The Best American Poetry

Dispatch from a Distance - Animal Tracking [by Cara Benson]

Rare glimpse

It’s easy to feel like a Magoo in the woods, walking my developing foot paths to repeatedly visited spots among the veritable highways and busy intersections of animal tracks crisscrossing all around me. Of course I notice them, the tracks, but the creatures themselves have typically skidaddled. I imagine far off sets of eyes up in branches, peeking out from burrows, shining in dark dens, all trained on me as I whistle away, largely oblivious to their precise locations. I am learning, though, that their movements are legible and that I can become better versed in deciphering them. There’s a wildlife tracker I’ve been able to walk with a few times who talks about it that way, that it’s a matter of reading the story in the landscape. These stories are more prominent in winter as their trails show in the snow like pictographs on a blank page, so the season just past fell perfectly open for me to put in the “time on the ground.”

In my previous post, I’d written that I was going to explore snowshoeing next. My loose idea was to ruminate on how the snow reveals desire lines. That’s the term planners use to describe foot paths that form regardless of design (think of those bare brown walkways in the green of parks that show the cut-throughs and ways that people actually travel). In the woods hikers often call them herd paths. I was thinking about my own desire as revealed by the path I tread through the landscape out my door. More than a few writers have taken this topic on of late. Robert Moor in his On Trails and Torbjørn Ekelund’s In Praise of Paths both consider how desire lines are a result of how the individual and the collective meet on the road. This idea was appealing to me, but whose trails I was meeting and overlapping with were not of human origin. My snowshoes packed and connected with paths that, from what I could tell, were deer, coyote, and would that have been mink? Or were they fisher? Are pine martens in the area? And then porcupines! That’s a yes (I think) to all of them. So my writing, like my walking, has followed this line.

I quickly became obsessed with reading prints. First I was drawn in to looking at each individual mark. Counting toe pads. Seeing the imprints of nails. The gentle drag of a paw across the powder. All such intimate evidence of the actual creature left behind. I wanted to touch everything. To get as close as possible to the impressions that demonstrated an incredibly diverse taxonomy of fauna in this corner of the world. Deer, sure. Okay, voles, even turkeys. But bobcat? Out my back door? How cool is that! (Very.) (Until one attacks you.) (I’ve never been attacked.) (It could happen.) (Probably won’t.) (Right?)

Trying to identify the animal by looking only at an individual print, though, is like naming that song in one note and that note might be muffled. Or played off-key and through a paper cup and you’ve got wax in your eyes. What I mean is that prints are not always clean impressions. Even when they are, some of them are similar enough to each other that more information is needed. That’s why trackers look at the gait of the animal as revealed in the series of prints. Are they body scissoring or leg scissoring? Bounders, leapers, waddlers, walkers, or trotters? Do they step back foot into front print? Land with hind feet first?

I try to picture the animal moving and get too mechanical about it. After a while, I can’t even remember how my cats walk. My mind loaded with data struggled to incorporate it into my sensing self. For a while, everything I saw was either deer or coyote (even if it wasn’t coyote). One of the pieces of information that stayed with me is that canine prints typically show the nails. As do weasels and mink and otter and fisher and probably others, but I didn’t know any of that yet. So I’d see prints with prominent front points and feel fairly satisfied with myself that I’d nailed it. But over the course of time and walking with those who’d been at it longer, I found that some of tracks I thought were coyote were actually fox. Of course then I went through a period of thinking everything I saw was fox, but I’m past that now (porcupine). For the record, I’m not always wrong. In fact, I’m getting less wrong.

If you can’t peg it from a small swath of the trail, the scope of the investigation must expand to follow the tracks for more information. That often means looking to see if there’s scat. Most animals in the wild, with the possible exception of porcupines who will sleep in their poop, don’t shit any old place. They do it to communicate. Fox, for example, will leave scat on little branches. Or up on logs. They want to elevate its presence. The message: “I’m here.” As I started looking, I saw them everywhere. It wasn't long before I began to wonder if they were also talking to me. [Insert various anthropomorphic assumptions here.] Something else to consider: what was I saying to them with my repeated trips through their range? What is it I might have wanted to say? I’m here, too.

I did notice over the course of winter more and more scat was being left right in the middle of my snowshoe paths. There was a particular corridor that seemed to be an information hotspot. At the bottom of one of the first hills I descend from the back of my home I enter a rich swath of hemlock forest that holds multiple rocky beds collecting runoff and rain in spring and summer that are blissfully easier to cross in snow. Just past the first of these temporal streams, in one afternoon I came across two fresh calling cards. Coyote (hair filled, rope-like) and fox (somewhat similar, but smaller).

I know scatology is serious business, but it is a particular type of feeling one gets when leaning in to another creature’s excrement, then zooming in for close-ups. I can’t tell you how many angles of pellets, tubes, segments, and other shapes of feces I have on my phone now. Due to pandemic distancing, it’s not that often that I’m in face to face conversation with someone and scroll my pictures to show them something, but even going through them for my own self, it does give one pause. Not kidding, I have passed more than a few Saturday nights this season comparing my pictures with what’s on the internet (I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise, there’s a lot of shit online).

Though they were leaving evidence right under my feet, trailing animal tracks also leads the walking off my usual paths. To follow where the animal treads rather than what I might have intended put me into a more deeply attentive state. “As the crow flies” becomes as the woodchuck waddles. My walking became stalking. Slow. Methodical. I want to run into the creatures, and, also, I very much don’t. Everyone wants to see a bear until they actually do. I have run into black bears a few times. It’s exciting! And scary. And I want to be their friends and feel badly yelling at them, as you’re supposed to do. But jeezum, they’re big.

Walking with the expert tracker we did follow right to the source – twice. Both times, benignly, porcupine. One down in a smelly den. The other up way up in a hemlock tree. Porcupines apparently are less skittish as they’re their bodies are supremely well defended. They get down in a den and curl up with their quilled backs to the opening. You can get your face in the hole for a peek and deep whiff (I did); they don’t actually shoot quills as one myth would have it. It might be safer doing that than standing under one up in the trees as they are known to fall out of the limbs, sometimes fatally.

Initially, though, I didn’t want to follow tracks too far as to not disturb whoever I might be on the tail of. Someone had said on one of my other walks that you can follow the trail in reverse to read some of the story. But it’s all moot, really, as it is ridiculous to think that a coyote is anywhere in the vicinity of me tromping along in my snowshoes. Over time I became more comfortable letting the trail take me wherever it went. Over downed trees, up rock ledges, frozen wetlands and bogs, some terrain I’d never tread without the protection of a hefty snow pack covering what’s frozen or asleep under it.

Now the snow is gone and mud season upon us. My tracker friend does walks year round, also in urban areas. The clues will likely be harder to discern, but I’m sure that they’re there to be decoded if I am looking. I was thinking about that while doing spring clean up last weekend, raking out the flower beds and cutting away last year’s dead growth. I saved the most unruly bushes for last, the catnip. I started snipping and pulling the stalks from the bottom, working my way up to the apex of the bush, when on top there was, elevated for sure detection, a small pile of dried fox shit, not far from my front walkway. Well played, red. Well played.

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance, Enter Geese, Whose Woods, Roads And Seeds, A Trace, and Hunting Season.

