The Best American Poetry

Peter Fortunato, Guest Author November 18-22

This week we welcome Peter Fortunato as our guest author. Peter grew up in Wappingers Falls and Poughkeepsie, New York at a family run restaurant and resort much like the one in his novel, Carnevale (Fomite Press, November 2019). Peter's father was a stage magician and singer and his mother an extraordinary seamstress and cook. He is a poet, painter, performer, ceremony maker, and hypnotherapist, recently retired from teaching at Cornell University and Ithaca College.Peter has been a Buddhist for many years, as well as a shaman, Reiki master practitioner, and Tarot mage. His poetry collections include Entering the Mountain (Cayuga Lake Books, 2019) and Late Morning (Cayuga Lake Books, 2013). Find out more about Peter here and follow him on facebook here. 

Welcome, Peter. 

-- sdl

I FELT FREE TO TAKE LIBERTIES WITH THE NOVEL [by Peter Fortunato]

I wrote Carnevale hoping my language would primarily evoke two periods of American history: the first is the 1960s, when so much seemed possible; its counterpoint and contrast is the Great Recession of 2008, when so much felt wasted and bitter truths about art and the art market had to be faced, even within the walls of the academy. The later parts of the novel have many observations to make about painting and photography. (Below is a work of mine, Dance with Me, painted in 2019.)

My childhood and adolescence weren’t completely blissful, and my family wasn’t financially well off, but life at a family restaurant and resort in Wappingers Falls often felt theatrical. Furthermore, as a young boy, the Place seemed to me a piece of Italy that had been relocated to the rural Hudson Valley. Like Guido, I’d lived in Italy with my parents for a time, and afterwards I experienced a sense of continuity with life at our restaurant, colorful and replete with drama. A carnival, so to speak, with galas and masquerade balls that I vividly recall.

This material is part of my soul, and it’s represented in my poetry collection, Entering the Mountain, which came out in 2017. Those poems are closer to home and more distilled than the episodes narrated in the novel. I was at work on both simultaneously, but I felt free to take liberties with the novel that I didn’t want to indulge in the poetry. Sure, my poems aren’t to be regarded as autobiographical accounts, and yet I decided that Entering the Mountain, a mostly elegiac collection, would memorialize my family members. Carnevale is more celebratory. My feeling while writing it was that I could see some of my family playing the roles of the characters—well, sort of. None of the characters in the novel is a portrait of an actual person.

A central event in Guido’s coming of age story is the fantastical masked ball, the Carnevale, or Mardi Gras party, that occurs at the Villa Giustovera. Although it’s fictional, the spirit of the event is true to the setting and characters of my own teenage years. Trite as it might sound today, during the early 1960s everything seemed to change from black and white to color, and I wanted to see those days and taste those highs once more; I wanted to preserve them in fictional amber. The characters and the setting, Guido’s solitary pleasures, his wild imagination, his snake hunting, his careful study of the lounge lizards that shoot craps with his father, his obsession with the Villa’s belle donne, and the psychic lessons imparted by his grandmother and her Tarot, all of these help to make Guido-the-person. The wish to preserve these elements help to make him an artist.   (Below is photo taken a mere three weeks ago at a Venetian mask shop)

In writing Carnevale I was able to animate aspects of my personal history by stretching them into fiction, largely through the invention of compelling characters and dramatic episodes. Guido’s irresistible cousin Tina and her brother, the devil-may-care Cristiano never exited in my own life (except as fictive personages I have spent a lot of time with!) I put an accent on adventures of a “piratical” sort, which include Guido’s days and nights at the Half Moon Café and Saloon where he is the apprentice of his rascal mentor, Leo Declare, and is exposed to Leo’s dubious partner Bob Badget. Guido’s obsessiveness, his foolishness, his vulnerabilities, his genuine open heartedness, and his search for lasting love are as much an education in the artist’s way of life as are all the hours spent in the studio at work or standing before masterpieces in museums and galleries. Although he isn’t me, I see myself in him.

 

Voices of Columbia 1967, #1 (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jared Korsauer, Student

Every Sunday night a group of us
Get together – a leftist lawyer,
CU Students, a tough black guy
Who got radicalized in the air force,
Some chicks, a psychiatrist who
Knows psychiatry is all bullshit --
Each with revolutionary intentions
And with a revolutionary analysis
Which doesn’t mean they’ve read
Every word that Marx ever wrote
Or all of Stalin’s letters to Molotov
But they understand the dialectic
And they’re action-oriented Leninist
Bolsheviks in the context of 1967.

*
Carlson Fenwick, Professor

Were we really to hear and
Understand Lear’s words,
‘If you have poison for me
“I will drink it,’ or Francesca
Of Canto V, ‘Quel giorno più
‘Non vi leggemmo avante,’
‘That day we read no farther,’
Or von Sternberg’s Blue Angel
In which Jannings dies a tragic
Cuckold and off the screen died
An unrepentant Nazi in 1950 --
Were we to take all that to heart,
Alas, in that case, I’m afraid
We would just cry all the time.

*
James Rice, Student

Pears are pear-shaped Jewish kids
From Brooklyn most of whom
Want to be doctors but they also
Like Government which is called
Political Science at a lot of schools.
Pears hang out in the pear palace
Which is the 24-hour study room
Near the vending machines in
Hartley Hall which are across the
Way from the TV room where
Pears are almost never found.
Jocks who come here from Ohio
Or Texas have never seen a pear
And it hugely freaks them out.

 

IS YOUR NOVEL CARNEVALE ABOUT YOU? [by Peter Fortunato]

"Is your novel about you?"

