The Best American Poetry

"Dino Dozes" [by Boris Dralyuk]

Dino Dozes

 

                                 In old age Dean Martin ate dinner every Sunday night at the counter

                                 of the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard.

 

While Dino dozes Jerry pulls new faces.

Skinny’s backstage and mentions that the place is

crawling with scouts. They need their act to click,

so Jerry hones the fine points of his schtick.

Luck is that part of art practice replaces.

 

But luck is Dino’s long suit. It embraces

his ease and swagger, looms like an oasis

before the average schmoes — they feel so slick

while Dino dozes.

 

Next thing you know, he’s in the world’s good graces.

And then he’s not. These days Dino retraces

his groggy steps. One, two — ain’t that a kick?

All gone. Not that he cared for it to stick.

What ghosts may rise the Hamlet’s Scotch erases

while Dino dozes.

 

-- Boris Dralyuk. (Photo of Dean and Jerry, circa 1950).

Did Freud Die? And if so, when? [by David Lehman]

I) Yes, he died

(1) At Freiberg (then part of Moravia) of a gunshot wound said to be self-inflicted on 6 May 1856

(2) In London of throat cancer on 23 September 1939

(3) Brokenhearted in North London of bronchitis on March 14, 1883

(4) In Paris, executed by guillotine, 28 July 1794

(5) In Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945.

(6) When his boat went down in a sudden storm off the coast of the Gulf of Spezia. on July 8, 1822.

(7) Drinking a goblet of hemlock 399 years BC

II). No, he did not die. He changed his name. He outlived Hitler. Beethoven's Ninth was the symphonic apotheosis of an ode to him. Freud means joy. Freud sounds like freedom. Freud is too close to fraud for comfort. 

Extra credit:

What were Freud's last words? And who said the others?
(1) Mehr licht! Mehr licht!
(2) More beer!
(3) Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.
(3) Friends, applaud! The comedy is finished.
(4) Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
(5) Am I dying, or is it my birthday?
(6) Nothing is easy for a dying man.
(7) "Good dog.” (Technically: vot sobaka.)

Thank you to our sponsors, including Beethoven, Nancy Cunard,  Benjamin Franklin, Freud, Goethe,  Lenin, Marx,, Gertrude Stein, Pancho Villa, Oscar Wilde, Nero Wolfe.

Name the object. It's in Vienna. 

I) Yes, he died

(1) At Freiberg (then part of Moravia) of a gunshot wound said to be self-inflicted on 6 May 1856

(2) In London of throat cancer on 23 September 1939

(3) Brokenhearted in North London of bronchitis on March 14, 1883

(4) In Paris, executed by guillotine, 28 July 1794

(5) In Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945.

(6) When his boat went down in a sudden storm off the coast of the Gulf of Spezia. on July 8, 1822.

(7) Drinking a goblet of hemlock 399 years BC

II). No, he did not die. He changed his name. He outlived Hitler. Beethoven's Ninth was the symphonic apotheosis of an ode to him. Freud means joy. Freud sounds like freedom. Freud is too close to fraud for comfort. 

Extra credit:

What were Freud's last words? And who said the others?
(1) Mehr licht! Mehr licht!
(2) More beer!
(3) Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.
(3) Friends, applaud! The comedy is finished.
(4) Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
(5) Am I dying, or is it my birthday?
(6) Nothing is easy for a dying man.
(7) "Good dog.” (Technically: vot sobaka.)

Thank you to our sponsors, including Beethoven, Nancy Cunard,  Benjamin Franklin, Freud, Goethe,  Lenin, Marx,, Gertrude Stein, Pancho Villa, Oscar Wilde, Nero Wolfe.

Name the object. It's in Vienna. 

I) Yes, he died

(1) At Freiberg (then part of Moravia) of a gunshot wound said to be self-inflicted on 6 May 1856

(2) In London of throat cancer on 23 September 1939

(3) Brokenhearted in North London of bronchitis on March 14, 1883

(4) In Paris, executed by guillotine, 28 July 1794

(5) In Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945.

(6) When his boat went down in a sudden storm off the coast of the Gulf of Spezia. on July 8, 1822.

(7) Drinking a goblet of hemlock 399 years BC

II). No, he did not die. He changed his name. He outlived Hitler. Beethoven's Ninth was the symphonic apotheosis of an ode to him. Freud means joy. Freud sounds like freedom. Freud is too close to fraud for comfort. 

Extra credit:

What were Freud's last words? And who said the others?
(1) Mehr licht! Mehr licht!
(2) More beer!
(3) Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.
(3) Friends, applaud! The comedy is finished.
(4) Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
(5) Am I dying, or is it my birthday?
(6) Nothing is easy for a dying man.
(7) "Good dog.” (Technically: vot sobaka.)

Thank you to our sponsors, including Beethoven, Nancy Cunard,  Benjamin Franklin, Freud, Goethe,  Lenin, Marx,, Gertrude Stein, Pancho Villa, Oscar Wilde, Nero Wolfe.

Name the object. It's in Vienna. 

