A Word to Husbands
To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.
from Candy is Dandy by Ogden Nash (1962).
Did you know that rhymester Nash wrote the lyrics for Kurt Weill's beautiful love song "Speak Low"?
"My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit."
—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons
-- sdl
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On the corner of 12th and Market, a man says
Nihao, China and I’m in love,
I just don’t know it yet. One day, I’ll love
the slant of my eyes, their slashing stare.
I’ll love the ching-chong clamour of the old country
and my grandfather’s names: both the one
he was given and the one taken away
by the registrar’s pen. None of his siblings
had the same last name but I’ll love them too:
the Che’s and Chen’s and Chong’s, all laid out
like a racist’s naughty nursery rhyme.
I’ll be shook by my buck-toothed gook
reflection. I’ll be cool with my coolie shape
and my sideways drape, how easily
my body zipperheads into anything else –
a container of chowmein, a coin slot
cooter choking open. I’ll be someone’s
bamboo chink and kimchee kink, though bitch,
I’m not even Korean. I’ll stan
my Jackie Chan doyenne Chinaman
brand. I’ll idealize this Oriental disguise.
I hope I just don’t know it yet.
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Lyn Li Che was born in Malaysia. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Michigan Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Waxwing, PANK, Passages North, Tupelo Quarterly, BOAAT, River Styx, and others. A 2021 Kundiman Mentorship Lab Fellow, she currently lives in New York City, where she works in tech strategy.
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Mohd Noor Mahmud, Siri Kala Kota Bharu series: Main Ayun, acrylic on wood, 2006
As Romance Fails
Indolence fans the aqua pools
before lovers’ spats prelude dawn’s make-up sex.
A chilling sky ensues, as everyone fears love,
the great mummer of regrets. Yet,
not even trees control their destinies,
half-stilled by burlesque bees, bird-burdened.
Nor can they turn upright one fallen limb, languishing
as if lonesome. You, Richard, have grown,
a green sailor upon a mulched sea, closer
to love, to reality, to the seashells of woodbine,
the seraph’s tunes; and, soon, trust,
regret’s second cousin, will alarm you
with devotion: its rose-lilt fathoms, their glass eye,
enfolding bold écrivains who, far-flung, revive.
from the archive; first posted December 1, 2008. Photo of Star Black and Paul Violi above. Photo credit: David Lehman (1998).
DUSK
for Barry Lopez [January 6, 1945 - December 25, 2020]
Horizon fades from blue to black
with infinite tenderness in London
tonight. Yet even at full dusk a smear
of cobalt rings the tree line. Maybe
endless love awaits us. I know you believed
so, even as forests and rivers turned to fire,
libraries to ash. Now that you’re not here
to tend them, I see the lamps you lit for us.
Sometimes it’s important to see the darkness,
you would say, to regard one another other,
and our trembling. Or on other nights, like
now: we must look up. How is this same
moon in my sky hanging over Eugene these
small hours? Do you feel its comforts?
As you sleep through this final stretch
how badly I want you to know we have
the torches now, my friend, we’ll protect the flame,
you are free to be the wind again.
-- John Freeman
John Freeman (pictured above) is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and The Tyranny of E-mail, as well as Tales of Two Americas, an anthology of new writing about inequality in the U.S. today. Maps, his debut collection of poems, was published in 2017. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the New York Times. The former editor of Granta and one-time president of the National Book Critics Circle, he is currently Artist-in-Residence at New York University. The poem appears in a special issue of Orion magazine, in which writers and artists salute the late Barry Lopez.
