The Best American Poetry

Rogues' Gallery [by David Lehman]

From The American Scholar:

<<<
There’s a special onus on the villains in crime dramas. They have to be wicked, but they also have to make that wickedness interesting. Whether by being singular in some way, or by virtue of fine acting, or because what they do is so despicable, they offend even those of us who might ordinarily root for the scoundrel. Then again, some of them simply impress us with their roguish charm or sharp-toothed wit.

Who are the greatest rogues, then? Many can be found in Hitchcock’s thrillers, in which the culprit can be two people, himself and his murderous mother (Anthony Perkins in Psycho). Or there is madness in the man’s method, and he steals every scene he’s in (Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train). Or the villains are forces of nature wreaking havoc on humanity, which has mistreated them along with the rest of the planet (the birds in The Birds). But let’s omit Hitchcock’s bad guys, as well as the homicidal freaks in movies starring Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, who might otherwise dominate the list.
>>>

From “Rogues Gallery” by David Lehman in The American Scholar. Click here for the article, which includes a list of some of my favorite miscreants, with links to the films’ trailers. The picture above is of Charles Boyer tormenting Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944), which donated a word to the language. Did I leave out your favorite culprits? Charles Laughton in The Big Clock maybe, or Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil? As with all of my Talking Pictures columns, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Ashbery on Paris (and Ellsworth Kelly)

from Ellsworth Kelly, Plant Drawings (Matthew Marks Gallery, 1992), Essay by John Ashbery. Unpaginated. About the life of an American expatriate in Paris:

          "I suspect that in this burgeoning period of his art the limiting force was Paris itself, that dome of intuitive appreciation of one's own powers of observation, a specific place and time where `some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, -- for that moment only,' in Pater's famous formulation, and where, as Gertrude Stein said, Americans can discover what it means to be American. One can never predict what form the generating impulse will take: in my case (my own years in Paris came just after Kelly's) I found my poetry being more `influenced' by the sight of the Paris phenomenon of clear water flowing in the street gutters, where it is (or was) diverted or dammed by burlap sandbags moved about by workmen, than it was by the French poetry I was learning to read at the time."

On Translating Baudelaire's Prose Poems for "The Paris Review"

In Baudelaire’s “La fausse monnaie,” which I have rendered as “Fake Money,” the poet is outraged when his companion gives a counterfeit coin to a beggar. Translating the poem, I aimed for a coherent and well-written narrative rather than a literal version.

The phrase la criminelle jouissance in the last paragraph is difficult to translate because we have no English equivalent of jouissance. The standard definition, enjoyment, leaves out the secondary sense of the word, sexual climax. Critical theorists have made much of jouissance and connected the term itself with a transgressive impulse.

My initial solution: “joyous criminality.” Thus, for the French Je lui aurais presque pardonné le désir de la criminelle jouissance dont je le supposais tout à l’heure capable, I had: “I might almost have acquitted him for desiring the experience of joyous criminality that I once supposed him capable of.” This is exact, if clumsy, and on further thought, I concluded the clause with the word criminality and dropped the rest: “I might almost have acquitted him for desiring the experience of joyous criminality.”

All along, I was undecided between this formulation and one that put a greater value on narrative speed. In the end, I decided on the latter: “I might almost have acquitted him of the criminality I have charged him with.” In tonality and succinctness, this is superior, though the gain in clarity sacrifices the concept of “joyous criminality” or perhaps “transgressive joy” that Baudelaire champions in a number of his prose poems (gathered under the title Spleen de Paris). Were I to publish a group of my translations, it would be with notes and an introduction addressing just such an issue as this.

I keep making changes in my translations, even after they have been published, as it is the bane of the translator’s life to keep discovering ways he or she can improve upon what he or she has done. The work is endless. But if we can communicate something of the flavor of a great writer, even at the cost of a significant nuance, the gain is great. —David Lehman, translator of Charles Baudelaire’s “Fake Money” and “Get Drunk”

Ed. Note: For notes by translators of other poets -- Pessoa's Alberto Caeiro, Miraji, Osorio, Guerra, Kahal, Farrokhzad -- click here  for The Paris Review forum entitled "The Untranslatable." For "Fake Money," click here.

