The Best American Poetry

Available Now: The Best American Poetry 2020

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. The 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” according to the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

The Best American Poetry 2020 is available for pre-order here.

--sdl

For Mr Pinsky on His Birthday

With "Moonlight in Vermont" on the radio (you were right:

No rhymes) I think of you, a true blue

Libra if ever I knew one,

And I am happy to know that today you're one

Day older and yet you haven't changed a bit or a byte

(Unlike J. Blackburn I have to rhyme) and it's fun to do

Just that while toasting you and the gloria mundi 

Which passeth show (I liked your poem in Salmagundi)

 

DL, 10 / 20 / 16

 

"Late, Late Show" [by John Koethe]

I never read John O’Hara’s stories, but having read them
Now they all seem pretty much alike.  There’s a lot of
Background and a few remarks before not very much happens
And the story ends, and apparently things are somehow changed.
I never even thought of reading them, yet now I like the way
They sometimes sound the way I like to think life feels, full of
Nuances and nothing, in which nothing’s ever heightened
Or exaggerated, and something unspoken and unrealized remains.
I even like the way they’re disappointing, and the way he’s disappointed
Too inside those Yale dreams he had in Pottsville, Pennsylvania---
The reciprocal resentments of the stories he embodied and the ones he wrote.
They’re called New Yorker Stories now that no one writes them anymore
And no one lives the way they used to live in them, or understands
The code of conduct they implied for everything one did or said or wrote,
When almost everything was implied --- hanging on something
Somebody suggested in a bedroom in the east eighties, or left unsaid
To someone sitting next to them at a late-night table at the Colony or 21.

I began by wondering what poetry used to be, and what it’s now become.
It still means everything to me, though to nearly everyone I know
It doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did.  Sometimes I think I’m terrified
That it was all a style, like John O’Hara’s or a restaurant’s or a way of talking
That’s had its day, and I’ve wasted my life.  Of course I hasten to say
That I don’t believe it for a moment, and that the fact of its near invisibility
Is a sign of how much it actually matters.  Still, it means that in the last analysis
You’re all alone, and that the only proof of its importance is your own.
What is this craving for validation?  When John O’Hara received the Gold Medal
From the American Academy of Arts and Letters he stood up and wept,
And then retired to Princeton and the life he thought it owed him,
To no avail.  Stellification comes too late to make a difference
If it comes at all, because it’s always about to happen or because it’s over
Before anyone even notices.  Either way, you can’t know whether
It was real or just an exercise in self-delusion, for whichever it might be
The view from where you are remains the same, with nothing to go on
But the trying, and dying for it to happen again and again.

Ed. note:  Written this summer (2020), the poem will appear in John Koethe's new book Beyond Belief, which Farrar Straus & Giroux will publish next year. 

Kim Roberts: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Roberts (photo, Art Omi, Oct 2019)

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Double Indemnity

 

No, not insurance. What I

meant to say was “double identity,”

 

as in Boutros Boutros-Ghali,

William Carlos Williams, Sirhan Sirhan,

 

Lady Gaga. For these folks, surely,

The Postman Always Rings Twice.

 

But now I’ve Mildred Pierced myself

to the image of James M. Cain,

 

typing away in his little white house

in suburban Maryland. His typewriter

 

is preserved in a university library;

I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the change

 

from manual to electric to electronic

to what-the-hell-is-a-typewriter

 

and no one will be archiving

our battered beloved iPads,

 

even if they once belonged to Yo-Yo Ma,

Flavor Flav, or Marky Mark.

 

Now all our devices must do at least

two things: phone-cameras,

 

calculator-umbrellas. But in truth

all of us lead double lives, an outer

 

story plus a hidden story, separated by

such a thin skin. Tell us that one again

 

Ford Madox Ford, Kris Kristofferson,

Humbert Humbert, Richie Rich.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Kim Roberts is the editor of By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018). She has published five books of poems, most recently The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017).

______________________________________________________________________________________

 

"Psalm and Lament for Los Angeles" [by Dana Gioia]

1

On the streets of Hawthorne I sat down and wept.
Yes, wept as I remembered it.

I came to the asphalt country of my childhood,
To revisit the precincts of memory.

I walked the old boulevard, where the shops
Had been condemned and demolished.

I passed the bankrupt mall, defaced and boarded.
And all was vacancy and squalor.

Where was the drugstore where my parents met?
And the neighborhood park with its Indian palms?

Where was the Plaza Theater with its neon beacon
Taller than a church spire?

I wandered the silent ruins of my city.
What was there to sing in a strange and empty land?
 

2

If I forget you, Los Angeles, let my eyes burn
In the smoggy crimson of your sunsets.

If I prefer not the Queen of the Angels to other cities,
Then close my ears to the beat of your tides.

Let me stand on the piers of Malibu, blind
To the dances of the surfers and the dolphins.

But, O Los Angeles, you dash your children against the stones.
You devour your natives and your immigrants.

You destroy your father’s house. You sell your daughters to strangers.
You sprawl in the carnage and count the spoils.

You stretch naked in the sunlight, beautiful and obscene—
So enormous, hungry, and impossible to pardon.

 

Ed. note: From the Summer 2020 issue of Hudson Review. Gioia was the guest editor of the 2018 edition of The Best American Poetry.

 

"Mary McCarthy" [by Mary Maxwell]

To the very end of Cape Cod the refugees have arrived, shipwrecked
heroes out of Homer.  But even Helen was an exile of sorts, pointing out
her noble countrymen to Priam from the stone barricades.  Alternating

with picnics on the beach, flirtation, clam pie and pitchers of martinis,
important work remains to be done. Typing out an English translation
of Weil and Bespaloff’s essays on The Iliad, Dyers Hollow sand gets

into the inky keys just as it does between sun-burnt toes.  Survivors, not
yet human remains dearer to the vultures than to their wives as the Greek
is deftly rendered by Dwight MacDonald, though death, and victory,

feels imminent as a thunder storm.  On an otherwise beautiful August day,
the first bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. A female chorus will continue to
share footnoted recipes while performing witty blue-stockinged dances,

sporting reversible masks of lover and mother. Articulate overprotective
Thetis hovering above the waves. A visit from Hermann Broch. Nicola
Chiaromante in a blue ruffled apron on the threshold where myth steps

nto poetry sweeps sand out of his Truro cottage. Philosophic principles.
Sexual practice. The pursued and the pursuer.  Shoplifted taffy, infidelity
warranting the inflated tragic dramaturgy accorded a child’s scraped knee.

Ed. note: From Cultural Tourism by Mary Maxwell (Longnookbooks, 2012). From a sequence of poems devoted to figures of renown who spent quality days in Cape Cod.

from "Grand & Ogden Auto Parts" (by Mitch Sisskind)

'Send your sick animals to me'

Kim and I (but she was Marilyn Novak then)

We smelt fished at Belmont Harbor one April

As the restriction allowed but seeing as how

Smelt only ran in April anyway the restriction

To April was really much ado about nothing.

Smelt fishing happened only at night.

Did you know that? Probably not, with

Smelt fishing now a thing of the past.

April nights were chilly, the cold not

Ameliorated by our tiny Coleman stove.

By an unwritten rule the smelt had to

Be cooked immediately when snared

In the little nets, nor was it at all difficult

To fill a gallon-sized bucket with smelt.

However, Marilyn threw all of them back.

This was a person who in her bedroom

Window displayed a hand-lettered sign:

'Send your sick animals to me.' It seemed

She was no less concerned about saving

Smelt while I monkeyed with the stove.

'Where the hell are the smelt?' I asked,

But oh ho ho, she only shrugged and smiled

And Marilyn's smile could break your heart.

That night we fished no more. Back in my car,

A 1949 Chevrolet, I asked her to marry me.

'Buddha," she said -- I was called Buddha

In those days -- 'I love you but the thing is

'I'm leaving tomorrow on a cross-country tour

'To model refrigerators at trade shows for

'A big refrigerator company. I'm sorry, Buddha.'

That was in 1953. In Los Angeles Marilyn

Won the title of Miss Deep Freeze and soon

Her name was Kim. I never saw her again.

As for the smelt, they wised up so no longer

Running in April they started running in May.

In Memory of Rabbi Aharon Eliezer Ceitlin, 1953-2015

On this day in 2015, Rabbi Aharon Eliezer Ceitlin passed away. He was a greatly beloved Rev, acclaimed for his devotion to the cause of education and to the governing principles of Lubavitch-Chabad. Born and raised in Montreal, he was hand-picked by Rabbi Menachem Schneerson of righteous memory to serve as an "emissary" to Israel, in which role he distinguished himself, founding a network of Chabad kindergartens serving 1,500 children. He was an inspiring speaker.

 After undergoing radical surgery following chemotherapy, I spent a week in the same hospital ward as Rabbi Ceitlin, who was enduring the same treatment. When Stacey saw a group of Chassidim and heard the unmistakable sounds of davening from a hospital room around the corner from mine, she encouraged me to take a look. We were invited into a room crowded with Rabbis who had flown to New York from all parts of the United States to pay their respects and lend support. Rabbi Ceitlin let me put on his t'fillin, and we davened together on that day and again on the next. He gave a sermon and told a joke that only he and I found funny, so much so that I laughed out loud, prompting him to point to me and say "he got it!" I write about the encounter, which continues to inspire me, in my book,One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir.

