The Best American Poetry

"The Garden of Allah" [by Boris Dralyuk]

The Garden of Allah Hotel, playground of the movie stars during the 20s and 30s, will be torn down to make way for a new commercial and business center. ... The hotel originally was the home of Alla Nazimova, late stage and screen star.
—Los Angeles Mirror-News, 1959

And now I watch another era fade,
Cyrillic letters scraped from shuttered storefronts,
tar-crusted bread, stale fish, stiff marmalade
sit sulking on the shelves, unchosen orphans
in what were once the bustling little shops
of Russian Hollywood. Hardly a soul now stops
to thumb the plums, frown at the penciled prices;
the neighborhood is lurching towards crisis,
all in slow motion. Rents climb out of reach
for émigrés ... There’s nothing new in this.
Think of Nazimova and of her short-lived bliss
beside her pool—her private Black Sea beach ...
She died a tenant in a bungalow
of a hotel razed sixty years ago.

from My Hollywood, Dralyuk's first book of poems (Philadelaphia: Paul Dry Books, 2022). Photo credit: Jennifer Croft.

On "Joan Mitchell" [by Sharon Preiss]

                                

                    Harbor December (1956)                                                    To the Harborbormaster (1957)

The Baltimore Museum of Art had to wait two, long, pandemic-years to open its Joan Mitchell retrospective. But finally, Harbor December and To the Harbormaster’s jittery wine-dark reds and cold-water greens are lapping the walls in Gallery 1, while the joyously mercurial La Vie en Rose and the exuberant Salut Tom warm the walls deeper in the exhibition.

Mitchell was born to old-school wealth in watery, windy Chicago in 1925, spent some early obligatory years on the East Coast, and was a contemporary of the abstract expressionists who broke painting’s rules and assured the triumph of the New York School. But Mitchell was of that scene, not in it. Or in it but not of it. She began traveling to Paris starting in the mid-fifties, after successfully showing with the East Village heavy hitters at the Ninth Street Show, and ultimately bought a property in Vétheuil, northwest of Paris, where she, her paints, and her army of German shepherds lived until her death in 1992. Her paintings are a dynamic blend of Abstract Expressionism’ hardscrabble muscularity and France’s vibrant Post-Impressionist affair with life and color.

As a synesthete, color was the lens through which Mitchell felt and saw the world. She was also an athlete, and her physical engagement with her canvases is evident. The intense verve of her work surprises over and over, and to walk through the galleries at BMA is to be awestruck. Never mind the violent darkness of some of them, nor what you may know about her prickly personality, her turbulent relationships, her fraught romance with scotch. Though she could be, at times, angry and bitter, her expressions in paint, even of her darker or more confused feelings, are rife with her urgent love of life.

With many of the pieces on loan from private collections, and so rarely seen in public, the chronologically arranged show presents some small early pieces of figurative work along with photos, books of poetry by friends, and a looped video interview with the painter in her Vétheuil studio. There’s also a supplemental soundscape of letters, music, and poetry guiding the viewer through the galleries. The listener is privy to a personal tour of Mitchell’s thoughts and inspirations, from her early pieces that experiment with cubist obfuscation on through the creation of her masterworks and late paintings, including an homage to one of Van Gogh’s final paintings, Wheat Fields with Crows. Mitchell’s painting, an eight-foot-long diptych of wind-whipped evergreen and gold blowing across a mostly white ground is slyly titled No Birds. No omens, no doom, just the dark swirling wheat beneath a weather-heavy sky interspersed with… Wait. Is that pink!? Is the weather breaking? La Vie en Rose, indeed.