https://orionmagazine.org/article/writers-artists-on-the-influence-of-barry-lopez/#freeman
The Salmagundi Club’s Figurative Art Exhibition
Denizens of lower Fifth Avenue in New York City are excited by the figurative art on display at the Salmagundi Club:
47 Fifth Avenue @ Twelfth Street | New York, NY 10003
Tel: (212) 255-7740 | Email: info@salmagundi.org
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The Salmagundi Club is pleased to announce its 2022 open New York Figurative exhibition. This will be an exhibition of figurative work and the human form in all of its permutations: portraiture, clothed, nude; focusing on the human form and/or face
D A T E
January 10, 2021 – January 28, 2021
L O C A T I O N
Skylight gallery
H O U R S
Monday to Friday, 1PM – 6PM
Saturday & Sunday, 1PM – 5PM
Salmagundi welcomes Max Ginsburg and Colleen Barry who will serve as the Jury of Awards. Guest Advisor: Patricia Watwood Among the painters whose work is on display is Ricky Mujica with his portrait of David Lehman.reproduced on the cover of The Morning Line. Click here for more information. Below are paintings from the 2021 show by (left to right, top to bottom) by Susan O’Neill, “Eloquent”, Charcoal and Water-Soluble Graphite, 28″ 36″; Elizabeth Zanzinger, “Foragers”, Oil on Panel, 20″ x 15″; Anton Zhou, “Folklore”, Oil, 24″ x 18″; Anthony Almeida, “Connections in Time and Place”, LE Black and White Photo on Aluminum Substrate, 24″ x 30″; Christopher Zhang, “Mother and Child”, Oil, 28″ x 22″; Jane Manco, “Evening in the Drawing Room”, Oil, 12″ x 12
Of these, which is your favorite? So far we have received votes for "Foragers," "Mother and Child," and "Evening in the Darwing Room."
The Crows
There must have been greetings
that rhymed with each of them,
but now she only remembers
the goodbyes, the countless times
they stood together speechless
under a starry meal of snow,
crows congregating above them
in bare winter branches, all through
the desperate sadness at the end,
one of them still madly in love
while the other admitted defeat,
taking turns as if exchanging
a heavy suitcase. And they were after all
always traveling. Somehow never at home.
He loved her in libraries and parking lots,
in cemeteries and cafes. She loved him
in the held breath of elevators, in stairwells
and trains. He loved her in daylight. But also
in the dark. She loved him most at the end
of the day, telling a story at dinner
while waving his fork and knife. He was her
never husband and she his never wife.
There must have been greetings
that rhymed with each of them.
All along, though they couldn’t hear it,
before they had stopped being lovers,
before they had even started,
back when they were two people leaving
a restaurant in summer’s dusk,
the crows were growing busy, numerous,
there was one coming to land
on every branch of every tree, once
the thumbless black hands of their wings
had finished stroking the malleable sky,
all along, though they couldn’t hear it,
the birds had been winging
their silent applause
for the love that was going to be, then was.
--Jennifer Grotz
Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open, and translator of three books from the French and Polish, most recently Everything I Don’t Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, co-translated with Piotr Sommer. She teaches at the University of Rochester and directs the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. Still Falling, her fourth book of poems, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2023.
Photo by Marion Ettlinger
The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-One): Jennifer Grotz
Jennifer’s Grotz’s mysterious, generous poem, “The Crows,” is parable—but more; the crows, its totems, but more. Reading it, we are pulled in two directions. There is much to say, there is nothing to say—the direction of the ordinary, the direction of the holy. The poem’s almost-refrain, “There must have been greetings / that rhymed with each of them” suggests a Blakean song of innocence in which the world is right, is true; but also suggests the calls of crows announcing something dead and ready to eat; and Ted Hughes’s landmark book, Crow, the dark parable he made of marriage.
The poem dramatizes Robert Frost’s useful dictum, which applies so well to the New York School of Poets and their diaspora: poetry must possess either outer humor and inner seriousness or outer seriousness and inner humor. Dead seriousness is powerless to move us. That’s why the late Stephen Sondheim, in his wrenching (though often over-acted: Judi Dench sings it best) song of lost love, calls for clowns.
