The Best American Poetry

Willis Reed, Legendary Center of the World Champion N. Y. Knicks, RIP [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Basketball great Willis Reed spoke about his literacy project. David was eager to get his predictions for the upcoming Knicks season.

In 2003, then chairman of the NEA Dana Gioia, invited David to join him in Washington for the annual Washington Book Festival, hosted by Laura Bush. It was a great event. Dana had even arranged for David's mom Anne to come along and for all of us to join him at the White House for the breakfast ceremony preceding the Festival. 

Just as the guests were taking their seats for Bush's opening remarks, David saw former Knicks great Willis Reed enter the room. He was impossible to miss, of course; at 6'10" he towered over just about everyone in the room, with the exception of former Detroit Pistons center Bob Lanier (6'11"), also in attendance. 

Reed was on hand to talk about his literacy project. 

I watched David from across the room (he was seated among the day's speakers; I was elsewhere, with Anne). He lit up when Reed took the podium. When the proceedings adjourned and guests made their way to the exits, David practically lept over seats with the finesse of a point-guard making a layup shot with two seconds on the clock. I've seen him focus on an objective, but this was masterly. 

He reached Reed and I snapped the photo, above. 

As it so happened, my office in New York City was at One Penn Plaza, across the street from Madison Square Garden. On a whim, I phoned the Knick's publicity department with the request that Reed sign the photo, which he graciously agreed to do. I've given David many gifts over the years, but I think this signed photo of the basketball great ranks among his favorites.

-- sdl

The moment no Knicks fan will ever forget: when Willis Reed hobbled onto the court in the deciding game of the 1970 championship series with the LA Lakers. When Reed came out, the crowd roared. Reed, injured, played well. The great unselfish Knicks of Reed and Walt Frazier, Dave DeBuschere, Bill Bradley, and Dick Barnett, coached by Red Holtzman, won the game, the series, and the hearts of New Yorkers.

-- DL

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: March 22, 2023

Did you ever wonder who your favorite poet would be if she weren’t a poet? A rock star maybe? Here’s Anne Waldman (part Debra Harry and part Madonna) in a music video from 1982!  I first heard about this on my favorite podcast Breaking Form (hosted by James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith) and now I’m hooked. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHX-PU9SN8A

And who can resist Anne Sexton performing (in the 1960s) the song "Woman with Girdle" with her band Her Kind? If only there were music videos back then!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O33wdQnN7Y

And here, Anne says in this wild impromptu video: Better than a poem! Music beats us!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqes93PxO7g&t=73s

"It Might As Well Be Spring" [with Dick Haymes in 1972]

 

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Six): Dorothea Lasky [by Angela Ball]

 

The Ballet

The dancers
In a terribly bright
Light blue gauze
Retained the mystery

Skating on a lake
Blue and ice
An illusionary time
Where poetry feels inevitable

The terrific clown
Who lies inside
Every blue dress
Does he see me

Always a star
Always a root
Horrible auras
At the door

But no matter where we start
It all ends in an ocean
Hard and fast
On the approaching blue dawn

Until then
A deep low whisper
What is language anyway
An ending that never happens

-Dorothea Lasky

"The Ballet" was originally published in American Poetry Review in 2021. It is from a book called The Green Lake, which is forthcoming from Wave Books. The book is in conversation with the horrors of our time, particularly in regards to climate change and its effects. -Dorothea Lasky

Dorothea Lasky is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including Animal (Wave Books). Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry in the MFA program at Columbia University School of the Arts, where she directs the Poetry program.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Six): Dorothea Lasky

In her luminous “The Ballet,” Dorothea Lasky both caresses the idealization art brings and exposes its divided nature. Her address to ballet reminds us of Emily Dickinson’s address to God as “burglar, banker, father.” We are also perhaps reminded of Frank O’Hara’s love of ballet as embodied by his lover, dancer and dance-historian Vincent Warren; and of O’Hara’s frequent comic alternation between idealism and realism (“we love you get up”).

The poem’s short, heavily stressed lines carry candor close to the unspeakable. In the first stanza, “terribly bright” is a first suggestion of a deformed reality that jealously retains “the mystery.”

The second stanza, moving from a specific past to a sweeping present, works a little like an old toy in which figures are slotted into a base, below which the player’s hand moves them unseen, so that that they glide from one position to the next, “Skating on a lake / Blue and ice.” By now, it’s clear that this is a poetry of constraint, of frightening concentration, of the breaking of the “illusionary time / Where poetry feels inevitable.”

“The terrific clown / Who lives inside/ Every blue dress / Does it see me? brings a coterie of associations. The circle of blue gauze  (the poem’s central color)  hides the dancer’s sex, with its horrific mysogenized lips, so like a clown’s—like Lon Chaney’s rictus in the silent film, Laugh Clown Laugh, in which Chaney’s character is terrorized by desire for his innocent, beautiful ward (Loretta Young, in her first film role).

We may think of the custom, in the 19^th-century foyer de la danse of the Paris Opera Ballet, of devoting the hours from five to seven to assignations between impoverished dancers and the aristocratic “patrons” who make of them divided creatures, ethereal and hungry, gliding and grasping.