The Godfather: How we know Don Corleone died on December 7th

<<<
While Sonny is driving  to his death, he's listening to the October 3,1951 radio broadcast of Russ Hodges calling the decisive third game of the Dodgers-Giants playoff -- a half-inning before Bobby Thomson ended the Dodgers' season with the "Shot Heard 'Round the World, which many consider the national pastime's all-time greatest moment.

Both Frankie Avalon and Vic Damone auditioned for the role of Johnny Fontane. Francis Ford Coppola was most impressed with Damone and gave the role to him, but Al Martino got the part and is said to have used his organized crime connections to ensure he kept the part. Ironically, Fontane sings "I Have But One Heart," which was Damone's first hit song. The cover story has it that Damone turned down the role because it was based on Sinatra, whom he revered.

According to Mario Puzo, the character of Johnny Fontane was NOT based on Frank Sinatra. However, everyone assumed that it was, and Sinatra was furious; when he met Puzo at a restaurant (Ciro's maybe) he screamed at the novelist and issued threats. Sinatra hated the movie. Rumor has it that the Johnny Fontane role was scaled down as a result.

Of the main cast, four pairs of actors share a birthday: Al Pacino and Talia Shire (April 25), Diane Keaton and Robert Duvall (January 5), James Caan and Sterling Hayden (March 26), and Abe Vigoda and Al Lettieri (February 24). 

How do we know that the Godfather was born on December 7? "The nerve of them Japs. To bomb [Pearl Harbor] on Pop's birthday." "They didn't know it was Pop's birthday."

Whether the film ranks, as it does for many of us, as one of the greatest of all movies, The Godfather is a script that the certified US male of a certain class knows much of by heart. For more exquisite Godfather trivia (Jews play Sonny and Tessio, an Italian plays the Jewish Moe Greene) go here.
>>> 

from the archive; first posted January 13, 2012

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: December 6, 2023

Congratulations to Mary Jo Bang whose book A Film in which I Play Everyone was published earlier this fall by Graywolf.  Here’s a spectacular sample poem:

SPEAKING OF THE FUTURE, HAMLET

is saying, someday this day will be over.  
A moon will presumably still be above:  
a bone quiet, an inflatable in the scene 

—the cool blue swimming pool  
it finds itself in. And I will want to be. 
My mother, the Queen, will want only  

my father, the King. All will be want  
&get. And I will be me. And O, O,  
Ophelia—will be the essence of love.  

The love of a sister. Or, the love of the  
brother. Compassion. Forgiveness.  

All will be want & get. We will all be  
together, on stage & in dress, reciting  
our lines: “What a fine day. What a  

wonderful way. To be.” No sirens. Fifty  
stars, a cloud. A drawing of an all-night  
sky. We’ll be there. You as you. And I. 

 

"The New York School of Beauty" [by Mary Maxwell]

The New York School of Beauty

The man who cut James Schuyler’s hair also cuts my hair.
I once heard Schuyler read at the Ninety Second Street Y.

A large man, he sat at a wooden table positioned center stage
and took highly dramatic gulps of water between the reading
of his dead-pan poems.

                                           Carrying my postpartum weight,
I trudge behind my child’s stroller up Hudson Street past
Saint Luke’s and then over to the White Horse Tavern.

I find myself thinking of him, identifying sequentially with
the poet’s size, his last-ditch Episcopalianism, his thirst.

from Cultural Tourism by Mary Maxwell (LongNookBooks, 2012). James Schuyler is pictured above.
From the archive; first posted December 4, 2020.

The New York School of Beauty

The man who cut James Schuyler’s hair also cuts my hair.
I once heard Schuyler read at the Ninety Second Street Y.

A large man, he sat at a wooden table positioned center stage
and took highly dramatic gulps of water between the reading
of his dead-pan poems.

                                           Carrying my postpartum weight,
I trudge behind my child’s stroller up Hudson Street past
Saint Luke’s and then over to the White Horse Tavern.

I find myself thinking of him, identifying sequentially with
the poet’s size, his last-ditch Episcopalianism, his thirst.

from Cultural Tourism by Mary Maxwell (LongNookBooks, 2012). James Schuyler is pictured above.
From the archive; first posted December 4, 2020.

The first Paul Violi Prize (February 2015)

In February 2015, Gabriel Don took photos at a reading honoring the first recipients of the Paul Violi Prize at the New School. You'll recognize the late Bob Hershon, Tony Towle, Honor Moore, Marc Cohen, Susan Baran, Charles North, Rozanne Gold, Sharon Mesmer, Luis Jaramillo, Laura Cronk, Stacey Lehman, David Lehman, and Mariam Zafar.

    

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Four): Joel Stein [by Angela Ball]

Through a Country

 

You, on the one hand, see a land

Green and rolling

With chalky marble

And stretches of yellowed sandstone

Patched here and there into the hills,

Coming up for air after eons of sleep.

While I on the other hand say

Here collisions occurred

A hundred million moons ago

With valleys heavy and damp

And sea islands becoming rock above the clouds.

