set plan by Mélanie Planchard in collaboration with Simone Mousset and Lewys Holt.

___________

Festival Artdanthé

Simone Mousset’s “The Grand Chevalier Tour” premiered the 2025 edition of Artdanthé, founded in 1998, a mixed-discipline dance-performance festival featuring, especially, creations by emerging artists. Notable Artdanthé alumni include Boris Charmantz, named director of the Tanztheater Wuppertal in 2022, and Jeanne Candel, whose latest work was discussed in Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in September 2024 (Rockets, space, place, sets and the power of theater: Jeanne Candel’s “Fusées”).

The Spymaster as Vacuum-Cleaner Salesman [by DL]

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And the sad man is cock of all his jests.

-- George Herbert

>>>

Epigraph to Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana (1958). The protagonist -- an English widower living in pre-Castro Cuba -- is a vacuum-cleaning salesman named Wormwold, as unattractive a name as Greene could manage. In order to satisfy the demands of intelligence officers in a gray faceless London building, Wormwold dupes them by creating "purely notional spies" and killing them off, "like a bad novelist preparing an effect." (Alec Guiness plays him in the movie.) The book is in a comic tenor but is less a spoof than a forcible statement on the extent to which military intelligence work and espionage fiction resemble one another.

-- DL

And the sad man is cock of all his jests.

-- George Herbert

>>>

Epigraph to Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana (1958). The protagonist -- an English widower living in pre-Castro Cuba -- is a vacuum-cleaning salesman named Wormwold, as unattractive a name as Greene could manage. In order to satisfy the demands of intelligence officers in a gray faceless London building, Wormwold dupes them by creating "purely notional spies" and killing them off, "like a bad novelist preparing an effect." (Alec Guiness plays him in the movie.) The book is in a comic tenor but is less a spoof than a forcible statement on the extent to which military intelligence work and espionage fiction resemble one another.

-- DL

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-Six): Billy Collins [by Angela Ball]

In Praise of Ignorance

On a bench one afternoon
in a grassy park in Minneapolis,
I realized that what I liked best
about the dogs of Minneapolis
is they have no idea they’re in Minneapolis.

The same could be said
of the dogs of Houston or Philadelphia,
it occurred to me on the slow walk
back to my hotel, but I was
in no mood to be distracted.

I’m sticking with the dogs of Minneapolis,
I resolved as the elevator
rose to my floor, just as they stick
with their owners, the natives of Minneapolis,
most of whom know exactly where they are.

Alone in my room on the 17th floor,
I surveyed the vast prospect below me—
the slithery river and hills beyond
and the bluish hills beyond those hills—

in the manner of those English poets
who loved to regard the world from a height.
One of them even had a witty epitaph
inscribed upon the tombstone of his hound.
                                                                     -Billy Collins

Billy Collins's most recent book of poems is Water, Water.  Forthcoming is Dog Show, a collection of his dog poems with accompanying canine watercolor portraits. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 

Billy Collins’s arresting “In Praise of Ignorance” begins with a revelation: “I realized what I liked best about the dogs of Minneapolis/ is they have no idea they are in Minneapolis.”

Animals are often said to be devoid of self-consciousness (not true) to live only in the moment (also not true), and/or not to experience duration when we leave and do not return for many hours (currently being disproven by research). In comparison to such metaphysics, Collins’ revelation seems ridiculously inconsequential. But is it?

Collins’ aperçu perhaps gets at the source of the bounce in a young dog’s walk—they simply travel, guided by a leash, unconstrained by geography. Unlike adult people, who remain aware of longitude, latitude, and the whole awkward contraption of distances, dogs are true cosmopolitans. They are anywhere and everywhere.

John Ashbery has said that he doesn’t think his thought operations are that different from anyone else’s. This assertion shows him capable of dramatizing thought in universal ways. Perhaps Collins does the same thing, though in a more direct manner. When he says, “I’m sticking with the dogs of Minneapolis,” he celebrates and satirizes human chauvinism, the basis of all fandom. And he supports his choice by likening it to the loyalty of dogs, who are, in a way, revealed here as models for living.

