The Best American Poetry

"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.”

Will the Real Cary Grant Please Stand Up? [by David Lehman]

In the TV show "To Tell the Truth," there were always three individuals pretending to be the prominent or accomplished figure, an adventurer or a football hero, and the panel had to choose who was the genuine article.

But Cary Grant stumped the panel.

Each of the three individuals named Cary Grant was extraordinarily handsome, suave, charming, and irresistible even though one was a glib ad man named Roger Thornhill, skillful at stealing a taxi cab or fobbing off girlfriends with gifts of chocolate and insincere praise. The second Cary Grant was a fast-talking newspaper editor ("Duffy! Get me rewrite!"), who can outwit Ralph Bellamy or whoever the designated rival is, and recover the affections of alienated partners such as Irene Dunne and Rosalind Russell. The third showed up at the top of the Empire State Building to meet Deborah Kerr but she, though equally eager, gets hit by a car in the street below, and they do not consummate their affair to remember.

Born Archie Leach on January 18, 1904 in Bristol (England), Cary Grant spoke in an accent that sounds somehow British and yet is not out of place in any set of circumstances in the States. His versatility extended from the globetrotting realm of Hitchcock's thrillers (the England of "Suspicion," the South America of "Notorious," the French Riviera of "To Catch a Thief") to comedies with leading ladies on the order of Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Eva Marie Saint. Possibly the handsomest leading man in the movies, though not the sexiest, he starred with both Hepburns, Katharine in a whole bunch of films and Audrey in Charade. He ties Jimmy Stewart as the most frequent Hitchcock hero. He became a US citizen in 1942 and never won a regular academy award, although he did collect an honorary Oscar in 1970.

Origin of name: Boring Hollywood legend has it that "Cary" came from his stage role as a guy named Cary in a musical with Fay Wray, and "Grant" was assigned to him by the studio. You and I can do better. "Grant me an hour, and I will carry you over the altar," he said sheepishly.

Marital status: five times, with wife #3 (Betsy Drake) the marriage that lasted longest. He had a genius for screwball romantic comedies and was a natural straight man. His work in Frank Capra's "Arsenic and Old Lace" is a good example.

His last romantic hurrah: Charade with Audrey Hepburn in 1963. The Stanley Donen-directed film also exploits the talents of Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, the Marché aux Timbres and the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Gene Kelly doing a carefree dance on the banks of the Seine (though filmed on a studio) is lovingly recalled by Miss Hepburn (Mrs. Charles Lampert) as the hero and heroine hold hands under a bridge and a bateau mouche glides by. Cary Grant shrewdly insists that the romance begins on the lady's side; he is acutely conscious of the age difference between him and Audrey Hepburn. But then you think about it and you realize that he is ever the pursued one -- that his good looks trump the ladies' and he doesn't even have to make a pass to score. If life were a romantic comedy with a Nora Ephron accent, you could not do better than cast Cary Grant in the lead role.

From Charade: "You know what's wrong with you? Nothing." From North by Northwest": "The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I've no desire to make love to her." "What makes you think you have to conceal it?" "She might find the idea objectionable." "Then again she might not."

There is, however, a blank where an identity should be.

Cary Grant took LSD more than 100 times, having been introduced to the narcotic by Betsy Drake. It helped him more than a posse of doctors in his lifelong quest to confront his identity. Best quote: "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." The plot conceit generating North by Northwest, in which a Madison Avenue executive is mistaken for a CIA agent who doesn't exist, is based on an incident in Grant's biography.

A rose is just a rose: "I never had so much fun since Archie Leach died," he says in His Girl Friday. If you watch Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace, you'll see the grave of Archie Leach.

Posthumous scuttlebutt that doesn't shock anyone anymore: he may have been bi-sexual (with flatmate Randolph Scott).

Dodger Fan Info: Shared exclusive box seats with Frank Sinatra and Gregory Peck at Dodger Stadium. Did not pay very close attention to the games.

Retirement job: Became a director of the Fabergé company and promoted the fragrance firm's products.