"No Alphabet" [by Joanne Dominique Dwyer]

If not for the lust of women, there would be no alphabet.
Save for the breaking of traffic rules, there would be
no Cubism; no fractured light scrutinized from subways
or kaleidoscopes in the tool belts of surveyors.
Save for the white shoes the busgirl wore
there would be no cloud-colored shoe polish hardening
under the sink cabinet; no wet-chalk streaking
the sidewalk during the summer monsoons.
Save for the ravishing bruise stenciled across the man’s cheek
there would be no hand-to-hand combat.
No 7-Eleven thieves with nylon stockings over their heads.
No trail marked with the shells of sunflower seeds
from the church steeple to the strip bar.
If not for the tiny, expensively coiffed gray-haired wife
the judge would never get out of bed.
Save for the lead saucepan of water in the dry grass
there would be no means to quench our thirst.
If not for the napoleons and éclairs the busgirl pilfered
from the walk-in cooler at the country club
she might not have been bulimic.
Save for the hearth rugs made from the skins of bears
placed in front of fireplaces lit with gas
falsifying every sighting of fallen stars seen
since the inception of love, there may never have
been application of kohl around women’s eyes.
If not for the avarice for heated seats and more legroom
the average new car might not be weighing-in
at four-thousand and nine pounds.
And the stranger’s car might have weighed just enough less
that my son’s black and white wolf-dog Santo
might not be dead and my son would not have the dog
lying on snow in the back of his pickup, bringing it home to bury.
Save for a hollowed-out tree trunk, there would be
no place for the dead to reassemble their limbs.
Save for a shovel, there might not be a heaven.
No flowers thrown into prehistoric graves.
Save for the aura of light before a seizure
there would be no steel girders
to keep the sublime monsters
from entering the atmosphere of earth.

Ed. note: From the new, highly recommended issue of The Common (October 2020).

Meg Kearney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Gabriel Parker

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George Says Stop Writing About Yourself

(New York, December 2001)

 

This one’s for George, who urged take off those

shit-kicker boots, leave your husband wrapped

in the scroll of last night’s sheets, forget your mother

sipping a cigarette, a Dugan’s Dew—forget

your other mother, your other father, too,

 

and the one you last saw in a coffin not looking

at all like himself, so much not-him you couldn’t

bear be near that body. Forget your first kiss—

how it sounded like peanut butter, tasted like

a train. Stop talking about the Alabama Slammers

 

and four Blue Whales or those men you drove crazy

with your push-him, pull-him love. And don’t speak

of babies, about not having them or the ugly one

who’s so much a part of your nights she must be

real, her mongrel face breaking into sadness.

 

Don’t talk about holding her above your head,

calling her Sweet Girl, Mama’s Girl—how she almost

smiles. Just for George, this poem looks beyond

Sea Monkeys and that first Louisville Slugger.

It opens the window to the stench, three months

 

now of that smell, man-made, human, wafting

from downtown. This poem is in the street,

where war does its thing. See, there’s a man

walking up Broadway: his shoes, suit, eyelashes,

lips covered with dust that used to be a building.

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In June 2021, The Word Works Press will publish Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry. Meg is also author of An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award; a heroic crown, The Ice Storm, published as chapbook in 2020; and three verse novels for teens. Her award-winning picture book, Trouper, is illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Meg’s poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series, and included in the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology (Natasha Tretheway, guest editor). She lives in New Hampshire and directs the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program in Massachusetts.

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Three Poems (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

The Wandering Jew

1.

In the Gremlin he drove Chicago to NYC

And back again I-90 segueing into I-80

Outside Cleveland but neither Chicago

Nor NYC could be called his destination

Considering how upon arrival in one city

He turned back towards the other without

So much as getting out of the Gremlin.

