The Best American Poetry

Unrest by Emily Fragos

Every now and then, I come across a quiet little poem that sticks in my head, like "Unrest" by Emily Fragos. Maybe because I worked at the local SPCA when I was a girl, or maybe because I lived on a farm where we received drive-by cats every spring,  this poem speaks to me. It settles in the heart, just so. 

 

 Unrest

By Emily Fragos

 

At the shelter, the cats are kept in glass-enclosed cases with just enough room to stand, walk a few steps, and eat; but strangers come on weekends to adopt them, take them to larger rooms and give them new names: James, Tabitha, Snowball, Molière, so you would never know how they began their lives, in abuse, grave hunger, and deprivation, or what strange turbulence lies coiled up inside their bodies, as they float to the top of  warm stone walls or sleep in a lone patch of sun on the newlyweds’ bed.

“As Above So Below”: Mark Leckey Does a Good Job [By Tracy Danison]

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

These days, as, each morning, a body must crouch up and frog run from the Huey Combat Utility Copter of Personal Belief into the unending Battle of The Whips and Scorns, they need metaphysical reassurance. Not an ethical dewicate wittle kissie-wissie, but, as it were, a hearty thumbs-up from a beefy philosophical Sarge or Sarge-equivalent. Mark Leckey, whose installation As Above So Below is at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, until 20 July, is, in at least one way, that Sarge.

Leckey is an artist who knows reality and transcendence of reality are rooted in more obscure mechanisms and broader cultural beliefs as well as personal experience. So, his work may very well provide an anxious body with that hearty thumbs up. If not, a body will provide themself with a couple or three wry smiles.

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Since the late 1990s, Leckey has been exploring culture, technology, music and memory. As he sees it, the current obscure mechanisms and beliefs from above have been here-below since the Renaissance. So, for As Above So Below, thematically, Leckey seamlessly integrates the tradition of the ecstatic vision into the 21st century quotidians of psychic displacements and dissociations, unexpected plague, future shock and louring technology. Artistically, Leckey links the technology, esthetics and media of marketing and advertising with, especially, broadly Renaissance and Baroque religious symbolism.

A large gargoyle-like statue of Job – an All-powerful God’s faithful servant and a vigorous Satan’s whiny plaything – is both at the topographical center of and media command post for the installation and source for an audio feed of mutter and lament. Job’s skin is explosively torn with fist-size and larger holes up and down and back to front of his body. Seemingly from the inside.

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

At first, I thought the wounds were versions of corrupt flesh, recalling popped buboes or boils and thought Job might be an ultra-vi or video-game version of Saint Roche, the Baroque plague saint. Radiated out from Job, what amount to “chapels”, or, considering the Job-ean lament in the air, maybe teched-up “stations of the cross”. These use graphic styles from gaming and public-messaging iconography to touch on themes such as fear or the ambiguity of reality. They contain what amount to “relics” (contemplative or holy-looking objects) that are evoked through thematic legends, video-painting, other multimedia or just or objects whose style or intent suggests a different era.

The highly contemporary mediums of the relics integrate such period- or use- symbolic materials-techniques as gold leaf or such period-themed objects as a labyrinth-map or iconography such as a recurring stylized shining sun stamp (as on Baroque-style illuminated maps).

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Though there is of course an implicit narrative in joining together old and new, Leckey’s approach is to let an on-looker’s visual, sound and tactile experience of the installation work out the sense they want to give to it. They are never pressed to understand anything. They can just have fun if that’s all they wanna do. The non-directivity is also true in terms of the approach to technology and technique: transistors, chips, VDTs, brushes, paint and canvas are used as equal tools in putting a piece together. In the end, in this very technology-intensive installation, there is very little or no accent on technology.

______

Elsa Coustou is curator for Mark Leckey’s “As Above So Below” multimedia installation, which I saw at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, on 31 March 2025. “As Above So Below” runs until 20 July 2025.

Two Tragedies in Life [by Walter Carey]

What do it mean?

Trans studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, queer, and postcolonial theory, this class contends with how bodies of flesh and bodies of knowledge change over time. Bodies of Transformation takes a historiographic approach to the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of corporeal meaning, practice, and performance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Animating questions include: What is the "corporeal real"? If anyone can build a nuclear bomb, should we report him or deport her? Why is "cunt" less acceptable than "pussy"? How does bodily transformation map the complex relationships between coercion and choice? How might one approach nonhuman interiority? On the basis of what principle would you refute the Freud in "The Future of an Illusion"? How do you define "woman"? Have you ever heard a meadowlark?

-- Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan: "There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."

-- Shaw, Man and Superman: "There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it."

-- Did Voltaire have a mixed view of Plato? If Voltaire, despite ranting against the church, believedf in God, what attributes does that divinity have?.

Comment on four of the following:

-- “We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”

-- Auden, "The Age of Anxiety"

“You purchase pain with all that joy can give and die of nothing but a rage to live.” -- Alexander Pope, "Moral Essays"

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street."

--Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening"

 “What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.” -- Henry Miller

“I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.” -- Ruskin

“There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.” -- Disraeli

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic" - Joseph Stalin

And Dostoyevski on Lenin, Rousseau, Marx etc.:
“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”

Marsh Hawk Press: Poetry Contest (judged by Elaine Equi]

2025 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prizes The Contest Will Close Soon. DEADLINE: 11:59 pm Wednesday, April 30th Contest Judge: ELAINE EQUI  Submit Manuscript Here

2025 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prizes

The Contest Will Close Soon.

DEADLINE: 11:59 pm

Wednesday, April 30th

Contest Judge: ELAINE EQUI 

Submit Manuscript Here

On Jackie Robinson Day

“It kills me to lose. If I’m a troublemaker, and I don’t think that my temper makes me one, then it’s because I can’t stand losing. That’s the way I am about winning, all I ever wanted to do was finish first

—“To do what he did has got to be the most tremendous thing I’ve ever seen in sports.” -- Pee Wee Reese

 

Sestina for Susan Sontag [poem by Tim Disch (1940-2008)]

Sestina for Susan Sontag
    --by Tom Disch

Susan, you must allow me to condescend
This once. I suppose you mean well, but
Is Godot what they really need off there
in Sarajevo? Wouldn't it be more worthwhile,
And amusing, to offer some gallows comedy
About the awful life they've all been living?

Of course, everyone needs to earn a living, 
And Beckett may be a better bet than "Muse, descend,
And help me write, right now, the comedy
All Yugoslavia's been waiting for." Better the butt
Of a few ephemeral lampoons while
The neverending crisis lasts than for there

To be new proofs that the Muse is rarely there
When she is summoned. Bad faith? Who's not living,
After all, one kind of lie or another? And while
There are hopefuls and a stage to send
Clowns on, there's life at the box office. But
Can't we, in hindsight, posit an original comedy?

One germane to the situation: a comedy
of terrorism that would show unshaven Serbs their
Visages, complacently corrupt as Joey Butt-
Afuoco, smirking and working for a living 
In prime time; show Croats gloating at the end
Of what little civilization they had; as, meanwhile,

Muslims pray for a new jihad. What would Simone Weil
Have woven from such contradictories, what comedy
of a Godot-less and godless world without end,
Rhymeless and unreasoning? Susan, Susan, there
Would be more comfort in Sarajevo from the Living
Theater's Frankenstein than from the droning sackbut

Of Samuel Beckett. Leave them alone. But, 
If you must meddle, offer an evening of Kurt Weill.
Have Bob Hope tell them life's worth living.
Appease them with sentimental comedy
By anyone but Beckett, and let is moral be: There, 
With the grace of God, go we. But don't condescent. 

Pretend you're human. And smile. Send but
A sentence to where they're waiting: Life's worthwhile,
And all's forgiven in the comedy we are still living.

       --- by Tom Disch (Poetry magazine, March 1996)

(Ed note: In 1993, Susan Sontag went to Sarajevo to stage a production of Waiting for Godot. Thomas Michael Disch was a celebrated American science fiction writer, critic, and poet. You can read more about him here. sdl)

Age & Arizona 2025 [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

Glad to be back in the desert
After all the wasted years;
The javelinas of the 1950s
Are gone now of course 
But new ones have arrived 
and they still need water only
A few times during the year;
The big saguaro cacti can be 
Two hundred years old and 
When a beautiful young king snake
Went looking for a place to hide 
I knew exactly how it felt although 
I'm not quite eighty yet. Look!
There's a female tarantula.

Echad Mi Yodea (Choreography by Ohad Naharin, Batsheva Dance Company) [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Jews all over the world are observing Passover this week. On the first night (and for some on the second and final nights as well) we gather around for the Seder, a ritual meal during which we retell the story from the Book of Exodus when the Jews, led by Moses, fled slavery and captivity in Egypt. This year Passover is especially meaningful because as we celebrate our freedom at home, we are mindful that there remain 59 hostages who were taken from Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023 and who are being held captive in the Gaza strip. We pray for their release. For more about the importance of this ritual, I encourage you to listen to this interview with Rachel Polin-Goldberg, whose son Hersch was murdered by Hamas while in captivity. 

At the close of the Seder meal, we sing several traditional songs, including Echad Mi Yodea (Who Knows One), which was the inspiration for the dance (above) by Israeli-born choreographer Ohad Naharin. The song enumerates the Jews' faith, beliefs and traditions, founded in the affirmation of One God and summing up in the recognition of God's thirteen attributes. You can find an English translation here. 