This is from Menachem Posner's obituary in the Chabad.org newsletter of October 15, 2015.

<<<  A large man with a flowing beard and a booming voice, [Rabbi Ceitlin] was equally at home in Yiddish, English and Hebrew, and would speak passionately about Torah and Judaism to audiences across the globe.

Aharon Leizer, as he was known, was born in Montreal two days before Yom Kippur in the fall of 1953 (8 Tishrei 5714), to Rabbi Heshel and Rivkah Ceitlin, who had escaped the oppressive Soviet Union and found refuge in Canada. He was named after his paternal grandfather, Rabbi Aharon Eliezer Ceitlin, who perished in a Soviet labor camp, where he had been sentenced to eight years of hard labor as punishment for his efforts to keep Judaism alive in the face of Communist oppression. >>>

<<<  A passionate and inspired personality, [Rabbii Ceitlin] he was often invited to address Chassidic gatherings around the world. He would often weave together anecdotes from the Russian yesteryear with fresh experiences and teachings of the Rebbe [Schneerson], helping spellbound listeners appreciate the seamless bond of service and self-sacrifice that he personified.

Dedicated to the Rebbe’s work, he was among a group of young Chassidim who carried out the Rebbe’s instructions to print the Tanya—the seminal work of Chabad philosophy—in a number of locations in Lebanon during the 1982 Lebanon War. Despite the danger involved, he and his companions went directly to the front lines in order to print the sacred book, specifically in Beirut.  >>>

For more click here. 
https://www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/3098133/jewish/Rabbi-Aharon-Eliezer-Ceitlin-of-Israel-62-Passes-Away-in-New-York.htm

Movement, Life, Dance-nature and the value in Dance-practice [by Tracy Danison]

Ayelen Parolin’s “WEG” dance-performance choreographs observation, imitation, vibration, variation and novelty, letting onlookers revel in the complex subjectivity of human relationships. “Indispensable !”, Atelier de Paris, 11 September 2020.
Photo©Benoîte Fanton

For this year’s Nuit Blanche culture and arts festival, I chose a performance venue called Le Générateur. While I was hanging around waiting for another show to start, somebody suggested a visit to an installation-performance called déjà… j’ai habité tous ce mots. The performance was originally scheduled for the local park but the government closed the parks abruptly as a health-emergency measure. I had to go in a doorway and wait at the foot of a stairway for somebody to come get me. There was a low table with beribboned paper scrolls strewn over it; little blue link-light lit the stair risers. After a while, a young woman called, as I learned later, Anne-Sarah Faget, came down, said hi, grabbed a scroll, unrolled it, made a sign for me to follow. As she went up the stairs, she began to read – at first, I didn’t realize it was a poem, by a dead Congolese poet called Sony Labou Tansi, I learned afterwards, who had, as I followed, a resonance of sense-of-Baudelaire. Anticipating Anne-Sarah Faget’s pace was hard – it’s hard to follow anybody  – clumsy collision is the stuff of comedy. You have to concentrate, I had to concentrate – how far is right, how near is wrong? I didn’t want, nobody wants, to be left behind.

Then I heard the poem Faget was reading. Sony Labou Tansi says consciousness has destroyed the world and all that is left is that making-dream of ours, a dream like the mist between two mountains at a distance. ‘Though it comes from somebody already beyond the grave, the observation moves me.

Anne-Sarah Faget arrived just before me in a room where scrolls like the one she was reading the poem from hung from the ceiling, like rolls of sticky fly catcher or like room partitions. She handed our scroll to a handsome African-looking fellow – whom I later learned is called Cheriff Bakala – who bade another man rise and me sit. In a warm, smiling baritone, the handsome man read the rest of Sony Labou Tansi’s poem to its finish. After, I helped Bakala hang the scroll from the ceiling, a sticky flycatcher or a space partition, like the rest.

Until moving within what I call Faget and Bakala’s “dance- (performance)”, I had never known what “carried away by words” meant. I do now.

But there’s more sense to dance- (performance) than inhabiting the language one uses. There’s also the fact of movement in dance- (performance), the foundational fact that movement in space is what I feel to be “me” and the foundational fact that the “me” in space is what we mean when we say experience.

Faget and Bakala, and the artist-performers and programmers at Le Générateur and elsewhere, are not the first to recognize the fundamental importance of movement in space in the construction of human experience.

Heraclitus and Aristotle both thought that Life, capital “L”, is the movement in things, in atoms. Contemporary scientists think movement (“vibration”) is in both ordinary and quantum things. Dance – the art of movement – links us to the consciousness that we and ours, all six degrees of us, are movement.

"Dance-nature”, let’s say, marks our difference from stumps of wood or shards of volcanic glass. We experience our relationship with ordinary things as a pas de deux of movement and material, subject and “other”.

Ayelen Parolin’s “WEG”, Atelier de Paris. Photo:©Benoîte Fanton

As in other innate relationship behavior, there’s a practical element involved in “Dance-nature”. In the same way that “chasing” games practice of one type of basic human relationship, Dance practices shared being: oneself with other humans, oneself and other humans with the world around. And in the same way that chasing-practice enables abstract relationship potentials, Dance-practice enables awareness of the subtle link between personal experience and the Life in ordinary things.

And in the same way that chasing-practice enables abstract relationship behavior, there’s a practical element involved in “Dance-nature”. In the same way that “chasing” games practice of one type of basic human relationship, Dance practices shared being: oneself with other humans, oneself and other humans with the world around.  relationship potentials, Dance-practice enables awareness of the subtle link between personal experience and the Life in ordinary things.

After all, while Dance-nature enables us to sense that all the other elements that make up the world around are subjects, like us, Dance-practice enables us to open a dialogue with that subjectivity. Isn’t facing up to the environmental emergency – not just dealing with “rising sea-levels” or “hotter summers” or “deluge rains”– a matter of understanding that our complex interaction with our environment resembles more than anything else our interaction with our infinitely subjective fellow humans?

And, until now, hasn’t dealing with each other mostly meant an ultimately futile effort of trying to overmatch each other with a better tool: club to sword, sword met by shield, castle met by cannon, machine gun met by tank? And so far, the best reply overmatching has generated has been mutually armed destruction. But MAD won’t work with other types of consciousness than human: “Men come and go, but Earth abides”.

Maybe, if we Dance-practice more, in the same way that the chase game suggests new ways of hopping on each other, some new ways of negotiating with each other and the world around will suggest itself.

"Machaut's Complaint" [by Guillame de Machaut, trans. Robert Launay]

Like wicked men whose evil exploits taint
The pages of the story of their lives,
Damned by God, cursed by all the saints,
Banished, of any glimpse of light deprived,
The month of March should share their fate as well
And perish in the raging flames of Hell.
Each day I would condemn him, without doubt,
Who cruelly afflicts my foot with gout.

From his eyes, may the bright sun be ever hid,
Nor may the moon’s rays ever grace his night.
His realm is darkness, which all light forbids.
Nature is his nemesis, whom he would fight
With coward’s weapons. May the deceit
Of such a thief and looter earn defeat.
Perish that King of Ice, that miserable lout,
Who cruelly afflicts my foot with gout.

May other months expel him from their fold
And Nature consign him to oblivion.
Let April instead be honored and extolled,
The gentlest, noblest, and the kindest one,
Who strews the world with flowers ever fair,
In pastures, meadows, forests everywhere,
Who cures me when the month of March he routs
Who cruelly afflicts my foot with gout.

-- Guillame de Machaut (1300-1377) translated by Robert Launay.

Ed note: The French title for Machault's poem is "Ballade Contre la Goutte." The double meaning of complaint" makes "Machaut's Complaint" superior to "Against Gout, a Ballad" as a title for this masterly poem. Machaut was celebrated as "a master of French versification and regarded as one of the leading French composers of the Ars Nova (q.v.) musical style of the 14th century" (Brittanica). 

How are you, Ron Padgett?

"Tea for You, Too" by Ron Padgett:

Ron Padgett's poem "Tea for You, Too" appears in Together in a Sudden Strangeness: American Poets Respond to the Pandemic, edited by Alice Quinn and published by Alfred. A. Knopf.

--sdl

"Homage to Bashō" [7 Haiku by David Lehman]

Leaves that left the trees
are litter now on the ground
in orange and yellow.

This, and six other haiku, are in the November 2020 issue of The Atlantic under the title "Homage to Bashō." Please click and read the poems and, if so inclined, leave a comment.

Uccello’s Battle in Aspic [by Clark Coolidge]

An ant has landed in the distance, as I try
to realize the swords as bumbershoots fallen
tracked around under the horses placed, and beneath
there are giant cracks in lace.  The hook cap of a cat
left into crystal of wood. Seeing a matter of
oranges raised, pole-braided into instrument of throng.
Nobody’s flag catches into pages marbled of an end.
I throw throats, howls the one in bath cap, but the
shower is raisin and he clicks on lit glass, a shard
map of pink of blood and the berry stillness. No one
looks beyond all this, and I only get to see it
tiny from away where I am.