Like Ashbery’s, Collins’s poems often both celebrate and parody human thought processes. Here, in characterizing an idee fixe, Collins chooses graphic simplicity.

His poem has a Romantic peripatetic impetus—its recognition takes place outdoors, in nature, and continues as he strolls back to his hotel room. He compares himself to the Lake poets, humorously satirizing his own pretensions—a joke that becomes explicit in the poem’s last two stanzas. The same humor is evident in a short biopic made on Collins several years ago, after he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. A camera is trained on him as he pilots his car—he comments later that he was “afraid of looking like a bad driver.”

Collins’s description of the view from his 17th-floor window is both lyrically evocative and subtly satirical of Romantic endlessness--“the slithery river and the hills beyond / and the bluish hills beyond those hills. . .”—and of those “English poets/who loved to regard the world from a height.” “One of them,” he says, “even had a witty epitaph inscribed upon the tombstone of his hound.”

Collins’s ending is, of course, a sly reference to that most satirical of Romantic poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron. The internet tells us that “Epitaph to a Dog” was written in 1808 in honor of Byron’s Landseer dog, Boatswain. A tribute of some twenty-six lines of heroic couplets, it is inscribed on Boatswain’s monument (grander than Byron’s own in the same park), and includes the following sentiment:

 

     . . .the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend

     The first to welcome, foremost to defend

     Whose honest heart is still his master’s own

     Who labors, fights, breathes for him alone

     Unhonor’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth

     Deny’d in Heaven the Soul he held on earth*

 

Byron is reported to have nursed Boatswain to the end of his illness—rabies—with no thought of being bitten and infected.

That the poem ends by tacitly endorsing the grandeur of dogs in no way subtracts from its humor. It simply completes, in a surprising turn to human and canine history, the poem’s “praise of ignorance”—a praise both funny and solemn, consummately human and humane.

*The website The Classical Quill gives encomiums to dogs a classical pedigree, quoting the Greek teacher Hermongenes of Tarsus (fl. AD 550) on how to write encomia of animals.

Douglas Murray on Israel, Hamas and the Future of Democracy

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“Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing.” – Douglas Murray

On October 7, a flare went up, and by October 8, it became clear exactly where Douglas Murray was standing – erupting into the world’s conversation about Hamas’ attack on Israel, pointedly, insistently and with utter moral clarity.

“If you don’t believe that Israel has the right to stop a group that has proposed repeatedly . . . that it wants to annihilate Israel . . ., then of course you don’t believe Israel has the right to live. You believe Israel has the right to die.”

Douglas Murray might not be Jewish. But, led by his guiding ethos that one truth can puncture a thousand lies, he is unwilling to accept the dishonest criticism being leveled at the Jewish state.

In his new book, On Democracies and Death Cults, the #1 international bestselling author and cultural commentator, reveals what he saw and learned reporting in Israel after October 7. Mr. Murray explains how many in the West are not only condemning Israel to perpetual attack but emboldening forces that seek to undermine democracy across the globe.

The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center welcomes Douglas Murray to discuss why the conflict is not the simplistic leftist tale of oppressor versus oppressed but a clash between a thriving multi-racial democracy that values life and a death cult bent on its destruction.

A prominent reporter whose work has taken him not only to Israel, Gaza and Lebanon, but to Iraq, North Korea, northern Nigeria and Ukraine, Douglas Murray is the author of eight books. Mr. Murray is Associate Editor of The Spectator and a prolific debater; he is also a columnist at the New York Post and frequently writes for The Sun, The Telegraph, National Review and The Free Press. Over the past year, he has written scores of dispatches from Israel and spoken widely about the conflict.

Murray will be in conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe, a 21st-century sage who is widely considered among the very best Jewish teachers in America. He has taught Torah to Hollywood stars, scandalized his colleagues by opining that the Exodus didn’t happen the way we’ve been taught, caused a major stir when he quit Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group and wrote a best-selling book optioned for a movie by Warner Bros.

Monday, April 7       8:00 pm Eastern >>> 

Douglas Murray at Temple Emanu-El.

