The Best American Poetry

Tony Lo Bianco once batted against Sandy Koufax

 

Matthew Nienow: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__________________________________________________

Someday, If I Am Lucky

I will be survived by this open acre

ringed by cedars and firs, this

meadow collecting yellow light,

where today, alive, I linger

in the listening, housed in a shape

capable of such ordinary song. I wish

to thank the minerals in my bones

and all this borrowed epiphany, all this

endless ache linking arms with sorrow.

May many tomorrows nest

in such green valleys. May we all

accept the ground we will become.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Matthew Nienow is the author of the recently released collection, If Nothing, as well as House of Water (2016), both from Alice James Books. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and has been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.

____________________________________________________________________________________

    Vincent van Gogh, A Meadow in the Mountains, Le Mas de Saint-Paul, 1889, oil on canvas.

 

 

Zoom Golly Golly Golly

Next Monday,  Bastille Day, le quatorze juillet, Claire Barnes and Caterina Domenghini have organized a program at Oxford University 

On 'What Makes an American Classic?"

Zoom in to listen: Monday 14 July, 5 PM British time.

You can join us on Zoom at the following link: https://zoom.us/j/94639736858?pwd=FiBfsGGePRQUmZe7JtEojSVzbsebaf.1 

On Mon, Jul 7, 2025 at 12:30 PM Claire Barnes <[email protected]> wrote:

Dear all,

 

A reminder that you are warmly invited to join us for the online launch of our special issue 'What Makes an American Classic?' on Monday 14^th at 5pm UK time. The event will be hosted by Oxford's Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD). 

 

You can join us on Zoom at the following link: https://zoom.us/j/94639736858?pwd=FiBfsGGePRQUmZe7JtEojSVzbsebaf.1 

 

There will be an opportunity for contributors to the volume to share their thoughts (highlighted below) and we would love to hear from as many of you as possible.

 

Timings for the event:

 

Introduction from Pantelis Michaelakis, Director of the APGRD: 5 mins 

 

Response from Wiebke Denecke: 10 mins

 

Response from Glenn Most: 10 mins

 

Response from Tessa Roynon: 10 mins

 

Comments from the editorial board: 5 mins

 

Response from Cat and Claire: 5-10 mins

 

Contributors' thoughts: 10 mins

 

General discussion: 30 mins

 

If you would like to share details of the event more widely, please use this link: https://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/events/2025/07/what-makes-an-american-classic

 

With very best wishes, and a hope to 'see' you on Monday!

 

Claire and Cat 

Frost at Midnight [by David Lehman]

Frost at Midnight

White skies, tall pines, blue spruce
give way to evening darkness total.
I read Robert Frost’s “New Hampshire,”
twice, getting stuck on a line where “Nothing”
is a thing or event, like “the nothing that is”
in Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” The line:
“Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred,”
which is not only a metrical way
of praising manual labor but also an elevation
of “nothing,” before waving the subject away,
the real problem having less to do with the sacred
than with “what to face or run away from.”
That’s Frost for you, who elsewhere said Nirvana
was “the only nothing that is something.”

-- David Lehman

Read two other poems by the author here.

The Cancer Quiz: Part One [by Russell Kolnikov]

Who said it: The white race is the cancer of human history

a) the author of Illness as Metaphor
b) the author of Tropic of Cancer
c) Mao
d) Malcolm X
e) Franz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth

Saperlipopette! Nearly already September and still no deeds! [By Tracy Danison]

Si l’art est partout, il est aussi dans cette boîte (“If art is everywhere, it is also in this box”) by BEN. Photo © Ben Vautier, Adagp, Paris 2025

“So I bunged the thing in and got on with the job”.

I think that’s a line from Goodbye To All That, Robert Graves’ autobiographical novel.

It’s the “bung together” that tickles me: dirty, weary and drunk, hopeless, the squad and I bung the looted, still near-full, cask of Amontillado into the breach, scrabble back, dully wondering if it’ll do the trick.

The exhibition Tous Léger at the Musée du Luxembourg has inspired this.

I left the exhibition months ago now with thoughts and ironies aplenty – too many – and I put them off with a promise to myself to consider them later. I surely had time. I then stuck to discussing the sense in art in the 20th- and 21^st-century: Good and giddy, arty and philosophical: “Tout Léger” at the Musée du Luxembourg.

Saperlipopette! Tous Léger ends 20 July! Nearly already September, still bursting with things to say and ironies to bandy.

Time to bung in that cask of Amontillado!

When it was observed that he had “something of the night about him”, UK Tory politician Michael Howard’s prime ministerial ambitions just up and died, went to wherever killed ambitions go. Similarly, having something of the woman about an artist seems to kill serious just as effectively.

It’s hard to put a finger on it, but even popular contemporary artists such as Sophie Calle or Tracey Emin, who for some reason spells her first name wrong, are somehow not quite serious artists. In the many different exhibitions where she’s presented, Niki de Saint Phalle, who figured largely in the Nouveau Réalisme group and figures largely at the thematic heart of Tous Léger, very often gets an air of high-class decorator who makes cute and optimistic stuff to go on tee-shirts and coffee mugs.

Miles Davis by Niki de Saint Phalle. Photo © 2025 Niki Charitable Art Foundation - Adagp, Paris

But I didn’t have that feeling about the artist after my Tous Léger visit. On the contrary. I had the feeling that Niki de Saint Phalle, though she has something of the woman about her, is an honest-to-God, serious artist. And, after reflection, I decided I felt this this less because she was given good space, was gifted by curators with an esthetic legacy from Fernand Léger and grouped with serious-artist peers such as César and Martial Raysse and Yves Klein and much more because in the course of the exhibition, I got a vocabulary adequate to analyzing and discussing her art.

I got my adequate vocabulary from Tous Léger curators Julie Guttierez and Rebecca François. For the show, they developed a lexicon they call Histoire des Gestes (“Story of Deeds”) and wrote it in the format of an ordinary explicative timeline on the walls of, I think, the second room of the exhibition. As I continued through the exhibition I remembered the new words I’d learned as I considered the different pieces. By the time I did my backward and forward run, I felt equipped with a new discourse – one suitable also for talking about visual arts as a part of “movement art” (dance performance).

I adapt and re-publish Histoire des Gestes below as “Lexicon of Creating”. 

Looking at de Saint Phalle (and at her peer artists – and at today’s artists) using words of deeds nudges the conversation from art as “beauty” or “object” or “product” or “heritage” (from esthetics, technicity and ideology), to art as “creativity” –  to the creative process and the role and effect of creativeness (“art movement”) in the world around.

 

Le Cycliste by Karel Appel. Photo © Karel Appel Foundation 

Histoire des Gestes throws an anchor into 1930 to localize Fernand Léger as genitor for the post-war artists featuring in the exhibition. But otherwise it describes “key” doings or actions or movements undertaken by the featured artists from 1954 to 1974. Each of these doings is characterized by a word, usually a verb. For instance, the entry for Fernand Léger’s doings is DEFINIR (“Define”).

Taken together, the deed-words of Histoire des Gestes make up a vocabulary that descries the shape of the creative action of Nouveau Réalisme that is the thematic of the exhibition, although it surely has wider applications.

Yves Klein’s “Blue Women Art”, essentially, a performance of models rolling in or smearing on blue paint performance  just makes more sense as an act of ANTHROPOMETRIE, “Man-measuring” (viz., the entry in the lexicon below). Similarly, qualifying Niki de Saint Phalle’s Hon, essentially walking into a giant vagina, makes a lot of sense on many layers as an action of NANA-IFIER (“Girlie-ize”), broadly, re-position and express woman art and woman in art but also “woman” as a social being (viz., the entry in the lexicon below).

As I indicated above, in my mind, “creating”, “action”, “movement” point to the natural entanglement of visual art and dance performance. The one emphasizes perhaps the flow of creativity into and out of things and the other, the flow of creativity within people, between them and into the things that make up the world around. Yves Klein, according to Histoire des Gestes, an anthropometrist, saturator, empty-er-fill-er is also considered by many as the originator of performance art (what I call “dance performance” and is broadly characterized as “movement art”).