-- sdl

I Cried for You: Harry James & Helen Forrest

 

"Letter to Eve" [by Ruth Homberg]

Letter to Eve

I wanted to make you a
Thesaurus. Feed you words
He defined, and make synonyms
fall from your mouth.

and be options. Remember,
Queen Anne’s Lace was royalty
but now are weeds. On walks
through Eden you would grasp
handfuls and place them in your hair;
as though already you knew
what it was like to be dethroned.

-- Ruth Homberg

 

painting by Masaccio

from the archive; first posted February 10, 2010

Jim Daniels: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

_______________________________________________________

Obedience School

 

Near the end, the experts on loss

sold us a robot dog that barked

and leaned into the touch

 

to give comfort to my blind dying

mother. She wasn’t fooled enough

to name it—or gone enough,

 

though she was pretty gone

then. We put it in her hands

and she stroked it

 

then hurled it across the room.

Nothing to lose is never true.

Always something more to lose.

 

I turned the dog off.

Bad dog, I said.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jim Daniels’ most recent collection of poems is Gun/Shy, Wayne State University Press. He has published many collections of fiction; written four produced screenplays; and his collection of essays, An Ignorance of Trees, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2025. He has edited or co-edited six anthologies, most recently RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and currently teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA Program.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                      Paul Strand, Blind Woman, photogravure, 1912, The J. Paul Getty Museum

The Death of FDR: April 12, 1945

Unfinished portrait of FDR by artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff (1888-1980), April 12, 1945

<< President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. He had been inaugurated on January 20th for his unprecedented fourth term as president. He was 63. He looked like a dying man and suffered from very high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, possibly melanoma. He was weakened by post-polio syndrome and the strain of governing the nation during the Great Depression and leadin the allies to defeat the Germans, the Japanese, and Mussolini's Italy.

FDR succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage (stroke) while at Warm Springs, Georgia, the polio treatment center he had created in the late 1920s. On his prior visits, he had always come away feeling rejuvenated from the exercise and friendships and warm water. He was at home, the Little White House, while sitting for his portrait and chatting with friends. "I've got a terriifc headache," he said. He never regained consciousness. 

An Autobiography in Cookbooks: The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook © 1948 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

My mother received this cookbook as a wedding gift and passed it on to me many years ago. It remains one of my favorites, not because of the recipes though there are some good ones, but because this book is responsible for kindling my love of cooking and poetry, especially poetry that rhymes.

The recipes are punctuated with light verse to serve as mnemonics for proper technique. For example, the captions to a series of photos illustrating loaves of bread read:

This is the well-made bread about which we’ve all read;
It’s so easy to make, so come, on, let’s bake.

See what results if the oven’s too hot;
decreased volume and over-brown top.

If the oven’s too slow, the crust will be pale,
the texture’ll be porous; it’s sure to fail.

In homemade bread, especially rye,
you know there’s more than meets the eye.

and on and on through yeasted breads and rolls, specialty loaves, quick breads and muffins.

My mother was a competent cook though not an enthusiastic one. She fully embraced the post-WWII convenience foods such as frozen TV dinners, boxed macaroni and cheese, and canned soup. It seemed that for years everything was made with a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, with its sponge-like brown bits suspended in a gelatinous goo. I loved those meals.

They were children of immigrants, my parents, who left the Bronx in the 1950s, first to New Jersey, then to Rockland County, New York, where my mother found work as a school teacher while my dad worked a salesman ("plastics"). From the outside, our's was a typical suburban development home. Not so inside.

My mother was a long-time subscriber to both Women’s Day and Family Circle magazines, with their projects for the thrifty homemaker (“Feed a Family of Four on Fifty Dollars a Week!” “Transform Your Home with Color in One Weekend!” and “Bring the Outdoors In with Rustic Cedar Shingles!” The latter project transformed a wall in my parents’ bedroom with hours of furious hammering.).

My father was a scavenger who often arrived home with odds and ends he’d picked up while making his sales calls in and around New York City. The combination of mom's and dad's talents was on full display in our kitchen where one wall was covered with silver metallic wallpaper illustrated with scenes from the Folies Bergere, done up in pink and black; the floor was covered with carpet tiles in every color; and the cabinet pulls were ringed with the colored plastic inserts to 45 RPM records. My mother made new curtains for every season, some quite beautiful. 

The crowning glory of the kitchen was the table--a wood slab that my dad refinished with pockmarks to make it appear aged--suspended from the ceiling with picture wire. One day I arrived home from school and Noah, our large white German shepherd, was reclining on the table as it swung gently to and fro. Meals at that table were an adventure as one had to take care to avoid the wires while passing dishes. You could lose an arm. At my mother's insistence, my dad eventually anchored the table to the floor with more wire.

Years of preparing meals for our family of six, on top of full-time work, took their toll. When I was in my early teens, my mother declared a moratorium on cooking. My two sisters and I would have to take over responsibility for dinners several times a week. She delivered this news as if it were a punishment and my sisters took it as such but I thought it a grand opportunity to experiment. We were told we could cook whatever we liked; my mother would shop though she refused to buy exotic ingredients, like ground black pepper, or nutmeg. “You don’t need that,” she said, crossing off those items on our shopping lists.