                                         No Birds (1987)

Speaking of La Vie, if you’re lucky enough to live in New York City, that painting is usually on display at the Metropolitan Museum in their Modern and Contemporary Art wing. Ironically, (or perhaps not), this quintessential Joan Mitchell work came out of a particularly dark and artistically dry period in the mid-1970s, as did the absolutely sunny Salut Tom. Both pieces are among her largest, each one a quadriptych, with the four panels stretching together to a stunning twenty-two and twenty-six feet, respectively, and reaching upward of nine feet in height. Patricia Albers, in her 2011 biography of Mitchell, Lady Painter, calls La Vie’s “four movements…a symphony…Joan’s tour de force emotional reckoning” of her long, turbulent relationship with fellow artist Jean-Paul Riopelle, which finally imploded when he and Mitchell’s young protégé, Hollis Jeffcoat, became a couple and ran off together. While the painting is stunning on its own, knowing the backstory makes the moody intensity of the work even more potent.

  
La Vie en Rose (1979)                                                                               Salut Tom (1978)

The same could be said for Salut Tom. Not only is the painting also part of this period of loss and despondency, it’s a post-mortem homage to Mitchell’s great friend Tom Hess. Hess was the longtime editor of Artnews and, as such, championed Mitchell and her contemporaries. His death, at 58 from a heart attack, was a devastating shock. Yet Mitchell’s luminous yellows interspersed with airy puffs of white and sky blue are a celebration rather than a dirge.

Many print reproductions don’t do Mitchell’s work with color justice. But the installation images on BMA’s website give a taste of the sheer WOW of the show. It’s on display in Baltimore until August 14 and will travel to the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris from there.

https://artbma.org/exhibition/joan-mitchell/images

"Ode to My Father’s Manhattans" [by Beth Gylys]

Ode to My Father’s Manhattans

Clink
of ice
in a glass,
crack
of the cubes
as he poured,
bright red
eye
of a maraschino
bobbing
in the brown
gold
slosh
of Jim Beam
and sweet
vermouth.

Surely
we could
swim
in a lifetime,
of those drinks,
gallons
upon gallons
swirled, sipped,
swilled
and swallowed,
sticky
on the counter,
the twinkle
of his high.

My father’s
Manhattans
sometimes
made him
want to dance,
to tell
the latest joke.
My shy father
lit
from within
becoming
someone
other
than himself,
sloppy-jolly,
sometimes
standing
(or that
is how
I remember it—
him at the table
standing
(hands
moving
like an Italian
from my mother’s
side of the family),
my father
and the glass
empty
but for
soft stones
of melting ice,
my father
abuzz,
chatty,
full of stories—
then
my father,
spent,
his chin
on his chest.

From "Sincerity and Authenticity" on July 4th, Lionel Trilling's Birthday

Here is the magnificent final paragraph of "The Authentic Unconscious," the final chapter of Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), his last book, which originated as the Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 1970.

<<< Yet the doctrine that madness is health, and that madness is liberation, receives a happy welcome from a consequential part of the educated public. And when we have given due weight to the likelihood that those who respond positively to the doctrine don’t have it in mind to go mad, let alone insane—it is characteristic of the intellectual life of our culture that, in radical psychology as in radical politics, it fosters a form of assent which does not involve actual credence—we must yet take it to be significant of our circumstances that many among us find it gratifying to entertain the thought that alienation is to be overcome only by the completeness of alienation, and that alienation completed is not a deprivation or deficiency but a potency. Perhaps exactly because the thought is assented to so facilely, so without what used to be called seriousness, it might seem that no expression of disaffection from the social existence was ever so desperate as this eagerness to say that authenticity of personal being is achieved through an ultimate isolateness and through the power that this is presumed to bring—the falsities of an alienated social reality rejected in favor of an upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity, each one of us a Christ but with none of the inconveniences of interceding, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals, of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished. >>>

Notice the last phrase and how eloquently it concludes the allegorical identification of "each one of us" as "a Christ." Written to counter the idea that madness is a necessary component of genius, the graf concludes with a summary statement followed by a dash, not a typical Trilling ploy. What follows the dash reiterates the main point with a twist achieved by the strategic use of "psychopathic" to alter the common meaning of "upward mobility" -- as if a term usually associated with matters of money and social class could well apply to the case of madness as an ideal. And then follows the remarkable metaphor, with its understanding of what divinity entails, its definition of what it means to be "a Christ." In the Gospel According to St. John, Christ's last words on the cross are  "It is finished." These are the book's last words.-- DL

