The Best American Poetry

"Hamlet versus the Nazis" [by David Lehman]

Ed note: I write the "Talking Pictures" monthly column on movies for The American Scholar. My latest deals with Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 masterpiece, "To Be or Not to Be," with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny. Here is my opening and a link to the post:
                            Carole Lombard, Maude Eburne, and Jack Benny in To Be or Not to Be, 1942

A master of the slow burn and the exaggerated double take, Jack Benny may have been the greatest of all persona comedians on radio and television. The persona was preposterously vain. He played the violin, badly. He would never admit to being older than 39. Above all else, he was cheap.

In his most celebrated radio routine, Jack is walking along carrying a borrowed Oscar award. A mugger stops him, asks him for a light, and then demands: “Your money or your life.” There ensues a lengthy silence. Finally the mugger says “Look, bud! I said your money or your life!” And Benny replies: “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”

Benny plays five roles in Ernst Lubitsch’s comic masterpiece, To Be or Not To Be (1942), and in each of them, he is Jack Benny. We are in Warsaw in August 1939, and Benny is an actor in a troupe—in his own words, “that great, great actor Josef Tura,” whose ambition is to play Hamlet. Behind the scenes, he is the jealous husband of actress Maria Tura (the charming and justly acclaimed Carole Lombard, in her last film appearance), afraid he is being cuckolded. During the course of the film, he also plays a fictional Nazi colonel on stage, impersonates a real Nazi colonel, albeit badly, and impersonates a bewhiskered Professor Siletski (Stanley Ridges), who has passed himself off as a Polish resistance leader but is actually a Nazi spy.

to read the rest of this piece, please click here: 
https://theamericanscholar.org/hamlet-vs-the-nazis/

"The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered" [by Clive James, 1939-2019]

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

A Culture in Crisis: Jason Shinder on "Howl" [film by Bill Hayward]

"A culture in crisis..." from bill hayward on Vimeo.

"Miss, Missed, Missing" [by Beth Gylys]

A shame you blew me off.  I shaved my legs,
the sheets are clean, the dust poodles all gone.
I’ve spent the day lounging in my new dress

or standing at the mirror (it does attest
I’m looking pretty hot) and drinking wine.
A shame you didn’t make it. I shaved my legs

and finished that novel about a family mess:
an affair, a murdered child, a mother stricken.
I’ve whiled the hours lounging in my new dress.

I even wore lipstick. I try to want you less.
Night and not even a message on my phone.
Too bad that you aren’t here. I shaved my legs,

cooked veal cutlets. I serve the cat the dregs,
shimmy out of Spanx, my black-lace thong.
I wash my face, slip off the wrinkled dress,

put on sweats and think how I would press
against you. I touch myself. I’m so alone.
Again you blew me off. I shaved my legs,
another wasted day, waiting in some new dress.   

Ed. Note: The villanelle is a notoriously difficult form to master. I, a great believer in the value of constrictive verse forms, regard it as far more challenging than the others I have tried -- the sestina, the sonnet, the pantoum, the canzone, the tanka, you name it. For many years now, Beth Gylys has made the villanelle serve her narrative and lyrical purposes reliably, with good nature, candor, and humor: an achievement it gives me pleasure to salute. 

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly Fly TWA

The great Mad Ave mad men could not have created a better ad for TWA. --  DL

"Not exactly easy and it shouldn’t be": Aspen Matis in Conversation with Mitch Sisskind

Photo © Alex Pieros.

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Often when people have some ability or inclination, they become aware of that or others might point it out to them. Then they’re well-advised to develop that ability. If you’re seven feet tall, try playing basketball. Unfortunately, there can be blocks against it. You might refuse to play basketball for the very reason that you’re seven feet tall. But if you’re a certain kind of person—let’s call it a creative person—and you don’t act upon that fact, there can be problems. In “Madmen” someone says of the main character, “This is what happens to an artistic personality who isn’t an artist.” So I have to give it a shot.
 
Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his/her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation? 

When I was in middle school the girls learned to speak Pig Latin. They liked speaking it fast to each other, both for its own sake and because the boys couldn’t do that or understand it. As I remain a “boy” after all these years, much of academic criticism is like Pig Latin to me. Meanwhile, Auden wrote that negative criticism always turns into showing off, so it's best to skip it as a writer or as a reader. Sometimes wonderful critical insights appear spontaneously. My professor Angus Fletcher once casually remarked, “Freud is such a great writer. He can make you believe anything.” Negative and positive at the same time!

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

I have a few inspiring alter egos that can help me write. One of them is the “peckerwood”—a sort of backwoods man in the modern world who breeds dogs. But he's not a Trump person. He’s deeply apolitical and anti-materialist. He likes it when his car breaks down. He would see Trump as soft, materialistic, and frightened of dogs. Perhaps surprisingly, V.S. Naipaul shows real understanding of peckerwoods in his book on the American South. Other alter egos are the Torah scholar, the sorority girl of the 1950s, and the Chicago policeman. Maybe a common theme would be people who have passionate, unconventional interests that they desperately want to communicate, and they assume that the reader shares their interests. I identify with these people. I don't have to “get inside” them. They’re inside me.

Your new book of poems, Collected Poems, is rich with moments of delightful surprise, sudden twists beyond the mundane moment and into themes that feel vast and universal. How do you achieve this element of freshness? Was this volume’s unifying quality of surprise a conscious choice?

I like characters and voices that are hard to identify as either mundane or transcendent. If I can create that indeterminacy, whether in a short poem or in a whole book, I hope it brings the surprise and freshness you refer to. On the other hand, some readers find this unpleasantly confusing. I’ve gotten both of those responses to my writing and also in other areas of my life.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?

Kenneth Koch said that a poet is interested in the word “ashtray” while a prose writer is interested in all the people who have used the ashtray. Poets young and old should to be sensitive to words or phrases that catch their interest, that strike a spark, however slight. See what you can make of that. I recently came across the phrase “make cow eyes,” meaning to flirt, and I was able to write a poem from that starting point. Stuff like this can happen in wondrous ways. You may know that Lewis Carroll thought of the last line of his long poem “The Hunting of the Snark”—“For the snark was a boojum, you see”—before he wrote anything else.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?
I’ve done lots of ghostwriting with publishers large and small. After that experience, in my own work I’m much more comfortable with self-publishing. I don’t like soliciting people to take an interest in my writing and the snail’s pace of the whole thing can also be demoralizing. I’m getting ready to do a new book of poems that I want to call “Bringing in the Sheaves.” I like not having to consult with a publisher about the title or about the cover. I hope people like my work, but I want to have full responsibility, whether it succeeds or not. I find writing easier now than at earlier points in my life. That is certainly exciting, although it’s still not exactly easy and it shouldn’t be. As Emily Dickinson stated, it’s “all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.” Surf and turf. Nothing better than that.