Ed. note: Thanks to Geoffrey Young, publisher of The Figures, the press that published Coolidge’s Odes of Roba in 1991.  On top, Paolo Uccello's "Battle of San Romano" at the Uffizi gallery  in Florence.

Anonymous Poet [by Stanley Moss]

Sometimes I would see her with her lovers
walking through the Village, the wind
strapped about her ankles.
Simply being, she fought
against the enemies of love and poetry
like Achilles in wrath.
Her tongue was not a lake,
but it lifted her lovers
with the gentle strength of a lake
that lifts a cove of waterlilies—
her blue eyes, the sky above them—
till night fell and the mysteries began.
My friend I love, poet I love,
if you are not reading or writing tonight
on your Underwood typewriter,
if no one is kissing you, death is real.

(originally in The New Yorker, 2008)

A Monday Morning Cartoon [by Nin Andrews]https://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00e54fe4158b883300e54ff804ab8834/post/compose

from the archive; first posted March 25, 2013

Doug Lang: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doug Lang at the Rodin Museum in Paris, 1996. Photo by Sandra Rottmann

______________________________________________________________________________________

Lang’s Special Fortune Cookies

 

Nothing special is coming your way.

Your luck will not change today.

Your sense of humor is of no use to you.

No one is thinking of you this evening.

Your determination has gotten you where you are today.

You will always be surrounded.

If you see someone, why not have doubts?

You have no sense and you don’t know what time it is.

Nothing in this one.

 

Please ignore the music. it is not for you.

If you stop looking for what you want, you will be sure to find it and lose interest in it.

Everything will now come your way and go right past you.

You do not need to be patient anymore: do not think, do not listen, do not heed signs.

You should regard delays and setbacks as normal.

Versatility is beyond your reach.

A good home is too expensive.

 

You are unable to show your true self to others. You have no true self.

You will conquer all obstacles and achieve world domination, but first you must shave your mustache.

You will notice that nothing has changed in the near future.

You are capable of repeating everything endlessly.

Don’t put your egg in one basket.

A true friend always walks away when you start whining.

A small house will not hold as much as a big one. This should not be a problem for you.

You have a superficial understanding of the arts and music.

You will never forget a friend who owes you.

You will go a long way.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Doug Lang is from Swansea in Wales. He came to Washington DC in 1973, the year that his novel, Freaks, was published by New English Library. He ran a now legendary reading series at Folio Books in Dupont Circle from January 1976 to June 1978. His erudite command of literature, cinema, music, and visual art, along with his wit, intellectual generosity, and good will, made him the most popular professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, where he taught writing for 37 years. His most recent book is dérangé, published by Primary Writing in DC in 2013. A new collection, In the Works, Selected Poems 1973–2013, is forthcoming from DC’s Edge Books. For more of Doug’s poems, see the Beltway Poetry Quarterly. For his 2008 post on the poetry of the 1970s, click here.  His film blog from 2007 is also worth checking out. For a multi-part, six-hour conversation between Terence Winch and Doug Lang, visit PennSound. The Doug Lang Papers are held by the Burns Library at Boston College.  [editor’s note: Doug is currently off-line, but I will make sure he gets any comments on this post.] 

_____________________________________________________________________________________

   Doug Lang with Blaise Cendrars book in Paris, 1996. Photo by Sandra Rottmann.

"Odd Man Out": the Belfast Noir [by David Lehman]

<<<
British director Carol Reed turned out three masterpieces in the late 1940s. With an exemplary performance from Ralph Richardson, The Fallen Idol (1948) does justice to Graham Greene’s brilliant story “The Basement Room.” The Third Man (1949), the most celebrated of the three, has its unforgettable zither theme, its evocation of postwar Vienna, and its extraordinary script, including the speech Orson Welles improvised at the Prater amusement park. Fierce competition, but my vote for Reed’s best goes to Odd Man Out (1947), a modern passion play about a doomed man in the shadows and alleys of his last hours alive.

Odd Man Out foregrounds political and religious themes and differs thereby from most film noirs. Yet I wouldn’t hesitate to claim it for the category. The setting is Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the people take their Catholicism seriously, and the robbery that triggers the plot is committed not by your typical thieves but by an unnamed underground movement, presumably the IRA. Thanks to the inspired cinematography—the hero’s haunted profile, the desolate cityscape, the long narrow alleys—the Belfast we see is a dark and bleak war zone.

You may argue that the revolutionary cause is undermined in Odd Man Out, which establishes that the men who rob a mill for a cause are no nobler than those who rob banks for money. Nevertheless, the viewer’s sympathy is with rebel leader Johnny McQueen (James Mason), whom the children in the street emulate in their pretend games of cops and robbers. “It’s probably the best thing that Mason has ever done, and certainly the best film he’s ever been in,” Richard Burton observed.

Johnny, who escaped from prison six months ago, has spent the time hiding at the house where Kathleen Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan) and her grandmother reside. Kathleen would be Johnny’s natural mate if he were not wedded to “the organization.” Far from a femme fatale, she is closer to a martyr or saint, embodying the Christian virtue of caritas. Love is the moral absolute that sustains her. There is no evidence that she and Johnny have so much as kissed. Yet she is willing to die for him or with him.

The narrative takes place all in one day. When McQueen and chums go over last-minute details of the heist, Kathleen implores him not to go: “You’re not fit for it.” Another man offers to go in his place: “Your heart’s not in this job, Johnny.” Johnny is rusty; his six months in hiding followed eight months behind bars. But though he is not as steady on his feet as he should be, Johnny is “the chief” and feels he must lead the four-man team.

Naturally something goes wrong. Alarms sound. Johnny has renounced violence, but now he finds himself in a struggle with an armed cashier, and when the guns go off, the cashier lies dead and Johnny has taken a bullet in his left shoulder. No one was supposed to get killed. And Johnny wasn’t supposed to fall out of the getaway car—and be abandoned by his none-too-bright chums fleeing for their lives.

Dazed and bleeding badly, McQueen manages to get to his feet and stumble into a deserted air raid shelter. There is a precious moment of relief when, upon waking, he imagines that he is still in prison—and that the little girl who has entered to recover her lost ball is reassuringly a prison guard to whom he can describe the strange dream from which he has woken. Only when his hand reaches inside his jacket and feels his blood-soaked shirt does the wounded man realize that what he dreamed did happen. He is no longer safely, almost contentedly, in a prison cell. Susceptible to hallucination, hunted by the authorities, he staggers out of the shelter and into the mercy of chance encounters.

Johnny’s progress is like that of a pilgrim on his way through hell to get to purgatory. As gray skies give way to heavy rain, he is seldom fully conscious but constantly on the move. Some citizens take brief pity on him—tending to his wounds, giving him liquor, sheltering him in a pub—before returning him to the streets. Sometimes luck lends a hand, as when Johnny is deposited in the back of a hansom cab, which the police do not inspect on the assumption that the passenger, out cold, is an ordinary drunkard.

The secondary characters are extraordinary. As Penn State media professor Kevin Hagopian puts it in his film notes for the New York State Writers Institute, Odd Man Out is “festooned with gargoyles.” The crazed painter Lukey (Robert Newton) sees in Johnny’s suffering face the perfect model for a masterpiece of portraiture. With the bearing of a genteel bordello mistress, treacherous Theresa O’Brien (Maureen Delany) lets two of the bandits drink her whiskey in one room, while in another she informs the police of their whereabouts. Dim-witted Shell (F. J. McCormick), who collects birds and speaks in avian metaphors, discovers Johnny in a rubbish heap and relishes the reward he will get for turning in this bird with the wounded left wing. But Father Tom (W. G. Fay) persuades Shell that there is a greater reward than money and it is called Faith. When Shell wonders what Faith is, his roommate, a medical student, says, “It’s life.”

Odd Man Out is rife with dualities. Father Tom stands for mercy. A police inspector, who represents justice, distinguishes between the sphere of guilt and innocence, which is his concern, and that of good and evil, which isn’t. The med student ministers to Johnny’s body; the painter labors to capture his soul. As for the politics, most of the people are like the cabman who tells Johnny that he’s neither for him nor against him but can’t afford to get mixed up in his troubles.

Movies that make intelligent use of poetry or scripture hold a charm for me, and when he is being painted, Johnny breaks from his delirium into lucid speech, quoting from I Corinthians (13-11 and 13-2): “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” With a visionary gleam in his eyes, Johnny stands up and raises his right arm: “Though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”

The heavy rain has turned to snow by the time Kathleen locates her man. Johnny: “Is it far?” Kathleen: “It’s a long way, Johnny, but I’m coming with you.” Shots ring out. And then the clock strikes midnight.
>>>
From "An Exchange of Bullets in Belfast," The American Scholar (July 9, 2020)

"The Ambivalence of Being in Glück’s 'The Triumph of Achilles'" [by Caroline Malone]

Opening the box. Opening the book. Opening the self. What often initially emerges from opening is just what Pandora unwittingly released into the world: fear, ignorance, jealousy, and hatred. And just as often, agency has either been denied or stripped from the one who lifts the lid, or in the case of Pandora, uncorks the jar. This swirling cloud of misery easily blinds us to the hope trapped inside the vessel of gifts from the gods and goddesses. In opening, we release boundaries either permanently or temporarily, and for varying lengths of time and amounts of space. For many, the potential discovery, insight, and growth are worth suffering, with the absence of clarity ultimately causing deeper damage to the self. Experiencing the self must become communal for the price of isolation is the death of identity, the soul. Helen Vendler writes that art, especially poetry, is a means by which one identity reaches out to another, tries to explain itself to another, gathers images to define its shape, to clarify itself, to author itself. A constant, ever-changing business, the desire for terminus is intense, and the existential angst can devour one. There is great relief in declaring something finished, beyond change.

