The Best American Poetry

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God [by Jonathan Edwards]

God holds you over the pit of hell,
as one holds a loathsome insect over the fire;
the last of the just rings the bell;

"I tell lies," said the liar,
a convict released because the question lacked an answer.
He did calisthenics after reveille. She said she had cancer,

but the beast was more in love with his desire
for her than with her beauty, and the camera was just a way to transfer
the self from the self you see when you look in the mirror.

God grew ashamed of his creation. That's what the gravestone    
told the crone. Nevertheless she wants you to stay;
she wants you to pray; and if you do, if you pray,

if the dove returns after the storm has blown,
the cage door will stay open, and you'll never walk alone,
you'll never walk alone.

Noir or Not: "The Maltese Falcon"

Do you believe "The Maltese Falcon" should be categorized as "noir"?

Suzanne Lummis:
It's a terrific movie but ultimately not as dark as others -- Noir Gris. But regardless of the quality of darkness, I'd feel funny about any poet of my generation, or the one following, who hadn't seen John Huston’s classic with the great Warner Brothers cast (Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha J. Cook). I'd wonder what else they hadn't seen, or read. Had they seen On the Waterfront? Had they read Orwell's 1984, or only read about it?  Et cetera. But re. Noir or Not, there's an undercurrent of pessimism that we usually feel from film noir and don't in The Maltese Falcon. However, it has many noir elements, the dialogue certainly, especially in the final scene where Bogart tells Mary Astor,  "I don't care who loves who. I won't play the sap for you! You killed Miles and you're going over for it. If you're lucky you'll get life and be out in twenty years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."   

David Lehman:

The Maltese Falcon, one of my all-time favorites, is similar to a noir movie but not the same thing, mainly because the male protagonist does not succumb to the wiles of the femme fatale.  Compare Bogart in The Maltese Falcon to Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. The former belongs to a different genre, the detective story, in which justice, however much compromised, does prevail in the end.  Sam Spade refuses to “play the sap” for his femme fatale; that is alas exactly what Mitchum does with Jane Greer in Out of the Past. The division is epitomized in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. The detective stories such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter” stand on the one side, and the gothic horrors (“The Fall of the House of Usher”) on the other.  The detective story affirms the possibility of justice, of the restoration of order. The noir movie suggests the opposite and introduces the figure of a femme fatale to ensure that failure or death is the likely end of any criminal or questionable enterprise.

Beyond its antithetical relation to Out of the Past, there are plenty of reasons to consider this, John Huston’s first movie, in the context of noir.  Sam Spade is not unambiguously a servant of law, order, and ethical kashruth.  The brilliant Warner Brothers cast – Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook, Jr., and Mary Astor join Bogart – arouses noir expectations, and the status of the sculpted bird,  a fake responsible for at least three deaths, elevates the tale to the level of a parable about fortune, value, and desire.

There are a lot of other movies that I like to consider in relation to noir: Le Jour se leve [Daybreak] (Marcel Carne), if only because of the number of cigarettes that Jean Gabin smokes, and A Bout de soufflé [Breathless] (Jean-Luc Godard), primarily because of Belmondo’s imitation of Bogart. Neither is noir, but the former is like it, and the latter is an homage to it that testifies to the genre’s success. 

Click here for last week's exchange in which Night and the City and The Asphalt Jungle are discussed. 

-- 2019

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: November 29, 2023

Julia McConnell’s first book Landlocked was published earlier this year by Wheelbarrow Books of Michigan State University Press. The poems explore lesbian spaces in Oklahoma where the speaker also feels trapped/locked as she forges ahead to create a life.  Keeping her company in this wonderful series of poems are Walt Whitman, Mark Doty, Audre Lorde, and Elizabeth Bishop. You can preview her poem "Elizabeth Bishop Swipes Right" here:

https://www.screendoorreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/JC-Elizabeth-Bishop.pdf

Congratulations, Julia!

"Night Flight" by Sarah Holland-Batt [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

In the introduction to her collection of short essays on Australian poets, “Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry”, Sarah Holland-Blatt writes “As a form, poetry is full of freedom and possibility. It asks the reader to be open to coincidence and association, to music and imagery, to chance and change. Poems are full of surprises: each line is a little detonation of language and imagery, each stanza a series of swift steps into the unknown.” Holland-Blatt’s “Night Flight” is a perfect demonstration of these detonations of language and imagery. From one line to the next throughout the poem, we are shepherded across continents and desires, to destinations known and unknown, physical, temporal, bodily, imaginative and personal, where everything is “defined / by distance: how close we were, how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh / and those killing Chicago winds”.