Click here to listen to Mitch Sisskind on WKCR's "Bookworm" with Michael Silverblatt, click here to read Mitch's blog posts. Order Sisskind's Collected Poems here. 

Aspen Matis is the author of Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir (Little A, June 2020). Called “fearless…A beautifully written story of inspiration, courage, and ultimate transformation” by Booklist, the book was a #1 Amazon bestseller in memoirs. Author Deepak Chopra said the memoir “will open the door to empathy, compassion, and healing.” Novelist Aimee Bender called Your Blue Is Not My Blue “gorgeous…a gripping read that wrestles honestly and sensitively with the ways we connect and the ways we miss one another.”

Matis's short-form writing has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tin House, Psychology Today, Salon, Bloomberg, and Marie Claire. Her first book, the critically acclaimed memoir Girl in the Woods, was published by HarperCollins in 2015. Called “a powerful read” by O, The Oprah Magazine, the book made The Guardian's annual top 50 list. The New York Times named Matis “a hero.”

Rudy Burckhardt’s “New York Hello!” (part one) [by Vincent Katz]

Rudy Burckhardt : “New York Hello!” Photographs and Films from the 1970s and ‘80s

At Tibor de Nagy Gallery, December 11, 2020 through January 23, 2021

https://www.tibordenagy.com

https://www.tibordenagy.com/exhibitions/rudy-burckhardt4

Through January 23, run over to Tibor de Nagy Gallery at 11 Rivington Street to see a glorious selection of the later New York City street photographs of famed downtown denizen Rudy Burckhardt. You can also see the images online, but Burckhardt’s prints, small and unassuming as they are, repay close observation in person.

I guess the only art form that survives intact online is poetry. Poetry was something Burckhardt had a lot of, and I often find myself making the Freudian slip of referring to a photo of his as a “poem.” Partially, that has to do with the wide spaciousness Burckhardt was able to include in his photographs. They have a space in them that reminds one of the space in the city poems of his friends Edwin Denby, James Schuyler, and Frank O’Hara.

When he first came to New York from his native Basel, in 1935, at the age of 21, excited though he was by the city’s gigantic scale, he was unable to photograph it, focusing instead on a prescient series of fragments — pedestrians rushing past him in midtown against slivers of storefronts and sidewalks. The effect was almost hermetic, as though Rudy was a consciousness that the urban swirl buffeted but never disturbed.

That still consciousness was something he brought to his well-known photographs of the 1940s, iconic views of Times Square and the Flatiron Building. After a few years in New York, Burckhardt had figured out a way to bring the tallest buildings and pedestrians into the same frame. He worked quickly, never wasting film, preferring to wait for the right season and light, rather than to force an unwilling moment into a picture.

Concomitant to his photographic practice, Burckhardt made over one hundred 16-millimeter films, some in collaboration with other artists, musicians and poets, others on his own as a form of diary or collage film he would assemble over time from footage shot in New York, Maine, and other locations. The collaborative films were one way Burckhardt kept up to date, choosing to invite into them succeeding generations of New York’s brightest stars, from Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles and Aaron Copland, through Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara, to Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Rackstraw Downes, Taylor Mead and Yoshiko Chuma, Douglas Dunn, Grazia Della Terza, Dana Reitz, David Shapiro, Christopher Sweet, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Jacob Burckhardt and Tom Burckhardt, among others.

Like his lifelong friend and collaborator, poet and critic Edwin Denby, Burckhardt made it a habit to keep up on the latest developments in poetry, music, theater, dance, and visual art. Denby and Burckhardt were inveterate culture vultures, inspiring generations of New Yorkers after them. Part of that urbane desire involved being attuned to the look of people and things, as they changed through New York’s mid-century.

Burckhardt photographed on New York’s streets from the late 1930s through the 1990s. His later work shows him experimenting, evolving, using familiar themes in different ways, with subtly different emphases. The photographs currently on view at Tibor de Nagy are striking in their immediacy, their sophisticated informality, and their ability to project certain types or looks of people. Burckhardt was remarkable in his ability to find the beauty in many kinds of people.

Three photos of couples walking are emblematic of the power of youth, of animated promenade. In one from the mid 1980s, a black couple presents ultimate contemporary style — he in t-shirt, athletic shorts, and Pumas without socks, she elegantly coiffed, in designed low-V t-shirt, carefully ironed and cuffed jeans, white sandals. They fit together in style perfectly. But to make a great photograph, he needed more than the main subject. Intimately steeped in classic European painting, he had no trouble forging balanced photographic figure-and-ground compositions on the fly. He also was immersed in modern Abstract painting, learning from it never to leave any area without interest. Here, Burckhardt catches memorable figures between and around the two mythic beauties who dominate the scene.

Ed. note: Part two of Vincent Katz's review will appear tomorrow or the day after.

"On Bedtime and Books" [by Victoria Kelly]

For three years, before I had my own children, I was a Court Appointed Special Advocate to two little girls living in the foster care system. As a CASA, I visited these girls weekly—at home, at school, and at daycare—and attended all court hearings relevant to their placement. My goal was to make sure they were safe and thriving—both in their foster home and when they visited their mother, who was overcoming a series of difficulties in her life. The role as a volunteer CASA is not unlike that of a social worker—get to know the children, learn their routines and habits, and hope that they come to see you as someone they can trust. If many cases, they will confide in you things they might not confide to a foster parent or a social worker, situations that could become harmful or life-threatening.

I loved these little girls. We played paper dolls and “running away to Hollywood.” I watched them enter kindergarten and learn to read, sounding out each word with furrowed brows, and then graduate to chapter books. These girls were fortunate to have a caring foster family. But in their guardianship situation they were not so lucky. They still linger in the foster system after many years, caught in a court battle that remains unresolved.

It was heartbreaking to watch these girls struggle to feel safe, to understand where they belonged, to wonder if they were wanted. Now that I am a mother to two little girls of my own, I look back on those years I spent as a CASA with new eyes. It was what drew me to support the Pajama Program, an organization that provides new pajamas and new books to children like the ones I knew. The children they help are in foster care, or living in shelters, or living in poverty, or have been abandoned. These are kids who do not get tucked into bed. Sometimes these pajamas and books are the only new things they have ever received. Pajamas, and books, help them feel warm and secure at a time when they are most vulnerable.

