The Best American Poetry

Yom Kippur, Grand Concourse, Bronx, 1948 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Renee and Huy Harwood, my parents, eager to end the Yom Kippur fast.

-- sdl

Steady My Laden Head [by Mary Gilliland]

The hours don’t count, I don’t count the hours. This is not a task but an activity. Unassigned. A practically involuntary part of the day, sowing itself in my unconscious during times I might not be physically involved. I’m winging it, without formal education. It looks like I have chosen to engage, but really the chooser was something larger that said Do.

What is done is admired by walkers on the South Hill Recreation Way, both people I have met before, and people I will never know. A couple with their dog stopped along the trail while I was weeding not far away, uphill: “When we see these flowers, every year, we know that spring’s really here!” This was during the era of my corralling Garlic Mustard by—every autumn—laying down Dame’s Rocket seedheads on areas among the trees where I’d weeded out G-M. Yes, “like a gleaner [I did] keep/steady my laden head across a brook”—the freshet, that is,
behind our shed, that by this time of year is a dry streambed. My strategy was to replace the invasive with a secondary invasive, one that blooms more prettily and at first glance looks like phlox. A place holder.

The scent of hesperis matronalis rises in the evening. The flowers bloom pink, mauve, white, purple and, sometimes, an eye-catching white streaked with one of the other hues, or vice versa. Those I would mentally note to let stand through the frost. The seeds matured, then I deliberately scattered them in new areas in order to multiply the striated enchantment. Which, last year, I discovered is caused not by genes but by a virus. Was it nature or culture that brought me the next-door neighbor whose PhD research focused on plant-virus interactions? Lizzie studied host and pathogen as they co-evolved; my brassica species, Dame’s Rocket, hosts turnip mosaic virus—resulting in variegated color in the flowers.

Turning the rocky hillside acre into a garden began with an earlier next-door neighbor’s retirement. He was of the tribe who trim every blade of grass to the same length, edge the sidewalk and allow no chipped paint on trim or siding.“Mary,” he asked after once more perfecting his holdings, “would you mind if I took some of those privet bushes out of your woods?” When purchased, our house had been closed in by invasive privet and Japanese honeysuckle, up to every door. By the time Walt posed his question, there was some green lawn, my husband’s joy. I imagined the clearance would lead to lovely walks in our very own wood after a day of teaching. But the cleared land was, next spring, thickly carpeted with a mystery plant. Helped by a few students, I pulled them all out. They returned. Pull. Return. And again. GarlicMustard had just begun its inexorable march across the Lower Forty-eight.

Hence the mass plantings: of deer-proof perennials that spread. Not so many rocket now, but cowslips, hellebore, brunnera, primrose varieties (including
Wanda!), pulmonaria, trachystemon, comfrey, andcetera, follow spring’s explosion of flowering bulbs, ephemeral pink corydalis, Virginia bluebells.

I garden at the end of a one-block cul de sac. This area bordering the woods is classified on the municipal maps as vacant land. Yes, it’s poetry.

                                                                                ——MG, 5 October 2022

In Praise of Bruno (1983)

Two redheads having a much-needed snooze in Ludlowville (July 1983).

Wednesdays with Denise [by Denise Duhamel]

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE
October 5, 2022

Sharon Olds’ latest book BALLADZ was published yesterday. It is a tour de force of mature, startling, haunting poems that reach over time from the speaker’s childhood to the recent pandemic, from first loves to present day romance and loss, concluding with a series of wise, powerful elegies. The book also plays homage to poetic lineage, most notably a suite of poems in conversation with Emily Dickinson. Olds also acknowledges a slew of poetry friendships and their sustaining power. Here is just one example in which she writes a poem “like a mate for Galway’s ‘Bear.’”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/a-song-near-the-end-of-the-world

And here is the late Galway Kinnell’s poem:
https://poets.org/poem/bear

Congratulations, Sharon!

In the photo above, Sharon Olds (right), David Lehman (center), and Gerald Stern (left) prior to the "Best American Poetry" launch reading of 2010. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Six): Clarence Major [by Angela Ball]

Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving

                                                                   --based on an old photograph bought in a shop at Half Moon Bay, summer, 1999
No sound, the whole thing.
Unknown folk. People waving from a hillside of ripple grass
to people below in an ongoing meadow.