 

Remembering Tom Disch, February 2, 1940 – July 4, 2008 [by Dana Gioia]

Tom Disch, who died on this day in 2008, is pictured here with his terrific computer game "Amnesia," a participatory novel in which the player awakes naked in a hotel room without any clues as to who he or she is. From the Wikipedia entry on Tom Disch: << David Lehman singled out "Amnesia" for praise in his essay "You Are What You Read" in Newsweek (January 12, 1987). In an interview published in the Southwest Review (edited by Willard Spiegelman), Lehman asked Disch about the origin of "Amnesia." "Please don't say 'I forget'," Lehman said. "It's true," Disch replied. "I forget my own life all the time, so amnesia was a natural subject for me." >> Here is Dana Gioia's remembrance of Tom:

<<<
Tom Disch was one of the few people I’ve ever met whom I considered a genius. Not that genius did him much good. He had a superabundance of invention, an often startling clarity of perception, and a preternaturally quick mastery of literary technique. At the same time he had little ability to handle the ordinary challenges of daily life. If he possessed the fertile imagination of a brilliant child, he also had a child’s social awkwardness and vulnerability. A connoisseur of self-loathing, he never understood how much his friends adored him. He was enormously good company—endlessly funny, intelligent, and genuinely sweet—except when he fell into a rage or depression. He could be difficult but he was never, never dull.

Their weird turns of invention, darkness of vision, and rough humor go far beyond the conventions of the genres in which he worked.The originality of his novels beggars description. While each book shares a common sensibility, these bizarre and compelling volumes not only differ from one another; they are unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. Their weird turns of invention, darkness of vision, and rough humor go far beyond the conventions of the genres in which he worked. Disch loved to outrage respectable opinion—not just middle-class opinion, the easy target of most writers. He also mocked proper liberal opinion and habitually violated even the most flexible limits of good taste. This eagerness to outrage would have been tiresome if he had not been so consistently funny and insightful.

Disch was never popular among science fiction, fantasy or horror readers. His admirers were mostly fellow writers. And despite Disch’s remarkable literary achievements, the fans were right. They knew he wasn’t writing for them. The literary mode of genre fiction is romance—the narrative tradition of wish-fulfillment featuring exciting adventure, idealized characters, and satisfactory closure. Disch upended the conventions of fantasy and science fiction by creating narratives that stubbornly refused to proceed in the proper directions. His heroes almost inevitably lose, mostly after humiliating defeats. Love ends in betrayal and abandonment. Villainy or mere incompetence triumphs. Moral authority proves useless or hypocritical. Disch’s mode was not romance but bitter satire. He liked to amuse his audience, but he took even greater pleasure in frustrating them.

Disch’s central importance in science fiction and fantasy was his determination to transform the imaginative possibilities of the science fiction and fantasy genres. Each of his novels pushed the boundaries of the field in a new way. (Had he constantly pushed the boundaries in the same way, as Philip K. Dick did, Disch might have eventually developed a cult following.) His best novels—On Wings of Song, 334, The Businessman: A Tale of Terror, and Camp Concentration—occupy a unique place in the canons of American science fiction and fantasy as disturbing and unruly counter-classics. The best of his short stories are perhaps finer still, though they await a judicious editor. The Brave Little Toaster is an utter joy—unlike the awful Disney adaptation. There was also another side of Disch’s prodigious talents—his poetry. He wrote so prolifically that his verse also awaits a skilled editor, but his best poems are not merely good but truly distinguished. Had he never written a page of science fiction, he would have a claim to posterity on his poetry alone.