I remember my attempt at Moussaka, the Greek casserole of eggplant and ground beef baked under a layer of béchamel. Is there a sound more dreaded to the cook than that of diners' forks silently pushing a poorly executed entrée around a dinner plate? Finally, my father put his fork down and looked across the table at my mother. “Renee,” he said, mouthing his words, “I don’t like it.” The leftovers were fed to Noah, who devoured them without complaint and in short order deposited them on the carpet-tiled kitchen floor.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 13, 2016 at 03:4

My mother received this cookbook as a wedding gift and passed it on to me many years ago. It remains one of my favorites, not because of the recipes though there are some good ones, but because this book is responsible for kindling my love of cooking and poetry, especially poetry that rhymes.

The recipes are punctuated with light verse to serve as mnemonics for proper technique. For example, the captions to a series of photos illustrating loaves of bread read:

This is the well-made bread about which we’ve all read;
It’s so easy to make, so come, on, let’s bake.

See what results if the oven’s too hot;
decreased volume and over-brown top.

If the oven’s too slow, the crust will be pale,
the texture’ll be porous; it’s sure to fail.

In homemade bread, especially rye,
you know there’s more than meets the eye.

and on and on through yeasted breads and rolls, specialty loaves, quick breads and muffins.

My mother was a competent cook though not an enthusiastic one. She fully embraced the post-WWII convenience foods such as frozen TV dinners, boxed macaroni and cheese, and canned soup. It seemed that for years everything was made with a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, with its sponge-like brown bits suspended in a gelatinous goo. I loved those meals.

They were children of immigrants, my parents, who left the Bronx in the 1950s, first to New Jersey, then to Rockland County, New York, where my mother found work as a school teacher while my dad worked a salesman ("plastics"). From the outside, our's was a typical suburban development home. Not so inside.

My mother was a long-time subscriber to both Women’s Day and Family Circle magazines, with their projects for the thrifty homemaker (“Feed a Family of Four on Fifty Dollars a Week!” “Transform Your Home with Color in One Weekend!” and “Bring the Outdoors In with Rustic Cedar Shingles!” The latter project transformed a wall in my parents’ bedroom with hours of furious hammering.).

My father was a scavenger who often arrived home with odds and ends he’d picked up while making his sales calls in and around New York City. The combination of mom's and dad's talents was on full display in our kitchen where one wall was covered with silver metallic wallpaper illustrated with scenes from the Folies Bergere, done up in pink and black; the floor was covered with carpet tiles in every color; and the cabinet pulls were ringed with the colored plastic inserts to 45 RPM records. My mother made new curtains for every season, some quite beautiful. 

The crowning glory of the kitchen was the table--a wood slab that my dad refinished with pockmarks to make it appear aged--suspended from the ceiling with picture wire. One day I arrived home from school and Noah, our large white German shepherd, was reclining on the table as it swung gently to and fro. Meals at that table were an adventure as one had to take care to avoid the wires while passing dishes. You could lose an arm. At my mother's insistence, my dad eventually anchored the table to the floor with more wire.

Years of preparing meals for our family of six, on top of full-time work, took their toll. When I was in my early teens, my mother declared a moratorium on cooking. My two sisters and I would have to take over responsibility for dinners several times a week. She delivered this news as if it were a punishment and my sisters took it as such but I thought it a grand opportunity to experiment. We were told we could cook whatever we liked; my mother would shop though she refused to buy exotic ingredients, like ground black pepper, or nutmeg. “You don’t need that,” she said, crossing off those items on our shopping lists.

I remember my attempt at Moussaka, the Greek casserole of eggplant and ground beef baked under a layer of béchamel. Is there a sound more dreaded to the cook than that of diners' forks silently pushing a poorly executed entrée around a dinner plate? Finally, my father put his fork down and looked across the table at my mother. “Renee,” he said, mouthing his words, “I don’t like it.” The leftovers were fed to Noah, who devoured them without complaint and in short order deposited them on the carpet-tiled kitchen floor.

Quantum Entanglement Revealed! Jeanne Alechinsky’s “Ghosts” is on to something [By Tracy Danison]

“Ghosts” cast: Jeanne Alechinsky, background, with musician collaborators Jacques Salamaka and Julie Appéré. Photo © Isabelle Chemin, Paramour Compagnie, 2025

My next-to-eldest brother, Joe, now deceased, said of our childhood house that a body so inclined could always find a signed first edition of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, a 5-ton differential axle or a worn yellow rubber bath duck. Indeed, my parents essentially roped off an area of the house where we kids were free to do pretty much as we pleased. And we pleased to do a rural slum with junkyard and life library, to make an unnatural condominium of magpie and pig, faun and wolf.

