The Best American Poetry

Alfred Hitchcock's Fate Was In His Stars [by David Lehman]

At 3:15 in the morning, in London, England, one hundred and twenty-something years ago today, the great film director Alfred Hitchcock was born, a solid Leo with a macabre imagination (moon in Scorpio). When August 13 falls on a Friday, as in 1993, 1999, and 2021,you may expect bats to fly in through the slightest opening in the bathroom window, and the phone will ring at 11 PM and it will be someone you have never met, who asks you for a job and sounds drunk. Hitchcock was short (5'5) and stout and perhaps unaware that he shared his birthday with both Annie Oakley and Fidel Castro.

There is a tremendous amount of fire in his natal chart (see below): more than 50%. This accounts for his energy, drive, ambition. The water in his chart, topping 18%, indicates a man of subtlety and sensitivity. He has three times as much yang as yin in his personality, and no one should be surprised to learn that a man whose dominant planets are the sun, Venus, and Mars may luxuriate in bathtubs in the English manner and have an almost phobic distrust of showers, which comes through in such movies as "Vertigo" (in which Kim Novak does not drown in the Pacific Ocean) and "Pyscho" (in which Janet Leigh meets her shocking fate behind a torn curtain). Leo, Sagittarius, and Scorpio are the predominant signs of a man whose self-confidence can lead him to commit the sin of pride. I hear that Janet Leigh greatly prefers baths to showers and has ever since working with Hitch.

A picture of the master of suspense emerges from a study of Hitchcock's chart. He is a Roman Catholic; a lover of blondes (especially American blondes); and a prankster of the imagination who knows that a straight face is best for effects either comic or scary and that the best way to get an actor and an actress to understand their parts as quarreling lovers is to handcuff them together and lock them in a room overnight, as in the filming of "The 39 Steps."

When he was a boy, Hitchcock's dad sent him to the local police constabulary with a note instructing the officer on duty to lock the boy in jail for a few hours. This experience had the desired effect on the lad, who worked out his guilt complex by dispatching heroes, heroines, and villains to their deaths from the top of a church tower or the Statue of Liberty; from a moving train, or in a wood stove, or by an attack of killer birds, or in an out-of-control merry-go-round at an amusement park, or by a nasty piece of goods who uses his necktie as a strangling device, or sometimes with a gun, a knife, or a pair of handy scissors. The leonine Hitchock had his sun and his Venus in Leo. This makes him a most logical man, a constant man, generous in his affections but domineering, and almost tyrannically loyal to his lovers and friends.

Given this man's stellar combination of assertive confidence and deep-seated guilt, it comes as no surprise to students of the great man's chart that (1) the great Hitchcock actors (male) tend to be old-fashioned types (James Stewart, Cary Grant) rather than the method-trained new breed; (2) in some (not all) of the best Hitchcock movies, the villain is either more interesting than the hero (Robert Walker versus Farley Granger in "Strangers on a Train"), suave and attractive(James Mason in "North by Northwest," Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder") or exceptionally complicated in an attractive way (e.g., Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt,"  the birds in "The Birds," the real imposter in "Spellbound")); and (3) the perfect Hitchcock heroines are Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Teresa Wright, and Tippi Hedren. Hitch shows us the craziness inside every man and his (almost invariably) blonde fantasy lady.

A tip of the fedora to Bernard Herrmann, a June Cancer, who wrote the music of Hitchcock's mind as well as soundtracks for such movies as "Citizen Kane" and Brian de Palma's  underrated "Obsession." -- DL

Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.

from the archive; first published August 13, 2015

Dante, Near and Far [by Robert P. Baird]

There is much strange in La Vita Nuova, the libello or “little book” that Dante composed fifteen or so years before starting in on the Divine Comedy. Take, for starters, the form of the book, an alternation of prose and poetry that produces effects as dizzying as any in Williams's Spring and All. Or take the central narrative, which describes a love—young Dante’s, for the slightly younger Beatrice—so intense that it causes the poet to faint in public and forces him, poor lad, to write lying love poems to the donne dello schermo, the “screen ladies” he uses to hide the real object of his affection. Take even Beatrice herself, who begins the book as a girl in a girdled dress only to reveal herself not long after as a miracle made flesh.

All of this is strange for us to read, or should be, even if, grinning behind our commentaries, we spot in the donna dello schermo an unacknowledged ancestor of the celebrity beard. After all, when Dante says that Beatrice is a miracle, he isn’t indulging mere hyperbole, the way Roxette did in that song I remember too well from seventh grade. Nor does he mean it less merely in the manner of an established trope, as John Donne did at the end of “The Relic.” Uniquely for the time and all but blasphemously, Dante meant that his beloved’s appearance on earth was a miracle that repeated (and maybe even competed with) Christ’s Incarnation itself. In the young poet’s eyes, Beatrice was the agent of his religious salvation and the summit of all Creation, the radiant filament that binds together heaven and earth. 

Dante’s strangeness, his distance from us in time and cultural space, is the reason Eugenio Montale took T.S. Eliot gently to task for suggesting that the Commedia was “extremely easy to read…for a foreigner who does not know Italian very well.” It’s not that Montale felt any need to defend the reluctant intricacies of his native tongue. His point was to insist that “Dante is not a modern poet…and that the instruments of modern culture are not ideally suited to understanding him.”

And yet even if we accept Montale’s reminder as well warranted, and I do, I don’t think it’s careless or unfair to say that there are times when Dante can feel close to us, “strangely close,” as Montale admitted. Graduate school is far enough behind me that I won’t bother you with theories of transhistorical subjective affiliation. My effort here is only to point out, a little like a finger before the moon, a single small moment that I love in the Vita Nuova.

The moment I mean happens early in the libello. At the start of the third chapter, Dante is describing his second encounter with Beatrice. (The first occurred nine years earlier.) The meeting is brief and profound: eighteen-year-old Dante sees Beatrice in the street, she waves hello, and her greeting causes the young poet so much giddy distress that he decides he can only go home and put himself to bed. 

That night Dante has a dream, and—perhaps predictably, dreams being dreams—this is where things get weird. In his sleep the poet sees uno segnore di pauroso aspetto emerge from a fiery cloud. Despite his fearful aspect the lord is happy, very possibly because he is carrying in his arms a naked woman asleep beneath a crimson drape. After Dante realizes that the woman is Beatrice, the lord holds up a burning object and tells the dreaming poet, in Latin, Behold your heart. At that moment the lord wakes Beatrice and starts to force-feed her Dante’s flaming heart. With understandable reluctance, Beatrice eats the thing until the lord’s happiness mysteriously turns to grief and he carries her away, presumably to heaven. 

As I said: weird. 