Squibs 457-463 [by Alan Ziegler]

457:

458: Louvre Pyramid aglow, flat on my belly angling the camera with my wallet, my cheek to the ground to peek through the viewfinder. A tug on my feet—must be security I’m always doing something wrong in Paris, fingers wagging at me. But it’s just a young guy laughing with his friends. “Vous rude!” I blurt, and he says Frenchly, “It is a joke.” I reply, “Do you want to hear a joke? ‘A Frenchman pulled my leg.’ That’s a joke.”

459: Live it up now. Live it down later.

460: The elevator door opened. I didn't get in because it was occupied by a baby in a stroller and her mother. I waved and smiled behind my mask. The baby—about a year—stared back expressionless. As the door was closing she grinned and waved. It occurred to me that no child born in the last year has likely experienced a complete stranger smiling at them. I stood alone in the hallway, as if on a deserted platform having just missed a train.

461: I never think about you sexually. Except when I masturbate.

 

462:

463: Party at Gary Giddens’ apartment. I ask a young critic with an academic appointment how he would define bebop. The critic starts to answer then realizes that the jazz musicians surrounding us have gone silent. "I'm not going to answer that in this room."

Amy Gerstler in Conversation about "Index of Woman" [Sunday, April 18, 2021]

Chevalier bookstore:
L.A.'S Oldest Independent Bookstore, Est. 1940 

Virtual Event

Monday, April 19, 2021 at 7:00PM

INDEX OF WOMEN
by AMY GERSTLER

the author in conversation with LOUISE STEINMAN

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO JOIN: 

https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/amy-gerstler

 

From a maestra of invention (The New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood

Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. Women's voices, from childhood to old age, dominate this new collection of rants, dramatic monologues, confessions and laments. A young girl muses on virginity. An aging opera singer rages against the fact that she must quit drinking. A woman in a supermarket addresses a head of lettuce. The tooth fairy finally speaks out. Both comic and prayer-like, these poems wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and what it is to be human.

AMY GERSTLER

Author

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. The most recent is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015 was longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010 she was guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She is currently collaborating with composer, actor and arranger Steve Gunderson on a musical play. She is also collaborating with comics artist, author and scholar Trina Robbins on a comic about women comic book artists from the 1940s. 

LOUISE STEINMAN

in conversation

Louise Steinman is a writer, artist, and literary curator. Her work frequently deals with memory, history, and reconciliation. Her three books include: The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation; The Knowing Body: The Artist As Storyteller in Contemporary Performance and The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War.  Steinman founded-- and was for twenty-five years the curator—of the celebrated ALOUD literary series at the Los Angeles Public Library. Her essays have been published widely, most recently in Los Angeles Review of Books.   She is the editor of the 2018 anthology: Country Gone Missing: Nightmares in the Time of Trump. Her installation, “Welcome the Stranger: An Urban Installation for Social Engagement” (with Dorit Cypis), was featured at the 2019 Lublin (Poland) Open City Festival. She is co-director of  The Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at the University of Southern California.  Her lead essay, “The Questions We Ask,” appears in the forthcoming volume A History for the Future: The Museum of Contemporary Art 1979-2000. www.louisesteinman.com

Join us here | 04/19 at 7PM PT on Zoom

David Lehman, Denise Duhamel & Nin Andrews: Reading at the KGB Tonight 4/12/21

 

<<
I am so excited to be reading with David Lehman and Denise Duhamel tonight for the KGB series, I can barely breathe. I am thinking of this as my ten minutes in the presence of fame—as well as in the presence of two of my all-time favorite poets.  I can’t wait to hear Denise read from her new collection, Second Story, which includes a long poem in the form of Terza rima about her terrifying experience with hurricane Irma, as well as her equally terrifying poems about the last few years, under the influence of Donald Trump. And I am so excited to hear from David Lehman whom I expect to surprise us by reading from his forthcoming collection, The Morning Line, due out in the fall of 2021 from the University of Pittsburgh Press.  I owe so much to both of these poets. David was my first real poetry professor. I would never have pursued poetry if it were not for him. And it was Denise who taught me how to read an orgasm poem aloud.  -- Nin Andrews >>

 

The reading starts at 7 pm.

 

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86561522512?pwd=UW1BRXU0dVZHZ2ZWM0xHWUtjWWNkQT09

 

Meeting ID: 865 6152 2512 Passcode: 799004

<<
I'm grateful to David Lehman for giving me the chance to say a few words about his April 12 KGB Bar reading with Nin Andrews and Denise Duhamel, because it was David who introduced me to their work. Back when the reading series was new, in the late 1990s, with Star Black and David in charge, he gave me a copy of "The Book of Orgasms" by Nin Andrews, and I was blown away by the sheer happy lusty sexiness of the concept and the individual poems illustrating the poet's orgasmic "quest," which is a never-ending one inasmuch as the "last" in any series is the first in a new series. I also recall a night at the bar when, drinking Tanqueray martinis, Lehman insisted that feminism and fun were not incompatible, and won the bet with Duhamel's Barbie poems in her book "Kinky." As for Lehman himself, will he read daily poems, poems "in the manner of" his favorite dead poets, or a Baudelaire translation? What this virtuoso trio has in common is authenticity, humor, wit, daring, and sensibility, which is just about everything. >>  -- Fred Chervil 

 

Daniel Tobin: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Banshee

            The long, drawn-out howling of a dog

            shut up all night inside the auction ring

            out back of our B&B scares awake

            the owner's child so that she cries

            in the room below our bed, a duet

            that in my half-sleep seems to carry

            beyond Mount Eagle and Slea Head

            to my grandmother's Brooklyn apartment

            thirty years ago where, back-lit in her chair,

            she told me her story of the banshee,

            how as a child she heard it wail

            through the townland of Kilvendoney the day

            the neighboring farmer died; and again

            years later she listened to what sounded

            like the keening of an old woman

            under Sixth Avenue streetlights,

            and knew then that no prayer could save

            her oldest son lying in a coma,

            meningitis working into his brain,

            the pain like a small voice rising to a pitch

            beyond all hearing -- a noise so unlike

            the steady hum and beep of machines

            that monitored your induced sleep

            in the outpatient wing where they carved

            the lump from you, as it turned out,

            benign, the word soothing as the whisper

            this child's mother must use to calm

            the fractured music in her daughter's throat,

            Shush, shush, it's only an old watch dog,

            as moonlight softens the tin roof

            outside both our windows, and I draw you

            closer to me in our rented bed

            and rest my hand on your scarred breast.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, including From Nothing, winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award, The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the German of Paul Celan, and most recently Blood Labors, named one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year for 2018 by the New York Times and The Washington Independent Review of Books. His poetry has won many awards, among them the Massachusetts Book Award and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. His critical and editorial works include Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Awake in America, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, and To the Many: The Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge. His most recent work is On Serious Earth: Poetry and Transcendence. A trilogy of book-length poems, The Mansions, will appear in 2023. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston. [See also this link for more poems and information.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

                    Kiki Smith, American (born Germany), born 1954; Banshee Pearls (detail), 1991;  Smithsonian American Art Museum.          

From My Diary No. 3 – February 2020

 

Inner Voices – Oil on Canvas by Lera Auerbach

(1.)

I think of the mountain from Rafael's childhood.
Once upon a time, there lived a woman.
Her name was Soledad.
Nobody lives on that mountain now.
Nobody is left who remembers Soledad,
only Stella (Rafael's mother) and Rafael.
She's also in my memory.
And if you are reading this, she's now in your memory, too.