Side rows of trees waving in a tide of wind,
and because what is moving is not moving,
you catch a state of stasis.

Opposite of this inactivity
you imagine distant music and buzzing and crickets
and that special hot smell of summer.

To the garden past the Bay to the meadow,
cliff sheltered with low clouds, offset by nodding thistle.
Tatter-wort and Stinking Tommy along footpath
worn down by locals. But who and why?

In the photograph itself you’re now looking the other way
to unknown clusters of houses.
Where forces are balanced to near perfection.

Who could live
in such a great swollen silence and solitude?
You hear church bells
from Our Lady’s Tears breaking that silence nicely
but just in the right way so silence continues
as though nothing else matters day after day.

And anyway, each face seems so familiar.

What do you do when you wave back?
You wave vigorously.
You remember your own meadow,
your cliffside and town,
photographs forgotten,
the halfhearted motion of your hand,
your grandmother’s church-folk
gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness.

You name the people
whose names are not written on the back.
You forgive them for wrapping themselves in silence.

You enter house after house and open top-floor windows
and you wave down to future generations like this.

--Clarence Major

From CONFIGURATIONS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. Copyright © 1998 by Clarence Major. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Source: Waiting for Sweet Betty (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

The old photograph got my attention right away and stirred my imagination. Who were these people? Who were they waving to? What were their lives like? Where are they? What is their history, their future? Sometimes old photos—and I used to look through a lot of them in street bins in France—evoke so much. --Clarence Major

CLARENCE MAJOR is a novelist, poet and painter. His novels include Dirty Bird Blues (a Penguin Classic), Such Was the Season, a Literary Guild selection; My Amputations, winner of the Western States Book Award; Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year; and One Flesh. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Harvard Review, and dozens of other periodicals. He is the author of sixteen collections of poetry. A Fulbright scholar, Major won a National Book Award Bronze Medal, the Western States Book Award for fiction, a National Council on The Arts Award; in 2015 he won a “Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Fine Arts” from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and in 2016 a PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett “Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature.” He was elected to The Georgia State Writers Fall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth century American literature at the University of California at Davis.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Six): Clarence Major

Clarence Major’s “Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving” is an ekphrastic of the unnamed, named. Which is to say it speaks to and for its subject. Major, himself painter as well as poet, is a maestro of relations between art and life, experience and memory, motion and stillness. It is fitting that the poet found the photograph at a store at the mysterious-sounding “Half-Moon Bay.” A bay is a stasis, a peacefulness—it is the sea’s Sunday.

The poem starts by removing sound, since a photograph is silent, and this one particularly so—so it can surprise us later. The poem is not just visual, but kinesthetic. It moves us, not just emotionally, but spatially.

The first motion is of the anonymous hands, whose undulations translate into “ripple grass,” to an “ongoing meadow,” to “side rows of trees waving in a tide of wind,” "and because what is moving is not moving / you catch a state of stasis.” The “you” makes us spectators of the photograph, puts us under its spell.  And, since opposites invite one another, “you imagine distant music and buzzing and crickets / and that special hot smell of summer.” How effective, that leap of smell, how it penetrates.

The poem continues its waves of description, “to the garden past the Bay to the meadow / cliff sheltered by low clouds, offset by nodding thistle,” its rhythms lifting and dipping, to the pungent surprise of the “common” names “Tatter-wort” and “Stinking Tommy,” plants that become personages “along footpath worn down by locals. But who and why?”

And then, we may feel, we suddenly enter this domain of strangers—“you’re now looking the other way / to unknown clusters of houses.” What a fine précis of architecture, “where forces are balanced / near perfection,” but also of the poem, its rolling descent of the page.

Just as we wonder at the lives of those within the “great swollen silence and solitude,” we hear: “church bells” from the wonderfully-named “Our Lady’s Tears,” each bell a tear made audible, each bell inviting silence, “as though nothing else matters day after day.” Isn’t silence the essence of church, and bells its handmaidens?

Then a wonderfully casual one-line stanza, “And anyway, each face seems so familiar.”Just like that, we have moved from contemplating anonymity to feeling at home:

     What do you do when you wave back?