That question has become very familiar, and partly it has to do with the use of first person narration. Besides that, anybody who knows I’m a poet as well as a painter, that I’ve taught at several colleges—one of them reminiscent of the fictional Hudson River College—and that I grew up at an Italian American restaurant and resort during the 1960s, is likely to wonder if the book’s narrator, Guido Diamante, is an alter ego of mine. But the novel isn’t only about Guido: it has quite a cast of characters beginning with his immediate family which is dominated by his grandmother. Among other things, Carnevale is a family saga.

“Nineteen years, you say? It took nineteen years to write it?”

Yeah. It’s a big book. It wouldn’t let me leave it behind, even though I did try to abandon it, and at one point the project lay fallow for six years. (I’m a slow writer, anyway, and a single poem can take me years to finish, and I’ve learned this is good.) My novel ripened at its own rate, sometimes more quickly than at other times. I discovered a healthy distance from the subject matter and characters once I realized how liberating it is to write long form fiction. I also discovered how challenging it is for the narrating voice to manage the individual voices of all the characters, their consciousness and also their unique speech during dialogues. However, once you have the right way of telling a story—voice and tone—things start to clarify of themselves. Different writers have different ways of trying to describe how characters and their stories come to life, but really it’s rather magical.

In one way, I think I could actually say the book is about me, meaning it represents how I learned to write a novel. Indeed, it starts out with the protagonist, Guido, believing he’s writing a memoir, which he abandons for various reasons when he returns to his teaching position at HRC. Other writers will get what I mean about the work being a reflection of yourself over the time you were creating it—not that this meta understanding will be important to most readers, who mainly want a good story and characters they can believe in.

One of the differences from writing poems was in my realization that an early analogy with which I encouraged myself was inexact: I thought that making poems was to cabinet making as writing a novel was to building a house. In terms of attention to craft and the scope of the respective projects this might be fair to say, but a novel needs more horsepower than a poem or short story to propel it. Or I could say, it needs a large enough floor-plan to integrates a lot of different rooms where the action takes place. One advantage for my storytelling in this book is the physical fact of the Villa Giustovera, where Guido’s childhood was lived (and which, yes, I remembered from my own childhood) and where his mother continues to live into the present time of the story. Here’s a partial description:

The Villa was "our house," and I knew how strange a place it was compared to the ordinary houses where other people lived.   For one thing, privacy was rare amid the busy, peopled rooms, and the idea of “family” sometimes felt as vague as it did inclusive, because our house was also the Hotel, the Resort, the Restaurant. Although there were three different bars over the years in three different rooms and a cocktail lounge that was continually remodeled, the Villa Giustovera was never called the Bar, except by my father and his pals. To my mother, it was usually referred to simply as the Place or the Business—but it was also, indisputably, her home since childhood.

The Place haunts Guido in several ways, most obviously because of all the memories associated with it. His grandparents’ generation and their stories connect him to events that happened there before he was born, and whether or not a reader believes that Guido is actually psychic, these ghosts speak through him. Tarot cards play an important role in Guido’s life, just as they do in his grandmother’s, and they help Guido to learn more fully about his people and certain events from the long ago past. I myself am a Tarot reader and I relied on the cards as part of my writing process.

I needed to answer an urge to complete the novel, to a great extent because I wanted to preserve certain elements of my own history, but also because I wanted to salvage the memory of a more rural Mid-Hudson Valley that’s now gone. The book does end up in 2008, not so long ago, but even that era, the Great Recession, is already fading from the collective psyche. Beyond this, I wanted to write a coming of age story that would resonate for any reader.

That Old Black Magic [music Harold Arlen, lyrics Johnny Mercer]

This version of the song -- as sung by Louis Prima and Keely Smith -- was my introduction to the Arlen/Mercer standard. I liked the collaboration of Arlen and Mercer so much that in my mind their names merged into one: Merlin. Happy birthday, Johnny Mercer. -- DL

A NOVEL IS ANOTHER KIND OF WRITING [by Peter Fortunato]

So I wrote a novel, and it’s just been published: Carnevale. The name means “carnival” and it refers to a gala masquerade party held at the family run, Italian American restaurant of the protagonist’s childhood. Sure, this part is based on my own youth, but no, the book isn’t truly autobiographical. I have mined some of the same material from my Italian heritage before in my poetry, but a novel is different—let me explain.

 

While a lyric or narrative poem written in the first person voice isn’t to be assumed autobiographical—we refer to its speaker as “the speaker” or “the persona”—a novel is by definition a work of fiction. Its great appeal to readers is that we know it’s going to take us places we haven’t been to in the same way before, neither in actuality nor in our imaginations, and the novel proposes to do that on its long river of words. If we’re lucky, we’ll find that we enjoy living in that book, on that craft, for some time. A collection of poems can also do that, of course, and an entire collection might be narrated in the voice of a character its author has adopted, a persona or “mask” she is speaking through for her purposes. But a novel goes further—at least that’s what I found. For starters it had to do with loosening my language beyond the constraints of the metrics that the music of poetry requires. Oh, I’ve read aloud to myself every line of Carnevale many times, and I trust my ear, and the narrating voice of the main character, but still, it’s another kind of writing.

When I’ve told people of a new collection of my poems has just been published, the responses tend to range from whole hearted “Congratulations!” to the polite, “That’s nice,” to “Well—I don’t really understand poetry.” Usually, it’s only fellow poets who will ask, “Where can I get it?” These reactions indicate something about the paradoxical position of poetry in the collective American psyche: It’s fascinating to the general public that people continue to write it and that some enjoy reading it, but to grasp its essence requires a certain sensibility. I agree with what Stanley Kunitz once said, that people are glad to know poets still exist, even if as readers they don’t care to spend much time with their words. But almost everybody has read a novel or two, and a lot of people have dreamt of writing one (usually based on what they imagine as their own adventurous lives!), and to be told by an actual writer that his actual novel is now on sale generally elicits enthused reactions.