I can’t imagine what it would have felt like to have never owned a book as a child, to have never had those long Sunday mornings in bed reading, dreaming up new worlds. If you would like to get involved, visit the Pajama Program site to donate, sponsor a book drive, or volunteer at their NYC reading center. Or go here to learn about volunteering as a CASA. 

from the archive; first posted October 7, 2015

"General Strike" [by Jim Dolot]

And balagan and Milosz on jstor.
Certainly Danny Kaye was The Court Jester.

“This day” (Darwin wrote) “I shot me a condor.”
Who manages to say no to being quaestor?

And in Jerusalem, what is the new measure?
Zechariah 2.   The Duke composes.  The maestros

Generally struck down this whole orchestra.
And the chord, the long interval, is Shakespeare-Castro.

Because of polyptychs, or was it politics, disaster
Struck the General Strikers from the cadastre.

Yestreen, Torahs of authors met in The U Bistro.
Tzaddik, what untold mastery, Cholesterol Pollster?

What violence is done within all the test rows?
What worth, after your Censuses, your lustratios?

(Who, long dead, outpipes the Hasty Paperer?
What Domesday Book is or is not a roster?

On bikes with bamboo shoots, whose happy jousters?)
& is the acrobat is a knot in the air, a typographer?

What freedom in this world but the unrhymed rooster’s?
Carl Friedrich carries dawn’s K down on a poster.)

And Certs and Crest to brush our teeth, the Flosser.
To defy all surfaces, asters and pilasters.

And balagan and Milosz on jstor.
Certes, Danny Kaye was The Court Jester.

from the archive; first posted September 22, 2018. Jim Dolot's poems have appeared in Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms and The Stud Duck.

Reading and Rereading "One Tree" by Philip Metres (by Nin Andrews)

 

In the fall of 2019, I was at a The Lit Youngstown Literary Conference in Youngstown, Ohio (amazing how
long ago that seems now) when I heard Philip Metres read his poem, “One Tree” from his wonderful new book, Shrapnel Maps. And like many poems that are also parables, the poem stuck with me. And stuck with me.  And stuck with me.

When I first heard it, I thought I knew exactly what it meant. I could see it unfolding in my mind. After all, it seems like a simple story, and a true one. I know the neighborhood where the poet lives, and his wife, Amy Breau, a fabulous poet in her own right. I smiled, picturing her, rushing outside with her hair on fire, screaming, “NO!” as the man began chainsawing a limb from her sacred tree, while Philip, the consummate peacemaker, stayed inside, wishing he could hide. But in the end, when the chainsaw was lowered into the tree, I thought, Phil! You let them cut her tree? Because “someone must give”?

I was particularly irked by his apologies to the neighbor, his repeated claim, “it’s not me,” when it was, too, him. After all, “we” said no in the third sentence, not she. What a coward! I thought.

The poem triggered memories of my own family where my mother fought and lost many local, environmental battles. This was back in the 60’s when sexism was even more alive and well than it is today, and my father was so horrified by her activism, he asked that the local newspaper use her maiden name when they wrote about her. He didn’t want the businessmen in town to know that she was his wife. I sometimes wondered—if he had stood by her side, would she have been more successful? After all, people listened to men back then. Not to women.

As I was driving home to Virginia after the conference, a line kept repeating in my head:  “Always the same story: two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love.” I began contemplating the poem as a parable of the one tree—or the sacred tree of life. What will or won’t we do to defend it? I loved how he compared the tree to the baby brought to Solomon. It makes a lovely environmental parable.  Or so I thought.

But then, this winter Philip Metres sent me a video of another tree poem, "Olive Tree" for a project called Lit by the Imaginationthat I am working on for LitYoungstown (we are asking poets to read a poem and offer a prompt based on the poem. These short videos will be posted in April on the LitYoungstown Facebook page). I thought of the olive tree, and the term—offering an olive branch. And of the closing words in the poem, “first brambles, then olives.” Written at his brother-in-law’s home in Palestine, the poem reminded me of Metres’ faith, hope for, and interest in peace and conflict resolution, especially in the Middle East. And suddenly I realized I had misunderstood the first tree poem. Somehow I had fallen so in love with the image of the wife, the glorious, fiery wife with her passion and vision so clear, I had not paid attention to what the poet intended.

The speaker of the poem isn’t championing his wife or the tree. Instead he’s pondering the question of what one should do if he sees both sides of a conflict. “Must I fight for my wife’s desire for yellow blooms when my neighbors’ tomatoes will stunt and blight in shade?” he asks. The tree is not the tree of life, but a tulip poplar, one of the fastest growing native trees of the eastern United States, and a tree that grows so wide, the Native Americans used to make canoes from their trunks. Like the wife in the poem, I had tulip trees in my yard as a child, and they grew to be over 90 feet tall in a relatively short time. In the end the poem, when “they lower the chainsaw again,” I suppose they are putting the chainsaw down on the ground, not raising it to the tree. And the speaker is apologizing, “Dear neighbor it’s not me,” as he places the blame squarely on the shoulders of his hot-headed wife. The poem is not an ecological parable but a political parable about neighborly love, or the lack thereof.

Now, when I reread the poem, I wonder at how often we blame the hot-headed, unappeasable women of the world. Is that a word, unappeasable? I am picturing them now, whole tribes of unappeasable, rising up as one. Needless to say, I still vote for the wife.

Philip Metres has written numerous books, including Shrapnel Maps, Sand Opera, and The Sound of Listening. Awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations, and three Arab American Book Awards, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. 

Auden (& Others) on the Difference between Authors and Critics

There are people who are too intelligent to become authors, but they do not become critics.

-- W. H. Auden, "Reading" (in The Dyer's Hand, 1962)

Compare with Kenneth Tynan's: "The critic knows the way but can't drive the car"

and Hemingway's "Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors."

 

-- W. H. Auden, "Reading" (in The Dyer's Hand, 1962)

Compare with Kenneth Tynan's: "The critic knows the way but can't drive the car"

and Hemingway's "Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors."

 

A Tommy Lasorda Pep Talk, circa 1985 [by David Lehman]

In 1985 the Dodger skipper Tommy Lasorda -- who died a few days ago at age 93 -- turned the team's season around when he switched Pedro Guerrero from third base to left field on June 1st.  Guerrero hated playing third base. When Steve Sax was the Dodger second baseman and suddenly developed a tendency toward errancy, Guerrero was asked what was in his mind when he played the hot corner and the opponents had two men on base. His first thought, he admitted, was "Please don't hit the ball to me." And what was his second thought? ''Please don't hit it to Sax." Guerrero, which in Spanish means "warrior," hit fifteen home runs that June, after Lasorda reversed himself and moved Guerrero to left field, where, in Jim Murray's words, "the action is more sporadic, the existence more monastic." The change woprked wonders for Giuerrerao and since "hitting is contagious" (Lasorda) for the team. "I've seen Mays and Aaron carry ball clubs," Tommy said. "That's what Pete is doing for us."

