The Best American Poetry

Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette. . .

The Last Cigarette — Cinema’s most seductive prop — By David Lehman

Every cigarette is the last cigarette.

In the black-and-white world of noir, cigarettes are everywhere. But then, they are ubiquitous in all movies, as in life, in the first half of the 20th century. Among great smokers I think of FDR with his holder tilted rakishly upward, as if to reinforce his smile, and Ike, who smoked four packs of unfiltered smokes a day before and after D-Day in 1944. Gregory Peck smokes fiercely as he types up his exposé of anti-Semitism in Gentleman’s Agreement, as if to say that smoking is an aspect of the writer’s job, a sine qua non, and that an ashtray full of butts is evidence that a writer has done his work. When New York replaced Paris as the world’s art capital, the art critics fell into two rival camps: Pall Malls for Harold Rosenberg, Camels for Clement Greenberg. Audrey Hepburn smokes stylishly in Charade. Marlene Dietrich smoked brilliantly, sometimes with a cigarette holder and furs. Bette Davis is in the smoker’s hall of fame, and not solely because of the end of Now, Voyager, when Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes, one for her and one for him, sealing their intimacy, and Bette has her famous line about settling for the stars if you can’t have the moon.

She’s got a cigarette between her fingers in All About Eve when she says “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Chesterfield ads of the 1940s and ’50s featured Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, and Rita Hayworth. Camels were advocated by Teresa Wright, Alan Ladd, John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, and a neon sign in Times Square that blew out smoke.

Some of the great jingles of the 1960s advertised mediocre cigarettes. Winston “tastes good like [sic] a cigarette should” (which gets spoofed by the scary Chinese villain of the original Manchurian Candidate), L & M has got the filter that unlocks the flavor. You can take Salem out of the country, but. To a smoker, it’s a Kent. The most famous of all Marlboro commercials used Elmer Bernstein’s music from The Magnificent Seven, and Yul Brynner, who played the leader of the pack, was a dedicated smoker (and made a public service announcement after he learned he didn’t have long to live). Nat King Cole credited the quality of his singing voice to cigarettes. Leonard Bernstein couldn’t live without them.

Addictive? A hardened criminal would rat on his best friend for a cigarette, even a bad one (Lark, Parliament, Viceroy) if he needed it. Reason not the need. Hell, the guy in solitary would smoke the butts off the floor if he needed a smoke.]. Read the opening chapter of Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno. It is titled “The Last Cigarette” and narrates the hero’s efforts to give up cigarettes and the lengths the addict will go to satisfy his or her craving. In Dead Again (1991), Kenneth Branagh’s ode to the noirs of the 1940s, the intrepid reporter played by Andy Garcia smokes and smokes, and when we see him as an old man, decades in the future, he has a tracheotomy tube in his neck. What does he ask for—what does he crave—in return for sharing information with the detective played by Branagh? A cigarette.

There is the cigarette of combat: According to Roger Ebert, Out of the Past (1947) is “the greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time.” Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas wage war by cigarette proxy. “The trick, as demonstrated by [director] Jacques Tourneur and his cameraman, Nicholas Musuraca,” Ebert writes, “is to throw a lot of light into the empty space where the characters are going to exhale. When they do, they produce great white clouds of smoke, which express their moods, their personalities, and their energy levels. There were guns in Out of the Past, but the real hostility came when Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoked at each other.”

https://americandigest.org/long-read-of-the-day-the-last-cigarette-by-david-lehman/

Mystery in familiarity: Marion Zurbach’s “Les Héritiers-x” happens [By Tracy Danison]

A couple of months ago, a neighbor over the street with whom Karine, my partner, has only ever had a nodding acquaintance, decided to move to Berlin, to be with her younger son. The neighbor, a 60-something mother also of two other grown children, a pretty fair hobby painter and who speaks only French remarks, “Why not? I’ve never been to Berlin”.

Emptying her apartment, the neighbor put at least the last 30 years of her many self-portraits, as well as portraits of friends and family, in the street for trash pickup. Coming back from a movie, Karine saw the portraits, and brought them all into her house. She has festooned the living room and mezzanine with them.

Now, I often find myself contemplating these portraits. There seems such mysterious familiarity in people! Whether they are familiar because over the years of being in the neighborhood I’ve actually seen or experienced these particular faces and their attitudes, or because the different seemings depicted in the portraits hold a mirror to my own seemings, or because there are only really such a small number of human types in the world that everybody and their portraits everywhere eventually become familiar, I just don’t know.   

All this come to mind because Marion Zurbach’s Les Héritiers-x (“The Inheritors-x”), which I saw the other day as part of the selection of the Festival Artdanthé 2025, deals in mysterious familiarities, too. Only not in human interactions, seemings or types, but the mysteriousness of human movement.

 

“Les Héritiers-x” by Marion Zurbach in collaboration with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

Zurbach’s piece is based on Orchésographie, said to be the first known manual of dance and the first instance of choreographic notation, too. Orchésographie has a priest teaching a lawyer pretty much all the types of dance step current in the 16^th Century. The symbolic relationship of priest and lawyer is “Auctoritas docet legem”: God informs the laws that govern people. The different dance steps represent the different human characteristics. So, at the Renaissance, at least, dance is a general declaration on the mechanics of life: Authority informs the law which interprets it into the different choreographies that create the dance of life here-below.

Something like that.

Except under Marion Zurbach’s auctoritas and the fine interpretation herself and her collaborator-performers Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton, Orchésographie’s rather recondite premise becomes a lively improvisation of a continuous flow of dance – a happening – that seems to have more to do with the relation of movement to environment to light to space to sound to symbolism and what we believe and suppose.

Here’s how i Les Héritiers-x rolled out for me, which, since happening comes on and carries a body along so early on, is not necessarily how it rolled out for anybody else, choreographer included. It seems to me that discrete things happen through little cues: add a bit of sound or attitude or both or a prop, or a light, or a gesture or, since Zurbach doesn’t use her inputs to imperialize, there’s room for the spectator to share the piece’s sensibilities.

 

“Les Héritiers-x” by Marion Zurbach in collaboration with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

At the back of the stage, by a woman in the front row calling moves and marking time, two performers, both imaginatively, but not outlandishly, dressed in gaudy corselets and short pants, are brought forward. They move by numbers, OK – But numbers of what nature? Are they really under instruction from that woman? Is the simpering and flustering part of it? Is this a game or a reconstitution or some sort of effort to get at an essence by a performing ménage à trois?  – with – what I suppose are proper facial attitudes – handholding and steps – I believe – are prescribed – by the manual Orchésographie. And then after what comes before, there’s jigs and part-singing and all sorts of prancing that I can’t recall because I kept putting my pencil down to watch.

Don't get the idea that my stream of broken consciousness hints at confusion in the performance. Not at all. It just un-stuck or de-stuck me in time: it’s hard to express a rational break up of narrative linearity into a happening or a form of the process of perception. Les Héritiers-x rather declares that past and present are of a piece.

The long and short of it is that Les Héritiers-x is both a Marion Zurbach-inspired early 21^st century love and dance show and an honest reconstitution of a (pretty-much imagined) Renaissance when Auctoritas et Legem freely cooed and simpered. Zurbach, with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton, create a happening that both carries me and enables me to carry forward and backward, around and through, the “inheritance” of Orchésographie.