It seems to me that in underlining the movement or process aspects of creativity, along with the context-contingence of, especially Nouveau Réalisme’s products, the artists in this exposition are, at least in terms of concepts, actions and conversations, big contributors to building dance performance as we see it today. An even bigger contribution could be argued, I think, if a body considers performance-theater such as that being made today by Nathalie Béasse as part of the “Nouveau Réalisme”’s legacy in contemporary movement arts.

Lexicon of Creating (Histoire des Gestes)

The interpretation and adaptation into English of Julie Guttierez’ and Rebecca François’ Histoire des Gestes is my own. I’ve re-titled it Lexicon of Creating.

As noted above, Guttierez and François organize the content of Histoire des Gestes on a timeline. But I want to play down history and heritage, so I’ve removed it. I have also shuffled content and the original place of the entries when it suits me.

In the entries for Lexicon of Creating, I first give my English adaptation of the French word designating the deed/movement, with the all-caps French word just after in parentheses. I summarily adapt into English the event(s)/action(s) referenced by Guttierez and François. I’ve added all the hyperlinks and they don’t necessarily reflect choices that might have been made by the authors of Histoire des Gestes. [Between brackets], I sometimes add information that I think potentially useful, in particular, for a non-specialist person of the Anglo-Saxon cultural persuasion.

Entries of Lexicon of Creating look like this :

Package/Wrap (EMPAQUETER): seat/contextualize objects, like artist Christo & Jeanne Claude, who are creating wrapping and packaging for bottles, cans, baggage, furniture and toys by tying it in thick fabric.

Entries of Histoire des Gestes look like this:

EMPAQUETER Christo réalise ses premiers empaquetages d’objet. Bouteilles, conserves, bagages, mobiliers, jouets sont emmaillotés dans un tissu épais à l’aide de cordages. Cette action suscite un nouveau regard sur des objets cachés, dissimulés à la vue du spectateur. Dans cette logique de voilement/dévoilement, la question de la protection (conservation) et de l’identification (reconnaissance) d’objets ordinaires acquiert une dimension esthétique et poétique.

As to the misunderstanding and misinterpretation, over- and under-reading I generate or might have generated for Lexicon of Creating, here are three exemplary problematics to guide scepticism: I want to write “Tous Légers”, “s” plural, not proper convention for a family name in French and I habitually write Musée de Luxembourg instead of du; in English we have “story” and “history for histoire; is Beowulf a chanson des Gestes like Chanson de Roland and if so how does this information apply to my reading of cultural allusion in the title Histoire des Gestes? …

I am no better than I should be, so don’t hesitate to consult the text or even contact the authors of Histoire des Gestes. The original is available in the catalogue of the exhibition or you can have a partial list in the pedagogical notes to the show

______

Lexicon of Creating

Define (DÉFINIR): In 1930 Fernand Léger uses the term nouveau réalisme (“new realism”) … [to define what he sees as the esthetic revolution worked by the [cinematic] close-up, which allows “the fragmentary to be the whole [of the personality]”. This is not without resonance with quasi-contemporary and also self-defined post-impressionist Dada/Expressionist-inspired Kurt Schwitters’ famous “Merz” approach to art – creating a whole from random fragment. Léger returns to the idea often in his writing; Thomas O. Bouchard’s film documentary on his 1940-45 exile in the USA is called Fernand Léger in America: His New Realism (1945)].

Rival (RIVALISER): Put like with non-like, like New York MOMA’s The Art of Assemblage show (1961) [put together by William Chapin Seitz, only recently appointed associate curator, who uses “assemblage”, ways in which found objects or objects brought together are assembled]. The show brings together contemporary actors of Nouveau Réalisme and Pop Art.

Electrify (ÉLECTRISER): Seek to animate, like Martial Raysse, who adds neon light to his visual art.

Play in Play with Play over (JOUER): Do interactive and immersive installations, like Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum’s “Dynamic Labyrinth” installations  set up by Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt.

Eat (MANGER): Do Interactive performance art, like Daniel Spoerri’s “Eat Art”.

Sign life (SIGNER LA VIE): De-separate “art” and “non-art”, like Ben’s Fluxus action-art performance in the streets and businesses of Nice, signing all the ordinary things around him.

Veil and Unveil (VOILER/DÉVOILER): Reify esthetic value of ordinary things with in-situ performance events/objects, like Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s Valley Curtain, hiding a whole valley view.

Nanafy (NANA-IFIER), Bring woman back into creation, like Niki de Saint Phalle’s giant polyester Nana statues. [Centre nationale de ressources textuelles et lexicales (CNRTL): Nana: “Attested in 1949, the word indicated a prostitute, mistress, then concubine, before evolving into “girl, woman, girlfriend”  around 1952.” “Nana” is today in current use as a casual form of “woman”, is often in a pair, “mec et nana”. Cf., mug and moll, bitch and stud, guy and gal.]

Love (TO LOVE): Re-integrate word and thing, like Robert Indiana with his LOVE fetishes. [The French word “lover” means “writhe” as a serpent or cat or, often, “nestle” or “rub up against, rub together”.]

Pierce (PÉNÉTRER): Bring the public inside, make the inside the outside, like Niki de Saint Phalle’s Hon project sculpture at the Stockholm Moderna Museet, a giant walk-in Nana whose entry-point is the vagina. [Viz., lexicon entry “Nana-fier”. Cf., Centre Pompidou architecture].

Expand (EXPANSER): Find and use new materials, like the sculptor César, [known also for his “compressions” (of objects such as cars)] presents his “La Grande Expansion orange”, a sculpture in polyurethane, at Salon de mai 1967

Commemorate (COMMÉMORER): Together, recall and finish work begun (define), like the Nouveau Réalistes do at Milan for their 10th and final anniversary…

Dream (RÊVER): Realize the dream, like Niki de Saint Phalle creates her Tarot Garden between Florence and Milan

Bring together (ASSEMBLER): Let objects speak, like Niki de Saint Phalle with her “tableaux-assemblages” (assembled sculptures/paintings), ordinary/everyday objects such as toys inserted into plaster on wall board

Saturate (IMPRÉGNER): Think color and nothingness/perception as contingent phenomenon, like Yves Klein’s “époque bleue”, an assembly of identical International Klein Blue [rectangles] for Klein’s “Propositions monochromes, époque bleue” exhibitions in Milan, Düsseldorf and London

Tear and wear (LACÉRER): Look again (and over time), reconsider public spaces, like Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, who present worn, torn off advertising posters from the streets of Paris for an exhibition called Loi du 29 juillet 1881 [the law that, essentially, establishes free speech in France and is as ubiquitous as a fine print in public space as Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité]

Empty out-Fill up (VIDER/REMPLIR): Note being and nothing, multiple and ironic binaries, like Yves Klein’s Le Vide (“Vacuum/Nothingness”) exhibition at Iris Clert galérie in Paris, featuring empty white walls. Arman responds to Le Vide by filling up the gallery’s display with litter and trash and within his own Accumulations exhibit presents Le Plein (“Filled up”), consumer and industrial objects.

Accumulate (ACCUMULER): Reproduce industrial stuff, like ARMAN’s action-object Accumulations show at hôtel Ruhl in Nice. This brings together, first, ordinary and used, then, new, identical manufactured objects in a wooden box which is then boxed in Plexiglass. This is followed by an in-situ, ephemeral installation of 60 free-standing coat racks.

Compress (COMPRESSER): Reshape common objects, like César, whose “Compressions dirigées” exhibition uses a hydraulic compressor to squash cars into one-ton boxes whose qualities differ according to materials, plasticity and mode of charge into the machine.

Parody (PARODIER): Consider machine creativity, like Jean Tinguely’s “Méta-Matics” drawing and painting machines.