Michael Earl Craig: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

________________________________________________________________

Chunk of Sea Glass

 

Becky I’m typing this in your study.

It’s a rainy fall day and for some reason

I want to type “you’re in Japan” and

don’t know where your man and kid are.

Man and kid feels a little crass but

it’s okay because I’ve let myself into

your house and I’m weak, and drunk, and

a little hungry, looking at a sizable chunk

of blue-green sea glass here on your desk,

considering the weight it exerts upon the desk

and the desk’s equal (inverse) force upon its base.

 

A thunderstorm’s just passed through,

I type that. And one of your windows

is cracked slightly—the study sips the balmy

air. The room smells like old books.

There’s a red wig on a wig rack,

a heavy black stapler that feels like a pistol,

a water glass with an inch of water in it.

 

Soon Becky I will recline in your recliner,

your cat sprawled on my abdomen,

making it difficult to nap. But I’ll nap.

And when I wake I’ll still have the house

to myself I am sure. And all the browns

and beiges and burnt mustards of your study

will resume again their quiet work on me,

coaxing me along on my journey without you

(who may or may not be in Japan), your man

or your kid.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Earl Craig’s most recent (of six) books of poems are Woods and Clouds Interchangeable and Iggy Horse. He has published poems in various magazines, journals, and anthologies—Poetry, The Believer, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry (2014, 2022) among them. He was Poet Laureate for the State of Montana (2015–17) and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow (2021). He lives near Livingston, Montana, where he shoes horses for a living.    [Author photo by Susan Thomas.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                  Heinrich Campendonk, Sitzender Mann mit Katze, 1919 .       

 

Let's take a bow. . .

Losing it [getting it] over a non adhesive barricade tape [By Tracy Danison]

“Losing it” by Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King. Photo © Christian Altorfer

Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King get it just right with Losing it, their sound and dance performance exploring the experience of any war zone, thinking especially of the experience of the Gaza war and events on the West Bank. Losing it uses voice, synthesizer and about 30 feet of 3-inch wide green barricade tape stretched across a shallow stage. The performance succeeds as good esthetics and dance performance.

Potential exiles should keep it in mind as good dance performance.

In imagining how many ways a body can dance around a barricade tape, Samaa Wakim and  Samar Haddad King get at what ought to be a home truth: separation offers no solution to conflict (even if both individuals and groups can persist a long, long, long time in a state of extreme conflict and call it living).

Haddad King shapes performance space and Wakim does performer movement. There is a natural synchronization to the piece that points to what I think must be a friendship.

“Kingdom of Noise” came to mind from the first not very loud sounds of Losing it.

I had always thought “Kingdom of Noise” one of the many traditional epithets for Hell, like “Tophet” or “Tartarus”. Nope. It’s C.S. Lewis.

It’s hard to imagine Lewis deliberately saying something sensible, so, for me, from now on, it’s Haddad King what gives “Kingdom of Noise” the sense of Hell. With a couple of whistles and squawks, she manages to create a sound composition that actually provoked in me a remembered stink of diesel exhaust, heat and frightened people. It seems to have subjugated those who do not have such memories, too.

Within the Kingdom of Noise, Samaa Wakim, a very good dancer, performs the fullness of the the non adhesive barricade tape. In space: over and around, under, over it, touching it, pressing it, bulging it, but never getting too far from or too close to [it: facing reinforced concrete blockades with matching blast-resistant agent booths]. In gesture and style: small and careful, calculated shuffle: a calibrated equilibrist, taut, always aware that the tightrope is three inches wide and sharp on both edges [and keeping in mind the kid don’t get shot up like a Swiss cheese as she is slipping off and falling the foot and half to the ground].

“Losing it” by Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King. Photo © Christian Altorfer

Given the sturdy long-lastingness of the extruded polyester of barricade tape, Wakim could very well have been dancing with the first non adhesive barrier tape ever extruded. The thing was invented in the early 1960s, just in time to rope off the path of civil rights marches – that demand for inclusion as well as an end to Jim Crow exclusion that also raised up woman rights and generally, fairness.