This is a world tied to two horses who gallop in diametrical directions:

 

     Always a star

     Always a root

     Horrible auras

     At the door

 

The ocean’s blue is “hard and fast”—impersonal, impregnable, riding the “blue dawn”: a destiny, the sadness and travail of age.

The poem’s absorbing fatality, accomplished in “a deep low whisper,” is altered at its close, denying closure: "What is language anyway? / An ending that never happens."

In these lines, the feigned offhandedness of “anyway” carries an excruciating Dickinsonian “zero at the bone.” Dorothea Lasky’s sui generis “The Ballet,” a masterpiece of mixed feelings, sears and purifies with honesty and the unreasonable comfort of an apt surprise.

-Angela Ball

Steve Reich: The Cave [by Lewis Saul]

REICH, Steve (1936-       )

The Cave (1993)
The Steve Reich Ensemble
Paul Hillier, cond.
(1:43:29)

The Cave is a multimedia opera in three acts with a libretto by Reich's wife, Beryl Korot.

The Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron

This is a sacred place where Muslims, Jews and Christians pray. The music and libretto is derived from, and includes spoken responses from Israeli, Palestinian and American interviewees who were asked questions about the story of Abraham. The sound track also includes readings from the religious texts that detail the story of Abraham, and a recording of the ambient sound that is found in the ancient building that surrounds the sacred site.

Why everything is going to be OK. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I’m supposed to be cleaning!  I was given a specific task: straighten up the kid’s bookshelves for Jessie’s birthday party this weekend.  But then my husband, who suggested this task, took the kids and went to Goodwill to get rid of some of the heaps of stuff of which we’re getting rid, leaving me alone to sneak like a thief back to my computer to write you guys a quick post.

I figure as long as I finish by the time he’s back, I’m good.  So.  What I want to tell you is pretty important.  I spent the weekend in Omaha and now have another Homaha in these United States.  What great people I met.  Ridiculously cool people.  Ridunkulous.  And they gave me roast beast, and took me to hear Yo Yo Ma, and made jokes about Exit 420.   If you don’t get it, don’t pay it no mind, but if you do get it, you get that it is good to know.  I gave 6 talks in four days!  One to a synagogue full of clergy, mostly Catholic priests, collared and mostly grey-haired.  Some rabbis, some ministers, some visitors, a lovely woman who said she’d driven six hours to see me.

I told them that I’d come to tell them about Poetic Atheism.  There is no God, but as Durkheim said a hundred years ago, what we thought was God, was the community.  What we feel when we are gathered together, that there is something larger than us, that feeling is true.  It’s us. 

We can add to it that what we thought of as faith is love.  We have to try to believe in each other, in our mutual misery and compassion.  

The solace we have to offer one another is sufficient to our wounds.

Our feelings of meaning are sufficient to the definition of meaning.

There is no hidden world of meaning.  The feelings of meaning are the meaning.  It’s all true.

Human beings need community, meditation, and ritual.  We need to come together and pray that we will do the right thing, that we will help each other, and that we are capable of helping one another.  It’s a long shot, but it’s better than trying to believe in some third party and hoping that he will do the right thing. 

Am I telling you that all this time you’ve been alone in the dark?  Yes.  Come sit with us.  We're right here.  Turn on the light.

We must look after one another.  There is no heaven.  We are all going to die, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe two years from now, maybe forty years from now, maybe sixty.  It doesn’t matter all that much.  There is an eternity on either side, an eternity, so who cares?  Life is not theater, you can’t miss the end.  You are here.  It’s wonderful.  We made it into existence together. 

We have to start coming together and singing, celebrating.  Health Care, people!  Gorgeous African-American president and presidential family!  Now is the time to lift our voices up.  We are all there is.  We don’t have it for very long.  We have it right now.  America is a lot of things.  I know.  Tea party.  I know.  Beck, and not the good kind.  But it’s okay.

We are here together.  We can keep each other company.  We can see that if this is the world, if our consciousness is what we have of consciousness, than what we feel and what we make is very important indeed.  You’re sacred because you are, and it’s my job to support your awareness of the true and glorious reality that is.  It’s your job to support this awareness in the rest of us.  We are getting better at this.  We are going to get even better.  That's why everything is going to be okay.

Excellent work staying alive since last week, most of you.  Let’s try to do even better next week.

By the way, on my way home from the airport we got stopped on the Brooklyn Bridge and there we stayed for two and a half hours, my whole little family and me, from around 12:30 am to 3 am, when they finally backed us off the bridge.  Meanwhile we got out of our cars.  We heard someone had jumped and saw boats and helicopters shining lights.  Then we heard there was a woman who had climbed up into the bridge girders and was going to jump.  John encouraged me to walk down to where it was all happening; given what I’d been writing about lately, I should just go down and see.  So I did, there was a woman up there, a cop up there near her, I saw him hand her a cigarette, I saw him light it for her, I saw her talking to him, I saw her move her long, brown hair behind her ear. 