But now all of this

Comes to bear upon

Exit 49, a place

Of rest,

Of a chosen view of the Taconics and the Catskills on the horizon

The geometric fields left half fallow, half

In hope of an early spring,

A pause on our way home.

The time continues

One stop past this moment.

Clairvoyant for a mortal hour

We finish what is in our cup

Then climb back into our debate

As to where the best place is

To eat, to die, or

Start anew.

The land moves down to the sea

And the sea relents

It is getting ready

To begin again.

                                Joel Stein

                                Highland Park, NJ 2010

Joel Stein was born in Denver, Colorado, and grew up in the Hampton Roads area of Southeastern Virginia.  He attended college at the University of Cincinnati, and the Iowa Writers Workshop.  He lived in New York City for several years and then commuted to, and worked in, New York City for many years more.  He was a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  He has been published in The New York Quarterly, The Kansas Quarterly, Glassworks, Icarus, The Vanderbilt Poetry Review, and The Paris Review. He currently lives in Hancock, New Hampshire.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Four): Joel Stein

Joel Stein’s compelling meditation on the landscape of the interstate, addressed to a partnered “you,” dramatizes the temporary clarity—“clairvoyance” of highway travel, which, as we progress, provides illusory panoramas of future, present, and past. Of the “big four” poets of the New York School, its tone shares most with James Schuyler’s wry sense of the limitations of human experience. But where Schuyler’s decision in “June 30, 1974” to “have another piece of toast” suggests contentment, even coziness, Stein emphasizes our apartness from geological processes that take place in a distant and alien time frame. Where Schuyler is domestic and personal, Stein is objective. A “Rest Area,” that oxymoron, provides an anonymous beverage: “We finish what is in our cup.” There is a coolness appropriate to the experience described—but that also extends itself to a characterization of the human. A poet mindful of quantum physics, Stein reminds us that choice is sparse, even illusory.

The poem’s contrary “you” sees an up-to-date landscape, viewing it as a painter might:

     You, on the one hand, see a land

     Green and rolling

     With chalky marble

     And stretches of yellowed sandstone

     Patched here and there into the hills,

     Coming up for air after eons of sleep.

What an excellent image, that “coming up for air.” In it, road cuts become agents of awakening. 

But our poet/speaker penetrates further, reaching underneath to the drama of collisions as perceived by science—possessed, after all, of its own lore—as suggested by the language of “a hundred million moons ago.” Where the “you” sees a quiescent landscape woken after “eons of sleep,” the speaker is most interest in origins, in orogeny—the violence of change.

     While I on the other hand say

     Here collisions occurred

     A hundred million moons ago

     With valleys heavy and damp

     And sea islands becoming rock above the clouds.

That all this is visible or imaginable to the traveler is the work of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the federal interstate system built in the fifties that redesigned travel—in a way somewhat analogous to Haussmann's redesign of Paris in the nineteenth century-- exchanging, for the dark vagaries of Medieval alleys, wide boulevards and their prospects.

Super-highways colonize, neutralize. We must see the marked miles as they have been arranged, an organized text with exits as chapters, a primer we skim in powerful machines. All has been thought out by engineers: grade and degree of turn, depth of road cut, opportunities for drainage, possible wind shear.

A town near me once owned a throwback hairpin curve in its interstate—the source of much excitement and inconvenience. Known as the last such crimp allowed in any major highway, it was, in its time, a thrilling deviation.

It can be said that highways form an enduring metaphor for how we too often live: following a bland prescribed route, observing signs. But, as Stein’s poem brilliantly points out, they also provide moments of clarity:

     The time continues

     One stop past this moment.

     Clairvoyant for a mortal hour

     We finish what is in our cup

     Then climb back into our debate

     As to where the best place is

     To eat, to die, or

     Start anew.

When they deepen into seriousness, free-verse poems tend to wax iambic, and Stein’s “Through a Country,” with its provocatively bland title, is no exception. “As to where the best place is” wisely roughs up the rhythm for a moment, mirroring the difficulty and/or impossibility of choice. So does the line break at “or”—not to mention the wild incongruity of the list itself. Is this what choice comes down to? The list is chilling yet inspiring, ending as it does with (a somewhat ironic) “Start anew.”

“Then climb back into our debate” provides more than an eloquent metaphor for re-starting a discussion. The vehicle itself, powered by the destruction of nature, is the debate. It keeps the dialogue going, for the poem’s couple and for us, who emerge from it with both a clearer and more vexed sense of possibility and destiny. Stein’s masterful “Through a Country” incites us to look beyond ourselves, to question speed’s smooth illusions, and to cast a cold eye on the resurgent sea. -Angela Ball

What's Your Favorite Film Noir? (with Suzanne Lummis and David Lehman]

 What is the greatest noir movie?

Suzanne Lummis:
I think Double Indemnity of 1944 is seminal, though a couple of others before it have strong noir elements. But Double Indemnity’s got it all, a terrific script and story, thanks to director Billy Wilder; smart, cracking dialog, thanks to co-writer Raymond Chandler, master of the hardboiled detective novel; and the best (worst!) crime: Two Lovers Kill Husband Then Shoot Each Other. In the annals of immortal crimes, that one’s hard to beat. However, although John F. Seitz is credited with some innovations—such as the smoky look of certain interiors—I prefer the hard, almost glossy, contrasting shadow and light of John Alton and Nicholas Musuraca.  