It was weird for Dante, too. So weird, he tells us, that he woke immediately afterward and decided to write a sonnet about what he saw. Not only did he write a sonnet but he told his readers, in the poem's second and third lines, that “these words I have composed are sent for your elucidation in reply.” And not only did Dante include this request (which I like to think of as the thirteenth-century equivalent of a self-addressed stamped envelope) he also decided to send the sonnet to molti li quali erano famosi trovatori in quello tempo, “many of the famous poets of that time.”

And here, finally, we get to the moment I love, the slender moon my finger’s been wagging after all this time. Here we see Dante—newly a poet, desperately in love—appealing to the judgment of his literary betters. Ostensibly, of course, the point was to ask about the dream, but who could doubt that what Dante really wanted was a judgment on his poem? What writer, what person of any ambition whatsoever, can’t remember that feeling of wanting to know—wanting to test—the quality of her nascent talent? 

It’s in this way that Dante comes to occupy, in my mind, anyway, the head of a secret history of such events, the benedictions or baptisms that link one poetic generation to the next. This is the history in which a young Walter Whitman sends Ralph Waldo Emerson an unsigned and unattributed copy of Leaves of Grass. This is Emily Dickinson asking T. W. Higginson, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” This is Paul Muldoon sending Seamus Heaney a sheaf of poems topped with the question “What's wrong with these?” (“Nothing,” the older poet responded, or so the story goes.) 

Among those who responded to Dante, the Vita Nuova acknowledges only Guido Cavalcanti, whose response “Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore” marked the start of the poets’ friendship. On the reading of his future primo amico, Dante’s dream was a vision of “all value, every joy and goodness that one can feel.” Cavalcanti suggests that the lord “who rules the world of honor” wanted to bring Beatrice back from near-death with the flaming food of Dante’s love.

It’s no surprise that Dante would choose this response to quote in his Vita Nuova, even while he would insist, as well, that “the true meaning of the dream I described was not perceived by anyone then.” As scholars have argued, Cavalcanti’s interpretation of the dream, while not strictly coincident with Dante’s own, was nevertheless close enough to buttress the latter’s dramatic sense of his love’s significance. 

Not all of Dante’s respondents, however, were so encouraging. Of the three reply-sonnets that survive, one, by the Tuscan poet Dante da Maiano, is about as far from Cavalcanti in spirit and tone as we can imagine. In so many words da Maiano tells Dante that it’s simple love-sickness that’s got him bothered, and probably bad hygiene besides. If Dante really wants to heal himself he needs to get rid of the noxious vapors infecting his brain. And the only way to do that, da Maiano says, smirking down the centuries, is for the young poet to go and give his testicles a good washing.

Here, too, we get the chance to meet Dante at his most queasily familiar: not as a prodigy reveling in the warm validation of his peers, but as a callow poetaster hearing harsh words from a poet he respects. It’s probably too easy to admire da Maiano’s sonnet for its precocious snark, but I appreciate his poem even more for the rare gift it affords: the chance for once to meet Dante outside the glare of his own genius.

Under Fire [by Terence Winch]

Under Fire       

Stop looking at me.  I didn’t do anything
wrong.  I don’t know the words to the song.
That’s all.  I wandered around the mall
with my broken watch.  I had all my receipts.
But no one would take anything back.
I am stuck with the whole mess.  Saved
phone messages, archived email, notes
you wrote on your hand.  The hand you once
held out to me,  the bed where we once slept
together. The dirty underwear in the hamper.
I don’t know how I will get home.  I don’t
need you to tell me I’m an idiot.  I need you
to remember where I came from so I can get
back there and put out the fire and go to sleep.

—Terence Winch
from i.e.  anthology

from the archive; first printed 8/8/09

Ben Jonson tells investors to face the music [by David Lehman]

Ben Jonson, England's first poet laureate, wrote great poems conjoining wit and powerful feeling. Consider "My Picture Left in Scotland") about which I have written this little essay)  His poetry, his plays. his great influence has overcome its one-time state He is a great poet and I should do a little column on his elegy for his son, "child of my right hand, and joy." Ben and the son who prer-deceased him had the same first name: Benjamin, which, in Hebrew, means "son of my right hand."

Less well known is that avatars of Ben continue to perform in important and unexpected ways in our culture. In The Wild Bunch, for example, Ben was Warren Oates's brother. 

Now (according to the September 2022 issue of Kiplinger's) he is head of global ETF research at Morningside, the financial data firm, and he has this to say to nervous investors: Worry "is part of the price of admission. If it's too hard to watch, then step out and look at the trees, which at this time of year are mostly green, unlike the markets."  Note the simile's elegant allusion to Ben Jonson's book Timber, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641).

slippage (un)fixed by Bridget Gilmartin [introduced by Thomas Moody]

Brigit Gilmartin achieves a lot within sixteen short lines. “Louis Buvelot is painting” is the kind of opening you’d expect from a Frank O’Hara poem: both casual and direct, and there is an easy brevity to “slippage (un)fixed” that masks the significance of what it addresses. The poem is ostensibly about the artifice in art, the distance between the artwork and that which is being represented, no matter how faithful the attempt. Ironically, the landscape painting Louis Buvelot is working on is continually interfered with by the landscape being captured. “A mammoth gust of wind blows a twig onto the canvas” to mess up a branch of the painting's eucalypt. “Louis / picks out the twig with his thumb and forefinger.” Next a tooth appears in the painting's foreground. The tooth signals a shift (a volta?) in the poem's themes, as Gilmartin masterfully moves us away from representation in art and towards Australia’s colonial history.

Louis Buvelot was a Swiss-Australian painter best known as Arthur Streeton’s tutor, a founding member of the Heidelberg School. Inspired by European Naturalism and Impressionism, the Heidelberg School was a movement in Australian art during the late 19th century which favored painting en plein air and claimed to be the first set of (settler) artists to see Australia “through Australian eyes.” (Up to that point, landscape painting in Australia had neglected the great tonal idiosyncrasies in the Australian countryside.) The movement coincided with the county’s push towards federation, and there is a fair amount of nationalism associated with it—these are the paintings you find reproductions of in textbooks, on the walls of pubs, and as symbols of “Australian-ness.”

 

Louis Buvelot "Summer Evening Near Templestowe"

 

What these artworks refused to include was any representation of Indigenous Australians, their culture or their violent mistreatment by colonial Australia. The exclusion of Indigenous representation was symptomatic of Australia’s historical amnesia, or as W.E.H Stanner termed it “The Great Australian Silence,” in which Australians do not only fail to acknowledge the atrocities of the past, but consciously choose not to think about them, to the point of forgetting they happened at all. In “slippage (un)fixed” we get Louis Buvelot literally "clearing" the landscape of this history from his canvas in real time as he paints “Louis goes on picking out teeth / until finally he pulls a whole skull out of his /canvas. He tosses it away and puts the finishing / touches on the landscape”.