Les Héritiers-x is satisfyingly dizzying dance, capital D.

_______

I saw “Les Héritiers-x” by Marion Zurbach performed by and in collaboration with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton as part of Festival Arthdanthé at Théâtre de Vanves on 7 March 2025, with sound composition by Stélios Lazarou, dance coaching, singing and musical arrangement by Madeleine Saur, writing assistance by Arthur Eskenazi and costumes by Silvia Romanelli.  

Kenneth Koch at 100: A Celebration [by Mindy Aloff]

Left to Right: Kenneth Koch, David Lehman, John Ashbery (photo © Stacey Lehman)

On St. Patrick’s Day, The New School and Library of America put on “Kenneth Koch at 100: A Celebration.” The program featured thirteen speakers, all but one of whom knew Koch—that playful and continuously surprising leprechaun of American poetry—rather well. Our fearless leader at this website, David Lehman, wasn’t able to be there; however, he was remembered in the welcoming remarks.

I never met KK, but I’d loved the poems of his I’d begun to read in the 1970s and remain enthralled by his two books on teaching children to write poetry, books that encouraged the founding of Poets in the Schools programs around the world. Like Arlene Croce (who quoted the following opening lines in one of her New Yorker columns) I also loved his poem to the New York City Ballet:

“Oh dancers of New York, arranged by Balanchine,

You are more beautiful than groves of evergreen!

You have aesthetic distance, like the blue-white sea

Outside the porthole--Agon or Symphony in C!”

In the event, I went to The New School to learn something about the poet, and I did learn about him from two sources: the speakers and the anthology of photos of him, which played continuously on a screen above the stage.

From the speakers:

-- He was as adept at improvisation as in formal writing, and his oeuvre includes many plays—embodying his high concept of “play” as a major principle of artmaking. Furthermore, as in his lamentation to Marina, he could be playfully sorrowful. He was funny (Tony Towle), but his idea of play went beyond the comic. It was a philosophical idea of how the universe worked.

-- "He was high avant-garde, yeah. It was unchecked modernism.” (Alex Katz, appearing by way of a video statement)

-- He was an avid tennis and ping-pong player. His papers are in the Berg Collection of The New York Public Library. (Jordan Davis)

-- Whatever the “New York School” of poetry was—spiritual institution grounded in Greenwich Village or a roving band of bards associated with The New School and Columbia plus a few smaller storefronts and bars--KK belonged to it. Some of his fellow travellers were Ron Padgett, Jane Freilicher, David Shapiro, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, Jim Dine (“We had the same rabbi, same temple, same summer camp”), Jim Jarmusch,  and, of course, Frank O’Hara. (Passim)

-- KK once, at a party, had a “pissing contest” with Leonard Bernstein about Shakespeare. (Jim Dine) He was “the Pied Piper of joy and pleasure, sensuality and fresh air,” and, during the ‘50s, he spent five days a week in psychoanalysis, which may or may not have have helped him to pipe it all. He was also a “charismatic teacher,” which is why Phillip Lopate refused to take KK’s popular courses at Columbia while, on his own, accruing neuroscientific detail concerning KK’s thoughts and motivations in the writing of prose fiction. (Phillip Lopate)

-- The legendary performer; editor of The Paris Review; agent; bittersweet muse to other legends; red-headed goddess of New York lit who still looks like a million; Maplewood, New Jersey native; and the only woman on the KK Celebration line-up, Maxine Groffsky, intersected with KK throughout many of her careers, including as a “real client” whom she represented--“15 %”—and whom she immortalized as the inventor of “Dog Baseball.” (Maxine Groffsky)

From the photos:

Has anyone ever taken so many pictures, in so many decades of life, that show the subject broadly smiling as KK took? He’s smiling next to John Ashbery and with Allen Ginsberg (who once declared that, next to KK’s fandom, he—the Bard of the Beats—had fallen into obscurity). He’s smiling while shaking the hand of the mayor: Koch on Koch. He’s grinning while being escorted (under arrest?) by an armed guard down stairs that look like some at Columbia. Yet one portrait photo, by Wren de Antonio (daughter of the documentarian Emile de Antonio and the third of his six wives), offered a unique glimpse of personal depth. From his Bob Dylan-hair style and leather jacket, it seems to have been taken in the ‘60s. KK is smiling, but not all the way, and his eyes look as if they come from another level of being, where tears are always going by. This was, by my lights, the handsomest photo of KK in the group—the one that offered up an individual I could believe wrote not only “Sleeping with Women” and “The Pleasures of Peace” but also both “Circus” poems (John Keane) and “Marina,” in which the poet, a quarter century after the fact, reflects on how he threw away his life with a lover in his helpless pursuit of what poets traditionally lust after: fame.

--Mindy Aloff

THE MOODY TEMPLE and A HUM-DRUM NOT KNOWING [by John Hennessy]

SIFNOS (c) IAN MACLELLAN

Psalm on Sifnos

By Stephen Yenser

One does not want,
O Lord, to heap
Up by still waters
Of words a cairn
But hopes to attend
A small covert
Of tamarisk
Whose leaves salty
Yet feathery
Will shed light over
A thickened plot.

One wants at last
To cede the field
To tamarisk
And mastic tree,
To olive and stone,
Stones in the fruit,
Seed in the stones.

    Like this poem by Stephen Yenser, a straight-razor-witted fellow Hellenophile I got to know on a visit here several years ago, the island is deceptive in its apparent simplicity. From the ferry, Sifnos looks denuded, its smooth volcanic peaks all sun firing across a yellow skull. Disembark, though, and you begin to see that flora here is cunning, vines shifting along every available crack in stone, tamarisks lining the beach, olive trees low and orderly up on the terraces digging their roots deep.

    The people living here are pretty clever too; over the last five thousand years they’ve developed an architecture and agriculture to survive in style. Their houses are all clean lines and square angles, a series of unfolding cubes, thick-walled to be cool in summer, warm in winter, and painted uniformly white, shutters a limited variety of blue, green, brown, and pink. The blue and white domes of churches—one for every day of the year, one for every sixth Sifnian—speckle each inhabited hillside. Shrubs, vines, and fruit trees surround the buildings: lemons, limes, oranges, figs, pomegranates, mimosas, almonds, cascading bougainvillea, shady grape arbors, banks of flowering capers and night-blooming jasmine, enormous geraniums, and on and on. Beyond the limits of each town there are farmers’ fields, orchards, and pastures, chickens pecking, goats grazing, the odd cow, pig, or sheep poking, donkeys, horses and mules performing their tasks or stalling in attitudes of sublime passive aggression.

    And of course there is the sea. Visible from virtually every inch of this island. It’s kind of blue.

    Our arrival on Sifnos was a happy accident. In the summer of 2000, we found ourselves between apartments—Sabina Murray, Nicholas, our first child, two years old at the time, and I. In September we were to move into free housing on the campus of Phillips Academy, Andover, where Sabina would serve as writer-in-residence for three years, but until then we had nowhere to go. We looked into summer sublets and seasonal rentals in Boston, Maine, southern New Hampshire, the Jersey Shore, all places near friends or family, but found nothing we could afford. It was actually cheaper, in the last years of the drachma, to go to Greece for a couple of months, than to stay in any of those local places. We moved around the Aegean that summer, but Sifnos was our favorite spot and we continue to return there when we can.