Jim Murray, one of the great sports columnists, asked Lasorda how he had persuaded Guerrero to play third in the first place. In a piece for the Los Angeles Times  that rain in late March, 1985, Murray described the problem:

"[Guerrero] is not at his best at certain fine points of the play at third base. At picking up or stopping ground balls for example.

"A minor detail, shrugs Lasorda. Even Caruso had to learn to sing.

"A more major detail was that this particular third baseman did not really want to be one. He preferred some place where the action was more sporadic, the existence more monastic, where he had somewhat more than a blink of an eye to react to a batted ball approaching at something only slightly less than the speed of sound.

"Tommy called Guerrero in. 'Pete,' he asked him in the fatherly tones Moses might have used carrying the tablets down from the mount or guaranteeing the Red Sea would part, 'when you walk down the street and the team is trying to get in the Fall Classic, do you want kids to read where Pete Guerrero said that ‘since the Dodgers made it possible for me to be secure for life, I want to repay them in any way I can, including playing third base,’ or do you want them to read, ‘Pete Guerrero says he won’t play third, too bad about the team?’ ”

"History doesn’t record Guerrero’s exact answer, but he was next seen on third base, whereupon Lasorda next introduced him to Brooks Robinson, a passing broadcaster who only happens to be the greatest third baseman of his day, and a man who practically invented the position as it is practiced today.

"Now, introducing Pedro Guerrero to Brooks Robinson is tantamount to introducing Ma Kettle to Miss America and urging her to find out how to be more like her, but history records Pedro Guerrero went out that afternoon and turned in two sparkling, vacuum-cleaner plays at the third sack that afternoon. After the game, Lasorda was ecstatic. “From now on your name is ‘Brooks!”’ he screamed at his third baseman. “The new human vacuum cleaner! Who do you think was standing up in the press box cheering his head off!? Brooks Robinson! He said those were two of the greatest plays he ever seen in his life!

"Lasorda’s stock-in-trade is unbridled optimism. 'I learned it from my father,' he boasts. 'Every day of his life he drove this truck down in this quarry. He’d come home at night, and we’d have to rub his feet--they were frostbitten--and he’d say ‘I’m the luckiest man in the world. I’m living in the greatest country in the world and I have this family and a job.’ And I’d say, ‘How can you say you’re the luckiest man in the world--your feet are frozen!?’ And he’d say, ‘What’s a little frozen feet compared to all the other happiness I got?!’ So, I say, what’s wrong with playing a little third base? I mean, do your feet get frozen?”

*

PS: This is the opening graf of Jim Murray's "Blue-Carpet Treatment by Lasorda," Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1985:

<<<
VERO BEACH —  

The pride of Abruzzi, Italy, Norristown, Pa., raconteur, published author and all-around good fellow stood with bandy legs, arms akimbo and spoke in his normal tone of voice--somewhere between a guy shouting “Fire!” in a crowded building and a man seeing an iceberg from the bridge of the Titanic--"WELL, IF IT ISN’T THE GREAT JIM MURRAY!” as he spotted a newcomer around the batting cage." >>>

William Waltz presents a prose poem by Sarah Manguso

Although I’ve been urged, now and then, to go there, I’ve never been to Hell. A good Minnesotan might say, “I hear it’s nice there in the winter.” They say war is Hell, and I’m pretty sure they’re right about that, so that means there’s a little Hell here on Earth. Two arid locales come to mind, and, in case we forget while the “battle” over heath insurance rages, dozens of other wars churn around the globe today.

Of course, Hell is a state of mind, really, not a place, and it befalls us all from time to time. And, as is the way with most things, Hell comes in degrees. There’s the burning, piercing Hell of torture and war, and then there’s the low-grade fever variety that catches us between what we have and what we want, leaving us feeling either stuck or adrift.

Thankfully, this is in the province of poetry, and this week’s poem, “Hell,” by Sarah Manguso, marches in triumphantly. “Hell” first appeared in our “Dumb Luck” issue (#14). It was then selected for Best American Poetry’s 2005 edition, edited by Paul Muldoon, before appearing in Ms. Manguso’s Siste Viator.

In this lovely prose poem, full of humanity and humor, Manguso uses short declarative sentences and longer winding ones that arrive just where they should to the reader’s great pleasure. Somehow she manages to say things, wise things, you wish you had. She does this often, yet the poem doesn’t prescribe a remedy, it is a remedy.

-- William Waltz

Hell

The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing’s slave.

Hell is that. Hell is that, others, having a job, and not having a job. Hell is thinking continually of those who were truly great.

Hell is the moment you realize that you were ignorant of the fact, when it was true, that you were not yet ruined by desire.

The kind of music I want to continue hearing after I am dead is the kind that makes me think I will be capable of hearing it then.

There is music in Hell. Wind of desolation! It blows past the egg-eyed statues. The canopic jars are full of secrets.

The wind blows through me. I open my mouth to speak.

I recite the list of people I have copulated with. It does not take long. I say the names of my imaginary children. I call out four-syllable words beginning with B. This is how I stay alive.

Beelzebub. Brachiosaur. Bubble-headed. I don’t know how I stay alive. What I do know is that there is a light, far above us, that goes out when we die,

and that in Hell there is a gray tulip that grows without any sun. It reminds me of everything I failed at,

and I water it carefully. It is all I have to remind me of you.

--Sarah Manguso

from the archive; first posted by The Best American Poetry on September 20, 2009 at 03:46 AM in "Conduit" | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

September 13, 2009

Haiku Exchange between two Davids on Jan 11, 2003 [Shapiro and Lehman]

Ed. note:  An exchange of e-mails on January 2, 2003, prompted David Shapiro to suggest to David Lehman that the two Davids "link haiku" for a year. They more modestly sustained their haiku exchange through the month of January 2003. In February of that year they traded couplets, and in March aphorisms. Here is haiku exchange #4 dated January 11, 2003. On left, a photo of David Shapiro between two portraits of him.

DL to DS

your mystifying silence is the answer to all haikus
Date:    1/11/03 1:33:45 PM Eastern Standard Time

Let's face it: it has
always been snowing, it has
never stopped snowing.

Do you ski? No, I
snow. I don't know why but I
do. Do you know why?