 

Sarah Holland-Blatt is one of Australia’s leading poets, editors and literary critics. She has been published widely internationally, including in The New Yorker on several occasions. From 2014 to 2019 she was the poetry editor of Island magazine, and was also the editor of The Best Australian Poems 2016 and The Best Australian Poems 2017. Her three collections of poems to date have swept up nearly every major literary award Australian poetry has to offer, with her most recent title, Jaguar, winning the 2023 Stella Award.

Night Flight

 

As my plane drops down in turbulence

I think of you and of Salt Lake City,

I think of ice stealing over the Great Lakes

and of Omaha and of adamant plains.

I think of all the places

I have never been: Caracas,

La Paz, Kingston. I think of the way

our bodies puzzled together in that room

over pine woods where night deer

passed in the snow, their lonesome

inscrutable tracks sluicing

in the morning’s melt, I think of

your eyes that are almost the colour

of mercury, of their unbearable weight,

I think of the plateau of your chest

rising, rising, and of your hand

resting on my right thigh,

of the slim glint of your wedding

band in the dove predawn light.

I think of how everything is defined

by distance: how close we were,

how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh

and those killing Chicago winds

and union towns near Detroit, Michigan

where loyalty is the only religion.

I think of the sound of your breathing,

which is the sound of fields

of blond Illinois wheat bent down,

I think of those silver silos

of harvest corn we saw in Schuylerville,

barns blazing in all that silence

as we drove through what we could

not think or say. There is no grace

in this kind of longing, there is only pain,

pain which I have always preferred

anyway – it is where I live,

and called love by any other name.

From “My Friendship with Victor Borges” [by Walter Neff]

It is high time that we  raise a glass in honour of Victor Borges, the poet, blind pianist, and film critic, A native of the Moroni Islands, a group of islands off the coast of Guadalajara, he has recently doubled down on Bruch's Violin Concerto as the most underrated of all the great underrated violin concertos. The article, in Underrated Quarterly,  kicked up quite a fuss among the fiddlers on the roof of the Chesterton Museum in Boston, and the author's notoriety caused him to take refuge in his Moroni family heritage. 

Historically, the Moronis, like their sister city, are known for their tequila, mariachi music, and more recently, the production of witty instruction manuals. (The latter business moved south in the early 1950's, after being blacklisted; their motto is “Instruct and delight!”)  Borges grew up in Buttinski, the strangely-named capital of the Moronis, which Russian immigrants settled in the early 1600’s.

Like many young poets in his hometown, he labored for years to keep body and soul together by working in the instruction manual industry. Then one afternoon while sitting at his desk, he looked out the window and had a vision of Cincinnati, the riverfront city famous for Proctor and Gamble, Pete Rose, and Kentucky -- a riverfront city right in the middle of the American heartland, city of hills and parks, old money and rugs. He had been working on a short manual for the government -- the Moroni legislature had revised the national “Medal of Distinction” it awarded to its foremost citizens -- and Borges’ manual described how to attach the new medal. (Unlike the old medal, the new one had a difficult clasp instead of the traditional lanyard). He suddenly realized he didn't want to write the instruction manual for the attachment of the new medal -- or old medals, or any medals!  He longed to visit Cincinnati - to witness the miracle using all his senses to compensate for the lack of sight. 

After an arduous and scary emigration--a story for another time, involving secret  codes, Russian spies, and an insane ICE agent--he was finally able to settle in Cincinnati. Victor rented a small apartment in Clifton, the university district, and we got to know each other one morning in Kroger's, when our shopping carts somehow got hooked together and no amount of pushing or pulling could unlock them. I was completely flummoxed, but Victor said, “This problem looks just like one of our medals.”  “You put shopping carts on your medals?” I asked.  Victor smiled, “No, but the clasp —“ And he deftly unhooked the two carts with a move that was almost magical; I certainly didn't see it. After that, we got some coffee at the in-house Starbuck's, and sat in Kroger's for hours talking about poetry and rugs and how what goes around comes around. Molly Arden has written this about that

Victor, who did a masterly imitation of Art Tatum made elaborate jokes in the scherzo movement of his first book, The Knife and the Gaucho, which he set in Buenos Aires. By then he had moved to Los Angeles and was married to a shrewish Brooklyn-born babe with an ankle bracelet she flashed whenever she wanted something that poor Victor couldn’t give her. In my next installment I will tell of the time I sold Victor a straight-life insurance policy and the improbable consequences of this routine event. The client kept the whiskey in a locked cabinet but he brought his own set of keys. How could he have known murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?