In the poetry of Louise Glück, the boundaries of self are destroyed and recovered through the dialectic of identity formation. Like Kali, the speaker in Glück’s poems both creates and destroys the world of the self in hope of reconciling with death and accepting the way things are (reality). Our identities are constructed, according to the modern paradox, by others. And one’s inner authority struggles against outside disabling conceptions to accomplish the self. Yet, identity is provisional, constantly evolving in slender moments of time and space, sometimes almost imperceptibly. It is also through these multiple perspectives that Glück comes to know and understand the self. Her lyric personae become vehicles through which the poet discovers and authors both the linguistic, ephemeral self and the contingent, embodied self. The tension produced between these incarnations is what makes

Glück’s work so powerful. The evolving self, constantly subject to revision, is composed of different voices, is most safely explored on the page, yet to enter language is to abandon human relation.
In The Triumph of Achilles, Louise Glück records the process of creating the self. These early poems explore the tentative movement from emotional isolation to humanity. For Glück, leaving the safety of the mind for the page is a risky endeavor for even something as controlled as the poetic lyric posses the power to expose too much of the self, thus inviting vulnerability. Yet the desire for intimacy requires action, and Glück accomplishes this through the form of the poem. It is the tension between what can and cannot be said, through the possibilities and limitations of language that Glück explores being and non-being. The lyric form's power to contain yet release, to hide yet reveal, to dissolve yet embody allows Glück to cautiously test the boundaries between two equally attractive states: the protected self of Platonic forms and the vulnerable self of the assailable world.

In The Iliad, the great warrior Achilles embodies the perfectionist qualities of the Greek heroic age. He admits there are better orators, more clever men amongst his ranks, yet he knows his strengths, and therefore has lived for honor, for his standing in the eyes of others; for Achilles, life is less important than his reputation. By the tenth year of the Trojan War, Achilles has achieved his goal of surpassing all others to become the greatest hero among the Greeks. Isolated from the Greek troops, Achilles is consumed by his uncontrollable rage, a rage that is a curse and a gift from the gods. Yet despite the hero’s temperamental, impulsive, selfish character, Achilles’ withdrawal from battle provides him the opportunity for discovery and allows for the truly defining moment in his mortal existence. Sulking in his tent over Agamemnon’s insult, Achilles explains to Odysseus why he will not rejoin the fight:

Fate is the same for the man who holds back,
The same if he fights hard.
We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings.
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions
In forever setting my life on the hazard of battle. (Book 9, 318-322)

The dishonor Achilles has suffered leads him to question the basis of his life, and in his bitterness, he encounters emptiness previously unknown to him. However, his insight is squandered as Achilles chooses to remain selfishly centered on what he might personally gain or suffer. Confronted with this new self-knowledge, Achilles’ boundaries must shift. He cannot remain by his ships forever – he must decide whether to sail for home where he will live a long, undistinguished life, or stay to fight where he will further enhance his reputation but die in the process. It is only upon the death of the beloved that Achilles is moved to act. When he hears of Patroclus’ death, Achilles is transformed through the pain of loss. It is not, after all, his prowess on the battlefield that earns the hero victory but rather his entry into the fallen world of the mortal. Being almost a god, Achilles appears to have seldom experienced such passion other than his rage. He does not know what it means to be fully human. But the pain of separation from the human, Patroclus, leads Achilles to grief and the expression of his grief takes form in his particularly brutal stalking, killing, and defilement of Hector.

Glück’s The Triumph of Achilles becomes a metaphor for the human condition as it charts the evolution of the self in all its incarnations. Throughout the collection, the self’s choice remains constant: to enter the world of human relation or to live in the perfected world of the mind. Glück’s speaker locates the struggle for the self in the argument that because the body will perish, the autonomous self will be betrayed; the dependence of the self / spirit the mortal frustrates autonomy. Glück’s compromise is the poem, the linguistic self. Neither fully vulnerable nor entirely exposed, the self on the page comes as close to perfection and protection as possible. Glück’s compromise, then, is the divided self. Like Achilles, who is part mortal (Peleus, his father) and part immortal (Thetis, his mother), Glück’s speakers celebrate and lament existence. The poems in The Triumph of Achilles explore the opposing human longings of creating the self, creating boundaries, and giving the self to the other, thus losing distinction, which threatens identity. The loneliness of one and the pain of the other.

The signature of Glück’s poetry is tone. Particularly in the first four collections, the poems are subtle, calm, and controlled, embodying stoicism and endurance. Furthermore, Glück uses understatement, metaphor through statement to create the complex, evolving self. In The Triumph of Achilles, the self is explored in a mythical context, chiefly through Biblical and Greek classical subjects. Glück’s use of artifact and story revision allows her to create a distance from her own life necessary to observe the self with disinterestedness, thus simultaneously opening and protecting the boundaries of the self. The self embedded in the myth and the form of the poem becomes the lyric persona. The speaker in “Mythic Fragment” is Daphne, who escapes Apollo’s pursuit through the interference of the father who grants her request for freedom by changing her into a tree. Apollo’s passion represents a threat to Daphne’s autonomous self and therefore she is unable to retain her boundaries. To avoid having the self subsumed by one male, the female relinquishes agency to another, the father; Daphne renounces power in exchange for protection. The paradox is, of course, that the protection also limits the self, cuts it off from human relation, including the father who abandons Daphne to isolation in her new form. This altered self is captive in the form of a tree, an object that is hard and incapable of feeling: a petrified self. Daphne must choose between beauty and erotic desire (Apollo) and safety and confinement (the father), and in either case, the autonomous self is negated. To give in to erotic desire is to lose control of the self, is to draw closer to one’s body and the body of the other, and the resulting pleasure adds to the mixture forcing the speaker to acknowledge mutability. If one never partakes, then one is never empty.

“Mythic Fragment,” then, is a metaphor for the self’s struggle to find a form, to find a voice, to exist on its own terms. The structure of the poem, 18 two beat lines, mimics the fragmented self it portrays. Much of what we know about Greek antiquity comes to us in pieces, quite often with major sections of the vase, temple, painting missing. The story is incomplete. In the middle of line 11, the brief narrative comes to a full stop just as Daphne’s self becomes arrested. Upon realizing the price she must pay to preserve the autonomous self, Daphne tells her reader:

When
the god arrived, I was nowhere,
I was in a tree forever. (9-11)

The remaining lines constitute a direct address to the reader, the tone, released through spare diction and imagery, initially sarcastic as the speaker asks us to “pity Apollo,” then becoming stoic and detached:

--as
I stiffened in the god’s arms,
my father made
no other sign from the water. (14-17)

At the end of the poem, the father remains unresponsive, the father-daughter relationship empty. In “Mythic Fragment,” the speaker, Daphne, has no chance to become whole. Although Glück does not consider herself a feminist poet, the fact remains that “Mythic Fragment,” as do many of her other poems, gives voice to the female trapped in patriarchy. Once again, the embodied self betrays the authentic self or spirit. It is the form of the poem that confirms identity.

Whereas the speaker in “Mythic Fragment” clearly rejects the prospect of union with another, the speaker of “Hawk’s Shadow” reveals ambivalence toward the other. Glück uses the image of the hawk carrying its kill as a metaphor for the speaker’s relationship to her lover. As the predator hawk soars through the sky, the single shadow cast on the ground is composed of the living and the dead. The shadow is an omen of separation. Here, Glück imagines again that giving the self to the other results in violence and thus damage to the autonomous self. As the speaker remembers the lovers’ embrace, she notes that once the hawk and its prey merged into shadow “they disappeared.” In response, there was discovery, the emergence of the self, in the speaker’s mind:

And I thought:
one shadow. Like the one we made,
you holding me. (10-12)

The structure of the poem emphasizes the passivity of the speaker and the agency of the natural world, which she sees as hostile. The image of the hawk, its kill and the shadow they create is bounded by statement in lines 1-4. Next, the vivid image of the predator in lines 5-9 is followed by another statement in the last three lines. Statement “embraces” what destroys, creating boundaries that isolate the self. In the shadow of the hawk and its kill, the speaker sees the archetype of the self, or rather the self that is created in the relationship with the lover. The monosyllabic words and enjambed lines create tension and speed the pacing of the poem, expressing the speaker’s anxiety over the relationship. The poem ends with the simile expressed as a sentence fragment, which reflects the speaker’s sense of the self being engulfed. Moving from statement to image of predator and prey back to the abstract shadow, embodied existence is contained within the boundaries of the mind where it may be controlled and protected.