David Lehman:
We agree. Double Indemnity is the ne plus ultra of noir movies, and if we were to give out noir awards on the model of the Oscars I believe it would win for best picture, best screenplay, best femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck), and best supporting actor (Edward G. Robinson). The underrated Fred MacMurray would get a nomination for best actor in a lead role but would lose to Robert Mitchum (Out of the Past). My favorite moments: Stanwyck as traffic cop, MacMurray as speeding motorist; Edward G. Robinson’s great speech on types of suicide; the movie’s last line (“I love you, too”). It’s a movie I watch at least once a year and could talk about it for an ardent hour.

---

On July 7, 2019, Suzanne Lummis and I initiated a weekly dialogue on noir. We sustained the exchanges until November. This was the first in the series. Herewith from the original announcement:

<<
Suzanne's film noir and poetry themed series, They Write by Night, can be found on YouTube and the website poetry.la, and features explorations such as "Damaged Women," "Separating the Dark from the Light," and "Are the Femmes Fatale?"  Her essays include "The Poem Noir--Too Dark to Be Depressed" in Malpais Review and "Never Out of the Past: Noir and the Poetry of Lynda Hull" in The Los Angeles Review of Books. Her most recent poetry collection, Open 24 Hours, won the Blue Lynx Prize.

Our columns will go up on Sundays at noon -- timed to coincide with the conclusion of Eddie Muller's noir movie of the week on TCM. Eddie, I like your period-accurate ties and your taste, and this, the first of our exchanges, is dedicated to you, with thanks for today's seventy-minute feature, The Tattooed Stranger, with the shootout amid the gravestones and with the detective and his botanist lady friend in Fort Tryon Park with the GW Bridge in the background. That -- Washington Heights --is where I grew up. >> - DL

Note: On Tuesday, December 5, at 6 PM, an all-star panel will consider Crime Novels of the 1960s, the two-volume Library of America set edited by Geoffrey O'Brien. You need to register. For more info click here.  

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/12/coming-up-on-december-5th-6-pm-all-star-panel-on-crime-novels-of-the-1960s.html

For another of our noir exchanges, please use this link.

 What is the greatest noir movie?

Suzanne Lummis:
I think Double Indemnity of 1944 is seminal, though a couple of others before it have strong noir elements. But Double Indemnity’s got it all, a terrific script and story, thanks to director Billy Wilder; smart, cracking dialog, thanks to co-writer Raymond Chandler, master of the hardboiled detective novel; and the best (worst!) crime: Two Lovers Kill Husband Then Shoot Each Other. In the annals of immortal crimes, that one’s hard to beat. However, although John F. Seitz is credited with some innovations—such as the smoky look of certain interiors—I prefer the hard, almost glossy, contrasting shadow and light of John Alton and Nicholas Musuraca.  

David Lehman:
We agree. Double Indemnity is the ne plus ultra of noir movies, and if we were to give out noir awards on the model of the Oscars I believe it would win for best picture, best screenplay, best femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck), and best supporting actor (Edward G. Robinson). The underrated Fred MacMurray would get a nomination for best actor in a lead role but would lose to Robert Mitchum (Out of the Past). My favorite moments: Stanwyck as traffic cop, MacMurray as speeding motorist; Edward G. Robinson’s great speech on types of suicide; the movie’s last line (“I love you, too”). It’s a movie I watch at least once a year and could talk about it for an ardent hour.

---

On July 7, 2019, Suzanne Lummis and I initiated a weekly dialogue on noir. We sustained the exchanges until November. This was the first in the series. Herewith from the original announcement:

<<
Suzanne's film noir and poetry themed series, They Write by Night, can be found on YouTube and the website poetry.la, and features explorations such as "Damaged Women," "Separating the Dark from the Light," and "Are the Femmes Fatale?"  Her essays include "The Poem Noir--Too Dark to Be Depressed" in Malpais Review and "Never Out of the Past: Noir and the Poetry of Lynda Hull" in The Los Angeles Review of Books. Her most recent poetry collection, Open 24 Hours, won the Blue Lynx Prize.

Our columns will go up on Sundays at noon -- timed to coincide with the conclusion of Eddie Muller's noir movie of the week on TCM. Eddie, I like your period-accurate ties and your taste, and this, the first of our exchanges, is dedicated to you, with thanks for today's seventy-minute feature, The Tattooed Stranger, with the shootout amid the gravestones and with the detective and his botanist lady friend in Fort Tryon Park with the GW Bridge in the background. That -- Washington Heights --is where I grew up. >> - DL

Note: On Tuesday, December 5, at 6 PM, an all-star panel will consider Crime Novels of the 1960s, the two-volume Library of America set edited by Geoffrey O'Brien. You need to register. For more info click here.  

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/12/coming-up-on-december-5th-6-pm-all-star-panel-on-crime-novels-of-the-1960s.html

For another of our noir exchanges, please use this link.