Here are some: “Congratulations! What’s it about?” “Is it on Amazon?” “Who published it?” “How long did it take you to write it?” “Is it available for e-readers?” “Is it an audiobook?” What I’ve concluded is that the fact of the novel’s existence, whether in print, electronic or audio format, seems to people to be inclusive, in contrast to the way that poetry, alas, is often regarded as exclusive; that is, only for some readers.   (Footnote: Carnevale is in print and electronic formats, but not yet an audio book; I plan to record it as soon as possible.)

It’s the question, “What’s it about?” that lately gives me pause before I reply. The book has meant so much to me over so many years, and it’s such a relief not to be hawking it to literary agents, that I just don’t feel like giving a packaged reply anymore. People do sometimes sincerely ask of a poet, “What is your poetry about?” and while that question makes some poets squirm to the point of almost blurting out “Read it and find out for yourself!” I think it’s understandable that before they invest their time and attention, prospective readers expect that a novel, a big book, will have a plot and interesting characters and readily identifiable subject matter. Once the book is in their hands and before their eyes, they will have their own relationships with it. I’m not in control of that. Most people don’t know how to respond to poems, even if they’ve read and liked a collection. But, as I’ve said, with a novel things are different. There are characters and drama and comedy depicted, the stuff of ordinary life painted by the author’s hidden hand. There’s a lot for people to relate to.

Over the many years I was writing Carnevale—about 19, including final revisions right before publication—I condensed my “elevator pitch” to these 48 words: “Carnevale begins as coming of age story set in the Hudson Valley at an Italian American resort in the 1960s. The painter Guido Diamante’s memory is jarred when he returns to teach at the Hudson River College in 2008 shortly after the suspicious death of his rascal mentor.” But that isn’t what I said recently when a friend at my gym asked me, “What’s it about?”

We’d each just showered after our workouts and were in the process of getting dressed, and I really didn’t feel like giving one of my practiced synopses, but also, this guy is a friend around ten years older than I who’s from Poughkeepsie, where some of the novel is set, and so for a moment I hesitated. I really wanted him to read it and like it.

Then I replied: “It’s about an artist. He’s Italian. He lives in the Hudson Valley. I made up most of what happens.” The next time I saw him, about a week later, he said, “I’ve read the first three chapters. I’m glad they’re short. They bring back a lot of memories.”

Helen Forrest and I wish you a happy birthday, Johnny Mercer

 

 

Long Live Noir -- and No R [by David Lehman]

A few years ago I wrote a piece for The American Scholar employing the Raymond Roussel method of composition that obliges the author to commence with one word or phrase and end with a meaning derived from a homonym of the initial word or phrase. Noir became No R. Here's how:

<<<
Kaminsky got on the noir bandwagon early on.

At Wesleyan he majored in French, spent his junior year in Paris, went to the Cinémathèque Française at the Palais de Chaillot, and watched American movies with French subtitles as a way to learn the language. Many of the films were classic noir efforts of the 1940s and early ’50s. He saw Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, and Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, and Dark Passage with Bogart and Bacall, and The Killing with Sterling Hayden organizing a racetrack heist, and The Lady from Shanghai with Anita Ellis’s voice coming out of Rita Hayworth’s mouth singing “Please Don’t Kiss Me” and meaning the exact opposite, and Pickup on South Street with Richard Widmark as an experienced pickpocket who lifts a woman’s wallet in the subway and the wallet happens to have strips of microfilm that the Communists crave, and Widmark lives on a houseboat under the Brooklyn Bridge and Thelma Ritter gets offed and Jean Peters gets beaten up like you wouldn’t believe, and Cry Danger and The Woman in the Window and Laura and The Asphalt Jungle and the dozens of other notable movies that feature fatal females, mixed-up males with mixed motives, robberies and insurance scams that go wrong, greed that turns lusty, lust that turns deadly.

The dialogue is snappy, witty in the hard-boiled manner. Even cabdrivers crack wise. The fare is a private eye, and the cabbie says sympathetically, “Tough racket.” “Maybe so,” the dick replies, “but cabdrivers don’t live forever.” “Maybe not,” the cabbie concedes. “All the same it’ll come as a surprise to me if I don’t.” In another part of town, Ann Sheridan of the magnificent mane kills a burglar in self-defense, or so she claims. The dame-in-distress sobs to the police: “I’ve told you all I know.” Husband Zachary Scott of the mustachioed sneer knits his brows, but can’t help looking bitchy: “There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of.” Both are lying. But the true noir note is sounded by Eve Arden as Paula, a secondary character, officiating at a party for the suspects, witnesses, and extras. When she has everyone’s attention, she admits to having committed a crime against society some years ago. I “married a man,” she announces. Later the busty broad deadpans that “practically everything” she has is real. “It’s a shame to waste two perfectly good mouths on you,” she remarks when a pair of gossiping girlfriends get on her nerves. Later, still: “Don’t show me out, I know the way. I always look for an exit in case of a raid.”

“Some things that happen for the first time / seem to be happening again”: Lorenz Hart’s definition of déjà vu (from his lyric for “Where or When”) applies with a vengeance to noir. Accidents seem predetermined; events occur as if repetitions of themselves. The gang leader has a heart-to-heart with his dead Ma in the back yard after dark, and the brains of the operation feeds nickels into the jukebox so he can watch a nubile girl jitterbug with a boy her own age. Exhibitionists in gaudy undergarments perform for laid-up photographers across the courtyard. The surgeon with a cigarette dangling from his lips gives the escaped con a new face, and if there’s a knock on the door, the chances are that a man with a gun will enter the room and shoot first, ask questions later. What do you want me to do, count to three like they do in the movies?