For money he had a small inheritance

Plus some government disability payments

That he accessed at the ATM machines

In gas stations or in the motels where

He stayed every third or fourth night

But definitely at least one night per week

And he paid little attention to his meals.

2.

After months or years of Chicago/NYC

He began crisscrossing the country with

No particular rhyme or reason while in

His brain mentations came and went like

The fireflies that flitted in the gloaming

After long-ago picnics at Potawatomi Park.

However as winter came upon the Interstates

A more apt metaphor of his thoughts was

Snowflakes blown by winds like the one that

In a blizzard near King of Prussia Pennsylvania

Sent the Gremlin spinning on an overpass and

Plunging through the side rail as an apparition

Of the man he could have been appeared.

3.

This was the the man he could have been

Had he not had spent his life in the Gremlin,

The law school or medical school graduate,

Husband and father, grandparent, homework

Helper, dumb joke teller, dryer of tears, loving

And loved in return, and he wept at seeing

The man he could have been except in the

Last second or even in the final nanosecond

Of his wasted existence an amazing joy filled

His heart as the man he could have been

Disappeared and in that man's place he saw

A shining and spectacular vision of the man

He was irrevocably destined to be when the day

Of גְּאֻלָּה and מָשִׁיחַ at long last arrives! Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Tires

 

Eventually I saw how beautiful women are

Stimulated by new tires on a man's car and

Ever since that realization dawned on me

I buy new tires whenever the possibility of

Liaison with a beautiful woman presents itself.

Isn't that awfully expensive? Yes and no.

Generally I pay around five hundred dollars

For four tires which is nothing to sneeze at

But look at it this way: beautiful women are

Nature's true masterpieces so if they want

New tires, well then, new tires they shall have.

As to why they want new tires, I have no idea

But many things in science remain unknown.

How aspirin works was a mystery until 1994.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meat Loaf

 

He had been watching Meat Loaf videos

Or rather he watched the same video

Again and again, the performance of

Paradise by the Dashboard Light from

1979 or 1980 which was Meat Loaf's

Masterpiece and had received over

Forty-five million YouTube views and

Eleven thousand admiring comments

Since it first appeared on YouTube

Four years earlier. The very existence

Of the millions of Meat Loaf admirers

Reassured him like a quote from Seneca:

'Whatever time has passed is owned

'By death. Most of death is already gone.'

 

 

 

"Little Star, 2015" [by Mary Jo Salter]

But soon, I’m told, I’ll lose my epaulets altogether
and dwindle into a little star.

                                      —Joseph Brodsky, 1940-1996

Joseph, how is your sense of irony
holding up in Heaven?
Did you know, by chance, that the United States
released in 2011

a postage stamp in which your youthful visage
is price-tagged at Forever?
When did you think they’d do that for you in Russia?
How about Never?

Yet here you are, their little star, depicted
in the city you called Peter;
your troubles have been weighed at seventeen rubles
on the poetry meter.

Pressed like a headstrong schoolboy to the corner
of the envelope,
your image puts me in mind of your doting mother,
who never lost hope

she’d see you again (although of course she didn’t)
as she stood in line in
the post office, holding a letter to be franked
with the face of Lenin.

from The Surveyors  by Mary Jo Salter (Knopf, 2017). Reprinted with permission.

Mary Jo Salter (pictured above with the late Mark Strand) is the author of A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems from her longtime publisher, the house of Alfred A. Knopf.Her work has appeared in seven volumes in the Best American Poetry series. (The selectors were Richard Howard, Paul Muldoon, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, Mark Doty, and Dana Gioia.) She writes with a respect for form and meter, for the shape of a poem  and its music, that is most unusual these days, and most precious when the poet has as good an ear as Mary Jo Salter. She sees or hears the poetry in a misprint or mishearing; and when the insight sparks a poem, the writing sparkles. "We'll Always Have Parents," is the title of her poem in the 2018 Best American Poetry.