You may forget about Soledad as soon as you finish reading this.
Or, perhaps, I may make her a bit more memorable
or bring her name again later, so if you forget her now,
you will remember when you see her name later on.

Soledad was 82 years old when she died.
The house, high in the mountains, had no electricity,
and each morning, she would milk cows and look around for snakes.

Snakes loved the sun and would come out to lie on the stones.
Some of the snakes were poisonous, but they only bite if frightened.

Nobody knows how Soledad appeared and from where she came.
She was always living with Rafael's family, although she was not related to any of them.

Soledad never married.
Every night she would make bread in the oven,
enough for the whole family.
She would drink coffee all day long,
and her hands smelled of coffee, bread, and milk.

When we moved to our house in Florida, Rafael bought a machete to protect against the snakes.
He never used it, and the machete was lost,
just as so many things tend to get lost and never found again.

(Where do all these lost things go?)

 

(2)

Before coming to the Mayo Clinic, I was preparing to perform my 'Arctica' with the Oslo Philharmonic.
In my hotel room in Rochester, I had a piano, and after long days of tests and doctor's consultations,
I would return and practice for the upcoming concert.

Very few people knew I was at the Mayo Clinic. One of them was Enric Sala.
Enric is an explorer with National Geographic and my partner in the "Arctica" project.
Enric encouraged me to put my health first and not to postpone the surgery.
I don't know if I would have the strength to cancel my performance in Oslo without Enric's support and perspective.

Fortunately, the presenters found another pianist who was able to learn the solo part in time.
The performance in Oslo went on as scheduled.
I felt like the captain who abandoned the ship, yet the ship miraculously sailed on,
while the captain was left alone on the reefs, bruised and confused.

Each day in the hospital, some part of me was in Oslo, rehearsing with the choir,
rehearsing with the orchestra, practicing alone.
Another part of me was back in the Arctic, listening to its silence (which is never silent)
and trying to grasp the enormity of its solitude.

Arctica – the fragile giant, the North of the North.

Only a small part of me, the least real one, was in the hospital,
trying to walk around my room (ten steps in each direction)
while holding onto the IV stand.

I also used the IV stand in my symphony as a musical instrument –
it is how "Arctica" starts – with the sound of drops falling from an IV stand.
Sound of time passing, ice melting, seconds and droplets melting away.

(Sound of a hospital, of a medical emergency, of life passing or life renewing itself.)

 

(3.)

Generally speaking, quarantines need to be continuous –
since at any time in any given place, there are plenty of contagious illnesses.
One quarantine should melt into another.

Quarantines shouldn't be limited to viruses.
For example, when there is a spike in fatal crashes while driving,
there should be a few days per week when driving is forbidden.
Or at least limited to certain hours.
Let's say one would be allowed to drive between 2:00 and 5:00 AM at night
when nobody drives, but not during rush hours.
It would certainly balance things and improve statistics.

The researchers at the Mayo Clinic explained to me that Cushing disease
has only a 30% success rate of treatment by operation in Germany,
while in the USA, the rate of success is 100%.

"How could it be?" I asked.

"We operate on healthy people," the researcher explained. "In Germany, they wait
until you are damaged by the illness. Healthy people have a 100% recovery rate."

Statistics are a powerful thing.

For example, if there is a spike in divorces, let's freeze all marriages for a while.
Fewer marriages result in fewer divorces.

It's not a bad idea to quarantine all children; they seem to get ill much more often.
Healthy children equal healthy nations.

And definitely forbid people from gathering.

(Let's approach life in a way to improve statistics.)

 

(4.)

Why would anyone want to gather anyway? I never understood that.
Much better to stay at home and read good books.

Or you can listen to orchestral music using noise-cancelling earphones.
Noise cancellation is vital because this is how audible viruses (for example, news) get in.
The earphones don't fully protect you from noise, so when you are not listening to symphonic music,
you should wear earplugs with noise-cancelling earphones on top of the earplugs.

If someone asks you a question, just nod in response.
Nobody expects you to listen anyway.
Nodding is similar to clicking likes under social media posts –
you just add your support to the ego-boosting activities of your friends.
Nobody expects you to actually read their posts or click on their links (unless they contain cute animals, of course.)
After all, if you start reading and clicking on all posts of all your friends, most of whom you have never met,
you will never live to be 82 like Soledad, who lived alone in the mountain and never owned a computer.

The other positive side of a continuous quarantine
is that the Apocalypse loses its edge after a while.
One can scream, "We are all doomed!" only until one loses one's voice.
After a while, it's no longer believable.

But I'm worried about my parents. They are 82 like Soledad.
They don't fully understand the weight of the impending disaster, even though they have a computer and television and other viral spreading news outlets. They still venture outside and are reckless enough to visit various doctors wherein the waiting rooms they wait for sick people to spread more germs around.

Their refusal to quarantine themselves saddens me.

I have quarantined myself from everyone long ago, for that's what a writer must do anyway.

(It comes with the territory.)

 

(5.)

Can poetry and music, serious music, still be written?
In times when people have forgotten how to listen,
how to keep silent, how to remain still?

Perhaps I am starting to sound depressive.
As my doctors have warned me, cortisol deficiency can take its toll.

Every week, I receive a questionnaire from the Mayo Clinic.
The questionnaire is always the same.
It compares my attitude and feelings before and after the surgery.

I don't think my answers have changed so far, but I do not know for sure
since I did not keep my previous answers.
Probably, researchers may find my data disappointing.
They would like to see a graph. A graph is when lines go up and down.
Flat graphs are boring. Flat graphs are unremarkable.
Like rubber ducklings in a bathtub of a polar bear hunter.

Keep it together, I say to myself.
But I am worried that I may not be able to keep it all together
and may turn into a soundwave or break into tiny particles
that no longer make any sense and can't be reconstructed.

(I wish I could go to that mountain and meet Soledad,
who never, I am sure, worried about becoming a soundwave.)

 

 

Force Majeure (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

Professor Koch said, 'We know the story

'Where the guy wakes up and he's turned

'Into a bug, right? Now write a story where

'The guy turns into a beautiful woman.'

 

He was always talking about beautiful women.

Very well. Anomaly Englehardt spoke up,

A kid recognized as a universal genius who

In class always kept one hand over his mouth.

 

Anomaly Englehardt said, 'Concepts of ratio

'First appeared in ancient India as attempts

'To numerically express the ideal proportions of

'A beautiful woman's physiognomy, i.e. her face.'

 

Then Mar Knee spoke. Mar Knee always kept 

One eye closed and most often the left eye.

Mar Knee said, 'In The Book of the Courtier

'Castiglione imagines a conversation between 

 

'A man and two beautiful women but one more

'Beautiful than the other and Castiglione relates

'How the man flatters the more beautiful woman

'Without at all offending the less beautiful one.'

 

Then I spoke. 'Somewhere Byron remarks 

'That a boy should see only beautiful women

'Until he's twelve years old,' I blurted out. 

In those days I ordinarily stood on one foot.

 

'But what about when the boy turns thirteen?'

Inquired Anomaly Englehardt with his droll

Intonation to which Mar Knee responded,

'Then we must simply do the best we can.'

