The Best American Poetry

Auden in New York [by David Lehman]

Born February 21, 1907, W. H. Auden came to NYC in 1939. Here is his poem "The More Loving One":

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

 

Léonce et Léna: due to a change in situation... [by Tracy Danison]

Photo©Sandra-Then

Love or its material equivalent is out there, somewhere, but neither Léonce, nor Léna, nor even the suicide barber Woyzeck, can hide from a pre-existing situation.

This version of “Léonce & Léna” originated by Georg Büchner was informed and directed by Thom Luz from the Theater Basel, Basel, Switzerland, for the Theater des Amandiers, Nanterre, France, and performed in January 2019 by Carina Braunschmidt ,Annalisa Derossi, Elias Eilinghoff, Martin Hug, Daniele Pintaudi and Lisa Stiegler

It’s been 7 hours and 15 days since you look your love away/

Since you’ve been gone I can do whatever I want/I can see whomever I choose/I can eat my dinner in a fancy restaurant/Put my arms around any girl I see/

But nothing I said nothing can take away these blues/'Cause nothing compares/Nothing compares to you

Nothing compares to u, Prince Rogers Nelson (Sinead O’Connor)

It’s the “7 hours” that gets me. 

I wake after four or five hours. She is sitting on my chest, her pubis somehow pressing hard on my breast bone, looking down into my face, occupying my interior commentary. I start counting the hours.  I remember only later that I’ve been doing this same half-lit heart-crush now for better than two weeks.

This isn’t the only sort of vaguely psychotic repetitive behavior I can get absorbed in. Since the 1980s, I have seen Georg Buchner’s Léonce & Léna and Woyzeck whenever I’ve noticed one or the other’s being staged Paris intra-muros.

Léonce & Léna and Woyzeck started getting regular play in the early 70s, just as I did, perhaps taking the place of the Situationist International. Both pieces have Ur-propos that can be welded into almost any post-1968 conundrum. For love (or is it duty? Or lust? Or congenital idocy?) Private Woyzeck, otherwise a barber, makes himself a guinea pig to a heartless doctor and a slave to a thoughtless hussar. Prince Léonce and Princess Léna both run away from personally untenable situations. Love or its material equivalent is out there, somewhere, but neither Léonce, nor Léna, nor Woyzeck can hide from the tragedy of the situation they were born into.

I was to the MC93 – Maison de Culture of Seine Saint Denis – for a ninth anniversary performance of Alan Platel’s Out of Context for Pina (Bausch), on the evening before the foggy ragged Sunday afternoon I went to see Léonce & Léna at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, to the west of Paris.

Nanterre is the town where`68 broke out, where Situationism bore fruit, where Daniel Cohn-Bendit tapped his finger on a 500-page report on youth and observed that there wasn’t a word about sex in the whole damned thing. ‘Though that moment has been obscured by memory, the tear gas, strikes and street fighting and politics, everything that has really mattered, I think everything that’s happened since then, proves that sex and gender has mattered far more than anything else.  

Photo©Sandra-Then

As I watched "Léonce & Léna" and their future present selves salute the soundless piano, I thought, “This play cannot ever be this play again”.

Kaori Ito has played Alain Platel's "Out of Context for Pina" many times and will again. She felt the same

“Out of Context for Pina”, written and directed by Alain Platel, performed at MC93, Bobigny, France, January 2019, was performed by Mathieu Desseigne-Ravel, Kaori Ito, Mélanie Lomoff, Ross McCormack, Romeu Runa, Elie Tass, Rosalba Torres Guerrero, Hyo Seung Ye and Emile Josse alternating with Quan Bui Ngoc

The MC93 made a perfect setting for a tenth anniversary performance of Alan Platel’s Out of Context for Pina (Bausch), which included all the original cast members. Pina Bausch, died suddenly of smoking-related cancer in June 2009, though the piece is for her, not in her memory. If you’ve seen Bausch’s inimitable choreography you’ll see why that must necessarily be so.

There’s a lot of memory in the MC93, an angular bare-concrete slab building, located on the boulevard Lénine in a place called Bobigny. Thanks to Charles De Gaulle airport and its discrete but extensive underground police complex, Bobigny is site of the busiest immigration court in France. Following a foolish confusion of passports in the besotted wake of a morally shocking, day-long, all-night, series of vigorously consensual acts, I was able to create my own high-security memories there.

At the end of Out of Context, a scratchy-voiced version of Prince’s  Nothing compares 2 u reminded the cast as well as myself that nothing compares, period. Life just goes on; the performers returned one by one to the seats in the audience from which they’d hopped up onto the stage and begun the piece, becoming spectators to the ghost of their own memories.

I thought, “This play cannot ever be this play again”. A tear ran out of my eye. Probably because I don’t sleep enough.

Kaori Ito, now a much-in-view-performance-dance-choreographer with a babe in arms, was in the original cast of Out of Context. She came and sat back down in the seat next to mine; I asked her after if she felt as moved as I to reckon whatever was done was always finished forever. Ito said she did.

This time, Léonce and Léna seemed about taking your place, no matter what. That’s what I remember. So this. Is the situation now that all the Princes and Princesses, fifty years after ’68, must stand ground, make an end of the old memories while waiting for Léonce & Léna to play again?