SIFNOS (c) IAN MACLELLAN

    Our apartment on Sifnos abuts the grounds of the chapel of Panagia Ouranofora, once a temple to Apollo, the god from whom our town, Apollonia, the island’s capital, takes its name. Lengths of marble column and fragments from the walls of the temple have been integrated into the more modestly designed church, and ancient marble blocks still provide a few of the long steps up from the steno, the path that cuts between a block of terraced white Cycladic houses and Mamma Mia, the popular Italian restaurant next door.

    I feel deeply moved by this site; I’m at home here.

    But why?

My wife likes to call New Jersey the old country. Peterstown, Elizabeth, Price Street and Seminary Ave. in Rahway—that’s it for you, she says. The old country.

    She’s more than half serious. I grew up there with my mother’s family from Sicily. Cusumanos, Catalanos, Frangiamores and Federicos. As it is with other émigrés, my old country, my New Jersey, is gone, colonized by time and change, made unrecognizable by a tyrant present. I wasn’t around to see it happen. To observe without noticing. I go back as often as I can, but I’m a shade there, almost as out of place as I am in Sicily, even though I visit family in both places. Before Elizabeth and Rahway, we’re from Agrigento, Akragas, an ancient Greek colony. According to my grandfather, our family house of worship began as an altar for Phoenician traders, sailors from the Eastern Mediterranean, some of the earliest visitors to the island. Later the Greeks raised a temple around that altar, offered their own sacrifices there. The temple was rededicated by the Romans when they colonized us, consecrated as a church after Constantine Christianized the empire, converted to a mosque in the time of Arab rule, and re-transmogrified into a Roman Catholic church under the Normans. Even if it is in the old old country, I pass many days feeling very much like that building.

***

    I prefer going to Greece because Sicily is fraught for me: I’m more of an outsider there even though I look like everyone in town. In Greece I’m an outsider, sure, but a kind of distant cousin. There’s a certain level of acceptance, even welcome, offered to me, attended by very low expectations. You’re here? Great, just don’t get in the way and we’ll all do fine.

    The same courtesy extends to my family. Sabina, who is half Filipina (Tagalog, Spanish, Chinese) and half Irish, is a chameleon: she looks Asian in Asia, South American in South America, Mediterranean here. Our sons also have friends of their own in Greece. Although our command of the language is limited to the most basic transactions, that seems to satisfy us. Until we open our mouths, we even pass for Greek.

    I don’t mind not understanding what people are saying. It reminds me of childhood—and I don’t just mean the English words and constructions that flew over my head. Between my family and neighbors there was always some unintelligible language being spoken: various Southern Italian dialects, Spanish from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the DR, Armenian, Yiddish, German, Ukrainian, and whatever the hell my buddy Paul’s grandfather McCarthy from Cork was firing from the side of his mouth. It was just a given that you couldn’t understand everything being said in your presence—even if you were the one being addressed. You moved from Dennis Rivera’s apartment to the Keossians’ to the Smiths’, you ate the food, played the games, took the physical and multilingual abuse from the older siblings, and you tried to keep your head down, avoid attention. There was nothing profound about this—it was the Negative Capability of the quotidian. A humdrum not-knowing.

(For a brief discussion of the Greek economy and links to articles on the Greek political situation, please see yesterday’s post.)

From the archive; first posted July 23, 2012.

The Poet, Amy Woolard (by Nin Andrews)

Every now and then, I come across a poet who makes my jaw drop, my heart skip a beat--my mind, too. A poet who surprises me line after line, poem after poem. They are like magicians who really do pull rabbits out of hats or make coins disappear or saw people in half. No matter how hard I try, I can't figure out how they do it. Amy Woolard is that kind of poet. Her debut book, Neck of the Woods, is a must-read, and I can't wait for her next collection. A former waitress and an accomplished Civil Rights lawyer, she probably doesn't have as much time to write as I would like her to. I find myself looking for her poems online whenever I need a hit of inspiration, a dose of awe, or that feeling, Oh wow, so that's what a poem can do. 

 

Delivery

 

Paper pusher, I’ll tell you what it feels like
To spend the exact cash you make the same

Night you make it. That sky velveted as
An empty ring box. Disintegration coming out

Of the speakers again. Neck-deep in the quarry swimming
Hole. This thing between us like snapping a bar of cold

Chocolate. I like wading into my weakness &
Treading there like the final girl. This life no

Bigger than a drugstore makeup aisle, than waking
Only to learn of the late-night car accident. Who said

To stitch shut is to mend. Each morning the dogs kept
Us alive, even when we hadn’t planned it. The room slow

Spun the way the water had moved around us, & the bare
Light on the water, those apparitions—our love’s

Strategy, a deer tendering into the kitchen through
A back door left open, through the rooms where we

Undressed. Bring me to myself & sew the horizon
Into place. Out of the winedark that sun we like

Was coming back into style. What we borrowed
We know we cannot return. I held your jaw

Like a piece of fruit. Your hand rested on the warm
Animal between us, running in its sleep.

Published in The New York Review

Late Shift 

Those days I could only love someone who was ashamed
Of their teeth. The way the dogs will always sleep in the spots

They know I’ll need to step. The things we do so not to lose
Each other. So as to lose something every day. Church key,

Bar rag, the obscene puckered red of maraschino, the wrecked
Line cook in the walk-in. His chilled kiss. How it tastes like a future

Eviction. Thieves in the temple of our bodies. Years later I will
Still feel most at home when I eat standing up. When I settle up

In cash. When I barter for your attention. Fingernail of heat
Lightning tapping the tabled sky. A broken pint glass

In the ice bin. Every shift Sinéad sings This is the last day
Of our acquaintance. There are nights I give up on the world

But not my body. How in the Bruegel, if you didn’t know
The title you might not look for Icarus at all, a paper lantern

Giving its wish back to ground long after we’ve left. Push
A fork into a fish & what you get is a meal. Push a knife into

A knuckle & what you get is to be changed. Like Icarus, what I want
Is to start over but not do it all again. Like Icarus, I wanted the light

To love me back. How in my lungs still nests the fur of every animal I
Ever kept. Years later the gods will have me cough up a snow leopard.

I thought the main selling point of breathing was we didn’t have to
Be reminded to do it. I never wanted children but I always liked the one

About Athena pouring full-grown from Zeus’ forehead. How did we survive
Before Advil, love. Before the armor of us glinting in the closed kitchen

Dark. The way a creaky floorboard’s one job is to wait. Service means
The spoon appears before you know you need it. The water looks

To refill itself. The napkin calls a truce. When something is soft we believe
We deserve to touch it & so we do. When something is sharp we long to

Perfect it. Nothing belongs to us until last call: one more &
Then no more. The lights go on & it’s time to cough up

What’s owed. Build a cathedral in the dead of night & then give it
A shift meal, a smoking section, a cover charge, a swinging door, a till

To reckon. Those days we didn’t have a prayer, separated our love
From each other like cupping a yolk between the cracked half

Shells back & again until it’s perfect. Forgive ourselves. Give
Ourselves the tenderest title & call it a day. How could we ever

How could we not. Baby, draw the spoked sun in the corner
Of our afternoon sky. Wake us in its slow-cooked gaze.