The poem’s two characters are isolated, as in parables and fairy tales:
they stood together speechless
under a starry meal of snow,
crows congregating above them
in bare winter branches, all through
the desperate sadness at the end,
one of them still madly in love
while the other admitted defeat,
taking turns as if exchanging
a heavy suitcase.
Dark humor informs the mechanical exchanging of roles, the absurd simile of the suitcase.
The poem partakes, also, of Wallace Stevens’ “mind of winter,” in which silence has the most say.
Yet at its heart there’s a beautiful fairy tale in which each lover’s action is answered variously but exactly by the other’s:
He loved her in libraries and parking lots,
in cemeteries and cafes. She loved him
in the held breath of elevators, in stairwells
and trains. He loved her in daylight. But also
in the dark. She loved him most at the end
of the day, telling a story at dinner
while waving his fork and knife. He was her
never husband and she his never wife.
How exact, that “held breath of elevators.” The last sentence of the interlude, with its nursery-style clinching rhyme, pronounces both the perfection of the moment and the disaster hovering over the couple from and, indeed, before their beginning. Arrive it does, with a suggestion of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds:
the crows were growing busy, numerous,
there was one coming to land
on every branch of every tree
that introduces the poem’s final trajectory with this most lovely, most chilling couplet: “once / / the thumbless black hands of their wings / had finished stroking the malleable sky,” finally declaring the ascendency of fate, the force that ever and always operates in silence:
all along, though they couldn’t hear it,
the birds had been winging
their silent applause
for the love that was going to be, then was.
It is the last small phrase of Jennifer Grotz’s The Crows that pronounces victory not just for fate, but for love. Love “was”—existed, held sway. The small word, a weak verb’s past tense, declares both loss and possession, two forces that equally hold us—until, at last, they fade.
--Angela Ball
Mark Twain, on the Viennese Parliament in 1897: "As to the make-up of the House itself, it is this: the deputies come from all the walks of life and from all the grades of society. There are princes, counts, barons, priests, mechanics, laborers, physicians, professors, merchants, bankers,shopkeepers. They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere, devoted, and they hate the Jews." Lionel Trilling, who quoted this, added that "This hatred of the Jews was the one point of unity in a Parliament which was torn asunder by the fiercest nationalistic and cultural jealousies." Still true.
-- DL
In the summer 2015 issue of Stay Thirsty there's a great interview with Eddie Muller (shown here with Kathleen Maria Milne). Eddie is host of TCM's Noir Alley and head of the foundation that has rescued from oblivion such film noir classics as Cry Danger (1951), Try and Get Me! (1951), Repeat Performance (1948), Too Late for Tears (1949), and Woman on the Run (1950). Watch his showings -- midnight Saturdays and 120 AM Sundays -- and you'll marvel not only at his erudition and charm but also at his period-authentic ties and stylish decor. Click here to read the interview. It was a particular thrill for me when Eddie genrously provided a blurb for my new book, coming in May 2022, The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir. -- DL
https://www.staythirstymedia.com/201507-089/html/201507-yost-muller.html
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501763625/the-mysterious-romance-of-murder/#bookTabs=1
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The Swimming Pool
The diver was a knife that slit the surface
with the merest sliver of a splash.
Her zaftig mother was a pudding oozing
through the poolside plastic webbing.
The diver's boyfriend was a mannequin
in bronze tan and vermillion trunks.
He ran past the mother, leapt, grabbed his knees,
and landed with a cannonball tsunami.
I was a chimera, dog's head and walrus body,
swimming laps through the chlorine blue.
I knew the mother and the boyfriend would tire of the sun
and leave the pool to me, the diver and the indigo dusk.
The diver bounced on the board, lifted off, hinged at the hips,
straightened like a blade and sliced into the bubbles.
I stayed in my lane, scooping with my hands,
swimming toward her, away, toward her, away.
Water was our world. Water was our language.
Water was our worship. Water was our embrace.
I could be the spoon to her knife.
