The Best American Poetry

"Transit of Venus" by Marty Hiatt [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Marty Hiatt is a Berlin based poet and translator who runs the intrepid Baulk Press. Originally from Melbourne, Hiatt’s work keeps alive the correspondence between the experiments in French poetry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and those taking place in Australian poetry today, exemplified by his great long-poem “The Manifold”. His translations include works by Philippe Soupault, Apollinaire’s  “Vendémiaire” and Nathalie Quintane’s contemporary masterpiece Tomatoes.

 

 

Hiatt’s own poetry is infused with the spirit of those writers he translates, who seem to give him, as Soupault said of Apollinaire, “permission to go faster and father”. In “Transit of Venus”, discordant images crash against one another, creating a kind of junk energy: both energizing and enervating. “Possible arcs are continually amassing”, but they are of “almond milk or intratelluric menses”. Engines and alien dialects lull either the monsoon season or the speaker, or both. The effect is a curated disorientation (“I look down but not back”) that embodies precisely the defining features of our postmodern selves: we haven’t simply “had enough of the old world” but are addicted to the new world we continue to fashion around us, a world that causes us to be at once both perpetually exhilarated and permanently exhausted.

 

Transit of Venus

 

standing on top of the helicopter counting

the bristles of my toothbrush

i look down but not back

for with precision instruments we’re raked

a vision of my next career move pins my eyes

but it turns out to be just another thundercloud

to hack through like one more enemy toad

gliding past black n red wreckages

in whose erstwhile spans we’re serried

as one — whether baggage attendant pilot or stag beetle

we kiss one another’s lofty bitumen with creaking lips

 

my lust for diesel is becoming

a problem n water’s too hard

though other possible arcs are continually amassing

like almond milk or intratelluric menses

that help me through the dilation of the monsoon season

lulled by so many engines n alien dialects

 

about the garbage press

the circular koan foreseen by the oracle composes itself

trips on a splattered helmet

pronouncing radio static that implores me to return

to my neglected duties to world’s best practice rooftop dining,

silt deposits n jubilant mastication

mammoth concerns devour one another in the lagoon

i’ll have to leave the slack-water revert to aerobic status

even as the advancing front engulfs what little

oxygen i’d extracted n carried through

 

suns set at 9am

after peak hour broke its banks

damaging conveyors n other infrastructure

it is time to pick up my thighs

from the dry-cleaners. no cash

so steam torture in its stead

platoons flush by too quick to indict

though silken families stranded on the pontoon

compliment my figure, at once

offering their condolences n implying

the loss was worth it all told

but their countenances turn with my shoulder

 

in the application window tread on the

heads of the buoyant while

distilling new perfumes to compliment

the scum of enslavement

i frankly didn’t lack a post (i’ve blades) but

to run with the exhumed midst manifolds

lengthens the spinal casing improves bee fertility

n at time of writing no synthetic substitute

has yet appeared on the open market

 

then so spruced, break left, set course for

high-voltage transmission lines

for the great axis has at last been precisely determined.

they’re winking as adult themes in children’s books

but to whom? so am i:

not even the blind could miss em

 

Marty Hiatt's latest collection of poems The Months Of (2022) is available now through Baulk Press.

 

Pearl Harbor according to "The Godfather"

"Say, what do you think of the nerve of them Japs?" Sonny asks. "Dropping bombs on our own backyard on Pop's birthday here." To which Fredo, who didn't go to college to get stupid, replies, "They didn't know it was Pop's birthday." The flashback finale of The Godfather, part 2.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: DECEMBER 7, 2022

As the year draws to an end, I’m thinking of other kinds of endings. Victoria Redel's  “Ode to Menopause” was first published in SWWIM on November 7, 2022.  And Lucille Clifton’s poem “to my last period” is from Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton.

 