Perhaps a sign of quantum entanglement, in the early 1960s, my Dad had rigged up a model silicon extruder in our basement; he was a processing engineer and very keen on staying hands-on.  Born in the sign of Cancer, it appears I am also a native of extrusion – like Wakim and Haddad King.

Watching Wakim turn and twist and pace so beautifully around the extruded non adhesive barricade tape, I realize that while Wakim and Haddad King have actually been born into it, non adhesive barricade tape and I have been, one way or another, cohabiting most of my adult life. Unfortunately, non adhesive barricade tape and I are unlikely to co-terminate: the ethic of separation seems to be growing from bloody strength to bloody strength.

Wakim has her barricade tape as green, as in “green line”, “Palestine-Israel”. I see that.

But, in some measure, thanks to the success of her and Haddad King’s piece, my non adhesive barricade tapes say things like “Whites Only”, “Economy Class”, “Other Passports”, “Police Line Do Not Cross”… And everybody obeys them unless somebody takes them down.

If, in the future, and think on this, if you please, a blazon is needed for our time, it could very well be “non adhesive barricade tape, per bend and bend sinister, embattled”.

Inclusion not separation is the thing we seem to want to fail at.

________

 

I saw Losing it by Samaa Wakim et Samar Haddad King as a feature of the Festival Faits d’Hiver at Théâtre de la Bastille on 7 February 2025. Co-created, choreographed and performed by

Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King, the 7 February performance featured lighting by Cord Haldun and Music  from Turathy (album Autostrad). Losing it was first produced in 2021 at Festival Theaterformen, Hanover, Germany, as part of the Goethe Institute’s 2019-2020 “Un|controlled Gestures” project.

The Romanticism of Edna St. Vincent Millay: "For unremembered lads. . ."

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

 

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

 

 

Millay's genius was to condense the essence of Romanticism into sonnet form. She was a peerless sonneteer. -- DL

I. B. Singer on the sexual organs

 

 

"The sexual organs are the most sensitive organs of the human being. The eye or the ear seldom sabotage  you. An eye will not stop seeing if it doesn't like what it sees, but the penis will stop functioning if he doesn't like what he sees. I would say that the sexual organs express the human soul more than any other limb of the body. They are not diplomats. They tell the truth ruthlessly."

-- Isaac Bashevis Singer

"No truth to the rumor" at Columbia

We're grateful to Adela Quant (not her real name) who leaked this exchange of correspodence to us.

 

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To the Office of the President:

 

Don't you think that the university should discipline the masked hooligans who disrupt classes, occupy buildings, destroy property, injure staff, and make crude anti-Semitic slurs to intimidate Jewish students? Even the New York Times reports: Some Jewish Students Are Targeted as Protests Continue at Columbia." Not just Fox news. Did you know that Hamas files show it spies on ordinary Palestinians? Furthermore, the former co-president of a Columbia Barnard Sikh Group says she was forced out for being pro-Israel.  And now this. And now this. Are you in favor of Hamas?

Marvin Butler SAS '93
>>>

 

<<<

Dear Marvin:

I am writing in response to your concern over recent events on campus. I want to assure you that your thoughts and concerns are being shared with University leadership. I appreciate that you feel passionately about this situation and feel strongly about the University. I hope the fact is not lost on you that my first three sentences all begin with "I" and yet there is no individual signatory.

 

There is no truth to the rumor that "recent events" and "this situation" are as they are portrayed. Consider the tendency of the media, or certain elements of it, to distort such events and to allow itself to be exploited by bad actors.  There is also no truth to the rumor that unabashedly pro-Hamas propagadists work actively on our campus. Despite our academic safeguards of free expresion even for those whose views are most odious, the rumor that Jewish students at Columbia are required to wear enlarged yellow stars made of cloth as opposed to making a clothes-optional choice as in the case of masks is false..

 

Secondly, polls show us 68% of you are aganst calling in the politce under any circumstances. 