Vital stats: Rising sign Libra, moon in Aquarius; Water Cat (Chinese astrology); six feet one and a half inches tall.

The well-dressed actor's method was the opposite of the method of Marlon Brando's. Brando wanted to find the character within himself. Cary Grant lost himself in the character he was playing.

Like a handful of other Hollywood giants -- Bogart, Cagney, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Wayne -- he was always himself plus whoever he was depicting. When Bogart or Cagney want to shock you, they act like madmen, Bogart the paranoid ("The Caine Mutiny"), Cagney the psychotic bundle of rage who holds conversations with his dead mama ("White Heat."). Gable is always dashing, Cooper always stoical, strong, and silent, and John Wayne will never lose a fight or a battle. But Cary Grant is at heart a comic actor of supernal charm thrust into a melodrama of high gravity. And what he acts out is invariably a romance. No man is luckier in love than the Cary Grant that existed only in the movies. It is said that Ian Fleming concocted James Bond with Cary Grant in mind.

In the TV show "To Tell the Truth," there were always three individuals pretending to be the prominent or accomplished figure, an adventurer or a football hero, and the panel had to choose who was the genuine article.

But Cary Grant stumped the panel.

Each of the three individuals named Cary Grant was extraordinarily handsome, suave, charming, and irresistible even though one was a glib ad man named Roger Thornhill, skillful at stealing a taxi cab or fobbing off girlfriends with gifts of chocolate and insincere praise. The second Cary Grant was a fast-talking newspaper editor ("Duffy! Get me rewrite!"), who can outwit Ralph Bellamy or whoever the designated rival is, and recover the affections of alienated partners such as Irene Dunne and Rosalind Russell. The third showed up at the top of the Empire State Building to meet Deborah Kerr but she, though equally eager, gets hit by a car in the street below, and they do not consummate their affair to remember.

Born Archie Leach on January 18, 1904 in Bristol (England), Cary Grant spoke in an accent that sounds somehow British and yet is not out of place in any set of circumstances in the States. His versatility extended from the globetrotting realm of Hitchcock's thrillers (the England of "Suspicion," the South America of "Notorious," the French Riviera of "To Catch a Thief") to comedies with leading ladies on the order of Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Eva Marie Saint. Possibly the handsomest leading man in the movies, though not the sexiest, he starred with both Hepburns, Katharine in a whole bunch of films and Audrey in Charade. He ties Jimmy Stewart as the most frequent Hitchcock hero. He became a US citizen in 1942 and never won a regular academy award, although he did collect an honorary Oscar in 1970.

Origin of name: Boring Hollywood legend has it that "Cary" came from his stage role as a guy named Cary in a musical with Fay Wray, and "Grant" was assigned to him by the studio. You and I can do better. "Grant me an hour, and I will carry you over the altar," he said sheepishly.

Marital status: five times, with wife #3 (Betsy Drake) the marriage that lasted longest. He had a genius for screwball romantic comedies and was a natural straight man. His work in Frank Capra's "Arsenic and Old Lace" is a good example.

His last romantic hurrah: Charade with Audrey Hepburn in 1963. The Stanley Donen-directed film also exploits the talents of Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, the Marché aux Timbres and the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Gene Kelly doing a carefree dance on the banks of the Seine (though filmed on a studio) is lovingly recalled by Miss Hepburn (Mrs. Charles Lampert) as the hero and heroine hold hands under a bridge and a bateau mouche glides by. Cary Grant shrewdly insists that the romance begins on the lady's side; he is acutely conscious of the age difference between him and Audrey Hepburn. But then you think about it and you realize that he is ever the pursued one -- that his good looks trump the ladies' and he doesn't even have to make a pass to score. If life were a romantic comedy with a Nora Ephron accent, you could not do better than cast Cary Grant in the lead role.

From Charade: "You know what's wrong with you? Nothing." From North by Northwest": "The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I've no desire to make love to her." "What makes you think you have to conceal it?" "She might find the idea objectionable." "Then again she might not."

There is, however, a blank where an identity should be.