As befits a student of Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Jo balances the exigencies of sincerity and wit, candor and tact. In her recent poems she has written wonderfully about the condition of growing old -- something that none of us thought he or she was doing to do. She is also a skillful parodist and satirist, as "No Second Try" and "Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.", two of the poems we have highlighted this week, demonstrate. Thank you, Mary Jo, for giving us this opportunity to showcase your poetry. -- DL

Ace Boggess Interviews the Author of "Playlist"

Interview with David Lehman

by Ace Boggess

 

Q: You’ve been working on a new volume of daily poems like those collected in both The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun. An interesting year to do that. Your daily poems have a powerful sense of movement, not just in the narratives but in the vision of daily life you describe. How have you adapted your writing to the pandemic and forced stillness of quarantines and shutdowns?

 

A: I start the same way: turn on the music, think of something to say, and go. My brush with my own mortality when I went through cancer is like a light wind that grazes my cheek every once in a while. The virus that is on everyone’s mind has made me nervous. For good reason; I am at high risk. There’s been no shortage of bad news, alarming news, distressing news. While I figure that some aspects of the current situation will sneak into my poems, I don’t plan on it. It just happens.

The reason I turn to poetry is not to confront Satan’s universe of death but to affirm the opposite – to take the side of life, freedom, and the imagination.   

 

Q: Your work often meditates on or refers to classic films and songs (Playlist). Could you talk a bit about how these things inspire you and the place of pop culture in modern poetry?

  

A: By writing about what you love well, you enliven your poems, and so you have a better chance of catching the reader’s attention and holding it. The movies and music I love need to be perpetuated. Posterity can always use a helping hand. So I want to do my part to spread the word about, say, To Be Or Not To Be with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard in 1943, or Thelonious Monk’s “Monk’s Mood.” With luck I may be able to recruit new fans.

 

Q: Is there a subject you’ve tried unsuccessfully to capture in poetry, or perhaps a better way to put it, what subjects do you struggle to get down on paper?

 

A: When I was a very young man the war in Vietnam was raging and, like all the other poets, I wrote anti-war poems. But the poems of that period that I prize the most – by Ammons, Ashbery, Schuyler, Koch, Merrill, Bishop – have little to do with the news of the day. I detest politics; Clausewitz’s famous dictum has it that war is the continuation of politics by other means, and that may remain true if you invert the terms.

 

Q: As series editor of Best American Poetry, you read much more poetry than most folks. What is the last poem you read that you wished you had written, and what was it that made that piece so powerful?

 

A: Mary Jo Salter is a poet I greatly admire. Two terrific poems from her book Nothing By Design, which I just read, are “No Second Try” and “Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.” I love many poems in God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike by Stanley Moss, a wonderful poet whose work is not nearly as well-known and celebrated as it ought to be.

 

Q: Finally, an issue young writers face is doubt, both in themselves and their work. You’ve had a long and successful career so far. In spite of that, what doubts stick with you, and how have you adapted to them over the years?

 

A: Doubt. I have a master’s degree in doubt. The reading list for my oral certification examination included three books by Kierkegaard, Freud’s “Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” Thomas Mann, Henry James, Kafka, Borges, Mark Twain, the Confessions of Augustine, and Emily Dickinson. (My thesis was on Dickinson’s conception of “despair.”) Financial doubt, which can be terrifying, can go away of its own accord, with no changes in your circumstances. On the other hand, doubt regarding the value of your work, whether as a poet or author or editor, endures, because there is no way to demolish it. You never overcome the fear that your work may be as mortal as your body. There are no guarantees. After a while, you don’t think about it. There are other risks you are running. Keats thought that to be a poet, you had to be comfortable with half-truths, contradictions, ambiguities, doubts. You never want to disagree with Keats on such matters.

 

from The Adirondack Review. For the seven recent daily poems accompanying Ace Boggess's interview-- all from late September, early October 2020 -- please click here.