4 / 12 / 20

Ed. Note: One of Victor B.'s early librettos, "Lady and the Scamp," published in the "Libs for Kids" series, was scooped up by the Disney adult department and was the basis for their porn production starring Linda Lovelace and Louise Lasser. (It was Lasser's first porn movie; she went on to star in "Geoffrey Hartman! Geoffrey Hartman!" a brutal send-up of the Yale philosophy department, filmed entirely in the nude.)  In "Scamp," a coming-of-age story set in Detroit, Lasser played a late-model Trans-Am who was transitioning from a V-8 to a V-6, in a country dangerously attached to fossil fuels.  The various and vicious discriminations she had to endure always seemed to end up in the bedroom, much to the delight of the Car & Driver and Motor Trend wankers around the country; it won a J. D. Powers award for best movie, as I recall.  Lovelace almost stole the movie playing a skanky pick-up.

11. 27/ 23

"So I said like why so he said like maybe" [by Molly Arden]

So I said like why so he said like maybe my place?

So he said on the job around the cock
So I said that's hard
So he said what
So I said around the clock
So he said yes
that's what i meant 
like it was like he looked straight
at you when he spoke
of guns versus flowers
or Picasso versus Matisse
as the greatest modern painter
or the hatred of crowds
condemning hatred
so I said typo
so he said type-A
so then we unambiguously
did the thing that has no name
the secret everyone knows
so no one ever spills the beans.

Lovely to be the queen of the scene!

-- Molly Arden (2008)

So he said on the job around the cock
So I said that's hard
So he said what
So I said around the clock
So he said yes
that's what i meant 
like it was like he looked straight
at you when he spoke
of guns versus flowers
or Picasso versus Matisse
as the greatest modern painter
or the hatred of crowds
condemning hatred
so I said typo
so he said type-A
so then we unambiguously
did the thing that has no name
the secret everyone knows
so no one ever spills the beans.

Lovely to be the queen of the scene!

-- Molly Arden (2008)

Diana Cao: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________

Old Dogs (Remember)

 

You’ve heard the saying. The first day at home,

snub-nosed and sweet, house-trained but otherwise

unbroken, our rescue ignored every trick

in the book—classic commands: sit, stay,

be good, I begged. But as the wisdom goes:

At some point, learning comes too late. The sun

sinks on the dull glare of what used to cut,

bitter and sweet and just out of reach

of memory. Redemption is for those 

who remember, and my mother slaps the glasses

off my father’s face, laughing, her sharp edges

blunted into the barking violence of a bully.

 

Be good holds no water when the night falls,

dripping with the echo of another 

she can’t recall. The sound of time running out

sounds a lot like the word they keep asking her, 

sounds like something she can almost string

together. Sounds, a little bit, like surrender.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Diana Cao is a writer and JD candidate at Harvard Law School, whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and International Literary Seminars, and her writing has been nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Award and Best New Poets. She is a winner of Nimrod International's 2023 Neruda Prize, and she likes night swims, talking to citrus, and the gloaming.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

          
                                                        No Escape from Within, photo by Tony Luciani of his mother

 

"Modern Love": XVII [by George Meredith]

At dinner, she is hostess, I am host.
Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps
The Topic over intellectual deeps
In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:
It is in truth a most contagious game:
Hiding the Skeleton, shall be its name.
Such play as this the devils might appal!
But here's the greater wonder; in that we,
Enamoured of an acting nought can tire,
Each other, like true hypocrites, admire;
Warm-lighted looks, Love's ephemerioe,
Shoot gaily o'er the dishes and the wine.
We waken envy of our happy lot.
Fast, sweet, and golden, shows the marriage-knot.
Dear guests, you now have seen Love's corpse-light shine.

-- George Meredith

(painting: "The Death of Chatterton" by Henry Wallis,  for which Meredith posed. It hangs in London's Tate Gallery.)

"Apophasis at the All-Night Rite Aid" [by Catherine Barnett]

"Apophasis at the All-Night Rite Aid" [by Catherine Barnett]

Not wanting to be alone
in the messy cosmology
over which I at this late hour
have too much dominion,
I wander the all-night uptown Rite Aid
where the handsome new pharmacist,
come midnight, shows me to the door
and prescribes the moon,
which has often helped before.