I hope that in some alternative universe, a slimmer, happier Tom Disch sits in his beach house with walls lined by awards and a stack of royalty checks on his desk. It seems entirely possible. Tom had enough talent to fill several dimensions.
>>>

from https://danagioia.com/essays/reviews-and-authors-notes/remembering-tom-disch/

See, too, https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/04/the-businessman-the-statesman-and-the-poet.html

To Independence (Steve McQueen) and some prose in favor of peace [by David Lehman]

It is July 4th in The Great Escape, and in the POW camp dominated by Brits, the Americans on hand gather to celebrate the day. Steve McQueen lifts his glass of homemade rotgut and says "Independence." In one word he characterizes an entire way of life. We observe the privileges of freedom and independence on a day when we must also remember that the fruits of freedom begin with peace and that a hallmark of peace is civility in discourse and an agreement to respect ourselves by respecting each other. 

The great music in The Great Escape was written by Elmer Bernstein.

<<
Poets tend to be more in love with love, with ideas, with death, or with the details of their own autobiographies-in-progress than in peace, or health, or well-being as a subject in its own right. Peace in poetry is the necessary but only implied backdrop for all productive human endeavors. I sometimes think of William Carlos Williams as the one modern poet whose collected works seem a hymn to peace as the ground condition that makes all else possible, beauty included. I have wondered whether this may be because he preferred things to ideas. He captures fragments of being: plums in a paper bag or in the ice-box, a young housewife, flowers and farm implements, people at a ballgame, rain, a cat in its stealth, an eight-foot strip of copper, the “rank odor of a passing springtime.” But before I get carried away, Bob Hass reminds me that Williams could also be warlike; he wrote enthusiastically about the cleansing blaze of violence in “Burning the Christmas Greens” (1944).  In the poem, green turns into ash, and we stand there “breathless to be witnesses, / as if we stood / ourselves refreshed among / the shining fauna of that fire.”

Poems of war announce themselves as such; poems of peace do not invariably do so. An exception is Kenneth Koch’s long poem “The Pleasures of Peace,” which he wrote in the late 1960s when the Vietnam War was raging and poets felt a tremendous pressure to write anti-war poems or take part in protest rallies. Many bad antiwar poems were written at this time. Political urgency leads often to poetical triteness. Koch’s solution to the problem was to write a joyful poem not an angry one, radiating pleasure, not scorn or detestation. The madcap poem affirms that the natural state of man is peace, not war. In a last,valedictory stanza, boats sail and apes run and the sun shines for peace, and monkeys climb for peace, and serpents writhe for peace, and “the Alps, Mount Vesuvius, all the really big important mountains / Are rising for peace.” The poem reaches its highest level of pathos when the poet punctuates his closing peroration with a plea, not a prediction: “Surely it won’t be long.”
>>>

For more of the essay "Peace and War in American Poetry," written at the behest of the Library of Congress, click here.

Wendy Xu: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________

I Must Change My Form

 

It’s true, nothing is coming out like it used to anymore

Usually I am rather neat and tidy in my work

It is spring, that time of year when all rain is expired cherry blossoms, the ground pink like above us, more pink

Walking through the park with my love I think about Chang-e, goddess of the moon, her exquisitely timed appearances at my moments of deepest need

I’m so tired of the compromises of women in my cultural folklore, as if: sacrifice is defensible as a feminist vision?

For example:

Your husband is greedy and demands ever greater production of silk from you, plucked from your own tender skin, spun overnight to meet his needs

Your husband is hoarding the immortality pills and so now you must live on the moon

Your husband loves you even in your true form, an enormous white snake, but he dies because you’re pregnant

Your husband is a dick, generally, and the other details are fluid

Thank god you are beautiful and a wonder to be regarded from earth

GuanYin remains the champion of mercy except in her punitive dealings with men

As a child I admired her for being above all helpful in my limited aspirations, perhaps I only aspired to that much, to function with use

Do you have context for this legend? Shall I include it here for you?