What makes “slippage” (un)fixed” such a terrific poem is that an ignorance of the history it references is no impediment to its enjoyment. Gilmartin's casual tone immediately welcomes us inside the poem, and the deftness of her transitions mean we never linger too long in any one place. It is such a visual poem, and the imagery so exact that once we arrive at pulling skulls from a canvas, we can see it so clearly it is hardly fantastical, an achievement which also might be mimetic of the ease in which history is erased (this process itself a fantasy), and the ease in which we accept this erasure.

 

 

slippage (un)fixed

 

Louis Buvelot is painting. It’s a quarter past

midday and you wouldn’t know out here unless

you looked at the sun but Louis doesn’t look

at the sun because he’s squinting at the trees.

A mammoth gust of wind blows a twig onto the

canvas. It lodges itself in a glob of oil paint. Louis

picks out the twig with his thumb and forefinger.

It messes up a branch of his painted eucalypt.

There’s something else stuck to the grass in the

foreground. It looks like a tooth; human or

animal, Louis doesn’t know. He picks it out but

once he’s done that he sees another appear.

And another. Louis goes on picking out teeth

until finally he pulls a whole skull out of his

canvas. He tosses it away and puts the finishing

touches on the landscape. Calls it The Clearing.

 

[First published at Cordite Poetry Review]

 

Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom) [with Perry Como and the Ray Charles Singers, 1956]

This was high on the charts when I was eight and riding a bicycle to impress a little girl. I am still fond of the song.

If you're hearing Emmanuel Chabrier's España (1883)
you're not wrong O
America we serve 
hot dogs to the King
and Queen of England
and did you know It was Al Jolson
who launched "hot diggity dog"
in the 20s, a decade famous for phrases,
like digga digga do and making whoopie.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Two): Diana Goetsch [by Angela Ball]

YOU COULD

I stood in the middle of my kitchen eating butter.
It was 11 a.m. on an overcast morning
I was wearing—well, let’s not worry about
what I was wearing. I don’t make a habit of this—
I’d never done it before. It wasn’t a whole stick,
though a good half inch. Popped it in
and let it melt into the flesh under my tongue,
the place where you’d insert nitro-glycerin,
if that’s what you needed. I won’t describe
the taste—you’ll have to try it for yourself.

Perhaps when you’re thinking about goals,
that would be a good time to let some
butter have a ride on your tongue,
or stick a thumb in a bowl of icing,
scarf a pie with no hands, like a wolf—
whatever pulls you in from, or shoves you out on the ledge
you might need to come in from, or go out on.
You don’t have to climb Mount Everest,
unless you find yourself in front of it
and can’t come away. Unless something’s
calling you to do something your friends
wouldn’t understand in a million years.

I don’t understand butter. I know it
comes from cows, who have given so much
for so long. But it’s a person I picture,
the first to try it. Others in the tribe
discarded the floating globules, but this one
opted to taste the world, the same world
that has us so worried and confused.
You could do it, and afterwards write it down:
Today was overcast. I put on a full slip, just because.
Oh and I ate butter—incredible!

--Diana Goetsch

Poems come out of nowhere and then you see what went into them. “You Could” is a carpe diem/anti-bucket list type poem. I knew a bucketlister whose goal was to see a baseball game in every major league stadium. This same person also said he wanted to die by age 60—which actually makes sense because been-there-done-that-ism is more about dying (“kicking the bucket”) than living. “You Could” was also influenced by Nazim Hikmet’s great poem, “Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison,” which recommends against certain activities (“to think of roses and gardens inside is bad”) in favor of others (“to think of seas and mountains is good”) in order to stay truly alive. Hikmet’s rating system may be cryptic to some, though the incarcerated kids I used to teach had no problems relating to the poem. “You Could” also elevates some experiences (butter tasting) over others (mountain climbing). And yet it ends with a journal entry, which makes every life look like a bucket list. –Diana Goetsch

Diana Goetsch is the author of several poetry collections, including Nameless Boy (Orchises, 2015) and In America (Rattle 2017), and also the memoir This Body I Wore (FSG, 2022), which was pronounced “achingly beautiful” by The New York Times Book Review. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.  She used to teach at Stuyvesant High School. Her website is www.dianagoetsch.com

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Two): Diana Goetsch

In her important “You Could,” Diana Goetsch treats us to the miraculous ordinary, like Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch when they thrill at “the park full of dancers and their tights and shoes / in little bags . . .” or at staring into, as into a musical telescope, “a bottle of sparkling pop.” Like both O’Hara’s and Koch’s work, “You Could” instructs by delighting.

The poem begins with a bald announcement of the kind a Noir narrator might make, complete with place, time, and weather: “I stood in the middle of my kitchen eating butter.” The speaker begins to tell what she was wearing, then rejects this as unimportant, launching instead into rationalization: it’s something she doesn’t do often and “wasn’t a whole stick / though a good half inch.” The butter dissolves into, in disconcerting coincidence, “the place you’d insert nitro-glycerin, / if that’s what you needed.” The poet declines to usurp our experience of butter by detailing her own encounter.

The poem’s second stanza introduces goals only to supply anarchic ones sure to be rejected by America’s ultra-serious dieters and exercisers, including “scarf a pie with no hands, like a wolf.” There’s no call to go all death-defying—“You don’t have to climb Mount Everest, / unless you find yourself in front of it / and can’t come away.” It broaches matters mysterious and serious, though mentioned casually: “Unless something’s calling you to do something / that your friends wouldn’t understand in a million years.” Something, perhaps, like changing your métier, your name, or your sex, as eels do going to or from the sea?

Then the poem makes a strange and wonderful pronouncement: “I don't understand butter.” Normally, butter does not offer itself to our understanding, not even on cooking shows that display its behavior as an ingredient, but tell us nothing of its inner life, its thisness. After a nod to the all-important cow, the poet moves to what truly interests her, the discoverer of butter—the explorer who, despite unfamiliarity “opted to taste the world, the same world / that has us so worried and confused.” The poem dares us to dare—to assume an MO arcane merely because so few have followed it—among them Frank O’Hara, who in in his poem “Autobiographia Literaria” transforms from reject to poet:

     And here I am, the
     center of all beauty!
     writing these poems!
     Imagine!

“You Could” ends by relating the author’s journal entry for the day as possible model, generous example, happily including the detail withheld at the start, what she is wearing:

     You could do it, and afterwards write it down:
     Today was overcast. I put on a full slip, just because.
     Oh and I ate butter—incredible!