Ode to Menopause

Victoria Redel

I miss the blood.
The plush, thick insistence. Lunar declaration, my flag.
Then years living together, mysterious reconciling,
not that we were always a sister nation,
didn’t bitch, get bitchy, blame everything
on a knot that bellied down, rumped me to my knees.
& those gym passes, Coach too embarrassed
to challenge how it stretched on for weeks.
Now I’m missing cash registers where I averted my eyes,
the rectangle box a public admission, & yes,
let’s bless the shyness of teenage boys bagging,
handing back change & what happened
between us, a moment, electric—what was it?
—cringe, tease, apology, brag—
that we were actually bodies walking around
with the whole screwy, beautiful, damaged
human history of bodies. & bless too,
the anti-corporate, vinegar-cleansed sponges
& menstrual cup years I bannered to take back
body and night. & let this be praised:
how his cock looked crimson sheathed,
how his face came up smeary & I tasted iron on his tongue.
Destroyers, we were—sheets, mattress,
my own sticky fingers—our carnage, &
oh, that muscled relief of coming.
& then the just-after, cleaned-out days,
follicular, ovules burst, dropping luteal.
Call this bat shit nostalgic, but here’s to the crazy-making
late months, that haze of calculation & fret,
stalled in doorways practicing conversations I didn’t want.
Once, on my knees in a summer field, I prayed.
Then the stain of forgiveness, like blessing.
Here, right now, an official thank you
to every public library, office, gas station, airplane,
restaurant, concert port-o-potty, state park bathroom
where, behind latched stalls, I angled in
smooth cardboard & also, too, to strangers,
ladies who helped when I was an empty purse,
not a scrounged coin to turn the metal dispensary
for this nest I shed month after month
after year after decade like it was nothing,
a tag-along, the occasional phew, other times the rebuke,
fertility failure, but never once did I acknowledge
did I really consider, what it gave the rest of me:
brain, skin, bones, tissues, memory, sleep, mood,
until it was gone. For months. Then back.
Back out of whack rollercoaster of a coda,
odd day, whole month wallops uncontainable,
dinners or meetings unfinished before torrent,
final rampage, this sorcery of woman
the ancients believed could stop lightening.
And then it stopped. Really. Forever. Period.

 

You can read Lucille Clifton's "to my last period" here: 

https://poets.org/poem/my-last-period

 

William Makepeace Thackeray: Pendennis [by Lewis Saul]

Fifty years ago, your Editor, a few friends and I were drinking strong black coffee at a nice little café in the Montparnasse district of Paris. I was studying music composition and -- frankly -- had never read anything other than texts on music (with the exception of Theodore Dreiser, a high-school independent study project).

The conversation was filled with author names which were totally unfamiliar to me -- James Joyce, Henry Miller, and David insisted that I also read some good poetry, like Apollinaire and Mayakovsky (not to be confused with Nikolai, the composer).

Having never gone to college, this started me on my journey with literature. (Thank you, David!)

A few years later, Stanley Kubrick released his masterpiece, Barry Lyndon, based on the novel by somebody named William Makepeace Thackeray. The film had extensive narration, which sounded like it was lifted straight from the book.

Fast forward to this century, and I had seen the film Vanity Fair, written by the same dude with this weird name. I had to check it out. As is my wont, I decided to go for the guy's complete works. I found this slightly mildewy 1903 edition on Ebay:


I devoured Barry Lyndon and Vanity Fair and just yesterday completed Pendennis, written in 1849-50.

The book begins with Arthur Pendennis at 13, away from his country home at College (I guess that's what they called Junior High back then). He is an average student -- deficient in Greek -- and is plucked! (dismissed) ...

Ashamed and demoralized, he determines to set himself right. There is his saintly mother, Helen; his step-sister Laura, his severe uncle, The Major, retired on half-pay from service in India and a host of other characters who one gets to know intimately through the nearly 800 pages of this two-volume edition.

We are swept along with events in London and the countryside as Pen eventually reaches the age of 26. Thackery masterfully keeps things moving, ending chapters on a cliffhanger and abruptly changing scenes and characters.

The classism and misogyny are to be expected, I suppose. But even there, Thackeray has great fun with some minor characters of a lower (but only slightly) strata in "society."

A great read and a tremendous morality tale.

P.S. Myakovsky's A Cloud in Trousers is an awesome poem!

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty): Dara Wier [by Angela Ball]

95% of Thoroughbred Horses Descend from Eclipse

 

I’m walking slowly the way trees walk. 

I’m letting my branches slip over steaming coastline.

My bucket, my stick, my good boots.

My eyelids shoot out lightning bolts.

They’re over before anyone sees. 

I tie them down with strips of old bed sheets.

If you’ve never ripped up a sizable piece of cotton, try it.

My wolf pal thinks I’m jumpy and says so. 

Where hide the really good sifters when we need them?  

If you take some yellow and rightly apply it

You can rid yourself of something or other. 

This campaign I’m on is addictive. 

Close to the vest plays good with some cats.

Someone’s fretting I’m betting on fill-ins.

My twin, my subtle other, my upright shadow,

My me, my myself, My I, I multiply as if

Famines of me are not something to treasure.