My brother, Peter, the oldest of a couple three natural musicians among us, would sometimes spend hours plonked in the middle of our junkyard slum, deaf, mute, systematically contemplating the different declensions of vibration flowing out from his guitar with wahwah, new in those days. Sometimes, the vibe would make us all slow to a stop while the air thickened and shimmered, things and people took on a vibrato glow.

I bring this up because it’s the remembrance Jeanne Alechinsky’s Ghosts work-in-progress inspired in me.

Ghosts, Alechinsky writes, themes around the visible us with the “invisible” – the shimmer and glow to the world that Peter naively conjured with his guitar, I think.  She conjures quite deliberately by putting musicians Jacques Salamaka, with a drum set, and Julie Appéré, with bass guitar, on stage, at the limit of performance space. Alechinsky herself is at the center, wears regular-fit silver pants, a white top, shares her space with a chair with a white dust cover slightly behind, to the right. This is what I saw when the lights come on.

 

“Ghosts” logo by Jeanne Alechinsky. Photo © Jeanne Alechinsky, Paramour Compagnie

I can’t recall whether action begins when I realize that Alechinsky has either assumed or innovated the gestural tropes of talking to the invisible and somebody talking to their cell phone or when Julie Appéré makes everything and everybody shiver with a loud long, rich note or subtle chord thrump on her bass.

Not too terribly long ago, before smartphones and Bluetooth, talking to the air meant “crazy person”. Now talking in the air has evolved to signify either talking with another person or with your ghost. We’ve mostly learned to tell the difference. Alechinsky has noticed this and used it. It’s important. Here’s a proof of meaningful evolution of a visual figure and also that the transformation is choreographed into a “lexicon” or, better, a “vidicon” of dance: an entry for Mathieu Bouvier’s Atlas.

But it’s not just that with choreography and dance Alechinsky conjures the shimmer and glow of vibrato we sometimes hear and see in the subjects and objects around us.

Her dance performance gets across the nature of the “ghosts” and the “invisible”, that, based on my own long-ago first experience of it, I think she’s talking about. Spectators, as I was, are drawn into and stimulated by the sound and presence of the musicians. But Alechinsky is always strangely parallel and there amidst. Her movement does not flow with the swells of the bass and her pace is not rhythmed by the beat of the drum. She does that I guess because ghosts (and the invisible) are individual and states, insides and outsides, bordered and not, felt and not. Her figures have to point in all directions at once but at somewhere rather than nowhere. And by seeming to do all that, she does. So, visually, while Alechinsky seems physically is pierced to the root, seems to run into walls and move mountains, to hear and chase voices, to see and be seen by the unseen, she projects the sensibility of, and the spectator experiences instead of sympathetic physical feeling, awareness – the sense of slowing to a brief stop within the shimmer and glow of reality.

As I was hurrying out – it was the middle of the working day, after all –  I was thinking that my headline for Alechinsky’s Ghosts might be, à la click bait…

____________

I saw “Ghosts”, a work-in-progress dance performance by Jeanne Alechinsky and musicians Jacques Salamaka, playing drums, and Julie Appéré, bass guitar, on 27 March 2025 as part of the Open Space program at Théâtre Etoile du Nord. “Ghosts” in expected to premiere at Etoile du Nord in September 2025.

Other works in progress on 27 March included Prouesses de l’Echec N°17 (“Adventures in failure N#17”) by Collectif Format A3, from a concept by Sylvain Ollivier and written and performed in collaboration with David Lelièvre and Julie Mouton and “De Diaboli” by Christine Armanger and performed by her and Clémentine Vanlerberghe.

“Prouesses” features a hilarious take on Dunning and Kruger syndrome, which posits, rather ominously for humanity, I think, that while incompetents overestimate their level of ability and are perfectly unaware of this, they discount demonstrated competence in others.  Armanger’s piece uses a devil-invoked robot (drone) dog to explore the shaping effects of technology on human outcomes. De Diaboli is programmed for the Faits d’Hiver 2026 dance festival.

The Last Shall Be First [by David Lehman]

Next Line, Please

By David Lehman | November 25, 2014

We love last lines. The endings of favorite novels enter the mind and lodge there. Scott Fitzgerald’s majestic conclusion of The Great Gatsby is a favorite: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Hemingway concludes The Sun Also Rises with a bitterly ironic line of dialogue enlivened by an unusual choice of adjective: “‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” The terseness at the end of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is no less memorable: “For there she was.”

For their full impact, the great endings depend on the narratives that precede them. But a surprising number will be seen to have a meaning and a charm even when removed from their context. This is true of several of the lines I’ve quoted, and others spring to mind. When Dostoevsky brings Crime and Punishment to its finish, he leaves the door open for subsequent developments. He dangles the possibility of his hero’s redemption, then says matter-of-factly: “That might be the subject of a new story—our present story is ended.” Herman Melville airs a similar sentiment but with an effect that is both eerie and menacing at the close of The Confidence Man: “Something further may follow from this Masquerade.”