 

'Haha, mes élèves,' Professor Koch laughed,

'Class dismissed. Go out into the world and

'Good luck to you.' He had a slight stammer

Mostly on the letter G or on the letter M.

 

Later on College Walk I ran into a grad student

I knew slightly, an ardent Italian communist.  

A beautiful woman walked by and he sneered,

'Look at her. All she wants is a prick.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The How-To Poem with Rebecca Morgan Frank [by Nin Andrews]

I had all these great ideas for a blog post last night as I was drifting off to sleep, feeling thrilled to have just received my second vaccine, and dreaming of life after Covid—dinners out, coffee shops, friends. But this morning, when I woke, I felt done in. Overnight, my brain seems to have turned into Jello. I’m not sure if there’s a coherent thought in there, thanks to Moderna. Usually when I lack inspiration or brain power of my own, I pick up a poetry book at random, and it helps get the juices flowing. Or at least, I have an enjoyable moment with someone else’s poetry. But today, those poetry books are staying on the shelf.  No way can I focus on poetry.

Instead, I’m reaching for my guilty pleasure—self-help books.  Because there isn’t a subject I don’t need a how-to book for. Or a book for dummies. Whenever I walk into a bookstore, I am amazed to find a whole shelf of books, written just for me. So far, I have read Walking for Dummies--I mean how does anyone put one foot in front of the other? Daily Sex for Dummies. Daily, seriously? Tying Shoes for Dummies—it’s true, I don’t even tie my shoes correctly. And The Dummies’ Guide to Love and Happiness.  

What can I say? I love instruction manuals, precisely because I can never follow directions. I remember, many years ago, in a college poetry class, one student said, “Nin never does the assignment. She just goes off into her our own world.” “Yep,” the teacher said. “But at least she has another world to go to.” I am not sure if that’s a good thing. But I try to do what I am told. Well, more or less.

I also love instruction manual-poems like Ashbery’s “The Instruction Manual,” and Rebecca Morgan Frank’s “How to Make Your Own Automaton,” which she reads in this video below. And then offers advice on how to write your own how-to poem. Frank is brilliant. And she gives great advice.  Now, if only I can follow it. 

 

An Interview with James Longenbach [by Aspen Matis]

Renowned poet and literary critic James Longenbach is the author of six poetry collections ― including Earthling, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award ― and eight books of prose. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Nation, and he is the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim +Fellowship, among other honors. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Longenbach via email about his forthcoming book of poems, Forever. We also discussed wisdom as a way of trying to stop time, how immediacy is constructed through language, the reality that "everyone writes what they’re given to write," and how perhaps poets ― and all people ― need a lot of road blocks in order to find a road. 

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

I like how writing poems makes me feel. We all listen to pop songs we love many times, and we don’t generally listen again because we can’t remember how the song goes; we like how it feels to move from the beginning to the end. I think our experience of poems, especially as we write them, is like that, like living acutely in time.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?

I’m not sure there is one! — though it’s important to believe there is one. Over the last 20,000 years most poems have been lost, and five or six have changed society; these days, how many people read Theocritus or Tennyson? It’s important to do the work, important not to formulate rules from anything; it takes a lot of forgotten poets to make a Theocritus.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

Make a poem, which is also the most mundane thing.

If you were to teach a course in modern poetry, where would you begin?

Since the 80s, I’ve done just that lots of ways. These days I organize such a course not by authors (who in this format recur several times) but by verse forms — prose, several different kinds of free verse, sonnets, other rhyme and metrical schemes, songs, and so on. This arrangement changes, but the advantage is that I can better emphasize the great diversity of modernism.

How, in your view, is immediacy constructed through language? 

As I say in The Lyric Now, a great poem creates a sense of the now; the language is happening now; this is why we might keep reading Theocritus. There are lots of ways to do that, but I end up talking a lot about syntax, about how the order of the words creates in each poem a repeatable event in time; this is why, looking back, great poems have been written about (say) both the Holocaust and about sunflowers.

What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of Earthling? 

The poems of Earthling are all overshadowed, as I look back, by my mother’s death. She was old, it was both expected and shocking; but it took me years to figure out how to write about it, and really it wasn’t until, in “The Crocodile,” I haphazardly hit upon the idea of seeming to speak in a very contrived voice that I began to tell what felt like the truth. As that poem points out, maybe we need a lot of road blocks to find a road...

Writers who do more than one thing often face the problem of expectation: people tend to like to pigeonhole them. As a celebrated poet and critic, have you had to navigate the limiting assumptions of your readers and reviewers?

Yup. And my own limiting assumptions, too. But all poets are brilliant critics; they may not write their criticism down, that’s all. You need to have read (so to speak) a hundred great poems in order to write one good one.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

Tons of them. Frost said famously that poetry is what is lost in translation, and Pound said poetry is what is made in translation — with that interesting word in English that corresponds to Theocritus’s Greek. To me, the latter definition has the advantage of seeming less mystical, more material, and poetry is of course a material art, a making of objects out of the medium, in our case the English language. Every human being has had the most complex emotions, but very few human beings have written poems.

Is your forthcoming book of poems, Forever, your most personal collection? What would you like to share about its conception and your vision for its life? 

In one sense, anything we write is deeply personal — what else could it be? But certainly the poems of Forever happened because of my ongoing coping with kidney cancer, and without question I have dealt with questions about mortality (which, looking back, I thought I already had!). Especially inasmuch as these poems are bound up with grappling with such questions, questions that often feel uncomfortably primal, questions of love, the poems feel to me deeply present.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

Conrad Aiken won the National Book Award, and Aiken is a good poet, though he’s not often read. Prizes are of the moment, made of the moment and the moment’s judges, and sometimes history is eventually there, too.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

The philosopher Emil Cioran once said we become wise when we should have been depressed! That’s a little sly, but there’s something to it, too; wisdom is a way of trying to stop time, and time can’t be stopped, as our constantly and surprisingly changing poetry reminds us. There are no rules, and what works really well for one poem or one poet has nothing to do with the next poem or poet. All artists know a lot about sliding back to the bottom of the mountain...

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

I’ve been working on some new poems and some new essays, too. An essay on punctuation (especially its absence) in poetry from the 8th-century “The Seafarer” to the current Jos Charles just appeared in Poetry magazine, and a new poem called “Now and Then” has just come out in The Threepenny Review. I’m grateful. Everybody writes what they’re given to write, and doing so sounds as if it should be easy; but it’s very hard, and in my experience it gets beautifully harder. Often I wish I got to decide anything.

Who said it? [A Challenge]

Remember when the Sunday Times Book Review, frankly middlebrow and proud of it, used to run author's queries ("for a biography of Maxwell Anderson I would be grateful . . .") and legitimate questions from college grads who wanted to track down a favorite quotation (was it Scott Fitzgerald who said "live fast, die young, and have a handsome corpse?") In that spirit I offer you this cocktail party line that would have beguiled Flo Bear.

"If the Kennedy White House was decadent; the Clinton White House was sordid." Who said it? I have asked a lot of smart people, to no avail, and would be grateful for any leads. Meanwhile, my friend Burt Hooton proposes this multiple choice list of possible candidates:

1) Jane Fonda
2) Arthur Schlesinger
3) Diana Trilling
4) Senator Susan Collins
5) Jacques Barzun
6) Lawrence P. Berra

I'm not convinced by any of Burt's suggestions, though the terms of the distinction do sound as though they could have come from #3 or #5, and I appreciate the convention observed in #6.