Jesse Nathan: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_____________________________________________

Scouts

 

There was a boy even stranger than I

who’d call me in the evening

to see if I’d come to Scouts. Something in me

hesitated. Then one morning

 

during eighth grade English we got hall passes

and did it in a stall in the bathroom

taking turns over the john,

as thrilling as clumsy.

 

We kept our secret.

But he came to seem a target

around that one-light town. The cut of his hair

or the way he laughed, or maybe

 

his jittery hunched-up walk.

For a while he went on calling me

to see if I’d go with him to Scouts.

Instead I learned: treat him low

 

or be treated so myself.

Once in Art while the others snickered

I planted tacks across his chair,

and he sat down and shot up so quick

 

the chair sprang backwards, a few silver tacks

still sticking in his rear, his roar

like the shining in the corners of his eyes,

snarling as he came at me with scissors,

 

and only the teacher’s lightning maneuver

kept me from my due.

After that he looked at me, if at all, like the traitor

I was. Later that year his dad moved him

 

to a Christian school where they teach

the planet was made in seven actual days

and dinosaur bones got planted by God

to amuse geologists and children.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jesse Nathan was raised in northern California and rural Kansas. He was a founding editor of the McSweeney's Poetry Series, and now teaches literature in the English Department at UC Berkeley. His poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, and other magazines, and he's been a recipient of fellowships from the Arts Research Center and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He lives in Oakland.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                  Boy Scouts at a swimming class at Boy Scout Camp in Florence, Alabama. Photograph, July 1942

from “The Hitchcocks” [by Peter Ferry]

“Call me Tommy,” the boy said.

They didn't. They called him “Earl” or “Earl the Pearl” or “Earrrl” or Earl the Girl.”

“Don't pay your brothers any mind,” his mother said peeling carrots into the sink. “Earl is a good name. It was your grandfather's name. Wear it proudly.”

“It's the name of an English Lord, said his father with dismissive impatience. That was how he said most things, and only his mother found it charming, and then not always and later not at all. Not even his father called him Earl or Earl Thomas or Tommy. He called him The Boy to distinguish him from his brothers who were nearly men by then, and what started as a description became a name, or nearly a name.

When the teasing or the indifference or the impatience got too bad, Earl left his place and went up the canyon to the Hitchcock's old ramshackle house. He didn't advertise the fact because he sensed even as a small boy that his family considered the Hitchcocks strange. And they were strange.

Wonderfully strange. Three brothers spaced a year apart the youngest of whom was a year older than Earl. Three brothers who talked fast, who walked fast often in lockstep with arms held at their sides, who usually had a purpose or a mission when no one else around him seemed to have either.

They would spread maps out on the dining room table and study them half standing, half leaning, one knee on a chair, pointing, talking all at once, tapping with their index fingers. They discovered or perhaps invented old Indian trails. They found an ancient wagon in the woods encased in vines which they were quite sure was a "caisson." Earl had no idea what a caisson was, and when he repeated the story to his parents, his father laughed derisively. “A caisson!” he said. That's when Earl stopped talking about what he did at the Hitchcocks' place.

What he did mostly was watch. What the Hitchcocks did was let him watch and, he was to realize looking back on that time, also perform for him. He became their audience, and as such they accepted him. That didn't happen at home. He watched the Hitchcocks build model airplanes using tiny tubes of glue and tweezers. Then they hung the planes from the rafters in their common room, something Earl knew that his parents would never allow. "Now this is Spitfire AB910 that flew 143 operations between 1941 and 1945," one of the Hitchcocks would say holding a tiny decal with the tweezers and studying it through a magnifying glass as he placed it on the plane's fuselage "just so. A steady hand is required." That's how the Hitchcocks talked. Earl was quite sure that they were all geniuses. He “arrived at this conclusion” (also how they talked) after a heated debate on the nature of genius, and who was (Einstein, Fermi, Madame Curie) and who wasn't (Henry Ford, Franklin Roosevelt and Lucile Ball included for consideration because someone in Parade magazine had called her a “comic genius”). Earl loved their debates. He watched them as if they were sporting events. The Hitchcocks paced, gestured, jumped up suddenly and sat down emphatically. They argued over the uses of nuclear power, who wrote Shakespeare's plays, space travel, the existence of God, UFOs, socialism, and the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of The New Deal. Their favorite topic, however, was the “future.” They were forever speculating about what the future world would look like.

"A Noir Christmas": A Killer Panel on "Crime Novels of the 1960s"

"I'm Dreaming of a Noir Christmas":

On Tuesday, December 5, at 6 PM , the Library of America hosts a killer lineup of panelists to explore the two-volume set, Crime Novels of the 1960s, edited by Geoffrey O'Brien. 

To cap the LOA LIVE’s fall season, the panel will discuss such compelling crime thrillers as Margaret Millar's The Fiend, Ed McBain's 87th-Precinct classic Doll,  Donald Westlake-writing-as-Richard Stark’s The Score, Fredric Brown's The Murderers. and Patricia Highsmith’s eerie vision of an American in Africa ,The Tremor of Forgery.