The last line of Sholom Aleichem’s story “A Yom Kippur Scandal”—“Gone forever”—concludes its narrative beautifully while making this reader believe it could perform the same function admirably for a half dozen others.

Your task for next week is to write the last sentence of a nonexistent story—either a story that we can imagine or one that we would yearn to read strictly on the basis of your sentence. The winning entry may imply a specific narrative—or it may be so suggestive that readers will be inspired to supply the writing that culminates in the sentence.

It doesn’t have to be long—just unforgettable.

For the entries generated back in November 2014, click here.

Perfection Wasted [by John Updike]

 

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

from the archive; first posted January 29, 2009. John Updike (March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009) was dying when he wrote the poem. 

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

from the archive; first posted January 29, 2009. John Updike (March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009) was dying when he wrote the poem. 

"Theoretical Positivity" [by Loren Goodman]

Theoretical Positivity

“Always be positive,” said the neutron
“But I’m not feeling well” said the electron
With a tear in the eye of its unsmiling little face
“The key is to always be positive
”Rejoined the neutron impassively, un-
Locking the potential of the nearby neutrinos
“I don’t believe in keys” the negatively
Charged ion chimed in, “which tend
To dissolve at the sub-atomic level
As do chimes for that matter”
“That’s your position” said the neutron
And very soon after rings out the sound of
Lively laughter: “the keys
Are there, man — they’re just smaller”
Everything negative frowned
And there was much rejoicing

-- Loren Goodman

from The Lab & from the archives (February 9, 2009)

Theoretical Positivity

“Always be positive,” said the neutron
“But I’m not feeling well” said the electron
With a tear in the eye of its unsmiling little face
“The key is to always be positive
”Rejoined the neutron impassively, un-
Locking the potential of the nearby neutrinos
“I don’t believe in keys” the negatively
Charged ion chimed in, “which tend
To dissolve at the sub-atomic level
As do chimes for that matter”
“That’s your position” said the neutron
And very soon after rings out the sound of
Lively laughter: “the keys
Are there, man — they’re just smaller”
Everything negative frowned
And there was much rejoicing

-- Loren Goodman

from The Lab & from the archives (February 9, 2009)

It Even Has an Image File, I Am a Real Blogger [by Lindsay Daigle]

I am not a blogger, I am a poet. This week though, I was both. And it was thrilling—scary and vulnerable, fun and really pleasing. In determining the direction this fifth and final blog might take, some favorite go-to poems came to mind. Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter” is one that I constantly return to. Oranges are pretty great. So is the color orange. Sardines aren’t so bad either. What I really love it for is its ability to say so much without saying anything at all, what it says about the composing process, about what it is to be an artist and a notice-er. It’s the sort of poem that asks for noticing— It’s plainly spoken, but honest and exposed in its plainness. (The speaker says, “Oh.” That’s all he needs to say.) I’m now going to read it again. You should too:

Why I Am Not a Painter [by Frank O’Hara]

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

We need so many words to express a word, twelve full poems to get at orange without ever using the word itself. This is why I spend so much time close-reading with my composition students. We spent an hour yesterday coming up with and interpreting over 50 definitions for “critical inquiry.” We could have continued the conversation well into the afternoon, asking things like— Do we inquire into issues that trouble us, or is it more of an uncertainty? Is it uncertainty or a crisis of belief? Are we destabilizing those beliefs or questioning their validity? Do we mean validity or is it a matter of global stakes? Are personal stakes a part of global stakes, or is it the other way around? If we have a personal investment in what’s being researched, is it more difficult to be critical? Is it important to be critical of our own input as much as others’? What do we really mean by critical? Not taking texts at face value? Pushing texts beyond summary into the realm of further understanding? Does further understanding, the journey of discovery, ever really have an end? Is discovery the process or the product? …

And now I’ve written twelve lines sparked from O’Hara’s poem (and therefore oranges?) in which the poem isn’t mentioned at all. Part of me says, “Whoops!” The other part says, “Well, yeah. That’s how it works.”

“There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life. Days go by.” These are my favorite lines. Words (and therefore oranges?) are exalted here. There are not enough of them. But they’re also terrible in the ways that life is both terrible and wonderful. Poetry attempts to expand the limits language places on our ability to share human experience. Days go by, more life happens, more words are needed to fully experience it.

One of my dearest friends is moving from Milwaukee to New York City in a few weeks, something I did six years ago. Even now I can’t adequately explain what that experience was like – how I felt necessarily pulled to the city, tethered to it as though my left arm rented a studio apartment in Gramercy while the rest of me went for daily runs along Lake Michigan. My friend’s experience is similar, it seems, but there’s no telling which part of her exists where. She might not know until she receives her first piece of mail addressed to her Astoria zip code. And even then, there should be so much more.