Like I said, she hadn’t come down when we left, they’d turned us around to get out, but I felt sure she’d come down, she was talking calmly for hours, there were tons of people everywhere.  We googled it when we got home but saw nothing of it.  Then yesterday saw a report.  She’d jumped.  After we were home in bed.  She’s in critical condition.  A 41-year-old woman from Long Island.  Like so many of us, or thereabouts.  So forgive me, bleaders, for repeating myself.   Stay, everybody.  No more going off the deep end.  Stay.  Let’s all give up together, right here, right now, and have chocolate cake.  But don’t give any to the dog, because chocolate isn’t good for dogs.

I love you like crazy,

 Jennifer

from the archive; first posted March 24, 2010

Joanna Fuhrman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________

The Poetry Reading

 

The mustached cowboy-hatted thrice-divorced

old-man poet famous for sleeping with flaxen-haired

(or was it flax-seed eating) quote-unquote

nubile graduate students is at the podium

reading his poem personifying a wedding dress—

how sad it is, all alone in a dusty closet, how

it longs to be laid on a funeral pyre or set ablaze

next to the replica of Plath and Hughes’ robin’s-

egg-blue Terra Cruiser gas range, or was it     

the neglected moonlit member of the old man

poet “breaking into blossom” or recoiling

from the memory of time passing faster than

the dust can settle on his brand-new Honda

Civic LX or ranch-style remodeled sunroom?

The audience is trying to remember what

ingredients they need to pick up for tomorrow’s

paella, what that email said about the time

of that meeting with Suzanne about assessment.

They are alternately trying to remember

if they remembered to order that Minecraft book

for a nephew’s 8^th birthday party and worrying

if their Facebook-level “friends” notice that

their purple cat socks clash with their scuffed

burgundy clogs, and at a certain point, the poem

has gone on for so long no one can tell if

the old-man poet is still personifying that

wedding dress or if a headless wedding dress

has taken his place at the podium. We look up

from the cell phones we are hiding in our laps,

and there it stands—smoky and lacy

in front of the glowing microphone

in the corner of the basement bookstore,

104 miles from the nearest artist colony,

the flaming dress is burning like a 12-hour

candle, or like the lost poetry of an elderly

Rimbaud written on the slats of sunken ships,

and the dress itself has grown a mouth

and in the middle of its flames its lips

belt out a new poem, about fake

cowboy poets, how sad they are, how alone.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Joanna Fuhrman is an assistant teaching professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and the author of six books of poetry, most recently To a New Era. Her next book, Data Mind, a collection of surreal, darkly comic prose poems about the internet, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. After publishing with them since she was a teen, she recently became editor at Hanging Loose Press.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                          Lorette C. Luzajic, The Blood Jet Is Poetry---Sylvia Plath, acrylic, collage on canvas, 2022

"Saturday" [by Mark Ford]

After bursting through the allusion-barrier so dramatically, as related on Thursday [Oct. 16, 2008], there has been no stopping me, and I would like to conclude my very enjoyable stint as your guest-blogger with a poem in a genre my young self would have despised, ie. the poem about another poet –- which, come to think of it, was exactly what the poem imagining Whitman’s youthful conquests in my last post, was too. Oh well…. This one is about Hart Crane, and is in prose – to be precise it’s in the form of a letter addressed to the editor of a literary journal. The rest, I hope, explains itself. Thanks for having me, and for the many entertaining responses I’ve received; it’s been a ball…. I should perhaps say in preface to this piece that Crane was christened Harold, but shortly after deciding to become a poet adopted his mother’s maiden name of Hart.

The Death of Hart Crane

Sir / Madam,
I was intrigued by the letter from a reader in your last issue that recounted his meeting, in a bar in Greenwich Village in the mid-sixties, a woman who claimed to have been a passenger on the Orizaba on the voyage the boat made from Vera Cruz to New York in April of 1932, a voyage that the poet Hart Crane never completed. According to her Crane was murdered and thrown overboard by sailors after a night of such rough sex that they became afraid (surely wrongly) that he might have them arrested when the boat docked in Manhattan. This reminded me of a night in the early seventies on which I too happened to be drinking in a bar in Greenwich Village. I got talking to an elderly man called Harold occupying an adjacent booth, and when the conversation touched on poetry he explained, somewhat shyly, that he had himself published two collections a long time ago, one called White Buildings in 1926, and the other, The Bridge, in 1930. I asked if he’d written much since. ‘Oh plenty,’ he replied, ‘and a lot of it much better than my early effusions.’ I expressed an interest in seeing this work, and he invited me back to his apartment on MacDougal Street. Here the evening turns somewhat hazy. I could hear the galloping strains of Ravel’s Boléro turned up loud as Harold fumbled for his keys. Clearly some sort of party was in progress. At that moment the door was opened from within by another man in his seventies, who exclaimed happily, ‘Hart! – and friend! Come in!’ The room was full of men in their seventies, all, or so it seemed, called either Hart or Harold. The apartment’s walls were covered with Aztec artefacts, and its floors with Mexican carpets. It dawned on me then that Hart Crane had not only somehow survived his supposed death by water, but that his vision of an America of the likeminded was being fulfilled that very night, as it was perhaps every night, in this apartment on Macdougal Street. At the same instant I realized that it was I, an absurd doubting Thomas brought face to face with a miracle, who deserved to be devoured by sharks.
Yours faithfully,
Name and address withheld.