Relationship is seen as a test of endurance in part eight of “Marathon.” The nine section poem documents the end of a love affair and the speaker’s discovery that time ultimately takes all love away. But time can also slow or even stop time in the speaker’s mind. In “Song of Invisible Boundaries,” the speaker addresses her lover as she struggles to locate the self in time and space. One moment in dream the next awake, the disembodied speaker still floats in post-coital disorientation. As a result, even location in the physical world becomes difficult to determine:

Last night I dreamed we were in Venice;
today, we are in Venice. Now, lying here,
I think there are no boundaries to my dreams,
nothing we won’t share. (1-4)

On reflection, the speaker admits that intimacy with the other consumes the self, “this lying in the bright light without distinction” (13). Yet the speaker locates authenticity in the linguistic self; the sensual, corporeal self is allowed minimal expression. By the end of this section, the speaker sees that grief does not fully transform the self; there will always be the body’s memory of the union.

In the title poem “The Triumph of Achilles,” Glück further explores and creates the linguistic self through the mask of the legendary Achilles. Myth allows Glück the distance to approach what is most intimate and vulnerable – to love another human being. The godlike Achilles finds himself grief stricken over the loss of his beloved Patroclus. This loss forces Achilles to confront his own mortality. With these new boundaries of self, Achilles is able to achieve his greatest triumph: Becoming truly human. This grief makes Achilles fully alive and initiates him completely into the fallen, mortal world of humans. Observing the self through the Achilles—Patroclus relationship, Glück discovers that separation from the other can be more devastating to the self than intimacy. When Patroclus wears Achilles’ armor, he in effect becomes Achilles and for a time, the two men merge into one identity. By reclaiming his armor and rescuing Patroclus’ corpse, Achilles rescues the self and honors union simultaneously.

For the most part, The Triumph of Achilles expresses Glück’s ambivalence of being. From the stringent opening lyric “Mock Orange,” a poem in which the speaker expresses her revulsion with sex and its power to destroy the self, to the closing “Horse,” in which the other is finally given a voice, a voice that attempts through empathy to reinforce the bond between lovers, Glück charts the self in transition, in constant flux. Yet that Glück chose to title the book The Triumph of Achilles suggests that the developing identity on these pages acknowledges more consistently that perhaps although need and desire threaten the autonomous self, they do not necessarily reveal a defective selfhood. After all, Achilles was only one half immortal.

-- Caroline Malone

from the archive; first posted January 26, 2012

In the poetry of Louise Glück, the boundaries of self are destroyed and recovered through the dialectic of identity formation. Like Kali, the speaker in Glück’s poems both creates and destroys the world of the self in hope of reconciling with death and accepting the way things are (reality). Our identities are constructed, according to the modern paradox, by others. And one’s inner authority struggles against outside disabling conceptions to accomplish the self. Yet, identity is provisional, constantly evolving in slender moments of time and space, sometimes almost imperceptibly. It is also through these multiple perspectives that Glück comes to know and understand the self. Her lyric personae become vehicles through which the poet discovers and authors both the linguistic, ephemeral self and the contingent, embodied self. The tension produced between these incarnations is what makes

Glück’s work so powerful. The evolving self, constantly subject to revision, is composed of different voices, is most safely explored on the page, yet to enter language is to abandon human relation.
In The Triumph of Achilles, Louise Glück records the process of creating the self. These early poems explore the tentative movement from emotional isolation to humanity. For Glück, leaving the safety of the mind for the page is a risky endeavor for even something as controlled as the poetic lyric posses the power to expose too much of the self, thus inviting vulnerability. Yet the desire for intimacy requires action, and Glück accomplishes this through the form of the poem. It is the tension between what can and cannot be said, through the possibilities and limitations of language that Glück explores being and non-being. The lyric form's power to contain yet release, to hide yet reveal, to dissolve yet embody allows Glück to cautiously test the boundaries between two equally attractive states: the protected self of Platonic forms and the vulnerable self of the assailable world.

In The Iliad, the great warrior Achilles embodies the perfectionist qualities of the Greek heroic age. He admits there are better orators, more clever men amongst his ranks, yet he knows his strengths, and therefore has lived for honor, for his standing in the eyes of others; for Achilles, life is less important than his reputation. By the tenth year of the Trojan War, Achilles has achieved his goal of surpassing all others to become the greatest hero among the Greeks. Isolated from the Greek troops, Achilles is consumed by his uncontrollable rage, a rage that is a curse and a gift from the gods. Yet despite the hero’s temperamental, impulsive, selfish character, Achilles’ withdrawal from battle provides him the opportunity for discovery and allows for the truly defining moment in his mortal existence. Sulking in his tent over Agamemnon’s insult, Achilles explains to Odysseus why he will not rejoin the fight:

Fate is the same for the man who holds back,
The same if he fights hard.
We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings.
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions
In forever setting my life on the hazard of battle. (Book 9, 318-322)

The dishonor Achilles has suffered leads him to question the basis of his life, and in his bitterness, he encounters emptiness previously unknown to him. However, his insight is squandered as Achilles chooses to remain selfishly centered on what he might personally gain or suffer. Confronted with this new self-knowledge, Achilles’ boundaries must shift. He cannot remain by his ships forever – he must decide whether to sail for home where he will live a long, undistinguished life, or stay to fight where he will further enhance his reputation but die in the process. It is only upon the death of the beloved that Achilles is moved to act. When he hears of Patroclus’ death, Achilles is transformed through the pain of loss. It is not, after all, his prowess on the battlefield that earns the hero victory but rather his entry into the fallen world of the mortal. Being almost a god, Achilles appears to have seldom experienced such passion other than his rage. He does not know what it means to be fully human. But the pain of separation from the human, Patroclus, leads Achilles to grief and the expression of his grief takes form in his particularly brutal stalking, killing, and defilement of Hector.

Glück’s The Triumph of Achilles becomes a metaphor for the human condition as it charts the evolution of the self in all its incarnations. Throughout the collection, the self’s choice remains constant: to enter the world of human relation or to live in the perfected world of the mind. Glück’s speaker locates the struggle for the self in the argument that because the body will perish, the autonomous self will be betrayed; the dependence of the self / spirit the mortal frustrates autonomy. Glück’s compromise is the poem, the linguistic self. Neither fully vulnerable nor entirely exposed, the self on the page comes as close to perfection and protection as possible. Glück’s compromise, then, is the divided self. Like Achilles, who is part mortal (Peleus, his father) and part immortal (Thetis, his mother), Glück’s speakers celebrate and lament existence. The poems in The Triumph of Achilles explore the opposing human longings of creating the self, creating boundaries, and giving the self to the other, thus losing distinction, which threatens identity. The loneliness of one and the pain of the other.

The signature of Glück’s poetry is tone. Particularly in the first four collections, the poems are subtle, calm, and controlled, embodying stoicism and endurance. Furthermore, Glück uses understatement, metaphor through statement to create the complex, evolving self. In The Triumph of Achilles, the self is explored in a mythical context, chiefly through Biblical and Greek classical subjects. Glück’s use of artifact and story revision allows her to create a distance from her own life necessary to observe the self with disinterestedness, thus simultaneously opening and protecting the boundaries of the self. The self embedded in the myth and the form of the poem becomes the lyric persona. The speaker in “Mythic Fragment” is Daphne, who escapes Apollo’s pursuit through the interference of the father who grants her request for freedom by changing her into a tree. Apollo’s passion represents a threat to Daphne’s autonomous self and therefore she is unable to retain her boundaries. To avoid having the self subsumed by one male, the female relinquishes agency to another, the father; Daphne renounces power in exchange for protection. The paradox is, of course, that the protection also limits the self, cuts it off from human relation, including the father who abandons Daphne to isolation in her new form. This altered self is captive in the form of a tree, an object that is hard and incapable of feeling: a petrified self. Daphne must choose between beauty and erotic desire (Apollo) and safety and confinement (the father), and in either case, the autonomous self is negated. To give in to erotic desire is to lose control of the self, is to draw closer to one’s body and the body of the other, and the resulting pleasure adds to the mixture forcing the speaker to acknowledge mutability. If one never partakes, then one is never empty.

“Mythic Fragment,” then, is a metaphor for the self’s struggle to find a form, to find a voice, to exist on its own terms. The structure of the poem, 18 two beat lines, mimics the fragmented self it portrays. Much of what we know about Greek antiquity comes to us in pieces, quite often with major sections of the vase, temple, painting missing. The story is incomplete. In the middle of line 11, the brief narrative comes to a full stop just as Daphne’s self becomes arrested. Upon realizing the price she must pay to preserve the autonomous self, Daphne tells her reader:

When
the god arrived, I was nowhere,
I was in a tree forever. (9-11)

The remaining lines constitute a direct address to the reader, the tone, released through spare diction and imagery, initially sarcastic as the speaker asks us to “pity Apollo,” then becoming stoic and detached:

--as
I stiffened in the god’s arms,
my father made
no other sign from the water. (14-17)

At the end of the poem, the father remains unresponsive, the father-daughter relationship empty. In “Mythic Fragment,” the speaker, Daphne, has no chance to become whole. Although Glück does not consider herself a feminist poet, the fact remains that “Mythic Fragment,” as do many of her other poems, gives voice to the female trapped in patriarchy. Once again, the embodied self betrays the authentic self or spirit. It is the form of the poem that confirms identity.