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Geoffrey Himes’s poetry has been published by December, Gianthology, the Loch Raven Review, Survision, January Review, Salt Lick, the Baltimore City Paper, and other publications. His poems are included in the anthologies Singing in the Dark and Poet Trees: Poetry Hiding in Plain Sight. His song lyrics have been set to music by Si Kahn, Walter Egan, Billy Kemp, Fred Koller, and others. His book on Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A., was published by Continuum Books in 2005. He has written about popular music and theater for the Washington Post, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian Magazine, Paste, Downbeat, Sing Out, and the Nashville Scene since 1977.
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Paul Cézanne, Woman Diving into Water, 1870. Pencil, watercolor, and gouache on paper. National Museum of Wales, Wales, UK
A 1956 letter written by Ms. Freilicher to Frank O’Hara, who celebrated her in his acclaimed “Jane” poems, initiated various plans to get together, beginning: “Dear Frankie, I was utterly delighted to get your cuddlesome letter. Perhaps you don’t know how much I’m missing you but it is quite a tel’ble lot. It is a terrible thing being the Adlai Stevenson of the art world without a Young Democrat like you by my side.”
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This relationship [with John Ashbery], and the others that grew from it, are the subject of “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets,” an exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Midtown, a show that places Ms. Freilicher’s work in the context of her exalted status among the poets of the New York School — Mr. Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler — to whom she was muse, confidante, beloved brain. “One doesn’t stay friends with somebody for 40 years unless they have a lot of nice qualities, such as brilliance,” Mr. Ashbery wrote two decades ago. “Jane Freilicher is also the wittiest person I have ever known.”
By implication, the show is an exercise in anthropology as well, an exploration of an ever-receding way of social life among successful creative people in the city, one in which the friendships built and circles configured seemed more firmly rooted in genuine affection, in affinity, in shared notions of whimsy, than in the prospect of mutual professional advantage.
>>>
From Gina Bellafante in "Jane Freilicher: A Painter amid Friends," a review of Freilicher's 2013 show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, The New York Times, May 25, 2013.
I meant to put those
sixty-three names
and email addresses
in the BCC blind copy
space, not the CC
copy space. I meant to
send it to him, not her.
I meant to swallow not
drool, on the computer,
my lap, your sleeve, my
arm, the floor, that first
edition, in the drawer.
I meant to walk and
move with that feline
grace someone once
said I had, not wobble
and stagger like an
old wino. I meant to
hit the “y” not the “t”
the “h” not the “g”
the “b” not the “v”,
return not send,
amends not amen.
I meant to stand up
straight not bend, to
sit upright not slouch,
to not fall down and
get stuck between the
couch and a hot pipe
that burned my back
like the prolonged
sting of a fierce slap.
I meant to stay twenty-
nine or forty-nine, not
be seventy-nine turn-
ing eighty in May this
way, drooling and
stumbling and un-
able to make a fist
with my right hand
or grasp a utensil in
the proper way but
instead need foam
additions to the
handles for my one
or two fingers that
can still curl without
help. I meant to be
the exception to
obviously aging or
a long gone legend
by now not a bent
over drooling old
man who still often
feels like a woman
inside but I’ll accept
what I’m left with for
as long as I can and
still be grateful for all
that I’ve been and am.
C) 2021 Michael Lally
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Stay Thirsty Magazine is honored to present the following ten, never-before-published, original poems by David Lehman and to continue our special relationship with him that began with a Conversation in the Fall 2014 edition of our magazine.
From my work-in-progress, which will reflect my practice of writing a poem every day since August 1, 2020. -- David Lehman on the following ten poems.