--Dara Wier                                           (first published in The Laurel Review)

 

Dara Barrois/Dixon's (née Dara Wier) new book is TOLSTOY KILLED ANNA KARENINA
(Wave Books 2022). Others include in the still of the night, YOU GOOD THING, and REVERSE RAPTURE.
A new chapbook, Nine, is forthcoming very soon from Incessant Pipe; other chapbooks, Thru and Two Poems, 
have recently appeared from Scram. Lannan and Guggenheim Foundations have supported her work.
She lives in western Massachusetts.

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty): Dara Wier

Dara Wier’s “95% of Thoroughbred Horses Descend from Eclipse,” declarative and urgent, explores the vagaries of identity—its bloodlines and sightlines—and how we make ourselves through imitation and adoption, “By letting our branches slip over steaming coastline”—a coast both itself and a boat powered by water.

In this poem both “close to the vest” and generous, lines unleash surprises like resurrections: “the way trees walk,” “over steaming coastline,” “lightning bolts.” “Lightning bolts”? The speaker’s eyelids shoot them out. Though they are over “before anyone sees,” she must restrain them “with strips of old bed sheets.” A humorous surprise, the practical inserts itself: “If you have never ripped up a sizeable piece of cotton, try it.” As in everyday life, utility combines with mystery: “Where hide the really good sifters when we need them?” and “If you take some yellow and rightly apply it / You can rid yourself of something or other.” A woman at home is either problem-solver or dormouse, quiescent as a popsicle. There’s always something to be rid of—a flutter of khaki-colored wings, a dark seam rimming the stainless, a psychotic thrum from the fridge. I think of patent remedies, of Earwigs-No-More, M’Lady.

That’s part of why the speaker acts in fits—is “jumpy”—the self or home she is making, that we all make—is provisional, depending on what props we can gather to shore up or restrain. Its genealogy dark, it is always emergent, mysterious as Elizabeth Bishop’s “Monument”; enticing as John Ashbery’s “Lacustrine Cities.” Once we have begun, there’s no stopping: “This campaign I’m on is addictive.”

This is serious play; the rhythm lilts; words call out to one another in rhyme: “Someone’s fretting I’m betting on fill-ins.” The “fill-ins”: “My twin, my subtle other, my upright shadow.”

The penultimate line, with its assertions of multiple ownership, pelts us with questions. Who is behind the “my” of “My me, my myself, My I” that, proliferating, riffs both on idiom and on Arthur Rimbaud’s enigmatic: “Je est un autre.” If we let them, a horde of explanations descend, from Freud down to the most craven self-help tomes—but these are proforma, shallow, and useless.

Too soon, we approach the close of Dara Wier’s towering poem of refreshment and humorous solemnity. The ending’s emphatic back-handedness, “as if famines of me were not something to treasure,” discombobulating in its union of multiple want and our single speaker, releases a simple word, “treasure,” that deserts all conundrum for art’s self-forgetfulness, its gleaming oblivion.

--Angela Ball

Benjamin Garcia: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________

Le Daría Mis Pulmones

 

Toward the end, she could only

lift a cup of coffee. Closer still,

even that became too much for her,

my mother. A sponge, then,

I’d dip in coffee, or dip pan dulce,

and put that to her lips to suck. That

was all the cancer let her manage.

 

The IV was her sugar water, and she

the hummingbirds she loved to watch,

busy at the red and yellow feeder.

Those plastic flowers welded on

were poor excuses, but they worked. Whatever

 

worked, I guess, my mother thought,

lived. On the bed in the living room,

her body of sleeping birds, her dream

of a thousand green wings shimmering like

shreds of aluminum, that could, at any moment,

unloose on the wind. Toward

 

the end, the sponge and the coffee, the cancer.

She couldn’t smoke anymore either, of course,

because even drawing her own drag: impossible.

So she had me smoke for her—nine years old—

I was her lungs. I blew the smoke right in her face, right

in her face. Just like that, over and over:

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Benjamin Garcia’s first collection, Thrown in the Throat, won the National Poetry Series and the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, in addition to being a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where he received the Jill Gonzalez Health Educator Award recognizing contributions to HIV treatment and prevention. A CantoMundo and Lambda Literary fellow, he serves as core faculty at Alma College’s low-residency MFA program. His poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in: AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. His video poem “Ode to the Peacock” is available for viewing at the Broad Museum’s website as part of El Poder de la Poesia: Latinx Voices in Response to HIV/AIDS.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

      Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital (la camo volando), 1932. Collection of Dolores Olmedo Mexico City, Mexico.

A Question from Emily Dickinson [by David Lehman]

I have a great fondness for two-line poems.

Robert Frost's poem "The Span of Life" is a perfect couplet, enacting the life of a dog as if in a diptych representing youth and old age:

The Span of Life

The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.

– Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Many of the best two-line poems perform a verbal feat of some kind. The form is an invitation to the maker of epitaphs, including irreverent ones. From John Dryden:  "Here lies my wife. Here let her lie. / Now she's at rest, and so am I."

Stacey reminds me of Howard Nemerov's masterpiece of succinctness:

Bacon & Eggs

The chicken contributes,
But the pig gives his all.

Some two-line poems act like object lessons in montage technique, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" being the most famous example.

Rarer is the two-line poem that asks a question, a rhetorical question in a sense, but not in the sense that it asserts a self-evident proposition as when Yeats concludes "Among School Children" (not a two-line poem) by asking "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

Emilt Dickinson's #1095, without a title to help direct us, qualifies as such a question:

To whom the Mornings stand for Nights,
What must the Midnights – be!

The poem ends with an exclamation, rather than a question mark, and what is signified is wonder. But I maintain that the ratio deserves to be completed. If mornings are nights, what, then, are midnights? And whaty causes the poet to utter he exclamation? Think about it.  -- DL

– Emily Dickinson, (1830-1886)

Yeats & Paul Violi

<< Last evening, when listening to Paul Violi's friends and colleagues and students and admirers read his poems, I thought of the last two lines of Yeats's "The Municipal Gallery Revisited,"  and recited them in my capacity as MC of the memorial. Here are the culminating lines of Yeats's multi-part poem. DL

You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends. 

William Butler Yeats >>

From the archive; first posted December 2, 2011

Athena Sonnets (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'What are words that you hate, Athena,
'And what are the words that you love?'
Until now I had never called her Athena
But here was born a delicate intimacy 
Between us and moreover I really was
Curious re Athena's word preferences.
She hung fire for a moment then said
'Tantamount! I hate that word which
'Only the assholes speaketh. Words
'That I love? Hm, hm. Well, nosegay 
'Is dear to me except nosegay is rarely
'Heard since the old Victorian times.
'Wait, why did you call me Athena?
'Wait, I LOVE the word antimacassar.' 

Another Athena sonnet >> 

Read in my face a volume of despairs,
The wailing Iliads of my tragic woe,
Drawn with my blood and printed with my cares
Wrought by her hand, that I have honor'd so.
Who, whilst I burn, she sings at my soul's wrack,
Looking aloft from turret of her pride;
There my soul's tyrant joys her in the sack
Of her own seat, whereof I made her guide.
There do these smokes that from affliction rise,
Serve as an incense to a cruel Dame;
A sacrifice thrice grateful to her eyes,
Because their power serve to exact the same.
Thus ruins she, to satisfy her will,
The Temple where her name was honor'd still.

                           -- Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) 

 

 

Noir City Festival (Oakland, CA, January 2023)

Interstellar Theme Park [poem by Jack Skelley]

Photo by Gary Leonard

(Ed note: Ever since we posted the conversation between poets Jerome Sala and Jack Skelley we've been fielding requests for their poems. Here is Jack Skelley's Interstellar Theme Park, from his book of the same title. You can find it here.)

Interstellar Theme Park by Jack Skelley

Based on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s lost epic, Dune

I want whore-ships

And I want these whore-ships to dock in orbital flesh

I want ruby-throated ornithopters sipping the nectar of dwarf stars

I want Emperor Dali on a toilet throne of dolphins

I want drones that say Yes Daddy

I want H.R. Geiger mausoleums for the 27 Club

I want quasi-suspended animation (genital arousal optional)

I want a planet of toys

I want a jihad of joys

And a gulag of Karens

I want Rimbaudian grammar police

I want woke Stormy Daniels balloon rides

I want light-rail Stations of the Cross

I want Picasso’s pajamas 50% off in all emporia

I want Vibrators by Dre standard

I want Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd to levitate the Tomorrowland Terrace

I want 50-foot Miley Cyrus mourning her Dead Petz on Dog Star Sirius

I want time itself to eddy and unhitch from its turntable of deception

I want Moon Juice cougars – see them jump-start adaptation, anointed with next-gen Kardashian lips and hips

I want Fruity Pebbles vaccination bars, with stalactites nippling jelly babies, but without the jingle-jangle crash

While we’re at it, I want fingers that are 17 trillion light-years long, probing asteroids & healing hemorrhoids

I want Aristophanes’ tranny-globe beings, rolling around & layered with eyes – day and night, without ceasing, they sing

Don’t forget: I want on-demand K-holes mouthing the words “now” & “wow,” drooling and dripping with ahegao