The slip here, a garment now sadly in neglect, is the same one worn by the young Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront, and by the character Alison in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger; garment whose very mention (as “shift”) provoked riots during the run of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 Dublin. In putting it on, the poet puts on its feminine power, its fierce delicacy “just because”—the very reason we dare to indulge our dangerous and life-affirming impulses, the reason we enter an irresistible poem like Diana Goetsch’s “You Could” not knowing who we might be when we leave.

--Angela Ball

When Life followed Art, which returned the compliment

Life magazine, August 8, 1949. "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The artIcle that changed the art world. Merely by asking the question, Life made it a self-fulfilling prophecy, demonstrating the power of the media and the tendency of journalistic questions (like "Is God Dead?" on the cover of a 1966 issue of Life's sister magazine, Time) to slide into declarations. "Life -- consider the alternative" is attributed to Marshall McLuhan. I had erroneously thought the phrase served as an ad campaign for Life, the alternative to which was either Look or death. -- DL

 On the cover: Deborah Reynolds.

The Definition of Gardening [poem by James Tate]

So many people in my various social media feeds are posting pictures of their gardens these days. I'm reminded of this poem, by James Tate, from his wonderful book Shroud of the Gnome. sdl

The Definition of Gardening

Jim just loves to garden, yes he does.

He likes nothing better than to put on

his little overalls and his straw hat.

He says, "Let's go get those tools, Jim."

But then doubt begins to set in.

He says, "What is a garden, anyway?"

And thoughts about a "modernistic" garden

begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve.

He stands in the driveway a long time.

"Horticulture is a groping in the dark

into the obscure and unfamiliar,

kneeling before a disinterested secret,

slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,

birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and

destroy, pull out and apply salt,

hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,

where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,

the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love,

into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,

through the nose, the earsplitting necrology

of it, the withering, shriveling,

the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder

and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,

wireworms are worse than their parents,

there is no way out, flowers as big as heads,

pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently

at me, the me who so loves to garden

because it prevents the heaving of the ground

and the untimely death of porch furniture,

and dark, murky days in a large city

and the dream home under a permanent storm

is also a factor to keep in mind."

Martin Stannard: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________

Princess of Thieves

 

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine,

And I have something else I want to say:

That “Best of Phil Collins” CD you have is mine.

 

I have not slumped into a terminal decline

And Celia, I welcome each new sunshiny day.

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine.

 

It may be that you think I have no spine

But you’re wrong, and the truth is here to stay:

That “Best of Phil Collins” CD you have is mine.

 

Celia, I have never been the sort to whine,

And this is what I simply have to convey:

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine.

 

As I crack open another bottle of wine

The absence of that record causes me dismay.

Celia, that “Best of Phil Collins” CD is mine.

 

It is not in my nature to weakly repine

And every day I go out with my friends to play.

Since you left I’ve been absolutely bloody fine,

And Celia, that “Best of Phil Collins” CD is mine.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Martin Stannard lives in Nottingham, England, in quiet retirement with his cat, Xiao Mei. He was the editor/publisher of joe soap’s canoe magazine from 1978–1993, where he championed New York poets including Paul Violi, Tony Towle, and Charles North. His poetry and reviews have been published widely since the late 1970s, his most recent titles being The Review (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2020) and Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters (Leafe Press, 2020). “Princess of Thieves” is one poem in a short sequence now called “To Celia” that was originally written as a (slightly humorous but at the same time very serious) series of blog posts called “How To Write Poetry,” with tutorials on the sonnet, villanelle, triolet, sestina, and pantoum. These very useful guides can be found here.  

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"The Prophecy of an Assassination": On "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) [by David Lehman]

When The Manchurian Candidate, based on the novel by Richard Condon, was released in 1962, Pauline Kael called it “the most sophisticated political satire ever to come out of Hollywood.” Six decades on, the judgment holds, and I’ll go further. With its mind-bending plot, its celebrated brainwashing sequence, and stellar performances from a cast led by Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey, and Janet Leigh, director John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece remains supreme in the field of conspiracy-theory celluloid.

An honorable but inevitably lesser effort, Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, lacks the air of Cold War menace, not to mention the queen of diamonds in a game of solitaire as the trigger for a sleeper agent. Also lost is the cinematic magic of the original. Frankenheimer makes exemplary use of montage dissolve techniques to convey altered states of consciousness and depict the experience of hypnotic mind control. And, in retrospect, his 1962 movie seems almost to have anticipated either the earth-shaking events of November 22, 1963, or their interpretation.

Political scientists used to define politics as the art of the possible. If it has morphed into the craft of manipulative paranoia, the change dates back to the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission’s report satisfied few skeptics, journalists, or serious historians, and the credibility of politicians (who used to be called “statesmen”) keeps ebbing.

The Manchurian Candidate, which presaged the change, presents a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate by long-range rifle during his party’s nominating convention in Madison Square Garden. The movie’s conceit was so scary that studio executives at United Artists felt the project had to be cleared with the White House. Frank Sinatra dutifully called JFK, who greenlit the film, which Sinatra believed in so strongly that he volunteered the use of his private plane for an early scene in the movie.

Talk about serendipity: On October 22, 1962, only two days before the picture’s release, President Kennedy announced to the nation that he had ordered a naval blockade to repulse Russian ships, equipped with missiles, heading to the Caribbean. The Cuban Missile Crisis has been seen ever since as the tensest moment in the 45-year Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and here was a movie advancing the thesis that a Communist assassination plan was in the works.

The Manchurian Candidate is wickedly satirical. Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), a demagogue in the manner of Joe McCarthy, is revealed to be an imbecile under the thumb of his ambitious, intellectually superior wife, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury at her best). What happened to her first husband? The movie, mum on the point, offers an Oedipal triangle in which Mrs. Iselin controls her war hero son, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), and gets him to eliminate her rival, his bride (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of Senator Iselin’s fiercest, most principled opponent (John McGiver). Lansbury was less than three years older than Harvey. In the novel, she seduces him; in the film, just a kiss on the lips, but it’s enough.

What most distinguishes The Manchurian Candidate is its opening. If you miss the first five minutes of Hamlet, you can catch up (at the cost of some excellent verse), because the ghost does not appear to Hamlet until act I, scene 4 and doesn’t speak to him until scene 5. But, as the movie’s theatrical release poster accurately proclaimed, “If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about.” The film begins in Korea, 1952. Betrayed by a guide, an American army unit is ambushed. After Saul Bass’s marvelous title credits, featuring the queen of diamonds on an oversize political campaign button, we go to an American airport, where Sergeant Shaw, survivor of the ambush, is honored with hoopla for the valor he is said to have displayed under fire.