In The Fiend, Margaret Millar, who was married to Ross Macdonald, creates a gem of great psychological complexity in a suburban setting that may seem as far removed from crime as the Santa Rosa of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. Ed McBain, the acknowledged master of the police procedural, is a poet of the precincts in his ability to generate multiple levels of meaning and irony from "Doll," the single word that serves as his title. In The Murderers, the driving force of Fredric Brown's plot presents murder as the culmination of a sequence of events following a drunkard's irrefutable logic.

Join Geoffrey O’Brien, editor of Crime Novels of the 1960s, along with noir maven Sarah Weinman (The Real Lolita), cultural critic Gene Seymour, and poet David Lehman (The Mysterious Romance of Murder) for an arresting dive into nine astonishingly inventive novels that pulse with the energies of a turbulent, transformative decade.

There will be a brief Q&A at the end of the program; you will be able to type a question and submit it to the event moderator.

Registration is required to attend this event. Library of America, a nonprofit organization, champions our nation’s cultural heritage by publishing America’s greatest writing in authoritative new editions and providing resources for readers to explore this rich, living legacy.

Tuesday, December 5
6:00–7:00 PM ET

Click here to RSVP
Or go to: rebrand.ly/CrimeNovels1960s

This online event is free, but you must preregister to attend.

We thank our promotional partners: the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics & Writers and Film Noir Foundation.

Watch this space for more information on the event, or click here.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God [by Jonathan Edwards]

God holds you over the pit of hell,
as one holds a loathsome insect over the fire;
the last of the just rings the bell;

"I tell lies," said the liar,
a convict released because the question lacked an answer.
He did calisthenics after reveille. She said she had cancer,

but the beast was more in love with his desire
for her than with her beauty, and the camera was just a way to transfer
the self from the self you see when you look in the mirror.

God grew ashamed of his creation. That's what the gravestone    
told the crone. Nevertheless she wants you to stay;
she wants you to pray; and if you do, if you pray,

if the dove returns after the storm has blown,
the cage door will stay open, and you'll never walk alone,
you'll never walk alone.

Noir or Not: "The Maltese Falcon"

Do you believe "The Maltese Falcon" should be categorized as "noir"?

Suzanne Lummis:
It's a terrific movie but ultimately not as dark as others -- Noir Gris. But regardless of the quality of darkness, I'd feel funny about any poet of my generation, or the one following, who hadn't seen John Huston’s classic with the great Warner Brothers cast (Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha J. Cook). I'd wonder what else they hadn't seen, or read. Had they seen On the Waterfront? Had they read Orwell's 1984, or only read about it?  Et cetera. But re. Noir or Not, there's an undercurrent of pessimism that we usually feel from film noir and don't in The Maltese Falcon. However, it has many noir elements, the dialogue certainly, especially in the final scene where Bogart tells Mary Astor,  "I don't care who loves who. I won't play the sap for you! You killed Miles and you're going over for it. If you're lucky you'll get life and be out in twenty years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."   

David Lehman:

The Maltese Falcon, one of my all-time favorites, is similar to a noir movie but not the same thing, mainly because the male protagonist does not succumb to the wiles of the femme fatale.  Compare Bogart in The Maltese Falcon to Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. The former belongs to a different genre, the detective story, in which justice, however much compromised, does prevail in the end.  Sam Spade refuses to “play the sap” for his femme fatale; that is alas exactly what Mitchum does with Jane Greer in Out of the Past. The division is epitomized in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. The detective stories such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter” stand on the one side, and the gothic horrors (“The Fall of the House of Usher”) on the other.  The detective story affirms the possibility of justice, of the restoration of order. The noir movie suggests the opposite and introduces the figure of a femme fatale to ensure that failure or death is the likely end of any criminal or questionable enterprise.

Beyond its antithetical relation to Out of the Past, there are plenty of reasons to consider this, John Huston’s first movie, in the context of noir.  Sam Spade is not unambiguously a servant of law, order, and ethical kashruth.  The brilliant Warner Brothers cast – Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook, Jr., and Mary Astor join Bogart – arouses noir expectations, and the status of the sculpted bird,  a fake responsible for at least three deaths, elevates the tale to the level of a parable about fortune, value, and desire.

There are a lot of other movies that I like to consider in relation to noir: Le Jour se leve [Daybreak] (Marcel Carne), if only because of the number of cigarettes that Jean Gabin smokes, and A Bout de soufflé [Breathless] (Jean-Luc Godard), primarily because of Belmondo’s imitation of Bogart. Neither is noir, but the former is like it, and the latter is an homage to it that testifies to the genre’s success. 

Click here for last week's exchange in which Night and the City and The Asphalt Jungle are discussed. 

-- 2019

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: November 29, 2023

Julia McConnell’s first book Landlocked was published earlier this year by Wheelbarrow Books of Michigan State University Press. The poems explore lesbian spaces in Oklahoma where the speaker also feels trapped/locked as she forges ahead to create a life.  Keeping her company in this wonderful series of poems are Walt Whitman, Mark Doty, Audre Lorde, and Elizabeth Bishop. You can preview her poem "Elizabeth Bishop Swipes Right" here:

https://www.screendoorreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/JC-Elizabeth-Bishop.pdf

Congratulations, Julia!