Catherine Barnett is the author of three poetry collections, Human Hours (2018 Believer Book Award in Poetry), The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets) and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. Her fourth collection, Solutions to the Problem of Bodies in Space, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2024. A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, among many other places. She teaches in the NYU MFA Program in Creative Writing and works as an independent editor.

from The Kenyon Review; photo credit:  Farah Al Qasimi and Res 

On Bumblebee Mountain [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

Barrelling down Bumblebee Mountain
We are! All of us hauling ass down
Bumblebee Mountain but most of us
Don't even know it barreling down
Bumblebee Mountain in the $19.95
U-Haul towing a 1980 Buick Skylark!
Do we even realize it? Do we have
The barest inkling of what's going on?
Racing down Bumblebee Mountain
At tremendous velocity but somehow
Oblivious of it so we imagine ourselves
Someplace else until we inevitably get
To the bottom of Bumblebee Mountain
And then we know! O yes then we know!

Here's to the End of the Week

Come lift up your glasses

and drink what you may,

I'm a man you don't meet every day.

I'm a man you don't meet every day,

every day,

I'm a man you don't meet every day!

Ballet de Lorraine through the telescope: moving house and mountains, civilizational change, time, space and dance experience [By Tracy Danison]

“Songlines” by Marco Berrettini. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The Ballet de Lorraine opened its 2023-2024 season at the beginning of November with Michele Di Stefano’s Sierras: Danses atmosphériques (“Mountains: ambiance dances”) and Marco Berrettini’s Songlines (“Dream tracks”), both of them visually lovely and perceptually stimulating.

“Visually lovely and perceptually stimulating” makes me think how much more like science than esthetics dance experience is. More like peering through a telescope than, say, a kaleidoscope.

For a telescope, you’ve got to acquire a steady hand and agile eye before you can see anything at all. Whatever you discover after learning not jiggle is dependent on previous experience from within and without yourself, along with intense, very fragile and very fickle observation. Watch out! Looking for god-knows-what one deep winter’s night in Upstate New York, my Dad got lost up there and got frost bite.

After seeing Danses atmosphériques and Songlines, I had the good luck to chat informally over dinner with Petter Jacobsson, the Ballet’s director, and Thomas Caley, the artistic researcher. Jacobsson and Caley are a life couple. Beyond their affinities, Jacobsson has been insistently, consistently and publicly affirming Caley’s role as his indispensable creative partner throughout his more than 10-year tenure at the Ballet.

After about half hour’s sit down with Caley, I understood Jacobsson on both heads.

The 2023-2024 season in Nancy is the last for the creative couple. Instantly forever is the working title of their goodbye piece. It opens on 7 March 2024 and runs until the 12 March 2024 at the Opéra National de Lorraine, Nancy, with Marco da Silva Ferreira’s a Folia, also a new creation, sharing the bill.

 

“Sierras” by Michele Di Stefano. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Speaking of Instantly forever, Songlines, Mountains and personal and creative partnerships, and by the way, my thanks to Robert Weissberg. He was an assistant professor at Skidmore College. Back in 1972, he gave me boxes of books to take along to the Army with me.

When he gave me them, he said that taken together the books pretty much made up the sum total of a liberal education for our times. I’ve discovered that’s pretty much true, too; Hegel and Vico are pretty much in the ballpark on politics and history, Candide pretty much on life and Jung pretty much on experience. To add to this existing knowledge, during supper, Caley & Jacobsson recommended David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The book begins with a quote from the Undiscovered Self: something like, the moment is right for a change of civilizations.

In my small experience of it, Caley & Jacobsson’s choreographic work has two striking features, which I should tell you about to fog up your telescope if you chance to see Instantly Forever.

The first feature is an un-narrative concern around what we call “time”. The second feature is…  – I want to say executed individuation of the choreographic artists involved, viz., Jung, viz., Dawn.  This want-to comes down to saying that, so far, walking away from any Ballet de Lorraine performance, I feel like I’ve seen each artist – experienced something beyond words that honors the un-narrative they are mapping for the choreography designer and spectators.

I can sum up my experience of Jacobsson & Caley’s work this way. At the core are firmly-grasped – “un-narrative” or “movement-only” – themes (such as “time”), and a thought-through choreography shared, shaped and executed by trusted fellow artists on a visually pleasing set.