I want rings, blue rings, and rings around rings of Berlin-blue orbs

Get me Stanley Kubrick, I want him to edit all humanity to grunts and symbols

On gas-giant Neptune I want Hello Kitty to be Hell Kitty

I want fresh-baked hosts branded with the Holy Ghost

Oh, and I also want bio-feedback donuts that induce satori

I want 12 Lady Gagas to perform “Lady Madonna” – each one is pregnant and haloed with 12 stars

I want drunk-surfing on a river of anti-gravity

And into this river I want a comet called Wormwood to crash with cold fire nightly at 9

I want Kali the Destroyer decapitating Parvati from Survivor

I want to occupy octopi to learn their language of shape & texture

I want a sunken palace where the spirits of lost lovers murmur

I want thick, chewy anarchy in a candy-colored shell

I want to live-stream Apocalypse Dreams

I want universal chaos

I want the abyss

And, when the Singularity finally arrives, and dumb matter rises to gaze upon itself and remember who it always was, I want everyone to defragmentize into their star-child, co-mingle dimensions, and upload into each other’s arms

 

"Midston House" [by David Schubert, 1913-1946]

      What is needed is a technique
Of conversation, I think, as I put on the
Electric light. But not the limited
Vocabulary of our experience, the
Surface irritations which pile up,
Accumulate a city, – but the expression,
Metamorphosed, of what they are the
Metaphor of; – and their conversion into light.

      On the bus toward Midston House
I survey the people in their actions. Placid
And relaxed are they; this is the humdrum
Claptrap costume of girls and food, men
And work and house. The insurance
Of habit is circular, as
Democracy has interlocking duties,
Circular obediences.

      Yet how to transform
The continual failing clouds of
Energy, into light? The vital
Intelligence of the man whom I am
Going to visit – does he know? I
Think how the sharp severing of
My life's task – severed associations,
Produced in me almost a
Lypothymia of grief and a hiatus of
Days, which grew fangs of anger, my
Lycanthropy – thank god, it's over!

      I am fired from my job by flames, big
As angry consciences; I can do
Nothing; I have not one ability! This man
Whom I am waiting to see in the lobby – 
All my life I am waiting for something that
Does not eventuate – will he
Exist?

      The law of life, like an abstract
Rigorous lawyer, passes a terrifying judg-
Ment on poor little me, in a strange foreign
Syllogism. He is cheating me! He will not
Keep the appointment!

                                    His probity
Rebukes my suspicion. What can I say, that
I love him; that I am un-
Worthy? My doubt makes me feel,
– Even as we discuss another's dishonesty –
Ugly, irate, and damned avid, a cunning
Rascal, like that ugly bird of the White
Nile.

      But the poem is just this
Speaking of what cannot be said
To the person I want to say it.
I am sleepy with subtlety; the room strikes me as
Dark, so cold, so lonely. There is
No one in it. I will put on all the lights.
I wish I could go
On a long, on a long long journey
To a place where life is simple and decent, not
Too demanding.

No! On the vehicle, Tomorrow, I will see
That man, whose handshake was happiness.

Click here for Ron Horning's essay on David Schubert.

Three Poems from the Ukraine [by Slava Konoval]

The Ukrainian poet Vyacheslav ("Slava") Konoval sent us these three poems for publication. A member of the Geer Poetry Group (Wales) and a member of the Federation of Scottish Writers, Slava lives in Kyiv and is determined to weather the Russian military storm. He tells me he has devoted much energy to address "acute social problems, such as overcoming poverty, ecology issues, the relationship of people with the government." I mean to ask him whether he wrote these three poems in English or translated them. Do they not read like translations? On the theory that there is a certain charm in poetry as a second language, and in respect of the embattled nation for whom Konoval would speak, I present them here even before I find out more.

Now I have found out more:

<<< Yea, I am writing in English to promote my compatriots and show the thick skin of the Ukranian soul.

Translation of anything cannot guarantee the precisely, especially in art activity, so I do original form writing in non-my native language.

Yea, I live in Kyiv and haven't leave my city from time of the overwhelming Russian invasion till nowadays. >>>

Don’t be a freak

I can’t be a freak,
I can’t play it,
I have nothing to speak.
From thought about it
I want only to spit.

I’m not a freak,
I haven’t millions on account,
I’m not strong as beek,
which stands firmly on the ground or on the mount.

I was brought up with my mother’s milk,
it is precious like silk,
hey, artificial behavior is bilk.

Richard’s Castle

On the sprawling mountain of Usypalnytsia,
the neo-Gothic wind built
a castle for the Lion Heart,
below St. Andrew's Church.
The castle's a marvel of art!