(Re)position (PIÉGER): Turn-about perspectives, like Daniel Spoerri’s action-concept “Tableaux- Pièges” (Trick Paintings) that glue found pieces – from meal remains to things from a flea market shelf - to a horizontal board that is then turned to the vertical

Sublimate (SUBLIMER): Estheticize, ironize consumerism, consumer goods, like Arman’s and Martial Raysse’s  “Hygiène de la vision”, materialization of the artists’ consumerist visions, or displays of small one-use plastic items as the high art of the consumer society in “tableaux-assemblages” of such items and feature stylized forms in ultra-saturated bright colors around the theme “joie de vivre”.  

Anthropometrize/man-measure (ANTHROPOMÉTRISER): Do performance/movement as art and art-object, like Yves Klein’s “Anthropométries de l’époque bleue” performance at galerie internationale d’Art contemporain in which, directed by Klein, three nude women cover themselves in blue paint and imprint themselves on body-sized sheets of paper to the live sound of Klein’s Symphonie Monoton-Silence (“Monotone-silence symphony”), which consists of one-note lasting 20 minutes and silence lasting 20 minutes

Self-destruct (S’AUTO-DÉTRUIRE): Consider qualities of machinery, like Jean Tinguely, who starts up his first auto-destructive machine installation, Hommage to New York, in the gardens of the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Inaugurate (INAUGURER): Start then mark out creative vectors, forebears and familiars [I use “familiars” as a semantic composite: friends/ethereal connections], like when critic Pierre Restany and creators Raymond Hains and André Verdet stopped for the inauguration of the new Musée National Fernand Léger at Biot, a town in the south of France, on their way to the first collective exposition of Nouveaux Réalistes at galérie Apollinaire at Milan where Restany will read the Manifesto for Nouveau Réalisme. Musée National Fernand Léger is the primary source and organizer for the exhibition Tous Léger, from which this lexicon is taken.

Come together/constitute (CONSTITUER): Name yourselves, like Pierre Restany, Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Yves
Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Jacques Villeglé, who met a late October evening in the Paris apartment of Klein to sign Une Déclaration constitutive du Nouveau Réalisme, a brainchild of critic Pierre Restany and Yves Klein, which pointed to new creative perceptions of the ‘real’. César and Mimmo Rotella, invited to the event, were no-shows. Niki de Saint Phalle, Gérard Deschamps and Christo joined later.  [The declaration is two sentences handwritten on a single page with signatures].

Dissolve (DISSOUDRE ): Undo what’s done without undoing it, like Raymond Hains, Yves Klein and Martial Raysse did for the Nouveaux Réalistes (viz., entry “Commemorate” above), without, however, ending or interfering with any Nouveaux Réalistes group activities.

Shoot (TIRER): Expand the sense/roles of the tools in creation, like Niki de Saint Phalle who organizes  her “Tirs” (“Shootings”), including 12 “Actions-Tirs” at Jeanine de Goldschmidt’s Galérie J. Participants – Public shooting from 5 to 7 pm the time of the action-concept – and de Saint Phalle will create different optics on the actions, which by shooting into plaster where de Saint Phalle has concealed pouches of color or other liquids that then bleed out on the surface. New York Galerist Leo Castelli, painters Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, all known for Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art on the American scene, are present, along with many members of the Nouveau Réaliste group.

Burn (BRÛLER): Expand domains and tools of creation, like Yves Klein’s creation of his “Peintures de feu” (“Fire Paintings”) in collaboration with the Gaz de France test center at La Plaine Saint Denis.

Deconstruct (DÉCONSTRUIRE): Reconsider, recompose, re-discover, like ARMAN whose action-decomposition wrecked [specifically “symbolic”] old furniture or bourgeois musical instruments with a sledgehammer and, used the materials of the wrecked objects to create a new genre of Still Life.

Party/celebrate (FÊTER): Consider art as an active celebration, like the first festival of Nouveau Réalisme, including work by Arman, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely at galerie Muratore in Nice and a series of action-performances at the nearby abbaye de Roseland, owned by Paris gallerist Jean Larcade. [Larcade was also known for his appreciation of “Art Informel” (the WW2-period opening into de-compositional, “gestural” or movement creations, as well as Action-Art, which is also sometimes called “making the movement of paint part of the painting”].

Authenticate/stamp/invalidate (TAMPONNER): Recognize the tools, like Arman’s Cachets, which featured dense, random stamping of a sheet of paper [A cachet is an officializing stamp or notarization. “Obliteré” means to “remove validity”, as with a post mark, which uses a mark to invalidates the stamp to validate its value. Arman is influenced by the work of Dada/Expressionist-inspired Kurt Schwitters, famous for his “Merz” style: valuing/integrating “random” or found creativity].

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List of Artists featured at “Tous Léger! Avec Niki de Saint Phalle, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Keith Haring...”  

Marcel Alocco, 1937, Nice – lives and works in Nice/ Karel Appel, 1921, Amsterdam – 2006, Zurich/ ARMAN (Armand Fernandez), 1928, Nice – 2005, New York/ BEN (Benjamin Vautier), 1935, Naples – 2024, Nice/ César (César Baldaccini), 1921, Marseilles – 1998, Paris/ Christo & Jeanne Claude: Christo Javacheff, 1935, Gabrovo (Bulgaria) – 2020, New York/Jeanne-Claude, 1935, Casablanca – 2009, New York/ Gilbert & George: Gilbert, 1943, San Martino (Italy)/George, 1942, Plymouth (England) – both live and work in London/ Raymond Hains, 1926, Saint-Brieuc (France) - 2005, Paris/ Keith Haring, 1958, Kunztown, PA (USA) – 1990, New York/ Robert Indiana, 1928, New Castle (USA) – 2018, Vinalhaven, ME (USA)/ Alain Jacquet , 1939, Neuilly-sur-Seine (France) – 2008, New York/ Yves Klein, 1928, Nice – 1962, Paris/ Fernand Léger, 1881, Argentan (France) – 1955, Gif-sur-Yvette (France)/ Roy Lichtenstein, 1923, New York – 1997, New York/ Martial Raysse , 1936, Golfe-Juan (France) – lives and works in Issigeac (France)/ Larry Rivers , 1923, New York – 2002, Southampton (USA)/ Niki de Saint Phalle , 1930, Neuilly-sur-Seine (France) – 2002, San Diego/ Daniel Spoerri , 1930, Galati (Kingdom of Romania) – 2024, Vienna/ Jacques Villeglé (Jacques Mahé de La Villeglé), 1926, Quimper (France) – 2022, Paris/ May Wilson, 1905, Baltimore – 1986, New York.

"shoelace" [by Andrei Codrescu]

a real concern may turn out in a dream as “to be continued”
or make you sleep soundly for being common currency
splintering off café tables where free-lance shrinks
keep office spreading patter butter out of which “sex,”
the word, pops up at a higher or lower octave like a pigeon
pretending to ignore the fallen crumb of pizza shining nearby.
so that’s what you sound like, new york, no different than
you always sounded, though more at ease with pop-psych lingo,
and maybe less ability to tie your shoelace or another’s without talk.
In my absence you have acquired a lot of bla-blah underwear.
Newsprint and screens obscure “sex,” the thing not the word,
but what do I know? I can afford to be alone, deliciously alone,
and when I gain the street I am with others tripping over their
shoelaces to get to their café therapists where they can tie their
shoelaces together. Unless they are working for the city
with health benefits uppermost in mind. When these employees
want sex they pay for it. They wear work boots tightly laced.
Dear city, the same always, making twisted nothings and steel towers.
I spent time in america and I can feel your shoelace coming loose

-- Andrei Codrescu

Lehman Gets Good News

July 8, 2025

David Lehman wins the twenty-fifth New Criterion Poetry Prize

by the Editors

Criterion Books will publish Ithaca in the winter of 2026.

The Editors of The New Criterion are pleased to announce that David Lehman is the winner of the twenty-fifth New Criterion Poetry Prize. Mr. Lehman will receive $3,000, and his collection Ithaca will be published by Criterion Books in the winter of 2026.