Edna St. Vincent, M. F. A. [by Mary Jo Salter]

Chic and petite, blind to her destiny
of being hailed upon her death the worst
sometimes-excellent poet in history,
she ran the reading series, and ranked first
in her year despite some issues, namely those
pretentious, creaky sonnets emailed late
for workshop, densely wrought with “thee”s and “thou”s,
Apollo’s “dewy cart,” man’s “frosty fate”…
Her classmates listened, bored, without a clue.
Still, they liked her, partly because she friended
everybody who asked, and fucked them too,
lending them each some notoriety
by blogging through the night how things had ended.
Plus, she knew people at A.W.P. 

From Nothing by Design by Mary Jo Salter (Knopf, 2013).

"Dependable Epigraphs" [by Tony Towle]

                       

Dependable Epigraphs

My epigraphs will prepare you for the excursion
                         but not for the ruts in the road.

                                                                           — Virgil                                                                                       

Stay well ahead of your turnips in the garden of life. 

                                                            — Michel de Montaigne

Never parade your ignorance; a discreet amble down a side street will suffice.

                                                                 — Benjamin Disraeli

Don’t swat flies close to the ear of God.

                                                            — St. Francis of Assisi

Metaphors are the unstable companions of an already impractical fellow.

                                                                                                — Henry Ford

Those who are not willing to subvert the law do not have sufficient stake in the outcome of events.

                                                                        — Niccolò Machiavelli

 If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, religion is certainly the first.

                                                                                                          — Voltaire

Everywhere I go I find a poet has already been there neurotically before me.

                                                                                                 — Sigmund Freud

Socializing is networking to no purpose.

                                                                        — Oscar Wilde

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

                       — Paul Valéry, as quoted in the original French at a press conference by George W. Bush

Farewell, O insatiable biographers of the future.

                                                            — William Shakespeare

Pimp my soporific and annoying orchestral arrangements, bitch.

                                                                                    — Lawrence Welk

The peasant’s place is in the hovel.

                                                 — Harry & Leona Helmsley

The woman’s place is in the novel.

                                                — Henry James

Never let Henry James have the last word.

                                                             — Edith Wharton

You’ve got to know when to stop.

                                                 — Leo Tolstoy

from Winter Journey (Hanging Loose Press, 2008)

Mr. Boyfriend [by Mary Jo Salter]

New lover, known and unknown,
you’ve risen before dawn
and, delicious in suit and tie,
you lean down to the bed
to kiss my rumpled head
the tenderest goodbye.

A military bearing
adheres to what you’re wearing.
Oh, how many years
who knows he is a man
and not a boy?—who steers
himself through the long day

and rides it, come what may,
in a waft of aftershave
and the bracing, scratchy starch
of his dress shirt?  As you march
off to the office, brave
and clear-eyed in your tortoise-

shell glasses, looking gorgeous,
I feel both safe and weak
slipping back to your kiss
in my sleep, and the light graze
of your cufflink on my cheek.

from The Surveyors by Mary Jo Salter (Knopf, 2017). Reprinted with permission

Charles Bernstein: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On Election Day

 

I hear democracy weep, on election day.

The streets are filled with brokered promise, on election day.

The miscreant’s vote the same as saint’s, on election day.

The dead unleash their fury, on election day.

My brother crushed in sorrow, on election day.

The sister does her washing, on election day.

Slowly, I approach the voices dark, on election day.

The men prepare for dying, on election day.

The morning hush defends its brood, on election day.

So still, so kindly faltering, on election day.

On election day, the cats take tea with the marmoset.

On election day, the mother refuses her milk.

On election day, the frogs croak so fiercely you would think that Mars had fallen into Earth.

On election day, the iron man meets her frozen gasp.

The air is putrid, red, interpolating, quixotic, torpid, vulnerable, on election day.

Your eyes slide, on election day.

Still the mourners mourn, the weepers wept, the children sleep alone in bed, on election day.