An unknown architect
loved the pages of Walter Scott,
having built pointed Spires,
laid his heart.

Moody mountain, sharp descent,
she let the towers in
through philanthropic help, maybe cent,
neither royal funds, no sin.

The royal castle shines,
in yellow colors,
in the graceful contours and lines.

Night Singer

Where missile strikes hit,
where the borders with Belarus are close,
I am asking for Your consent, please, permit
to tell about the Ukrainian company,
I honor her, raise a glass, and toast.

In days of turmoil, in stormy days,
IKOC like a weapon took a thread and a needle,
IKOC has will, courage and actions,
not empty phrases.

Weavers, mechanics, accountants,
they are bees, buzzing in workshops,
IKOC flaunts its image and patents
sewn shoes and uniforms for the military,
sketches in laptops.

With style, taste, and quality
IKOC cares about defenders,
who grind the enemy in a meat grinder,
and like blenders.

May the company prosper
that IKOC had a pre-war profit,
an investor is waiting for him in line, a sponsor.

Ed: Re "Night Singer": Diligent Internet searches of IKOC turn up many a cul de sac. Other poems of his are posted here. Other of Slava's Engish-language poems, such as "Painful condition," can be found here.

Painful condition

Once on Thursday, I woke up weak,
having been covered with a warm quilt,
with a merciless temperature,
I am dying, and I am bleak.
Like a pendulum,
hearing the run of strikes in the clock’s click.
Laying in bed, I had exhausted from the undead,
I am similar to a sickly chick.
Contemplate on the white pills,
that had become the color of capitulation.
Please, God, stop all human ills,
overcome the pains, and be a healthy nation.

Or click here.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: NOVEMBER 30, 2022

Edward Hirsch’s 100 Poems to Break Your Heart hurts so good, as John Mellencamp once sang.

This anthology collects poems from Wordsworth (1815) to Meena Alexander (2018) in order to showcase grief in its many manifestations. Hirsch provides mini-essays following each poem to contextualize the work, including information on the author’s life and the social/political times in which it was written. Hirsch includes not only poets who write in English but translations from the Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Turkish, German, Portuguese, and Arabic. It is estimated that as of today the world has lost 6.62 million to Covid-19—and the real number is likely higher. We all are grieving someone or something, a tradition or a pre-Covid ritual now gone. 100 Poems to Break Your Heart is in line with Hirsch’s poetry advocacy, a continuation of his How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (Ecco, 2000) as well as his own stunning elegiac Gabriel: A Poem (Knopf, 2014). Included in 100 Poems to Break Your Heart is one of my favorite poems by Muriel Rukeyser:

 

Poem

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

 

I lived in the first century of these wars.

 

How Much? [poem by Jerome Sala]

Jerome Sala

(Ed note: Ever since we posted the conversation between poets Jerome Sala and Jack Skelley we've been fielding requests for their poems. Here is How Much? by Jerome Sala, from his book How Much? New and Selected Poems. Watch this space for a poem by Jack Skelley)

How Much?

        -- by Jerome Sala

How much is it worth —
the actual copy of
Poems by Pierre Reverdy
Frank O’Hara had in his pocket
when he wrote, “My heart is
in my pocket, it is
Poems by Pierre Reverdy
                                Probably not
as much as Duchamp’s chess set
or urinal: that’s because O’Hara
was not a painter but a poet,
and you know what that means:
while the other arts add value
to their objects, conspiring
with the world of commodities
to nurture the enrichment economy,
verse makes its objects worse
relieving them of their worth
casting them out into the world
beyond the cave of moneymaking
into another place that we do not
yet understand and cannot name.
                       How much is it worth,
the actual heart of Frank O’Hara,
the one stripped of its metaphors?
Can his heart actually be divested
of such accoutrements,
or must we be forever lost
in the moist mist, on the brink
of the heart in itself,
an irretrievable object?
                        When Shelley was
cremated, his heart refused to burn.
Mary Shelley carried it with her
for years wrapped in a silk shroud
inside a jar.
          When revered Tibetan Buddhist
teachers die, their hearts become relics
and are said to bestow blessings—
the greatest of which
is the knowledge of emptiness.

[Originally appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Dec. 18—Jan. 19, 2019 issue.] Now available in How Much? New and Selected Poems by Jerome Sala (NYQ books). 