You get extra points if you can say what Ava Gardner is doing in this post or if you can make a convincing case in favor of Oliver Stone's theory of JFK's assassination. -- DL

Larkin, Uncensored (On Robert Lowell)

On Robert Lowell

Lowell, Lowell, Lowell, Lowell,
Corn is the thing he does so well. . .

This version of the couplet was written in 1966; an earlier one was crafted in 1964. Among British academics Robert Lowell was considered top of the American heap in the 1960s and 70s.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. From the archive; first posted March 18, 2013.

On Robert Lowell

Lowell, Lowell, Lowell, Lowell,
Corn is the thing he does so well. . .

This version of the couplet was written in 1966; an earlier one was crafted in 1964. Among British academics Robert Lowell was considered top of the American heap in the 1960s and 70s.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. From the archive; first posted March 18, 2013.

Elaine Equi: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Jerome Sala

______________________________________________________________________________________

The Repairman

 

I can’t get rid of him. One day I found him sprawled on the floor tinkering

with the radiator. He was very vague about who had called him (not me)

but seemed to think he had every right to be there. Then he handed me a bill

for several thousand dollars. I said: “I can’t deal with this now, I’m late

for an appointment.” But when I got to my office, he was already standing

in the hallway tapping the walls with a concerned look. “Structural tests,” he said.

After that I began seeing him everywhere, like a shadow carrying a toolbox.

He followed me to school as sure as Mary’s little lamb. Later, he followed me

into a bar, sat a few stools away, sipped a beer, and made fun of my taste

in game shows. He even had the audacity to ring my mother’s doorbell on

Thanksgiving claiming he had come to look at the dishwasher, but instead

got into a discussion with her about fall fashions. In all fairness, he doesn’t

seem dangerous or malicious; he’s never tried any funny business. But I have

to ask myself if he’s fixed one thing. The answer is I don’t think he even tries.

He just seems to want to be with me. Meanwhile, the bills keep coming.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Elaine Equi’s latest book is The Intangibles from Coffee House Press. Her other books include Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, Click and Clone, and Sentences and Rain. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Big Other,  the Brooklyn Rail, The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, and in many editions of the Best American Poetry. She teaches at New York University and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The New School.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

              "The Painter," collage by John Ashbery, 2014.

On the Street Where You Live [by Robert Wrigley]

 

                        “Love takes time to overcome.”--Confucius

Certain love songs beloved by men are listened to with something like derision by women.  So I have been assured, by a woman, and I wonder about that.  I don’t doubt it, but I wonder.  I have known for many years that most of the canonical American songbook “torch songs,” for example, were written by men but in their classic versions sung by women.  Imagine Sarah Vaughn singing “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry.”  We are to believe she would never get over loss of the man for whom she carried forever “a torch.”  Right. 

But I would like to consider a song almost diametrically the opposite of a torch song.  I mean “On the Street Where You Live,” jaunty and upbeat, its lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, from the musical play My Fair Lady (Frederick Loewe wrote the music), first staged in 1956, when I was five.  The film version, which I saw in a theater in St. Louis with my parents and sister, appeared in 1964, right about the time I crashed face-first into puberty.  I remember being resistant to the improbable fact that the handsome young Englishman was standing on the street and singing, with orchestral accompaniment, but I also remember thinking that such a feeling as he expressed (turns out the actor was lip-synching; someone else did the expressing), that that feeling might be—I didn’t know—real.  I suppose I wanted it to be.  Why wouldn’t I?  He seemed so happy, so thrilled, that young man, and the lyrics of the song represented his happiness very convincingly, even to, or perhaps especially to, a thirteen year old boy. 

Somehow, I’m sixty-eight now, a year older than Alan Jay Lerner was when he died in 1986 of lung cancer, impoverished, owing the IRS over a million dollars, and unable to pay his medical bills.  Lerner was married eight times.  He said once, “All I can say is if I had no flair for marriage, I also had no flair for bachelorhood.”  (Something in that quip and its delivery is in his best lyrics too.)  It seems that Mr. Lerner might have felt the exhilaration his song expresses a few more times than anyone ought to. 

The character who sings the song in My Fair Lady, one Freddy Eynsford-Hill, is lost in infatuation with Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl taken in by Professor Henry Higgins, after she comes to him seeking elocution lessons.  The play, of course, is adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.  Professor Higgins wagers with his friend and houseguest, Colonel Pickering, that he can turn Eliza into a passable young “lady,” one who can, with his lessons, function in the upper social caste of which he and Pickering are a part.

The scene in which Freddy falls for Eliza takes place at a gathering of exceeding privilege and decorousness, at a race track.  Women in gowns and elaborate, even outlandish, hats; men in tophats, tails, and spats.  The musical number in the scene is “Ascot Gavotte” (also known as “Ascot Opening Day”—its opening lines: “Ev’ry duke and earl and peer is here/Ev’ryone who should be here is here”).  Eliza does quite well among the hoity-toity until, in the midst of the race’s final stretch she can stand it no longer and with all her suppressed Cockney fervor bellows at her favored horse, “Come on, Dover! Move yer bloomin’ arse?”  The vocal intro to “On the Street Where You Live” includes Freddy remembering, and repeating, Eliza’s unfortunate (or fortunate) ejaculation; it even suggests that that ejaculation may be what, beyond Eliza herself (played in the film by Audrey Hepburn), precipitates his headlong fall. 

Soon thereafter Freddy arrives at Professor Higgins’s house with flowers.  Higgins, Pickering, and Eliza are having dinner.  The maid takes the flowers and invites Mr. Eynsford-Hill in, but he declines and at the bottom of the stair, back on the street, sings his song.

The plays, both the musical and its Shavian model, are fraught.  Shaw took as his inspiration an ancient Greek myth.  Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with one of his statues, which—presumably so deeply and intimately loved and, much more importantly, so perfectly created—comes to life.  In Lerner and Loewe’s version, Eliza is matter, medium, raw material fashioned by a man into an acceptable, respectable, lovable, and cravable woman—made so, created even, by a man.

To say that the gender issues in the movie went right over my head at thirteen is accurate and predictable and an understatement.  Although one might also say that the issues went over a lot of heads:  both the plays and the film were enormously successful.

But Freddy seems head over heels for a fully-formed woman, as far as he can tell, one who is just enough like but not at all like the other women in his circle.  Something about class is involved in it too, of course; Eliza’s sudden coarseness is electrifying.  Who knows what it might suggest to Freddy?  But what I’m curious about is this: could “On the Street Where You Live” be one of those love songs beloved by men but derided by women?  Does the man’s infatuation seem, well, fatuous?  The word “love” is never spoken in the song.  Does infatuation really have anything to do with love?  (One might ask something similar about music or poetry.)  Freddy has seen but hardly even met Eliza—just once—but he is intoxicated by her, the possibility of her.  He’s smitten.  Is it Freddy’s smittenness itself that is suspect?  Is the very act of feeling smitten by another person suspect?  In the hetero-world, in and out of movies, it’s usually the man who is smote, so to speak, and his condition, in terms literary and historical—and in reality—is all too often dangerous for the woman.  Think of Daphne and Apollo, Zeus and Leda.  The list is endless; it is added to every day in brutal stories in the news.  Vastly more women are killed by obsessed lovers and husbands than by infatuated strangers.