     You wave vigorously.

     You remember your own meadow,

     your cliffside and town,

     photographs forgotten,

     the halfhearted motion of your hand,

     your grandmother’s church-folk

     gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness.

At one stroke the people are real to us, our familiars, forgiven their aloofness—and our own past forgiven its lost photographs, our half-gift of a reluctant wave; all of this blessed by the “saintly quietness” of “your grandmother’s church-folk,” a vanished generation:

      You name the people

      whose names are not written on the back.

      You forgive them for wrapping themselves in silence.       

Clarence Major’s bravura “Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving,” itself a wave, ends in a cascade of wonders. Finally, we access the soi-disant cliffside mansions to “to open their top-floor windows, . . .and wave down to future generations like this”—the casual, masterful “like this” both describing our own waves—for we are now waving—and making us at home inside the photograph, its life and art.

--Angela Ball

REBEL, Jean-Féry (1666-1747) [by Lewis Saul]

Les Élémens
1. Le Chaos

listen: Stuttgarter Kammerorchester
Thomas Zehetmair, cond.

Baroque music is pleasing to the ear. Bach was the master of delicious polyphony and beautiful part-writing. Handel, Telemann and Vivaldi are crisp and to the point. Rameau and Scarlatti wrote some of the greatest, technically difficult, and exciting keyboard works of all time.

Then there the lesser known composers -- Jean-Féry Rebel being one of them.

The first movement of this work -- whose later movements are more traditional, focusing on the elements: air, fire and water, along with some more popular French dances -- is called "The Chaos." In it, he attempts to musically depict that time right before the universe was created. 

Genesis 1:2

 

2Now the earth was astonishingly empty, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water.

בוְהָאָ֗רֶץ הָֽיְתָ֥ה תֹ֨הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ וְח֖שֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְה֑וֹם וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם

 

The important Hebrew words in the text above, are the third and fourth  -- TOHU (chaos) and VOHU (emptiness).

 

The Midrash Rabbah states:

 

"R. Huna said in Bar Chappara's name: 'If the matter were not written, it would be impossible to say it, viz., GOD CREATED HEAVEN AND EARTH; out of what? Out of NOW THE EARTH WAS TOHU AND VOHU.'"

 

But there is a fascinating footnote:

"God first created tohu and vohu, and out of these He created the world. But this is not to be taught publicly."

 

**

 

But indeed, this cannot avoid being discussed. What came before the nothingness?

 

Rebel -- who served as court composer to Louis XIV -- sought to teach us one of the strangest musical moments of the Baroque era:

1. Le Chaos

 

Here he opens with a tone cluster consisting of five clashing pitches -- C-Sharp, D, E, F, and G-Flat::

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out of this chaos emerges some normal tonality, but with quickly ascending 32nd-notes and a repeated riff on one note, which dies down and ends peacefully:

 

6:21: 2. Loure "La Terre" (Air pour les violons); "L'eau" (Air pour les flütes)

Earth and Water ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8:12: 3. Chaconne "Le feu"

 

 

 

 

 

 

10:48: 4. Ramage "L'air"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12:03: 5. Rossignolo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

13:42: 6. Loure "La chasse"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15:27: 7. Tambourin 1 -- Tambourin 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

17:34: 8. Sicillienne

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

19:39: 9. Rondeau "Air pour l'amour"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

20:42: 10. Caprice

 

 

Grace Cavalieri's Milestone Birthday [Terence Winch]

Happy 90th birthday to the extraordinary & indefatigable Grace Cavalieri, an inspiration to all who know her. Poet, playwright, painter, and long-time host of “The Poet and the Poem” interview program from the Library of Congress, Grace deserves all the love she asks for.