A thug throws a pot of hot coffee at a moll’s face or, giggling, rolls an old lady’s wheelchair down a flight of stairs and the wrong man is arrested. The prizefighter refuses to throw the bout and gets beaten in the alley. There's a scheme to do away with one angle of the triangular three, sit pretty, and collect the insurance. bit it doesn't quite work out as planned. The pampered invalid has a panic attack, picks up the phone, and dials the emergency number she has been given. A voice answers, “City Morgue.”

The dead return to life. A beautiful murder victim walks into her own living room wondering what the hell the gumshoe asleep in an armchair is doing there. A small-town notary goes to San Francisco, has a drink, feels funny, and spends the next week—that is, the rest of his life—trying to solve the mystery of his own murder before he expires of a slow-working poison. In one scene at a club, a girl singer does a swinging version of “Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are.” We go to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Reno, Mexico, the state penitentiary, a lost highway or two, but for some reason we keep returning to San Francisco. There is also a valise stuffed with $20 bills, a crooked cop, a cuckolded husband, a pair of lethal scissors on the desk, a sensitive black man played by James Edwards, a stick-up in the parking lot, a confusing plot, a lot of rain, and a lot of cigarettes.

It was an easy genre to like. The French were crazy about it.
>>>

But that's just the noir portion. How do we get from here to "no R"?
Click here to find out.
From "No R" by David Lehman in The American Scholar. Click here for the rest of the piece. [Originally posted 2015.]

For other noir features we have run every Sunday since July 2019, click here.

Beautiful Dreamer: Lawrence Tibbett and Frank Sinatra on the radio (1945)

Lawrence Tibbett, the great baritone, a mainstay of the Metropolitan Opera, was born on November 16, 1896. Happy birthday, Larry. "Beautiful Dreamer" is one of Stephen Foster's greatest serenades (1864). Jonathan Guyot Smith sings it here:

 

Nabokov on Chess

You wrote this marvellous novel The Luzhin Defence: are you a very good chess player? And what do you think of [Bobby] Fischer’s attitude?

Forty years ago I was a good enough player of chess, not a grandmaster, as the Germans say, but a club player sometimes able to set a trap for a heedless champion. What has always drawn me in chess is the trick move, the hidden combination, and that’s why I gave up live play to devote myself to composing chess problems. I don’t doubt that there exists an intimate link between certain mirages of my prose and the texture, at once brilliant and obscure, of enigmatic chess problems of which each one is the fruit of a thousand and one nights of insomnia. I especially like so-called suicide problems, where White forces Black to win.

Yes, Fischer is a strange being, but there’s nothing abnormal in the fact of a chess player’s not being normal. There was the case of the great player Rubinstein, at the start of the century: an ambulance would drive him each day from the insane asylum, his home, to the café room where the tournament was taking place, and then drive him back to his dark cell after the game. He didn’t like to see his opponent, but an empty chair across the chessboard also irritated him, so they put a mirror there, and he saw his own reflection.

See https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/melting-with-tenderness/

Lydia Davis Thrives, We Thrive [by Angela Patrinos]

If you want to pack the house, invite Lydia Davis.  The prose poets claim her, the fictionists claim her, and the translators show up to give her a cold, admiring eye.  Indeed, 150 people crowded into Room 510 last night for the New School’s first poetry forum of the fall 2008: Lydia Davis, moderated by David Lehman

David Lehman and Lydia Davis have known one another since their Columbia University days and it was this familiarity that made the evening a treat and a generous affair.

Lydia (who looked lovely in a pale blue scarf and librarian glasses) didn’t read anything from her most recent collection Varieties of Disturbance, a book that was nominated for the 2007 National Book Award.  She read from works in progress, saying, “Maybe this will inspire you to write, because you’ll think ‘this isn’t so great, I can do better.’” 

She read sections from something called “The Dreadful Mucomma” (I’m afraid I didn’t catch the word) about a family’s troubles in a foreign country.  Afterward, she told us that she didn’t yet know what sequence to put the sections in.  “The end could be the beginning and the beginning could be the end.”  Later still, in conversation with David and in reference to a novel that she wants to write in form of a grammar book, she said, “I just have to think up a plot.”

This is what I mean by generous.  Because, often enough, a student writer will hear an established writer say, “Oh, I always know how to start and end a piece, and I pretty much know what’s going to happen in between” and so for a MacArthur Fellow to tell us that for her it’s all fluid, and that ‘all it needs is a plot,’ truly is inspiring.  

She read sections from a piece called “Cows” that comes from her close observations of the variety of behaviors of the three cows that live in the field across from where she lives in Upstate New York. 

She read a piece wherein the narrator, suffering from a dislike of George Friedrich Handel, a composer that her husband and her friends adore, seeks help from a Handel therapist.

During the question and answer period between David and Lydia, she talked about translating Madame Bovary, a translation that will be finished at the end of the year.  She said that when she first read Madam Bovary, she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, why it was considered a masterpiece.  It was only after reading it in French that she got it.  The Norton Critical Edition, she said, is terrible, as is the Oxford.  “Reviews of a translation that don’t compare the work to the original are useless,” she said.

Lydia told us when she was working a novel which she referred to as Novel One, she was simultaneously working on Novel Two, a novel about writing Novel One, and eventually Novels One and Two came together as The End of the Story, the novel she published in 1995.

At times, the Q & A sounded like a conversation between two friends, which I liberally paraphrase here:        

          David: What ever happened to that modern translation you did of Laurence Sterne?
          Lydia: I’d thought that if people read a modern English translation of Sterne that would inspire them to read the original, but I discovered that changing the English killed the charm.
          David: There was an eccentric fellow at Cambridge who translated D.H. Lawrence into ancient Greek.
          Lydia: I’m not sure that would get people to read D.H. Lawrence.
          David: They take the study of classics very seriously over there.