(Mark Ford)

from the archive; first posted October 18, 2008

Yehuda Amichai, From an interview with Lawrence Joseph (1992) and a Poem ("Memorial Day for the War Dead")

Lawrence Joseph interviewed the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai for The Paris Review, Spring 1992. Amichai was born in Germany in 1924. With his family he fled from Hitler  in 1936, emigrating to Palestine with his orthodox Jewish family. He fought form the British in World War II, for the Haganah uderground in 1948, and for the Iarseli army in 1956 and 1973.

"I really have the feeling that I am the result and very contents of the twentieth century," he tells Larry Joseph.

<<< 

I was [raaised a Zionist], but my family’s Zionism wasn’t ideological in any intellectual sense. It was the Zionism of religious orthodoxy, a practical Zionism—going to Palestine. For my parents, going to Palestine was typically romantic, motivated in part by their sense of Orthodoxy and in part by the longing to be in their own country. I had cousins who may have seen Zionism in utopian socialist terms, though my parents did not. There was, of course, zealous anti-Semitism before Hitler, which also had something to do with my family’s going to Palestine. Some people think that anti-Semitism didn’t really exist in Germany until 1933. I certainly don’t want to take anything away from Hitler’s guilt, but the anti-Semitism I grew up with predated Hitler. We were called names. We had stones thrown at us. And, yes, this created real sorrow. We defended ourselves as well as we could. Funny thing, the common name we were called was Isaac—the way Muslims are called Ali or Mohammed. They’d call out, Isaac, go back to Palestine, leave our home, go to your place. They threw stones at us and shouted, Go to Palestine. Then in Palestine we were told to leave Palestine—history juxtaposed can be very ironic. But I do remember in 1933 when the Nazis came into power the anti-Semitism had been religiously based. Then it became political and economic. Before that the two hadn’t merged—there was a kind of horrible limbo—but you could feel what was happening. I remember my parents telling me to keep away from the military parades, not to become mesmerized by the music and marching. I was also told—Würzburg was a very Catholic town—to keep away from the Catholic processions on certain feast days. All Saints’ Day, I remember in particular. The processions were very somber, very German in a way, with students, priests and nuns carrying banners and holy icons and figures. Once—I was nine or ten—I was watching a Catholic procession because I liked its colorfulness and pageantry. Since I was Orthodox I was wearing a yarmulke. Suddenly, someone hit me in the face and shouted, 'You dirty little Jew, take your skullcap off!' >>>

Memorial Day for the War Dead

Yehuda Amichai  (1924-2000)

Memorial day for the war dead.  Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you.  Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.

Memorial day.  Bitter salt is dressed up
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.

The flautist's mouth will stay like that for many days.
A dead soldier swims above little heads
with the swimming movements of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.

A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

A great and royal animal is dying
all through the night under the jasmine
tree with a constant stare at the world.

A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”

From Amen by Yehuda Amichai, published by Harper & Row. Copyright © 1977 Yehuda Amichai.

Crocus & Daffodil welcome you to Clare College

What you see when you approach the gate at Clare College, Cambridge, in March:

The vew of the bridge and the old court in the near green future:

"The Other Sestina" [by Janice Erlbaum]

Janice Erlbaum participated in the group reading we did for "The Best American Erotic Poems" at KGB Bar on March 10. 2008. She read her sestina ("The Temp") from the book, but time constraints stopped her from reading a second sestina, which she has posted on her own blog and which you will find below, along with a few prefatory sentences from Ms. Erlbaum.
-- DL

The "Other" Sestina by Janice Erlbaum

Janice Erlbaum at KGB Bar March 10, 2008

Because I am fanatical about not running over my alloted time at readings, especially when there are nine other people on the bill, I didn't read this other sestina, which I'm dying to read in public, especially after it was rejected by McSweeney's for being, and I quote, "too much." I present it to you now, for your consideration for the Best American Completely Unerotic; In Fact, Makes You Never Want to Have Sex Again anthology:

How do married people masturbate?

How do married people masturbate?
What do they picture when they come?
They think of the guy at the office, the girl
In the video, her asshole stretched, wincing;
Ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, the ones they still hate.
There’s nothing safe to think about, they fall asleep.

This is how you prepare to go to sleep,
How you wake up, how you run home and masturbate.
Everybody does it! Why can't you? You hate
Me for wanting to fuck when you just want to come –
I turn to stroke you, you turn away, wincing.
I don't care if you think about another girl.

I would want to fuck her too, that girl,
Anybody but me, laying next to you asleep,
A big fat fucking obstacle to your wincing
Nightly ritual: Pop in a tape and masturbate,
Watch that girl get drilled. Two minutes to come.
You mop up, drift off. You burned off some hate.

Not me. I walk around with mine. I hate
What I saw on that tape. I thought, poor girl,
She's in pain and she has to pretend to come.
I lay next to you that night, unable to sleep,
Therefore you were unable to masturbate.
The clock shined mean and bright in the dark. We winced.

Some nights I straddle a pillow, wincing,
Squeezing at thoughts I don't want to think, I hate
The way you come to me when I masturbate.
Face down on my belly, I look like that girl.
I writhe a while. I give up. I go to sleep.
I don't come. It's okay. I don't need to come.