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This Poem Is Asking for Your Love

This poem is not usually like this
I don’t know what came over it
It’s mostly violet under the sun
with a large yellow parasol and a pond
with a center that never freezes
I swear I had no idea
I’m so used to trees of hearts and
cherries within its branches
I can’t imagine
what woke this poem up
with a truth I never wanted
It called out the tower window and said
I was alone
That in itself is a morbid lie
I have long shadows in Autumn and clouds
anytime there is a sky
In fact everything was going so well until
this poem wanted to undress me
and bring back my love
and hold me close and rub
my forehead when I had fever
It had no idea what trouble could come
from this so I wrote it
then I ran from it
now I can erase it
to show I never needed it after all
because don’t you know, Poem,
if you have to ask for something
it’s no gift.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                                Autobiography, mixed media, by Grace Cavalieri

Jack Skelley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Skelley, photo by Gary Leonard

______________________________________________________

Green Goddess

 

Who made the salad

Whose tangy vinegar made me wince

Who played pouty Venus to my impudent Caesar

Who taught me to renounce meat

Who flowed forth lubricants

Who performed dark sacraments

Whose tart shrub tangled my tongue

Who with unctuous poses oiled me

Who received my verdant sacrifice

Who, as I reclined panting, poured herself into her dressing

Who lured me to the garden and dragged me into deep greens

Who instructed me on the use of the proper fork

Who inserted an oblong cucumber

Who shredded slender carrot sticks

Whose burning bush consumed the sky god’s timbers, shaking his heavens to the rafters

Who roused me in damp chambers, dousing reasonable fires to consume knowledge raw

Who at the crack of the vernal equinox, broke seasoned bread into bite-sized croutons

Who parted beet-red vestments

Who swelled my painted cave-beast proud and pregnant

Who put me in the red-pepper pink

Whose celestial power I would enviously drink

Who succored me when I lay pallid

Who made the salad

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jack’s Skelley’s “Green Goddess” appears in his latest collection, Interstellar Theme Park: New and  Selected Writing (BlazeVOX books). Other books include: Monsters (Little Caesar Press), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press), and Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), spring 2023). He is also songwriter and guitarist for psychedelic surf band Lawndale which just released a new album, Twango.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    “Product Placement”—one of nine collages by Erin Alexander for Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing by Jack Skelley.

Quote of the Day: Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz (1903-1989)

Born on this day, 1903, in Kyiv, Ukraine.

“Always there should be a little mistake here and there - I am for it. The people who don't do mistakes are cold like ice. It takes risk to make a mistake. If you don't take risk, you are boring.”

 

-- sdl

BAP 2009: The Gala Launch [by Liz Howort]

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 [2009] featured  prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

 David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

            “Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

 John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprising movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each line beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard does. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2009

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 [2009] featured  prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

 David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

            “Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

 John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprising movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each line beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard does. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2009

Two Poems (by Mitch Sisskind)

Explosion

An explosion is always right because 
Gramps can't argue with an explosion.
If he starts up at Thanksgiving dinner 
You and him might argue but he can't
Argue with an explosion you set off.

Same thing as when Gramps buys 
A cell phone and you have to set off 
An explosion or when Gramps goes
On a trip down memory lane again 
You have to set off an explosion. 

What if Gramps keeps continuously 
Bungling old time expressions like
It is two sides of the same horse?
You must set off another explosion,
You got to so stop your blubbering.

Sleepless

Gramps is scared that he might 
Forget his Social Security Number
So tossing and turning like a ship 
Heavy laden he keeps reciting 
His Social Security Number to
Himself until the casement glows
A glimmering square (Tennyson.)

 

Introducing "Wednesdays with Denise"

Watch this space on Wednesdays for dispatches from Denise Duhamel. Denise’s most recent books of poetry are Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Find out more about these books and others here. A proponent of collaboration, she and Maureen Seaton have co-authored five collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Her nonfiction publications include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (with Julie Marie Wade, Noctuary Press, 2019). Denise was guest editor of the Best American Poetry 2013. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. Find more BAP blog posts by and about Denise here. 

Welcome, Denise. 

-- sdl

 

Wednesdays with Denise [by Denise Duhamel]

For this ‘Wednesdays with Denise,” I point you in the direction of Gulf Stream, Florida International University’s national literary magazine for which I am a faculty advisor.  Here’s a throwback to Ashley M. Jones (an alum of FIU’s MFA program and now Alabama’s Poet Laureate) interviewing David Lehman about the prose poem:

https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/archives/online-archives/online-8/features-8/gulf-stream-interviews-david-lehman/

Our latest issue is Spring 2022.  The editors will be reading submissions through November 3 for the next issue.

https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/issue-30/

The picture on top, from the issue, is "Marco Island" by Kevin Norwood.
Marco Island, Florida, November 2021
-- September 28, 2022

"Torrents of Spring" by Philip Mead [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

If T.S. Eliot had been writing in Australia, "The Waste Land" might have opened "September is the cruelest month". Spring has just arrived in the Southern Hemisphere, and on the east coast of Australia it looks likely the season will only compound what has been the wettest year ever recorded.