"Private Eye" [by Ron Horning]

Private Eye

For some reason I think Ghirardelli Square is Aquatic Park
and walk to the end of Columbus one Sunday off. Pretty bad,
so it must have been a lot different when Spicer came here—
with his transistor and a young poet he wants to sleep with—

to bake off a hangover left from drinking and writing to dark.
All you see now is a brick mall full of tourists about to be had.
There’s the Bay, OK, but that’s the beach? Where’s one queer
to bring to life ghost stories so much better now than a myth?

Hard to imagine someone as real as Jack Spicer here for hours,
and so, after managing to avoid what’s happened to the place,
I head back to the Dante and another dinner of pork and beans.

But first I cross Broadway and, in City Lights, buy Flowers,
poems by George Stanley whose lines read like a small face
that starts to glow as this room darkens. Maria, in our teens.

-- Ron Horning

from the archive; first posted November 2, 2013. Photo above, left to right, Ron Horning, David Lehman, Steven Silberblatt, Jamie Katz.

Guillermo del Toro: The Devil's Backbone (2001) [by Lewis Saul]

 

108 minutes
Color

5.1 Surround

in Spanish

1:85:1 aspect ratio

 

“What is a ghost?”

 

Answer: almost every character in this masterful film.

 

Del Toro plants a terrific red herring early on — which make repeated viewings so pleasurable and rewarding!

 

Set during the chaos of the Spanish Civil War, we observe the arrival a big 30’s car driving down a dusty road to an orphanage in the middle of nowhere, depositing a young boy, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), and his injured tutor. Casually, we also see Jacinto (an exceptional Eduardo Noriega) — an orphan who is now a grown man, acting as the caretaker, and his gigantic sidekick, The Pig (Paco Maestre).

 

The war is everywhere, but unlike Del Toro’s Spanish Civil War companion pic Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), we never see any actual fighting. We see a bomb drop from a plane — it lands unexploded in the orphanage’s courtyard, apparently subsequently defused.

 

We meet Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi) and Carmen (Marisa Paredes), the headmistress. We meet Conchita (Irene Visdeo), Jacinto’s lover and the boys, headed by a bully named Jaime (Íñígo Garcés) and the story takes off.

 

**

 

Del Toro is the kind of filmmaker who not only thinks through every single frame, but is such a polymath that he is able to draw on hundreds of varied sources to bring his material to life (see Commentary below). He was planning this screenplay even before he made his debut film, Cronos (1993) [starring Luppi] …

 

Produced by the Almodóvar brothers (Pedro and Agustin) and featuring an excellent subtle score by Javier Navarrete. Also incredible sound design by Salvador Mayolas.

 

Not a boring or inconsequential frame in 108 minutes.

 

A few influences which Del Toro mentions in his “rambling commentary":

• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
• Luis Buñuel
• Tom Thumb
• Thumbelina
• Hansel and Gretel
• Giovanni Battista Piranesi

 

• Carceri d’invencione (Imaginary Prisons)
• M.C. Escher
• Symbolist painters
  • Isle of the Dead
  • Death and the Grave Digger
• Arnold Böcklin
• Caspar David Friedrich
• Carlos Schwabe
• Odilon Redon
• Surrealist painters
• Salvador Dalí
• Giorgio de Chirico
• Lord Byron
• “If you cannot move them emotionally or intellectually anymore, just shove them.”
• Roger Corman
• William Castle
• The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• Charles Dickens
• M.R. James
• Arthur Machen
• The Willows by Algernon Blackwood
• Robert McKee [negative connotation]
• [in case you didn’t notice]: All the “good” characters’ names start with “C” (Carmen, Casares, Conchita, Carlos) and the “bad” ones with “J” (Jacinto, Jamie)
• The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffman
• Mark Twain
• Beauty and the Beast by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve
• Alfred Hitchcock
• Pedro Infante
• Deep Red by Dario Argento
• The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan)
• The Eye (Pang brothers)
• The Ring (Hideo Nakata)
• The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu)
• May (Lucky McKee)
• Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez)
• The Searchers by John Ford
• Mario Bava
• Sergio Leone
• Honoré Fragonard
• Horseman of the Apocalypse
• 
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• In Memoriam A.H.H.
• Juana Inés de la Cruz
• The Wild Bunch by Sam Peckinpah
• Marquis de Sade
• Ann Radcliffe
• Goths
• Tango

"What Hath Gable Got?" Rhett Butler in "It Happened One Night" [by David Lehman]

I could have called it "Hail to the King" or "Odysseus Hitches a Ride," but I went with "What Hath Gable Got?" for my American Scholar piece on the actor who played Rhett Butler & won Claudete Colbert's heart in "It Happened One Night":

As a college student, I watched Gone with the Wind at a Times Square theater where the 1939 film was enjoying a revival. At the first appearance of Clark Gable-as-Rhett Butler standing at the base of a spiral staircase and looking up, the woman sitting next to me, who was old enough to be my mother, blurted out, “God bless him.” At one of the film’s climactic moments, Rhett Butler mounts that spiral staircase with the indomitable Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh at her most ravishing) in his arms.