Why have I not heard
from you I wonder. It's strange
for you to miss a turn.               [DL, 1 / 11 / 03]

DS to DL

Re:  silence due to lack of access; also an elegy for Rudy B.,etc.
Date:    1/11/03 7:41:34 PM Eastern Standard Time

My son controls screens:
The computer, memory,
And other green scenes.

That's why I missed turns:
The turning fire that burns:
Those that father bairns.

The boy has grown up:
Knows the secrets of poems:
Grown girls he'll phone up--

Everything speaks:
Your lost voice, found computer,
The space between words.

Dead photographer:
He saw it all, spoke to it:
The space between clouds.

My son said: Are there
Words for everything, Dad?
For sky between clouds?

Poetry's secrets:
I taught you on walks to school:
Now I am your Fool--

Because of him I lose
A turn in haiku---because
Of him I see saws--!        [ DS, 1 / 11 / 03]

DL to DS

  Quick rejoinder
Date:    1/11/03 11:43:45 PM Eastern Standard Time

Because of love too
you lost count of syllables
on yon abacus

which happens to me
frequently though less frequent
now than dark blue snow.

What Kenneth poem
will you read at the tribute
at Columbia?

I'd opt for "Proverb"
or maybe "At Extremes" from
"A Possible World."

Brueghel painted it:
my window: hunters in snow,
skaters on green ice.       [DL, 1 / 11 / 03]

See also the first of their haiku exchanges
https://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/01/haiku-exchange.html
and this one devoted to Kenneth Koch
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/01/haiku.html

A protective blanket of words [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Arctic Dreams - Photo Credit: Lera Auerbach

(1)

I learned that a friend of mine was going through a tough time. His mother died, and he had debilitating neck pain. He needed to write the obituary and arrange for the funeral. His mother had dementia. Was he able to say goodbye? I did not ask. 

I don't know which scale would measure grief. Such a scale doesn't exist. 

Physical pain is easier to manage. If it is yours. Because at some point, the pain stops defining you. 
Grief buried deeper, so deep it can't be torn away, it becomes you.

In the Arctic, old babushkas, when they become unable to take care of themselves, hope to be killed by a polar bear. When they become too ill and weak, they look for the bear to eat them. I asked why. Being devoured by a wild animal didn't seem to me like an attractive way to finish life. 

"The bear will be nourished by eating me," explained an old Inuit woman. "The bear will become strong and fat. Then one day, my son will kill that bear. My son and his family will eat the bear's meat, make healing mixes from its fat, and make trousers from its fur. Thus, through the polar bear, I will nourish my son and keep him warm, even past my life, even past my death."

Post mortem motherly care.

(2)

A few years ago, I travelled to Greenland and stayed in Nuuk in the apartment of a polar bear hunter. A polar bear hunter's home looked like an IKEA house made by children constructors of adult sizing. Everything was modern, functional and perfectly unremarkable. 

A photograph on the wall showed a polar bear (or rather its fur) covered in blood, soaking in a bathtub. I realized it was the same bathtub in which I had showered that morning. It had rubber ducklings as lucky ornaments. Perfectly, chillingly, unremarkable bathtub.

(3)

"I wish I could make a blanket of protective words to shield you," I wrote to my friend, whose mother died after suffering dementia for several years. 

“A protective blanket of words” could be a definition of poetry. 
“Could be” because, like everything else, it rejects any definitions. 

Poetry is no different than spell-making or alchemy.

As if words could make a difference. 
As if anything could still make any difference.

In the world gone mad with apocalyptic craziness and fear, can words remain protective talismans? 

(4)

Bears in the Arctic are suffering from global warming. They're skinny and weak; they couldn't kill even old babushkas on their suicide mission. 

If I could stitch a protective blanket of words, I would make one for the polar bears, another one for the suicidal babushkas on their mission to feed the polar bears, and the third one for the polar bear hunters. I would then make a gigantic frozen quilt for the Arctic to protect it from climate change and even a bigger blanket for the entire world to save it from madness. 

Every stitch would be a word of love, a talisman against impending disaster. 

But I never learned how to make blankets or quilts. I can mend sounds and strings but not threads. The thoughts made of words are unravelling, and I can't weave them together. 

 

M.L. Smoker: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________

Borrowing Blue

I’m not the painter here. I leave that to you, but blue
is the color of my father’s camping cup, left tonight
on the Formica counter. This pen I am writing with.
and the beaded moccasins and belt I danced in
before my mother died.
My grandmother had made these for her as a child—
spelling out in blue beads on blue beads
each of our names, our collective history
in an invisible pattern only we would recognize.
Not the blue of Montana sky either,
not that at all, but the pulse of lake water lapping
at your ankles, the temperature rising
as a storm gathers on the plains.
The push and pull of forgiveness.
I’m already thinking of leaving again.
Did I tell you this? How can I speak of this wind,
how it has no color, no sense,
no guilt. It makes me feel even more lonely
than I would ever let on.
I’m guessing you figured this much already.
(We will never stop missing them, will we,
the parent each of us has lost.)
I’ll be honest, I have no idea what I would see
in the paintings if I were to visit you.
I like to think there would be some kind of end
to the blue, a visual end to what is never
adequate: blue flame, blue bead, blue ovary,
blue lung. See how easily we fail?
How can we believe that our secrets are in good hands—
yours resting at the bottom of Flathead Lake, mine held
in a small leather suitcase beneath the stairs.
I have not worn those moccasins or that belt for over
six years now. We should both be ashamed.
Look at us.  Look, as the grey fog
settles into your streets outside, how the near-white
canvases wait. You almost didn’t notice again.
Just like I almost didn’t notice the wind
dying down for evening.
So yes, let’s call it Montana blue, the vanishing point:
Maybe this is the real reason I have never learned
to trust in color. How can you take back
the kind of blue you’ve been dreaming of—trust
it will make something unhappen—
if it is the same blue you’re made of?

______________________________________________________________________________________________

M.L. Smoker is a member of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana.   She currently serves as co-poet laureate for the state of Montana, alongside her longtime friend, Melissa Kwasny. ◙ She holds an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula, where she was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Fellowship. In 2019 she was recognized as an alumna of the year by the University. ◙ Her first collection of poems, Another Attempt at Rescue, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2005. In 2009 she co-edited an anthology of human rights poetry with Melissa Kwasny entitled, I Go to the Ruined Place. She received a regional Emmy award for her work as a writer/consultant on the PBS documentary Indian Relay. ◙ She served as the Director of Indian Education for the state of Montana for almost ten years. In 2015 she was named the Indian Educator of the Year by the National Indian Education Association and was appointed to the National Advisory Council on Indian Education by President Barack Obama.  She currently works at Education Northwest as a practice expert in Indian Education. [For more on M.L. Smoker, click here.]