 

Published online and in the print edition of the March 18, 2024, issue of The New Yorker

"Sex with a Famous Poet" [by Denise Duhamel]

Sex with a Famous Poet

 

I had sex with a famous poet last night

and when I rolled over and found myself beside him I shuddered

because I was married to someone else,

because I wasn't supposed to have been drinking,

because I was in fancy hotel room

I didn't recognize. I would have told you

right off this was a dream, but recently

a friend told me, write about a dream,

lose a reader and I didn't want to lose you

right away. I wanted you to hear

that I didn't even like the poet in the dream, that he has

four kids, the youngest one my age, and I find him

rather unattractive, that I only met him once,

that is, in real life, and that was in a large group

in which I barely spoke up. He disgusted me

with his disparaging remarks about women.

He even used the word "Jap"

which I took as a direct insult to my husband who's Asian.

When we were first dating, I told him

"You were talking in your sleep last night

and I listened, just to make sure you didn't

call out anyone else's name." My future-husband said

that he couldn't be held responsible for his subconscious,

which worried me, which made me think his dreams

were full of blond vixens in rabbit-fur bikinis.

but he said no, he dreamt mostly about boulders

and the ocean and volcanoes, dangerous weather

he witnessed but could do nothing to stop.

And I said, "I dream only of you,"

which was romantic and silly and untrue.

But I never thought I'd dream of another man--

my husband and I hadn't even had a fight,

my head tucked sweetly in his armpit, my arm

around his belly, which lifted up and down

all night, gently like water in a lake.

If I passed that famous poet on the street,

he would walk by, famous in his sunglasses

and blazer with the suede patches at the elbows,

without so much as a glance in my direction.

I know you're probably curious about who the poet is,

so I should tell you the clues I've left aren't

accurate, that I've disguised his identity,

that you shouldn't guess I bet it's him...

because you'll never guess correctly

and even if you do, I won't tell you that you have.

I wouldn't want to embarrass a stranger

who is, after all, probably a nice person,

who was probably just having a bad day when I met him,

who is probably growing a little tired of his fame--

which my husband and I perceive as enormous,

but how much fame can an American poet

really have, let's say, compared to a rock star

or film director of equal talent? Not that much,

and the famous poet knows it, knows that he's not

truly given his due. Knows that many

of these young poets tugging on his sleeve

are only pretending to have read all his books.

But he smiles anyway, tries to be helpful.

I mean, this poet has to have some redeeming qualities, right?

For instance, he writes a mean iambic.

Otherwise, what was I doing in his arms.

From The Star-Spangled Banner, Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 

3 Poems from "A Few Comments Regarding the Makers" [by George Bradley]

A FEW COMMENTS REGARDING THE MAKERS

Richard

Adopted by childless parents, Richard knew nothing

of his blood relatives or genetic inheritance, so that

his extraordinary mind was an anonymous anomaly

bestowed by an agency.  Raised in an enclave, it wasn’t

until he went off to school that he understood others

lacked a home with acres of books in a two-story library. 

He knew Paris, but called New York “the only habitable

city” and lived there most of his life in a tiny apartment

where the bathroom was encrusted with photos of friends

or famous artists or both, and all other walls were shelves

loaded with volumes stacked two deep.  Every last inch

of space held a stimulus to thought, and I asked what

he would do when room ran out.  “My dear,” he replied,

“if you can’t fit all of western culture into a place this size,

you might as well give up.”  The whole of a culture is not

to contain, but Richard was not a man to admit defeat.     

 

Eleanor

Eleanor never tasted an alcoholic beverage in her life,

though her genial husband drank plenty and enjoyed

soirées and was in the habit of asking writers to stop

by for cocktails, so that she entertained often without

benefit of social lubricant.  Raised in the rural South,

she had plenty of self-control and a sense of propriety

others mistook for moral rigidity.  While her husband

lived, his books received far more attention than hers,

and it wasn’t till after he died that her old-fashioned

poems, still Modernist long after America moved on

to Post Everything, began to win awards.  The quietly

devastating accounts of domestic endurance she wrote

waste no word and want concentration to comprehend,   

as did she.  Always warm to me, she could strike others

as formidable, who didn’t realize that her firm opinions

were a form of defense, and that morality was not the key.

 

Mark

Most people as handsome as Mark don’t bother

to try hard in life, content to get by on their looks,

so it’s surprising he found the motivation you need

to persist in doing the difficult thing that is poetry.

He taught creative writing for years but didn’t like it,

and did so only so that he could afford top-rated

restaurants and fine wine and travel to foreign places.

Unashamed of his self-indulgence, he was generous

in his way, helping others find jobs and get published.

Like quite a few authors I’ve known, he wanted to be

a painter and entered art school hoping to become one. 

One night over dinner and drinks in a Manhattan bistro,

I asked why he abandoned his first pursuit for a second.

“My paintings,” he told me, “just stopped improving,

and the poems I was writing got better and better. 

You go where your talent decides to take you.”         

 

George Bradley is a poet, fiction writer, and translator who has published with Yale University Press, Knopf, NYRB Press, HarperCollins and elsewhere. His work has appeared in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Paris Review, and he has received numerous awards, including the Yale Younger Poets Prize and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has worked variously in construction, as a sommelier, as a copywriter, and as a literary editor. At present he imports and distributes an Italian olive oil produced on a farm near Florence. When not on the farm, he can often be found in Chester, near the river of rivers in Connecticut.

Photo credit: Chris LeQuire

The Latest Gossip: True or False

Which of these statements, lifted from a newspaper, is true?

The New Yorker has parted ways with its art critic (Jackson Arn) after the Condé Nast-owned magazine received complaints that he behaved dishonorably and made people "uncomfortable" with his allegedly “inappropriate” behavior at the periodical's 100th anniversary party in February.

Don Lemon claims women at CNN sexually harassed him, including one who touched his nipples.

Rosie O'Donnell, who will turrn sixty-three next week, revealed that she is moving to Ireland for "a nexus of reasons, tax benefits being one, but also my lifelong love of Yeats, Keats, and Gerard Manley Hopkins." 

“I’m gutted," Amanda Gorman siad. "Because of one parent’s complaint, my inaugural poem, The Hill We Climb, has been banned from an elementary school in Miami-Dade County, Florida.”

“Heroin, it’s my wife and it’s my life,” the late Lou Reed confided. "So what? Everyone knows Freud took cocaine, Nitetzsche opium, and Picasso hashish. Carl Sagan smoked pot, and it wouldn't surprise me if these computer geniuses, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, took LSD."

POTUS posted: “The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen.” 

Admitting he had lied when he bragged to have cooked for multiple US presidents in the White House, TV chef Washington Irving pled guilty to the lesser charge of hiring a female cook to dress up like Aunt Jemima. 

Three cheers for journalism!

Columbia, "the bedlam of 1968" redux [by Franklin Foer]

People are talking about "Columbia University’s Anti-Semitism Problem" by Franklin Foer in The Atlantic:

Here are a few excerpts.