          David: There’s that piece of yours “20 Sculptures in One Hour”—
          Lydia: An hour is a long time, but if there are 20 sculptures that you have to look at within an hour, that’s 3 minutes per sculpture, which isn’t a long time at all.  And yet, three minutes can end up feeling like a long time—
          David: Sounds like Zeno’s Paradox.
          Lydia: I love Zeno’s Paradox!

         Lydia: John Ashbery’s book, Other Traditions, is really wonderful.
         David: He wrote [much of] that book in the back seat of a car.

Early in the evening, Lydia read fourteen short pieces from what she called “Dream Pieces.”  She introduced the work by saying:  

“For a long time I wasn’t interested in my dreams, because I would dream about things like scraping the burnt part off a cookie, which is just as tedious as actually scraping the burnt part off a cookie.”  

This work, she said, came from not only her own dreams, but from the dreams of her friends, as well as dream-like experiences that occur in waking hours.  Some of the things that appear in these pieces are: a peach tart, a monk, Jesus, and the pushing of a broken piano off a cliff. 

In one of these dream pieces, called “The Young Man and the Sentence,” the dreamer spots an ungrammatical sentence in a trashcan and stops a young man from approaching the trashcan for fear that he will correct the sentence. 

-- Angela Patrinos
from the archives (2008)

"And the Angels Sing"

Music by Ziggy Elman (trumpet solo)
Lyrics by Johnny Mercer
The Benny Goodman Orchestra
Martha Tilton (vocal solo), whose birthday this is

 

What Next for the Market? [by Jonas Swedenborg]

Jonas Swedenborg is the pseudonym of a financial manager we know from college days. Every so often, we cajole him to writer a few words for the blog that will reflect the thinking of the Street without getting him into hot water.  -- DL

<<<
The market hates nothing more than uncertainty, and right now, we have a maximum of uncertainty. Heisenberg would be proud. I'll cite just a few concerns. Will China and the US get a trade agreement both can live with? Will Congress get its act together and ratify the new US-Mexico-Canada trade accord? Will the impeachment ordeal die slowly or rapidly? Will Bloomberg run and save the day? What will Putin do with all the oligarchy oil money the Kremlin has? How about Brexit? Will the Knicks ever again be competitive?

In the short term, the answer is easy. The market will fluctuate. In the long term, we are all dead. It's the mid-term that stumps us, like Sir Gawain when he takes up the challenge of the headless Green Knight. (You see, old boy, I remember quite well the class on medieval literature we took sophomore year with Robert Hanning.)

Conventional wisdom has it that if either Warren or Sanders seems in a position to win the Democratic nomination, the market will tank, not all in one day but over the course of six to eight months. The conventional wisdom is almost always wrong because people act on it in such a way as to avoid the predicted outcome.

At my firm [Jonas, Tarsish and Nineveh], we feel that a well-balanced portfolio, heavily weighted in favor of US equity funds (with a growth tilt) and solid blue chips (JP Morgan, Disney, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, and Deere) will get you through any crisis except those we cannot yet anticipate. Remember: not even the mob, well-informed though they were, could have predicted the Castro revolution. It is amazing the effect this little island ninety miles away has had historically on the United States. Basically, we fucked up, which is why JFK got assassinated.  But this is not the time or place for that discussion.

I'd stick to a 65-35 equities to bond ratio in my portfolio, with a bias toward dividend growth funds (the DRO ETF, for example), and intermediate-term municipals, always emphasizing that before starting you must make sure to have three years' worth of living expenses in the safest possible place (treasuries, savings account) no matter how boring and how skimpy the yield. >>>

I asked my old classmate what he thought of the wealth tax. This is what he said:

<<< The wealth tax is a crazy idea. It would be a bureaucratic nightmare. No one who tries it keeps it, even France. It has provoked outcries from savvy investors and entrepreneurs, who would be hit hardest by such a levy but who may also have a better idea of how the economy works than a Harvard law professor. Then the media, even the business-friendly media, declare that the billionaires are foolish to comment; they should keep their mouths shut as their statements help feed Senator Warren's narrative. (I hate what has happened to the word "narrative.") Nevertheless, despite the unprecedented political chaos and divisiveness of the moment, I'm reluctant to invest in emerging markets because of the geopolitical risk.>>>

New Work from David Alexander

We hear from the artist David Alexander:

<<<<
A selection of digital art pieces related to a recent print project of mine can now be seen on the website of the literature and art journal The New Engagement.

https://thenewengagement.com

 

The opening art on the site is a detail of one of these.  To see all, scroll down to the visual arts section.

 

[About]  the method involved in many of my larger pieces: I start with a photographic image and do many (many!) variations in Photoshop.  Then I take parts of the best and combine them collage-wise to create the final work.  What is on view is a selection of some of the individual transformations, something I don't usually show.  On paper the finished version is 74 by 12 inches in four sections. >>>>

 

 

 

Poem for Mitch Sisskind [by David Lehman]

On Veterans' Day let us remember the fallen, and honor them.
It used to be Armistice Day.
Now it is a three-day weekend.
As King David would have said: How the mighty have fallen.
But some things don't change even as all the fashions do
so the old feel older in an orgy of planned obsolescence.
I wondered: Who will inspire them to do the great things
the Alte Kockers of the past revealed in prophecies?

So I went to Mitch, my old friend, thinking: if anyone knows,
he does, and he told me a very simple solution he had
for the problem of inspiration, which Freud would have called
the problem of anxiety. "When you need inspiration,"
Mitch said, "there's no need to look any further than
Orson Welles' classic commercials for Paul Masson wine.
Many of them can be seen on You-Tube. I saw a nice one
the other day. I just wish it went on longer."