If I do, who is my perceived audience?

Some of you are my brothers and sisters and I allow you your infinite transgressions

My father writes me:

I just read your new poem NOTES FOR AN OPENING, it makes me think a lot, feel a lot, a lot about my life and our life. It will make me think and feel much more and more about myself and my children and the relatedness of our life in the true meaning of living or simply being alive. I love you Wendy, my daughter. Keep writing it. Let the thoughts flow whenever they come in your poetic form or other forms. Please ask if you need anything from me. I have been thinking a lot lately about our life journey. Nothing is better than writing it out and fully express it although it is really hard to re-experience many things.

Note: punctuation and grammar have been corrected

As per: your convenience

 

Do as much as you can as best as you can

I think about the wonderful hyphen, the place where I am allowed to live and am never followed

Blank Hyphen American

The hurt is the bridge, the bind, the unnatural (Hyper Hyphen Natural) adjoining my frankenparts

A grammar joke is: “Chinese-American” privileges the “Chinese” over the “American”

Get it?

I wish my life were so good that I was frequently bored

“A fatal sickness”

Which is despair but despair does not equal death, so what is unto death?

I am so glad I did not have to love him unto death, though I love him there

All good things must end and give rise to still undetermined things

If I despair of it I am sick with it, an already dead attitude, a levity I no longer feel

I am sick with love for my immigrant parents, the long mirror they hold out towards me

The poem will have no annotation, no disclosure, no burden, no qualifying exam, no end

It will be all language prerequisite

You might focus then on my sickness and use it to betray me

You might have no time no money no inner resources with which to begin

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Wendy Xu’s most recent books of poetry are The Past (2021) and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, New York Review of Books, Tin House, and widely elsewhere. She is assistant professor of writing at The New School, where she teaches poetry.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

   

   Panel with the Moon Goddess and Attendants. 12th–13th century China.  Metropolitan Museum of Art. The ornate style of clothing worn by these four women suggests they are immortals. The osmanthus leaf held by the largest figure, at the right, identifies her as the Moon Goddess Chang’e, who inhabits her celestial palace along with a rabbit that prepares the elixir of long life.

"Male Stargazing" [by Jim Cummins]

Male Stargazing

After the prostate is removed,
The male gaze, straight from the savannah,
Turns inward, toward the clinical.
The perusal of breasts is no longer
The perusal of breasts, but the aesthetics
Of proportion: how the breasts
Relate to the shoulders, the neck, the waist,
The chest—the male gaze without desire
Is curatorial at best.

After the prostate is removed,
The male gaze turns inward, toward the past.
“Ass” becomes memories of individuals,
The “legs for days” measure the dregs
Of the heart, not the organ warming up
For the show, with its cathedral tunes.
The penis still removes toxins,
But gone is the illusion of the great lover:
Those days whizzed by too fast.

After the prostate is removed,
The male gaze turns inward;
For some women that’s a win-win,
Though the new order panics the men.
The mind still “gets” the appeal,
But the body finds it harder to feel;
And no fantasy life can spin
The predicament one finds oneself in:
The male gaze confronting the real.

for D.L.

"Letters to Dead Editors" [by Tom Disch]

On July 1, 2008, at 11:16AM, Tom Disch revealed God's "other" Big Idea of the day. He called it "Letters to Dead Editors."

<<<
Another were-there-but-world-enough theme anthology. It was to have been a whole collection by yours truly, and the first letter would have been sent to Mrs. Gaskell, who inmho should be included with the great Victorian novelists, along with the woman she wrote the biography of, Charlotte Bronte. Recently the BBC has given Mrs. G. some of the attention she merits. So much so that she doesn't really need me beating the drum for her, tho my letter would have been written in response to her great novel about the urban underclass, Mary Barton. What she brought to bear was a humorless (but perceptive) Moral Earnestness and a patient trompe l'oeil realism about the daily life of the miserable-most poor. By comparison Dickens comes across as lazy and/or sneeringly cruel.