 

Nor is there truth to the rumor that the university is changing its name to something less Occidental, less colonial, and more consonant with the values of what we used condescendingly to call the third world. As President Armstrong has stated, Columbia does not tolerate antisemitism, discrimination, harassment, or intimidation against members of our community. We have taken steps to heighten and clarify our disciplinary processes through the new Office of Institutional Equity, appointing a new Rules Administrator, and strengthening the capabilities of our Public Safety Office as we work in tandem with the NYPD and other law enforcement. As we move forward, our Campus Climate Collaborative and Task Force on Antisemitism continue to work to identify and assess how Jewish members of the Columbia community feel, review University policies, and propose methods to support Jewish people at Columbia. 

 

I hope this offers additional insightful context and further understanding of how Columbia is working to promote a culture of civility and empathy where everyone feels safe and respected. Your commitment to improving the campus community is vital as we persevere through challenging times, and your insight is essential.

 

Sincerely,

The Columbia University Alumni Relations  & Development Team

>>>

The Romanticism of Dylan Thomas

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

-- the sublime last stanza of "Fern Hill"

"September 5": The Day That Terrorism Became a Global Spectator Sport

The Day That Terrorism Became a Global Spectator Sport ‘September 5’ is a gripping, disturbing and true-to-life depiction of ABC’s coverage of the Palestinian terror attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics reviewed for TABLET by Judith Miller https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/terrorism-a-global-spectator-sport

100 Best Poetry Blogs and Websites in 2025

The best Poetry blogs from thousands of blogs on the web and ranked by relevancy, authority, social media followers & freshness. Export full list with email contacts of bloggers in a spreadsheet or csv file.

Poetry Blogs

Here are 100 Best Poetry Blogs you should follow in 2025. Subscribe in one place on FeedSpot Reader.

1. The Best American Poetry

Blog https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/ + Follow Blog
The Best American Poetry. The news of the world, brought to you by poets. 
Email ****@gmail.com
Facebook Followers 2.3KTwitter Followers 22.4K Domain Authority 54

https://bloggers.feedspot.com/poetry_blogs/

francine j. harris: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________

Portrait of My Father Mocking Sammy Davis Jr.

 

He widens an eye and gets down on one knee.

He accepts a sliver of silver from my mother and kisses

her behind. He calls her Frank Sinatra. He calls our house

 

the Rat Pack. He steps away from his piano into the kitchen with a carrot

and now he is Nat King Cole. He is singing “Mona Lisa” on a tap

while he holds my mother’s hand. She is the head

 

of Capitol Records. He could do this every day

for 15 minutes. He forever sings to the stalk over jungle plants

buzzing along the windowsill. They go hand over hand

 

in a photo album. His pompadour is tight. He leans out the window crooning.

He hollers at all the little snakes, get back. Now he is bundling up in sweaters.

Now we all eat chocolate pudding. He hates the way we curse.

My father is silvering up his tap shoes. He overdoses on

 

a living room couch. Now, he has a Duke Maestro on a poster.

He’s super funny with a self-demure. In his nod he is Richard Pryor,

bluing in an afro flame. He jokes about his body

on fire. Now, if only he could remember his mother. He crumbles into

 

Sunday morning on stage. Suddenly scatting over oatmeal, now he is

Al Jarreau. We, she, and he take five. We are strumming into stutter

on guitar. But now he is turning over the dark into Miles. He turns his back

 

to my mother’s fading hue. He is blowing holes into living

room walls. His popped lapels are flattening. Flattering

his jacket is leather and Shaft. He sports the Private Eye Duke

 

slumped over. He takes up a shotgun to the neighborhood

in blue. Here he is, the mirage of a sober pimp.

He sends my mother off to the mailbox. One last honey

go get my money. The snow is full of snow and maroon.

 

He is Bryant Gumbel up at sunrise. Keeping his news

tuned to the network. He is high and he can’t stop

smiling. None of his teeth go missing. He is painting his mouth

 

blue and dressing in dresses. My father flips Flip Wilson. No

one will see his second act. The weather is full of beautiful

muppets. My father is Ben Vereen.