Breaking News: Art is Alive by Andrei Codrescu

Time is an arrow. It points forward, not back. To paraphrase Borges, certain metaphors are so evidently true they are no longer metaphors. “Life is a river,” for instance. If the arrow of time pointed backwards it would be aimed at the archer’s heart, a form of suicide. Memory itself is a form of slow suicide. Memoirs are neither cathartic nor instructive, they are the literary compositions of writers committing suicide. There is a brain activity, where so-called “memory packets” are employed by the body to eliminate itself. I don’t doubt that historians are necessary, but they are a self-sacrificing sort who give their lives over to the archive. Martyrs! The past tense of the pronoun “I” is a floating device, like a cork, used by the nimble among us to construct an amuse-bouche. The same past-tense “I,” non-floating and serious, is a variety of extortion. It should draw legal censure. “This guy is using his mother to make me cry.” He’s also using his mother to kill himself with guilt like Eartha Kit with song. Who or what is the arrow of time aimed at? Time to ask the brain again: it is aimed at what it doesn’t know, and it wants to hit it dead-center. What the speed of light means, to paraphrase Einstein (we love paraphrase, it’s the lazy way to quote) is that if you traveled at that speed you would be able to see your own ass. Your own ass shrunken by memory, that is. My favorite fairy tale is about a young man who sets out to be immortal and young forever, provided he doesn’t go to the Valley of Remembrance. He does, of course, and dies. There is nothing wrong with dying, painlessly one hopes, but curiosity, like the arrow, should aim at the unknown. Otherwise the cat is dead as a doorknob, another non-metaphor. 

This little speech is intended to exhibit the uselessness of the memoir as a form of therapy, and the superiority of poetry as a stab in the dark. If you know it already, it’s mean to yourself and others to repeat it in writing. On the other hand, ignorance is worse than education, which is remembering with bullet points. History exists and it should be reviewed, but artists should be against it. In fact, we are against it, but the current rage for pouring it into literary moulds kills whatever it purports to remember. This is and will always be the “uncanny valley,” to quote (this time) the great Lawrence Wechsler, between a mass-market commodity and art. Remembrance will never trump discovery. The last time I was happy, to paraphrase from David Grossman’s great new novel, “A Horse Walks into a Bar” is when I still had my foreskin. At that time, I had no idea what time was. Then I saw the archer. I was the target. Turn it the other way, please. My first phrase in English was "Why don't you kill yourself?" I was 19 years-old, but I'd had the urge to ask the question since I was wordless in Romanian.

A poem from "The Awl" [by Nuar Alsadir; posted by Mark Bibbins]

I'm very grateful to David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for the opportunity to feature poems from The Awl (RIP) here on the BAP blog. The Awl's poetry section had a great run—nine years!—and I'm delighted that we can share some of the poets' work with more readers. 

 

Up first is a poem by Nuar Alsadir. I love how it walks the line between imagery and abstraction, or rather, how it seems to declare that there is no line. And the exclamation point in the tenth couplet is one of the more complicated I've encountered. What does it want us to do? -- MB

 

Morning

when dark, is not that,
morning, but more like rain:

a sky of smog-stuck potatoes;
frustration without eyes.

The way I did nothing exhausted me:
I fed the wall,

ran water over my body
until it swirled down the drain.

On a determinable plane
I am undetermined,

on a moving train,
unable to find a seat.

The edge is what knows me,
the face half-carved off,

the gutter that gathers its objects
like knives, without connection,

here what is not there and vice versa.
I lie. I have seven jars of lies:

one for each day and the joy!
of repetition. Weeks redouble

and hold me still, anchors sprout
from my feet, stand in for will.

Desire is the lie I tell on Tuesday.
I tell it with my socks off

to be understood. The color
of intent is the crispness of bread;

whoever wants the heel
comes last to the table.

Nuar Alsadir is a poet and essayist. She is the author of the poetry collections Fourth Person Singular (2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection; and More Shadow Than Bird (Salt Publishing, 2012). She works as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.

"Asphalt, Muscle & Bone" - Bill Hayward's award winning film screening in competition 2/21/19 at the "North Europe International Film Festival - London"

On January 29, we gave you an early peek at Bill Hayward's award-winning film "Asphalt, Muscle & Bone." Here's another look: 

 

Rowan Ricardo Phillips on the Tennis Circuit [by David Lehman]

The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey by Rowan Ricardo Philllips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) effortlessly proves an important point and raises a fascinating question. The point is that a talented poet such as Mr. Phillips may double as an excellent sportswriter. The question is: what accounts for the affinity that poets feel for tennis?

A part of the answer -- only a part but a crucial one -- is that the tennis players on the professional tour today are remarkable by any standards. On top we have the matchless Roger Federer, crowd favorite Rafael (Rafa) Nadal of the muscular arms and chest, and Novak Djokovich, the gluten-free Serb, who has won the last three grand slams (Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open) and is the current king of the court. There are numerous others not far behind (Andy Murray, whose best days may be behind him, Juan Porto del Martin, Stan Wawrinka, and some exciting and very tall up-and-comers). On the ladies' side we have in Serena Williams an all-time great and, waiting in the wings, the player who upset Serena in the US Open last September, Naomi Osaka, among others.