"If the bullying of Jewish students had happened to any other group, the institution would be appalled."

<<<
In January, when the historian Avi Shilon returned to Columbia University from winter break, a thought coursed through his mind: If calm can take hold in Gaza, then perhaps it could also happen in Morningside Heights. Just a few days earlier, in time for the start of the semester, Hamas and Israel had brokered a cease-fire in their war.

Over the many months of that war, Columbia was the site of some of America’s most vitriolic protests against Israel’s actions, and even its existence. For two weeks last spring, an encampment erected by anti-Israel demonstrators swallowed the fields in the center of the compact Manhattan campus. Nobody could enter Butler Library without hearing slogans such as “Globalize the intifada!” and “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” At the end of April, students, joined by sympathizers from outside the university gates, stormed Hamilton Hall—which houses the undergraduate-college deans’ offices—and then battled police when they sought to clear the building. Because of the threat of spiraling chaos, the university canceled its main commencement ceremony in May.

Shilon felt that the tamping of hostilities in Gaza made the moment ripe for the course he was scheduled to teach, “History of Modern Israel,” which would examine the competing Jewish and Palestinian narratives about his native country’s founding.

But Columbia soon disabused him of his hopes. About 30 minutes into the first session of his seminar, four people, their faces shrouded in keffiyehs, burst into his classroom. A protester circled the seminar table, flinging flyers in front of Shilon’s students. One flyer bore an image of a boot stomping on a Star of David; another stated, The Enemy Will Not See Tomorrow.

In the Israeli universities where Shilon had studied and taught, he was accustomed to strident critiques of the country. Sometimes he even found himself sympathizing with them. Taking up difficult arguments struck him as the way to navigate tense disagreements, so he rose from his chair and gingerly approached the protesters. “You’re invited to learn,” he told them.

But the protesters ignored him. As one held up a camera to film, another stared at it and delivered a monologue in which she described Shilon’s class—which had barely progressed beyond a discussion of expectations for the semester—as an example of “Columbia University’s normalization of genocide.”

After she finished her speech, the demonstrators left the room, but a sense of intrusion lingered. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the umbrella group that organized protests on campus, posted a video of the action, with the caption: “We disrupted a zionist class, and you should too.” The university later offered to provide security for Shilon’s class because it couldn’t be sure if CUAD was bluffing.

Over the past two years, Columbia’s institutional life has become more and more absurd. Confronted with a war on the other side of the world, the course of which the university has zero capacity to affect, a broad swath of the community acted as if the school’s trustees and administrators could determine the fate of innocent families in Gaza. To force the university into acceding to demands—ending study abroad in Israel, severing a partnership with Tel Aviv University, divesting from companies with holdings in Israel––protesters attempted to shut down campus activity. For the sake of entirely symbolic victories, they were willing to risk their academic careers and even arrest.

Because the protesters treated the war as a local issue, they trained their anger on Jewish and Israeli students and faculty, including [the historian Avi] Shilon, some of whom have been accused of complicity with genocide on the basis of their religious affiliation or national origin. More than any other American university, Columbia experienced a breakdown in the fabric of its community that demanded a firm response from administrators—but these administrators tended to choke on their own fears.

Many of the protesters followed university rules governing demonstrations and free expression. Many others did not. Liberal administrators couldn’t or wouldn’t curb the illiberalism in their midst. By failing to discipline protesters who transgressed university rules, they signaled that disrupting classrooms carried no price. By tolerating professors who bullied students who disagreed with them, they signaled that incivility and even harassment were acceptable forms of discourse.

It was as if Columbia was reliving the bedlam of 1968, which included a student takeover of the university and scarred the institution for decades. And just like in the Vietnam era, the university became a ripe target for demagogues on the right, who are eager to demolish the prestige of elite higher education. And now that Donald Trump and his allies control the federal government, they have used anti-Semitism as a pretext for damaging an institution that they abhor. In the name of rescuing the Jews of Columbia, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal contracts and grants to the university. Trump officials then sent a letter demanding—as preconditions for restoring the funds—a series of immediate, far-reaching steps, including suspending and expelling Hamilton Hall protesters, producing a plan to overhaul admissions, and putting the school’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under “academic receivership.” >>>

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/columbia-antisemitism-israel-palestine-trump/682054

painting on left: "Visigoths Sack Rome"

 

The Party (a poem from 1992)

The Party

Everyone started talking about the drama critic

As soon as she left. "Did you see what she

Was wearing?" The Presidents of Harvard, Brown, and Duke

Were quoted deploring recruitment practices current

On their campuses. Would you say that these gentlemen

Are sincere? I would unhesitatingly do so!

I happen to know them and can vouch that each

Is an honorable man, and is married to the mother

Of the eye-turning theater critic whose power

To make or break a play is unparalleled in New York --

Lovely to look at, quick with a quip, easy to love --

Yes, but none of them has the backbone to stand up

To the power-hungry yahoos who want to destroy

The written word in the name of personal liberation!

 

(DL, 1992)

pictures by DL 2023

photo by Elaine Equi

 

 

 

 

Three Uplifting Poets: Denise Duhamel, Virginia Konchan, and Peter Krumbach [by Nin Andrews]

I doubt I’m the only one who has been under the weather, under a cloud or a looming feeling of dread and doubt and disbelief. I’ve had a lingering cold for weeks that’s made my head feel twenty pounds heavier. This morning the doctor prescribed various medications for me, but I fear the cure is not in a medicine bottle.

In my logy state of mind, I’ve been dipping in and out of books and poems and podcasts, and I have come across a few uplifting discoveries.

First, Denise Duhamel's wonderful poem,"How It Will End," was featured on my favorite poetry podcast, Poetry Unbound last week. Everyone should listen to it. It's fabulous. 

Second, I came across this wonderful gem of a poem from The New Yorker by the brilliant Virginia Konchan. She beautifully captures my hotel experience--meaning the ick of hotels-- while playing off of Hopkins "Pied Beauty." I am a huge fan of Konchan's poetry.

Gloria Patri

By Virginia Konchan

Glory be to god for septic tanks, drainage pipes:
for conversions thermodynamic and of the soul.
Glory be to god for this quiet, cheap hotel room:
only music the mini-fridge’s vibratory drone,
creaky plumbing groaning through the walls.
We underestimate the perfect peace of objects.
Before me was another traveller: after I leave,
hundreds of others will arrive, anonymously,
drink sink water from disposable plastic cups,
recline on bleached sheets, stare into the void
of a generic landscape painting across the bed
while contemplating the disaster of their lives.
And, when the alarm wails hours before dawn,
human cusses of angry protest join the chorus
of budget appliances failing before their time.
Why even look at a clock? It’s never good news.
It takes the time it takes, my estimated deadline,
which is likely why no employer would trust me.
I’m at an age where everyone around me is dying.
I’m at an age when the recited script isn’t enough.
Glory be to god for logjams, the antediluvian dark,
for being a supply of goodness outpacing demand
because so many prefer their egos’ endless ranting
to the suggestion of a different narrator or narrative.
Me, I am so clearly incapable of leading a brigade.
I’m glad to accept help in whatever form it comes:
hour of privacy within these semen-sprayed walls,
deadbolt securing my safety from the chaos outside
and the strivings of the people which are everywhere.
I can’t point to you on a map: don’t know your name
or from whence you came. But flames lick the canvas
and I acknowledge my poverty of being and my need.
Glory be to god for this unforgiving mirror, this soap,
this Gideon Bible tucked away in the bedside drawer:
whoever dwells in the secret place of the most High
will abide under the shadow of the Almighty, I read.
A freely given gift whose only precondition is belief,
it was put there for safekeeping, for salesmen like me.