Established in 2000, the New Criterion Poetry Prize is awarded each year to a book-length manuscript of poems that pay close attention to form. This year’s judges were Editor & Publisher Roger Kimball, Poetry Editor Adam Kirsch, and the poet Peter Filkins. Previous winners of the prize can be found for sale here.

David Lehman is the author of numerous books of poetry, nonfiction, and literary criticism, and the founder and series editor of The Best American Poetry. His recent works include The Morning Line (University of Pittsburgh), New and Selected Poems (Scribner), Yeshiva Boys (Scribner), and The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir (Cornell University). He resides in New York.

The submission window for the twenty-sixth New Criterion Poetry Prize will open in the winter of 2025.

"The Questions of Postmodernism" -- Great Poems of the World, episode 21, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

 

The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Four: Mitch Sisskind [by Angela Ball]

 

Two Poems After Koch

1.

If you want to write a love poem don’t say
Your girlfriend smells like a new car but
Maybe you could say, ‘I love you like I love
‘The smell of a new car that portends many
‘Pleasurable and interesting possibilities
‘Whether it’s a long drive to Arizona or
‘A quick spin to the seashore on a Sunday
‘I will always keep your top down because
‘You are my beautiful convertible, Julia,
‘Built for comfort and built for speed.’
I used the name Julia because Robert Herrick
In the 17th Century was great at this stuff
And he had a poem called ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes.’
Ha! Upon Julia’s Clothes! That’s so terrific!

2.

If I could push a button and write
A new Kenneth Koch poem
I would push a button and write
That I could push a button and
We are hitchhiking again near
Vallauris and the sky is cloudy
But who cares since we’re young
And kind of silly and when rain falls
We keep on skylarking as they said
In the army until we knock it off
As they also said in the army and
We make love and write poems
And if we get old I push the button
Again a hundred thousand times.

                                                      -Mitch Sisskind

I was born and raised in Chicago, then attended Columbia University where I met Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, plus other aspiring writers like myself. Subsequently I had various employments including diamond appraiser, night desk clerk, and high school football coach. I've done two books of short fiction: Visitations (1984) and Dog Man Stories (1993) and have more recently concentrated on poetry in Do Not Be a Gentleman When You Say Goodnight (2016) and Collected Poems 2005 - 2020. I live in Los Angeles with my wife and two daughters. 

The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Four: Mitch Sisskind

Mitch Sisskind’s revelatory “Two Poems After Koch” emphasizes aspects of Kenneth’s poetic character that aren’t often discussed: his unabashed love of immediate gratification combined with a kind of courtliness and a fanatic’s love of repetition. The title of his ground-breaking book on teaching poetry to children, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, is a rather good summation of Koch’s own poetry oeuvre.

The first poem of the two leaps from the gate teaching, with Koch’s own bravura elán: “If you want to write a love poem don’t say / Your girlfriend smells like a new car but. . .”  The suggestion that follows hilariously combines the literal and metaphorical: “I will always keep your top down because / You are my beautiful convertible, Julia, / Built for comfort and built for speed.” These lines both exemplify and spoof a famous male impulse: to treat women as objects, to ‘toy’ with them. They remind us of how Koch, no less than the other three preeminent poets of the New York School, was unabashedly himself. It seems to me that Frank O’Hara, flaneur, was a public poet of impulse; Koch more often privately impulsive. As examples I’ll quote O’Hara’s rallying cry to Lana Turner, “We love you, get up!” and Koch’s more reflective but still urgent, “Did you ever glance into a bottle of sparkling pop?” from his important “Fresh Air.”

Sisskind himself winks at the camera with the following lines:

     I used the name Julia because Robert Herrick

     In the 17th Century was great at this stuff

     And he had a poem called ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes.’

     Ha! Upon Julia’s Clothes! That’s so terrific!

Sisskind’s willingness to express unvarnished enthusiasm in a sophisticated context might be a distinguishing feature of his work. I think his ‘That’s so terrific!” accesses the childlike joy we feel at poetic surprise. It’s even better than a clown popping from a music box at a crank of its handle. And “great at this stuff”  is an expressive and radically simple evocation of poetic mastery.

Maybe above I should have said not “immediate gratification” but “immediate enthusiasm.”

We are given something we didn’t even know we wanted till we did.

Sisskind’s second homage to Kenneth Koch expresses an impulse made famous by behavioral psychology. He wittily turns a desire he has already manifested into an infinite regress:

     If I could push a button and write

     A new Kenneth Koch poem

     I would push a button and write

     That I could push a button and

Then, with a Kochian lack of preamble, he transports us to the romantic Vallauris, one-time Alpine Riviera hang-out of Pablo Picasso, and the kind of youthful devil-may-careness Koch was fond of invoking in poems like “The Circus”:

     But who cares since we’re young

     And kind of silly and when rain falls

     We keep on skylarking as they said

It’s no accident that an early meaning of the word “silly” was “pious” or “holy.” There is something saintly about the openness to experience here expressed.  I’ve always loved the moment in “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” when Auden says to him, “You were silly like us.” Plus “skylarking” slyly alludes to one of Koch’s foundational influences, Percy Bysshe Shelly, author of “To a Skylark.”

     In the army until we knock it off

     As they also said in the army and

     We make love and write poems

      And if we get old I push the button

     Again a hundred thousand times.

“Knock it off,” that blunt, dismissive idiom, contrasts beautifully with “skylarking.” And anything said in the army is going to go right to the point. As does this poem, summing things up for all of us, but Koch and Sisskind in special, “We make love and write poems, / And if we get old I push the button / Again a hundred thousand times.”

I think it’s safe to say that Kenneth Koch is the only person who would title a book One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays. The plays fairly burst from their slim volume. For Koch, repetition did not tarnish but magnified the beauty of experience. Advising graduate teaching assistants during a long-ago visit to the school I teach in, Koch suggested they ask students to re-start their essays, beginning with the last paragraph. The poem’s final gesture takes in both the despair of age and its inexhaustible hopefulness, present for us to enjoy in the poems of Kenneth Koch and in these two immensely celebratory poems by Mitch Sisskind.-Angela Ball

 

"The List of Famous Hats" [by James Tate, 1943 - July 8, 2015]

The List of Famous Hats

Napoleon’s hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous
hat, but that’s not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for
show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all hon-
esty wasn’t much different than the one any jerk might buy at a
corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The
first one isn’t even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing
cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his
childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a
chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up–well,
he didn’t really grow that much, but his head did: He was a pin-
head at birth, and he used, until his death really, the same little
tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it
was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he
needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even
get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn
bathing cap. Scholars like to make a lot out of this, and it would
be easy to do. My theory is simple-minded to be sure: that be-
neath his public head there was another head and it was a pyra-
mid or something.

"Why Go On?": Cezanne, poker, and a new "Next Line, Please" post

Why go on? Haven’t we all asked ourselves this question at one time or another? Perhaps we are suffering from an illness, an infirmity, a condition that will not get better; perhaps a mate has died or left us for another; or it could just be that we are overwhelmed with problems or bored by our jobs, disappointed in our hopes, depressed despite medication.

In John Avildsen’s Save the Tiger (1973), garment manufacturer Harry Stoner (Jack Lemmon) is wealthy enough to live in Beverly Hills, wear an Italian silk suit, send his daughter to a school in Switzerland, drive a Lincoln Continental. But running a business is not easy. There are cash flow problems; employees’ egos clash; clients make unreasonable demands; the Vietnam War rages on in the background, awakening bad memories in Harry, a World War II veteran.

Harry is also haunted by memories of a more innocent time. Cookie Lavagetto of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Helen O’Connell of the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra are two of the names that serve him as metonyms of that vanished past. When, at the end of the movie, he affirms his desire to live “for a season,” is it merely a wish for survival? No. “I want that girl in a Cole Porter song,” he says. “I want to see Lena Horne at the Cotton Club, hear Billie Holiday sing fine and mellow, walk in that kind of rain that never washes perfume away. I want to be in love with something.”