I've tried writing such letters to real-life good writers but they are too busy trying to grab the brass ring or otherwise advance up the ladder, or else simply think me pushy or wicked or dumb and don't write back or just say thank you, goodbye. Maybe it would be different now in the era of blogs and email, but back then my epistolary charms had no effect on the likes of Louise Erdrich et al. As indeed, they shouldn't have. There are too many possible venal reasons why we don't write to our favorite celebrities. But to those safely dead and in their vaults--why not? The idea would be to address them as though they were real people, not statues swathed in marble togas and bronze crinolines, and as though they'd been keeping up with the things they had usually been interested in.

If anyone wants to give it a try, you could post a specimen letter here, but this should not be the usual Anything Goes comment. Mere japery on the order of "Shit happens" as one's whole letter to Dale Carnegie would rate a quick dele from God's red pencil. But I do think, and so does God, that it might be a nice book. Indeed, He often writes such letters Himself and sends them poste restante to the big post office on high.

-- Tom Disch  >>>

from the archive; first posted November 1, 2008

Splash, splash [by Mitch Sisskind]

When I told Joe about how Sam Giancana

Punched Sammy Davis Jr. in the stomach

At Frank Sinatra's house Joe looked at me

And said, "I am like a frog that's been sitting

"Quietly on a lily pad until splash, splash,

"It jumps back into the water not because

"It wants to but because it must or else

"Everything will go right straight to hell.

"Sam Giancana hasn't been the same

"Since 1954 when Angeline passed on.

"She was an angel. Hey, I'd like to punch

"All of them in the stomach, Giancana,

"Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford,

"Not Dean Martin though. He's fabulous."

"In night when colors all to black are cast": Fulke Greville's Great Sonnet

In night when colors all to black are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;
The eye a watch to inward senses placed,
Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offense,
Doth forge and raise impossibility:

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,
Proper reflections of the error be,
And images of self-confusednesses,
Which hurt imaginations only see;

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.

Now read it a second time. The key word appears to be "inward." What governs the "inward sense"? Let's take it one step at a time. It is possible to have the power to see and be blind; that paradox we can figure out. But who has "placed" the eye there as "a watch?" Is there an appeal to a belief system the reader is presumed to understand and identify on the basis of the language and probable date of composition? The second stanza raises the possibility that "the inward sense" singular may be different from the "inward senses." And both are corrupt and susceptible to panic and fear. The eye can at least give a "proper reflection of the error." What's there is nothing, "the nothing that is," as Wallace Stevens would have it. And the news confirms the neuroses. The devil is a manmade expression of "inward evils" based on illusory images. And yet, saying all this, one feels one has left out something crucial to the poem: the darkness, the night, and the power of sight to see error or to see erroneously.

The late Edward Tayler, professor at Columbia, did his best to promote the English Renaissance poet Fulke Greville, Tayler believed that Greville's importance was on a par with that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. For a final paper Tayler had us analyze this sonnet. A piece of cake it ain't.

Aldous Huxley chose the following lines by Fulke Greville as the epigraph for the 1928 novel Point Counter Point:

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound,
Vainely begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws –
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

-- DL

Now read it a second time. The key word appears to be "inward." What governs the "inward sense"? Let's take it one step at a time. It is possible to have the power to see and be blind; that paradox we can figure out. But who has "placed" the eye there as "a watch?" Is there an appeal to a belief system the reader is presumed to understand and identify on the basis of the language and probable date of composition? The second stanza raises the possibility that "the inward sense" singular may be different from the "inward senses." And both are corrupt and susceptible to panic and fear. The eye can at least give a "proper reflection of the error." What's there is nothing, "the nothing that is," as Wallace Stevens would have it. And the news confirms the neuroses. The devil is a manmade expression of "inward evils" based on illusory images. And yet, saying all this, one feels one has left out something crucial to the poem: the darkness, the night, and the power of sight to see error or to see erroneously.