Cary Grant took LSD more than 100 times, having been introduced to the narcotic by Betsy Drake. It helped him more than a posse of doctors in his lifelong quest to confront his identity. Best quote: "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." The plot conceit generating North by Northwest, in which a Madison Avenue executive is mistaken for a CIA agent who doesn't exist, is based on an incident in Grant's biography.

A rose is just a rose: "I never had so much fun since Archie Leach died," he says in His Girl Friday. If you watch Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace, you'll see the grave of Archie Leach.

Posthumous scuttlebutt that doesn't shock anyone anymore: he may have been bi-sexual (with flatmate Randolph Scott).

Dodger Fan Info: Shared exclusive box seats with Frank Sinatra and Gregory Peck at Dodger Stadium. Did not pay very close attention to the games.

Retirement job: Became a director of the Fabergé company and promoted the fragrance firm's products.

Vital stats: Rising sign Libra, moon in Aquarius; Water Cat (Chinese astrology); six feet one and a half inches tall.

The well-dressed actor's method was the opposite of the method of Marlon Brando's. Brando wanted to find the character within himself. Cary Grant lost himself in the character he was playing.

Like a handful of other Hollywood giants -- Bogart, Cagney, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Wayne -- he was always himself plus whoever he was depicting. When Bogart or Cagney want to shock you, they act like madmen, Bogart the paranoid ("The Caine Mutiny"), Cagney the psychotic bundle of rage who holds conversations with his dead mama ("White Heat."). Gable is always dashing, Cooper always stoical, strong, and silent, and John Wayne will never lose a fight or a battle. But Cary Grant is at heart a comic actor of supernal charm thrust into a melodrama of high gravity. And what he acts out is invariably a romance. No man is luckier in love than the Cary Grant that existed only in the movies. It is said that Ian Fleming concocted James Bond with Cary Grant in mind.

Jane Freilicher, "Parts of a World" at Kasmin (Jan 21-Feb 27, 2021)

 

 

"The Master of the Gamblers": Omnia Vincit Amor

The "Master of the Gamblers" is how art historians, curators, and auctioneers refer to the 17th-century Italian painter (Rome, maybe Naples), otherwise unnamed, who painted, in the main, gamblers playing cards and shooting dice. "Omnia Vincit Amor" ("Love  Conquers All") is unusual among his works. -- DL

John Yau: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Eve Aschheim

__________________________________________________________________________________

Things I Should Tell You Before It’s Too Late

 

Princess Sitting Duck isn’t my real name

I am not one of the ones marred

 

By inexplicable outbursts of an obstreperous nature

Most times I am a curtain of conviviality

 

Don’t make friends with my dog

I used to collect ideas until I realized

 

I don’t have any of my own

Learn to shirk your duties

 

With dignity I always say

I used to dress in a squirrel suit

 

and play in the forest

where it flanks the railroad tracks

 

leading to the haunted mines

I never reached the rank of colonel

 

You can hold my hand

as long as you don’t lose it

 

I serve drinks in tall blue glasses

I am never sure which principles are mine

 

Sometimes I get glassy-eyed

and pee on the neighbor’s porch

 

I no longer throw stones at children

I bow whenever I see a high-ranking dignitary

 

stop to tie his shoes

or zip up his fly

 

Princess Sitting duck isn’t my nickname either

____________________________________________________________________________________________

John Yau has published many books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. He has a book of poems, Genghis Chan on Drums, forthcoming from Omnidawn, and a monograph on the Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong, from Lund Humphries (both fall 2021). He is the publisher of Black Square Editions, and his reviews of art and poetry appear regularly in the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He lives in New York City and teaches at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University). [For more information on, and work by, John Yau, click here.]

