The Best American Poetry

The Best American Poetry 2020: Series Editor David Lehman, Guest Editor Paisley Rekdal

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. The 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” according to the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

The Best American Poetry 2020 is available for pre-order here.

--sdl

"Coward, Take My Coward's Hand" [by David Lehman]

David Lehman's "Talking Pictures" column for The American Scholar is devoted this month to "Home of the Brave," Mark Robson's 1949 movie. Here is the opening paragraph:

<<<
Much of my early education in film history I owe to the old Million Dollar Movie on television (WOR-TV Channel 9 in the New York metropolitan area), which showed the same movie back-to-back every night for a week, with Max Steiner’s theme from Gone with the Wind to usher you in and out. As a boy, I watched the 1949 war film Home of the Brave on successive nights, deeply moved by this so-called “problem picture,” which Ralph Ellison praised for hitting the “deep center of American emotion.” It was, Ellison wrote, “a look at the ties between the races and also the deep-seated nests of American racism itself.”  It “set up a confrontation. One is forced to deal with racial issues.”
>>>

For more of the piece, please click here.

https://theamericanscholar.org/coward-take-my-cowards-hand/#.XzW0125KiM-

"Lesbian Corn" [poem by Elaine Equi, dramatic reading by Nicole Santalucia]

For several years I've been announcing the first corn sighting of the season. The first corn always reminds me of one of my favorite poems, "Lesbian Corn," by Elaine Equi. We're presenting here in a dramatic reading by Nicole Santalucia.

Lesbian Corn

In summer
I strip away
your pale kimono.
Your tousled hair too,
comes off in my hands
leaving you
completely naked.
All ears and
tiny yellow teeth.

by Elaine Equi from Surface Tension (Coffee House Press, Sept 1989)

Elaine Equi is the author of many collections of poetry including, Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and on the short list for The Griffin Poetry Prize; Click and Clone; and most recently, The Intangibles (Coffee House, 2019). Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The New Yorker, and several editions of The Best American Poetry. In addition to The New School, she teaches at New York University.

Nicole Santalucia is the author of Spoiled Meat (Headmistress, 2019) and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press, 2015). She is a recipient of the Ruby Irene Poetry Chapbook Prize from Arcadia Magazine for Driving Yourself to Jail in July and the 2015 Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize from The Tishman Review. She received her M.F.A. from The New School University and her Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University. Santalucia teaches poetry at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and brings poetry workshops into the Cumberland County Prison.

-- sdh

"Chemistry Lesson" [by Edward Hirsch]

                                                                                          (Chicago, 1966)

                                               “There’s a simple formula

                                               for getting along here:

                                               don’t call me Moon-head,

                                               don’t try to fuck

                                               the girls on the floor,

                                               and don’t break the beakers

                                               or the Bunsen burners

                                               when you slip them

                                               into boxes.  Don’t drop

                                               the Petri dishes

                                               or the porcelain crucibles

                                               when you stack them

                                               onto pallets

                                               and don’t crash the forklift

                                               when you carry shit

                                               through the aisles

                                               to the loading dock

                                               at the back of the warehouse.

                                               One of the truckers

                                               will take you with him

                                               to unload

                                               on those palaces

                                               of higher education

                                               where a bunch of assholes

                                               wearing lab coats

                                               will botch the experiments

                                               and blame the textbooks,

                                               which we also supply. 

                                               If you come back tomorrow

                                               I’ll walk you over

                                               to the plant

                                               where we house chemicals,

                                               but try not to breathe.” 

"Chemistry Lesson" is from Stranger by Night (Knopf, 2020), the compelling new collection from Edward Hirsch, the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2016. "Chemistry Lesson" was first published in Five Points. 

Portrait of Anne Porter [by Fairfield Porter]

Fairfield Porter, Anne, 1965, Oil on canvas. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.

On Robert Fitzgerald’s Odyssey [by Carolyn Clark]

The Odyssey has often been considered the lighter of the two Homeric epics, easier to read, more various and more entertaining than its counterpart, The Iliad.  The splendor of the narrative is indisputable, and great writers from Dante and Shakespeare to Tennyson, Joyce, and Kafka have mined The Odyssey for their own ends. 

Odysseus, who plays an important supporting role in The Iliad, is the main attraction of The Odyssey. Following the end of the Trojan War, he embarks for his home, Ithaca, but has to overcome perilous obstacles and to resist seductive blandishments before getting there.  It takes him ten years.