Tennis played on the level of these practitioners at their best is a beautiful game to watch (not to mention that the players themselves are extremely handsome). Each player in a match of greats can bring out the best in the other -- as in fabled matches between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe in 1980 or between Federer and Nadal in 2008. And as when two boxers embrace at the end of a grueling bout, there is a level of unity between worthy opponents that transcends the brutality of antagonism. There is also a unique quality of sportsmanship such that when McEnroe, in his bad boy days, or Serena last September, violates it with a tantrum, we are as shocked and saddened as repelled. To take the most celebrated of all players on the male circuit, and to resort to a well-worn locution, Federer conducts himself as a champion off as well as on the court. There is the same grace in an extended volley between Federer and Nadal as was exhibited by Joe DiMaggio chasing down a fly ball in center field.

In 2016 Rowan Ricardo Phillips broke his Achilles' heel and found himself confined to a couch for the better part of a year in a house near Barcelona. To while away the time he watched matches on Spanish television where the commentators leave it in no doubt that they are rooting for Nadal, Garbiñe Muguruza, or any other Spaniard in competition. A tennis player himself, Mr Phillips watched some matches thrice in their entirety. And it was then that he decided he would follow the entire 2017 world tennis tour with the object of writing the present book.

Less a journal than a journey in pursuit of a sublime experience of "beauty that must die," The Circuit is a joy to read. Mr. Phillips explains tennis's unique system of scoring and includes a helpful glossary, and the book will be valuable to any newcomer attracted to watch Wimbledon next July with a Pimm's Cup in hand. For the aficionado, the prose delivers insights worth having; in two brilliant pages early in the book, Phillips brings Andy Murray's game and personality to light in prose that is as vivacious as it is lucid, and just wait till he gets to the rivalry between Federer and Nadal, which was the story of the sport in 2017.

I have a further reason for identification with the author of The Circuit. Like him I was on the disabled list for most of a year -- in my case, 2015 -- and spent much of the time watching tennis on television, though I cannot claim the distinction of doing that in Barcelona, with Spanish announcers, and celebrating the restoration of health by chronicling in vibrant prose a year's worth of tournaments.  -- DL

Awl the way with Mark Bibbins

We're thrilled that Mark Bibbins will begin posting selections from the poems he published as the poetry editor of the now-shuttered "Awl" magazine. Mark is the author of four books of poems: Sky Lounge, which received a Lambda Literary Award; The Dance of No Hard Feelings; They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full; and 13^th Balloon, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Bibbins teaches in the graduate writing programs of The New School and Columbia University, and NYU’s Writers in Florence program. He was a cofounder of LIT magazine and edited the poetry section of The Awl from 2009 to 2018. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, and four editions of The Best American Poetry. He lives in New York City.

"It Had to Be You" (music Isham Jones, lyrics Gus Kahn)

One of the top ten love songs in anybody's book; as sung by Dick Haymes and Helen Forrest) -- DL

 

Come Rain, Come Shine, This Time or Some Other: a perfect division of labor [by David Lehman]

On Valentine's Day, the day before Harold Arlen's birthday, the day after Eileen Farrell's birthday, listen to this song with

Music by Harold Arlen
Lyrics by Johnny Mercer
Vocals by Eileen Farrell
Instrumentals by Leonard Bernstein

then follow with the same duo doing "Some Other Time
((lyrics Comden and Green, music Bernstein) 

Next Line, Please: Stanzaic Choreography [by Virginia Valenzuela]

"Stanzaic Choreography," a phrase coined by the witty Angela Ball, has been favorably chosen to describe the dance of words and ideas going on every week on the Next Line, Please column. And especially now, as we have not one, but five collaborative poems in progress. Each has three stanzas, missing only a final word.

For the poem designated as A1, we have lines submitted by Lutz Ebersdorf, Diana Ferraro, Donald LaBranche, Stephanie Cohen, and Katie R. A poem now with nine authors:

I spent my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce]
then spent, I slept; of reality dreamt;
and by mourning, could find no rest. [Koahakumele]

When night unstops its cross-boned bottle,
the dream: he killed a child by accident;
I protected him; even now, parents wait [Angela Ball]
where sat the two children we didn’t have, [David Lehman]

all grown up, as if entire chapters were skipped. [Lutz Ebersdorf]
Their wake precedes dawn. He opens his eyes. [Diana Ferraro]
The wine had turned sour, and the pickled fruit [Donald LaBranche]
smacked us awake in winter, real like medicine. [Stephanie Cohen / Katie R]

Charise Hoge proposed “The Wrong Side of the Bed” as a tentative title.

For the third stanza of A2, let's start out with a line from Millicent Caliban:

I spend my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce]
then spent, I slept; of reality dreamt;
and by mourning, could find no rest. [Koahakumele]

When, like a thieved wallet, the house emptied, [Stephanie Cohen]
we saw the blackbird-clustered face of night. [Donald LaBranche]
No absolution. Spirits, bring me absinthe, [Pamela Joyce]
a doleful pour not tasted before. [Charise Hoge]

Could the blackbirds play the role of ravens [Millicent Caliban]
in an empty house, in which I return the thief’s wallet
and then ingest the salt of absolution, [Donald LaBranche]
the final pinch of grass in a sandwich bag? [Stephanie Cohen]

And a nod to Stephanie’s working title: “Bender.”