 

He tips his bowler, and he lifts the sky.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

francine j. harris is the author of three collections, including Here is the Sweet Hand, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Originally from Detroit, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is Professor of English at the University of Houston and serves as Consulting Faculty Editor at Gulf Coast.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                       Valentina Bautista, The Rat Pack

 

George Bilgere's "Poetry Town": Poem of the Day, Feb 28,, 2025

Click here to read about George Bilgere and to subscribe to his "Poetry Town" newsletter. An excerpt from today's follows.

Here’s a poem for today, February 28, 2025

February 7

by David Lehman

It used to be Garibaldi’s, then it was Sardinia, now it’s Greek & it’s still the worst restaurant in the city, so naturally we go there instead of Suburbia at the Angelika, & Robert orders octopus, which is rank, while Lucie orders a Greek salad. “Ugh,” she says, because she usually likes feta cheese but this stuff tastes like goat cheese, which she hates. “But Lucie,” I say, “feta cheese is goat cheese.” She thinks I’m joking. “Let’s ask the waitress,” Robert says. We bet the tab on it. And when the waitress (name of Tricia) confers with her colleagues, comes back with the hot chocolate, and says, “The consensus is, we’re not sure,” I knew I had my poem of the day. __________ From The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry, Scribner Poetry, 2000.

Why I Chose This Poem For this book, Lehman set himself the task of writing a poem each day for a year. In a poem like this one, it’s almost like he was waiting for the poem to find him. And it did, in the form of Tricia. Poets, we should give this a try. An aside: this poem, from 2000, could never happen today, thanks to the curse of the omnipresent smartphone.

Boys, Beware of the Bad Girl! [by Mitch Sisskind]

How ironic that, as intellectuals and aesthetes, those of us who live by words may underestimate the power of the words we speak or write. Just the other day I was in pleasant conversation with a talented versifier when he happened to mention the name "Lilith." Although he was referring to the radical feminist magazine that may or may not still exist, there is no doubt that the real Lilith still exists just as she has since the time of Adam. And to utter her name without quickly pretending to spit twice over one's right shoulder is asking for serious trouble.

Lilith (spit, spit!) as some of you may know, was Adam's first wife. When she affronted the Creator by insisting on "unorthodox" relations with her husband, she was banished from Eden and spent the next 500 years at the bottom of the ocean. Finally she surfaced, determined to wreak as much havoc as possible in human domestic affairs.

When Lilith hears a man mention her name, she surmises (quite correctly!) that a secret wish for her appearance exists in the speaker. Of course, as with any repressed wish, the poor fool may not be aware of his own desire. That's why Lilith always appears in disguise. The new temp at the office, the Fedex delivery girl, the grad student in need of help with her thesis -- any or all of these may be Lilith. But those potential incarnations are relatively easy to resist. Lilith is much more dangerous when she manifests as a man's own wife!

If a woman appears and sounds like his wife, a man -- and especially a poet, naive by nature -- may assume the woman is his wife indeed: "If it looks like a duck..." etc.  He may also forget that he spoke the forbidden name that morning in Starbucks. Well, he's in for a surprise -- and the worst part is, Lilith is dangerously addictive. Not only is she erotically exciting but she's also an excellent conversationalist.

There are two solutions for this problem, both recommended by the ancient sages of the Talmud. First, don't speak the name in the first place! Just refer to the Bad Girl and any educated person will know who you're talking about. Second, create a secret code with your wife that only the two of you know -- an arbitrary phrase like "plate of shrimp"  from the film Repo Man. If you sense anything unusual in your conjugal affairs, demand the password. If it's not forthcoming, fill a bucket with water and pour it on the demon woman. Lilith has hated water ever since her five hundred years in the ocean.

The images above are just two of Lilith's infintely various disguises. On top, of course, is Veronica from Archie Comics; below is a seemingly innocous dental hygenist. Poets! Choose Betty, not Veronica -- and floss daily!

from the archive; first posted December 5, 2014

How ironic that, as intellectuals and aesthetes, those of us who live by words may underestimate the power of the words we speak or write. Just the other day I was in pleasant conversation with a talented versifier when he happened to mention the name "Lilith." Although he was referring to the radical feminist magazine that may or may not still exist, there is no doubt that the real Lilith still exists just as she has since the time of Adam. And to utter her name without quickly pretending to spit twice over one's right shoulder is asking for serious trouble.