So, no surprise that “visually lovely and perceptually stimulating” is my take on Berrettini’s Songlines and Di Stefano’s Sierras: Danses atmosphériques. Jacobsson & Caley hired them, after all.

Berrettini’s dance note makes Songlines seem like there’s some civilizational or even political story in the dance, which at first put me off – dance and politics hardly ever can mix for me. Previously known to me for meta-satire performance, Berrettini writes that he crafted the choreography after reading Bruce Chatwin’s spiritual travelogue, The Songlines. He also cites the odd coincidence of the farmer’s eternal dissatisfaction with an imperfect world and the nomad’s satisfaction with a perfect one.

 

“Sierras” by Michele Di Stefano. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

It turns out, though, that the choreographer is just coming to grips with “space” through the complex tradition of Australia’s first peoples’ space-time maps – called “songlines”. Berretini’s approach is to recall the first peoples’ successful concept to support a dance experience of his movement-only theme: space.

His choreography gets at it first by visual separation then by encounter and group actions. In the opening movement, the artists, all dressed in light-sensitive pastel colors, enter the set together from a single off-center point.

I experience them as spreading over the set space like a (lapping) tide on a beach. The movement evokes the familiar defining contraries of “land, sea, horizon”, which also fills its now three dimensions with people. The set becomes a place.

With a music that minds its own business, establishing presence within a diffusely lit place, spectators see the artists variously as in one of three of five possible colors – blue, yellow, rose, green, orange – as they encounter one another, establish a flow of meeting, take on personality, individuate. And just in case a spectator is getting into a rut: a sudden rain of helium-filled rocks/meteors/turds/chocolate truffles from “above”.  Lovely use of light, sound and movement and, for me, the spectator, a stimulating experience of the imagination of space.

With an intention to show dance as “a happy accident”, and keeping in mind that it must take a great deal of doing, Michele Di Stefano’s Sierras: Danses atmosphériques goes at the perception of space, too, but as “ambiance”. The challenge for Sierras’ artists is to figure spectators mountains that move spectators, or, perhaps, spectators moving figurative mountains, or both – in short, something that exists only in a body’s perception.

Di Stefano succeeds his dance with a choreography articulating around appearance and disappearance, along with continuous shading of light and (movement) energy.

In a first movement, Sierras’ intent artists, costumed in black and flesh,  pass in and out of the set space, then flow into and against each other within it, find distances, measures, relationships, limits.

As with Songlines, music that minds its own business backgrounds Sierra’s dim but changing light and tints and, especially, the artist movement. A unique red individual – a sun? – finishes a the unique and autonomous rhythm that now defines the place …  And, step right up, spectator! Experience space as place as its ambiance, its feeling, space that feels as real as a Mussorgsky Bald Mountain, a Hokusai Mount Fuji or a Richard Brautigan Big Sur! Lovely use of light, sound and movement and, for me, spectator, quite a new ambiance.

I’ll miss having Jacobsson & Caley’s Ballet de Lorraine at the other end of my dance telescope.

______________

Articles discussing Jacobsson & Caley’s Ballet de Lorraine referenced above

Performing time present - Petter Jacobsson’s Ballet de Lorraine [by Tracy Danison]

Ballet de Lorraine Season 2022-23 #2: a tale of sentiment and feeling [by Tracy Danison]

“Dancefloor” and “Acid Gems” fit and knit movement energy together for Ballet de Lorraine [By Tracy Danison]

Ballet de Lorraine 2023-2024 performance calendar: Nancy, On Tour

"The Stamp of Impulse" [by Stacey Lehman]

L to R: Kenneth Koch, David Lehman, John Ashbery.  Photo by Stacey Harwood

On May 6, 2001, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and David Lehman appeared at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Mass to celebrate The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints, the first exhibit to show the influence of Abstract Expressionism on printmaking. The exhibit was spectacular, with works on display by 100 pioneering Abstract Expressionist printmakers including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Nell Blaine, Louise Nevelson, Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly, and Joan Mitchell. Ashbery, Koch, and Lehman read their work and reminisced about a time in America when artists, writers and musicians were experimenting with creative forms.

Find out more about the exhibit here.

from the archive; first posted January 27, 2013.

Giorgione, "Three Philosophers" (a poetry challenge)

Who are they? In 150 words or less.  (Vienna, Kunsthistorische museum].