Eric Fretz offers three-quarters of the third stanza of B1; with two lines compressed from Katie R to bring the pirouette to a soft landing:

I spent my days in an expanse of spirit,
gave thanks to God for enemies with bad aim, [Jay Ronson]
as snow fell into the trees and blackbirds clustered
thick as leaves on the limbs, glossy shades of night. [Patricia Wallace]

When feathered darkness lifted up her hood
about my head, I saw that this was glory, too; [Christa Overbeck]
returning birds, retreating foes, [Beth Dufour]
the ache you blame on age and episodic sleep. [Stephanie Cohen]

If I could only sleep the length of clouds
and leap the length of August days again,
the snow would melt off blackbirds’ backs and bud [Eric Fretz]
in a blackened crown of night and crows. [Katie R]

Eric’s nominee for the poem’s title is “This Was Glory, Too.”

J. F. “Jeff” McCullers joins in on poem B2:

I spent my days in an expanse of spirit,
gave thanks to God for enemies with bad aim, [Jay Ronson]
as snow fell into the trees and blackbirds clustered
thick as leaves on the limbs, glossy shades of night. [Patricia Wallace]

When feathered darkness lifted up her hood [Christa Overbeck]
I worshiped in the temple of her trees. [Millicent Caliban]
Blackbirds scattered at the blast. The snow now [Pamela Joyce S.]
about my head, I saw that this was glory, too, [Christa Overbeck]

and shook with cold or fear or joy. I could not tell. [Christa Overbeck]
Come, sing to the snow something new [Donald LaBranche]
amid the shouts of others. The snow my pillow. [J. F. McCullers]
Could the blackbirds play the role of ravens? [Millicent Caliban]

Two possible titles for B2 are “Divine Guides” (Clay Sparkman) and “Gloria” (Josie Cannella). A simple “Blackbirds” (David Lehman) might also work.

The fifth poem to come forth was submitted by Maureen, who took what we had and did her own choreography with it:

I spent my days in an expanse of spirits,
with each cross-boned bottle, dreamt
reality quenched: two children killed—
I ached in feathered darkness.

God, no thanks I gave for episodic sleep,
when hood of night, that temple, lifted
and I, mind weak, saw what I worshipped
rent—not once but twice

as blasts un-wrung from limbs of trees
in snow a thick of blackbirds, mourning
all I too well know.

So now what we need is a final stanza—or rather, five. For A1, A2, B1, and B2 that means a quatrain; for Maureen’s submission, a three-line stanza would complete the sonnet. Good luck!

Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!

WILLIS BARNSTONE DUET WITH JOHN KEATS [by Andrei Codrescu]

Barnstone & Codrescu in Prague 2003

At the age of 92, Willis Barnstone is a miracle. The translator of The Gnostic Bible (2003) and The New Covenant: Commonly Called The New Testament (2009), he has turned over the grounds of Greek and Aramaic, and unsettled dogmatic readings. Jesus, for example, became Joshua, his real name. The poetry of the Bible, seen mostly as exemplary before Barnstone, became poetry in his rendering of The Poems of Jesus Christ (2012.) Barnstone knows languages and he knew and translated Borges. He also brought into English Heraklitus, Sappho, and Machado, alongside many volumes of his own vigurous verse. Recently he has revisited the entirety of Guillaume Apollinaire. This is about half the canon of Western civ reborn in American Lyric Space. It baffles me that he was never Poet Laureate of the United States. He is a founder. I hereby nominate him for the Laureate laurels. Reading his latest poem is watching Laocoon and the snakes. The snakes might win but we won’t remember their names. Barnstone’s we will, and he’s working with Keats.

ALL CREATORS HAVE A CONTRACT WITH TIME

by Willis Barnstone

When Guillaume Apollinaire, near death, begged
For help, “Save me, doctor, I’ve so many
Things to say,[1] neither a bootlegged

Truck-load of medicines, a Christmas tree,
Or 7 railroad cars loaded with caviar
Could save him. The flu was a bayonet

In the heart of 50 million, the Czar
Of Murder, more than generals in lorgnette
And clouds of medals could invent to kill

A nation’s youth. We artists have a soul,
A mortal one.  We need time to fulfill
Our unique creations, our dream to bowl

A 10-strike each time we roll our hope
In a new work. Marketing garners fame.
But the artists’ god is time, time to pen,

To paint. and to compose. No fame is shame
And sorrow, but worse is absence of time,
The motor grease, the black harbor where words,

Brush strokes and music notes suddenly chime
And George Herbert leaps from his grave, birds
In hand, clocks wound, to wake the dead, equip

Them with right glasses. Then they and we read
A book, linger in galleries, and flip
A lock in time to grant new decades, seed

New lands in Castilla. Lucky, I wrote
81 books. No vanities. But I
Need at 91 a decade to smote

The Devil of Disorder deep in me. Try
I do to choose among my sonnets 5
Hundred so that A Rose in Hell will buy

Me hope for a lifelong project.  I freeze
Thinking I’ll leave a mess. And I’ve a ton
Of stars I’d like to roam, and so I seize

Whatever Little Prince asteroid I watch,
Tame, and steal into my poetry barn
Or fiction ranch. Stars brighten. Lest I botch

It all, I’ll work desperate like a sophomore
Before finals. The incompletion of 
A life tames raw infinity. Male whore

And conman, I publish anywhere that
Will run my sheets of life as verse. Like you,
Like every artist, born hungry I’m fat

In vision. Old days I could disappear
In China, France, Greece or Spain. I try still
With my last sous. Nothing new in my fear.