But this epic tale is not just about Odysseus, MIA war hero, voyager, strategist, adventurer. It’s also a coming of age story about his son, Telemachus, who is trying to set things right. And Penelope, Odysseus’s long-suffering wife, is a scene-stealer. As wily as her husband, she has gamely and creatively fended off the advances of the many importunate suitors, vainglorious freeloaders all, who have violated the Greek values of hospitality and decorum. It is thanks to the unstinting help of the goddess Athena that Odysseus reaches Ithaka, vanquishes the suitors, and reunites with Penelope and their son, Telemachus.

For readers of English, embarking on this journey, which translation? There's the crucial question.

I'll start with my old favorite, Robert Fitzgerald's translation (Anchor Books, 1961, 1963), which I read enthusiastically in high school and college, and even gave a pale blue copy to my mother, also a poet, inscribed “with love to Florence - of journeys.” Written in very readable, American “plain style” language -- even more so than the prose-like verse translation produced a few years later by Richmond Lattimore (1965) -- Fitzgerald’s Odyssey was my bridge to the world of true epic, replete with richly physical depictions and closely linked to the language of Homeric Greek.  Himself a poet, Fitzgerald offered a refreshing alternative to the roundabout, prose-style translations by Rouse (1937) or Rieu (1945) that spoiled the fun for high-school students obliged to encounter Homer through their eyes.

Let me dwell on a passage that occurs well before Odysseus enters the story. In Book II “A Hero's Son Awakens” (l. 230 ff), Telemachus' guide, Mentor, a wise old warrior and friend of Odysseus, scolds the assembly both for short memories and for their long standing indifference toward the pack of ravaging suitors. For seven years they have usurped Odysseus’ home and kingdom, slaughtering his local herds and flocks and partying pretty much non-stop. Telemachus, who has just turned eighteen, finally calls the townspeople together for the first time since Odysseus’ absence to seek their help in banishing the suitors.

After Telemachus has his say, the aged Mentor stands up and gives the Ithacans a tongue-lashing. His opening words, fraught with irony and sarcasm, intend to waken their sense of social responsibility.  Mentor’s words also resonate with a well-known axiom from ancient history: when it comes to leaders, people remember kindness over cruelty.  In the historic concept of body politic, leadership that demonstrates fairness and caring for the balanced wellbeing of the entire community, large or small, is always cherished.

Odysseus, for all his survival tricks, had long been celebrated for the parenting skills he employed as king. Mentor knows this and suggests its inverse:

 "Let no man holding scepter as a king / be thoughtful, mild, kindly or virtuous, / let him be cruel, and practice evil ways,/ it is so clear that no one here remembers / how like a gentle father Odysseus ruled you."

They are important positives, these Greek adjectives – thoughtful (prophron), mild (aganos); most notably, used twice in this passage, in the phrase ‘as a gentle father’ – kindly or virtuous, well-disposed (epios). These same words recur in later passages in the poem.  

Homer also knew that posterity will remember, honor and cherish a good leader but will relegate a bad leader to oblivion. Mentor’s sarcasm builds on this general knowledge. Next, using an approach that is more direct, he tries to stir the Ithacans from their silent indifference.

"What sickens me is to see the whole community/ sitting still, and never a hand raised/ against them [the suitors] - a mere handful compared with you."

Reminding the townsmen that they are many (polloi) and the suitors are few (paurous), Mentor tries to draw the community away from its apathy, its silence; the Greek word used to describe them as ‘still’ is actually  ‘silent’ (aneo).

After reading and focusing on these passages, I discovered an amazing additional text, The Odyssey: A Graphic Novel (Candlewick Press, 2010).  The artist, Gareth Hinds, chose to illustrate the same passages from the speeches to the assembly of Ithacans. In his notes at the end of the 248-page graphic novel, Hinds acknowledges that his favorite translators of The Odyssey are Fitzgerald (1963) and Fagles (1996) – my favorites as well. I can also recommend Emily Wilson’s recently published version (WW Norton, 2018).