I don't care what you think about when you come,
As long as it's me you're fucking, wincing,
Waiting for you to get off and slump, fall asleep.
You are faithful. I have no right to hate
You, hate myself, hate the hundreds of girls
With their assholes stretched, so you can masturbate.

I know who you are when you masturbate. I come
Into the room, kiss your forehead, your lover girl. Why are you wincing?
Your toes curl in silence. I hate you. I love you too. Let's go to sleep.

--- Janice Erlbaum

from the archive; first posted  March 20, 2008.

Happy Birthday Ern Malley! [With an introduction by Thomas Moody taken from David Lehman]

Yesterday marked the 105th birthday of Ern Malley, who remains one of Australia’s most internationally renowned poets and our greatest ever literary hoax. After I disclosed that I'm Australian in our first ever email exchange, David immediately wanted to know where I stood on the whole Malley affair. While the hoax overall has legions of fans, many people feel that the poems themselves cannot possibly possess any quality due to the nature of their genesis. In his review of The Complete Poems of Ern Malley published in Jacket in 2002, David offers a comprehensive introduction to Ern’s formative years and a lucid and insightful commentary on his poetry, arguing that Ern’s oeuvre has merit beyond the hoax, no matter the dubious motivations behind the poems’ creation. You can read David’s review here. Happy birthday Ern!

The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax by David Lehman

"THE greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943. The uniformed noncombatants, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart, were a pair of Sydney poets with a shared animus toward modern poetry in general and a particular hatred of the surrealist stuff championed by Adelaide wunderkind Max Harris, the twenty-two-year-old editor of Angry Penguins, a well-heeled journal devoted to the spread of modernism down under.

In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised (‘not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others’), they rapidly wrote the sixteen poems that constitute Ern Malley’s ‘tragic lifework.’ They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.

Later, the hoaxers added a high-sounding ‘preface and statement,’ outfitted Malley with a tearjerking biography, and created his suburban sister Ethel. The invention of Ethel was a masterstroke. It was she who sent Malley’s posthumous opus, ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, to Max Harris along with a cover letter tinged with her disapproval of her brother’s bohemian ways and proclaiming her own ignorance of poetry."

 

 

Petit Testament

In the twenty-fifth year of my age
I find myself to be a dromedary
That has run short of water between
One oasis and the next mirage
And having despaired of ever
Making my obsessions intelligible
I am content at last to be
The sole clerk of my metamorphoses.
Begin here:

In the year 1943
I resigned to the living all collateral images
Reserving to myself a man’s
Inalienable right to be sad
At his own funeral.
(Here the peacock blinks the eyes
of his multipennate tail.)
In the same year
I said to my love (who is living)
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian Tree
Not having learnt in our green age to forget
The sins that flow between the hands and feet
(Here the Tree weeps gum tears
Which are also real: I tell you
These things are real)
So I forced a parting
Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness.

Where I have lived
The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach
Inhabits the crack and the careful spider
Spins his aphorisms in the comer.
I have heard them shout in the streets
The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich
And in the magazines I have read
The Popular Front-to-Back.
But where I have lived
Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray
Guernica is the ticking of the clock
The nightmare has become real, not as belief
But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo.

It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.
Set this down too:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence
Traces the inevitable graph
And in conclusion:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.
I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: March 15, 2023

I’ve never read anything quite like the poems in Michael Chang’s Synthetic Jungle which is published today by Curbstone books. I’ve never read anything quite like their poems and that is a good thing indeed. Chang is making space for high art (Heidegger)and low art (Shawn Mendes) and poets (CA Conrad and Wayne Koestenbaum) and by the time I finished this book I was dizzy with excitement. Reading Synthetic Jungle is like riding a roller coaster of associations, my equilibrium off in the best possible way. Congratulations, Michael!

You can check out their poem “Zum Zum” here:

https://www.barzakhmag.net/winter-2022-poetry-1/2022/1/15/michael-chang-5aam8-t8bw4

I Love Me, Vol. I [by Lewis Saul]

I LOVE ME, VOL. I

 

Pull up.
Was it a hat I saw?
No, it is open on one position.

 

Are we not drawn onwards, we Jews, drawn onward to new era?
Do not refer to Nod ...

Lew, Otto has a hot towel.
Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic.

Pittsburgh's a bash! (Grub St. tip)

Della called.
No trace -- not one carton.

Tenet

Tenet A is an (Ah, tuez!) euthanasia tenet.
Tenet B is a (Ha! Ha!) sib tenet.
Tenet C is a basis, a basic tenet.
Tenet D is a Hasid tenet.
Tenet E is an Asie tenet.
Tenet F is Asa's "As If" Tenet.
Tenet G is Rip's Pirsig tenet.

Le falafel
Red? No wonder!

Some men interpret nine memos.
Degas aged.
Known wonk.
Epode dope.

YAY!
AZ Zip Pizza!
Party boobytrap!

So, Ed, I vow to do two videos.
No home demo, Hon.

Day came -- not one Macy ad.

My gym taxes sex at my gym.
Too hot to hoot ...

DEIFIED!