The late Edward Tayler, professor at Columbia, did his best to promote the English Renaissance poet Fulke Greville, Tayler believed that Greville's importance was on a par with that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. For a final paper Tayler had us analyze this sonnet. A piece of cake it ain't.

Aldous Huxley chose the following lines by Fulke Greville as the epigraph for the 1928 novel Point Counter Point:

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound,
Vainely begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws –
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

-- DL

"Thursday" [by Mark Ford]

When I began writing poetry many moons ago, for some reason I deemed allusions infra dig, unbecoming. I suppose like all young poets I wanted my stuff to be anti-academic, to be a breath of fresh air – and I was mindful of Kenneth Koch’s poem on the subject, ‘Fresh Air’, in which he imagines a strangler dealing mercilessly with any poet he surprises alluding to Orpheus, Cuchulain, Gawain or Odysseus. Accordingly, my first collection, Landlocked, is largely allusion-free, though there’s a stray reference in one poem to Charlotte Brontë, and another borrows its title from a song by Olivia Newton-John. No casual dipping of my young and fevered hand into what Philip Larkin once derisively called ‘the myth-kitty’.

Then I began to brood – particularly on the oeuvres of 20th century poetry’s giants, on the careers of Eliot and Pound and Lowell and Olson and co., and on the vast quantities of criticism their work had inspired. Much of this criticism focused on their deft use of precisely the resource I had forsworn; throwing in a bit of Dante, quoting a line of Pope, furnished just the sort of grist the critical mill craved, and without appreciative criticism, what hope of immortality? None

I decided, therefore, that to be taken seriously I needed allusions, and plenty of ‘em; what’s more I decided to remedy matters in one fell swoop by writing a poem that would consist almost entirely of allusions. But I also wanted this poem to do more than just make up my allusion-deficit. It had often occurred to me that no one had ever written a poem addressing a faux pas we all occasionally make, particularly when attempting to appear more knowledgeable than we really are. I’m talking about mixing up famous people who happen to have the same surnames, like Rod and Jon Stewart, or Marianne and Michael Moore… Surely such mix-ups, often harmless, occasionally amusing, deserved a poem of their own. Enough, you might think, and yet I wanted more, still more from this poem. For again brooding on what went into the kind of verse that achieved celebrity and critical acclaim for its author, it struck me that mention of foreign locations always went down well. References to Locarno or Kyoto or Aix-en-Provence make one look cosmopolitan, Byronic, au fait with the treasures and history of civilization. Though I’d done my fair share of travelling, indeed grew up many different countries, I’d so far made pitiful use of the places I’d visited. And even if I hadn’t visited them, who would know?... And what about, come to that, all those films I’d seen, often ones in foreign languages?... Anyway, here is the result of these weighty cogitations, and only the most sober and industrious of critics, one who is early to bed and early to rise, is likely to do justice to it:

            Early to Bed, Early to Rise

It was in Berlin you mixed up John and J.J. Cale,
And we found ourselves watching Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past
           yet again.

I, on the other hand, confused Teniers the elder and Teniers the
            younger
In Amsterdam, where I saw Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys on my own.

On the outskirts of Moscow we failed to distinguish clearly between
            Charles and Burl Ives:
Our punishment was to sit though Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible,
            Parts I and II, twice.

I met a man in New York who couldn’t tell the difference between
            George
And Zbigniew Herbert; his favourite film was Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu
            Monogatari, which he insisted we see together.

In Cardiff I confounded Edward, Dylan, and R.S. Thomas;
To get over my embarrassment I went to a performance of Jean-Luc
           Godard’s Alphaville.

People continually mistake the work of Antoine Le Nain for that of his
            brother Louis, even in Los Angeles,
Where most films are made, including Doug Liman’s Swingers, which I
            recently saw for the first time, and really enjoyed.