The theme of ‘nostos’ – homecoming and the longing for home that compels Odysseus forward – is crucial. Near the beginning of Book 13, when Odysseus learns from the generous Alkinoos, king of the Phaiakians,  that he will be receiving a crew the next day to continue his journey home, Fitzgerald uses a beautiful Homeric simile to convey Odysseus’s emotion:

Just as the farmer’s hunger grows, behind
the bolted plow and share, all day afield,
drawn by his team of winedark oxen: sundown
is benison for him, sending him homeward
stiff in the knees from weariness, to dine,
just so, the light on the sea rim gladdened Odysseus…

Born in Ithaca, New York, Carolyn Clark studied Classics at Cornell, Brown and Johns Hopkins (diss. Tibullus Illustrated: Lares, Genius and Sacred Landscapes, 1998). Her recent poetry publications include Poet Duet:  A Mother and Daughter (Aldrich Press, 2019), New Found Land (Cayuga Lake Books, 2017), a pair of Finishing Line Press chapbooks – Choose Lethe: Remember to Forget (2017) and Mnemosyne: the Long Traverse (2013) – and winter poems in The Avocet (2017, 2018, 2019), all published after Carolyn moved back to the Finger Lakes.

Bascove's Bridges on the Streets of New York City

Embodiment Pantoum [by Amit Majmudar]

When you’ve had the same lover long enough,
You want the same lover in a different body
So that renewal isn’t quite betrayal
Nor the second first kiss a Judas kiss.

You want the same lover in a different body,
But every resurrection requires a death,
And what tastes like a kiss to the tongue of Judas
Can wither the tongue in a liar’s mouth.

If every resurrection requires a death,
What killed your love for the body you had?
The tongue and all its tastebuds blossom lies.
When you’ve lost your one lover long enough,

The tongue in your mouth can’t taste the kiss.
There was one incarnation, and you betrayed it.
A second first kiss is death to the first love.
You’ll die wanting the same love in the same body.

Ed. note: The poem appears in the Spring / Summer 220 issue of 32 Poems. Amit's new book is What He Did in Solitary, forthcoming from Knopf. It can be ordered here.

E. Ethelbert Miller: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

Photo by Max Hirshfeld

 

The South Bronx

We lived in the land of broomsticks

stickball played between cars

manholes for bases

We ran past fire hydrants

and caught balls near curbs

Now and then someone smacked

a Spaldeen to a rooftop—

Making pigeons fly

 

Fences

In the playgrounds

there were few left-handed

hitters so right field

is where the big kids placed us.

We became ghosts of the game.

We stood alone in sunlight.

Sometimes during a third out

we escaped through a hole in the fence.

We returned home like players sent down

to the minors.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV, which received a 2020 Telly Award. Miller’s latest book, If God Invented Baseball (City Point Press), was awarded the 2019 Literary Award for poetry by the American Library Association’s Black Caucus. (See The E. Ethelbert Miller Papers.)

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: John Murillo

Variations on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop

by John Murillo

Start with loss.  Lose everything.  Then lose it all again. 
Lose a good woman on a bad day.  Find a better woman,
then lose five friends chasing her.  Learn to lose as if
your life depended on it.  Learn that your life depends on it.
Learn it like karate, like riding a bike.  Learn it, master it.
Lose money, lose time, lose your natural mind.
Get left behind, then learn to leave others.  Lose and
lose again.  Measure a father’s coffin against a cousin’s
crashing T-cells.  Kiss your sister through prison glass. 
Know why your woman’s not answering her phone.
Lose sleep.  Lose religion.  Lose your wallet in El Segundo. 
Open your window.  Listen: the last slow notes
of a Donny Hathaway song.  A child crying.  Listen: 
A drunk man is cussing out the moon.  He sounds like
your dead uncle, who, before he left, lost a leg
to sugar.  Shame.  Learn what’s given can be taken;
what can be taken, will.  This you can bet on without
losing.  Sure as nightfall and an empty bed.  Lose
and lose again.  Lose until it’s second nature.  Losing
farther, losing faster.  Lean out your open window, listen:
The child is laughing now. No, it’s the drunk man again
in the street, losing his voice, suffering each invisible star.