The artist is a gambler who will win
And lose. Time be kind. If I stay around
I’ll droop from stars, quake like a mandolin

In a wild Java ensemble. Go back to school
And teach so I can blue my head. What’s best
Write, compose, paint? Or be a patient fool.

I’ve no contract with time but try to stretch
The years with time to write, gymming my flesh
With pushups, mind with verse. I must not kvetch,

The contract is impossible, yet know
The goal keeps me fanatic. I won’t be here
To check things out. Look at the rolling brow

Of the ocean. In splashing foam, I swim
Unseen. Please overhear a gleeful miser.
Listen. Hear clouds coughing an unheard hymn.

                                                                        2019

[1]

Sauvez-moi, docteur, J’ai tant de choses à dire.

Performing in confidence: CCN Ballet de Lorraine’s “Plaisirs inconnus” [by Tracy Danison]

Photo© Arno Paul

Plaisirs inconnus made its Paris premiere at the Palais de Chaillot in January 2019. At one point the performers come just to the point where skin galvanism makes lovers remember that resistance starts where desire flowers

Karine frowned as, to hide her doubt, she looked down into her wine glass.

The wine was white. This was after ten in the evening.

As I see it, nightmare’s original recipe. She took a false sip.

She’s never been crazy, so she never does really understand how terrifyingly uncomfortable living in one’s skin may be. Though usually on the money, the importance of some things may escape her.

We were meeting for a drink at la Comète, whose street sign looks like the emoji; I had just seen the CCN-Ballet de Lorraine’s Plaisirs inconnus (https://vimeo.com/269886819), (something like “Fresh pleasures”), at Palais de Chaillot – the Théâtre National de Danse. The idea of the piece was to put the accent on the performance (and its dancers) by hiding the names of the programs’s five well-known choreographers as well as its stage, lighting and costume designers.

The Ballet’s artistic director Petter Jacobsson says that anonymity reduces the affect of expectation. Onlookers might be able to renew the pleasure of first meeting with the choreographers by meeting them anew in the dancers. I counted nine segments in one hour and fifteen minutes of program; at beginning and end, the stage was bisected with a thick check transparent plastic curtain of contemporary colors; otherwise light. The idea seemed to add depth and breadth to the stage: a lot of womb space for the performance.

Unlike many people around me seemed to, I didn’t recognize any choreographic style and did not feel teased.

But then I never can do. I never can put my finger on the music either, even the most well known.

Anyhow, I said to Karine as I sat down, the river is never twice:  live performance is to get the new as new is made in the mix of performers, place, set, onlookers, weather and the crowd on the streets bus and metro. What seemed to me to be a mocking Bolero was really nice, because the humor let some real sensuality filter through – why Bolero, a march suitable to snappy uniforms, jackboots and feral shouts, is considered erotic has always been beyond me. A march recalls us to duty, perhaps, when we are bloody sick of our usual sex partner?

But, “Karine”, I said, just as my pint was delivered to the table, “The very best segment of the dance for me was three couples, two slightly in the back and one in front – Perhaps it was a tribute to American musical-style dance? Made me think of that”.

The hands and arms of the front couple came so close as they sought each other that I thought, Well, that’s really as close as you ever get, isn’t it?

“Just to the point where skin galvanism makes potential lovers aware that resistance starts where desire flowers”, I told her.

“Then the man and the woman began to dance. The woman fell, tripped. She was a charged wave shaping into her beloved’s orbit. And he, Karine, he was all head, arms, back, legs, feet, all regard, a Sun to her coruscating Venus. He confronted that woman. He caught that woman in his arms.

He spun that woman then spilled her for that she purled like the rainbow’s arc”!

Then the woman went sprawling! The man stood in disarray!

Bébé, “I was shocked. Almost, I was hurt. No, I was hurt”. And then, in a single, spontaneous spring the woman threw herself into arms that found strength only as they felt her need them.

“It was gorgeous. And then it occurred to me, Karine, that confidence, springing to or catching up, builds the join that lets us seem to come together. That’s the strength of Plaisirs inconnus, too”.

The various the anonymously-written choreographic segments of Plaisirs inconnus were arranged by CCN-Ballet de Lorraine performers. They included Jonathan Archambault, Amandine  Biancherin, Agnès Boulanger, Alexis  Bourbeau, Clara Brunet, Thomas Caley, Pauline Colemard, Justin Cumine, Giuseppe Dagostino, Charles Dalerci, Inès Depauw, Flavien Esmieu, Nathan Gracia, Tristan Ihne, Vivien Ingrams, Petter Jacobsson, Margaux Laurence, Valérie Ly-Cuong, Amélie Olivier, Elsa Raymond, Rémi Richaud, Ligia Saldanha, Willem Jan Sas, Céline Schoefs, Luc Verbitzky.