"Saving Face" [by Terence Winch]

I waited too long. Everything I did was wrong.
I didn't know how to make sense of time.
I have no idea where I was when Kennedy was shot.
What you didn't see is what you got.

So I came down here to be alone with the phone.
I was sick to my stomach, waiting for your call.
I used to drink red wine and eat cheese in cheap hotels.
Bite off more than you can chew, then swallow it.

Everyone waves goodbye to me, even though
I have no plans to go. I am waiting for the snow.
I hate the spring. I don't want anything to grow.
The apple falls far from the tree.

We are told that light is too far away to see.
You cannot hide any more in the refrigerator.
The neighbors will never learn their lesson in the dark.
People in glass houses continuously walk around in circles.

So fare-thee-well, valiant comrades of the revolution.
We all showed up for the rally that night with our guitars
and sang a Joan Baez song about rivers and stars.
Give a man a fish that will last forever.

2011

The Day that Kennedy was Killed [by David Lehman]

The day that Kennedy was killed
    Was the day before the Stuyvesant-Clinton football game.
    There was a rally in the auditorium
    And our coach who was from Texas or Oklahoma said slowly, carefully,
    “There isn’t a horse that can’t be bucked.”

    Meanwhile half the school was marching along
            Fifteenth Street to Union Square and then up to
            Forty Second Street and Fifth Avenue and some got up to
            Fifty Ninth, and they were parading,
            Yelling, “De Witt eats shit” until they were stopped by policemen.
                  I didn’t go.  I stayed in school.
                  That day I almost got into a fight
                  With a fellow twice my size on the stairway
                  And he laughed at me.  A friend of mine broke it up.

    In English the head of the Physics Department walked
    Into the room.  He said, “I think you are old enough
    To understand this.  The President was shot today in Texas.”
            I stand up.  I do not understand.  I say, “What”
            And I think, the President was shocked today in Texas.
            He leaves the room.  I am sorry.

    I leave early. The Clinton game is called off,
            And the series has since been discontinued.
    My French teacher is waiting for me.  Smiling shuffling his legs
            Touching his teeth with his tongue looking at me
            He says, “There is a rumor that Kennedy was shot.
            Do you know anything about that?”

    A week later I go to my cousin’s bar mitzvah
            Out in Long Island, and I bring a catalog with me
            From the Bernard Baruch School of City College.
                        I want to be a stockbroker.
    It is windy outside and we walk a mile or more
            To get to the bar mitzvah
    And as I walk I talk to my mother
    And I think carefully of what I am to say
    And I narrow my eyes.
    It is a cold and windy three days after Thanksgiving
    And I point my thumb to my stomach and chest
    And I brush my scarf against my face
    And I say, “I too want to become President.”

-- David Lehman, March 1967

The Poetics of Distraction [by Jerome Sala]

Studying the rise of the novel, the distinguished scholar Franco Moretti wonders how people managed to read so many of them. He points out that though the numbers of readers in Western Europe roughly doubled in the 18th century, the circulation of novels increased 30-60 times.  He concludes that this was possible because people learned to read in a new, distracted way, surfing through titles, as it were.  Drawing on the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Moretti argues that such a way of consuming helped people adapt to rapidly changing social and economic conditions.  It enabled them to become early multi-taskers.  And because the vast majority of what they read were action and adventure novels, their distracted reading also helped distract them from everyday tedium (like the action blockbusters flicks of today).

Moretti’s ideas got me thinking about the ways we’re taught to consume poetry.  If anything, what we learn in school about the form is the complete opposite of “distraction.”  Maybe it’s changed since I was a student, but I remember being taught that the form demanded rapt attention – that it was no country for the lazy reader.  (Of course, to be fair, something similar, if not as severe, was preached about the novel.)  In any case, I was wondering if there even was a more relaxed way to consume poetry.  And then I remembered how popular “Magnetic Poetry” once was in the corporate world where I work. 

 

Back in the early 90s, it was not uncommon when you strolled office halls to see, on the sides of file cabinets, tiny white, magnetic tiles forming snake-like patterns of humorous, surreal and usually mildly erotic word combinations.  It was as if Dave Kapell, the inventor of Magnetic Poetry (not a poet himself, but a musician), had found a way to market the Dada poem.  Dada offered a recipe for writing: cut up words from a newspaper, place in a bag, shake, empty, and record the results.  This was to make it easy for all to be poets.  But Magnetic Poetry made it even easier: they cut up the words for you, and placed a magnetic backer on them so they could be affixed to any metal surface.  And, judging from the fun people had playing with the tiles, magnetic poems did serve a function: they distracted their writers from a little of the tedium of 9-to-5.  As a result, the “Magnetic Poem” may be one of the bestselling poems of contemporary times: according to their website, over 3 million kits were unloaded.