 

The great Philip Mead's "Torrents of Spring" seems superbly situated for the occasion, a spring poem more doleful than celebratory. Through the speaker's conversation with the dead Scottish poet Sorley Maclean, who is on his way to Calvary (evoking both one of Maclean's most well known poems and the Crucifixion and resurrection of Christ), we are reminded that loss is just as an essential element of spring's process of renewal as the blooming of acacias and bottlebrush. But how do we find renewal in the loss of a loved one? According to Maclean "there are no solutions" but to be in the world and know that it carries on:

What I always did was walk to the edge of the sea
and watch the fishermen where they haul their boats
in and the surge of the ebbless ocean.
Everything passes between islands, and take it from me
anything in art can be deferred, it’s free of the future.

The last line suggests that art exists outside of this carrying on; one step removed from life, it can be deferred. I like the idea that art is free of the future, that its temptation to exist lies not in time but in the eternal. It allows for us to meet dead poets in city laneways and have them assure us we continue to dream in death, as in life, "lonely as exoplanets".

 

Torrents of Spring

 

I thought I recognised Sorley Maclean
walking towards me down Niagara Lane.
As he came alongside he said look up,
you can see our friend the sky where the tall buildings
lean in towards each other. I can see some glyphs
floating across up there. The in-between goes all
the way back to the well of darkness.
Sorry but I’m an analogist, and out of area.
Back on the corner the tree shadows had seemed
to scatter around his ankles. He said he was on his way
through, from Antofogasta to Calvary, reminded me
that the lamps are a super important part of the
hanging universe. We keep dreaming he said,
lonely as exoplanets. The hard thing, I know,
is losing one of your own. That always takes up a lot.
Then after a very long pause he said, there are no solutions.
What I always did was walk to the edge of the sea
and watch the fishermen where they haul their boats
in and the surge of the ebbless ocean.
Everything passes between islands, and take it from me
anything in art can be deferred, it’s free of the future.
I know you’ve read about my afflictions. And I was different then.
I wanted to ask him about sudden gusts of wind,
and the cries of memory, the unexpected turns
in full lives, like his, and the enigma of where people end up,
but he was gone. Round the corner and down the street.
The last thing I remember was his scarf, the blue of flax lilies.

 

                                                                            first published in Australian Book Review

 

 

György Ligeti (1923-2006)

How many of you listen to "modern music" (i.e. Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Kurtág, Xenakis, etc.) for sheer pleasure? I've been into this stuff since very early childhood so it's just as pleasurable for me to listen to a Mahler symphony as a Stockhausen opera.

But I completely understand the fact that our 21st century ears are still plugged into the 19th century ... our "pop" music is diatonic, the TV jingle is diatonic, the scores for Star Wars are definitely diatonic (or sometimes chromatic ... chromaticism can be used in both a diatonic and dodecaphonic context).

Most people react to non-diatonic music with a feeling of having listened to noise, incoherent musical sounds, or -- often -- just an annoying waste of time.

So I propose this experiment. Listen to all or some of the following four compositions by György Ligeti and observe your reactions:

1. Atmosphères (1961)
2. Requiem (Kyrie) (1963-65)
3. Lux Aeterna (1966)
4. Aventures (1962)

The first work is for orchestra; the other three all involve singers.

2001: A Space Odyssey
directed by Stanley Kubrick

Yes, I'm certain most of you recognized the above music as part of the score of this cinematic masterpiece from 1968. Were you able to enjoy the music on its own merits, or did you immediately begin to associate the sounds with images from the film?

It's not an academic question, because audio and visual cues comingle in our brains, and sometimes fuse together!