"Memories of the Past at Red Cliff" ["Nian Nu Jiao" by Su Shi]

East flows the mighty river,
Sweeping away the heroes of time past;
This ancient rampart on its western shore
Is Zhou Yu's Red Cliff of three Kingdoms' fame;
Here jagged boulders pound the clouds,
Huge waves tear banks apart,
And foam piles up a thousand drifts of snow;
A scene fair as a painting,
Countless the brave men here in time gone by!
I dream of Marshal Zhou Yu in his day
With his new bride, the Lord Qiao's younger daughter,
Dashing and debonair,
Silk-capped, with feather fan,
He laughed and jested
While the dread enemy fleet was burned to ashes!
In fancy through those scenes of old I range.
My heart overflowing, surely a figure of fun.
A man gray before his time.
Ah, this life is a dream,
Let me drink to the moon on the river!

-- Nian Nu Jiao           

Translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Taylor

With thanks to Chang Yao, who informs us that this is her favorite of the various translations of the poem she has read. "Yang Xianyi was a Chinese translator who translated many ancient and a few modern Chinese classics into English, including Dream of the Red Chamber (my favorite novel of all time), and he was also the first one to translate The Odyssey into Chinese from the ancient Greek original. Glady Taylor was a British translator, and wife of Yang Xianyi (the couple met at Oxford, where they studied together)."

"The Het" [by Thomas Moody]

Where was it one first heard of the truth?
The universe. The field. The heart.
The girl. The legs. The glass of wine
on the table. The bedside lamp we turn off
as we roll towards the ever expanding
Closeness, between us only
The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-- Thomas Moody 

 

-- Thomas Moody

Susan Sontag Contains Multitudes (excerpt from "Dance in America" by Mindy Aloff) [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

I'm still spending most of my reading time with Mindy Aloff's magisterial anthology "Dance in America." The volume spans three centuries and includes work by our most important dance critics along side poets (yes!), choreographers, literary figures, and dancers. While I'm learning a lot about dance and writing from the contributors, there's also much to be learned about putting together an anthology and writing head notes, those helpful guides that orient readers to the work that follows. Here's a remarkable sentence from Aloff's brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag's essay "On Dance and Dance Writing."

Novelist by ambition, essayist by temperament, filmmaker and playwright by will, public intellectual by circumstance, political activist by moral imperative, bisexual by nature, high-school graduate at fifteen, wife at seventeen, college grad (Phi Beta Kappa) at eighteen, mother at nineteen, acclaimed for her courage, damned for her arrogance: Susan Sontag's life was so full, and her friendships and love affairs around the world were so plentiful, that one wouldn't thing she'd have enjoyed much leisure to follow a demanding art form as theatrical dance. 

Sontag's essay is wonderful, of course, but it's Aloff's sentence that has stayed with me. Doesn't it make you want to keep reading?

Next Line, Please: Doubling Down [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Two weeks ago, we began a journey in which each step lead us to yet another line to another stanza, beginning with the opening line: "I spend my days in an expanse of spirits." This week, the dedicated writers of NLP continue to build not one, but two poems.

The opening stanzas, posted last week, are composites of lines provided by Pamela Joyce and Koahakumele (poem A), and Jay Ronson and Patricia Wallace (poem B). For next week, quizmaster Lehman seeks a third stanza and a tentative title for each poem.

And just to make it more interesting, David Lehman has given us multiple possibilities within poems A and B. One possibility, which we shall affectionately call "A1," joins Angela Ball’s lines 5-7 and David's line 8, with this most enchanting result:

I spend my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce]
then spent, I slept; of reality dreamt;
and by mourning, could find no rest. [Koahakumele]

When night unstops its cross-boned bottle,
the dream: he killed a child by accident;
I protected him; even now, parents wait [Angela Ball]
where sat the two children we didn’t have. [David Lehman]

Not only are there the allure of dreams and mourning, but the introduction of parents and unborn children, which can only mean one thing: high levels of drama.

Comprised of lines from Stephanie Cohen, Charise Hoge, Donald LaBranche, and Pamela Joyce, "A2" extends the cocktail motif, incorporates the blackbirds from poem B, and welcomes a second type of “spirits.”

I spend my days in an expanse of spirits,
vodka, scotch, tequila, gin—pick a poison then— [Pamela Joyce]
then spent, I slept; of reality dreamt;
and by mourning, could find no rest. [Koahakumele]

When, like a thieved wallet, the house emptied, [Stephanie Cohen]
we saw the blackbird-clustered face of night. [Donald LaBranche]
No absolution. Spirits, bring me absinthe. [Pamela Joyce]
a doleful pour not tasted before. [Charise Hoge]

As for the B poem, B1 combines two lines from Christa Whitsett Overbeck and singles from Beth Dufour and Stephanie Cohen:

I spent my days in an expanse of spirit,
gave thanks to God for enemies with bad aim, [Jay Ronson]
as snow fell into the trees and blackbirds clustered
thick as leaves on the limbs, glossy shades of night. [Patricia Wallace]

When feathered darkness lifted up her hood
about my head, I saw that this was glory, too; [Christa Overbeck]
returning birds, retreating foes, [Beth Dufour]
the ache you blame on age and episodic sleep. [Stephanie Cohen]

I love the description, "feathered darkness," as it echos the motif of the birds while furthering the plot: the feathered darkness lifts the veil (or the hood) and provides us with a realization of glory.