 

[from I LOVE ME, VOL. I by S. Wordrow's Palindrome Encyclopedia]

Columbia To Host Richard Howard Tribute March 31st

<<< Columbia University will be holding a memorial for Richard Howard, the greatly beloved poet, teacher, editor, and mentor, and  on March 31, 2023, at Miller Theatre.  For those of you not familiar with the campus, the entrance to the auditorium is to the left of the gate to the university on Broadway at 116th St in New York City.  Colleagues and former students will read from Richard's writings.  The event starts at 7 pm, with a reception afterwards in Pulitzer Hall across College Walk from Dodge Hall.  I hope you can come.

David Alexander >>>

 

Note: Miller Theatre is asking that people who want to attend make a reservation.  Here is the official announcement with a link for reserving:

 

https://www.millertheatre.com/events/a-tribute-to-richard-howard

 

Richard picked the poems for The Best American Poetry1995.

 

It was wonderful to work with him.  -- DL

The Year Kay Ryan Went to AWP (To Cover It): 4 Excerpts

A few excerpts from Kay Ryan's "I Go To AWP" (written for Poetry, in 2005, the year AWP was in Vancouver)

<<<

 Simone Weil would have starved herself to death before she would have gone to AWP.

Another Fear

I have a weak character. I am very susceptible to other people’s enthusiasms, at times actually courting them. I like to sit among people who feel strongly about a basketball team, say, and get excited with them. I love to love ouzo with ouzo lovers. These are, of course, innocent examples. But this weakness concerns me in going to AWP. If I’m exposed to the enthusiasms of others, I know that I am capable of betraying my deepest convictions, laughing in the face of a lifetime of hostility to instruction, horror at groupthink. The only way I’ve ever gotten along in this world is by staying away from it; I have had only enough character to keep myself out of situations that require character. Now here I am, going to AWP. How am I going to remember: these people are THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL? They will seem like individuals, not deadly white threads of the great creative writing fungus.

Back to the Panel

The ways the panel members say they stay creative are not what I would have said in their place, which is that I had abandoned the teaching of creative writing and run as though my clothes were on fire. Rather, one says she teaches but she also does her own writing projects at the same time, currently putting together an anthology of stories by sex workers. This is a person of an industriousness, social res-ponsibility, and generosity beyond my imagining. A number of panel members, with members of the audience nodding in agreement, say that they are actually nourished by student work, and stimulated to do their own work. I am speechless. My sense of this panel, mostly made up of women and attended by women for what reason I can’t say, is that these are sincere, helpful, useful people who show their students their own gifts and help them to enjoy the riches of language while also trying to get some writing done themselves. They have to juggle these competing demands upon their souls and it is hard and honorable. I agree and shoot me now.

Lunch Break

I met up with Dorianne Laux at the sonnet panel. In spite of my abstract contempt for everyone in attendance here, I am on the functional level delighted as well as grateful to see this person whom I know and like, a warm human being, a strong poet, and the head of a writing program in Oregon. This is all so distressing. I knew it would be. We find Dorianne’s husband, world’s-nicest-poet Joe Millar, and collect Major Jackson, a young poet making a name for himself, teaching in a writing program, and not incidentally an old student of Dorianne’s, and we all go for lunch at a little place around the corner from the Fairmont. I am so happy to be tucked into this booth with these down-to-earth, generous people whose lives are writing, as mine is. Why have I kept myself from this camaraderie? There’s lots of relaxed book chat. Major talks about not yet feeling he has an arc for his new book. (What is an arc? Dorianne explains that this is a term current in creative writing circles and refers to a shape the whole book of poems should ideally have, like a narrative arc, as I understand it, and forgive me if I have this wrong.) Already it is coming to me why I don’t have more of this camaraderie; just the thought of vogue shapes for poetry books oppresses like cathedral tunes. Dorianne seems to be able to coexist with stuff like this, letting it wash over her. The more I think about it, the more oppressed I feel—so many of us writing books of poetry, with or without arc. How in the world can I feel really, really special? No, I think poets should take the lesson of the great aromatic eucalyptus tree and poison the soil beneath us.

Transgressive and Post-Confessional Narrative in Contemporary American Poetry 12:00-1:15 PM, Friday.

Such a lot to think about, just in the panel’s title!

The word transgressive is thick upon the ground here at AWP. I could also have attended panels titled, “Transgression and Conven-tion: Writing the Erotic Poem” and “Impure Poetry: The Poetics of the Transgressive, Taboo, and Impolite.” It’s funny how writers will all want to jump on the same bed till the springs pop out. Then they go jump on another one. Transgressive apparently now means sex. Didn’t there used to be other transgressions? Will there be others again? How about, transgression against obsessive self-regard? That would be a good one: “Hello. I’m Jen and I keep having impersonal thoughts.”

Then post-confessional. What could this mean? Is post confession what comes after confession? Perhaps contrition? Or Hail Marys? Or dedication to good works? Or does post-confessional mean Confessional like Sexton or Lowell, but ironic and self-conscious now—saying, I am confessing, I see myself confessing, but I know no one can really confess?

In the event, transgressive and post-confessional narrative turned out to mean loosely-plotted tales of sex and attitude, read really fast and/or at high volume, which left me feeling amused and pleasantly avuncular, grateful to not be listening to a mumble panel.