• Atmosphères plays over the first three minutes of the film, before the MGM logo even appears. You could say that the music "sets the mood," or in its urgency, is subtly telling the audience to quit jabbering and prepare for the experience. But if you soak up this non-visual prelude, you will find a gigantic pay-off later in the film.
• The next Ligeti we hear is when the apes meet the monolith -- the music is the Kyrie from the Requiem. This music will accompany every appearance of the monolith, except the final one. We see the syzygy as the music reaches a peak and Kubrick cuts it off abruptly. The camera looks out on the African plains and the Moonwatcher episode begins, culminating in the bone/satellite Also Sprach section.
• Lux Aeterna makes its first appearance when Floyd's shuttle is approaching the monolith site. The music takes a break while the crew has sandwiches and coffee, and then resumes until it turns back into the Kyrie -- the leitmotif of the monolith -- and is overwhelmed by the high-pitched shriek of the radio signal.
• If your home-video version leaves out the Intermission, you've missed Atmosphères again. Shorter than the opening cut, but still an important cue to what will come next.
• A supertitle: "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite." Kyrie returns as we observe another syzygy -- this time from Jupiter. We hear almost the entire movement (Kyrie eleison = Lord, have mercy) -- nature's cosmic terror; mercy seems irrelevant!
• Now the payoff from having heard Atmosphères so often. As Bowman passes through the Star Gate, and we observe his face in a frozen scream, we hear ten minutes of music, accompanying one of the best-known scenes in cinematic history.
• In the alien apartment, we now hear Aventures for the first time. Strange vocal noises pierce what seems like silence.

The actual techniques Ligeti used to compose these works is fascinating, maybe a subject for a future post.

Oh yes -- Kubrick and all his lawyers somehow neglected to pay (or even correctly credit) Ligeti for his brilliant music. Ligeti sued; it was settled, and all must have been forgiven, for Christiane Kubrick accompanied Ligeti to the premiere of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), after Stanley's death.

The Proud Beggar [by Tom Disch]

Am I happy to have lived
When and where I did
America The 20th century
I've often said so
Grateful anyhow for my good luck
But I'll be happier soon
To have shed both when and where
My landlord has had me evicted
Katrina struck
As Charlie lay on the mattress
Of a New York hospice
And he had as little care
For the deaths of those other paupers
As for his own
May I achieve the same
Dark wisdom
Yet still I scrawl
These codicils and think
It matters who gets
Dibs on the dust
From my shitpile
Didn't I write
Just after he died
"Nothing we had
Was worth the having"
And isn't that still true?
These few disintegrating molecules
And then the mattress
Will be rotated
To receive the next deposit
Our chiefs may rejoice
For when they die
Their ships go down
In the same flames
They aren't evicted
They laugh at the poor in their rags
Pushing crook-wheeled grocery carts
Filled with moldy books
Please buy one, Sir
Just a dollar
Less for you

June 1, 2008

"Made Bed" [by Beth Gylys]

Made Bed

He could have been my lover again that night—
a whisper of dress lifting over ears,
the tie unknotting, the sheets predictably white,

the fumbling urgency leaving us breathless, light
from lust tinged by guilt, the vanished years.
He could have been my lover again that night,

confusing past with present, desire with flight,
image with image: elbow, breastbone, sheers—
the tie unknotted, the sheets ironically white.

Entangled, our voices pitching like a kite
in a storm with vowels, bleats, stifled swears...
he could have been my lover again that night

if the night were only and alone, if right
and right had not had different names. Affairs:
the ties unknotting, the sheets iconically white

and damp, and something's broken, lost, bright
as shattered glass, as side-lit, backstage mirrors.
He could have been my lover again that night,
the ties unknit, the sheets shamelessly white.

-- Beth Gylys

from Verse Daily, September 26, 2019

http://www.versedaily.org/2019/madebed.shtml

L'Shana Tova: "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" [poem by David Lehman]

Molly with Stick, Cayuga Lake, 1981 (c) Glen Hartley

For I will Consider Your Dog Molly 

 

For it was the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah, New Year's Day, day of remembrance, of ancient sacrifices and averted calamities.

For I started the day by eating an apple dipped in honey, as ritual required.

For I went to the local synagogue to listen to the ram's horn blown.