For B2, Christa’s striking lines form the sandwich inside which live lines from Millicent Caliban and Pamela Joyce S:

I spent my days in an expanse of spirit,
gave thanks to God for enemies with bad aim, [Jay Ronson]
as snow fell into the trees and blackbirds clustered
thick as leaves on the limbs, glossy shades of night. [Patricia Wallace]

When feathered darkness lifted up her hood [Christa Overbeck]
I worshipped in the temple of her trees. [Millicent Caliban]
Blackbirds scattered at the blast. The snow now [Pamela Joyce S.]
about my head, I saw that this was glory too [Christa Overbeck]

Here, the blackbirds gain more significance, and the winter landscape glows with divinity.

Now you have four options. Please submit either a three-line or four-line stanza—and, if you wish, a tentative working title for the poem of your choice.

Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!

Marion Lévy’s “Training” successfully mocks the endless pursuit of excellence [by Tracy Danison]

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                - Photo ©Joachim Olaya

Marion Lévy has perhaps invented a new comic commonplace: “Pursue that excellence, Pangloss!” I hope she has. Without the antidote of laughter, Panglossism will kill us more surely than the ungainly truths it always seeks to deny.Training, by Marion Lévy, was presented by the Festival Faits d’hiver at the Carreau du Temple in January 2019

And too much of nothing
/Can make a man a liar /It can 'cause one man to sleep on nails
/It can 'cause others to eat fire
/Everybody's doin' somethin'
/I heard it in a dream
/But when there's too much of nothing
/It just makes a fella mean/Say hello to Valerie,/Say hello to Karine/ send them all my salary on the waters of oblivion. 

                                                                                                                                                                            – Too Much of Nothing, Bob Dylan (Peter, Paul & Mary)

Marion Lévy’s Training performance piece doesn’t have enough monologue to be stand up but is physical enough for comedy; it’s in the lineage of silent film, Charlie Chaplin tossing and twirling that globe or Buster Keaton putting up that Sears Roebuck house – when the body had to tell a story as well as act as a foil for emotions other than desire.

I went walking with Karine last Sunday – Beelzebub, can she promenade! Last Sunday alone, arm-in-arm under more than occasional douches of freezing rain, from the Eiffel Tower rive gauche to the Institut du Monde Arabe then from Pont Marie rive droite to the Eiffel Tower.

AlI along the route we took, we clung to each other; I clung to Karine. Sometimes, Karine laid her head on my shoulder. The cloud of her hair was delicious. She has recently changed it from silver blonde to jet black; it is brittler than ever: little shards of it mixed in the needle-sharp freezing spray pissing into my face from the grey grey cap of boiling cloud above.

When I forced myself to look up, used my eyes, took the glacial rain in my face, I saw that cracks and fissures on high tore out a thin ragged line of horizon back lit in neon-white.

When I finally could, I told Karine that when I saw that pale light once before long ago, I decided to stay here forever. Karine replied that she wants to live forever, though she added that it isn’t very likely. I put my arm around her waste and pulled her as close as I could.

This vigorous, almost mad, walk provoked thoughts of my upbringing.

I was shaped a Panglossian Positivist. A Panglossian forces him- or herself to believe – and righteously forces others to believe – that everything is going for the best in the best of all possible worlds, that there is nothing behind the curtain and that, if some impetuous little dog proves the contrary, the humbug that puffs and stiffens the great and powerful Oz is meant only for my good.

Contrary to what you might think, Panglossianism is tough-minded and unforgiving in proportion as everything must be just fine. Panglossism denies that almost everything is a process begun in the middle of some other process. Life is a heavy thing to be seen and experienced in a particular, uncarping, way.

I really don’t believe, until I saw Marion Lévy’s Training that I had ever seen anyone mock at Panglossism, so I was amazed but rather delighted at her piece. I have missed a lot in my misspent life, so maybe I’ve just missed the criticism. But, as I say, I had never personally been able to respond to it farther than by clinging on to some woman or another and an inarticulate snarl. And, I think, nobody much thinks that Panglossism, such an optimistic-sounding approach to an apparently troubled world, also pressed and pursued by solid and progressive American ladies such as my Mother as well as every talent or reality-TV show in the world, could possibly ever be meant to break the spirit of mortal children. So, I think nobody much has dared to take the risk of mocking it.

Until Marion Lévy, whose piece just assumes that Pangloss has got under our skin because, I think, since I was brought up, everyone has learned to speak Panglossism and construct an aggressively unanswerable rhetoric of success and excellence out of it.  An especially obvious symptom of Panglossian triumph are people who could be enjoying their lives more than ever who are working harder than ever for less money than ever. And this is the true genius of Panglossism: these overworked and underpaid consenting adults blame nobody and nothing but themselves and their own supposed shortcomings.

Panglossism is as attractive, as hard for me to answer, as my Mother always was – “Where does all this negativity come from?” she might say, as follow on to some anodyne remark of mine, countenance amazed. It was of course the amazement that wounded.

Although it is obvious that in a world of process and evolution, “goals” and “challenges” have to be invented, Panglossism depicts them as natural occurrences, not deus-ex-machinas. Marion Lévy’s shtick, as I told Karine, shows how the pursuit of “excellence” indeed, the very belief in one’s “excellence” – think Rhianna’s “Diamonds in the Sky” – is actually a belief in some sort of external “success”, that is, the mastery of some externally contrived “challenge” or “goal”. Since, as noted, everything is a process begun in the middle of some other process, “goals” and “challenges” have to be invented, either by the people set above you or, in a desperate effort to beat those above you to the punch and prove a hollow “independence” – by your deluded self.