Whereas the speaker in “Mythic Fragment” clearly rejects the prospect of union with another, the speaker of “Hawk’s Shadow” reveals ambivalence toward the other. Glück uses the image of the hawk carrying its kill as a metaphor for the speaker’s relationship to her lover. As the predator hawk soars through the sky, the single shadow cast on the ground is composed of the living and the dead. The shadow is an omen of separation. Here, Glück imagines again that giving the self to the other results in violence and thus damage to the autonomous self. As the speaker remembers the lovers’ embrace, she notes that once the hawk and its prey merged into shadow “they disappeared.” In response, there was discovery, the emergence of the self, in the speaker’s mind:

And I thought:
one shadow. Like the one we made,
you holding me. (10-12)

The structure of the poem emphasizes the passivity of the speaker and the agency of the natural world, which she sees as hostile. The image of the hawk, its kill and the shadow they create is bounded by statement in lines 1-4. Next, the vivid image of the predator in lines 5-9 is followed by another statement in the last three lines. Statement “embraces” what destroys, creating boundaries that isolate the self. In the shadow of the hawk and its kill, the speaker sees the archetype of the self, or rather the self that is created in the relationship with the lover. The monosyllabic words and enjambed lines create tension and speed the pacing of the poem, expressing the speaker’s anxiety over the relationship. The poem ends with the simile expressed as a sentence fragment, which reflects the speaker’s sense of the self being engulfed. Moving from statement to image of predator and prey back to the abstract shadow, embodied existence is contained within the boundaries of the mind where it may be controlled and protected.

Relationship is seen as a test of endurance in part eight of “Marathon.” The nine section poem documents the end of a love affair and the speaker’s discovery that time ultimately takes all love away. But time can also slow or even stop time in the speaker’s mind. In “Song of Invisible Boundaries,” the speaker addresses her lover as she struggles to locate the self in time and space. One moment in dream the next awake, the disembodied speaker still floats in post-coital disorientation. As a result, even location in the physical world becomes difficult to determine:

Last night I dreamed we were in Venice;
today, we are in Venice. Now, lying here,
I think there are no boundaries to my dreams,
nothing we won’t share. (1-4)

On reflection, the speaker admits that intimacy with the other consumes the self, “this lying in the bright light without distinction” (13). Yet the speaker locates authenticity in the linguistic self; the sensual, corporeal self is allowed minimal expression. By the end of this section, the speaker sees that grief does not fully transform the self; there will always be the body’s memory of the union.

In the title poem “The Triumph of Achilles,” Glück further explores and creates the linguistic self through the mask of the legendary Achilles. Myth allows Glück the distance to approach what is most intimate and vulnerable – to love another human being. The godlike Achilles finds himself grief stricken over the loss of his beloved Patroclus. This loss forces Achilles to confront his own mortality. With these new boundaries of self, Achilles is able to achieve his greatest triumph: Becoming truly human. This grief makes Achilles fully alive and initiates him completely into the fallen, mortal world of humans. Observing the self through the Achilles—Patroclus relationship, Glück discovers that separation from the other can be more devastating to the self than intimacy. When Patroclus wears Achilles’ armor, he in effect becomes Achilles and for a time, the two men merge into one identity. By reclaiming his armor and rescuing Patroclus’ corpse, Achilles rescues the self and honors union simultaneously.

For the most part, The Triumph of Achilles expresses Glück’s ambivalence of being. From the stringent opening lyric “Mock Orange,” a poem in which the speaker expresses her revulsion with sex and its power to destroy the self, to the closing “Horse,” in which the other is finally given a voice, a voice that attempts through empathy to reinforce the bond between lovers, Glück charts the self in transition, in constant flux. Yet that Glück chose to title the book The Triumph of Achilles suggests that the developing identity on these pages acknowledges more consistently that perhaps although need and desire threaten the autonomous self, they do not necessarily reveal a defective selfhood. After all, Achilles was only one half immortal.

-- Caroline Malone

from the archive; first posted January 26, 2012

In the poetry of Louise Glück, the boundaries of self are destroyed and recovered through the dialectic of identity formation. Like Kali, the speaker in Glück’s poems both creates and destroys the world of the self in hope of reconciling with death and accepting the way things are (reality). Our identities are constructed, according to the modern paradox, by others. And one’s inner authority struggles against outside disabling conceptions to accomplish the self. Yet, identity is provisional, constantly evolving in slender moments of time and space, sometimes almost imperceptibly. It is also through these multiple perspectives that Glück comes to know and understand the self. Her lyric personae become vehicles through which the poet discovers and authors both the linguistic, ephemeral self and the contingent, embodied self. The tension produced between these incarnations is what makes

Glück’s work so powerful. The evolving self, constantly subject to revision, is composed of different voices, is most safely explored on the page, yet to enter language is to abandon human relation.
In The Triumph of Achilles, Louise Glück records the process of creating the self. These early poems explore the tentative movement from emotional isolation to humanity. For Glück, leaving the safety of the mind for the page is a risky endeavor for even something as controlled as the poetic lyric posses the power to expose too much of the self, thus inviting vulnerability. Yet the desire for intimacy requires action, and Glück accomplishes this through the form of the poem. It is the tension between what can and cannot be said, through the possibilities and limitations of language that Glück explores being and non-being. The lyric form's power to contain yet release, to hide yet reveal, to dissolve yet embody allows Glück to cautiously test the boundaries between two equally attractive states: the protected self of Platonic forms and the vulnerable self of the assailable world.

In The Iliad, the great warrior Achilles embodies the perfectionist qualities of the Greek heroic age. He admits there are better orators, more clever men amongst his ranks, yet he knows his strengths, and therefore has lived for honor, for his standing in the eyes of others; for Achilles, life is less important than his reputation. By the tenth year of the Trojan War, Achilles has achieved his goal of surpassing all others to become the greatest hero among the Greeks. Isolated from the Greek troops, Achilles is consumed by his uncontrollable rage, a rage that is a curse and a gift from the gods. Yet despite the hero’s temperamental, impulsive, selfish character, Achilles’ withdrawal from battle provides him the opportunity for discovery and allows for the truly defining moment in his mortal existence. Sulking in his tent over Agamemnon’s insult, Achilles explains to Odysseus why he will not rejoin the fight:

Fate is the same for the man who holds back,
The same if he fights hard.
We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings.
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions
In forever setting my life on the hazard of battle. (Book 9, 318-322)

The dishonor Achilles has suffered leads him to question the basis of his life, and in his bitterness, he encounters emptiness previously unknown to him. However, his insight is squandered as Achilles chooses to remain selfishly centered on what he might personally gain or suffer. Confronted with this new self-knowledge, Achilles’ boundaries must shift. He cannot remain by his ships forever – he must decide whether to sail for home where he will live a long, undistinguished life, or stay to fight where he will further enhance his reputation but die in the process. It is only upon the death of the beloved that Achilles is moved to act. When he hears of Patroclus’ death, Achilles is transformed through the pain of loss. It is not, after all, his prowess on the battlefield that earns the hero victory but rather his entry into the fallen world of the mortal. Being almost a god, Achilles appears to have seldom experienced such passion other than his rage. He does not know what it means to be fully human. But the pain of separation from the human, Patroclus, leads Achilles to grief and the expression of his grief takes form in his particularly brutal stalking, killing, and defilement of Hector.

Glück’s The Triumph of Achilles becomes a metaphor for the human condition as it charts the evolution of the self in all its incarnations. Throughout the collection, the self’s choice remains constant: to enter the world of human relation or to live in the perfected world of the mind. Glück’s speaker locates the struggle for the self in the argument that because the body will perish, the autonomous self will be betrayed; the dependence of the self / spirit the mortal frustrates autonomy. Glück’s compromise is the poem, the linguistic self. Neither fully vulnerable nor entirely exposed, the self on the page comes as close to perfection and protection as possible. Glück’s compromise, then, is the divided self. Like Achilles, who is part mortal (Peleus, his father) and part immortal (Thetis, his mother), Glück’s speakers celebrate and lament existence. The poems in The Triumph of Achilles explore the opposing human longings of creating the self, creating boundaries, and giving the self to the other, thus losing distinction, which threatens identity. The loneliness of one and the pain of the other.