"Night Flight" by Sarah Holland-Batt [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

In the introduction to her collection of short essays on Australian poets, “Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry”, Sarah Holland-Blatt writes “As a form, poetry is full of freedom and possibility. It asks the reader to be open to coincidence and association, to music and imagery, to chance and change. Poems are full of surprises: each line is a little detonation of language and imagery, each stanza a series of swift steps into the unknown.” Holland-Blatt’s “Night Flight” is a perfect demonstration of these detonations of language and imagery. From one line to the next throughout the poem, we are shepherded across continents and desires, to destinations known and unknown, physical, temporal, bodily, imaginative and personal, where everything is “defined / by distance: how close we were, how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh / and those killing Chicago winds”.

 

Sarah Holland-Blatt is one of Australia’s leading poets, editors and literary critics. She has been published widely internationally, including in The New Yorker on several occasions. From 2014 to 2019 she was the poetry editor of Island magazine, and was also the editor of The Best Australian Poems 2016 and The Best Australian Poems 2017. Her three collections of poems to date have swept up nearly every major literary award Australian poetry has to offer, with her most recent title, Jaguar, winning the 2023 Stella Award.

Night Flight

 

As my plane drops down in turbulence

I think of you and of Salt Lake City,

I think of ice stealing over the Great Lakes

and of Omaha and of adamant plains.

I think of all the places

I have never been: Caracas,

La Paz, Kingston. I think of the way

our bodies puzzled together in that room

over pine woods where night deer

passed in the snow, their lonesome

inscrutable tracks sluicing

in the morning’s melt, I think of

your eyes that are almost the colour

of mercury, of their unbearable weight,

I think of the plateau of your chest

rising, rising, and of your hand

resting on my right thigh,

of the slim glint of your wedding

band in the dove predawn light.

I think of how everything is defined

by distance: how close we were,

how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh

and those killing Chicago winds

and union towns near Detroit, Michigan

where loyalty is the only religion.

I think of the sound of your breathing,

which is the sound of fields

of blond Illinois wheat bent down,

I think of those silver silos

of harvest corn we saw in Schuylerville,

barns blazing in all that silence

as we drove through what we could

not think or say. There is no grace

in this kind of longing, there is only pain,

pain which I have always preferred

anyway – it is where I live,

and called love by any other name.

From “My Friendship with Victor Borges” [by Walter Neff]

It is high time that we  raise a glass in honour of Victor Borges, the poet, blind pianist, and film critic, A native of the Moroni Islands, a group of islands off the coast of Guadalajara, he has recently doubled down on Bruch's Violin Concerto as the most underrated of all the great underrated violin concertos. The article, in Underrated Quarterly,  kicked up quite a fuss among the fiddlers on the roof of the Chesterton Museum in Boston, and the author's notoriety caused him to take refuge in his Moroni family heritage. 

Historically, the Moronis, like their sister city, are known for their tequila, mariachi music, and more recently, the production of witty instruction manuals. (The latter business moved south in the early 1950's, after being blacklisted; their motto is “Instruct and delight!”)  Borges grew up in Buttinski, the strangely-named capital of the Moronis, which Russian immigrants settled in the early 1600’s.

Like many young poets in his hometown, he labored for years to keep body and soul together by working in the instruction manual industry. Then one afternoon while sitting at his desk, he looked out the window and had a vision of Cincinnati, the riverfront city famous for Proctor and Gamble, Pete Rose, and Kentucky -- a riverfront city right in the middle of the American heartland, city of hills and parks, old money and rugs. He had been working on a short manual for the government -- the Moroni legislature had revised the national “Medal of Distinction” it awarded to its foremost citizens -- and Borges’ manual described how to attach the new medal. (Unlike the old medal, the new one had a difficult clasp instead of the traditional lanyard). He suddenly realized he didn't want to write the instruction manual for the attachment of the new medal -- or old medals, or any medals!  He longed to visit Cincinnati - to witness the miracle using all his senses to compensate for the lack of sight. 

After an arduous and scary emigration--a story for another time, involving secret  codes, Russian spies, and an insane ICE agent--he was finally able to settle in Cincinnati. Victor rented a small apartment in Clifton, the university district, and we got to know each other one morning in Kroger's, when our shopping carts somehow got hooked together and no amount of pushing or pulling could unlock them. I was completely flummoxed, but Victor said, “This problem looks just like one of our medals.”  “You put shopping carts on your medals?” I asked.  Victor smiled, “No, but the clasp —“ And he deftly unhooked the two carts with a move that was almost magical; I certainly didn't see it. After that, we got some coffee at the in-house Starbuck's, and sat in Kroger's for hours talking about poetry and rugs and how what goes around comes around. Molly Arden has written this about that

Victor, who did a masterly imitation of Art Tatum made elaborate jokes in the scherzo movement of his first book, The Knife and the Gaucho, which he set in Buenos Aires. By then he had moved to Los Angeles and was married to a shrewish Brooklyn-born babe with an ankle bracelet she flashed whenever she wanted something that poor Victor couldn’t give her. In my next installment I will tell of the time I sold Victor a straight-life insurance policy and the improbable consequences of this routine event. The client kept the whiskey in a locked cabinet but he brought his own set of keys. How could he have known murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?