 

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way 2020), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books 2020). His honors include a Pushcart Prize, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020.  He is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and also teaches in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

Danusha Lameris Draws an Ace [by Ace Boggess]

EXPLORATION OF THE GRAND

“Dust” by Danusha Lameris

https://poems.com/poem/dust/
https://www.aprweb.org/poems/dust 

The universe or the smaller universe of subatomic particles, the heights of philosophy or the depths of psychic disruption and despair, divinities or absences, science or the unknown—the poems I love often ponder what’s beyond our grasp, or what holds us firmly in its. Tracy K. Smith’s book Life on Mars is filled with these meditative transcendences, as is Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In “Dust,” Danusha Lameris explores the Grand in the most common remnant of being. She shares wisdom from her grandmother and Gandhi, then fittingly ends with a question: “What could be more loyal, / more lonely, and unsung?” Any exploration of the Grand leaves the reader with new questions to replace those that have been answered on the way.

-- Ace Boggess

The poem appeared on the Poetry Daily  website on Friday, July 31, 2020.

In the New Yorker's summer "flash fiction" series: "Tales Told To Tevye"

In The New Yorker's summer "flash fiction" series, "Tales Told To Tevye" was posted yesterday. You can read

the three-art story here. Illustration by Ricardo Tomás; Source photograph by Cornell Capa / The LIFE Picture

Collection / Getty. The story is dedicated In memoriam Rabbi Aharon Eliezer Ceitlin, 1953-2015.

"Anxieties" [by Donna Masini]

It's like ants 
and more ants. 

West, east 
their little axes 

hack and tease. 
Your sins. Your back taxes. 

This is your Etna,
your senate 

of dread, at the axis
of reason, your taxi

to hell. You see 
your past tense-- 

and next? A nest 
of jittery ties. 

You're ill at ease, 
at sea, 

almost in- 
sane.  You've eaten 

your saints. 
You pray to your sins. 

Even sex 
is no exit. 

Ah, you exist. 

"After finishing a novel, I was in that drifting place, scribbling, taking notes, slowly collecting drafts toward a new book I'm calling 4:30 Movie. Terrance Hayes suggested I try to write an 'anagram/word scramble' poem--a form he'd 'invented.' As with any form or prompt, sometimes it leads somewhere, sometimes not, but there's always a surprise, and my first attempt ended up in another poem: 'If you think in anagrams, / parades and drapes, diapers, rape, despair and aspire / all come out of paradise.' Depending upon mood or poem I give myself different formal conditions, but every line must end (and in some poems begin as well) with one of the words that comes out of the scramble. Sometimes I use this to 'warm up'--to play. Sometimes I try it when I'm anxious--hence the title of this one."

--Donna Masini

The poem, from Donna's book 4:30 Movie, was selected by Sherman Alexie for The Best American Poetry 2015, the poem originally appeared From Poem-A-Day, www.poets. org

Dispatch From A Distance - Whose Woods [by Cara Benson]

“Land is life – or, at least, land is necessary for life.” Patrick Wolfe

“Whose woods these are I think I know” begins the canonized Robert Frost poem about stopping on a horse one evening “to watch [the landowner’s] woods fill up with snow.” Though the first stanza is concerned with this probable owner and whether he would catch the speaker of the poem stopping on his land, Frost’s primary aim in the poem, it seems, is to render a stolen moment of contemplation on the darkest day of the year, before traveling the long road home and ultimately the long road of his life to death, the forever sleep.

As someone who walks in woods often, nearly daily since COVID and moving up on a hill, this opening comes to me not infrequently. It’s one of the many lines I chirp out as I go, a refrain as I make music with my feet as well. Others include: bah bah bah bah bah bah bah You say it’s your birthday! Or, from The Sound of Music of my youth: Oh Mother Superior I could never get lost in these hills! And, also, because I take me with me: Paranoia paranoia everybody’s coming to get me. Just say you never met me. I’m not sick, but I’m not…. Well, you get the picture. Songs, catch phrases, bits of conversation – usually unbidden – burble up from the well of my experience, which is some small part of a collective experience, a version, if skewed and biased, of communal mixed tapes.

The Frost line, I’ve noticed, usually comes out as Whose woods are these – an interrogative, the maybe more expected version than how it was constructed for the poem. Of course Frost is being a poet in arranging his line for rhythm and surprise. In conversation we might say, “I think I know whose woods these are.” Instead, he opens with what sets us up for an expectation of the question. “Whose woods” feels as if it will be asking, rather than asserting. Though he then undermines the assertion (he thinks he knows, not he’s certain he knows), there is a claim embedded in the line. He is sure that there is a singular owner, even if he’s not entirely sure he knows which.