On Veterans Day [by Stacey Lehman]

My dad landed on Omaha beach, not as part of the first wave, thank god, or I probably wouldn't be here, but later, to clean up.  He went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge and to liberate a concentration camp. Like so many others, he enlisted, a tough street kid from the Bronx, the child of Eastern European immigrants.  During boot camp, he was court-martialed for striking an officer who called him a dirty kike.  Though he was acquitted, he got shipped out soon after without having completed his training.
    I don't know much about his service, not because he was particularly reticent but because he died suddenly at 50, before I was mature enough to imagine my parents had lives worth learning about. How I regret that I never asked him about those years. Anyone who has tried to get WWII military records knows that a fire destroyed many of them. All I have are the things he carried, a French-English dictionary, a guide to Europe, and, oddly, a copy of Don Quixote, in Spanish. Several years ago, I gathered these mementos together and along with a few photographs asked Star Black, the brilliant poet, photographer, and collage artist to make something of them. A few weeks later she presented me with three collages, one of which is shown here. That's my dad in the middle, looking handsome, and so young! In the upper left is a page from his guidebook in which he wrote a list of the places he fought his way through, ending with "and a funeral in some god-forsaken place."

The picture on the right is of his dog tag, which I recently discovered while cleaning out my mother's place after she died. My father's name was Hyman Horowitz. When he and his brothers returned from the War, they believed they would have an easier time finding work if their names weren't "so Jewish." Thus, Hyman became Huy, and Horowitz became Harwood. 

One of the more moving accounts of life as an infantryman during WWII can be found in Roll Me Over, by Raymond Gantter. Ganttner was a teacher who decided to turn down his third deferment. He was unfit for officer status so he joined the infantry as a private. His service was almost identical to that of my father's. Here's a passage: 

It is the slow piling up of fear that is so intolerable. Fear moves swiftly in battle, strikes hard with each shell, each new danger, and as long as there's action, you don't have time to be frightened.  But this is a slow fear, heavy and stomach filling.  Slow, slow . . all your movements are careful and slow, and pain is slow and fear is slow and the beat of your heart is the only rapid rhythm of the night . . . a muttering drum easily punctured and stilled.

A Poem for Veterans Day

President Dwight D. Eisenhower signing HR7786 June 1, 1954, changing Armistice Day to Veterans Day.

 

Reconciliation    

Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash
          again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near,
Bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

                                        -- Walt Whitman

 

("Reconciliation" by Walt Whitman appears in The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Ed. David Lehman, Oxford University Press, 2006)

-- sdh

Met Percent: Week Ten [by Alec Bernstein]

Sonrientes

Smiling Figure (Sonrientes), 7th-8th c. Remojadas, gallery 358. 

Not much is known about this happy figure. There are mixed cues: male and female, old and young, spirit and human, dwarf and child. It’s too small to stand alone and too large to admire in the hand. Emotional facial expressions, as in this figure, are very uncommon in Mesoamerica. I was captured by it from across the gallery and spent a good amount of time with that smile . . . 

Variations On An Ancestral Theme

Left: Purrukuparli, Enraeld Munkara, Tiwi people, 1955, gallery 354. The sobbing Purrukuparli is an ancestor from the Dreaming (primordial creation period). He chooses not to bring his dead son back, but instead announces the concept of mortality and creates the Tiwi burial rituals. “Humans too will someday die”. The very beginning of ancestors. 

Center: Ancestor Figure (Tsmas), 19th–early 20th c., Paiwan people, gallery 354. Of the Paiwan high nobles, minor nobles and commoners, only the high nobles were allowed to commission human ancestral images. These ancestors have powers, but their influence (help or harm) is controlled by the nobility. Class spirits. Very clear. 

Right: Male Diviner's Figure, 19th–mid-20th century, Baule people, gallery 352. High artistic achievement, the “more expensive the better”, presents not only the wealth and status of the diviner (and owner) of the image, but also “Dazzles the potential clients” of the artist, building his reputation and social position. The professional artist.

 

“   ”  Art

Upper left: Seated Figure, Djenne people, 13th c., gallery 350, Upper right: Constantin Brancusi, Mlle Pogany version I, 1913, MoMA, NYC, Bottom: Recumbent Figure, Henry Moore, 1938, Tate Galley, London.

“The term primitive is to be avoided or used in quotation marks”. - Tate, London. 

Originally, Nelson Rockefeller’s collection was called the Museum of Indigenous Art and later the Museum of Primitive Art. His museum and private collections became the Art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the Met in 1984. The Met had previously turned down the collection - considered by critics an American "Salon des Refusés".

 

Lime Paraphernalia

Lime Spoon with Seated Figure, Inca, 13th–16th c., not on view.  Lime Container, Usiai Island, late 19th–early 20th c., Lime spatula (Tap), Latmul people, late 19th–early 20th c., Gallery 354.

This container (center) was designed to hold powdered lime made from calcined seashells. The lime was removed through a hole in the top by a spoon (left) or a little spatula (right). Lime was a necessary part of the ritual of coca-leaf chewing; the coca leaves were put into the mouth to form a quid, and the lime was added to activate the drug. 

got montaigne? - 8oz Hip Drinking Alcohol Flask, Black (right) by Knick Knack Gifts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foot Jars ‘n Cowboy Boots

Pair of Ceramic Foot Jars, Peru, Inca Valley Paracas, 2nd-1st c. B.C. Gallery 354

      “Some boys went to look for his feet. His toes are made of crystal, so he can hide them, and the boys could not find them. Then the boys threw stones at the rainbow.

      When he enters the body of a man or a woman they become very sick and to cure them they are given a ball of seven-colored wool to unwind.”

From “The Rainbow”, Anonymous, Quechan, Peru, translated by W.S. Merwin.

Plastic cowboy boot cups, 1950s, U.S.A

As I pondered my interest in these charming foot jars, I recalled the three cowboy cups from childhood. My two siblings and I each had our own color cup. Mine was red. I loved that cup.