And finally, I recently discovered a new and wonderful prose poet, Peter Krumbach, who makes me laugh. Like this poem from New World Writing:

 

First-Grade Substitute

Good morning, children. Don’t raise your hands yet. That’s right, I’m filling in for Mrs. Davis. Can I share a little secret with you? Yes? Well — I stayed up late last night. That’s right, very, very late. Why do you think I did? Take a guess. No… No… No… You give up? Okay. I was smoking, watching my wife bake a cake. And we both had a taste of what’s called a single molt Scotch. You know, my little hearts, there’s a thing Mrs. Davis probably hasn’t brought up to you yet. It’s called affection. Remember the word. It’s what the moon’s gravity does to the goo in our hearts. Like a tummy ache, but higher in the chest. Just ask your parents when you get home. And while you’re at it, ask them about disappointment, unease, addiction and the happiness of the dead. Now, if you promise not to tell anyone, we’re not going to read anything today. And we’re not going to write anything either. Can I hear you say Yeah? I can’t HEAR you! Say YEAH like you mean it! There you go! Okay, who’s hungry? Guess what’s in that box on my desk? It’s called Medusa’s head — my wife’s work of art. The eyes are maraschinos. The snake-hair is marzipan. Pass along those paper plates. And feel free to eat with your hands.

The Great Chevalier Tour: trough of inspiration for USA folklore ballet? [By Tracy Danison]

"The Great Chevalier Tour", reaching for the sky for Luxemburg, Le Grand Chevalier. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

As part of the premier of The Great Chevalier Tour, M. Chevalier chose the Vanves, France, City Hall salle du marriage for his historic homage to Ballet National Folklorique du Luxembourg the iconic Danse du Pigeon, the trembling heart of the legendary ballet’s founders’, sisters Joséphine and Claudine Bal’s, signature ballet, Josiane la Paysanne (“Josiane the female Peasant”).

The Danse du Pigeon sequence of Josiane is today recognized as the paradigm of Western folklore ballet, was developed and premiered 50 years ago to the very day and under the very same gaze of the very monumental bust of Marianne mounted on today’s back wall.

 

Detail of panel, “Owl with Minerva”, Vanves City Hall, salle du mariage”. Note the clouds. Photo © Tracy Danison

The Bal sisters are said to have been inspired to the Danse du Pigeon choreographic riff by the symbolic owl in the emblematic Minerva figuring on the marriage salle’s central ceiling vault, painted there by the same 19th century artist who did the original cityscapes still decorating the walls, most of which are recognizable today, the city’s mayor said during his opening allocution. The sisters Bal, while native Luxemburgers to the core, worked in nearby Brussels, Belgium. The Vanves mayor, a strikingly attractive man, said his southwest Paris suburb had welcomed the celebrated sisters when devastating floods had temporarily destroyed their more northerly dance atelier, raising some sympathy among the evening’s spectators.  

Dancer (and remarkable prancer) M. Chevalier, dit “Le Grand Chevalier”, also co-director of the National Ballet Folklorique, performed Danse du pigeon upon the parquet between the salle’s antique oak Magistrate’s Bench and a rapt audience.

Le Grand Chevalier’s aplomb, in addition to the elegant en tête bobbling, sidewise en pointe stepping and abruptefancy flights that characterize the celebrated fortress nation’s most renowned dance, included a dramatic evocation of the history and national plomb of the celebrated dukedom.

 

Position #3.5 from celebrated “Wings high” sequence, Le Grand Chevalier, “Danse du Pigeon”. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

The multi-talented co-director was able, through states of undress, including modestly bare shoulders and breasts, a family-style codpiece, multiple revisions of the Iconic dance’s bobbles, pointes, grand jetés, along with enthusiastic audience participation in the symbolic gestures of skyward national ambition, to well characterize the Luxemburg spirit: “Growing like grass, blooming as buds”, as he might well put it.

In the air of the salle, as that truly throbbing Le Grand Chevalier made his final emotional, deeply personal salute, wrapping himself in a magnificent rug of many horses and thus pointing the many grand Chevaliers or Ritters or Horse Soldiers that have pockmarked the little fortress nation’s history, was a growing feeling, in warmer patriotic hearts, that the USA too must have their own Danse du Pigeon written into their iconic ballet, Winning Karen Winning.

Unfortunately, USA pigeons, are now extinct by necessity as well as national right and nature’s red-toothed law. They became, as historians note, the delicious squab that enabled my ancestors to build the limitless farms, factories and penitentiaries that have so long welcomed the rest.

 

Under Marianne's gaze, Monsieur Le Maire de Vanves, Bernard Gauducheau, in presence of co-director Simone Mousset, pays homage to sisters Joséphine and Claudine Bal, founders of Ballet National Folklorique du Luxembourg. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

Reminded that “squab”, “a nestling tumbling to the ground, fat and flabby, a richly slapping sound” reminds of those iconic offerings emblematic of true American contribution, that are, as Lord Byron has put it, “soft, yet cohesive, neither rashly swift nor insolently slow”:  The Turd.

Thus, as spectators filed pensively out of this salle of homage in Vanves, France, they thought, with love and pride, of course, of production values much bigger and better than diminutive Luxemburg could ever offer, for the USA: Dance of the Turd… With its own historic music, Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives… A modernist composer, yes, but also, and in his actual lifetime, a bigly successful salesman and insurance entrepreneur. 

Simone Mousset, does that eminently American “The” in the English title, The Grand Chevalier Tour, suggest that M. Chevalier himself might be tempted, munificently, as so many others, to perform the sure-to-be-a-classic Great American Dance of the Turd?

___________

Performance Detail

I saw the premier of “The Great Chevalier Tour” – billed as the “Occasion for Monsieur Chevalier to visit all the places which have contributed to the success of the Ballet National Folklorique, with this love letter, tender and intimate, addressed as much to the people of Vanves as to Luxemburg, and danced by one of its most talented prodigal sons” – 7 March 2025 at Mairie de Vanves, in presence of Monsieur Le Maire de Vanves, Bernard Gauducheau. “The Great Chevalier Tour” is the brainchild of choreographer performer Simone Mousset, written by Lou Cope
with historic music composed and recorded by Maurizio Spiridigliozzi and set plan by Mélanie Planchard in collaboration with Simone Mousset and Lewys Holt.

___________

Festival Artdanthé

Simone Mousset’s “The Grand Chevalier Tour” premiered the 2025 edition of Artdanthé, founded in 1998, a mixed-discipline dance-performance festival featuring, especially, creations by emerging artists. Notable Artdanthé alumni include Boris Charmantz, named director of the Tanztheater Wuppertal in 2022, and Jeanne Candel, whose latest work was discussed in Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in September 2024 (Rockets, space, place, sets and the power of theater: Jeanne Candel’s “Fusées”).