In the following scene, the camera slowly approaches Shaw’s commanding officer, Major Bennett Marco (Sinatra), asleep beside an insomniac’s paradise of books, among them The Trial, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Ulysses. Marco, who nominated Shaw for his medal, slides into a recurring nightmare of what really happened in Korea.

The brainwashing sequence begins with the captive GIs in their army fatigues on a stage. The audience appears to the men, in their trance, to consist of dowagers in sunhats who have gathered to talk about hydrangeas at a suburban garden party in New Jersey. In fact, the ladies in the audience are Russian and Chinese bigwigs, and Frankenheimer switches us back and forth between alternating versions, the harmless old women and the malevolent Communists in suits or uniforms. Then we watch in horror as, under orders, Shaw kills two of his fellow POWs while the other soldiers look on, affectless.

Like Major Marco, Corporal Al Melvin (James Edwards) has recurrent nightmares culminating in a public murder committed by Shaw. And, like Major Marco, he is programmed to say, when asked, that “‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Everyone says so, and it’s odd, because Raymond is a singularly cold, humorless fellow whom the men dislike..

The buried truth—that the recipient of a Congressional Medal of Honor, feted with fanfare, is a secret, trigger-ready weapon concocted by the enemy—created a mental shock to anyone who saw The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. (I was 14 years old, and amazed.) The plot: to engineer the nomination of the clownish Senator Iselin for the position of vice president, then to kill the man at the head of the ticket, paving the way for Iselin’s rise to that position. The paranoid paradox: the extreme right-wing John Iselin is really a clueless Communist placeholder. The brains of the operation: Eleanor Iselin, as icily ruthless as Lady MacBeth.

Marco, the veteran suffering from PTSD who tries to save Shaw from his predestined fate, looks like a man having a nervous breakdown, but he must have something going for him, because the glamorous and beautiful Rosie Cheyney (Janet Leigh) is willing to break her engagement to her fiancé on the basis of a shared cigarette with Marco on the train between Washington, D. C. and New York City. Although Leigh is extraneous to the plot, I have published a poem contending that the only justification needed for Janet Leigh’s presence in the movie is that she is Janet Leigh. More creatively, Roger Ebert argues that in the paranoid universe of The Manchurian Candidate, Leigh may secretly be Sinatra’s controller.

I will not give away other surprises and speculations except to say that the guises assumed by the queen of diamonds will endow that particular card with a rare significance if you are a part-time poker player. An amusing scene takes place in Jilly’s, Sinatra’s favorite New York hangout. When the bartender, telling a story, says, “Go up to Central Park and go jump in the lake,” Raymond—a solitaire addict who has just encountered the trigger card—does as told. Marco has to fish him out.

The Manchurian Candidate has altered political discourse, and the very word brainwashing has acquired a stink. The evil mesmerist-in-chief, Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), crows that Raymond Shaw’s “brain has not only been washed, as they say; it’s been dry-cleaned.” In 1967, George Romney shot his presidential candidacy in the foot when he said he had supported the Vietnam War because US generals had “brainwashed” him. Recently, Donald Trump has been depicted as a “Manchurian candidate,” allegedly willing to favor the Russians in exchange for lucrative real-estate deals.

But The Manchurian Candidate offers more than a linguistic afterlife, thrilling paranoia, and the cunning of Eleanor Iselin. It succeeds as well as it does because of the strong sense of the uncanny that informs it, as if we were watching our own history rendered as a spooky hallucination, delivered with the plausibility of a newsreel.

Click here for the "Talking Pictures" column on The American Scholar, January 22, 2022.

"A desire to capture events": Nick Courtright & Cynthia Good in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

I'm excited to introduce this conversation between Cynthia Good and Nick Courtright, who I've paired because of their shared investment in travel, documentary poetics, and entrepreneurship in literature and the arts.  Here, they discuss their latest collections, as well as the intersection of lived experience, craft, and the business of writing.  

Cynthia Good is an award-winning poet, journalist, and former TV news anchor. She has written six books including Vaccinating Your Child, which won the Georgia Author of the Year award. She has launched two magazines, Atlanta Woman and the nationally distributed PINK magazine for women in business. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Adanna Journal, Awakenings, Book of Matches, Brickplight, Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, Cutthroat, Free State Review, Full Bleed, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hole in the Head Review, Main Street Rag, Maudlin House Review, MudRoom, Outrider Press, OyeDrum Magazine, The Penmen Review, Pensive Journal, Persimmon Tree, Pier-Glass Poetry, Pink Panther Magazine, Poydras, South Shore Review, The Ravens Perch, Reed Magazine, Tall Grass, Terminus Magazine, They Call Us, and Voices de la Luna and Willows Wept Review, Semi-Finalist: The Word Works 2021, among others. Her debut poetry collection is available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press. 

Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light and Punchline, and he serves as the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, Nick lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel.

 

Cynthia Good: Why were you moved to focus on place, and what places in particular, since it is a bit mysterious in some of your beautiful poems?

Nick Courtright: I was drawn to place because the otherworldliness—and normalcy—of non-America called for a deeper exploration. I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to have seen a lot of the world, and what I found there was not just a bunch of tourist sites, but a reminder that the lives of others are just as rich and nuanced—and perhaps even more so—than ours in America, even though in America we tend to have a rather flat impression of the rest of the world.

IM Vin Scully (1927-2022) Laureate of Play-by-Play Poetry [by David Lehman]

When Kirk Gibson hit perhaps the most unlikely home run in baseball history – when, hobbled with injuries, he pinch-hit with two out and a man on first base, and the Dodgers were one pitch away from losing the game, and with one swing Gibson reversed the team’s fortunes – play-by-play man Jack Buck said “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Beautiful: a totally colloquial line of iambic tetrameter. Vin Scully, describing the same at-bat, let a few seconds of silence pass before saying, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened."

I am going from memory and I may have a word or two wrong there, but the point of this piece is an appreciation of play-by-play announcers and the memorable things they say. This (2016) is Vin Scully’s last year as the voice of the Dodgers, and I dedicate these musings to him, the red-headed gentleman who invites viewers to pull up a chair and join him in Dodger Stadium.

There were many anecdotes about Scully making the rounds as he completed his astounding career – having broadcast or telecast Dodger games since 1950. Everyone loves his call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. In October of that year, when Koufax on two days’ rest shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the World Series for his team, Vinny said, “Sandy, two days ago you said you felt like a hundred years old. How do you feel now?” “Like a hundred and one,” Koufax replied.

Every so often Scully will surprise you with a literary allusion, and he usually doesn’t repeat himself, though Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait” has served him well for years. When he broke the news of the untimely death of Don Drysdale, the great pitcher who had become his broadcast partner, Scully said, with simple eloquence, “Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart.”