"The Big Clock" -- Kenneth Fearing's novel, John Farrow's film [by David Lehman]

On TCM on a recent Sunday at midnight and again at 10 AM, Eddie Muller of Noir Alley showed The Big Clock (1948), a great movie adapted from the fearless Fearing novel centered on a magazine empire that puts out such periodicals as Newsways, Crimeways, Sportsways, Airways, Styleways, and Artways. Charles Laughton is the Luce-like villain; Ray Milland the magazine editor who happens to be in the wrong place at the right time and is the object of a manhunt that he is supposed to be in charge of. Watching it, and enjoying Elsa Lanchester's splendid performance as a kooky painter modeled on Alice Neel, I recalled writing this paragraph years ago for American Heritage. Here's what I wrote when asked to name an "underrated" detective novelist:

<<< The 1940s was a great period for the indigenous American crime novel, and Kenneth Fearing was a notably sophisticated master of suspense. A distinguished feature of his Dagger of the Mind (1941) is that it is set at a venerable artists’ colony like Yaddo or MacDowell, where intrigue and amorous affairs are usual but homicide is not. The Big Clock (1946), one of the greatest murder mysteries, has inspired two movies (the one from 1948 with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton has it all over the 1987 remake with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman, No Way Out). Fearing offers a clever variant on the law of the purloined letter, which stipulates that the elusive object of a search may be most effectively concealed if it is left out in the open. The Big Clock —the title is an allusion to Time Inc.—also features a manhunt organized and led by the hunted man, an editor at a magazine empire whose publications include Newsways, Crimeways, Homeways, Personalities, and The Sexes. How can I, a poet who has written for a newsmagazine and has a passion for detective novels, fail to embrace Kenneth Fearing, a hugely undervalued poet with a splendid last name who wrote for a newsmagazine and produced several masterpieces of detective fiction?
>>>

For our other recent film noir features, timed to coincide with the conclusion of Eddie Muller's Sunday morning repeat of Saturday midnight's noir, click here.

Kaia and Krista (by Mitch Sisskind)

I sold a Miro painting for a rich guy

That was basically a big number 68

And oddly enough it sold for about

68,000 so I got a nice finder’s fee

But it would sell for even more now.

 

My friend Dennis had this hot

New babe Kaia who wanted the

Finer things in life so he asked

Me did I know anybody that was

Selling a Picasso or whatnot.

 

Dennis was the kind of guy that

When we were at the race track

And he went to pee he came back

With ice cream cones for everybody

And he did a lot of stuff like that.

 

Many people carry guns but Dennis

Was the only guy I’ve known who

Carried a gun with a silencer but

I never saw him actually take it out

Nor did I see him lose his temper.

 

We went every week to a bar by

Grand Avenue to settle up our

Sports bets and once we came in

And a lowlife mope said to Dennis

You bastard you owe me money.

 

It was kind of a tense moment except

Dennis handled it with great aplomb

By asking the mope in a calm voice

How much do I owe you and the mope

Said 200 so Dennis just gave it to him.

 

When we were outside the bar a guy

Named Jimmy who was with us asked

Why he gave money to the mope and

Dennis said emphatically that it was

Worth his 200 to be rid of the mope.

 

He said how Joey The Clown Lombardo,

Joey Aiuppa, John No Nose DiFronzo,

Those guys owed him favors and with

One phone call the mope would be in

A trunk at O’Hare long-term parking.

 

But he stated that he was not a thug

So 200 to get rid of the mope was

A small price which I attributed to

The influence of Kaia who certainly

Would disapprove of any violence.

 

Meanwhile I happened to know a guy

Who wanted to sell a Matisse drawing

So Dennis and I went over to look at it,

A big drawing of a woman in charcoal

Or something hanging there on the wall.

 

The guy had an impressive art collection

But for some reason he wished to get rid

Of the Matisse which actually looked like

Something that could have been drawn

By a six-year old. He wanted 35,000.

 

Dennis handled it with great aplomb

Except I knew he was thinking how

A six-year old could have drawn it or

He could even draw one himself and

Who would be the wiser? But no.

 

Down in the car we giggled about it.

35,000 just to fuck Kaia he laughed

As much later I would laugh at myself

When I didn’t know or care how much

Krista took me for and she broke me.

 

"Folklore" (for Tony Hoagland) [by Denise Duhamel]

            --for Tony Hoagland (1953-2018)

You were folklore in Tucson, where you graduated the year before I arrived, where I befriended Agha Shahid Ali, now also gone, whom you had befriended before me. Shahid was kind, but even he couldn’t get me to stay longer than a semester. This was decades before “#MeToo,” decades before Facebook or hash tags. Rotary phones were still making way for touch-tones—to speak to someone in customer service, press the pound key.

Shahid died in 2001, almost three months after the towers came down. I don’t remember him as a target of any malice as we laughed at the diner eating pancakes or pulled up to the Shell to fuel up his car, a Nissan Stanza he purchased because of its nod to poetry.  I don’t remember, in 1984, any visceral prejudice directed our way for his skin (brown), his beliefs (Muslim), or his sexuality (gay). But I was living in my clueless, white-skin privilege and, if Shahid was having a hard time in Arizona or America, he surely didn’t tell me. I remember him bubbly, not one to complain. His first book A Walk Through the Yellow Pages is akin to the pound-key-turned-hash-tag. No one uses the yellow pages anymore—not for research nor doorstops nor booster seats for kids.

One grad student in Tucson was still in love with you, Tony, although you’d moved on. Or maybe you two had never dated and her affection was misplaced. She mentioned you often in workshop, like you were a young ghost haunting her psyche. This was before your first book or even your first chapbook. Your freckled admirer wore a straw sunhat with an oversized brim and gauzy long sleeve dresses because she so easily burned. The male professors talked about your poems, too, as though the poems they now had to read by the lot of us bored them.