Wait; I can’t feel avuncular. I’m a genetic woman. But I do. Am I starting to have transgressive issues?

>>>

Originally Published: October 30th, 2005

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/68318/i-go-to-awp

Lawrence Raab: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________

Original Sin

 

That was one idea my mother

always disliked. She preferred her god

to be reasonable, like Emerson or Thoreau

without their stranger moments.

Even the Old Testament God’s sudden

angers and twisted ways of getting

what he wanted she could accept

as metaphor. But original sin

was different. Plus no one agreed

if it was personal, meaning

all Adam’s fault, or else some kind

of temporary absence of the holy,

which was Adam’s fault as well.

In any case, it made no sense

that we’d need to be saved before

we’d even had the chance

to be wrong. Yes, eventually everyone

falls into error, but when my sister and I

were babies she could see we were perfect,

as we opened our eyes and gazed up at her

with what she took for granted as love,

long before either of us knew the word

and what damage it could cause.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lawrence Raab is the author of ten books of poems, including Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and named one of the Ten Best Poetry Books of 2015 by The New York Times, and What We Don’t Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993), a winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award. His latest collection is April at the Ruins (Tupelo, 2022). [“Original Sin” appears in Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts].

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

           Lucas Cranach the Elder, Detail of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, 1530, Oil on Panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

                                                                

Squibs 486-487: Charles Simic [by Alan Ziegler]

486: Charles Simic Was Generous to Children
On Memorial Day 1979, my ten-year-old nephew, Craig Luchen, was kicking around a soccer ball in his backyard during a family gathering. Craig was ahead of the curve in his soccer devotion (long before "soccer moms"), and had yet to meld with the piano, so we didn't have a whole lot to talk about. A sudden chill caused someone to say Brrrr," and I blurted out "All at once the whole tree is trembling / And there is no sign of the wind." Craig paused mid-dribble and pronounced, "Charles Simic!" then resumed his pursuit of an imaginary net. He later explained that a poet had visited his school. Now we had something to talk about. For a school assignment to illustrate a poem, Craig picked Simic's "Watermelons."

I particularly liked the tongue. I had a color photocopy made (big deal then) and mailed it to Simic (no email then). A week later, I received this post card:

I was especially touched by "My kids loved it too and were sort of proud of their Pop" (Simic did indeed respond to my book in detail.) This was the postcard Craig received:

Decades later, Craig remembers the "loon-music." And I remember that Craig was sort of proud of his Uncle.

Uncle and Nephew

487: Charles Simic Drives a Soft Bargain

In 1995, a few Columbia undergraduates wanted to invite Charles Simic to campus, particularly to talk about prose poems (for which he had won the Pulitzer Prize a few years earlier, engendering squawks from lineophiles). We had a minuscule budget. I suggested they write to him anyway and point out that we do not have access to Columbia's endowment. Simic said yes, on two conditions: We pay for his bus fare from New Hampshire, and we buy him a hamburger at the West End. We did not make a counteroffer.

Simic was warm, friendly and funny. When the students asked him about the prose poem backlash, he said, "My experience is that no matter what you do, someone is going to say something stupid about it. No matter what. There are many literary people out there who don't believe in the existence of prose poems....[My book] was the final nail in poetry’s coffin. American Civilization is doomed when shit like this wins prizes, they said. I must admit I loved it. It's always a pleasure when you can upset defenders of some imaginary virtue."

There was one more negotiation before we relocated to the West End. The students wanted to take some pictures with him, and he agreed on the condition they take one with students stepping on him. They obliged. When I reminded him twenty years later, he replied, "That’s very funny. I remember it now."

Slow down, and put on your "Panama Hat": Major Jackson's Pick for March 10

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

After I finished my MFA at University of Oregon, I packed up my worldly possessions (some clothes, a lotta books) in my beat-up minivan and was off to New Orleans. A week prior I was called with an offer to teach at Xavier University, an HBCU there. The job didn’t pay much, but I could mostly make rent. I was teaching five courses of composition writing each semester to remedial students. In my idealism, I was doing more than passing along the mechanics of writing. By teaching my students to express their realities and opinions, I was teaching a pathway for them to control their future.

The job didn’t leave room for much else. I thought about the students’ papers in the morning over bowls of oatmeal, and while brushing my teeth at night. And yet, when anyone asked what I did for work, I never mentioned the job that paid the bills. I pretentiously announced that I was a poet, often to quizzical looks.

Even though I desired to be seen as an artist, truth be told, I wasn’t writing. I hadn’t published a book yet; I just had a few poems in journals. I was posing. I told myself the intensity of grading crushed my creativity. When I showed up to write a poem at my local coffee shop with its rows of tables and green lamps, I sipped my latte, fiddled, and looked around at all the Tulane law students studiously buried in their law books.

Then, one of those students walked by and noticed a volume of poems by June Jordan. She stopped abruptly and said, “I love her! You must be a poet.” and I said, “Yes, well, indeed I am.” and she said, “What kind of poetry do you write?” And it was like my brain slammed into a wall of air. Nothing. I had become that disconnected from my writing life.