No doubt a comet came to see me, fiery and irreconciled, torrid, strummed, on election day.

On election day, the trespass of the fatuous alarm and ignominious aspiration fells the

       golden leap to girdled crest. 

The tyrant becomes prince, on election day.

Neither friend nor foe, fear nor fate, on election day.

The liar lies with the lamb, on election day.

The last shall be the first and first sent to the back of the line, on election day.

The beggar made a king, on election day.

“Let him who is without my poems be assassinated!” on election day.

Let he who has not sinned, let him sin, on election day.

The ghosts wear suits, on election day.

On election day, sulfur smells like beer.

On election day, the minister quakes in fear.

On election day, the Pole and the Jew dance the foxtrot.

On election day, the shoe does not fit the foot, the bullet misfires in its pistol, the

        hungry waiter reels before steadying himself on facts.

The grid does not gird the fiddler, on election day.

Galoshes and tears, on election day.

The sperm cannot find the egg, on election day.

The drum beat becomes bird song, on election day.

I feel like a nightmare is ending but can’t wake up, on election day.

 

(November 4, 2008)

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Charles Bernstein is the author of Near/Miss and Pitch of Poetry. ROOF recently published The Course, a collaboration with Ted Greenwald. University of New Mexico Press has published a facsimile reprint L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, a volume of related letters, as well as the late 1970s collaboration Legend. He lives in Brooklyn.  [For more information on, and poems by, Charles Bernstein, see the Poetry Foundation.]

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“November Graveyard” [by Sylvia Plath]

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees
Hoard last year’s leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn
To elegiac dryads, and dour grass
Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness
However the grandiloquent mind may scorn
Such poverty. No dead men’s cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones
Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot
To unpick the heart, pare bone
Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton
Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet:
Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare
Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind:
Whatever lost ghosts flare,
Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor
Rave on the leash of the starving mind
Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

With thanks to Grace Schulman who suggested "'November Graveyard,' by Sylvia Plath, of wintering trees that look dead to the poet but that come alive in her art. It appeared first in Mademoiselle, chosen by Cyrilly Abels, who published her for the first time nationally." 

What Really Happened: November 22, 1963 [by David Lehman]

Every year on this day I think unfailingly of three things:

-- that today is Hoagy Carmichael's birthday, which I imagine him celebrating quietly with a glass of bourbon as he tickles the ivories (and out of Lauren Bacall's sexy throat comes the Johnny Mercer lyric for How Little We Know, which is playing in my mind even now),

-- that if time were elastic I would write a series of popular history novels under the collective title: What Really Happened. Charlie Orr would design the covers. Hell, he already has designed the covers for the first three books in the series. What Really Happened at Waterloo. What Really Happened in Yalta. And, What Really Happened on November 22, 1963. Charlie's hypothetical library is a fabulous construction.

-- that paranoid conspiracy theories, and the narrative genres to which they have given rise, are based on our fundamental inability to understand events. What happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963, accounted for the penultimate section of a poem I wrote in my freshman year at Columbia, "The Presidential Years." Here is that section of the poem:

From The Presidential Years by David Lehman 

. The day that Kennedy was killed
    Was the day before the Stuyvesant-Clinton football game.
    There was a rally in the auditorium
    And our coach who was from Texas or Oklahoma said slowly, carefully,
    “There isn’t a horse that can’t be bucked.”

     Meanwhile half the school was marching along
            Fifteenth Street to Union Square and then up to
            Forty Second Street and Fifth Avenue and some got up to
            Fifty Ninth, and they were parading,
            Yelling, “De Witt eats shit” until they were stopped by policemen.
                  I didn’t go.  I stayed in school.
                  That day I almost got into a fight
                  With a fellow twice my size on the stairway
                  And he laughed at me.  A friend of mine broke it up. 

     In English the head of the Physics Department walked
     Into the room.  He said, “I think you are old enough
    To understand this.  The President was shot today in Texas.”
            I stand up.  I do not understand.  I say, “What”
            And I think, the President was shocked today in Texas.
            He leaves the room.  I am sorry. 