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Flathead Lake, Montana

 

Poets' Jeopardy [by Mindy Aloff]

Prima ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, who inspired Frank O'Hara's "Ode to Tanaquil Le Clercq," pictured here with Corrado Cagli, Vittorio Rieti, and George Balanchine, (photo © Irving Penn).

Special Edition: Poetry and the Dance

Question: What do the careers of Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Louis MacNeice, Marianne Moore, Amiri Baraka (né LeRoi Jones), James Merrill, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara have in common, apart from the fact that they all wrote poetry in English?

Answer: All of them wrote at least one poem about the ballet, not as a metaphor but as a self-contained art. Many of their ballet poems, in fact, are about particular ballets or named dancers.

Question: What do Edwin Denby, Jack Anderson, and Jay Rogoff have in common?

Answer: All of them were or are known as poets and also as working dance critics.

Question:  What do Théophile Gautier, Jean Cocteau, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline have in common, apart from the fact that they wrote in French?

Answer: All of them wrote libretti or scenarios for ballets. Gautier’s brainchild was the 1841 ballet Giselle. Cocteau, who served Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes (1909-1929), wrote ballet scenarios after Diaghilev’s death as well—most famously for the 1946 Roland Petit ballet Le Jeune Homme et la Mort, which Cocteau also conceived. Céline, a balletomane, wrote several scenarios that he hoped would be adopted by a ballet company in the U.S.S.R., to which he traveled in 1936 to try to get his ideas produced. For some reason, none of them seemed to attract the Soviets’ attention. And, yet, who could possibly resist Céline’s ballet scenario “Scandal in the Deep,” a bit of which goes:

“There he is, Captain Krog, with his spike in his hand. . .with his men. . .on the ice floe. . .massacring a thousand baby seals surprised in their little games. . .the blood of innocent seals runs everywhere on the ice. . .on the men. . .splattering Captain Krog. . .Captain Krog and his men dance with delight!. . .The Dance of the Massacre!” (Thomas and Carol Christensen, trans., Ballets without Music, without Dancers, without Anything, Los Angeles: Green Integer Press, 1999.)

Question: In terms of the New York City Ballet, what did the poets W.H. Auden and Lincoln Kirstein have in common?

Answer: They both wrote program notes for the company. (Read those ballet programs! You never know who the anonymous authors actually are.)

Question: Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Arthur Rimbaud, Edith Sitwell, and Gertrude Stein were some of his choreographic inspirations. Name the choreographer.

Answer: Frederick Ashton.

Question: What poet’s work provided the title of the Martha Graham-Aaron Copland masterpiece of modern dance, the 1944 Appalachian Spring?

Answer: Hart Crane’s “The Bridge.”

Question: The title of Paul Taylor’s 1990 dance Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun comes from the work of what poet?

Answer: Wallace Stevens’s poem of the same title.

Question: What soloist from the original, 1948 group of dancers for the New York City Ballet—where her culminating assignment a decade later was to serve as a member of the original cast of the landmark Balanchine-Stravinsky Agon—and who subsequently performed as a member of the original company of Jerome Robbins’s Ballets: U.S.A., went on to become a full professor of literature at the City College of New York and an esteemed scholar of Wallace Stevens?

Answer: Barbara Milberg Fisher (author of Wallace Stevens: The Intensest Rendezvous, University Press of Virginia, 1990, and In Balanchine’s Company: A Dancer’s Memoir, Wesleyan University Press, 2006)

Question: What poem contains the following stanza and who was the poet?

“Can you dance a question mark? / Can you dance an exclamation point? / Can you dance a couple of commas? / And bring it to a finish with a period?”

Answer: “Lines Written for Gene Kelly To Dance To” by Carl Sandburg.

Question: In 1893, the Symbolist poet and occasional dance critic Stéphane Mallarmé wrote in an essay on the American modern dancer Loïe Fuller that her programs using many yards of silk and complicated lighting constituted “the theatrical form of poetry par excellence.” However, a poem by Mallarmé himself became the wellspring for a much more renowned dance artist, by way of the composer Claude Debussy. Name the ballet and its choreographer.

Answer: Debussy’s 1894 symphonic poem for orchestra, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, a musical response to Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune (“Afternoon of a Faun”), served as the score for Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet, L’après-midi d’un faune, made for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In Nijinsky’s rendering, the Faun (performed originally by the choreographer) appears to pleasure himself on a scarf dropped by a nymph who evades his advances.

Question: Resolve the contradiction between the following passages:

            “[Mallarmé] believed that his own music was sufficient, and that with even the best intentions in the world, it was a veritable crime as far as poetry was concerned [for Debussy] to juxtapose poetry and music, even if it were the finest music there is.” (Paul Valéry, “Stéphane Mallarmé, Leonardo Poe Mallarmé, 1933; trans. James R. Lawler, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972)

            “I have just come out of the concert, deeply moved. The marvel! Your illustration of the Afternoon of a Faun, which presents a dissonance with my text only by going much further, really, into nostalgia and into light, with finesse, with sensuality, with richness. I press your hand admiringly, Debussy. Yours, Mallarmé.” (Letter included in the 1940 Debussy biography by Maurice Dumesnil)

Answer: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

from the archive; first posted June 2, 2014

"A Woe of Ecstasy" [by Emily Dickinson]

 

 

"A woe of ecstasy" -- Emily Dickinson's phrase. Run with it. 

 

The Arson Prevention Program [by Shanna Compton]

It is exceedingly difficult
to come to terms
with the facts—
someone you love
is redacted

The river continues
as though no one
were missing

The country moves toward
violet abutments

ever adjacent
to the idea we
once had of ourselves
redacted

You must listen
to what’s there
& to what’s left out

You must love too
the silk & the must
of the ash

Ed. note: "The Arson Prevention Program" is from (Creature Sounds Fade) by Shanna Compton. Black Lawrence Press, 2020. "You have to see how these poems sound in your head." -- Dara Wier. 

Inviting a Friend to Supper (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

Of Wittgenstein here’s all I know and

All you need to know, my dear friend:

‘I don’t care what I eat as long as it’s

‘The same thing every day.’ Genau!

Thus spake the great philosopher!

So don’t expect Cornish game hen

Chez moi. I was raised on Swanson’s

Chicken pot pies and the only change

Now is we’ll have the Stauffers brand

Plus an enormous orange Jell-o mold

Which in the days my youth signified

Gemütlichkeit, as the great philosopher

Might say. Dessert will be fig newtons

And I’ll ask you to please bring the wine.