For I asked Our Father, Our King, to save us for his sake if not for ours, for the sake of his abundant mercies, for the sake of his right hand, for the sake of those who went through fire and water for the sanctification of his name.

For despite the use of a microphone and other gross violations of ceremony, I gave myself up gladly to the synagogue's sensual insatiable vast womb.

For what right have I to feel offended?

For I communed with my dead father, and a conspicuous tear rolled down my right cheek, and there was loud crying inside me.

For I understood how that tear could become an orb.

For the Hebrew melodies comforted me.

For I lost my voice.

For I met a friend who asked "is this a day of high seriousness" and when I said yes he said "it has taken your voice away."

For he was right, for I felt the strong lashes of the wind lashing me by the throat.

For I thought there shall come a day that the watchmen upon the hills of Ephraim shall cry, Arise and let us go up to Zion unto the Lord our God.

For the virgin shall rejoice in the dance, and the young and old in each other's arms, and their soul shall be as a watered garden, and neither shall they learn war any more.

For God shall lower the price of bread and corn and wine and oil, he shall let our cry come up to him.

For it is customary on the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah to cast a stone into the depths of the sea, to weep and pray to weep no more.

For the stone represents all the sins of the people.

For I asked you and Molly to accompany me to Cascadilla Creek, there being no ocean nearby.

For we talked about the Psalms of David along the way, and the story of Hannah, mother of Samuel, who sought the most robust bard to remedy her barrenness.

For Isaac said "I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the offering?"

For as soon as I saw the stone, white flat oblong and heavy, I knew that it had summoned me.

For I heard the voice locked inside that stone, for I pictured a dry wilderness in which, with a wave of my staff, I could command sweet waters to flow forth from that stone.

For I cast the stone into the stream and watched it sink to the bottom where dozens of smaller stones, all of them black, gathered around it.

For the waterfall performed the function of the chorus.

For after the moment of solemnity dissolved, you playfully tossed Molly into the stream.

For you tossed her three times, and three times she swam back for her life.

For she shook the water off her body, refreshed.

For you removed the leash from her neck and let her roam freely.

For she darted off into the brush and speared a small gray moving thing in the neck.

For this was the work of an instant.

For we looked and behold! the small gray thing was a rat.

For Molly had killed the rat with a single efficient bite, in conformance with Jewish law.

For I took the rat and cast him into the stream, and both of us congratulated Molly.

For now she resumed her noble gait.

For she does not lie awake in the dark and weep for her sins, and whine about her condition, and discuss her duty to God.

For I'd as lief pray with your dog Molly as with any man.

For she knows that God is her savior.

David Lehman, "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" from Operation Memory (Princeton University Press, 1990)

-- sdl

Laura Orem: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Bald

 

Remember, remember that boy

who could not love you

because you were not pretty,

whose terrible honesty you’ve carried

for thirty years, the truth you mined from him

like some strange gemstone made of your

own desperation that you still wear

around your neck.

 

And now this boy, your boy, who carefully wields

the electric razor until, stroke by stroke,

your head is shaven, austere as a nun’s,

beauty or lack of it as irrelevant as it is to God. This is

about power. This is about mess. This is what you do

to claim some purchase on this absurd slide

down a hill of talus looking for meaning

or Jesus or some way to make sense.

The boy reminds you as he shifts

to a disposable razor and, surgically careful,

scrapes away the tiniest stubble, black and gray

as a prophet’s beard. Your choice, he says. My choice,

like forcing truth from another boy thirty years ago.

See, says my son. Look. It’s not so bad.

You can stand it. You already have.

Stand it some more.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Orem is a writer, artist, and educator. Currently a board member of the Baltimore Wisdom Project, a multi-faceted education program for inner city youth, she taught writing for many years at Goucher College. She is the author of two books of poetry, Castrata and Resurrection Biology.  She lives in Palm Coast, Florida.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This transformed image of the iconic Mona Lisa from a 2013 poster is the “perfect emblem of the upheaval that cancer brings with it, the enormity of its impact on the life of a person and of the inestimable stakes,” says the National Cancer Association Foundation of Italy, a nonprofit organization that provides free palliative care and pain management services to cancer patients throughout Italy.  