Lilith (spit, spit!) as some of you may know, was Adam's first wife. When she affronted the Creator by insisting on "unorthodox" relations with her husband, she was banished from Eden and spent the next 500 years at the bottom of the ocean. Finally she surfaced, determined to wreak as much havoc as possible in human domestic affairs.

When Lilith hears a man mention her name, she surmises (quite correctly!) that a secret wish for her appearance exists in the speaker. Of course, as with any repressed wish, the poor fool may not be aware of his own desire. That's why Lilith always appears in disguise. The new temp at the office, the Fedex delivery girl, the grad student in need of help with her thesis -- any or all of these may be Lilith. But those potential incarnations are relatively easy to resist. Lilith is much more dangerous when she manifests as a man's own wife!

If a woman appears and sounds like his wife, a man -- and especially a poet, naive by nature -- may assume the woman is his wife indeed: "If it looks like a duck..." etc.  He may also forget that he spoke the forbidden name that morning in Starbucks. Well, he's in for a surprise -- and the worst part is, Lilith is dangerously addictive. Not only is she erotically exciting but she's also an excellent conversationalist.

There are two solutions for this problem, both recommended by the ancient sages of the Talmud. First, don't speak the name in the first place! Just refer to the Bad Girl and any educated person will know who you're talking about. Second, create a secret code with your wife that only the two of you know -- an arbitrary phrase like "plate of shrimp"  from the film Repo Man. If you sense anything unusual in your conjugal affairs, demand the password. If it's not forthcoming, fill a bucket with water and pour it on the demon woman. Lilith has hated water ever since her five hundred years in the ocean.

The images above are just two of Lilith's infintely various disguises. On top, of course, is Veronica from Archie Comics; below is a seemingly innocous dental hygenist. Poets! Choose Betty, not Veronica -- and floss daily!

from the archive; first posted December 5, 2014

Nobody is getting off this train: interpreting “Qui Som”, a performance by Baro d’Evel [By Tracy Danison]

“Qui som” by Baro d'Evel. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Not too terribly long ago I was in a pretty fancy café on Paris' famous île Saint Louis. I fell into a chat with an American guy. He told me that France had a problem. That problem, this guy said, is in Saint Denis, a big suburban town to the north of the île Saint Louis.

From his chair, the guy portentously pointed as due north as he could.

I’m a smart-ass guy, sometimes, so I said, “The Monarchy”?

The basilica in Saint Denis, the city itself, is the burial ground of French royalty as well as the site of a lot of public housing for immigrants, mostly from former French colonies and current overseas territories, and since the 2024 Olympics, two, yes, I have written "two", public swimming pools for its lucky and remarkably stable population of 113,000. The tombstones in Saint Denis, by the way, go a ways towards showing that, even way way back, in the minds of its peoples “Europe” is a place that extends from Cape Finisterre on the Atlantic to that place somewhere above the Caspian Sea where people mistake oars for threshing sticks.

However, I asked my smart-aleck question because I grew up knowing that, because I’m so obviously what I am and he thus thinks that he can say any old word that begins with “n-“ around a guy like me that he could also confide some Azimovian “psychohistory” about “Islam” and “Western Civilization”.

Guys like him and me get our historiography from the Foundation series.

As I hoped, my smart-alecky question farted a little Hegelian doubt between us.

Politely resentful, the American guy-just-like-me, hesitated. I was able to get away.

You would think, though, heavily armed as we all are in our current head-long rush for some brand of Civilizational Apocalypse, Headstrong Ignorance himself would have begun to realize that, at the very least, the fault is not in the stars. Or that guys-like-me might do well to suspend the traditional belief that because a man can afford an over-priced cup of coffee, his fulminations can’t possibly be just plumb dumb or crazy.

But, no.