The woods where I now live are the original homelands of the Mohican (Muhheconneok) people. Their villages and great council fire were down closer to the river, the land in the hills for seasonal hunting, fishing, and gathering, and it is certain they were here for millennia prior to Henry Hudson sailing up “the river that flows both ways” in 1609. Their territory extended on both sides of the river and from as far north as Lake Champlain all the way south to close to the mouth of the river at Manhattan island. One account has it that their numbers had been 25,000, with 4,000 warriors, at their peak.

We know that this changed – dramatically and violently – with the coming of the Dutch, and then the English. This isn’t news. It also isn’t new to say that settler-colonial myths surrounding “giving thanks” between colonists and Indigenous people, as an obvious example, are distorted, propagandistic narratives. Still, the story of an amicably shared feast with scant acknowledgment of the atrocities that settlers enacted gets repeated every November. As do the tidal waters with their source high in the mountains of where the Mohicans lived still get called the Hudson rather than the Muhheacannituck.

Which names and narratives we reiterate have tremendous material, emotional, psychological, and spiritual significance. Erasure equals death. In a most literal sense, the story told in the 1493 Papal Bull that decreed “that barbarous nations be overthrown” wrote the justification for violently dispossessing non-Christians of their land solely by erasing the humanity of anyone who did not succumb to Rome. This is often called the Doctrine of Discovery, and in 1823 a United States Supreme Court decision incorporated this argument into federal law as the basis for further usurpation of Turtle Island. A more seemingly benign example, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, wherein he wrongly conflated the Mohicans and the Mohegans (neither of whom are extinct), gets retold to this day. 

What story, then, shall I tell of these woods? Rather, what story is it my place, nee duty, to tell? I am aware as I walk through the forested hills where I now live that I tread on history I don’t feel good about, to put it plainly.* I am also aware that this story is not solely in the past. The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation, the present-day descendants of those whose homeland I also call home, is a sovereign, self-supporting federally recognized tribe of about 1500 enrolled members. They live some one thousand miles west in Wisconsin on a reservation in Menominee tribal land due to various coerced removals, what they have called the “many trails” of their history. This distance has not diminished their connection to the area. The Muhheconneok, the people of the waters that are never still, after all, are a people named for place.

“The connection has never been broken,” says Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Bonney Hartley. “We’ve always returned, we’ve always had land claims, we’ve always had historical interest in our cultural sites. It’s always been home.” Her office, in fact, is located not in Wisconsin, but in New York in Muhheconneok ancestral homelands. Through the National Historic Preservation Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, their Tribal Historic Preservation program reviews hundreds of projects every year within its recognized areas of interest. In other words, in these woods.

What follows territorial acknowledgments? What comes once this story is brought to the fore? How to make this right? One specific avenue for reparation is, to use a complicated term, giving land back (is it giving if it was never rightfully owned?). The recent Supreme Court ruling in McGirt vs. Oklahoma, which decrees a large portion of that state as never having been disbanded as Muscogee (Creek) Nation land, is an historic win for Indigenous rights in the US. Could this signal the possibility of other favorable outcomes for Native American tribes and people? As for the Mohicans, they did petition the State of New York in 1986 for 23,000 acres, enough land that they would have been able to return home to live. The territory named wasn’t along the river valley but in western NY, the tribe’s last location before being forced out by developers in the 1800s. The suit was finally settled in 2010 with an award of less than 2 acres for potential establishment of a casino and an additional 330 acres added to their Wisconsin territory. The casino was never developed due to encroaching competition, ultimately from NY State itself. This certainly was not the win the Muscogee (Creek) Nation experienced, but that was 2010. Would the case have turned out differently today?

I am no legal scholar. I don’t know if there is a case to be brought for land along the Muhheacannituck. I imagine the tribe’s best legal claim was the one they sought in western NY rather than their original homelands. There are deeds that document agreements for most of the land along the river, though both sides of the signers on paper had vastly differing understandings of what those leases meant. But maybe this isn’t something that has to be negotiated through the law. Chelsea Vowel, writing as âpihtawikosisân, says that returned land could come from privately held territory. “I mean damn…maybe your huge ass union needs to fork over some of the land its executives have squirreled away on their massive salaries as a gesture of good guesting. That could be a real thing that could happen.” (She’s writing in response to the Canadian Association of University Teachers, hence mention of unions, but the point remains if we’re talking about corporate CEOs, for example.)