Mudcat
(June 12, 2021)
Mudcat Grant died today
possessor of one of the great baseball monikers
victor in game six of the 1965 World Series
the year Koufax refused to pitch game one
because Yom Kippur fell on that day
and did more for Judaism with that one gesture than
even Harry Belafonte singing Hava Negilla,
but I stray from the point,
the passing of Jim “Mudcat” Grant
who won twenty games that season,
and even though he pitched for the opposition
I couldn’t help admiring him
on the mound on the day before
Koufax shut out the Twins on two days’ rest
The Master of Gamblers (II)
(June 23, 2021)
You begin with a title,
“The Master of Gamblers”
by Caravaggio,
and you run with the idea,
the words, not the painting:
a school for gamblers
with majors in casino science
(roulette, poker, blackjack)
and track management,
the stock market,
and the aesthetics
of athletics (the next big thing)
with required readings
in Pascal, Baudelaire,
Dostoyevsky and
mandatory viewings
of Guys and Dolls
and The Cincinnati Kid.
The French Revolution
(July 15, 2021)
The French Revolution
still leads the league
with the Russian Revolution
a distant second
and the gap is widening
as the Jacobins stage an uprising
while the Russians renounce the Soviet idea
(except for the KGB)
and we wonder: can we expect
dictators along the lines of Napoleon before long,
and what about Metternich and the Congress of Vienna?
For the other seven poems, all from Summer 2021, click here for the rest of the feature in Stay Thirsty.
In the same issue you will find a q-and-a with Robert Olen Butler, Jerome Charyn on "The Golden Age of Hollywood," April Gornik on her paintings, and much else. https://staythirstymagazine.blogspot.com/
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REVIEW OF KYTHE HELLER’S FIREBIRD
Last August, I read Kythe Heller’s new book-length poem, Firebird (Arrowsmith Press, 2020), in a single sitting. Inspired by Sufi mysticism and by traumatic and kairotic events from her own life, the poem performs a theology of transformation in which purgative fires of struggle and pain become a path to awaken on. Pain in the poem isn’t something to be forgotten once things get better, or an illness to be narcotized, nor is it an occasion for poeticized identity narcissism. Pain becomes a site of grace, a pyre in which holy flames burn silence into song, madness into mysticism, body into spirit, and self into community.
The poem began as a series of notebook jottings. Kythe explained her process in an email:
I think of notebooks expansively, not only as a conventional and necessary literary practice on the page but also as an initiatory practice -- translating dreams and actual events and insights, into scraps of images, films, sounds, song, ritual, shared dreams or poems with which people can experiment and live new realities together. Over the course of several years of intensive spiritual practice, while writing Firebird, I also started a collective of artists and creatives, first in NYC and then in Cambridge, MA, eventually called VISION LAB, and some of the original material for Firebird came out of these living experimental notebooks. I was writing and then we also started to act out these dreams together, which led to more writing. The work became a book and then a set of fluid performance ritual pieces, living poems, performance scores or inhabited, experimental poems, like a living notebook of new forms.
As the title suggests, the poem’s element is fire, both in its destructive and transformative capacities. The flames surround, engulf, and transform a feminine subject who takes on several related identities: a teenage runaway, a burning girl, a feral child living in society’s margins, and a mystic-poet. The storylines of these individuals come in and out of focus -- at times existing as parallel novels in miniature and other times merging into the fold of a single story. The 64-page poem, which has an experimental quality due to frequent shifts between verse and prose, expressive uses of punctuation, ambulatory perspectives, and incantatory rhythms, is divided into five interlocking sections, with each section building on the resonances of the sections that precede it: “The Burning Girl”; “Mattress Under The Overpass”; “The Spirit Neither Sorts Nor Separates”; “Runaway”; “That Heart.” Whether the mysterious subjects who breathe, burn, and “become” across the five sections are different people, the same person, the poet herself, or even the reader remains unclear at first. The shifting pronouns (I, she, you) create a shared experience of brokenness and becoming familiar to seekers who walk down the spiritual path.