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

                  John Yau, 1983. Oil on canvas by Robert Berlind

 

 

 

"Witness to a Murder" [by David Lehman]

Witness to a Murder

                                                                   -- Barbara Stanwyck (1954)

She saw a murder.
She bought all the papers.
She pocketed the murdered woman's earrings.
She called the police.
She smoked a cigarette.
She told her story and was not believed.
She deduced that the door had been tampered with.
She answered the doctor's unreasonable questions reasonably.
She heard the woman say one thing: “Show Mr. Peabody into the library, please.”
She didn't back down.
She insisted she saw the ex-Nazi, author of Age of Violence, kill the girl, “Joyce Stewart.”
She didn't write the threatening letters that were typed on her machine.
She didn't get ticketed, just scolded, for speeding on a scary mountainous road.
She took the elevator down.
She ran in the street.
She hurried up the black and white steps pursued by shadows. 

Balanchine Quiz [by Mindy Aloff]

Question: In the Igor Stravinsky score for the 1928 Balanchine ballet Apollon Musagète, today known as Apollo, which 17^th-century French poet’s treatise, L’Art poétique—as the dance scholar Lynn Garafola has written—“sparked Stravinsky’s conception” and called for poets to practice which poetic meter, built by Stravinsky into the variation for Calliope?

Answer: Nicolas Boileau, Alexandrines.

Question: Name three ballets or ballets within other musical works in which Balanchine included the figure of a poet, immortal or mortal, anonymous or named.

Answer (choose any three): Apollo (or Apollon Musagète, 1928, Stravinsky score, Ballets Russes), Orphée aux Enfers (Comic opera in three acts and nine scenes, 1931, Jacques Offenbach, Les Ballets Russes de Georges Balanchine), Les Amours du Poète (Comedy with music in five acts: Act III song “Le Pauvre Pierre,” 1932, Robert Schumann, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo), Waltzes of Beethoven (1933, Les Ballets 1933), The Bat (1936, Jacques Offenbach, American Ballet Ensemble), Orpheus and Eurydice (Opera in two acts and four scenes, 1936, Christoph Willibald Gluck, American Ballet Ensemble), The Song of Norway (Operetta in two acts and seven scenes, 1944, Edvard Grieg, dancers from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo), The Night Shadow (later retitled La Somnambula; 1946; Vittorio Rieti, based on themes in operas by Vincenzo Bellini; Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo), Orpheus (Ballet in three scenes, 1948, Stravinsky, Ballet Society), Orpheus und Eurydike (Opera in three acts and five scenes, 1963, C.W. Gluck, Ballett der Hamburgischen Staatsoper. N.B.: The “Chaconne” of this production served as the basis for the 1976 ballet Chaconne at the New York City Ballet), Don Quixote (Ballet in three acts, 1965, Nicholas Nabokov, New York City Ballet). (From George Balanchine’s catalog raisonné, www.balanchine.org )

Question: Who answered as follows off the top of his head in response to a question during a 1983 interview with Richard Philp for Dance Magazine?

“Recently I was reading a collection of poems and felt a sudden shift, which at first I couldn’t identify. In a very modest, unemphatic way a simple “it” had been slipped in which had the effect of changing the whole sense of the four lines before and the three or four lines which followed. In just one sentence everything had been changed as a result of the placement of one two-letter word. You enjoyed the feel of that, sensed the correctness. The same is true of the shifts in Balanchine’s dances. As subtle as they may be, they are essential to the life and meaning of his work. Few choreographers have known how to do that.”

Answer: Edwin Denby (from “Balanchine’s Poetics,” Dance Writings, ed. Robert Cornfield and William MacKay, first pub. 1986 by Alfred A. Knopf, reprinted by The University Press of Florida.

from the archive; first posted June 2, 2014.

Rudy Burckhardt's Photos at Tibor de Nagy (part two) [by Vincent Katz]

How Rudy Burckhardt photographed on the move is something of mystery. He did it, so we know it’s possible, but try to put yourself in his position. He must have moved with a dancer’s speed and precision, or, cat-like, lain in wait before pouncing on his unsuspecting prey. He regularly captures head-on in close proximity the precise moment at which or just before someone looks at him and says, “Hey!”