I don’t know if that is a thing that would happen. It’s easy to mention words like hell and frozen over when it comes to expecting “good guesting” from corporate America. Corporate anywhere, really. It’s also easy to deflect personal responsibility, hence the moves I just made in pointing out the government and then corporations as the culprits. Maybe the real thing that could happen includes the 1.33 acres that are deeded in my name. Maybe not, but reckoning with this history – this present – is as crucial as (and interrelated with) remediating the climate crisis, and it isn’t only about territory (though obviously that’s a big deal). The theft of land is a symptom, if you will. The disease is White hegemony, and I believe it can be healed with patience, dedication, and a willingness to be uncomfortable (here I am talking to my fellow Whites). Even for those of us who’ve been engaged in this kind of introspection and/or public action for a while, there is still deep individual and collective work to be done. I hope that the watershed moment we are in regarding race leads to truly liberatory transformations that take hold. I think repeating that story, the one that says righting wrongs and honoring the agency of others is liberating for all involved, could be of use. For anyone, and I include myself in this, who is grappling with his/her/their path in this process, I’ll offer the reminder that no one has to have all the answers. It’s good to be asking questions. Possibility can absolutely emerge from uncertainty. Of that I am sure.

Notes:

*I realize that centers a White woman’s feelings (mine). I do this to show that it isn’t healthy (“feel good”) to be an oppressor. 

The Tribal Seal of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians is included with gracious permission by Tribal Council. It is the creation of Tribal Member Edwin Martin.

***

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 and Enter Geese. 

Francois Villon, Rascal Poet [by David Lehman]

The original bad-boy poet roamed the countryside of fifteenth-century France. Francois Villon narrowly escaped the gallows; a vagabond and a thief, he cast his major poems in the form of satiric versions of a last will and testament.

In "Le Petit Testament" (also known as "Le Lais") -- a title that appealed greatly to the Australian inventors of the great twentieth-century hoax poet Ern Malley -- Villon bequeaths his possessions, whether tangible, spiritual, or imaginary -- to the people and institutions that deserve them. The mood is one of irony, sometimes bitter, sometimes of the type known as gallows humor, but there is warmth of feeling and also compassion.

To the Holy Trinity, Villon leaves his soul; to the earth, his body; to a Parisian named Denis, some stolen wine; to a madman, his glasses; to a lover, all the women he wants. At least two of Villon's shorter poems -- "Ballad of Hanged Men" and "I Am Francois, They Have Caught Me" -- were composed in 1462 while the poet was under sentence of death.

Here is a brief excerpt of "The Legacy" ("Le Lais") rendered by John Payne in 1878:

                                Item, this trust I do declare
                                                For three poor children named below:
                                Three little orphans lone and bare,
                                                That hungry and unshodden go
                                                And naked to all winds that blow;
                                That they may be provided for
                                                And sheltered from the rain and snow,
                                At least until this winter's o'er.

This stanza, sweet and sad, yields a completely different set of emotions when you consider that the three "orphans. . .named below" were three of the richest men then living in Paris.

At Bennington College one winter, Anne Winters and I suggested that a group of young poets write a poem ending with Villon's grand line, "And I die of thirst at the rim of the fountain."

Here's my stab at a famous Villon verse:

“In my own country I live in a foreign place
With strength of mind and purpose, yet powerless,
A winner at any game I try, yet awash in loss.
At dawn I say goodbye to the night,
And in bed, I fear I'll fall from a great height."

Among translators the late Louis Simpson had a go at Villon's testamentary masterpieces in 2000. Earlier, Galway Kinnell edited a Signet book of bilingual selections. Robert Louis Stevenson's story "A Lodging for the Night" perpetuated some of the legends surrounding Villon, which have formed the basis of more than one Hollywood swashbuckler.

Simon Loekle has an excellent blog post on Villon, which begins with these paragraphs.

<<<
   Francois Villon disappeared from written record circa 1463 (aged 30), when he was banished from the city of Paris, after a dramatic reprieve from the gallows.