The next morning, at a crossroads, I woke up early and began to write down, with as much detail as possible, the previous day’s activities, a log of living. I abandoned the notion of poetic language, profound metaphors, and philosophical musing. I simply let myself go into myself, deeper and deeper. That process helped me find the real writer. Maybe he was somewhere in those depths, but maybe he was in the routine itself.

Today’s instructive poem realizes that sometimes, simply saying what happened with accuracy is the poem, naming in such a way that we become enchanting to ourselves.

---

Panama Hat
by David Lehman

“What kind of poems do you write?”
the interviewer asked and I said occasional poems
each day is an occasion take today

The sun shone on my face
shielded by a Panama hat
made in Ecuador

and the fate of a leaf in a hurricane
was the day’s best simile for financial markets
where the value of green keeps going up.

The trees and the grass are vying
in the green competition
because “good is as visible as green”

and the lawns are emerald
like the eyes of my beloved
when she saw the ring with two hearts

and an emerald crescent
in the jeweler’s case.
The food tasted good

and simple: beans and rice, chicken,
coconut sorbet, white cherries, lemonade,
and Matthew’s concoction with Cynar and jalapeno-infused gin.

The ice cubes in the glass
sounded like nothing 
but themselves.

The sky was blue
The shirt fit
I washed the car.

The newspaper reported
that Cambridge is catching up to Oxford
in real-estate prices

and my thousand words on “To His Coy Mistress”
were nicely illustrated
as I sat and sipped in the sun.

And then I read the new bio of Duke Ellington
and Helen Forrest’s own story
and tilted my hat as I walked

celebrating the day the occasion for
taking a walk enjoying the light
and my new Panama Hat.

           7/11/14

“Panama Hat” by David Lehman from THE MORNING LINE © 2021 David Lehman. Used by permission of The University of Pittsburgh Press.

https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2023/03/10/831-panama-hat

Mary Jo Salter on W. H. Auden (& more) in the new "Literary Matters"

Mary Jo Salter on W. H. Auden in Literary Matters

What is the secret meaning of the last line of "Epitaph on a Tyrant": 
"And when he cried, the little children died in the street"?

To what extent does "New Year Letter" owe its greatness to Auden's mastery of the tetrameter line?

"Poetry might be defined as". . .
complete the sentence with a six-word formulation derived from Auiden.

David Lehman thinks "Caliban to the Audience" is Auden's greatest prose poem. What would Mary Jo Salter say?

To get the answers to these and other fascinating questions related to the great W. H. Auden read Mary Jo Salter's essay in the new issue of Literary Matters, edited by Ryan Wilson. Salter reviewed the two new volumes of Auden's collected poetry edited by Edward Mendelson, with elaborate annonations, published in 202 by Princeton UP.

An excerpt:

<<<
One could spend years tracing such unwitting rehearsals and deliberate rethinkings. In Another Time’s “XXIX. Song,” whose manuscript Mendelson dates from September 1939, Auden writes “Silence invades the breathing wood” although he has already written, in January of that year, the famous line of the Yeats elegy, “Silence invaded the suburbs.” Maybe he didn’t remember. I prefer the line from the Yeats elegy, not because of the difference between a wood and a suburb, but because the past tense, “invaded,” makes you wonder what comes after the silence. In “X. Brussels in Winter,” I prefer the arresting 1966 revision “And fifty franks will earn a stranger right / To take the shuddering city in his arms” to the milder 1938 original, “And fifty franks will earn the stranger right / To warm the heartless city in his arms.” In “Music is International” (1947), Auden writes that “we may some day need very much to / Remember when we were happy,” which is fine, but it’s not as delightful as the ending to “Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno” (1958) : “…though one cannot always /  Remember exactly why one has been happy, / There is no forgetting that one was.” Auden was often wrong-headed to ditch his earlier poems, but it’s a pleasure to see him, late in his career, writing better versions of similar material, either in revised poems or wholly new ones. He also recasts ideas from prose into poetry, or the reverse. Among many examples, in “Vespers” (1954) from Horae Canonicae, he writes, “In my Eden our only source of political news is gossip”; in a section of his essay “Reading,” he lists the attributes of his “personal Eden”, and one of them is “Sources of Public Information: Gossip.”

And there’s yet another pleasure in store for the reader who plans to peruse these two volumes—as I do—for the rest of life itself, studying just a few pages in detail at a time.  You can never overestimate Auden’s technical ingenuity. [Edward] Mendelson alerts us to some of the most winning bits: for instance, a note says that Auden told Malcolm Cowley that the eleven-syllable line used in both “Miranda” (in “The Sea and the Mirror”) and “Lullaby” (in “For the Time Being”) “comes from Ireland—there has to be a caesura after the fifth syllable.” In another note, we learn that Auden proposes (insanely?) to Theodore Spencer, whose writing course at Harvard he will be visiting, “What about making your class write a drapa?” If you don’t know, and I didn’t, this is a Medieval Icelandic form, a death-lament or dirge, with a very long list of undergraduate-unfriendly requirements like this: “the odd lines contain an internal assonance, the second of which falls on the penultimate syllable.” 
>>>

And there many other great things in the issue.

https://www.literarymatters.org/15-2-our-auden/