The signature of Glück’s poetry is tone. Particularly in the first four collections, the poems are subtle, calm, and controlled, embodying stoicism and endurance. Furthermore, Glück uses understatement, metaphor through statement to create the complex, evolving self. In The Triumph of Achilles, the self is explored in a mythical context, chiefly through Biblical and Greek classical subjects. Glück’s use of artifact and story revision allows her to create a distance from her own life necessary to observe the self with disinterestedness, thus simultaneously opening and protecting the boundaries of the self. The self embedded in the myth and the form of the poem becomes the lyric persona. The speaker in “Mythic Fragment” is Daphne, who escapes Apollo’s pursuit through the interference of the father who grants her request for freedom by changing her into a tree. Apollo’s passion represents a threat to Daphne’s autonomous self and therefore she is unable to retain her boundaries. To avoid having the self subsumed by one male, the female relinquishes agency to another, the father; Daphne renounces power in exchange for protection. The paradox is, of course, that the protection also limits the self, cuts it off from human relation, including the father who abandons Daphne to isolation in her new form. This altered self is captive in the form of a tree, an object that is hard and incapable of feeling: a petrified self. Daphne must choose between beauty and erotic desire (Apollo) and safety and confinement (the father), and in either case, the autonomous self is negated. To give in to erotic desire is to lose control of the self, is to draw closer to one’s body and the body of the other, and the resulting pleasure adds to the mixture forcing the speaker to acknowledge mutability. If one never partakes, then one is never empty.

“Mythic Fragment,” then, is a metaphor for the self’s struggle to find a form, to find a voice, to exist on its own terms. The structure of the poem, 18 two beat lines, mimics the fragmented self it portrays. Much of what we know about Greek antiquity comes to us in pieces, quite often with major sections of the vase, temple, painting missing. The story is incomplete. In the middle of line 11, the brief narrative comes to a full stop just as Daphne’s self becomes arrested. Upon realizing the price she must pay to preserve the autonomous self, Daphne tells her reader:

When
the god arrived, I was nowhere,
I was in a tree forever. (9-11)

The remaining lines constitute a direct address to the reader, the tone, released through spare diction and imagery, initially sarcastic as the speaker asks us to “pity Apollo,” then becoming stoic and detached:

--as
I stiffened in the god’s arms,
my father made
no other sign from the water. (14-17)

At the end of the poem, the father remains unresponsive, the father-daughter relationship empty. In “Mythic Fragment,” the speaker, Daphne, has no chance to become whole. Although Glück does not consider herself a feminist poet, the fact remains that “Mythic Fragment,” as do many of her other poems, gives voice to the female trapped in patriarchy. Once again, the embodied self betrays the authentic self or spirit. It is the form of the poem that confirms identity.

Whereas the speaker in “Mythic Fragment” clearly rejects the prospect of union with another, the speaker of “Hawk’s Shadow” reveals ambivalence toward the other. Glück uses the image of the hawk carrying its kill as a metaphor for the speaker’s relationship to her lover. As the predator hawk soars through the sky, the single shadow cast on the ground is composed of the living and the dead. The shadow is an omen of separation. Here, Glück imagines again that giving the self to the other results in violence and thus damage to the autonomous self. As the speaker remembers the lovers’ embrace, she notes that once the hawk and its prey merged into shadow “they disappeared.” In response, there was discovery, the emergence of the self, in the speaker’s mind:

And I thought:
one shadow. Like the one we made,
you holding me. (10-12)

The structure of the poem emphasizes the passivity of the speaker and the agency of the natural world, which she sees as hostile. The image of the hawk, its kill and the shadow they create is bounded by statement in lines 1-4. Next, the vivid image of the predator in lines 5-9 is followed by another statement in the last three lines. Statement “embraces” what destroys, creating boundaries that isolate the self. In the shadow of the hawk and its kill, the speaker sees the archetype of the self, or rather the self that is created in the relationship with the lover. The monosyllabic words and enjambed lines create tension and speed the pacing of the poem, expressing the speaker’s anxiety over the relationship. The poem ends with the simile expressed as a sentence fragment, which reflects the speaker’s sense of the self being engulfed. Moving from statement to image of predator and prey back to the abstract shadow, embodied existence is contained within the boundaries of the mind where it may be controlled and protected.

Relationship is seen as a test of endurance in part eight of “Marathon.” The nine section poem documents the end of a love affair and the speaker’s discovery that time ultimately takes all love away. But time can also slow or even stop time in the speaker’s mind. In “Song of Invisible Boundaries,” the speaker addresses her lover as she struggles to locate the self in time and space. One moment in dream the next awake, the disembodied speaker still floats in post-coital disorientation. As a result, even location in the physical world becomes difficult to determine:

Last night I dreamed we were in Venice;
today, we are in Venice. Now, lying here,
I think there are no boundaries to my dreams,
nothing we won’t share. (1-4)

On reflection, the speaker admits that intimacy with the other consumes the self, “this lying in the bright light without distinction” (13). Yet the speaker locates authenticity in the linguistic self; the sensual, corporeal self is allowed minimal expression. By the end of this section, the speaker sees that grief does not fully transform the self; there will always be the body’s memory of the union.

In the title poem “The Triumph of Achilles,” Glück further explores and creates the linguistic self through the mask of the legendary Achilles. Myth allows Glück the distance to approach what is most intimate and vulnerable – to love another human being. The godlike Achilles finds himself grief stricken over the loss of his beloved Patroclus. This loss forces Achilles to confront his own mortality. With these new boundaries of self, Achilles is able to achieve his greatest triumph: Becoming truly human. This grief makes Achilles fully alive and initiates him completely into the fallen, mortal world of humans. Observing the self through the Achilles—Patroclus relationship, Glück discovers that separation from the other can be more devastating to the self than intimacy. When Patroclus wears Achilles’ armor, he in effect becomes Achilles and for a time, the two men merge into one identity. By reclaiming his armor and rescuing Patroclus’ corpse, Achilles rescues the self and honors union simultaneously.

For the most part, The Triumph of Achilles expresses Glück’s ambivalence of being. From the stringent opening lyric “Mock Orange,” a poem in which the speaker expresses her revulsion with sex and its power to destroy the self, to the closing “Horse,” in which the other is finally given a voice, a voice that attempts through empathy to reinforce the bond between lovers, Glück charts the self in transition, in constant flux. Yet that Glück chose to title the book The Triumph of Achilles suggests that the developing identity on these pages acknowledges more consistently that perhaps although need and desire threaten the autonomous self, they do not necessarily reveal a defective selfhood. After all, Achilles was only one half immortal.

-- Caroline Malone

from the archive; first posted January 26, 2012

Kudos to Nobel Laureate Louise Glück

Kudos to the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, Louise Glück, a wonderful poet whose work has appeared in many editions of The Best American Poetry. She was the guest editor of the 1993 edition and it  was a pleasure working with her -- and something of an education as well. She is as astute a close reader of poems as I know.

I remember, too, being the subject and addressee of one of her poems. This was the result of a bet as to who would win a certain book award that year. The loser of the bet had to write a poem and dedicate it to the winner.

From 1992 to 1994 a grant from the Lila Wallace -- Reader's Digest Fund enabled me, in conjunction with the Community School of Music and Art, to bring these poets to Ithaca: Mark Strand, Donald Hall, Charles Simic, Jorie Graham, A. R. Ammons, Louise Glück, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Each gave a public reading and did a session with Ithaca schoolkids. Louise accompanied me to the Montessori School on King Road where my son Joe was a student. 

The Best American Poetry 1993 was a highlight in our series. There were poems by Ammons (a huge chunk of "Garbage" that had appeared in APR), Ashbery, Bukowski ("Three Oranges"), Merwin "The Stranger"), Rich, Snyder, Stone, Strand, Tate, and  the greatly underrated John Updike ("To a Former Mistress, Now Dead").

There's Billy Collins, when his work was still a secret, and Denise Duhamel, then a new name. A magnificent poem by the late Tim Dlugos, "Healing the World from Battery Park," which saw the light of day because of the archival work of David Trinidad and the judgment of the editors of Hanging Loose. "I loved 'litany,'" the first published poem, a knockout, by the unknown Carolyn Creedon. Susan Mitchell's "Rapture"; Jane Kenyon's "Having It Out with Melancholy." Ron Padgett. Michael Palmer.

And Louise has an excellent introduction.

If copies of The Best American Poetry 1993 are available, you will be impressed and then some with the quality of the work Louise chose.  

In the University of Michigan Press's Under Discussion series, we published an excellent collection of critical essays devoted to Louise's work. Joanne Feit Diehl edited On Louise Glück. I still remember some of the catalogue copy, particularly "her searing honesty and compelling first-person personae." -- DL

Two Poems by Aaron Fagan

King and Trumpet

One night I was drunk at the Heartland,
And, apparently, I spoke to Dan, the bartender,
Because his roommate called the next night to say,
“My roommate, Dan, was your bartender last night.
I hope you don’t think I’m crazy for calling like this?”
A few hours later, after cocktails at the Green Mill,
She invited me home and screamed when she flipped
The lights on to find her chows, King and Trumpet,
Each with a dead kitten hanging from their mouth,
Which I wrapped in tin foil and buried them warm
In the backyard by moonlight smoking a Lucky.
That Sunday we met up near the Shell with the “S”
Burned out at the corner of Touhy before heading
To Leone Beach. She was so small, all that fit her
Was this worn out pink girls’ bikini she later made
A point of saying was see-through, her bobbed hair
Bobbing with baby-blue ribbons, nearly horizontal
In flip-flops and giant sunglasses, trying to hold back
Her chows. She’s a cop, a mom, and a boxer now,
Yet years before we met, when she was a stripper
In New York, she would shoot junk into the cowgirls
Riding torpedoes on her forearms, but after the beach,
She made us chicken and corn on the cob. Her hope
Was I’d write more and drink less, while she—
With the giant dogs at her tiny feet—painted
The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey over
A clown from her collection of John Wayne Gacy
Originals surrounding the bed where we made
Love and I first read The Double Dream of Spring.