When I first met you in person, maybe ten years later, you were eating oatmeal for breakfast at Yaddo and, though I usually sat at the silent table, I pulled up a chair next to you. I introduced myself as John Keats and you said you were Galway Kinnell, that oatmeal is “better for your health/if someone eats it with you.” We had fun with our nerdy poet jokes and then set off to work. We must have been in Saratoga Springs together that one day only. Otherwise I would have sought you out to tell you of Tucson’s adoration.

Before Shahid died, he and I saw each other at a reading at the 92^nd Street Y. I was trying to live on adjunct wages in Alphabet City. I must have been grousing as Shahid said, “Well, then, let’s steal these books!” Before the reading started, we saddled up to the merchandise table and slid a copy of each poet’s latest into our backpacks. I wonder if Shahid, who was from a wealthy family, knew he had brain cancer then. What did taking a few books matter if it helped him feel more alive? He seemed his animated, cheerful self.

I’m sure many poets at this moment are sitting down to write their “Goodbye, Tony” poems.  I’m sure there will be an AWP tribute at some point.  I’m hoping this doesn’t disgust you, but I imagine it might.  I’m kind of disgusted myself, but here I am adding my star or my stripe to the Hoagland flag. Amitav Ghosh wrote of Shahid “sorrow has no finer mask than a studied lightness of manner.”  I think you also wore a sorrowful mask, yours made of the hilarity of rage. Or maybe I am projecting.

The day before you died, I recommended What Narcissism Means to Me to Lily, a kickass grad student who wanted to give her father his first poetry book, something that would lure him into verse.  Lily’s father is a ferocious reader who, like so many ferocious readers, is leery of poetry.  Even Nissan, in the end, was leery of poetry—the last Stanza was made in 1992 and the Versa model, more “vice versa” than verse, only emerged in 2007.

Four days after your death, Ntozake Shange passed away too. Donna Brazile couldn’t have known Ntozake Shange would die the same month her book For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics debuted. I stopped teaching the elegy for a couple of years when I grew superstitious.  Several semesters in a row a student would suffer a personal loss (mother, husband, grandmother, best friend) the week the poem was due.

 I’m not sure if you can still tune into the earth’s news—or if you’d want to. Just two days after you died, a white supremacist shot two black people in a Kroger’s in Louisville. And the day after you died, a man who lived in a van just a few miles from me sent pipe bombs to prominent democrats and CNN. None of the devices exploded, but it was scary nonetheless. My students and colleagues had seen the man’s vehicle plastered with hateful messages in, of all places, the parking lot of North Miami’s Whole Foods. The Saturday after you died, a massacre in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life Synagogue. Eleven more dead. Your book Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America, as you predicted, hasn’t caught on.

In March of 2000 you came to give a job talk to my University of Pittsburgh workshop where I was a visiting writer. I was on my way to Florida the following fall. “This is the beating heart of the poem,” you said at the conference table. Students adored you, and you were promptly hired. Later we had a group dinner at a Thai restaurant in Squirrel Hill. Dippy, the fiberglass dinosaur, had been recently unveiled on the grounds of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. You said you were becoming a dinosaur. You were tired, just getting over the flu.

Then you came to read at FIU. This is where I finally spoke to you about Tucson, how you were so beloved there. When you asked why I didn’t stay, I told you what happened to me. Because I knew those professors were your friends, I made the preamble to my story longer than it needed to be—explaining this was before the testimony of Anita Hill, before there was even the language for sexual harassment. Part of me, even then, blamed myself. Was my scoop neck too low?  Did my bra strap show? I didn’t name the harasser, but you knew exactly who it was. You said you weren’t surprised, then “I’m so sorry that happened,” and most importantly, “I believe you.”

The tile-covered bench upon which you and Kath sat, waiting for me to pick you up, split in half during a hurricane shortly thereafter. And that hotel where you stayed, the 1940’s Driftwood, is gone as you are gone. In its place, million dollar condos. In your place, your poems. After my divorce, I sold the apartment where you and Kath stayed the following Christmas, where you fixed the leaky toilet several repairmen had failed to fix. Now I live in a one-bedroom next door, my footprint smaller though I can’t stop Florida from sinking.

When I used to assign the elegy, a student would inevitably say of a classmate’s poem, “This is more about the speaker than the person being memorialized.” And so be it. This is about me missing your folklore, your eloquence, your humanity, Tony, rather than your physical pure-essence Tony-self. What is the impact of one poet on another? Those who correspond by letter, then email, but only speak face-to-face a dozen or so times? I feel like Roethke writing of his departed student Jane. You too had a “pickerel smile,” and though not tendril curls, your hair was a wild grass. Roethke dubs Jane a “skittery pigeon” and you wrote an essay about contemporary “skittery” poems deliberately eschewing narrative impulse.  My skittery pigeon, I know deep down I have “no rights in this matter, / Neither father nor lover.”

Our last exchange, two weeks before you died, was about Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God. I told you how each poem is an authentic end-of-life tearjerker, though the poem that sticks with me most is “Playboy,” as you imagine your young mother finding your father’s stash. “Housework Times Fornication/ Divided by Taken for Granted / Equals Decades of Burnt Meatloaf.” I gave you an “A+ in Empathy” for those lines, though you didn’t need a grade from me. You still linger in my gmail, where I won’t erase you, where I’ll keep you stored like an electronic urn. Kath, of course, has the real ashes, the memories, the unbearable grief. When you wrote back to thank me, you ended your email “it’s been a trip.” I thought you meant the trip was writing your book, but now I know you meant your life.

-- Denise Duhamel. [Tony is pictured above left; Agha Shahid Ali, middle left; Denise, right]