The Spymaster as Vacuum-Cleaner Salesman [by DL]

<<<

And the sad man is cock of all his jests.

-- George Herbert

>>>

Epigraph to Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana (1958). The protagonist -- an English widower living in pre-Castro Cuba -- is a vacuum-cleaning salesman named Wormwold, as unattractive a name as Greene could manage. In order to satisfy the demands of intelligence officers in a gray faceless London building, Wormwold dupes them by creating "purely notional spies" and killing them off, "like a bad novelist preparing an effect." (Alec Guiness plays him in the movie.) The book is in a comic tenor but is less a spoof than a forcible statement on the extent to which military intelligence work and espionage fiction resemble one another.

-- DL

And the sad man is cock of all his jests.

-- George Herbert

>>>

Epigraph to Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana (1958). The protagonist -- an English widower living in pre-Castro Cuba -- is a vacuum-cleaning salesman named Wormwold, as unattractive a name as Greene could manage. In order to satisfy the demands of intelligence officers in a gray faceless London building, Wormwold dupes them by creating "purely notional spies" and killing them off, "like a bad novelist preparing an effect." (Alec Guiness plays him in the movie.) The book is in a comic tenor but is less a spoof than a forcible statement on the extent to which military intelligence work and espionage fiction resemble one another.

-- DL

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-Six): Billy Collins [by Angela Ball]

In Praise of Ignorance

On a bench one afternoon
in a grassy park in Minneapolis,
I realized that what I liked best
about the dogs of Minneapolis
is they have no idea they’re in Minneapolis.

The same could be said
of the dogs of Houston or Philadelphia,
it occurred to me on the slow walk
back to my hotel, but I was
in no mood to be distracted.

I’m sticking with the dogs of Minneapolis,
I resolved as the elevator
rose to my floor, just as they stick
with their owners, the natives of Minneapolis,
most of whom know exactly where they are.

Alone in my room on the 17th floor,
I surveyed the vast prospect below me—
the slithery river and hills beyond
and the bluish hills beyond those hills—

in the manner of those English poets
who loved to regard the world from a height.
One of them even had a witty epitaph
inscribed upon the tombstone of his hound.
                                                                     -Billy Collins

Billy Collins's most recent book of poems is Water, Water.  Forthcoming is Dog Show, a collection of his dog poems with accompanying canine watercolor portraits. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 

Billy Collins’s arresting “In Praise of Ignorance” begins with a revelation: “I realized what I liked best about the dogs of Minneapolis/ is they have no idea they are in Minneapolis.”

Animals are often said to be devoid of self-consciousness (not true) to live only in the moment (also not true), and/or not to experience duration when we leave and do not return for many hours (currently being disproven by research). In comparison to such metaphysics, Collins’ revelation seems ridiculously inconsequential. But is it?

Collins’ aperçu perhaps gets at the source of the bounce in a young dog’s walk—they simply travel, guided by a leash, unconstrained by geography. Unlike adult people, who remain aware of longitude, latitude, and the whole awkward contraption of distances, dogs are true cosmopolitans. They are anywhere and everywhere.

John Ashbery has said that he doesn’t think his thought operations are that different from anyone else’s. This assertion shows him capable of dramatizing thought in universal ways. Perhaps Collins does the same thing, though in a more direct manner. When he says, “I’m sticking with the dogs of Minneapolis,” he celebrates and satirizes human chauvinism, the basis of all fandom. And he supports his choice by likening it to the loyalty of dogs, who are, in a way, revealed here as models for living.

Like Ashbery’s, Collins’s poems often both celebrate and parody human thought processes. Here, in characterizing an idee fixe, Collins chooses graphic simplicity.

His poem has a Romantic peripatetic impetus—its recognition takes place outdoors, in nature, and continues as he strolls back to his hotel room. He compares himself to the Lake poets, humorously satirizing his own pretensions—a joke that becomes explicit in the poem’s last two stanzas. The same humor is evident in a short biopic made on Collins several years ago, after he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. A camera is trained on him as he pilots his car—he comments later that he was “afraid of looking like a bad driver.”

Collins’s description of the view from his 17th-floor window is both lyrically evocative and subtly satirical of Romantic endlessness--“the slithery river and the hills beyond / and the bluish hills beyond those hills. . .”—and of those “English poets/who loved to regard the world from a height.” “One of them,” he says, “even had a witty epitaph inscribed upon the tombstone of his hound.”

Collins’s ending is, of course, a sly reference to that most satirical of Romantic poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron. The internet tells us that “Epitaph to a Dog” was written in 1808 in honor of Byron’s Landseer dog, Boatswain. A tribute of some twenty-six lines of heroic couplets, it is inscribed on Boatswain’s monument (grander than Byron’s own in the same park), and includes the following sentiment:

 

     . . .the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend

     The first to welcome, foremost to defend

     Whose honest heart is still his master’s own

     Who labors, fights, breathes for him alone

     Unhonor’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth

     Deny’d in Heaven the Soul he held on earth*

 

Byron is reported to have nursed Boatswain to the end of his illness—rabies—with no thought of being bitten and infected.

That the poem ends by tacitly endorsing the grandeur of dogs in no way subtracts from its humor. It simply completes, in a surprising turn to human and canine history, the poem’s “praise of ignorance”—a praise both funny and solemn, consummately human and humane.

*The website The Classical Quill gives encomiums to dogs a classical pedigree, quoting the Greek teacher Hermongenes of Tarsus (fl. AD 550) on how to write encomia of animals.

Douglas Murray on Israel, Hamas and the Future of Democracy

<<<
“Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing.” – Douglas Murray

On October 7, a flare went up, and by October 8, it became clear exactly where Douglas Murray was standing – erupting into the world’s conversation about Hamas’ attack on Israel, pointedly, insistently and with utter moral clarity.

“If you don’t believe that Israel has the right to stop a group that has proposed repeatedly . . . that it wants to annihilate Israel . . ., then of course you don’t believe Israel has the right to live. You believe Israel has the right to die.”

Douglas Murray might not be Jewish. But, led by his guiding ethos that one truth can puncture a thousand lies, he is unwilling to accept the dishonest criticism being leveled at the Jewish state.

In his new book, On Democracies and Death Cults, the #1 international bestselling author and cultural commentator, reveals what he saw and learned reporting in Israel after October 7. Mr. Murray explains how many in the West are not only condemning Israel to perpetual attack but emboldening forces that seek to undermine democracy across the globe.

The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center welcomes Douglas Murray to discuss why the conflict is not the simplistic leftist tale of oppressor versus oppressed but a clash between a thriving multi-racial democracy that values life and a death cult bent on its destruction.

A prominent reporter whose work has taken him not only to Israel, Gaza and Lebanon, but to Iraq, North Korea, northern Nigeria and Ukraine, Douglas Murray is the author of eight books. Mr. Murray is Associate Editor of The Spectator and a prolific debater; he is also a columnist at the New York Post and frequently writes for The Sun, The Telegraph, National Review and The Free Press. Over the past year, he has written scores of dispatches from Israel and spoken widely about the conflict.