I expect, I told Karine, that that’s why Marion Levy’s Training begins at the gym, where she shows how calisthenics, an activity that meets you on your own terms if ever there was one, has become a “training” for “excellence”. It is comic because the pursuit of an “excellence” that exists only in a Panglossed imagination renders the protagonist’s efforts absurd. What sane person would do such a thing? Indeed, it’s amusing to see the poor thing scamper around in narcissistic desperation when she could simply enjoy the effort of doing well and for herself. And so Training goes.

Marion Lévy has perhaps invented a new comic commonplace. Twirl that ball, feckless dictator! Bung up that love nest, new husband! Pursue that excellence, Pangloss! I hope so, because, Panglossism will kill us more surely than the ungainly truths it always seeks to deny. And, Karine, I said, although the younger people around me laughed at Lévy’s riffs, physical and linguistic, it’s not funny.

WE MUST BE ANIMALS Manifesto [by Andrei Codrescu]

We are becoming machines. Exquisite Corpse has resolved to throw its sabots in the cog wheels. It is incumbent to our poetic sensibilities and fleshly complexity that we become animals. Not MORE like the animals we generally call "animals," but living Quadripeds. It will not be easy to attain the good will of pets, the ferociousness of panthers, or the patience of alligators, but it all begins by relearning Quadripedality. We will open Quadripedal Yoga (QY) studios in all states and countries, using the vacant spaces left by Bikram. The poem below, written for lyric encouragement, is a call to arms, or in the very least, to collaboration. We are inviting all readers persuaded by our passion to contribute new Quadripedal Poems to EXQUISITE CORPSE: EMMA LAZARUS, the revived journal of urgent revolutions. Your submissions should be made to http://aureolainc@gmail.com. Show us how you walk with beastly dignity.

WALK ON ALL FOURS: CODE IN DOG

I remember walking out of the ocean. What struggle!
Millions of mollusk years and shell games that hurt.
I remember getting up from all fours and looking down
on all my astonished variously shaped former friends.
Not one of them wanted to look up at me now I was up.
Bipedal and lonely until there were a bunch of others.
I remember the first scene in 2001 where I killed another.
I remember that every time I bent down to be closer
to the busy world of things that crawled loped or burrowed
I was condescending and they moved away from me.
I remember towering over everything that wasn’t me.
I remember the day I howled in pain because my back gave out.
That was the day I knew my body was weakly hinged
at the place where it first stood up, and I wanted down again.
Lord, help me walk on all fours again. I know that it’s late.
We only grow taller now like the towers we can’t stop building.
Since we got language not one nonhuman creature deigns
to speak to us though we pretend in vain to understand them.
Animals find it more understandable when we shoot them
then when we kneel down and pretend we are their friends.
We do kneel down often to pray not to commune but pray
that we won’t suffer from the back pain that is our sign of Cain.
I remember that I can still return to water and do flips
but I’m in charge now of all the things I covered over.
I remember kneeling to gods who were so tall I couldn’t see them.
Their heads were in the clouds, we barely reached their sandals.
Even the mono god was so tall he dropped the tablets on Moses
and made lightning to scare us all to the death we knew was coming.
In the little world I live in I sell diminishment at one dollar an inch
and practice quadripedal yoga every morning in my living room
hoping to walk one day into the street with my quadripedal brood.
It will be the day of no pain and of trading language for nozzling.
If we succeed it won’t be so hard to hope that learning screens hurts
less than when we first left the ocean, equally pushed by hubris.
Our new weak spot is memory. A bad back and a lousy memory
may smooth our way to becoming humble and wild again and good.

 

Ida Lupino and "The Bigamist" [by David Lehman]

Here's to Ida Lupino on her birthday (February 4).

The Bigamist

I saw The Bigamist, maybe the best
of the brilliant noir movies
Ida Lupino directed, though
The Hitchhiker gives it a run for the money.

Edmund O’Brien has
one wife in San Francisco
(Joan Fontaine, who wants a baby),
and another wife in Los Angels
(Ida herself, who has a baby).

Watching The Bigamist you realize
how hard it is to be a bigamist.
Bigamy is a full-time job,
especially in 1953,
requiring
two wardrobes with one or two overlapping suits
enough money to pay the bills for both households
an excellent memory to keep everything straight
a poker face
a creative mind
a happy childhood but troubled adolescence
no siblings
deceased parents
an active libido
plus the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time
    and continue to function.
an even more difficult conundrum when the contradictory ideas are
    Joan Fontaine and Ida Lupino.

The Great Chins of Hollywood: A test with prize [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman

Have you ever noticed that some of our most beautiful and talented actors have a certain physical trait in common? See if you can match the chin to the actor, list below (put your answers in the comments). The first person to identify correctly every chin will win an edition of the Best American Poetry. 

#1	#2	#3
#4	#5	#6
#7	#8	#9
#10	#11	#12

In alphabetical order: Sandra Bullock, George Chikiris, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, Christina Hendricks, Charlton Heston, Elsa Lanchester, Sophia Loren, Robert Mitchum, Viggo Mortensen, Isaiah Washington.