4 / 12 / 20

Ed. Note: One of Victor B.'s early librettos, "Lady and the Scamp," published in the "Libs for Kids" series, was scooped up by the Disney adult department and was the basis for their porn production starring Linda Lovelace and Louise Lasser. (It was Lasser's first porn movie; she went on to star in "Geoffrey Hartman! Geoffrey Hartman!" a brutal send-up of the Yale philosophy department, filmed entirely in the nude.)  In "Scamp," a coming-of-age story set in Detroit, Lasser played a late-model Trans-Am who was transitioning from a V-8 to a V-6, in a country dangerously attached to fossil fuels.  The various and vicious discriminations she had to endure always seemed to end up in the bedroom, much to the delight of the Car & Driver and Motor Trend wankers around the country; it won a J. D. Powers award for best movie, as I recall.  Lovelace almost stole the movie playing a skanky pick-up.

11. 27/ 23

"So I said like why so he said like maybe" [by Molly Arden]

So I said like why so he said like maybe my place?

So he said on the job around the cock
So I said that's hard
So he said what
So I said around the clock
So he said yes
that's what i meant 
like it was like he looked straight
at you when he spoke
of guns versus flowers
or Picasso versus Matisse
as the greatest modern painter
or the hatred of crowds
condemning hatred
so I said typo
so he said type-A
so then we unambiguously
did the thing that has no name
the secret everyone knows
so no one ever spills the beans.

Lovely to be the queen of the scene!

-- Molly Arden (2008)

So he said on the job around the cock
So I said that's hard
So he said what
So I said around the clock
So he said yes
that's what i meant 
like it was like he looked straight
at you when he spoke
of guns versus flowers
or Picasso versus Matisse
as the greatest modern painter
or the hatred of crowds
condemning hatred
so I said typo
so he said type-A
so then we unambiguously
did the thing that has no name
the secret everyone knows
so no one ever spills the beans.

Lovely to be the queen of the scene!

-- Molly Arden (2008)

Diana Cao: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________

Old Dogs (Remember)

 

You’ve heard the saying. The first day at home,

snub-nosed and sweet, house-trained but otherwise

unbroken, our rescue ignored every trick

in the book—classic commands: sit, stay,

be good, I begged. But as the wisdom goes:

At some point, learning comes too late. The sun

sinks on the dull glare of what used to cut,

bitter and sweet and just out of reach

of memory. Redemption is for those 

who remember, and my mother slaps the glasses

off my father’s face, laughing, her sharp edges

blunted into the barking violence of a bully.

 

Be good holds no water when the night falls,

dripping with the echo of another 

she can’t recall. The sound of time running out

sounds a lot like the word they keep asking her, 

sounds like something she can almost string

together. Sounds, a little bit, like surrender.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Diana Cao is a writer and JD candidate at Harvard Law School, whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and International Literary Seminars, and her writing has been nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Award and Best New Poets. She is a winner of Nimrod International's 2023 Neruda Prize, and she likes night swims, talking to citrus, and the gloaming.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

          
                                                        No Escape from Within, photo by Tony Luciani of his mother

 

"Modern Love": XVII [by George Meredith]

At dinner, she is hostess, I am host.
Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps
The Topic over intellectual deeps
In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:
It is in truth a most contagious game:
Hiding the Skeleton, shall be its name.
Such play as this the devils might appal!
But here's the greater wonder; in that we,
Enamoured of an acting nought can tire,
Each other, like true hypocrites, admire;
Warm-lighted looks, Love's ephemerioe,
Shoot gaily o'er the dishes and the wine.
We waken envy of our happy lot.
Fast, sweet, and golden, shows the marriage-knot.
Dear guests, you now have seen Love's corpse-light shine.

-- George Meredith

(painting: "The Death of Chatterton" by Henry Wallis,  for which Meredith posed. It hangs in London's Tate Gallery.)

"Apophasis at the All-Night Rite Aid" [by Catherine Barnett]

"Apophasis at the All-Night Rite Aid" [by Catherine Barnett]

Not wanting to be alone
in the messy cosmology
over which I at this late hour
have too much dominion,
I wander the all-night uptown Rite Aid
where the handsome new pharmacist,
come midnight, shows me to the door
and prescribes the moon,
which has often helped before.

Catherine Barnett is the author of three poetry collections, Human Hours (2018 Believer Book Award in Poetry), The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets) and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. Her fourth collection, Solutions to the Problem of Bodies in Space, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2024. A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, among many other places. She teaches in the NYU MFA Program in Creative Writing and works as an independent editor.

from The Kenyon Review; photo credit:  Farah Al Qasimi and Res