Asked to write poems articulating or enumerating their own “reasons for living,” NLP players came through with a winning array of poems. By June 20, our deadline, we had received 98 comments, some of them responses to or proposed revisions of poems provoked by the prompt. It is a pleasure to welcome one newcomer, Ashton Gildea, whose entry “The Essentials of a Life Worth Living” takes the form of an annotated list, full of surprises:

      – Mosquitoes
and how with every scratch of your pores you engrave and release memories of summer nights among friends and lovers

– Alarm Clocks
and the daily reminder that somewhere you are needed by someone, urgently

– Traffic
and the opportunity, as an adult, to simply sit and sing along to your favorite songs

– Breakups
and the challenge to love yourself in an uncrowded mirror

– Pandemics
and all the time & silence to reintroduce you to yourself, undiluted

– Death
and the tears that cleanse your eyes to see all you’ve had in front of you all this time

“The Essentials of a Life Worth Living” resembles an inspired footnote to the sublime closing paragraph of Emerson’s “Compensation,” in which the essayist asserts that the “death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.”

Meanwhile, inspired by Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry,” Sally Ashton contributed “Life,”:

I, too, dislike it
at times—its rigors
of sorrow and pain
not eased by stiffening
my upper lip or imagining
a worst-case scenario.
Living it, however, with
a perfect contempt for platitudes
and suffering alike, I do find
I prefer it to the extreme
alternative, that which waits
for each of us, not some high-
sounding heaven, more cosmic
reintegration, something
I do not understand nor
admire. But to look at the Moon,
watch day spill over a lake, hold
my grandson’s hand, take a
walk with a friend, look into
my lover’s eyes, these things
are important because they are.
Considering death—a real world
with no me in it—I discover
a genuine interest in life.

The poem quotes the first line of Moore’s poem as well other significant words and phrases: “genuine,” “a perfect contempt,” “things [that] are important.” NLP regulars applauded Sally’s effort. Emily called it a “wonderful poem” but offered a condensed version, shortening Sally’s concluding 15 lines to these nine:

I prefer it to the alternative.
Look at the Moon.
Watch day spill over a lake.
I hold my grandson’s hand,
look into my lover’s eyes.
These things are important
because they are.
Considering death,
I re-discover life.

Favoring understatement and verbal economy, I like Emily’s edits and am curious how others feel. Sally, has Emily cut anything crucial?

Millicent Caliban, who holds NLP’s Walter Pater chair in literary scholarship, derived the impulse behind her poem from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. Here is “The Undiscovered Country Can Wait”:

Why rush? Sooner or later,
The eternal Footman comes.
Meanwhile, enjoy and bless whatever is.
Life may be a cabaret for some.
For others, a magnificent museum.
Don’t like that picture? Move on to the next.
Skip that dreary poem. Turn the page.
One painted a charming image of his bedroom
Or went mad and saw a starry night.
Another looked (thirteen ways) at a blackbird
Or wandered (and wondered) at some daffodils.
Someone else found David in a stone.
Behold their beauty, then find your own.
Taste a liquor never brewed, inebriate yourself.
Though much is taken, much abides.
Tear your pleasures with rough strife.
Do not go gentle. Stay up all night.
Finish the book. See how it ends.

There is a flurry of allusions; the last five lines alone echo Dickinson, Tennyson, Marvell, and Dylan Thomas. Mere show this is not; there is value in poetry that performs acts of criticism and allusion. To my mind the best lines are: “One painted a charming image of his bedroom / or went mad and saw a starry night,” from which Van Gogh emerges at the last moment. Less effective, however, are “Another looked (thirteen ways) at a blackbird / or wandered (and wondered) at some daffodils.” Why? Because the Stevens and Wordsworth poems (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” respectively) are perhaps too often invoked, and the poet’s parentheses belabor the thought.

I admire how Josie Cannella uses the haiku stanza—five syllables in line one, seven in line two, five in line three)—to organize “Nine Reasons to Breathe”:

Wakened by birds, a
sweetness second only to
being kissed awake.

Dogwood offers us
blossoms, like a waiter with
white lace laden plates.

The landing geese break
the river’s mirror, merging
with doppelgängers.

Winter trees, Nature’s
brushes set to dry after
painting the sunset.

Snuggled up for warmth,
not wanting to miss a thing,
lying dogs fight sleep.

Supine child sculpting
snow angels, bundled up, laughs.
Heaven here on Earth.

The plane takes off. We
beat gravity and defy

Mother Earth’s magnet.

Musician plays on
girl-shaped guitar. Our heartstrings
hum in harmony.

Our way enlightened
with pages, blocks, canvases
transformed by artists.

Michelangelo, the sculptor in Millicent’s poem, sees “David in a stone” and creates the beauty that affirms life; in Josie’s poem, the artist is nature, “painting the sunset” or distributing dogwood blossoms “like a waiter.”

Kaleiheana Stormcrow’s poem grabs our attention with its title, “You are mistaken, the gods have not forsaken us.” What follows is thoroughly interesting but cries out for the kind of edits that Emily can provide:

Rain falling from blackened skies
thunder cries, rains moisten soil plagued by dry
flowers bloom despite gloom and doom,
in summer my body ripens with Strawberry moon
Bearing witness to the interplay of darkness and light
moon against the backdrop of night is stark and bright
the sun never fails to set or rise
birdsong breaks silence asunder and fills the skies
morning mists creep skyward from the forest floor
rays of light shine through except where trees obscure
spectrums of color dance in the ocean
I imagine dreams already set in motion
Helios in his chariot sets the sky ablaze
signaling the end of another day

There is much to admire here—“Strawberry moon,” “the sun never fails to set”— and the exuberant rush of words is a pleasure. I can’t help feeling, though, that even an arbitrary method of editing—cut every second line, say, or omit every adjective—would give us a poem that packs a greater punch.  

Angela Ball uses anaphora, repeating “Because” at the start of every line, to unify her “Reasons for Living”:

Because NYC is a large empty space
to write poetry

because alligators stand on their hind legs
under water

because the southern hemisphere gets a full moon
emblazoned with a horse and carriage

because they’re making a movie
of the sky’s dreams
and it’s showing continuously

because this hill is covered in soft grass
and you roll down
in a series of flashes

In “10 Reasons to Keep Warding Off the Worms (a.k.a., Savin’ Ate Nein) with thanks to Michael Sea Rush & nods to Manhattan (1979),” Paul Michelsen demonstrates his inventiveness. His wordplay implies that irreverence itself can serve as both a shield and an unconventional means of exposition:

One: To put off the inevitable, e.g., seeing the look of
disappointment on the face of God.

2: So I can skip right to the end
of all those books I still haven’t read.

III: Still doing re-writes on my book about decaying values
(Working title: Cheating with My Spouse’s Mistress).

Fore: Why let spontaneous indiscretions in the middle of
Bloomingdale’s be a thing of the past?

Cinco: My desire for “second opinions” from other therapists still burns.

Sicks: Free dance lessons.

Savin’: Just a bit more meaningless extravagance.

Ate: And a few more fits of rage, self-righteous misanthropy,
and nihilistic moods of despair.

Nein: So much more trouble to get into, and Trouble is my middle name. (Actually it’s not, but it sounds better than
“So much more Mortimer to get into.”).

X: In order to become the most devastating homunculus I can be.

Being funny is underrated; it is also quite difficult. The first two lines of Paul’s poem are priceless.

I wish I had space enough to present Elizabeth Aquino’s “Reasons for Living,” one of which is Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, and J. Randall Brett’s “Whap!” in which food is the answer,

life’s zuppa fateaglia –
stewed fate and beans,
its mélange of garlic
and curled fingertelli
pasta beckoning,
calling me spoonwards,
scent of fresh basil, all
giving both the fly and me
our reasons to let be.