With the rise of the Internet, the tiles quickly vanished from offices.  Now there are an infinite number of word recombination programs.  There are engines for writing entire poems, haiku generators and Magnetic Poetry itself has a free site with virtual tiles.  My current personal favorite is here, where a ghostly silhouette types your poem to order, from a flowing stream of words you play around with.  But there’s a drawback for me, to all this creative randomicity: I get bored with these games quickly.  It’s as if the tedium I was trying to escape, returns, like the fabled repressed. It all reminds me of what a copywriter friend told me in the early days of the Internet: it’s a revolution, all right, but often a dull one.  That’s why it’s necessary to keep hopping from site to site of these poem generators: as soon as some part of you recognizes a program at work, what you’re playing with loses its unexpected charms.

 

(Referred to in this piece: Franco Moretti.  “The Novel: History and Theory.”  New Left Review 52, July-August 2008.)

 

Jerome Sala lives and works in New York City.  His latest book of poems is Look Slimmer Instantly from Soft Skull Press. Read his other Best American Poetry post here.

 

from the archive; first posted October 29, 2008

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: November 22, 2023

For today’s post, I offer Jessica L. Walsh’s fiercely punk poem from her debut collection Books of Gods & Grudges, published in 2022 by Glass Lyre Press.

WHEN MY DAUGHTER TELLS ME I WAS NEVER PUNK

I say, honey, my being alive is punk. I made my life
out of grudges when I saw the odds placed against me,

when my role was to marry a man who’d kill me
and give me my hot young death, a guy named Charles

who would have and nearly did – the day I said fuck you
and threw his keys in the snow? That was punk.

When I called a nice guy who’d loved me steady
and thought what if I can try staying alive, that was punk;

when I had my last drink and surrendered the scene, that too was punk,
and yes I miss the me who would be dead

because I was a bottle rocket, a pipe bomb of a good time
but my being alive is the middle finger I never put down –

I did not let these days go by, I clawed each one from dirt,
and when I get my nails done I am stockpiling weapons,

when I buy groceries, when I gas up the car,
I am threatening to survive long enough to piss off

a million awful people to be alive in spite of,
I am promising to stay flagrantly alive:

This is my beautiful house. I am this beautiful wife.
How did I get here, I say, by my fucking teeth.

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Three): Rebecca Morgan Frank [by Angela Ball]

The Grande Dame

And I thought, clarity.
I thought mark and force,
I thought the green canopy.

I thought you, out there
pushing against the door-
knobs as if that could
make them turn, slamming
your body against walls
as if they would give in

to your body, the one giving
like the new playground material,
durable, sinking under
our feet even as it looks
like pavement. And I thought

maybe there is something
to be made of this, the ways
my own persistence plays
like a funny video on repeat–
the persistence of a pet
too innocent to know the move
still won’t work. Or like a ball

bouncing over and over again
slowing down, lowering
into a roll out into the brush,
disappearing. I was told this
is what happens. This is what will
happen to you when, but
I thought, I thought, I thought
maybe it would be different,
maybe it could be, for me.
                                         -Rebecca Morgan Frank

Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of four collections of poems, most recently, Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon, 2021), and her poems have appeared such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Three): Rebecca Morgan Frank

“The Grande Dame,” Rebecca Morgan Frank’s lucid and forceful poem of persistence, presents as a persona poem. Like all such poems, it magnifies a component of the poet’s self not always on display—as Browning is, in part, the tyrant of “My Last Duchess” and Pound “The River-Merchant’s Wife.” We think also of Flaubert: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” But here the theatrical bows to the subjective.

Of the poets of The New York School, John Ashbery comes to mind most, for his continual suggestion that real life, whatever that may be, drives onward mentally, the world’s fleet/garage/menagerie/Toonerville Trolley of metaphors for vehicle.

This poem’s first engine is thought—often believed to be passive. Here, it’s anything but.

     And I thought, clarity.

     I thought mark and force,

     I thought the green canopy.