 

 

 

Lewis Saul on Beethoven's String Quartet in C# Minor

BEETHOVEN, Ludwig van: String Quartet in C# Minor, Op. 131 (1825)

 It was forty years ago today ...

No, that can't be right -- it just sounded nice! But it was like 39 or so -- and it was Paris -- a Montparnasse cafe in fact and it was raining lightly (probably) and I knew a poet (definitely) who expressed his unreserved enthusiasm for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Op. 125 -- particularly the final movement, the "Ode To Joy," where Beethoven unleashes all the forces at his disposal, including vocal soloists and chorus.

I tried to explain to this poet how Beethoven -- using only the simplest and most basic harmonic structure (think two-chord rock 'n roll) -- spins the earth around with powerful orchestration and unbelievably brilliant variation in color and temperament. . .

. . . . but the best part was that this particular poet taught me the meaning of the German words which I had never really taken the trouble to learn.

Muß ein lieber vater wohnen means a lot more to me now thanks to this wonderful poet friend who turned me on to James Joyce, playfully informed me that Joan Miró was not a woman -- and had the good sense to bring Frank Zappa along as the soundtrack to our local hysteria . . . 

**

Much like his musical output as a whole, Beethoven’s 17 string quartets can be divided into three convenient periods: Early, Middle and Late.

Early: Opus 18, Nos. 1-6, all written between 1798-1800;
Middle: Opus 59, Nos. 1-3 (1805/6); Op. 74, the “Harp” (1809), and Op. 95 (1810);
Late: Op. 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135 (1823-26) 

I cannot recall when I first heard a Late Beethoven quartet. It must have been my senior year of high school at the Interlochen Arts Academy, where my composition teacher had pointed me towards the microfiche machine and a few spools of microfilm which contained the Complete Works of Beethoven! How I used to pour over those beautiful scores, surfing the microfilm the way we do the net today -- carefully studying these (mostly) unfamiliar scores.

After thoroughly absorbing the Late Quartets, I began to feel a particular fondness and appreciation of Op. 131 -- not that the others are not equally brilliant and exciting, world-shaking music -- but 131 became a focal point for my idea about what it means to write for these four stringed instruments …

~~

HOW I BECAME SUCH A HUGE AMADEUS FAN

I have 15 or 20 different recordings of the string quartets. The Amadeus Quartet recordings from the 1960’s -- recently reissued on CD -- are my favorites, by far! 

I still have the original 10-LP DGG set and listen to it often, marveling at how much better analog vinyl sounds than squeezy-thin dynamic range and contrast CDs. I’ve never heard better performances -- particular the Late Quartets.

Unlike most quartets with a famous name, who routinely replace departing players (“Juilliard,” “Tokyo,” “Turtle Island”), The Amadeus Quartet had always agreed that “ … if any member could no longer play, for whatever reason, the Quartet would not continue” -- and when Peter Schidlof, the violist, died in 1987, The Amadeus Quartet disbanded. 

I had the good fortune to hear the Tokyo Quartet play this here in Tucson in April of 2008. My review of that performance is here.

HOW FIVE BECAME SIX AND OTHER DETAILS

Op. 133 (“Grosse Fuge”) was originally the last movement of Op. 130. Shockingly, Beethoven listened to reason and his publisher and agreed to replace the mammoth movement with a light dance movement (one of the very last things he ever wrote!), which now stands as the Finale to Op. 130.

Op. 133 was published separately -- although more and more quartets today are playing this as the Finale of Op. 130, a strange historic reconstruction … 

What makes these late quartets so special?

First of all, if you are familiar with the Ninth (Op. 125) and/or the Missa Solemnis (Op. 123) or the Diabelli Variations (Op. 120), you already know that his style and perhaps even his fundamental musical language had changed dramatically from his output of the previous decade or so.

But the string quartet being the intimate, ultimate form for any composer (true today, methinx), Beethoven seems to have deliberately set out to not only “change” music -- but to revolutionize it!

Briefly, the other Late Quartets:

Op. 127 (Eb Major). The “Eroica” (or “heroic”) key! The quartet begins with massed tonics (seven or eight notes played by four) going to dominant seventh chords in -- respectively -- second and third inversions -- all leading to a quick transition to a delightful, slippery Allegro trip in ¾ time, which ends simply. The second movement is an astonishing series of variations on a simple, rising theme in Ab Major. The notes become blacker and blacker (faster rhythms) as the movement progresses, modulating to E Major a few times, before a beautiful ending; simplicity itself. The third movement (“Scherzando vivace”) is the usual jocular Beethoven, but in this Late period, the joke is a bit bizarre and otherworldly -- particularly in the Trio, which sweeps by like a witch on a broomstick. The Finale is a regular rondo-type 4th movement -- but the theme has a very bizarre (“Late”) element to it -- the Ab changing to an A-natural after two repetitions:

Op. 130 (Bb Major). Not only did Beethoven search out new sounds and explore novel harmonic territory, but he obviously felt constrained by the typical four-movement form (Op. 127, for example). Here he burst forth with six separate movements!

1. Adagio - Allegro. A wonderful example of beginning with a fairly typical sonata-form type of exposition and quickly changing key and mood (there are some major seventh chords in this section which are astonishingly beautiful for 1826 or anytime!)
2. Presto. A thrilling fun ride. Beethoven screws with your head as he jumps from duple to triple meter;

III. Andante. Gradually increases in intensity until it fairly busts apart at the end!

1. Alla danza tedesca. A light joyful dance -- four voices in perfect balance;
2. Cavatina -- Adagio. This short movement is rightfully proclaimed a mini-masterpiece. The middle section (Beklemmt[“anguished”]) is positively 20th-century sounding!
3. Finale. A bouncy happy replacement for what used to be a massive double-fugue (see below).

Op. 132 (A Minor). Beethoven makes do with only five movements in this soul-shaking masterpiece. That he opens with a low G# (the “leading tone” to A, the tonic) on the cello was in itself a revolutionary thing to do -- but Beethoven pushes the form to its limits in these quartets. Here -- as in 130 and many other late, and even early and middle works -- he moves back and forth between slow and fast. A Minor is a “dark” key -- and he ends the movement with the first violin sawing back and forth on the same E on two different strings. The second movement (A Major, ¾) also begins on a G#! The trio uses the first violin’s A string to make a bagpipes-type sound. Then follows the famous “Lydian” hymn of thanksgiving, a march and a dazzling ¾ Allegro appasionato to close things out.