I hadn’t planned to write a poem to this prompt, but I am reluctant to disappoint Charise Hoge, who encouraged me to write my own “Reasons for Living.” So I have:

Look at the dog asleep on the sofa.
You don’t need a reason.
A grown man will sprain an ankle
playing a boy’s playground game,
yet he plays. He drives to the beach
with a girl he hardly knows, half
his age, and she gets him high,
and he listens to Bunny Berigan’s
theme song, “Can’t Get Started,”
music by Vernon Duke, words
by Ira Gershwin, and what he feels
is nostalgia, not desire but
a postdated lament for its absence,
which like all laments is a secret
renewal of desire, a push against
the unmovable rock of existence.

Here’s a prompt for next time.  Use one of the following three paintings as your point of departure:

• Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players (1890-1892)
• Edward Hopper, Chop Suey (1929)
• Botticelli, Venus and Mars (1485)

Your poem can be a meditation on the painting or its subject matter, or you may introduce the painting and deviate far from it. You could, for example, write about poker, games of chance, Chinese food, prewar small-town America, Venus, Mars, beauty, war. It would be wise to incorporate a rhetorical trick, such as using, in every line, an anagram of a word in a previous line. Or consider writing a poem in which the first and last lines are identical. Limit: 12 lines.

Deadline: two weeks after the post goes up, noon any time zone.

Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

David Lehman, a contributing editor of the Scholar, is a poet, critic, and the general editor of The Best American Poetry annual anthology and author of the book One Hundred Autobiographies. He currently writes our Talking Pictures column.

from The American Scholar, July 7, 2025

https://theamericanscholar.org/why-go-on/

"This Be The Verse" [by Philip Larkin]

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
    They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself

Lynne Dreyer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________

Down monkey. Monkey down

Go girl and get, he ices and is rowdy. The lamp still hangs dirty and massive. Eat this ox, now eat
this meat all in a jovial mess. The bee dovetails its only trail, a trial with the dog it meets. You’d
think they’d see the score implicitly but no per se. Piggy she see, she small. An ABC jumping in
head over the books the connection is made through motion, rhyme, and tongue. In that place
between yours and theirs each letter hangs free in form.

The voice was a structure of the guidelines which were changing in Biggy and memory.
Between memory and the future was desire and before desire was rest. Art is pain and light. It
is distinguished by the portable sky that touches various hues. It is small and within and has
something in it that is almost clear. Art is jealous and human, it asks for hope. The good house,
the writer’s context, the poet’s mind.

________________________________________________________________________________

Lynne Dreyer is the author of The White Museum (Roof Books), Step Work (Tuumba Press), and The Under Arc (Primary Writing Books). Her writing is also Included in various anthologies--- e.g. None of the Above (ed. Michael Lally), Moving Borders (ed. Mary Margaret Sloan), and Leaving Lines of Gender (ed. Ann Vikery). She is forever grateful and lucky to have been surrounded by the Washington DC poets through the years.  [This poem is from The Under Arc, Primary Writing Books, 2025.]

________________________________________________________________________________

Doug Lang, language collage, ca. 1980  [courtesy of Diane Ward]. Pictured in the piece are unknown, Doug Lang, P. Inman, and Michael Sappol.

"Dancer and Dance" [by Jim Cummins]

Dancer and Dance

When he was young, he thought his narcissism
was anguish; but it was just narcissism.
Everyone’s in some kind of anguish or other—
or do the Protestants merely suffer?
Protestants buy things; it helps the pain.
Catholics buy things, too, but it doesn’t help—

Protestants don’t get how things “accrue.”
They gain their purchase on the earth
by purchasing it. No vestments, incense,
mumbling over wafers, in the economical church—
no folderol, no magic tricks, no ghosts.
And certainly no “Stations of the Cross,”

reminding you every Sunday of anguish
you couldn’t conceive of. Not to mention
the shit you had to go through to be a saint—
a woman carrying her eyeballs on a plate?
Most of all, that body on the cross,
writhing in agony if you looked more closely.

Back then, when they crucified you,
they drove the nails into your wrists &amp; ankles—
otherwise, your flesh ripped away
&amp; the heap of you ended up on the ground.
They wanted you to die, but in agony,
on rough wood, not on a breast of dirt.

Of course, if they wanted you to die faster,
they broke your legs at the knee—that way,
you’d be lucky if you lasted half an hour.
But suffering is different from anguish—
anyone familiar with both knows that.
Suffering touches the body, but anguish

torches the soul. When they crucified Peter,
they turned the old man upside-down.
They said they wanted him to reconsider;
but really, they just wanted to kill somebody
that morning. A bright cheerful morning,
the pictures say, if you didn’t mind seeing

a gray-haired man, somebody’s dad or grandpa,
getting nailed upside-down to some wood.
I suppose, at the end, the old fisherman
got what he desired. You could even say
he saw it coming, spreading his arms out wide,
knowing he was the one that got away.

from Everday Knowledge by James Cummins (Dos Madres, 2025)

Malcolm Bradbury on Paul de Man and "Signs of the Times"

The New York Times Book Review 
February 24, 1991

The Scholar Who Misread History

By MALCOLM BRADBURY [pictured left]

SIGNS OF THE TIMES Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. By David Lehman.

ate in 1987 an extraordinary literary, intellectual and political scandal broke in a place we would least expect it: among the solemn deconstructionists of the humanities faculty at Yale University, the Sorbonne of Connecticut. One of the leading deconstructionists, the former Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Paul de Man, who died four years before, proved to have pulled the curtain on a dark stage in his wartime history. As a young man in his native Belgium, influenced by a powerful uncle who became a leading supporter of the Nazis, de Man had contributed some 170 articles to collaborationist newspapers. Though largely literary, they celebrated the historical justice and destiny of Nazism and, to put it at its least, colluded with its anti-Semitic philosophies.

David Lehman, a poet, critic and journalist who covered the story for Newsweek, gives a valuably detailed if sometimes highly polemical account of the ensuing crisis. (Though a little too inclined to parody deconstruction, the author succeeds in clarifying its doctrines and making them accessible.) "Signs of the Times" looks at the amazing success of deconstruction as a semipopular modern philosophy before looking at de Man's "fall" and its implications. At several key moments when modern history has turned -- Western Europe in 1945, Eastern Europe now -- we have seen how moral crisis comes to those who have served a cause that history has, fortunately for humanity, repudiated. Often this develops into what Mr. Lehman calls "Waldheimer's Disease," the amnesia of those who must defy or erase the record.

Such was the case with Martin Heidegger, and so it was with [Paul] de Man [pictured elft]. He obscured his wartime past, Mr. Lehman writes, even a wartime marriage and family. In 1948 he came to the United States, fresh-born as Gatsby, and after various jobs was discovered as a scholar and made a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. He became a distinguished teacher at Cornell, Johns Hopkins and the University of Zurich. When in 1970, in a great seasonal migration of academic birds, the new deconstructionists took wing and settled in the elms of New Haven, he joined Yale, to become what a standard textbook describes as "the most powerful and profound mind in the group of critics who, inspired in part by the work of Jacques Derrida, made Yale a center of deconstruction in the 1970's."

As the author of "Blindness and Insight" (1971) and "Allegories of Reading" (1979), de Man was a leading literary philosopher and an austere and rigorous scholar, much admired, then and still, by academic peers. He was a demanding teacher who rejected all classroom show biz; he was also benign, courteous and considerate. His death was widely mourned by those who knew him and those who valued his work. Above all, he stood for a new age of literary theory. In his most famous essay, "The Resistance to Theory," he argued that the age of esthetic and ethical criticism was over and that new rhetorical criticism gave the basis for a universal theory. Even this was said with an appropriate measure of irony; he was always judicious and temperate. In a time his own theory defined as the Age of the Death of the Author, de Man was an authority.