Left: Sandy Koufax (center) and the late Tommy Lasorda at a ceremony honoring Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium, May 3, 2017

Added on August 4, 2022:

Vin Scully died this week, a year after his beloved wife passed. He was 94. The eulogists were justly extravagant in their praise of the Hall of Fame broadcaster, voice of the Dodgers from 1950 through 2016. Nor did the plaudits come exclusively fom Dodger fans. Honoring Scully, the team's bitterest rivals, the Giants of San Francisco,  did something very classy prior to Wednesday's evening's contest between the two squads. Jon Miller, the Giants' lead broadcaster since 1997 and one of the best in the business, calls him "the greatest broadcaster there ever was." Miller does a tremendous impression of Vin - in English,Japanese, and Spanish!

Here's Vin's call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on September 9, 1965. "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium is the loneliest place in the world right now" on 9:43 PM. Koufax ended the game with a strikeout; in fact he struck out the side in both the eighth and ninth innings. "Swung on and missed, a perfect game!" Andf then Vin had the wit to keep quiet and let the crowd noise take over "in the city of angels." 

When the Sandy Koufax statue was unveiled at Dodger Stadium in June of this year, the great southpaw said “Vin Scully is the greatest of all time, period." 

Some of Vin Scully's best lines, with thanks to Houston Mitchell of the Los Angeles Times:

“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theater, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!”

“He pitches as though he’s double-parked.” — on Bob Gibson

A Joey Gallo home run off Clayton Kershaw looked like "a marble" when it went way over the right field fence.

“He’s like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” — on Tom Glavine

“It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timers’ game.”

"Statistics are used the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination."

“Roberto Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pittsburgh.”

"Losing feels worse than winning feels good."

"Fernando ready, and the strike-two pitch is hit back to the box, dribbling to second, [Juan] Samuel on the bag, throws to first for the double play! Fernando Valenzuela has pitched a no-hitter at 10:17 in the evening on June three 29th, 1990. If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!"

Calling Hank Aaron‘s 715th home run: “What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. … It is over, at 10 minutes after 9 in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth. You could not, I guess, get two more opposite men. The Babe, big and garrulous and oh so sociable and oh so immense in all his appetites. And then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama — slender and stayed slender throughout his career. Ruth, as he put on the poundage and the paunch, the Yankees put their ballplayers in pinstripe uniforms, because it made Ruth look slimmer. But they didn’t need pinstripe uniforms for Aaron in the twilight of his career.”

His final words as a Dodgers broadcaster:

“You know, friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a 67-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family, and now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you. May God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every care, a promise; and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life seems, a faithful friend to share; for every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for each prayer. You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know, in my heart, I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball. So, this is Vin Scully wishing you a pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.”

So pull up a chair and listen to the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's greatest pitching feat.

There were many anecdotes about Scully making the rounds as he completed his astounding career – having broadcast or telecast Dodger games since 1950. Everyone loves his call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. In October of that year, when Koufax on two days’ rest shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the World Series for his team, Vinny said, “Sandy, two days ago you said you felt like a hundred years old. How do you feel now?” “Like a hundred and one,” Koufax replied.

Every so often Scully will surprise you with a literary allusion, and he usually doesn’t repeat himself, though Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait” has served him well for years. When he broke the news of the untimely death of Don Drysdale, the great pitcher who had become his broadcast partner, Scully said, with simple eloquence, “Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart.”

Left: Sandy Koufax (center) and the late Tommy Lasorda at a ceremony honoring Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium, May 3, 2017

Added on August 4, 2022:

Vin Scully died this week, a year after his beloved wife passed. He was 94. The eulogists were justly extravagant in their praise of the Hall of Fame broadcaster, voice of the Dodgers from 1950 through 2016. Nor did the plaudits come exclusively fom Dodger fans. Honoring Scully, the team's bitterest rivals, the Giants of San Francisco,  did something very classy prior to Wednesday's evening's contest between the two squads. Jon Miller, the Giants' lead broadcaster since 1997 and one of the best in the business, calls him "the greatest broadcaster there ever was." Miller does a tremendous impression of Vin - in English,Japanese, and Spanish!

Here's Vin's call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on September 9, 1965. "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium is the loneliest place in the world right now" on 9:43 PM. Koufax ended the game with a strikeout; in fact he struck out the side in both the eighth and ninth innings. "Swung on and missed, a perfect game!" Andf then Vin had the wit to keep quiet and let the crowd noise take over "in the city of angels." 

When the Sandy Koufax statue was unveiled at Dodger Stadium in June of this year, the great southpaw said “Vin Scully is the greatest of all time, period." 

Some of Vin Scully's best lines, with thanks to Houston Mitchell of the Los Angeles Times:

“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theater, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!”

“He pitches as though he’s double-parked.” — on Bob Gibson

A Joey Gallo home run off Clayton Kershaw looked like "a marble" when it went way over the right field fence.

“He’s like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” — on Tom Glavine

“It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timers’ game.”

"Statistics are used the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination."

“Roberto Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pittsburgh.”

"Losing feels worse than winning feels good."

"Fernando ready, and the strike-two pitch is hit back to the box, dribbling to second, [Juan] Samuel on the bag, throws to first for the double play! Fernando Valenzuela has pitched a no-hitter at 10:17 in the evening on June three 29th, 1990. If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!"

Calling Hank Aaron‘s 715th home run: “What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. … It is over, at 10 minutes after 9 in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth. You could not, I guess, get two more opposite men. The Babe, big and garrulous and oh so sociable and oh so immense in all his appetites. And then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama — slender and stayed slender throughout his career. Ruth, as he put on the poundage and the paunch, the Yankees put their ballplayers in pinstripe uniforms, because it made Ruth look slimmer. But they didn’t need pinstripe uniforms for Aaron in the twilight of his career.”

His final words as a Dodgers broadcaster:

“You know, friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a 67-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family, and now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you. May God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every care, a promise; and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life seems, a faithful friend to share; for every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for each prayer. You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know, in my heart, I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball. So, this is Vin Scully wishing you a pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.”

So pull up a chair and listen to the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's greatest pitching feat.

Auden's Predictions in "For the Time Being"

<<< Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, and the same for all, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions—feelings in the solar plexus induced by undernourishment, angelic images generated by fevers or drugs, dream warnings inspired by the sound of falling water. Whole cosmologies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of school children ranked above the great masterpieces.

Idealism will be replaced by Materialism. Priapus will only have to move to a good address and call himself Eros to become darling of middle-aged women. Life after death will be an eternal dinner party where all the guests are twenty years old. Diverted from its normal and wholesome outlet in patriotism and civic or family pride, the need of the materialistic Masses for some visible Idol to worship will be driven into totally unsocial channels where no education can reach it. Divine honors will be paid to silver tea-pots, shallow depressions in the earth, names on maps, domestic pets, ruined windmills, even in extreme cases, which will become increasingly common, to headaches, or malignant tumors, or four o’clock in the afternoon.

Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish. Every corner-boy will congratulate himself: “I’m such a sinner that God had to come down in person to save me. I must be a devil of a fellow.” Every crook will argue, “I like committing crimes. God likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged.” And the ambition of every young cop will be to secure a death-bed repentance. The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums, and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with the animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Tragedy when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.

Naturally this cannot be allowed to happen. Civilization must be saved even if this means sending for the military, as I suppose it does. How dreary. Why is it that in the end civilization always has to call in those professional tidiers to whom it is all one it be Pythagoras or a homicidal lunatic that they are instructed to exterminate. O dear, Why couldn’t this wretched infant be born somewhere else? Why can’t people be sensible? I don’t want to be horrid. Why can’t they see that the notion of a finite God is absurd? Because it is. And suppose, for the sake of argument, that it isn’t that this story is true, that this child is in some inexplicable manner both God and Man, that he grows up, lives and dies, without committing a single sin? Would that make life any better? On the contrary it would make it far, far worse. For it could only mean this: that once having shown them how, God would expect every man, whatever his fortune, to lead a sinless life in the flesh and on earth. Then indeed would the human race be plunged into madness and despair. And for me personally at this moment it would mean that God had given me the power to destroy Himself. I refuse to be taken in. He could not play such a horrid practical joke. Why should he dislike me so? I’ve worked like a slave. Ask anyone you like. I read all official dispatches without skipping. I’ve taken elocution lessons. I’ve hardly ever taken bribes. How dare he allow me to decide. I’ve tried to be good. I brush my teeth every single night. I haven’t had sex for a month. I object. I’m a liberal. I want everyone to be happy. I wish I had never been born. >>>

from For the Time Being © The Estate of W. H. Auden

The speaker is King Herod, who has just ordered the massacre of the innocents, the slaying of the first-born of Judea. The question is whether Auden agrees with the predictions, particularly those in bold face. Is he, like Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, committed to the notion that that self-criticism is the writer's first obligation? When Herod says "I'm a liberal," is this a comment on Herod (self-delusion) or on liberalism? One could argue that Auden discredits these predictions by assigning them to the villainous Herod. Nevertheless, a case can be made that many of these negative predictions have come to pass.

The new two-volume set of W. H. Auden's complete poems, meticulously assembled and presented by Edward Mendelson, is highly recommended (Princeton University Press). DL

Poet Spotlight: Shane McCrae [by Kristina Marie Darling]

I'm thrilled to introduce this new poem by celebrated writer Shane McCrae.  As a longtime admirer of McCrae's work, I never cease to be amazed by his ability to bear the distinctive lineation of Frank O'Hara and the cadences of classic New York School poetry into new and unforeseen sociopolitical territory.  

Poet Shane McCrae grew up in Texas and California. The first in his family to graduate from college, McCrae earned a BA at Linfield College, an MA at the University of Iowa, an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a JD at Harvard Law School.
 
McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Mule(2011); Blood (2013); The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Gilded Auction Block (2019). His work has also been featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler, and his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

--Kristina Marie Darling 

A New Poem by Shane McCrae

“The Dreyfus Affair” [by David Lehman]

Louis Begley writes well and is a good guide to one of modern history's great tragic causes celebres, the court-martial of French artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus [left] on trumped-up charges of treason in 1894. The evidence was fabricated, the trial closed to the public, and Dreyfus was convicted and imprisoned on devil's island off the coast of French Guiana. His real crime was that he was a Jew and France was embracing anti-Semitism with the lust of a pimp eyeing Catherine Deneuve. Emile Zola (J'Accuse] and others rose to Dreyfus's  defense. Nevertheless, Dreyfus suffered five years of solitary confinement before the verdict was overturned. In 1906 the French high court exonerated Dreyfus. Despite his mistreatment by the French army, the assassination of his character, and the degradation and suffering he endured in prison, Dreyfus wanted nothing more than to return to active military service. He served at the front in World War I with an artillery command close to Verdun, was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and was decorated with the Legion d'honneur.

Begley's Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters is published as part of a "why it matters" series by Yale University Press. it is a cogent little book, certainly worth reading, though my disquietude was awakened by the jacket copy that asked whether the Dreyfus case was "merely another illustration of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti-Semitism." That merely bothered me, and I note that the preface of this brief book, the last eighteen pages of its opening chapter, and its coda strongly imply that the lesson of the affair, the reason it matters to us today, is that it warns us against such "crimes and abuses" committed against "some Guantanamo detainees" in the aftermath of the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001. 

Is that really what makes Dreyfus relevant to us here, now? Or isn't the resurgence of a virulent  anti-Semitism -- the demonizing of the Jews and of Israel (Islamic dictatorships and religious authorities make no distinction between them); the chorus of voices calling for the annihilation of Israel; the campaigns of hatred and violence targeting Jews; the re-surfacing of the vicious Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the murders; the beheading of an American journalist after forcing him to tell the camera that he is a Jew and that his mother was a Jew, as if that were a capital offense; -- isn't all that reason enough to recall the Dreyfus Affair in its unhappy detail? Do you mean to tell me that this infamous episode in modern history, this outrageous injustice, is not finally about the Jews and those who would vilify them but about something else entirely, the depredations of the Bush Administration? I fear that this sort of reasoning may itself be evidence of the phenomenon that it evades.

BTW, this is the publisher that has withdrawn, from a book just weeks away from publication, the Danish newspaper cartoons that offended Islamic bigots in 2005. The book, by a Brandeis professor named Jytte Klausen, is called The Cartoons That Shook the World. Reproduction of the illustrations would seem to be an inevitable and indispensable part of any study of them. To withdraw the pictures is a craven act of self-censorship founded on no principle nobler than the adage to let sleeping dogs lie, especially when they are killers. Let the pictures be published. If enough people make enough of a fuss, maybe Yale University Press will buckle to the pressure. They seem to be good at that.

-- DL 

from the archive; first posted on September 18, 2009 at 07:12 PM

"Intellect, anxiety, philosophy, history, art": Rachel Abramowitz and Tina Cane in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

It is a pleasure to introduce this conversation by two outstanding and generous literary citizens:  Tina Cane and Rachel Abramowitz.  In both writers' bodies of work, we see a poetics powered by community, enriched by conversation and emboldened by dialogue across genres and mediums.  

Rachel Abramowitz is also the author The Birthday of the Dead, which just launched from Conduit Editions, as well as the chapbooks The Puzzle Monster, winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2022), and Gut Lust, the winner of the 2019 Burnside Review prize (Burnside Review Press, 2020). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Tin House Online, The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Oxonian Review, POOL, jubilat, Sprung Formal, Transom, Colorado Review, and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Oxford, and has taught English Literature at Barnard College in New York. 