“Qui som” by Baro d'Evel. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Indeed, the players of the performance troupe Baro d’Evel from Catalonia brought the home truth here home to me a couple weeks back with their lively and hopeful piece Qui Som (“Who are we – Who we are”) at Maison de la Culture de Seine Saint Denis, Bobigny or MC93. As a fact, the theater is not all that far from where guys-like-me such the American psychohistorian above, are claiming that “Islam” is skulking around those old royal tombstones, muttering the Coran, if not snorting coke. Anyway, not working.

Qui Som put it this way: “Nobody is getting off this train”. The phrase is meant as a call to solidarity in the face of catastrophe, of course. But I understood it as more like the Army marching song: “Aint’ no use lookin’ down/ain’t no discharge on the ground/Ain’t no use in lookin’ back, Jody got your Cadillac!/Ain’t no use in goin’ home, Jody got your girl an’ gone! Airborne! Airborne! Airborne”. Pugnacious-sounding resignation to the orphan yonder with his gun.

I rather liked being a soldier and I liked Baro d’Evel and Qui Som but both a train I can’t get off and Jody running off with my girl leave me depressed.

Indeed, don’t get me wrong. Qui Som is a really good show. Well done, Baro d’Evel! Their shtick is good: a flustered MC with the ability to get on with the show in spite of messy slip ups into an imponderable slime and into a sea of plastic trash, of much disaster and missed opportunity… A cast able to turn clay pots into hats and those hats into masks and masks into…

Well, it seems, there is little bit of magic still in this world of autonomous fighting drones and precision strikes that kill hecatombs…

All hail the ancestor Vaudeville, the messiah of the modern era: where apocalypse can amuse as well as kill…

Qui Som ends with a marching band. Spectators are invited to join a dancing fête in the theater foyer. The Baro d’Evel troupe have it right. Everything is still possible. But.

Usually ready to hang around, especially at MC93, where the bar-cafeteria is really gemütlich, I instead slink away, take my bike, don’t bother with my wet poncho, fade into the pouring rain.

It comes down to this: what do you do when a body is not sure how to frame the answer because a body is not sure what the operative question is or even if there is an operative question?

And, then: Ain’t no use in lookin’ down, nobody is getting off this train until it gets to where it’s going.

__________

I saw “Qui Som”, created and directed by Camille Decourtye and Blaï Mateu Trias at the MC93, Maison de la Culture de Seine Saint Denis, Bobigny, 25 January 2025, performed by members of the troupe Baro d’Evel, including Lucia Bocanegra, Noëmie Bouissou, Camille Decourtye, Miguel Fiol, Dimitri Jourde, Chen-Wei Lee, Blaï Mateu Trias, Yolanda Sey, Julian Sicard, Marti Soler, Maria Carolina Vieira, Guillermo Weickert with participation of Luc Delafrênée and Yasmin Nahioul of the La petite troupe de la MC93.

Pal Johnny, Our Greatest Story Writer [by David Lehman]

John O'Hara, author of "How Can I Tell You?" -- one of the subtlest stories in the language -- among other masterpieces, has one memorable sentence in his Hollywood novel, The Big Laugh (1962). It is said to the movie actor Hubert Ward, the book's protagonist:

<< There's more people see you in one picture than ever saw all of Shakespeare's actors in his whole lifetime. >>

I am reading Geoffrey Wolff's admirable biography of  Mr O'Hara, The Art of Burning Bridges, and I am inspired to read or re-read O'Hara's short stories. No one, not even Hemingway, can so brilliantly tell a story primarily in dialogue form. I greatly enjoy certain of O'Hara's novels, such as Appointment in Samarra and Ten North Frederick, and someday I will get around to reading them all. But in the genre of the short story, O'Hara is the best we have.

John O'Hara's Stories are available in a Library of America edition put together with an introduction by Charles McGrath, formerly the deputy editor of The New Yorker, in which magazine O'Hara published most of his best work. Of O'Hara, Lionel Trilling wrote in the introduction to Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara (1956), “The work of no other American writer tells us so precisely, and with such a sense of the importance of the communication, how people look and how they want to look, where they buy their clothes and where they wish they could buy their clothes, how they speak and how they think they ought to speak.”

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

from the archive; first posted January 25, 2020.

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

from the archive; first posted January 25, 2020.