The poem invites the reader into its life, mining experience for shared magma: “The body of eyes everywhere a joyful sobbing: everywhere a crackling wash of cries where the glowing coals emerge / just at the center of the fluff of ash and blackened fabric--” Like Eliot’s Quartets, Firebird doesn’t present “the lifetime of one man only.” I felt this to be true when I first read the poem last summer and even more so when I reread it this past week. Like her mentor and friend Fanny Howe, Kythe’s poetry performs mystical theology in a language of experimental poetics that invites the reader in. Both writers seek to say something barely communicable but commonly experienced by spiritually oriented people, which, according to Paul Tillich, is potentially everyone.
A burning girl haunts the poem, setting its pages ablaze. She sits at the center of the work in a circle of flames. At first, the girl’s obsession with fire is emblematic of a self-destructive impulse, a promethean urge destructively rendered: “But how could I open the door / while she stood there burning?” the poet asks. The burning girl, a possible Jungian shadow, shows up at her door demanding entry. “I stood at the door of my life / but she was already there,” reads the opening couplet. “Her skin swollen. / And in her eyes / pain like a flower opening its body forever.” By the poem’s second page, it becomes clear that the poet and burning girl are the same person. Like the Gerasene Demoniac described in the gospels, the poet seems to be recalling a time when her self-unity was fragmented by the trauma of abuse, neglect, and social estrangement. Fire becomes an object of seduction for the girl. It calls to her like flames call to a pyromaniac.
The burning girl is depicted at first as problematic, uncontainable, dangerous. Who’s more feared than a fire-obsessed, self-harming woman with wild hair living in the woods on the outskirts of town? The poem touches on this in an interpolative moment: “There were fire marshals signaling. This is illegal, they said. With enormous effort, I prevented myself thinking the thing inside the match that wanted out. And then, because I had to, because the fire could not be prevented, I wrote this.” As Jungians know, the key to our evolutionary growth as people can often be found in the bewildering symbols and plotlines that populate our fantasies and nightmares. Everything is meaningful.
Fire becomes a meaningful site for transformation through the poem. The firebird is the phoenix, the immortal bird from Greek mythology that cyclically regenerates from the ashes of the fires that consume it. The subject of the poem is transformed through a process of negation that, like death by fire, is brutal and unspeakable in its infernal erasures. Birth names are burned away (“...She wanted meaning. / And her given name sounded fake, like a porn star”), previous selves and their aspirations are burned away (“to burn away what she was, what she meant / to become--”), suffering and desire are burned away (“Look inside the mattress, the suffering / burns. The desire / to heal again through suffering burns”), possessions are left behind (“Leave all that is mine on the street again”), and the body and its sensations are immolated as well (“Joy or anguish, to be born in fire, in the elemental moment, to feel the flames coursing over my bones, caressing every cell with light / until at last the fire bent down low over / the rib cage, / and reaching, reached in”). What remains is the beating heart of who we are at the level of shared spirit (“Never knowing the difference / between your own heart pumping 1,640 beats a minute / and the heart of the world into which you fly / What trust”). The turbulence and pain of the past aren’t disavowed. They become a path that culminates in compassion and moral clarity.
Like many poetic works that engage the immaterial world, the experience of Firebird doesn’t easily lend itself to the prodding and summations of literary criticism. The poem performs its purpose in its own apophatic terms when read or performed. Perhaps this is why it has been performed as a musical album in collaboration with the composer/musicians Andrew Stauffer and Nicholas Denton Protsack of Sounds Like Things, as well as four short video poems, in collaboration with talented video and movement artists Anya Yermakova, Grace Jackson, and Marizo Siller, among others.
When our society talks about positive change on an individual level, it’s often couched in material terms. We talk about changing our careers, our life partners, our scenery, our cognitive, affective & narrative patterns, and our brain chemistry. Firebird enacts a different sort of change, a change of spirit that renders everything we’ve lost, all our scars, all our shocked silences, and all the times we’ve been alone in the darkening wood – into a meaningful process. It’s a process through which we can find our hearts “melted into the form of liquid pearl.” Even if we remain exiled from the homes of our birth, there’s nothing in our lives that can’t help us find a final home in the capacities of our heart. The final line of Firebird asks, “In that heart, what point is there in dying or being born again?”