These lines somehow combine sureness and doubt—as if the speaker is summoning ammunition, naming values. Then the “you” appears, as the fourth object of the forceful anaphora “I thought.”

     thought you, out there

     pushing against the door-

     knobs as if that could

     make them turn, slamming

     your body against walls

     as if they would give in

The “you” is both us, I think, and someone beloved. Love is frightening in part because its object shares the dangerous, frustrating surroundings everywhere to be seen. This is particularly scarifying for a mother envisioning her child’s stubborn contacts with the immovable.

     And I thought

     maybe there is something

     to be made of this, the ways

     my own persistence plays

     like a funny video on repeat–

     the persistence of a pet

     too innocent to know the move

     still won’t work. . .

The poem surprises by openly implicating its speaker in the persistence she describes—a persistence the repeated “I thought” has already demonstrated. We are ambushed by truth. A less complex poem would keep the speaker beyond the process that the “you” is undergoing—the speaker wised-up, positioned to advise. Instead, she has “the persistence of a pet / too innocent to know the move / still won’t work. . . .”

The poem’s last stanza darkens further, at the same time growing more beautiful:

     Or like a ball

     bouncing over and over again

     slowing down, lowering

     into a roll out into the brush,

     disappearing.

We hear the action of the ball as its persistence flattens to a “roll out.”

     I was told this

     is what happens. This is what will

     happen to you when, but

     I thought, I thought, I thought

     maybe it would be different,

     maybe it could be, for me.

The fatalism here is akin to the sun’s announcement near the close of Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” that “they” are calling him away:  “ ‘Who are they?’ / Rising he said ‘Some / day you'll know.  They're calling to you / too.’”

Like O’Hara’s poem, Rebecca Morgan Frank’s “The Grande Dame” possesses the all-too-rare quality of unbroken dream. Or a dream broken just at the end, with the words “for me” that unexpectedly twist the poem back to its speaker and her consciousness of the failure of her own persistence, a failure mirrored in each generation. Those two short syllables deliver a poignant falling off after the climactic repetition of “I thought, I thought, I thought / maybe it would be different, / maybe it could be, for me.” Imagine the poem with one less “I thought,” or without the movement from “would” to “could,” or—horrors!—without its final two words—what a lesser thing it would be. “The Grande Dame” enacts the saving grace of art. In life, our drives so often dead-end unsatisfied. This poem is a triumphant paragon of the very persistence it despairs of. The feeling of those two attributes co-existing is indeed sublime. -- Angela Ball

 

Daniel Nester and Jonah Winter's proposed names of poetry books

Poet-slash-evil genius Jonah Winter and your guest blogger [Dan Nester] spent an afternoon in Pittsburgh not too long ago, talking of our lack of faith in Jesus Christ as our personal savior as well as making fun of poetry book titles. They all seemed so aggressively portentous, imbued with such fawning obsequiousness. To exorcise ourselves of the real-life titles we were mentioning, titles that shall not be mentioned here, we played a word association game wherein either Jonah or myself would think of the second word of a two-word poetry book title, which would after after whatever the other participant named as the first. 

So, for example, Jonah would say “Imprimateured,” while I kept in mind the second word for the title, “Meanderings,” thus giving us a title ready for someone’s poetry manuscript, Imprimateured Meanderings. (That's Jonah in full evil genius mode pictured up on your left, reading at UMaine's reading series awhile back; do check out his books, the very un-portentously, unobsequiously named  Maine and Amnesia.)

Sometimes we would even think of the press one of our proposed books titles might be associated.  TransDarkness would fit right beside those titles published at the experimental Ahsahta Press, for example, while Tremulous Beaver might be more feasible for, say, Knopf.

Without further ado, here’s our list. Got any others?  Add them to the Comments box.

The Orchid Sac
Lunar Guest
Concrete Pedigree
Beviled Desires
Standard Flow
Leftward Thwartings
Modified Rapture
Tremulous Beaver
Uninformed Highwayman
TransDarkness
Uninformed Tomorrowings
Imprimateured Meanderings
Sluiced Regret
The Sentinel Awakes
In situ, Storms
Alarm Morningwood
Darling; Wandering
Streaked Pugnaciousness
Variegated Cock
Woman House
Descartes’ Pancakes
Fugitive Contraband
Entering Beaver
Airport Beaver
Damage Thruway
Matchstick Haven
Unsublettable You
Earning, Toward
The Felt Apogee
Technical Vulva
Tree Entrance
Veinous Miriam
Unvisited Stickerbush
Polished Lendings
Stiff Flowering
Penelope’s Nubbin

from the archive; first posted May 30, 2008.