 

"SARDINES" by Mike Goldberg

It’s troubling to always be attempting this sort of explanation of human experience. Being a poet is actually quite masochistic. Even O’Hara says, “I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not.” This is not to say that visual artistic methods are “easier” or less limiting than verbal/textual. I really don’t know because I am not a painter either. What I do know is that Mike Goldberg’s painting called “SARDINES” has no sardines in it, the same way that the poem called “ORANGES” has no oranges (or orange) in it. But the painting is actually full of sardines – the thought process following sardines, their implications, their many versions and colors and patterns, shapes and non-shapes, and the remnants of the word itself scrawled and painted over. We do what we can to represent the days that go by. We try to understand our lives and convey that understanding so that others might better understand theirs too. It’s a cyclical process, both terrible and wonderful.

first posted July 25, 2014

Why I Am Not a Painter [by Frank O’Hara]

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

We need so many words to express a word, twelve full poems to get at orange without ever using the word itself. This is why I spend so much time close-reading with my composition students. We spent an hour yesterday coming up with and interpreting over 50 definitions for “critical inquiry.” We could have continued the conversation well into the afternoon, asking things like— Do we inquire into issues that trouble us, or is it more of an uncertainty? Is it uncertainty or a crisis of belief? Are we destabilizing those beliefs or questioning their validity? Do we mean validity or is it a matter of global stakes? Are personal stakes a part of global stakes, or is it the other way around? If we have a personal investment in what’s being researched, is it more difficult to be critical? Is it important to be critical of our own input as much as others’? What do we really mean by critical? Not taking texts at face value? Pushing texts beyond summary into the realm of further understanding? Does further understanding, the journey of discovery, ever really have an end? Is discovery the process or the product? …

And now I’ve written twelve lines sparked from O’Hara’s poem (and therefore oranges?) in which the poem isn’t mentioned at all. Part of me says, “Whoops!” The other part says, “Well, yeah. That’s how it works.”

“There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life. Days go by.” These are my favorite lines. Words (and therefore oranges?) are exalted here. There are not enough of them. But they’re also terrible in the ways that life is both terrible and wonderful. Poetry attempts to expand the limits language places on our ability to share human experience. Days go by, more life happens, more words are needed to fully experience it.

One of my dearest friends is moving from Milwaukee to New York City in a few weeks, something I did six years ago. Even now I can’t adequately explain what that experience was like – how I felt necessarily pulled to the city, tethered to it as though my left arm rented a studio apartment in Gramercy while the rest of me went for daily runs along Lake Michigan. My friend’s experience is similar, it seems, but there’s no telling which part of her exists where. She might not know until she receives her first piece of mail addressed to her Astoria zip code. And even then, there should be so much more.

 

"SARDINES" by Mike Goldberg

It’s troubling to always be attempting this sort of explanation of human experience. Being a poet is actually quite masochistic. Even O’Hara says, “I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not.” This is not to say that visual artistic methods are “easier” or less limiting than verbal/textual. I really don’t know because I am not a painter either. What I do know is that Mike Goldberg’s painting called “SARDINES” has no sardines in it, the same way that the poem called “ORANGES” has no oranges (or orange) in it. But the painting is actually full of sardines – the thought process following sardines, their implications, their many versions and colors and patterns, shapes and non-shapes, and the remnants of the word itself scrawled and painted over. We do what we can to represent the days that go by. We try to understand our lives and convey that understanding so that others might better understand theirs too. It’s a cyclical process, both terrible and wonderful.

first posted July 25, 2014

Why I Am Not a Painter [by Frank O’Hara]

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

We need so many words to express a word, twelve full poems to get at orange without ever using the word itself. This is why I spend so much time close-reading with my composition students. We spent an hour yesterday coming up with and interpreting over 50 definitions for “critical inquiry.” We could have continued the conversation well into the afternoon, asking things like— Do we inquire into issues that trouble us, or is it more of an uncertainty? Is it uncertainty or a crisis of belief? Are we destabilizing those beliefs or questioning their validity? Do we mean validity or is it a matter of global stakes? Are personal stakes a part of global stakes, or is it the other way around? If we have a personal investment in what’s being researched, is it more difficult to be critical? Is it important to be critical of our own input as much as others’? What do we really mean by critical? Not taking texts at face value? Pushing texts beyond summary into the realm of further understanding? Does further understanding, the journey of discovery, ever really have an end? Is discovery the process or the product? …

And now I’ve written twelve lines sparked from O’Hara’s poem (and therefore oranges?) in which the poem isn’t mentioned at all. Part of me says, “Whoops!” The other part says, “Well, yeah. That’s how it works.”

“There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life. Days go by.” These are my favorite lines. Words (and therefore oranges?) are exalted here. There are not enough of them. But they’re also terrible in the ways that life is both terrible and wonderful. Poetry attempts to expand the limits language places on our ability to share human experience. Days go by, more life happens, more words are needed to fully experience it.