Before the sixth day of the next new year,
Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear:
Four kings shall be assembled in this isle,
Where they shall keep great tumult for awhile.
Many men then shall have an end of crosses,
And many likewise shall sustain great losses;
Many that now full joyful are and glad,
Shall at that time be sorrowful and sad;
Full many a Christian's heart shall quake for fear,
The dreadful sound of trump when he shall hear.
Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down,
In every city and in every town.
By day or night this tumult shall not cease,
Until an herald shall proclaim a peace;
An herald strong, the like was never born,
Whose very beard is flesh and mouth is horn
– Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)
"On the Cards and Dice" is my favorite poem by the redoubtable Sir Walter Raleigh. What I admire most is the sustained metaphorical ingenuity and the slippage in the analogy between games of chance (cards and dice) and the events of the Christian calendar culminating in the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. The poem achieves a stirring and ominous effect, rising to a prophetic level, though at its base it is merely a vivid description of men playing poker (or bridge) and throwing dice. The implicit relation between gambling and religion is the poem's secret power. And "the dreadful sound of Trump" is a bonus. -- DL
Click here for Lehman's essay on Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and here for his reading of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."
Love's Philosophy
The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?
See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
We’ve all been getting booster shots self-quarantining these past couple of weeks.
Karine remarked to me how differently different people are affected by them. She gets a sore arm, for instance, while a day goes by and then I get three days of a mild but depressing cold. Another friend faints, yet another gets so sick she moans she would have done better to get the damned disease naturally. Another has no idea what we’re talking about.
The Covid virus too is now different to what it was before, more contagious: at least three people have called me recently to warn me they’ve tested positive. In nearly two years this has never happened. So, in addition to watching and hearing about the different reactions among people in my circle, I’ve been standing around a lot more in the local pharmacy, watching how differently different perfect strangers take all this different common Covid experience.
Too much testing myself has affected me. I have become very ambivalent about having my nose reamed by a long cotton swab. I would now rather silently submit to an improvised enema from Nurse Ratched than undergo yet again one of these five-second nose swabbings. I have noticed, though, that nobody else in the impossible swarms of those getting tested seems especially troubled by the swabbing experience.
Even so, testing is making me nervouser and nervouser. As I write, I have said ‘No’ to a home test before hosting a perfectly legal, eight-person New Year’s gathering… I shall instead bury myself at the foot of my bed unless an enraged Karine insists on testing that Nurse Ratched/enema proposition.
Has my ‘difference’ – fear and loathing of to Covid testing – crossed into mental ‘disability’? Has difference crossed from ‘can’ do to ‘can’t do’ such that I no longer function in the normal range of humans?
Ridiculous idea. Just because you get a little fed up with something, you don’t slip from your god-given “difference” to “disability” surely… you can still choose… Right?
I have been thinking a lot about “difference” and “disability” for the past couple days, since I saw a mother-daughter dance performance called De Françoise à Alice, choreographed by Mickaël Phelippeau. It appears I’m not the only one to be struck by the performance. It has another date at a new annual arts show at Carreau du Temple called Everybody, so, who knows, perhaps you’ll be able to see it! Everybody, which is open to ‘every body’ in every sense, starts in mid-February and features visual arts, physical training techniques and dance-performance. It’s programming turns, of course, around difference, associating themes such as gender, consciousness and sexuality. For instance, Marta Izquierdo Munoz’s excellent woman-warrior piece Guérillères is featured alongside Annabel Guérédrat’s I’m a Bruja (‘bruja’ = witch) with performances (or performers) that touch on “disability” by doing without specifying, such Chiara Bersani’s Seeking Unicorns. Bersani herself is about two-feet tall.