Tina Cane was born in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC in 1969 and grew up in the city’s East and West Village. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne and completed her master’s degree in French Literature at ​the University of Paris X-Nanterre and Middlebury College.  She is the founder and director of Writers-in-the Schools, RI, for which she works as a visiting poet. Over the past twenty-five years, Tina has taught French, English, and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island.  Her poems and translations have appeared ​in numerous publications, including Spinning Jenny, The Literary  Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, Poem-a-Day.  Her work,The Fifth Thought, was the 2008 Other Painters Press chapbook winner. Her books include The Fifth Thought,Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work. Tina was the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and their three children. In 2020, Cane was named a poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Tina is also the creator/curator of the distance reading series, ​Poetry is Bread.  Alma Presses Play, Tina's debut novel-in-verse for young adults readers, will be released in September 2021 with Penguin/ Random House Books.

Tina Cane: There's a poem I keep returning to called "Vantablack" from your new collection, The Birthday of the Dead. It's named for that blackest shade of paint ever made, but manages to encapsulate the book's exploration of how, in your words, "any human interaction" with the natural world "turns out  to be devastating in unexpected ways." The thrust of this observation pervades your book, which is a place where "the forest fills and unfills, drops itself down root tubes and turns to dark lace." Where does this vision of our relationship with nature spring from? How would you characterize your relationship with the natural world?

Complain, Complain: Poems about writing poetry [by Katha Pollitt]

    Complain, Complain: Poems about Writing Poetry
    by Katha Pollitt (pictured below left, reading at KGB Bar)

Have you ever noticed how many modern poems there are in which the poet complains about the difficulty of writing poetry?  I suspect this is a relatively recent addition to the long list of poets’ complaints, perhaps replacing the traditional lament that the poet’s girlfriend won’t sleep with him. Now chances are she’ll do that, at least for a while.  Back in the day poets  wrote scads of poems about about how cold and heartless or just mysteriously uninterested the desired woman was, but at least the poem itself was not the problem.  Poets  were always comparing themselves to shepherds tootling on flutes or panpipes, which sounds restful and pleasant and not very musically challenging, or to madmen raving, birds warbling, or other images of spontaneous and untutored communication.  Perhaps it was easier when you had the Muse to do the heavy lifting.

  I thought about this because of a dinner party I recently attended, to which each guest was asked to bring a poem to read around the table. Most of the guests were writers, although I was the only poet.  I am embarrassed to say how long it took me to choose my poem -- so many of my favorites I had to disqualify as too long, too sad, too intimate, too familiar,  or inviting an inaccurate autobiographical reading.  I mean, nobody wants to have to hear the whole “Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” before they get to eat dessert. 

     Aha, I thought, Stevie Smith (pictured above)! A poet I love. She’s funny, she’s poignant, she has lots of short poems.  Lots of short poems about Christianity (no), death (no), ridiculous people (no) and unhappy love(no!).  Just when I was about to have a fit -- because did I mention that I left all this to the last moment and had persuaded myself that I was about to make a great fool of myself in front of a whole roomful of people I admired and esteemed and even, in one or two cases, was a bit afraid of, and I was beginning to wonder if  possibly, my humiliation was the whole secret point of the exercise --  I found  this wonderful poem:

Mrs. Arbuthnot

Mrs. Arbuthnot was a poet
A poet of high degree,
But her talent left her;
Now she lives at home by the sea.

In the morning she washes up,
In the afternoon she sleeps,
Only in the evenings sometimes
for her lost talent she weeps,

Crying: I should write a poem,
Can I look a wave in the face
If I do not write a poem about a sea-wave,
Putting the words in place.

Mrs. Arbuthnot has died,
She has gone to heaven,
She is one with the heavenly combers now
And need not write about them.

Cry: she is a heavenly comber,
she runs with a comb of fire,
Nobody writes or wishes to
Who is one with their desire.

   As it happens, another guest brought  a poem on the same theme, Brenda Shaughnessy’s "A Poet’s Poem":

If it takes me all day,
I will get the word freshened out of this poem.
I put it in the first line, then moved it to the second,
and now it won’t come out.
It’s stuck. I’m so frustrated,
so I went out to my little porch all covered in snow
and watched the icicles drip, as I smoked
a cigarette.
Finally I reached up and broke a big, clear spike
off the roof with my bare hand.
And used it to write a word in the snow.
I wrote the word snow.
I can’t stand myself.

  If Mrs. Arbuthnot had written a poem about not writing that poem about the sea wave, it might have been this very poem.   

   So if nobody writes or wishes to who is one with their desire,  has the poem itself become the elusive, resistant love object, the modern  Phyllis or Clorinda?

Posted by Katha Pollitt on August 02, 2009 at 06:18 AM

Said Disraeli to Gladstone. . .

 

At a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli, "I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease."

Disraeli replied, "That all depends, Sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

Poet Spotlight: Cole Swensen [by Kristina Marie Darling]

It's truly an honor to introduce this new work by acclaimed poet Cole Swensen.  Here, she offers a complex and gorgeously lyrical phenomenology of perception, deftly interrogating the ways that language shapes one's experience of the senses and the world around us.  In Swensen's newest work, the unique artistic opportunities of poetry - performative language, metaphor, and the image - are brought to bear on these philosophical questions with incredible skill.  It is the associative logic that Swensen implements that allows her to present inquiries into the nature of language and perception in a visceral way. Indeed, "New Green" involves and implicates the reader in the speaker's efforts to understand - and delineate - a clearer boundary between self and world.  This is a stunning addition to an already accomplished body of work.  

Cole Swensen is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017), Gave (Omnidawn, 2017), and Landscapes on a Train(Nightboat 2015), and a volume of critical essays. Her poetic collections turn around specific research projects, including ones on public parks, visual art, illuminated manuscripts, and ghosts. Her work has won the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and the founding editor of La Presse Poetry (www.lapressepoetry.com). She teaches at Brown University.

New Green by Cole Swensen 

What is the unseen, and how do we see it before it emerges? That is the nature of earliest things, and you try to observe what comes first—a blade of grass, a livening of the moss, an outbreak of leaf—looking out the window and then walking outside in search of emergence. It really does have a different color—which is also what’s puzzling your child as she runs out of the house holding up a crayon, asking “What does New Green mean? Haven’t all colors been around forever?” And I think of the translation that I’ve just finished for a catalogue in which the artist, among a list of colors, included verd, which turned out to be old French for vert, and, sure enough, Old English has grene, but despite this clear illustration, the child refuses to believe that it’s possible to invent a new color simply by inventing a new word.