 

Mise en Abyme

An erotic life
Of boredom
Enacts a fake
Movie with
Real violence,
Sincere as sun
Sparks lightning.

Looking out
Closed eyes,
Sagacity’s field
Is in arrears—
Video feedback,
Beside the point,
History a habit.

from A Better Place Is Hard To Find by Aaron Fagan (The Song Cave, 2020). Photo credit: Camilla Ha.

Dispatch From A Distance - Roads And Seeds, A Trace [by Cara Benson]

“There is a rhetoric to walking.” - Michel de Certeau

Most everyone I know right now is alternating between sheer terror over politics (I’ll leave it at that) and a desperate search for respite in order to manage the panic. Same here. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s read any of my previous Dispatches that I take to walking when trouble is afoot (sorry). It gets me out of my interior, both my four walls and my mind, and into the body and the outer world. As I am physically capable, which I try not to take for granted, I can just go. I don’t need to have a thing sorted out but eventually how to get home.

Of course walking is ripe for metaphor, that time-honored mechanism for making sense of the world, especially if one is writing about it. As I am walking to interrupt myself, to disrupt the mind’s search, seize, categorize, repeat, I will leave it to the reader’s imagination to make of this string of sentences what she will. In fact, I’m in a mood to write a series of digressions and left turns, similar, at times, to how I walk (this grove, that path, over a hill, why not). Again, so long as I make it back.

I’ll start off with a confession: I trespass. Beyond being of European descent in the US, what I mean here is that I sheepishly tiptoe past POSTED signs all the time. In my defense, I’m not traipsing across someone’s back yard. There are thousands of wooded acres around me that host no dwellings. I do not hunt, rip it up on ATVs, nor leave detritus behind (these are often the concerns) – quite the opposite. I typically pick up any litter I come across (Mylar balloons know no borders) or pull dead branches from squashing new growth. I am very careful where I tread so as not to tear moss, for example, from a rock. Not to create mud, to cause erosion. I pay close attention when I am walking through what I will call raw woods, when I am not traveling a previous path that has shown over time that the forest will be just fine with this trail boring through it. Whether on private or public terrain, I am acutely pained to tramp down green, to step on an unsuspecting red eft, to leave a trace. Sometimes it’s just easier to walk a road.

One of the draws for moving up on the hill where I live was that even the paved routes stretching out in the vicinity of my home hold a boundary with much wildness. This area is one of NY State’s largest contiguous forests. Seasonal waterfalls, rampant wildflowers, long stretches of wooded land or meadows fill as much of the lengths along these roads as do homes, though those are here and I am curious about them, too. As I wander roadside, these walks can lend themselves to notions of rural flâneusery. I am out of step with utilitarian travel, as the urban flâneuse is by strolling city sidewalks as she does. What is it I am browsing if not shop windows?

Dogs. I know where all the dogs are on these walks. Or should I say that they make themselves known. Some are more aggressive in their pronouncements than others and I make guesses about their people based on this behavior, like we do with parents and their offspring. I could be wrong, of course, but sometimes the humans are outside or yell from an open window and one in particular seems hellbent on confirming my suspicions. (For the record, I adore puppies and love to nuzzle the noses of dogs, but not all canines have been raised as snugglers. Just saying.)

Other creatures that are plentiful out here: chickens. They seem to be fearless in foraging right at the edge of passing cars or trucks. Roadside gullies must have the best pickings. I am proud to say I have become a pretty good clucker.

Site of the heron sighting

And once, a Great Blue Heron! Less than 20 feet from me I spotted his stately, curved-neck repose atop leggy stalks, raptly focused on a swampish watering hole for a catch for dinner. So sleekly upright. I caught his blended colors (not as starkly blue as one might expect) and slim-limbed silhouette among the young trees and stopped on a dime, just behind a larger trunk. Slowly, I moved back into sightline. Holy, the biodiverse world is a glory. I stood with him forever (3 minutes) until he powered off.

Then there’s Duck Duck and Buzz, two white fowl with orange bills, best buds, that have their own homemade pond in front of a neighbor’s house down the road in the north direction. Buzz is much bigger than Duck Duck. Or is it the other way around? The bigger one (let’s agree on Buzz) had come to my neighbor with a sibling. They were deeply bonded, I’m told, and when Buzz’s sib died, he was inconsolable. My neighbor (I can’t remember her name even to get it switched. No! It’s Laurie! Or is that the woman who lives down the side road?). Whatever her name, she, too, became distraught, caring as she did about her despondent Buzz, until one day driving along a county route down off the hill with traffic speeding by was young, soon-to-be-named Duck Duck on the side of the road. She turned her car around and pulled up beside him. Legend has it that she opened the door and Duck Duck hopped in. Now the two of them, the ducks, are inseparable, and LaurieLisaLiz has a superb set up for them. Lilypads in the pond, room to roam, nighttime digs for sleeping in the slightly abandoned barn along a path in the trees beside her house. Duck Duck and Buzz are a high point on my walks when I head this direction. I don’t always see them right away as they might be squatting down in the grassy banks of the pond. I crest a hill and crane my head to see if the stark white bodies are hunkered in or floating. They rise up when I see them! I always call out in the happy goofy voice I use with my cats. Duck Duck! Buzz! There you are. Such cuties. They quack quack, lowly, little duck noises. I only ever saw Elizabeth once, to learn the lore and to get their names. I’m grateful that I can use the syllables they’re used to hearing and that I’m hoping signal me as friend. My clucking is better than my quacking, so far. 

Occasionally as I walk I wonder, does anyone notice my peculiar patterns? My mutterings, farmer’s blows (clearing the nostrils sans tissues), conversing with birds and self and god as I go? My boisterous swishing of a stick? Deer flies and mosquitoes don't give a shit about spray repellent, so in bug season I whip around a piece of downed maple with chunks of acorns still clinging to the mast to ward them off. It’s my version of a handheld accordion fan and I use it to the fullest. The faster I walk, the faster I wave and chatter. I might as well be doing Python's Silly Walks. Though sometimes I “pull it together” if I hear a car coming, I am often caught in the act of exhibiting my private self in public.

It is a particular vulnerability to be the walking body roadside as a motorized vehicle approaches, then passes. I ready myself to leap, if necessary, and every so often find myself staring down the drivers. Same as with my imagined dog owners, I make guesses or have visceral responses to the sounds of the oncoming cars or trucks or motorcycles. The louder the machine, the more obnoxious the person, especially if it's an intentionally aggravated volume. Then the upending of my tiny narratives – what if it’s a beater, the driver too broke to fix it, limping along as best he can in a hostile economy (systemic thinking is never far). Then my sympathy is evoked. I hear you, sister. I get it, guy. A moment of solidarity whizzes by.

Something there’s more of on roadsides: trash. I feel like such a nellie, but I hate it. Sometimes, my better self works very hard to give people the benefit of the doubt that the scandalous crap at my feet blew out of their hands or backseat unknowingly. Or I labor to see it as part of the mosaic, to puncture romantic notions about purity, about humanless nature. I’m reminded of something I read on eco-regional studies, that nature ain’t just out there. Humans, after all, are creatures of the planet. It’s how we live on it, with it, with creatures and dirt and each other, cars and machines – all technology – included, that is at issue. This same article reported that crows were struggling in the initial pandemic lockdown because less people were driving, and their main dietary staple of roadkill had severely decreased as a result. It’s an interactive scape – everything. Planet. Where and how we walk. What it means to be wild. I love this expansion of how to consider the world and my small part in it. 

And then I think the person who dumped his truck ashtray out the window is an asshole. (Keep walking, Cara.)

Speaking of technology, sometimes I bring my phone with me to track time or to take pictures. A recent shot of Cardinal flowers, the scarlet-robed beauties lining a wet run as if they are marching up water greens to their blue source, was such a catch. But that’s deep woods. What do I photograph roadside? This is the season of color in the leaves: flaming reds, tangerine dreams, delicious yellows. The understory is marvelous, too. Goldenrod, Snake Root, and Joe Pye Weed, so designated after the English name of Mohican sachem Shauquethqueat who used the flower as remedy, fill fields and edges at eyelevel. I have been watching them bud, flower, sustain pollinators, and turn to seed, which I am now collecting from the public right-of-way. I carry scissors and paper bags to clip and transport fluorescences for seeding the land behind the church where I live. Back home, I store the bags where their contents can properly dry until it’s close to the first frost. That’s when I’ll cast them, then lightly walk the area to ensure good seed to ground contact. Seems I do want to make something of my wanderings, after all.  

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance, Enter Geese, and Whose Woods.