The ‘Alice’ of De Françoise à Alice has a disability, too: Down syndrome.
Alice says that Down syndrome is a state of being – “Je suis trisomique” – rather than a burden she has to (awkwardly) bear. She claims, in effect, that the extra chromosome makes her different rather than disabled. Alice is right.
As much as difference allows, Alice can do what she wants to do, just as you and I can, as much individual difference allows. I don’t know if she can boil carrots and most people I know of can, or if she can frog jump five feet high, and most people I know can’t, or if she can pilot the death ship of the Apocalypse, and, I hope most people I know do not want to, but she can certainly do what she wants to as much as the next person can. That means that I can apply the same critical principles to Phelippeau’s choreography as to Alice (and Françoise) ’s performance as I would to any other performers.
When the curtain goes up, it becomes evident immediately that Alice, within Françoise’s caress, is the principal: her performance absorbs me. Alice, in particular, talks, moves, then dances, with aplomb, sensibility and intelligence – as she moves, I meet her movement in my bones and skin. Her movement sharpens and flows into what I perceive as Dance, capital D: she creates and informs a shared happening of feeling, meeting and imagination.
As I come to this realization, it seems obvious to me – and, Dorothy, I’m not 14 any more – that my sense of ‘difference’ is distorted by my notion of ‘disability’. ‘Disability’ is a brake on a full appreciation of difference.
The distortion and the brake are owing to my underlying Oomph-capitalism Weltanschauung; I’m defending a moral order I’ve spent most of my life trying to run away from. Oomph-capitalism posits a self-sprung Individual, a paragon of pure, self-sufficient Oomph, not just an honest working fella who resists charity from his betters because they’re too busy pulling up their boot straps and studying the Bible. The Oomph paragon is the One Who Needs Nothin’ From Nobody. In the Oomph-capitalist mindset, it is not Oliver Twist’s Oomph that leaves Mr. Bumble sputtering but Oliver’s self-incriminating admission that he needs ‘more’ food, more ‘help’.
The 1990 movie Pretty Woman, “a modern-day fairy-tale”, which played on one of the local television channels as uplifting Christmas-spirit duff, figures Oomph ideology pretty well. Although he must, as for every other primate, have been born squalling for his mother’s tit, Oomph paragon, the handsome Richard Gere, opens the script by showing how he needs nothing: not money, nor pretty women, nor even driving lessons for his fancy car. The unnecessary hero and pretty woman of the title, played by a nubile but gum-chewing Julia Roberts, on the other hand, is surrounded by friends eagerly helping her become a Hollywood Boulevard prostitute. Roberts spends the whole script showing she has enough natural Oomph-capitalist fiber to need no help from nobody neither, thus winning the utterly self-sufficient Richard Gere and, with him, a life among people she can ignore or tip, as she pleases, fuck you.
The idea of ‘disability’ suggests, without asserting a concrete claim, that, in some cases, difference goes beyond ‘natural’ difference. That’s to say that with an unlimited acceptance of difference, some humans will get what they need with, as Allen Ginsberg famously demanded, just their good looks. That would be egalitarianism run wild. ‘Disability’ makes an imaginary line beyond which ordinary rules of fairness and justice don’t apply and notions of ‘special’ humans – not just Alice with 21 chromosomes, but especially Richard Gere with billions of inherited dollars – can apply. Alice may get a little more help and protection than, say, my cross-eyed grandson, but Richard Gere, besides getting to keep everything he is born with, gets self-iterating superiority rather than mere difference to go with it. On the one hand, he can test Julia Roberts’ (or your) existential merit and call attention to his own Oomph-virtue by doing so: Roberts’ obvious (social and moral) disability validate whatever bribes the Oomph paragon proffers.
In short, ‘disability’ is about as seamless a con-trick as there is for making sure “accepting difference” doesn’t mean actually accepting it.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
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