No male actor exuded as much confidence and devilish sex appeal as this six-foot-one fellow with the best pencil mustache in the business. In his other movies, Gable frequently plays a variation of Rhett Butler. He is the take-charge guy, the born winner, whom it is impossible to dislike—unless you’re Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who characterized Gable as a “well-tailored roughneck.”

Gable is the American male as he would like to be: crafty, capable, sure of himself, equal to any situation. Born and raised in Ohio, he loved literature and used to recite Shakespeare’s sonnets to friends. Devastated by the loss of his wife, the actress Carole Lombard, who died in a plane crash, he joined the U. S. Air Force in World II and flew operational missions over Europe in B-17s. Undershirts went out of style when Gable took off his shirt to reveal a bare chest in Frank Capra’s sublime 1934 comedy, It Happened One Night, in which Gable plays a brash newspaperman who wins runaway heiress Claudette Colbert’s heart—much to his surprise, and hers.

It was in It Happened One Night that Gable established what we today would call his brand. When we first encounter him, he is on a public phone, getting fired, and his boss hangs up on him. Several of his journalist pals are listening, and Gable doesn’t let on that he has lost the phone connection, let alone his job. With a show of bravado, he declares that he wouldn’t come back even if his boss begged him to, “and let that be a lesson to you.” He hangs up, and his chums hail him as “the almighty king.” The character’s real name is ordinary, Peter Warne, but he is more kingly than the patrician “King” Westley (Jameson Thomas), a stuffed shirt to whom the mixed-up Ellen Andrews (Colbert) is engaged. Ellen expresses her ambivalence about the nuptials by running away from her upper-crust home to the buses and trailer parks of the common folk.

Gable is a hero on the model of Odysseus. Luck favors him. On the bus from Florida to New York in It Happened One Night, he takes the one available seat, which happens to be the seat next to Ellen. She wants nothing to do with Peter, but after much disputation, they join forces. To scare the dickens out of a pest who has recognized Ellen from a newspaper photo, Peter assumes the identity of a gangster. As if to proclaim his destiny, he presents himself at a motor lodge as the husband of this chic woman with the wide eyes, the semi-circle eyebrows, and effortless charm.

For the rest of this piece, click here to reach the current "Talking Pictures" column on the web site of The American Scholar.

Kathleen Rooney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________

Western

 

My favorite flavor of Western is revisionist; my second favorite flavor, spaghetti.

Unforgiven is the best Western of all time; don’t at me.

An acidic landscape, accelerated, unstructured. How long before no vestiges of wild country remain?

The Best Western motel chain began in California in the 40s, but can now be found all around the nation.

I really liked The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but I could not stop thinking how all three of those guys needed to drink a lot more water. The sun above a red-hot poker, stoking greed, stoking wrath.

One of Custer’s many nicknames was Old Iron Butt.

Fistful of dollars, fistful of fists. The best revenge is not living well; it’s simply not wanting revenge to begin with.

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” said a minor character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Entertaining for sure, but bad for democracy.

The noun meaning “a book or movie about the Old West” is first attested from 1909.

I like when a character lays his ear to the rail to listen for the heartbeat traversing the train tracks.

Bemused fatalism may be the most effective bravado.

The sun may be unforgiving because we are unforgivable.

According to Evan S. Connell, the early Mandans believed “there was not only a benevolent spirit but an evil spirit which came to earth before the good spirit and whose strength was greater.” Seems pretty accurate.

Abolish the Second Amendment.

For the notorious Mexican standoff scene in the cemetery, Leone told Morricone to compose a track “like the corpses were laughing from inside their tombs,” and that’s what it sounds like. It sounds exactly like that.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, has just been released by Texas Review Press and her next novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in Fall of 2023.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mountain Chief, Blackfeet War Leader by Terrance Guardipee, Siksika (Blackfeet), 2008

Borges: "Translators have impoved my stories"

Jorge Luis Borges said: "I respect translators, and my stories have sometimes been greatly bettered by them. One of them told me so himself. Besides, I am so fond of English that I like anything better in English than in Spanish." While the relevance of this quote to "No R" is not obvious, people of good faith can figure it out. Borges also declared unequivocally that Robert Louis Stevenson "is the most wonderful writer of all English writers, after Shakespeare."