 

 

What are the Scariest Poems in the English Language? [by David Lehman]

            What is the scariest poem in the language? I wager that many would select Poe’s “The Raven,” and it is unquestionable that Poe has the ability, in his verse as in his stories, to scare the dickens out of you. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" will get votes, as it should. There are poems by Emily Dickinson that, like a Magnum .44 wielded by Dirty Harry, could "blow your head clean off." Byron's "Darkness" makes you shudder, and many poems from the Elizabethans and the Metaphysicals make you see a skull and bones on the other side of your pillow. You can, however, make the case that Robert Frost -- Frost, who was once habitually misread as a genial Yankee sage -- has written as dark and frightening a poem as we have.  The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal confessed himself terrified by the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces.” It is Frost who captures that silence.

            The brilliant sonnet “Design” – in which a spider makes a meal of a moth -- exemplifies the view of nature that informs Frost’s poetry. Nature at work is aesthetically satisfying; it has order, pattern, design; but there is nothing moral or ethical about it. Nature, as opposed to human nature, is indifferent to individual life. Put another way, nature feeds on itself, and life requires death, as the life of the spider requires the death of the moth.

            Humanity is stupid or destructive in Robinson Jeffers’s poems, which take the side of nature against human life. Frost doesn’t go that far, but in his poems the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Man is frail, and the loss of a man may be mourned, but the mourning lasts a mere moment. In Frost’s “Out, Out – “ a boy working with a buzz saw loses his hand in an accident. The results are surprisingly fatal: “No one believed. They listened at his heart. / Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.” But what truly shocks the reader is not only the death in quick stages -- brilliantly captured in that line with two dashes -- -- but also the moment when the boy, a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart,” pleads, “Don’t let him cut my hand off -- / The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!” We infer that brother and big sister lack parents, and this knowledge deepens the pathos. 

             The ending of “Out, Out –“ seems at first to indict humanity for its essential callousness. They – the same “they” that had listened at the boy’s heart – go right on living: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Callousness or realism? The ending is similar to the ending of Auden’s great “Musée des Beaux Arts,” in which Icarus, in Brueghel’s painting, falls from the sky to his death in the sea, “and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Both poems are superb, but Frost’s will give you the chills while Auden’s more analytical approach will make you ponder the thesis that humanity is necessarily indifferent to human suffering.

             Among the scariest of Frost’s poems is “Desert Places.” Compare it to Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” Both poems are about “nothing.” It may be that Stevens’s poem is the stronger of the two; it certainly requires enormous attention and rewards numerous re-readings. But “Desert Places” has something that “The Snow Man” with its “distant glitter of the January sun” lacks. “Desert Places” has terror.

              In his "Pensées" (i.e., thoughts), Blaise Pascal wrote: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Here is the final stanza of Frost's "Desert Places":

            They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
            Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
            I have it in me so much nearer home
            To scare myself with my own desert places.

 Take that, Pascal.-- DL

from the archive; first posted October 31, 2015

End [by Susan Brind Morrow]

I like having a fierce dog

Who barks and bites

And leaps at your head

The beauty boy who sleeps at my thigh

Red fox red

My beautiful Ted. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What carnivore 

brought down the deer

Whose rib-cage stands red

In the brown spring fields below

 

Venus rising in the dawn

Frost on the lawn

This April morning.

                                                                 *

We sat and watched the sun go down across the lake below through the broken black outlines of the trees. The faint flicker of a rainbow formed for an instant in the low sky to the north as though it were the rim of something suddenly visible, the shining fragment of the rim of a halo. The last light fell in a wave of gold that swept quickly around the room settling for a moment on each of us in turn. We sat talking in the dark, in what seemed like a box of deep blue light as we had in summers past, so that the evening had about it a sense of timelessness.

I reminded Terry of how once he said that everything operates on the level of four basic elements, their combining and breaking down, and that we are all “just some spectacular sideshow,” as though all the desperate suffering of life were simply an elaboration of this basic principle.

“What is it that makes a human being?” He had said, “What defines being human? Falling in love. And what is that? Seeing something ordinary- as numinous. Seeing. The intensity of that focus, that concentration of energy, would be the heating up in which some significant transformation could take place.”