Is Freddy’s smittenness a form of potentially dangerous, power-mad insanity?  Probably not.  He seems too callow to be a monster.  Shaw resisted the “happy ending,” with Eliza and Higgins in love and together; the musical, not so much.  Higgins seems to realize his love, or his loss (though of what, exactly?  His dejected song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” is another of the musical’s long-lived chestnuts).  But then Eliza returns.  The happy ending is at least implied.  As for Freddy, when Eliza leaves Higgins earlier, she tells him she’ll marry Freddy because he, at least, is one who loves her.  But in the end, that doesn’t matter.  She comes back to the man who, as it were, made her what she is. 

This is an excerpt from Nemerov's Door: Essays by Robert Wrigley
(Tupelo Press, North Adams, MA)

Paper $19.95

https://www.tupelopress.org

The Final Season [by Greg Pattenaude]

RALPH FASANELLA (1914 - 1997) | Sandlot Game

Thursday was the most glorious day on the calendar, one filled with childlike dreams and unmatched optimism. No, I’m not referring to April Fool’s Day, but Major League Baseball’s Opening Day.  Never mind that there was wet snow falling most of the day at my house. The sun would be shining somewhere. What I did not count on was a Covid outbreak among Washington Nationals ballplayers cancelling the Mets first game of the season, and as I write this, it was just announced that the entire weekend series is cancelled. So on Thursday, I settled for a few innings of the Blue Jays – Yankees game which lasted three hours and thirty minutes, tied 2-2 after nine innings. The 10^th inning then showcased Major League Baseball’s latest game “enhancement” – putting a runner at 2^nd base to encourage scoring and forcing a quicker ending. The Blue Jays scored in the top of the 10^th; the Yankees did not in the bottom frame. This enhancement might be nice in youth sports where parents can get home earlier, but it has no place in professional sports. But I digress and this leads me to my main topic.  

Since its establishment in 1876, the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs has had nine players in the lineup. In one half of an inning, nine players are in the field.  In the other half, those nine players take a turn batting. This repeats for nine innings, or if tied after nine, to extra innings. In the 1950s and 60s, the National League was seen as more exciting than its junior counterpart, the American League, formed in 1901. With sagging attendance in the late 1960s, American League owners sought a way to boost fan appeal. Ideas like yellow baseballs were ruled out. The Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley introduced bright colored uniforms for pizazz. But his biggest proposal, one that other American League owners agreed with, was the idea that pitchers, not being the best hitters, should be replaced in the lineup with someone else. That tenth person would be known as the Designated Hitter, or DH.  In 1973, the Yankees’ Ron Bloomberg had the distinction of being the first major league player to bat multiple times in a game while never having to put on a glove.  Since then, the two leagues played by different rules and whether you love or loathe the DH still is as heated as any political discussion.

Much has happened in the nearly 50 years since the DH’s introduction. In 1976, players were granted the right to free agency, boosting salaries by exponential proportions. The leagues added teams several times, to the current 15 teams in both leagues. In 1994, playoffs were expanded to allow more teams to participate in the post season.  Interleague baseball was introduced in 1997. And in 2000, the National and American Leagues, as legal entities, were dissolved. And during this past winter, Major League Baseball exercised its muscle to take control of minor league baseball, and in the process left forty communities around the country without a team. But through it all, pitchers hit in the National League, despite the DH being used in the minor leagues and colleges. I like to think of it as a badge of honor connecting the 19^th century to future generations – nine gloves and the same nine batters.

Baseball, by nature, is bucolic; it’s played on a field. Sure, there may be 50,000 seats surrounding that field, and, pre-Covid, fans are screaming. But there also are moments of parents and children or groups of friends sitting there watching the action, second-guessing managerial moves, cheering and clapping.  The best applause is saved for a starting pitcher coming to bat for the fourth time in a game.  

With the current collective bargaining agreement between the owners and players ending this year, it’s nearly certain that the DH will be adopted in the National League. From the players’ standpoint, it means a roster spot where a one-dimensional player can earn a lot of money or an aging player who can’t field his position anymore but can still hit can still earn big bucks at the end of a career. For the owners, its protection for a high-priced pitcher having to do anything other than throw a baseball and encourage the opportunity for more runs in a game. There is this notion that fans, particularly younger ones of the video game era, want more runs at any cost.

The fan base who enjoys a more cerebral experience of talking to your neighbor, second guessing managers, bunting a runner over to 2^nd and double-switches--I’ll call this strategy--will come to an end.  During the Covid-shortened season of 2020, the DH was used in the National League, under a “health and safety” protocol to protect pitchers from overly exerting themselves. It was pretty clear that this was a trial run, like the silly runner on 2^nd to start extra innings rule.  

So this is it. My Mets, welcomed into the National League in 1962, appear to have a very strong team this year, and just paid 27 year-old Francisco Lindor $340 million to play shortstop for the next 10 years.  And they have new ownership for only the third time in their history. As far as the National League, it had a good run. With the inevitable ahead, I’ve branded this as The Final Season.  Let it begin.

From My Diary – February 2020 No. 2 [by Lera Auerbach]

Home © Lera Auerbach, Oil on Canvas

(1)

The doctors warned me that I might get depressed after the surgery.
Before the surgery, my tumor was producing five times more cortisol than normal. 

After the surgery, it would take months before my remaining adrenal gland would start producing enough cortisol.

In between, I will feel tired and low even though I will be taking hydrocortisone pills.
Ideally, I will be able to taper them off slowly, reducing the dose every week.

"It will be a long and tiring process," the doctors assured me. 

"I felt tired and depressed before the surgery so that it will be nothing new," I tried to reassure my doctors.

"Yes, but before, you felt tired and depressed because you had too much. After, you will feel so because you don't have enough. It's very different," the doctors seemed concerned.

The doctors seemed tired. And somewhat depressed.
But they were also excited because they would get to cut my tumor off. And cutting tumors is exciting and admirable.
And then one gets to experiment with those tumors once they are cut and out.
No patient asks for a tumor back or expresses the wish to keep it for a souvenir in formaldehyde on a shelf in a library
or on a bedside table. So, the doctors get to play with other people's tumors and write papers about their findings.  

(2)

My clock lost its hands and could no longer tell time.
"It's okay," I reassured doctors. "I understand the complications."  

"You may no longer feel like yourself," the doctors continued.
"I'm not sure if I feel like myself now before the surgery," I said. 

It was true. I could not tell if I felt on top of the world, or downright miserable,
or even if it mattered at all how I felt. I no longer knew.

After the surgery, I discovered that my tumor was made of fear.
That's why it was producing so much cortisol: the fight-or-flight hormone. 

Now, while the remaining adrenal gland is still half-asleep, I seem not to feel fear.
No, I don't feel particularly brave, but rather… indifferent.  

Fears are hopes in disguise.
Have I lost hopes too?

(3)

One of the scars on my belly is bigger than the others. 

Sometimes, I dream it becomes unglued, my belly opens up,
and my insides start falling out for everyone to see. 

Last night I dreamt I was having surgery, but the surgeon kept forgetting what kind of surgery it was
and kept waking me up to ask over and over again. He was also not sure if he had my name right.
Drugged by anesthetics, I kept misspelling my name until I, too, was doubting if I was the right patient. 