Op. 133 (Bb Major). This massive double-fugue which must be heard to be believed. There is a massive amount of ink, virtual and real, spilled over this masterpiece. One of my favorites is here.

Op. 135 (F Major). Famously, Beethoven “prefaced” the music with actual musical notation (which does not appear in the actual work itself) from a goofy canon he had written several months earlier. (Beethoven wrote many such canons. Some are very funny.) 

Thus, we are given an unusual visual clue to what was on Beethoven’s mind! The final movement literally explodes with these questions. Must it be? Yep? Etc.

 OPUS 131 in C# Minor (39:17)

1. Adagio, ma non troppo e molto espressivo -- attacca: (6:58)
   2. Allegro molto vivace -- attacca: (3:05)
   3. Allegro moderato -- attacca: (0:56)
   4. Andante, ma non troppo e molto cantabile -- Andante moderato e lusinghiero -- Adagio -- Allegretto -- Adagio, ma non troppo e semplice -- Allegretto (14:17)
   5. Presto -- Molto poco adagio -- attacca: (5:27)
   6. Adagio quasi un poco andante -- attacca: (2:04)
   7. Allegro (6:30)

No one had ever written a string quartet in seven movements before!

The word “attacca” means that the players proceed directly to the next movement without pause. Therefore, a listener with no program might conclude that the piece is in two very long movements! (The only pause occurs after the fourth movement).

In fact, the quartet is really in five moments -- Nos. 3 and 6 are really just short introductions to Nos. 4 and 7, respectively.

1. Adagio, ma non troppo e molto espressivo -- attacca: (6:58)

A fugue of unsurpassed beauty, intensity, majesty -- and of course, inventiveness! The first violin (notation above) opens with the dominant note (G#) which lands on the leading tone (B#), followed by the tonic (C#).

The fourth note (the first beat of the second full bar) dips down to the submediant (A) and is held for three beats -- almost like a divine sigh -- before it continues on its way towards the second entry in the second violin, played a fifth lower. The texture thickens magnificently as the viola enters back in the tonic and the cello follows, again a fifth lower. With much typical fugal imitation, the music continues along, moved steadily by the quarter-note pulse, surging towards something.

Using an enharmonic (D#/Eb), he modulates to six flats; nine bars later to G# Minor (eighth-notes are introduced), and then to A Major, where we then encounter the First and Second violins in a delicious duet:

Soon, the pulse picks up again (more eighth-notes); the theme is heard in various disguises; and then the sun seems to set:

This gorgeous, peaceful ending is actually no ending at all!

Beethoven immediately repeats the octave skip, but a half-step higher, as he moves to D Major for the

2. Allegro molto vivace -- attacca: (3:05)

second movement -- a delightful romp in 6/8. Beethoven at first holds back a bit with a fermata and ritard, but eventually the quartet shouts out a slippery bit of off-beat sforzandi in unison much of the time -- until the music simply dies away …  

3. Allegro moderato -- attacca: (0:56)

This quick transitional movement features a wonderful run in the first violin:

…

and ends on a nice loud dominant chord.

4. Andante, ma non troppo e molto cantabile --Andante moderato e lusinghiero -- Adagio -- Allegretto -- Adagio, ma non troppo e semplice -- Allegretto (14:17)

This massive theme and variations begins with a theme which speaks to simplicity itself. There is barely anything to it.

A long passionate section follows and transforms itself with dotted rhythms and a sweeping lick (a 16th and two 32nds) until concluding with a light flurry of 32nd notes leading right into a 4/4 march variation.

A perfect example of Beethoven’s extraordinary creativity presents itself here. As he keeps the quarter-note march pulse going by giving a beat to at least one instrument, it finally dissolves into a falling cascade of octaves on A and E:

… but he immediately launches right back into the march on the very next beat!

The next variation (Andante) combines duets between viola/cello and the two violins into a mass of bizarre trilling and offbeat sforzandi. A stately Adagio follows (rudely interrupted by loud pizzicato double- and triple-stops!). This creeps up to a beautiful Allegretto featuring 8-note chords:

From there to a long 9/4 Adagio, with anguished chords, voiced for orchestral-type timbre, and accompanied by a silly little 16th-note figure in the cello:

Eventually, things get moving with rolling arppegios and trills, until finally the original theme is heard again, distinctly. Beethoven plays with it as if he were a cat pawing a toy. He cuts it off in mid-phrase. He passes it back and forth (as he did with its initial statement!) … and finally ends on a gently plucked A Major chord.

5. Presto -- Molto poco adagio -- attacca: (5:27)

This exciting music is nearly impossible to describe. You must hear it to believe it! The tempo should be extremely fast -- so fast, in fact, that the bars are counted in “one” instead of “four” because they go by so quickly.

Later, Beethoven indicates Ritmo di quattro battute -- or “count it in four” -- but he does not mean four beats per bar, he means that the players should count four consecutive bars as a four-beat phrase!

Finally, after many repetitions, Beethoven presents the bouncy theme in an entirely new way -- the strings play sul ponticello, or “on the bridge.” If done correctly, it produces the most delicious, eerie sound -- and frankly, I have never heard it done as well as Amadeus does it! Note the da capo per l’ordinario, or “back to playing normally.”

After three loud E major chords ends the movement, Beethoven repeats the three beats with unison G#’s -- the dominant of the final movement, in the tonic C# Minor …

6. Adagio quasi un poco andante -- attacca: (2:04)

Plenty of double-sharps for the players to negotiate in this short transitional movement …

7. Allegro (6:30)

… which is announced with a ferocity that is hard to describe. It bites at you with its jagged rhythm.

However, Beethoven soon offsets this marching fury with a plaintive, truly heart-breaking motif in the First violin. Look at this carefully:

Read it backwards, skipping what would be note #2 and putting that as note #4; i.e., G#/B#/C#/A -- our old four-note friend from the first movement fugue!

Perhaps Beethoven knew he was dying. When I listen to this movement -- having been properly prepared by a brilliant performance of the previous six -- I feel as though Beethoven is showing us the long, unfolding road through town or path through forest which leads to that famous “undiscovered country” we all know nothing about.

But when the above “sighing” theme interrupts the march, I feel that Beethoven must have been an optimist at heart. There is something hopeful there, something that feels eternal, immortal, divine. . . . otherworldly. . .

Can Beethoven truly have been a human being, then? 

As the "march to death" winds down.

from the archive; first posted July 11, 2010. Click here for the entire article, of which this is a mere excerpt.

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2010/07/the-seven-most-meaningful-compositions-that-i-will-love-forever-ii-beethoven-string-quartet-in-c-min.html