    I leave early. The Clinton game is called off,
            And the series has since been discontinued.
    My French teacher is waiting for me.  Smiling shuffling his legs
            Touching his teeth with his tongue looking at me
            He says, “There is a rumor that Kennedy was shot.
            Do you know anything about that?”

    March 1967 [published in The Paris Review, #43, Summer 1968]

Here are the jackets Charlie has designed for the other books in the series, which have been endorsed by Donald Kessinger: "Lehman has a strategic mind."

From the archives: previously posted November 22, 2015.

"In 1976, When She Was Born" [a sonnet by Molly Arden]

Life was dull in 1976.
Dad had to read "Ivanhoe" and write a report.
Sex was not yet Mom’s favorite sport.
The only rhyme that came to mind was "dicks."

Mom was somewhere north
of the Mass / NH border.
She was just following an order,
not calculating its moral worth.

She was on vacation
feeling unclever
and not happily after ever.

He promised to wait
for her return to the state
of eternal temptation.

See also http://www.coconutpoetry.org/arden1.html

"Oak Hill, West Virginia" [by Mary Jo Salter)

OAK HILL, WEST VIRGINIA

1. Robert Cooke, 1929-2017

“Great louts are necessary
at funerals,” Julian Barnes 
wrote in Flaubert’s Parrot,
a book I had just read—
in fact, it was in the car
I’d parked at the cemetery—

and so I thought of that,
some witty argument
to shore up against grief.
My friend had lost her father,
and although he wasn’t mine
to mourn for, I’d revered him.

I stood there as his grown
children traded jokes
about their Gregory Peck
look-alike, coal-country
barber’s son who’d risen
to glory as a doctor.

Remember how Mom said
(they said again) that Da
had been elected second-
handsomest man in college?
(A pause, for full effect.)
Who was the other guy?

At last came two great louts,
two bruisers in T-shirts
(one of which read PROUD
TO BE AN AMERICAN)
hired to sink the weight
of the old man’s coffin

into his native soil.
No, a small box of ashes.
The louts respectfully
lowered it, then their heads.
Why, really, were they here,
or the last-minute preacher?

A skinny boy aswim
in a man’s threadbare suit
and just a little lame,
he walked up with his cane
like a bishop’s scepter.
Everything off-kilter,

beginning with the hint
of atheists among
the party that had hired him,
and then there was that key ring,
gigantic, dangling from
the belt that barely held

his baggy trousers up.
At last his volume too
went up.  His voice was clear.
It’s been a year... I’ve kept
wanting to say something,
anything, so true.

He said he saw his father
in his own shaving mirror.
Just that; made the claim
our images don’t vanish
wholly, or at once.
And when he had to end

by calling on Our Father
in his Kingdom, I even thought
(not laughing, not entirely)
He’s got Saint Peter’s keys.
Then we all shook his hand
and the hands of both the louts.

I walked back to my car,
lump in my throat, not quite
able to tolerate
my loutishness, and prayed
for the hidden, vivid face
that smiled at me in childhood.

 

"November" [by Robert Frost]

We saw leaves go to glory,
Then almost migratory
Go part way down the lane,
And then to end the story
Get beaten down and pasted
In one wild day of rain.
We heard " 'Tis Over" roaring.
A year of leaves was wasted.....
By denying and ignoring
The waste of nations warring.

- Robert Frost

"No Second Try" [by Mary Jo Salter]

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery…

W. B. Yeats, “No Second Troy”

Why should I blame him that he filled his days
With mistresses, or that he came home late
To meet most ignorant trust with smiling ways,
Such thoughtful gifts, and claims that I looked great—
Whatever that meant, though clearly not desire?
What help if I’d been wiser, with a mind
Simply to hurl his laundry in the fire,
Rather than buy his tall tales with a kind
Solicitude and a deluded kiss,
Having cleaned his house from stem to stern?
Why, who else could he use, a guy like this?
Was there another wife for him to spurn?