In addition to tableaux frozen from the city’s gyre, Burckhardt could compose images that seem snatched from a Renaissance picture-making textbook. Such a one is V-Back, from about 1985. There are two versions of this moment. In the first, Rudy has come up close behind a beautiful woman, her hair carefully styled and held back by a clip, a slender chain around her neck, a purse hanging from her left shoulder, her sweater turned backward, so that its V reveals her upper back. We can see the spinal cleft as it travels down, widening to a darkness in between her delicately flaring shoulder blades. We see a man in a suit in front of her, waiting to cross the street. We catch a glimpse of the traffic as it rushes past.

In the second photo of this moment, Burckhardt has quickly and adroitly turned his camera from a vertical to a horizontal format. He takes advantage of a moment of urban serendipity. A large white delivery truck is passing. In Burckhardt’s horizontal frame, we now see, in addition to the man in the suit on the left, a man in a long-sleeved striped shirt on the right. These two men frame this remarkable woman, each one turned slightly toward her, without actually looking at her, in two different gestures, diffidence and deference. And in that split-second, the woman has suddenly become aware of something behind her, some heat of energy, some thinking, something stretching back to the galleries of European museums, kindled on the stages of New York’s ballet. She turns, looking at Burckhardt, and now at us in the photograph, her beautiful face caught in that glance, the whole picture given a timeless quality by the pure background of the white truck passing, such that, for a split-second, Burckhardt has taken the city completely away, and we are enveloped in this moment of observation, two people seeing each other for the first time.

The exhibition of these and other chance encounters of New York City residents immortalized by Burckhardt’s eye and body is punctuated by a sequence of three films shown on a wall-mounted monitor. In these three films — Default Averted  (1975), Cerveza Bud (1981), and Ostensibly (1989) — Burckhardt takes three different approaches, all showing his complex approach to cinema. Default Averted refers to the moment when New York City almost went bankrupt; Burckhardt takes a typically wry approach to the topic, choosing to show a building being demolished over time. This is a favorite motif of his in his films; he loved the way New York was built, and also knocked down, sporadically, without municipal oversight. Cerveza Bud focuses on one of New York’s great pleasures — public joy, in this case in the form of outdoor dancing, music playing, and roller skating. As usual, Burckhardt is drawn to the city’s black and Latinx populations. Ostensibly uses a poem by that title by John Ashbery, and in fact Ashbery appears in the film, in red suspenders, recording the poem. So many events and images fly by in these films, balanced by moments of calm, that I like to try to document them as they pass. I’ll end with my notes from the films.

Default Averted (1975, 20 minutes, black and white, music by Thelonious Monk and Edgar Varèse)

Architectural emblems, details, demolition, smoke and fire
Fireman grins
Boards dropped from roof
T Monk big band sound to sped up b/w city traffic
Shakespeare-like head all that remains: preserved relic in antic sweep of wreckage-remake (the New York mantra)
Earl Hines reflections in wet pavement
Walls fall, classic Burckhardtism

Cerveza Bud (1981, 30 minutes, color)

Endless bodies of color, dancing, roller skating
Public displays of love: bodies, gay couples dance Hustle to Kool & The Gang
Reclining in summer grass à la La Grand Jatte but more relaxed, more openly sexual
Open embrace of Twin Towers, part of that cityscape with street light suspended in front
Seagull soars against dirtied blue

Ostensibly (1989, 16 minutes, color, poem by John Ashbery,)

piano music by Alvin Curran)
JA reading poem
Kia Heath nude poses in front of Rudy’s De Kooning then dresses, walks in snow
Nice family hops backward up steps
Maine log-throwing competition
A woman (Rochelle Kraut?) reads same poem
Shots of pond details of trees
Man jogs shirtless on Maine road
NY intersection (23rd & Broadway?) in rain reflection
Dancers at party (Skowhegan?)
RB pushing garbage to gutter (NY) and trees to ground (Maine)
Lichen details
NY walkers, skylines, water towers, sped up clouds

Ed. Note:  for part one of Vincent Katz's piece on the new Rudy Burckhardt show, click here. 

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 11 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side
Tel: 212 262 5050. | Web: www.tibordenagy.com | Email: info@tibordenagy.com
The show is up from December 21, 2020 until January 23, 2021.
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday to Saturday 10-6pm

"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

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.