Deconstruction, crudely, is a paradox about a paradox: it assumes that all discourse, even all historical narrative, is essentially rhetoric. Rhetoric slips and is "undecidable," has no fixed meaning; so when we read, we inevitably misread. It came out of Paris and, for all its claim to universality, has an evident history. It was born in the aftermath of existentialist anxieties about presence and absence, the there and the not-there. It developed via structuralism and its emphasis on linguistics and semiotics. From these sources it derived its fundamental premise: the endless slippage of the referent, the unfixity of our attempt to name existence. It grew from two major collapses in late 20th-century European thought: the metaphysical decline of humanism and the dialectical decline of Marxism.

For all that, it found its own best home in the United States, that late-modern postculture of multiplied signs and random meanings. ("America is deconstruction," said the leading proponent, Jacques Derrida [pictured left]. It later fell to him to bring back to the American academic community the record of the master's youthful writings, unearthed by an admiring de Manian in Brussels.) But in the 60's and 70's, deconstruction filled -- perhaps better, emptied -- the gap left in the American humanities by the demise of the Old New Criticism. What began as a brilliant and creative performance philosophy soon became classroom pedagogy.

Throughout the 70's the seminar rooms on American campuses -- and then campuses worldwide -- became workshops in deconstructionist practice. Junior misreaders worked away, becoming ever more like C.I.A. operatives, decoding false signals sent by a distant enemy, the writer. Deconstruction lifted itself with ever higher pretensions. As Jonathan Culler of Cornell exulted, "The history of literature is part of the history of criticism." Deconstruction transformed everything into a text ready to be studied (deconstructed, if you will), as Mr. Lehman notes, and so easily made affinities with radical feminism and latter-day Marxism, two other philosophies that also seek to challenge the sanctity of text. According to de Man himself, it showed itself capable of being a supra-ideological mode of analysis, exposing the ideological aberration of others while seemingly possessing none itself.

If deconstruction encountered resistance, that was often seen as censorious ignorance. Gangs of neo-deconstructionists would now come to town with their critical services and descend on the library. One would demythologize, another decanonize, another dephallicize, another dehegemonize, another de-fame. Literature, the deconstructionists frequently proved, had been written by entirely the wrong people for entirely the wrong reasons. Soon all that would be left would be a few bare bones of undecidable discourse and some tattered leather bindings. This would be called a conference of the Modern Language Association.

De Man himself remained temperate and stayed apart from some of the more extreme phenomena (with which Mr. Lehman has some justified fun). De Man did believe in good reading, and he did not constitute all of deconstruction. Likewise, all deconstruction was not de Man, and when he fell from grace not everything fell with him. Even so, the most interesting part of Mr. Lehman's book is his record of what followed the dismaying discoveries. In all fairness, these were made by deconstructionists themselves, though they squirmed in the telling. For, from a variety of reasons -- collegial friendship, liberal respect for a fine mind, the need to sustain the critical enterprise, but perhaps above all dependence on the intellectual mind-set formed by deconstruction itself -- many of them set to work to reconstruct Paul de Man.

The ironies grew clear. The discourse so often used to decanonize and de-fame other writers was put to work to canonize and re-fame the master of deconstruction. More significantly, the vacancies of his theory -- it is avowedly not esthetic, moral or ethical, and submits creation to the eternal condition of pure discourse -- became a way to pronounce de Man's early writings undecidable, slipping away from their apparent meaning and their crucial historical location. Since a text has no existential author, no absolute historical occasion, the 170 articles [de Man wrote for Nazi-controlled newspapres in wartime Belgium] could become texts in the construction of the discourse called Paul de Man.

No one should cheer the fall of de Man. The harshest irony is that his mature criticism was distinguished and deepened the power to read. What these events showed was that "resistance to theory" -- and, always the ironic Belgian, de Man reminded us that even theorists possess it -- had its point. This resistance, which grew among many critics and writers, could be a necessary revolt against an ever more confident form of literary theory that emptied away far more than a transcendent signified. As writers of fiction know, the point about writing is that it is existentially real, an active mode of discovery through the modalities of the imagination, a reaching toward a supreme fiction. It is not a subordinate category of criticism.

When writers are censored, imprisoned, killed or threatened with death for their writings, this is not because they are the disciples of undecidability. Writing is an act of expressed moral responsibility. If we are to take authors and their fate seriously, criticism must offer a portrait of creativity and of authorship as existential self-declaration. We need to honor fiction as more than a rhetorical practice, in fact as a mode of radical discovery. We need an ambiance around writing that collaborates with its nature as imaginative exploration, as idea, as dream, and that in the longer view considers creativity a prime power in the making of intelligence, feeling and moral existence.

This was the position from which Jean-Paul Sartre started the postwar debate, of which deconstruction is a latter-day development. He started it because during the 1930's the word had been defamed and defigured, the book burned, the writer erased, by forces that lay outside criticism, in history. The tragic paradox exemplified by de Man links us again to that crisis -- just at the time when, as much of the guiding ideology of the 20th century wanes or collapses, we must advance the task of creative discovery on our way to an opening, uncertain future. In the sad drama of a man who in youth misread not text but history, the cumulative moral, political and linguistic crises of our agonizing century are returned to us. This is surely the contemporary meaning of the story of Paul de Man; it calls neither for the simple exultation some might take from Mr. Lehman's book nor for the arcane circularity of Mr. Derrida's recent defenses. You might say it calls for reconstruction -- or the Birth of the Author.

"Malcolm Bradbury is a novelist, critic and professor of American studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.Bradbury was knighted in the year 2000." His novels include The History Man. Below, the cover of the New York Times Book Review (May 1992)  with David Lehman's afterword for the paperback edition of Signs.

"Ariodante": a cinematic live performance experience from Frédéric Savoir [By Tracy Danison]

The cast of Les Arts Florissants from “Ariodante”, the film by Frédéric Savoir. Photo © Amazing Digital Studios

In what is, as far as I am concerned, a first, the filmmaker Frédéric Savoir has managed to capture an opera performance on camera and transmit the experience to a film audience. It’s a big claim, but Savoir’s treatment of the celebrated baroque orchestra Les Arts Florissants’ performance of Handel’s opera Ariodante made me feel as close as I could get to the live performance without actually being on stage and in the way.

I’m not talking about a simulation of “the live performance experience”, but of a cinematic one. 

In my experience until now, the usual film of opera (or live dance or theater/music performance) uses cameras as dramatizing telescopes, going up close or distant as they dolly along the front of the stage to keep up with the passage of time (or the libretto or stage directions or choreography) as, for instance, in among the many others, Il Complesso Barocco’s 2023 presentation of Ariodante.

 

Lea Desandre, soprano, from “Ariodante” by Frédéric Savoir. Photo © Amazing Digital Studios

Savoir’s cameras are "mirrors" – full-front, partial, around-corners and over-and under-walls. The mirror-cameras “point-of-view” the scene, responding “naturally” to their experience of movement and sound in the performance as whole. The achievement is the sense of a live performance filming a live performance. Part of my emotional response to the film may be because the camera work provokes mirroring, pretty rare for me for film.

Finally, although continuous filming of a single live performance, no edits, is not exclusive to Savoir’s film, I felt it as especially dynamic in his film.

 

Ana Maria Labin, soprano, from “Ariodante” by Frédéric Savoir. Photo © Amazing Digital Studios

Les Arts Florissants bills itself as a troupe dedicated to “revealing, discovering and reviving the Baroque spirit” and is not, strictly speaking, an opera troupe such as, say, Opéra de Paris or even a dedicated period orchestra such as Il Complesso Barocco, cited above (See the accompanying note - Baroque) Savoir’s achievement depends a lot on Les Arts Florissants’s broader or “holistic” approach to classic opera.

Because of how it sees its mission, Les Arts Florissants does not, even when it could, and as most others do, focus on singing and (when they can afford it) spectacle. Instead, its singers (and/or dancers), musicians and conductor are performers doing a performance together in single visual and sound space – almost, but not quite, theater.