From Nothing by Design by Mary Jo Salter (Knopf, 2013)

Mary Jo Salter's work has appeared in seven volumes in the Best American Poetry series. (The selectors were Richard Howard, Paul Muldoon, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, Mark Doty, and Dana Gioia.) She writes with a respect for form and meter, for the shape of a poem  and its music, that is most unusual these days, and most precious when the poet has as good an ear as Mary Jo Salter.  She sees or hears the poetry in a misprint or mishearing; and when the insight sparks a poem, the writing sparkles. "We'll Always Have Parents," is the title of her poem in the 2018 Best American Poetry.

As befits a student of Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Jo balances the exigencies of sincerity and wit, candor and tact. In her recent poems she has written wonderfully about the condition of growing old -- something that none of us thought he or she was doing to do. She is also a skillful parodist and satirist, as "No Second Try" and "Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.", two of the poems we are highlighting this week, demonstrate. (Compare "No Second Try" to William Butler Yeats's "No Second Troy.") Thank you, Mary Jo, for giving us this opportunity to showcase your poetry. -- DL

Remembering Richard Wilbur [by A. E. Stallings]

Eric M. Crawford

I am lucky to have a number of memories of Richard Wilbur, who died on October 14. The first time I heard him read was in the mid-90s. I was working then as a secretary for a professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, hoping, I suppose, to keep some connection to academia and a library while working on my own writing. An obvious advantage was attending events in the English department when celebrated writers swanned through town. Only dimly aware of Richard Wilbur at this time, I probably first encountered his poem “Juggler” from an English department flier Scotch-taped onto the library’s glass door.  No doubt I did not fully appreciate the elegance and sprezzatura of this poem-performance—its stanzas of patterned line lengths and pure and off rhymes, the philosophical conceit, its mix of elaborate syntax and everyday statement, its precise etymological use of “resilience”—literally to bounce back—jostling with one-syllable exclamations like “whee” and even “damn.” Possibly, I thought, with the innocent bravado that is somewhat necessary in a young poet, I can do that too. Wilbur had a way of keeping all the balls in the air, winking at difficulty while making the performance seem effortless. Yet nothing is glib—even clapping becomes strange, clumsy in view of the juggler’s (and the poet’s) legerdemain—a battering of hands.

Continue reading over at the American Scholar. 

from the archive; first posted October 25, 2017

Tommy Lasorda, Dodger fan no. 1, on his pal Frank

<<<
Today [December 12] is Frank Sinatra's birthday.  We should all celebrate because he was a tremendous man who touched many, many lives.

He did something for me that I never ever thought possible, and that I will always be thankful for.

Frank called my mother and my sister-in-law answered.  He asked for Ma Lasorda and said it was Frank Sinatra calling.

My sister-in-law hung up in him.

I called back and said, "Hey, that was really Frank.  Put Mom on the phone."

Frank told my mother that he was coming to Philadelphia for a concert and wanted to invite her to be his guest.  He also told her that he wanted her to cook my favorite meal, scarole and beans, and hot peppers and sausage.

Well, to ask an Italian lady to cook is very high honor.

So Frank comes to Philadelphia and pulls onto our block. Jilly, his right-hand man, gets out of the car and knocks on our neighbor's door.  He asks is Ma Lasorda is there, and of course she tells him that she lived next door.

That lady saw Frank and within 20 minutes there was a swarm of cars and the police had to be called in.

The next night at the concert, Frank sent a limo to pick up my mother.  There was a doctor and nurse in the limo who Frank wanted there just to make sure she was okay.

They got to the show, and her seats were in the front row. As Frank started the show, which was at the Valley Forge Theater, he introduced her to the crowd, came down from the stage to give her a kiss and flowers, and dedicated the entire show to her.

What a man!

So today I wish Frank's family all of my love, and I will always treasure the memories we made during our friendship.

-- Tommy Lasorda