One of my dearest friends is moving from Milwaukee to New York City in a few weeks, something I did six years ago. Even now I can’t adequately explain what that experience was like – how I felt necessarily pulled to the city, tethered to it as though my left arm rented a studio apartment in Gramercy while the rest of me went for daily runs along Lake Michigan. My friend’s experience is similar, it seems, but there’s no telling which part of her exists where. She might not know until she receives her first piece of mail addressed to her Astoria zip code. And even then, there should be so much more.

 

"SARDINES" by Mike Goldberg

It’s troubling to always be attempting this sort of explanation of human experience. Being a poet is actually quite masochistic. Even O’Hara says, “I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not.” This is not to say that visual artistic methods are “easier” or less limiting than verbal/textual. I really don’t know because I am not a painter either. What I do know is that Mike Goldberg’s painting called “SARDINES” has no sardines in it, the same way that the poem called “ORANGES” has no oranges (or orange) in it. But the painting is actually full of sardines – the thought process following sardines, their implications, their many versions and colors and patterns, shapes and non-shapes, and the remnants of the word itself scrawled and painted over. We do what we can to represent the days that go by. We try to understand our lives and convey that understanding so that others might better understand theirs too. It’s a cyclical process, both terrible and wonderful.

first posted July 25, 2014

"God Made Me" [by David Lehman]

from The Yale Review:

Poem of the Week

God Made Me

        Returning from a walk across the Dug Road bridge and into the Ludlowville

woods, Joe carried some violets we had picked. An old man with a handsome 

Labrador going in the opposite direction asked, “Are they for Easter?” “No,” Joe said. 

“For Passover.” Joe was nearly four, I nearly thirty-nine.

        In May of that year, 1987, Joe and I approached the Dug Road bridge, and there

was no one in our path. Joe whispered: “Go quietly over the bridge, so you don’t wake

up the geese.” The next day I repeated his words to him when we came to the place.

He immediately started singing. “Why?” “Because the geese are awake,” he said.

        The day we went to the bird sanctuary at Sapsucker Woods, Joe made up a song,

“Fish Birds on the Sea,” to the tune of the verse introducing “Jingle Bells”: “Dashing

through the snow.” That night I asked him to tell me a story. “Okay,” he said. “Once

upon a time, there was a little boy named Daddy.

        Then, out of the blue, “‘God made me,” he said.

---

How did this poem begin for you?

I seldom leave the house without a little notebook tucked into my jacket pocket or the back pocket of my trousers. Ideas, titles for poems I’d like to write, memories, overheard phrases, quotes, dreams, jests, anecdotes, lists of books I want to read, even mundane lists of errands that need doing may find their way into the notebook. With defunct notebooks, I can be careless. All the better when a lost notebook turns up and on one of its pages a cryptic phrase from 1987 summons a delightful memory. My son Joe made some arresting statements that year, and he even wrote (or dictated to me) a poem a day for several weeks. A phrase about the Dug Road bridge reminded me of walks he and I took that spring. That’s how I came to write “God Made Me.”

David Lehman is a poet and professional writer. He edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His recent books of poems include The Morning Line and Poems in the Manner Of.

Clare Banks: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

___________________________________________________________________

Playing in the Pastoral Dream

 

My neighbor spent the summer destroying

his yard. Lopping the tops of his trees,

and razing the ground until it was no more

than dirt, the roots of vines ascending

 

like wire. I was on the sidewalk

watching my kids ride bikes when his wife

came onto their porch in a bathrobe.

Her head behind the screen was pale and bald

 

from what could only be chemo.

My body seized at the sight of her,

and I thought of my sister last winter

in her wig. It’s no use, I wanted

 

to tell him. There’s no construction,

no revision that will stop this.

In the street it was dusk: I knew about death

and I didn’t. It hardly mattered.

 

The red brush of a cardinal darted

across my yard in the evening’s odd coolness,

moving to her nest in the hedgerow.

Sycamores lining the street shed bark

 

like snakes in wide strokes, leaving their trunks

a pale green. Inside my pastoral dream,

the white noise of cicadas rises

around my son playing in the grass.

 

The street lies awash in golden light

like that of endless spring. And my daughter,

at the end of the block, she’s a deer

wandering the trees, she’s in and out of sight.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Clare Banks is the author of Notes on Endings, forthcoming from Terrapin Books, and associate editor for Smartish Pace. A recipient of two Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards, her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Iron Horse, Boulevard, Poet Lore, and Mississippi Review, among others. She was nominated for the Best New Poets 2023 anthology by Mississippi Review, was a 2023 finalist in Radar Poetry's Coniston Prize and a 2024 finalist in Iron Horse Literary Review's National Poetry Month Prize. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and lives in Baltimore City where she co-hosts The HOT L Poets Series.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                                          Vincent van Gogh, The Road Menders, 1889.