 

Hugh Cutting, countertenor, from “Ariodante” by Frédéric Savoir. Photo © Amazing Digital Studios

I used sometimes to go to undress rehearsals at the opera that I found refreshing and powerful in a way a formal performance just can’t be. The Baroque troupe’s (live) performance has a similar effect on me. In undress, musicians, cast and staff focus on the getting the thing right – the thing being the sense and beauty of an artefact from another space-time and right being each individual performer’s singular and general contribution to that sense and beauty.

Dedicating to the Baroque spirit in the way of Les Arts Florissants turns out in practice to be pretty much the same as reaching for the thing. And the troupe ordinarily manages pretty much to get the thing right once they’ve grasped it. Since they do, Savoir’s mirror-cameras have a performance-oriented opera, something other than specialized singing and/or spectacle, to capture and transmit.

 

Ana Vieira Leite, soprano, from “Ariodante” by Frédéric Savoir. Photo © Amazing Digital Studios

I said above that Savoir’s continuous filming strikes me as more dynamic than with other films. Part of the source for the feeling, I think, is that, in the same way as Les Arts Florissants’ performance orientation lends itself to Savoir’s camera, Savoir’s choice in sound reproduction lends itself to capturing the dynamism of live performance. I’m not talking about stereo or noise reduction or what not.

As I was experiencing the film, I was sent back to another moment of awakening sensibility in my past, which perhaps explains another part of the strong emotion the film raised in me.  I first heard a band called The Moody Blues in a car equipped with an 8-track tape player. And O! The Moody Blues’ white satin nights! They blended. They swirled. As if the band was in the front seat.

 

Renato Dolcini, bass baritone, from “Ariodante” by Frédéric Savoir. Photo © Amazing Digital Studios

When, next day, I bought the tape cassette and played it, however, I heard a melody, a rhythm trying to dance, not blending and swirling figures and phrases, band members jostling to harmonize in the front seat. I suddenly realized that recorded music is reproduced music, in the same way that photographs are mechanical pictures. Reproduction melodizes more often than it expands harmony.

Savoir’s sound reproduction goes with harmonizing, gets in the front seat with jostling musicians, so to say. By its underlying harmony the music lends itself to the dynamism built into the accrued movement involved in Les Arts Florissants' performance.

I hope Frédéric Savoir makes more live performance films like Ariodante. If he does, he’ll become a genre.

_____

I saw “Ariodante”, a film by Frédéric Savoir of Amazing Digital Studios, based on the continuous filming of a single representation of Georg Handel’s 1735 opera Ariodante in a private screening on 27 July 2025, featuring the orchestra of the Les Arts Florissants, conducted by William Christie, and mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre, Ariodante, a worthy heir; sopranos Ana Maria Labin and Ana Vieira Leite, respectively, Ginevra, Princess of Scotland, and Princess companion; countertenor Hugh Cutting, Polinesso, Duke of Albany; bass baritone Renato Dolcini, King of Scotland; and tenors Krešimir Špicer and Moritz Kallenberg, respectively, Lurcanio, Ariodante’s brother, and Odoardo, the King of Scotland’s companion. "Ariodante" the film debuted in at the Grand Rex Theater in Paris on 30 July 2025. For more information contact: [email protected]

A Toast to Lionel Trilling on his Birthday (July 4, 1905)

Arnold, Goethe, and Homer

 

You ask what I like

about Trilling’s writing

and I pull out the Viking Portable Arnold

and turn to page twenty-five

of his introduction:

“He [Arnold] could join Goethe

in agreeing with Homer

that our life is a kind of Hell,

yet with Goethe he believed

that it must be lived

with as much pleasure as may

be dragged from it.”

It’s even better in prose.

DL

7 / 4 / 21

Yankee Doodle, do or die!

Happy birthday to us from Jasper Johns 

Les Arts Florissants: dealing with the artefact in opera as performance

Ariodante, Léa Desandre, mezzo-soprano, with Les Arts Florissants’ founder and conductor William Christie. Photo ©Amazing Digital Studios.

Frédéric Savoir’s cinematic Ariodante, performed by the baroque performance group Les Arts Florissants – along with recent events –  remind me that sublime and ridiculous are very close in life and in art and never closer than in classic opera.

Getting opera right as artefact, as an old work of art, getting a balance of the sublime among the (now-strange truth) and the ridiculous isn’t enough talked about, at least not in a way that satisfies me. But Les Arts Florissants, founded by William Christie back in 1979, has been talking about it by trying to get it right for better than 40 years.

For instance, the troupe recently put Amala Dianor, one of today’s strongest beyond hip hop choreographers (“Dub”: Amala Dianor’s sparkling and energetic hip hop fusion ballet consecrated in Paris) to write dance for Gesualdo Passione [of Christ]. Carlo Gesualdo, an Italian nobleman, wrote sacred music, was ahead of his time in his use of chromatic language, is part of Les Arts Florissants Baroque project. The combination a cappella Krump seems more spot welded than quantum entangled but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a brilliant idea – there is a point of convergence hip hop/Baroque/Passion someplace.

 

Ginevra, Ana Maria Labin, soprano, with her husband-to-be, Ariodante. Photo © Amazing Digital Studios.

Les Arts Florissants’ approach to Handel’s Ariodante is part of what I see as a general mission to develop the feeling and esthetic – a sensibility – of what the troupe’s founder(s) see(s) as a civilizational phenomenon: Baroque sensibility: Baroque space time, Baroque nature. Baroque civilization could castrate a slave boy in order to obtain a widely appreciated highly-specialized form of voice and sincerely invoke and imbibe God’s sublime presence in the world while doing it.

Embracing a sensibility allows Les Arts Florissants to generate for Ariodante what I think of as an and-and opera experience: ridiculous and sublime: laughing and crying, giggling and sniveling, crying while laughing and laughing while crying.

Duke of Albany, Polinesso, Hugh Cutting, facing off with Ariodante. Photo © Amazing Digital Studios

An audience can enjoy mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre’s fine work, including her fine singing, and the material fact of her as a bitty slip of a woman with stick-out ears who obviously savors the complexity of doing a (presumably) Scots prince called not “Malcom” or “Macduff”  or even “Ainsley”, but “Ariodante”, otherwise a castrato voice. Desandre is performing – not just singing.

Performing is continuous respect for the artefact: the narrative, sense, sound, movement, and both the archaic and current audiences.

That’s why, in Les Arts Florissants’ Ariodante, the obvious vocal gifts of the 40-something LUCKY BRIDE Ginevra, and her attendant, Dalinda, and wonder why Dalinda is so MADLY HOT for the Duke of Albany,  Polinesso, that she’s ready to dress up like the LUCKY BRIDE for the chance to BANG the Duke of Albany. Clichés, memes, boilerplate thrills for people who still have no car chases and explosives?

 

King of Scotland, Renato Dolcini, bass baritone, with Ginevra, exercising kingship, but tenderly. Photo © Amazing Digital Studios

The Duke’s AMBITION IS ALL, but he sings a mean countertenor and has cooked up just the most hare-brained scheme of SHOCKING BETRAYAL that, presumably, pushes every possible emotional button before twisting into a most UNEXPECTED happy end. Are characters types - still? Is this scheme really hare-brained or is it projection – or do I just not perceive the hare-brained nature of contemporary schemes of SHOCKING BETRAYAL?

And. Not before a little contemplation of the practice of the theory of kingship with the King of Scotland, a VERY MODEL OF A KING and a bass baritone. And a LOYAL BROTHER Lurcanio, a formidable tenor, for whom HONOR IS ALL and who is a knowing CUCKOLD and, and. And. It occurs to me that all this imbroglio may indicate that, notwithstanding the Duke’s scheming, Ariodante’s suicide and a king’s power, anyway it’s all in God’s hands.

A lot of people have trouble believing that the United States has been BETRAYED into the hands of Christian reactionaries who SPURN modernity and want a HOLY Alliance with more GODLY powers in order to TURN BACK the evils of HUMANISM. Such skeptics would be less sceptical if they watched more opera.