Though Gutenberg's contraption was thumping clanking and squeaking in Germany, the first printing press did not set up operations in Paris until 1470; the earliest edition of Villon was published in 1489. That Villon's reputation survived for nearly 30 years after his disappearance, that it proved strong enough to support a half dozen published collections of his work over the XVI century is his true legacy. It was the literate and literary readership that preserved his words and brought them to the print shop, but he had a reputation among his contemporaries not only for his criminal activities: he was known for his poems. The First Respondents were listeners, in taverns and jail cells and fine chateaux.

The Legacy was written (I think quickly) in 1456 just before the poet fled Paris, and it is in part a farewell to his native city. The specific places and people underscore its satiric motive; if the topical humour falls flat after 500 years, the energetic bite of the verse still makes its mark. Over the next four years on the road, "The Legacy," it may reasonably be supposed, served as a kind of ticket or calling card, as it displays his skill in a long poem (a traditional ambition of poets). The satiric parody of the Last Will (popular since the days of the plague) spared Villon the demands of narrative (which, somehow, Villon does not seem temperamentally suited for). The format is obviously flexible, and if Villon presented it along the way, it is easy to imagine his touching up the text with local references. 

That "The Legacy" is a work of hard-boiled irony is palpable, though how the irony works through the poem is more difficult to grasp. Over the centuries, virtually all of the "heirs" have been identified, but we have lost the immediacy of the reference, and must bear in mind that Villon is engaged in presenting "the thing that is not." It is also clear that The Testament is unquestionably the masterpiece: the interludes of ballades and rondeaux enrich the poem, providing human details and warmth, and better exposing Villon's humours. The two poems cover much the same territory (behind or to the East of Notre Dame); some of the "heirs" in the first are "re-gifted" in the later. I cannot but think that the later work was a conscious revision of the first.
>>> 

From the archive; originally posted October 5, 2013.  See also "Francois Villon Begins His Journey," a poem I wrote in 2017 following the impulse that gave rise to this piece on the "Rascal Poet."  The Hollywood swashbuckler pictures is Ronald Colman playing Villon. -- DL https://www.thecommononline.org/francois-villon-begins-his-journey/

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Yesenia Montilla

Eartha Kitt As Muse

by Yesenia Montilla

The eyes are two saucers filled with every

forlorn woman’s last meal: roasted

chicken & a good Bordeaux                    & how

the heart is found in the neck’s thick artery, ready

                                    for a man’s good touch.

Eartha, I know nothing about fame or fortune

            but I know a little about being so lonely

that even the flower’s elaborate bloom can not keep me company.

You’re so damn pretty, that I could write a poem about you

                        & you  

                        & (insert lover’s name)    We both have had plenty

to spare           & darling, I love how

we look in the mirror & kiss the air

            & how when our hand waves in greeting

the sky and all its particles dance & a sweet sigh

escapes from our parted lips                   

                        & isn’t that  sound a kind of tenderness?

How laughter bolts from our mouths like a wild

heart drumming

this is how we muzzle the world —

 

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry & Poetry in translation. Her first collection The Pink Box was published by Willow Books & was longlisted for a PEN award. She lives in Harlem, NY.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

Emily's Escape [by Nin Andrews]

(c) Nin Andrews 2014

Karen Sagstetter: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo [detail] by Diane MacEachern

 

No Crying in Baseball

No crying when I struck out swinging.
No crying when a runt smashed a grand slam
off my pitch. Or when I wrecked my legs
black and blue sliding into third. 
No crying when I was picked off
at third for the third time
or when my wondrous fly ball
whacked the rear fence
and bounced back like a prodigal to a centerfield glove.
Not even when my mind wandered to the beach 
and I bobbled the ball and the manager screamed
get out of my life!

I’ll tell you what brought me tears. 
I was in space, orbiting the generous blue earth 
and pressing my face against 
the plain window glass of my ship.
I witnessed ball fields in neighborhoods on every continent,
green diamonds shining through glorious clouds 
and dogs the world over
chasing grounders in the afternoons.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Karen Sagstetter is author of Commotion, a book of poetry, as well as poetry and fiction in numerous literary journals, two chapbooks of poetry, two nonfiction books, and The Thing with Willie, a collection of linked stories set largely in Galveston. She  studied in Japan as a Fulbright journalist and  worked as senior editor for many years at the Smithsonian’s museum of Asian art and at the National Gallery of Art. She grew up in Texas and now lives in Maryland. 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Emily Alexander Draws an Ace [by Ace Boggess]