(4) 

It is now two weeks and three days since my surgery, and I can no longer see the surgeon's initials
marked on my belly next to the four scars. Strangely, I miss them. 

The scars also look different. The glue has partially fallen off, and under the bond, there is some pink skin 
senza the red-and-black drama of stabbing wounds.

The remaining glue looks dirty and gray, like the residue left by Scotch tape.
My belly still looks inflated; for the surgery, they filled it with gas and fluids. 

I do not know how to answer how I'm feeling because I do not know what I am feeling and, more importantly,
how I'm supposed to be feeling. The best thing to do with feelings is to transport them. 

I know what I'm feeling if I hear it in music or read it in a poem.
But without art, without its forms, how can I name the unnamable?  

After the storm, the choir of frogs sings "Alleluia"
while Venus and the moon are getting ever closer each night this week. 

(5)

Anything can become anything can become anything. 

I love nights because nights hide; you can imagine something magical,
and there is no evidence to the contrary. 
That's why witches preferred to fly at night. Shady characters. 

But if flying on a broomstick seems childish,
why is wearing a cross with a brutally murdered Jew any better? 

Each religion pulls the symbolic blanket of righteousness on its side.
My god is the only true god; my beliefs are the most believable. 

My friend Burcin in Minnesota said, "I believe in butter. Because butter makes everything better." 
But probably even 'I believe in butter' belief could find its opposition. 

I believe in music. But does music believe in me?

I am here but also absent. 

 

 

Writing Prompts for April's Poem-a-Day Challenge (by Nin Andrews)

It’s April, the cruelest month, and here in Virginia the rain has been falling so steadily, I am worried it will never dry out again. I feel soaked to the bone. Brain-foggy, too. Socked in. But, in spite of that, I’ve signed up for one of those write-a-poem-a-day groups. Now, I know a lot of you BAP readers are naturals at writing daily poems. Maybe you follow William Stafford’s advice of lowering your standards, and just keep writing no matter what. Or you’re a regular Emily Dickinson or Frank O'Hara--scribbling brilliant lines every other second. Or you’re like David Lehman who wrote a poem a day for two years (gulp) and then published his lovely book, The Daily Mirror.  Me? I don’t write a poem in a day, or even in a week. Ever.    

But, I have decided to give it a try. After all, it's what poets do in April, right? And I want to say, I'll be relying on all those poets who so graciously offered up video prompts for Lit Youngstown's Lit by the Imagination project, poets like Denise Duhamel, Stephanie Strickland, Peter Johnson, Jeff Friedman, Dante Di Stefano, and others. So many others. Every day there’s a new poet and a new prompt here. 

I want to post a few examples here, just to give a taste of what's ahead. Like this one by Nicole Santalucia:

And this one by Lauren K. Alleyne:

And this one by Leona Sevick:

 

Vastness, Immensity (by Mitch Sisskind)

1.

I want you to imagine a yacht the length 
Of three football fields filled with the top
Two hundred and fifty celebrities from 
The worlds of music, movies, sports,
Silicon Valley and Wall Street sailing 
Around the world for three weeks 
With gourmet food twenty-four hours
And nightly concerts in the auditorium 
Of the yacht that go on literally 
Until the next morning featuring 

Sam Blender, Cathy Lynn Doherty, 
Ed Froom, Jojo Greinke, and with 
Mary Drell and the whole thing 
Presided over by Henry Dreiben.

 

2.

There were days when I woke up
In the morning and said to myself
What am I doing here? I confessed
To Henry Dreiben that I felt sort of
Unworthy all the time but Henry was
Having none of it and he introduced
Me to Bud Wagner a top entertainment
Lawyer who remarked how if the boat
Sank it would be like the extinction of
The dinosaurs because imagine a boat
With actually everybody who is anybody
On it and then multiply it by a zillion,
Pete Krups, Liz Walitari, Bub Zebel,
Bess Turk, Pat Caine, Mel Brazelton.

3.

But now let's look at it in reverse.

Suppose instead of the boat sinking 
Everything except the boat sank
So the boat would be like Noah's Ark   

And whereas if it sank that would be 
A tragedy but if everything else 
Sank we could start over from scratch
Again with just the people on the boat 
Like the animals and Henry Dreiben
Like Noah. Do you know how much 
Money he has? I once asked him
What is the best thing about having
So much money and he said it was
Not having to stress about anything.

 

4. 
I feel like I can't put it into words. 
A huge yacht filled with celebrities,
The brainchild of Henry Dreiben,
A yacht full of famous musicians.
Do you see what I'm trying to 
Convey here? It's so frustrating.
Frank Catalano, Meg Deutsch, 

Also standup comics, animators, 

Lawyers all mingling around with 
Each other, Harley Blomquist,
Maureen Garber, I feel like 
I can see it in my mind but
If I write it I get so frustrated!
Elise Krodniki. Everybody!

 

Wit and Metaphor in George Herbert’s ‘Love (III)" [by David Lehman]

Like John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, though not as flamboyant as the first or as metrically inventive as the second, George Herbert proved that devotional poetry can generate high intellectual excitement.

Born in Wales in 1593, Herbert distinguished himself at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was elected to Parliament twice. In 1630, a year after he married, Herbert took holy orders. He served as rector in Bemerton near Salisbury, delivering sermons and writing poems, for the rest of his short life. Before he died in 1633 he entrusted a gathering of his poems, The Temple, to a friend. The poems won an immediate audience.

Herbert is one of the so-called “metaphysical” poets, who rely on cunning wit and use elaborate, sometimes incongruous metaphors to explore complex themes. He has a poem, “The Pulley,” in which God pours all his pleasures on man except “rest.” Anyone who doubts that the lowly pun can perform sublime feats need only consider these two lines in which “rest” meaning “remainder” and “rest” meaning “repose” are entangled to their paradoxical enhancement: “Yet let him keep the rest, / But keep them with repining restlessness.”

Where Herbert is most obviously innovative is in his use of carmen figuratum – shaped or patterned poems. He has one in the shape of an altar and another, “Easter Wings,” that demands to be viewed as a pair of winged birds in flight. Herbert was also an inveterate compiler of proverbs. To him we owe that durable cliché: “His bark is worse than his bite.”

But Herbert is most dear to us because his poems suggest an intimacy of discourse between the poet and his creator.  Not for Herbert the attitude struck by Donne, who can begin a poem by telling off a heavenly body (“Busy old fool, unruly sun”). The speaker in Herbert’s poems is marked by an unforced humility – he may be the only poet in the body of English poetry who is believable not only when he addresses the divinity but when he transcribes the responses he gets.

Among my favorites is “Love (III),” the most admired of three Herbert poems with that title:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
          Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
          From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
          If I lacked anything.

“A guest," I answered, “worthy to be here”:
          Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
          I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
          “Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
          Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not," says Love, “who bore the blame?”
          “My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down," says Love, “and taste my meat.”
          So I did sit and eat.

The poem is the record of a dialogue. The key metaphor is the personification of “Love” at the door welcoming an invited but trepidatious guest to enter and dine. The guest is not the speaker exactly but one part of him, “my soul,” who bears the guilt “of dust and sin.” To have a body is to participate in human nature, universally understood as selfish and competitive. And so the soul, thus tarnished, tarries at the door.