Murray will be in conversation with Rabbi David Wolpe, a 21st-century sage who is widely considered among the very best Jewish teachers in America. He has taught Torah to Hollywood stars, scandalized his colleagues by opining that the Exodus didn’t happen the way we’ve been taught, caused a major stir when he quit Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group and wrote a best-selling book optioned for a movie by Warner Bros.

Monday, April 7       8:00 pm Eastern >>> 

Douglas Murray at Temple Emanu-El.

Michael Earl Craig: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

________________________________________________________________

Chunk of Sea Glass

 

Becky I’m typing this in your study.

It’s a rainy fall day and for some reason

I want to type “you’re in Japan” and

don’t know where your man and kid are.

Man and kid feels a little crass but

it’s okay because I’ve let myself into

your house and I’m weak, and drunk, and

a little hungry, looking at a sizable chunk

of blue-green sea glass here on your desk,

considering the weight it exerts upon the desk

and the desk’s equal (inverse) force upon its base.

 

A thunderstorm’s just passed through,

I type that. And one of your windows

is cracked slightly—the study sips the balmy

air. The room smells like old books.

There’s a red wig on a wig rack,

a heavy black stapler that feels like a pistol,

a water glass with an inch of water in it.

 

Soon Becky I will recline in your recliner,

your cat sprawled on my abdomen,

making it difficult to nap. But I’ll nap.

And when I wake I’ll still have the house

to myself I am sure. And all the browns

and beiges and burnt mustards of your study

will resume again their quiet work on me,

coaxing me along on my journey without you

(who may or may not be in Japan), your man

or your kid.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Earl Craig’s most recent (of six) books of poems are Woods and Clouds Interchangeable and Iggy Horse. He has published poems in various magazines, journals, and anthologies—Poetry, The Believer, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry (2014, 2022) among them. He was Poet Laureate for the State of Montana (2015–17) and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow (2021). He lives near Livingston, Montana, where he shoes horses for a living.    [Author photo by Susan Thomas.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                  Heinrich Campendonk, Sitzender Mann mit Katze, 1919 .       

 

Let's take a bow. . .

Dear David: : "What do you plan to do once you become a time millionaire?"

 

The cat's out of the bag.

I'm retiring.

The Best American Poetry 2025, edited by Terence Winch, will be the last book in the BAP series under my supervision. That's thirty-eight annual volumes since 1988 plus two "best of the best" retrospectives, for a grand total of forty BAP books. Scribner has also published two anthologies I edited (Great American Prose Poems and The Best American Erotic Poems) and seven individual collections of my poems, including Valentine Place, The Daily Mirror, and When a Woman Loves a Man. It's been a great run.

People ask: "What do you plan to do once you become a time millionaire?"

Hard to answer that hypothetical, but I can affirm with some confidence that my staff and I will continue our BAP web site, our archive, our blog, and our weekly newsletter. An editor's job is never done. Besides which, I will continue to write poems and to play shuffleboard in warm weather. -- DL

Losing it [getting it] over a non adhesive barricade tape [By Tracy Danison]

“Losing it” by Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King. Photo © Christian Altorfer

Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King get it just right with Losing it, their sound and dance performance exploring the experience of any war zone, thinking especially of the experience of the Gaza war and events on the West Bank. Losing it uses voice, synthesizer and about 30 feet of 3-inch wide green barricade tape stretched across a shallow stage. The performance succeeds as good esthetics and dance performance.

Potential exiles should keep it in mind as good dance performance.

In imagining how many ways a body can dance around a barricade tape, Samaa Wakim and  Samar Haddad King get at what ought to be a home truth: separation offers no solution to conflict (even if both individuals and groups can persist a long, long, long time in a state of extreme conflict and call it living).

Haddad King shapes performance space and Wakim does performer movement. There is a natural synchronization to the piece that points to what I think must be a friendship.

“Kingdom of Noise” came to mind from the first not very loud sounds of Losing it.

I had always thought “Kingdom of Noise” one of the many traditional epithets for Hell, like “Tophet” or “Tartarus”. Nope. It’s C.S. Lewis.

It’s hard to imagine Lewis deliberately saying something sensible, so, for me, from now on, it’s Haddad King what gives “Kingdom of Noise” the sense of Hell. With a couple of whistles and squawks, she manages to create a sound composition that actually provoked in me a remembered stink of diesel exhaust, heat and frightened people. It seems to have subjugated those who do not have such memories, too.

Within the Kingdom of Noise, Samaa Wakim, a very good dancer, performs the fullness of the the non adhesive barricade tape. In space: over and around, under, over it, touching it, pressing it, bulging it, but never getting too far from or too close to [it: facing reinforced concrete blockades with matching blast-resistant agent booths]. In gesture and style: small and careful, calculated shuffle: a calibrated equilibrist, taut, always aware that the tightrope is three inches wide and sharp on both edges [and keeping in mind the kid don’t get shot up like a Swiss cheese as she is slipping off and falling the foot and half to the ground].

“Losing it” by Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King. Photo © Christian Altorfer

Given the sturdy long-lastingness of the extruded polyester of barricade tape, Wakim could very well have been dancing with the first non adhesive barrier tape ever extruded. The thing was invented in the early 1960s, just in time to rope off the path of civil rights marches – that demand for inclusion as well as an end to Jim Crow exclusion that also raised up woman rights and generally, fairness.

Perhaps a sign of quantum entanglement, in the early 1960s, my Dad had rigged up a model silicon extruder in our basement; he was a processing engineer and very keen on staying hands-on.  Born in the sign of Cancer, it appears I am also a native of extrusion – like Wakim and Haddad King.

Watching Wakim turn and twist and pace so beautifully around the extruded non adhesive barricade tape, I realize that while Wakim and Haddad King have actually been born into it, non adhesive barricade tape and I have been, one way or another, cohabiting most of my adult life. Unfortunately, non adhesive barricade tape and I are unlikely to co-terminate: the ethic of separation seems to be growing from bloody strength to bloody strength.

Wakim has her barricade tape as green, as in “green line”, “Palestine-Israel”. I see that.

But, in some measure, thanks to the success of her and Haddad King’s piece, my non adhesive barricade tapes say things like “Whites Only”, “Economy Class”, “Other Passports”, “Police Line Do Not Cross”… And everybody obeys them unless somebody takes them down.

If, in the future, and think on this, if you please, a blazon is needed for our time, it could very well be “non adhesive barricade tape, per bend and bend sinister, embattled”.

Inclusion not separation is the thing we seem to want to fail at.

________

 

I saw Losing it by Samaa Wakim et Samar Haddad King as a feature of the Festival Faits d’Hiver at Théâtre de la Bastille on 7 February 2025. Co-created, choreographed and performed by

Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King, the 7 February performance featured lighting by Cord Haldun and Music  from Turathy (album Autostrad). Losing it was first produced in 2021 at Festival Theaterformen, Hanover, Germany, as part of the Goethe Institute’s 2019-2020 “Un|controlled Gestures” project.

The Romanticism of Edna St. Vincent Millay: "For unremembered lads. . ."

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

 

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

 

 

Millay's genius was to condense the essence of Romanticism into sonnet form. She was a peerless sonneteer. -- DL