REVERENCE AND IRREVERENCE AT THE SAME TIME

“Meredith Is Crying and I Am Too” by Emily Alexander

http://www.glass-poetry.com/journal/2019/august/alexander-meredith.html 

One of the greatest things a poem can do is pull a surprise laugh out of the reader when solemnity is all that’s expected. Mark Halliday, Stephen Dunn, and Dick Allen are masters of this. The reader moves along in beautiful sadness, and then, suddenly, laughter. In Emily Alexander’s “Meredith Is Crying and I Am Too,” a richly detailed meditation on the Emergency Room, the serious tone stops to elbow readers in the side. “a bomb rib-lodged in a man’s chest / then two train commuters / skewered onto a hand rail so I shove / a spoonful of peanut butter in my mouth / to shut me up,” Alexander writes, and already the bleak moments feel lighter. Or: “I woke up to pee then I found / my keys drove home I barely made / a dent in night it dented me right / back.” This poem bares a moment, revealing both its tragic and comic sides: reverence and irreverence, existential absurdity … life.

"When I Heard the Learn'd Urologist" [by Mitch Sisskind]

Where were you when televisions
Multiplied in American homes
And pastel-colored cars had fins
On which at least once a boy
Chasing a ball stabbed himself
And the fins, like kings, died out?

I lived when Eisenhower’s golfing
And mumbled press conferences
Affronted the intelligentsia whose
Worship of Stevenson blossomed
Into the miracle of Jack Kennedy’s
Televised White House cello recitals.

In the doghouse was an expression
Extremely common in those days.
You might hear a man who forgot
The anniversary of his marriage
Forty years ago refer to himself
As in the doghouse, for example.

People said, On the warpath.
They said, You’re cooking with gas.
They said, Fish out of water --
Jump on the bandwagon – A fly in
The ointment – The jury is still out --
He’s always blowing his own horn --

Or how about this? Eke lullaby,
My loving boy, thy lusts relent --
Four hundred and fifty years ago
A man wrote that poem to his penis.
Can you imagine it happening today?
I can. I’m a board certified urologist.

-- from the archive; first posted September 2014

"Smoking in Heaven" [by Robert Hass]

Watching young poets in the early evening
Smoking on the terrace outside the poetry reading,
I wondered if there would be a smoking terrace
In heaven. I have a friend, dead now,
A Catholic who was unimpressed by the prospect of paradise
Until he discovered a group of medieval theologians
Who had proposed that there was a special kind of time
In eternity. They gave it a Latin name.
Like my friend, they couldn’t conceive of a God
Who would force them to live forever
Without sunrise and sunset. His wife, a skeptic,
Called it decaffeinated time, at which he shrugged wryly.
This idea of life after death made him very happy,
Which was, as far as he was concerned, the point.
He’s been dead now for almost a decade,
So I suppose he knows one way or another
Whether there is nothing after death and no one there
To know it or not. The smoking terrace would, of course, be out of doors,
So it wouldn’t be as depressing as those smoking rooms in airports
Where people with grey skin submit to their addiction
With religious humility. You could light up and walk to the edge of the clouds
And watch the fragrant smoke you were expelling
Drift into the decaffeinated sunset. It made me wonder
If there were coffee in heaven. Or sex. I knew a woman
Who said that the main reason for sex,
As far as she was concerned,
Was the cigarette afterward. And if there were sex
In heaven, why would there be anything else? Probably
So that you could also watch Canada geese settle on a lake
Just as the moon was twilighting the surface of the water
In luminous little scallops. The young poets
Should read Allen Ginsberg who said that poets should set an example
By not submitting to what he called “the nicotine haze
Of capitalism.” Probably in the heaven without tobacco
The couples are walking by the sea, having already made love,
And the moon, almost unnaturally large,  is just coming up,
And the color of the moon on the water is just like what
Their bodies are feeling, contented but still tingling,
And in the moonlight they can see a pack of feral goats
With their beards and inhuman eyes grazing on the hillside, also contentedly,
As if time and eternity were the wrong ideas altogether,
And the women would have come in with their Greek masks on
To walk the shoreline and dance what fate is.

From Summer Snow by Robert Hass (Ecco, 2020), an extraordinary new book by the poet, author of The Apple Trees at Olema and Twentieth Century Pleasures, editor of Poet's Choice, and guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2001. Kudos, Bob. -- DL