Here we cannot help feeling that Love the host is not an abstraction in an allegorical parade of proper nouns.  No, “Love” as presented by Herbert is “quick-eyed,” confident (“drew nearer to me”), even romantic (“sweetly questioning”).

Is Herbert’s Love, then, female, a goddess like Athena? And is “Love” not simply “caritas,” or Christian “charity,” but something almost sensual?

The second stanza complicates matters further. The speaker confesses himself unworthy, an ingrate, but Love is infinitely patient.  To “I cannot look on thee,” Love responds, “Who made the eyes but I?” With the majestic pun of “eyes” and “I,” the answer is as irrefutable as the statements Job in the Bible hears when he complains of his lot– with the difference that it is difficult to picture the God of Job except as a fierce patriarchal authority whereas the Christian Love depicted here takes the sinner’s hand like a “dear” friend. .

          The would-be guest’s sense of guilt is not easily abated. Herbert – who elsewhere depicts himself as “A wonder tortur’d in the space / Betwixt this world and that of grace” -- fears he should enter not this house but a place where “shame” receives the punishment it “deserves.”

          Is the house, then, not the church but the divine afterlife? Do we stand at heaven’s gate? If so, is the poem as much about death as about love?

          The poem is resolved in its last four lines. The guest must be reminded that the God who speaks is capable of triple form and that in one of them, he is the son of God, who dies on the cross for humankind, accepting all the “blame.” The argument carries the day and the guest, in a fit of enthusiasm, volunteers to “serve” the Lord – as Herbert himself did as the rector of a church. The word “serve” is beautifully chosen, reviving the image of the dinner party, in which waiters serve guests. But, then, look how much is conveyed by the rhyme words alone of the last stanza.

          Herbert’s deity is an unfailingly good host – and here we cannot overlook the religious meaning of “host” as the body of Christ in the ritual of the Eucharist.

          Love says, in effect, eat me and be whole. In this poem of communion, Love defeats not sin but guilt. Love overlooks shame. Love is a feast and even the “unkind, ungrateful” may partake.

           I am proposing a way of reading “Love” that would help explain its appeal to the secular reader, whose enjoyment of the poem depends less on its structure of orthodox Christian belief than on its brilliance as verse. But let it also be noted that more than a few former atheists have found their way back to God’s good graces through George Herbert’s poetry.

Ed note: This article first appeared in The Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2014 under the headline "A Feast for the Guilt-Ridden Guest" and sub-hed "Exploring complex themes with cunning wit and elaborate metaphors in George Herbert’s ‘Love (III)." For other readings of great poems, click on these links:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html

New Trilling Essay the Talk of the Town

The emergence of a previously unknown and uncharacteristically fiery essay by Lionel Trilling is all the buzz in intellectual circles. Our stringers at far-flung campuses report the excitement at faculty clubs and academic production centers where Trilling's essays in criticism, particularly those written between 1940 and his death in 1975, command a respect accorded to few contemporaries, not because he had a penchant for oracular pronouncements (he did not) but because of the nuanced style of exposition in his writing, which reflected a mind of immense subtlety, irony, and complexity. By indirections he found directions out.

The reputation for what champions admired as subtlety (and detractors considered coyness) may change with the posthumous appearance of an essay Trilling was said to have begun in 1967 but never completed to his satisfaction. The essay's working title was "I Hate the Liberals." Victor Mathis, the archivist who discovered the draft in Trilling's papers, insisted that marginal handwritten comments in the legendary Columbia prof's distinctive script imply "that this jest was a place-holder for an ultimate title along the lines of 'The Liberal Dilemma in an Age of Economic Decline'."

That Trilling, author of "The Liberal Imagination," had commenced on an essay critical of New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and of what was vulgarly known as "limousine liberalism," a phrase Trilling dissects, made news wherever talking heads shmooze. "It's like an intellectual version of Tom Wolfe's outing of Leonard Bernstein's black panther party as 'radical chic'," said Jenna Clauss of the Brookings Institute. Marvin Murdeck of the McLuhan School of Public Information emphasized that the title, though evidently a joke Trilling enjoyed, was "deliberately reductive of his thoughts on the whole question of political hypocrisy among union-smashing NIMBY elites who are incredibly full of shit but should not be caricatured nevertheless."

Handmade signs declaring "I Hate the Liberals" (or variants, including celebrations of poetry as the antithesis of sociological claptrap, have sprung up in affluent parts of Ann Arbor, Madison, Colorado Springs, Ithaca, Providence, Rhode Island, and Evanston, Illinois. Some say this is happening in the spirit of a joke. "It's post-modernism, man," said Josh Lucas, a freshperson at Northwestern, who has not yet declared a major but is leaning toward sociology. But there are those who see in the outpouring of anti-liberal sentiment the hyperbolic release of impulses long repressed. Professor Leon Elson, the Hayte-Ashbery Professor of Applied Kenesiology at Florida Ache, compares the "I Hate the Liberals" fad with people screaming out the windows, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more." Elson's point: "It's not so much a matter of art following life, or life following art, but life following life, and art, art, depending on how you define it."

from the archive; March 31, 2011.

Professor Trilling, asked to comment for the record, replied with this link but said he was of "mixed minds, because of the implicit inaccuracy in the record of any correspondence between two persons, neither of whom is alive." The court decided in favor of the plaintiff, who affirmed his belief in the "irony of circumstance," as he termed it, and a distrust of any idea that, if stated flat out, could be construed as signifying both itself and its opposite. "You know, Fitzgerald was right about consciousness," he said to me one afternoon, sneaking a cigarette. -- DL

Much better late than never. . .a (more or less) favorable review

Today (3/31/21), Caesura posted Inspector Watt's review of Poems in the Manner of, and in a curiously contrarian way I am pleased that in the poetry business, in which it sometimes seems that business is always personal (in defiance of the Corleone family's command not to mix the two), a review of a poetry book can appear four years after the book's pub date.

You ask who is Inspector Watt? I don't know, but the pseudonymous one also comments on Maureen McLane's 2014 volume This Blue and Chelsea Minnis's 2018 collection Baby, I Don't Care, with its wonderful title: Robert Mitchum's line in Out of the Past (which so well sums up Mitchum's attitude that it served as the title of Lee Server's biography of the actor). Inspector Watt's idiosyncratic style makes one wonder whether he praises with feigned damns. -- DL

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Poems in the Manner of  by David Lehman. Scribner Poetry, 2017 ($18.00)

There are two ways to look at this strange book of poetry, which “channels” poets from Catullus to Joe Brainard.  If you’re not convinced that Lehman can imitate any poet you can name, at the end of the book, just for good measure, he includes his satirical lyrics for songs by Bob Dylan, Lorenz Hart and Irving Berlin, and Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.  Lehman can parody anyone, with aplomb and humor.  Here’s his tribute / goof on Bashō’s famous haiku: “Pond / Frog / Splash.”  So, on the one hand, the book is a display of brilliance.  But on the other hand, it wonderfully illustrates where contemporary American poetry is — driving forward by looking in the rear-view mirror.  This book implies that the best poetry is behind us.  The new and improved poets who have rose petals tossed at them by critics for their shockingly new and improved poetry pale in comparison to the poets listed on the front cover of Lehman’s book: Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda.  OK, Ernest Hemingway not so much.  Damn you, David Lehman.  You’ve left me elated and depressed.

https://caesuramag.org/posts/anvil-and-rose-10