(Mark Ford)

from the archive; first posted Thursday, June 16, 2008

Poets and Jobs [by John Foy]

All jobs seem real to the people who have them, but poets like to make distinctions. They refer typically to “real” jobs when talking about employment outside of academia (illogical though that may be). I’m a poet, and I’ve been told that I have a real job. I work as a senior financial editor at a Brazilian investment bank. Despite an urge early on to enter the teaching profession, for which I had some talent, I went down another road. I had to support my family in Manhattan. By the year 2000, my black beret and cape were gone, but the calling was still with me, so there was nothing for it but to change my way of thinking about the literary life. Over the years, through friendships with many poets and writers, I’d come to see that the only thing that mattered in a so-called literary life was generating literature, and in this case, writing poems. No surprise, then, that I’ve been fiercely interested in major poets who lived “unliterary” lives. We all know the usual suspects.

Wallace Stevens (pictured left) was trained as a lawyer and spent most of his working life as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. The guy won a Pulitzer Prize in 1955, and he was offered a position at Harvard, but he turned it down. He chose to stay at his job. He liked being a vice president. He was often seen walking along the leafy suburban streets of Hartford in a suit, mumbling to himself. We know what he was doing.

In 1917, when he was 29, T. S. Eliot (pictured above) signed on with Lloyd's Bank in London as a clerk in the Colonial and Foreign department. He would stay for eight years. The writer Lisa Levy, in her article called “A Peaceful, but Very Interesting Pursuit” (The Rumpus, January 31, 2012), notes that Eliot thought himself very fortunate to have found this job, and she quotes from a letter he wrote to his mother in 1917:

“I am now earning £2 10s a week for sitting in an office from 9:15 to 5 with an hour for lunch, and tea served in the office… Perhaps it will surprise you to hear that I enjoy the work. It is not nearly so fatiguing as schoolteaching, and is more interesting. I have a desk and a filing cabinet in a small room with another man. The filing cabinet is my province, for it contains balance sheets of all the foreign banks with which Lloyd’s does business. These balances I file and tabulate in such a way as to show the progress or decline of every bank from year to year.”

It’s both riveting and appalling to hear Eliot speak with such affection about his filing cabinet. Yet in the midst of such a life he conceived The Waste Land, which was published in 1922. Eliot didn’t leave the bank until 1925, when he went to join the publishing house Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber). Granted, this new job was all rather literary, but it was also corporate, and he became a director and went about, happily, in a three-piece suit.

There are other examples. The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda labored as a diplomat. Philip Larkin worked for 30 years as a librarian at the University of Hull. During these years—more deprivation, perhaps, than daffodils—he wrote most of his glum, bilious and brilliant poems. William Carlos Williams, a doctor, delivered 3,000 babies in the grimy industrial zones of New Jersey. Are there other major poets who’ve delivered even 30 babies? Or 3? If so, I would  like to know. We’re talking 3,000 here. I verified this arresting fact with Herbert Leibowitz, whose masterful biography of William Carlos Williams, Something Urgent I Have to Say, was published by FSG in 2011.

Then there is the louche and sublime C. P. Cavafy (left) In 1892, at the age of 29, he took a job as a low-level clerk in the Irrigation Department of the Ministry of Public Works in Egypt. He would stay for 30 years! According to the Official Website of the Cavafy Archive, when he “was finally able to gain employment… at the Ministry of Public Works, he was hired as a temporary clerk, since his Greek citizenship excluded him from any permanent position. Being an assiduous and conscientious worker, Cavafy managed to hold this temporary position (renewed annually) for thirty years. He was always mindful of his finances, both out of necessity and out of vanity… He started working at the Alexandrian Stock Exchanges early on, and was a registered broker from 1894 to 1902.”

The most “poetic” side of Cavafy’s life—aside from his poems—were his wanderings about the streets of Alexandria after he left the office. We know what he was doing.

I’d like to conclude with James Merrill’s affectionate and counterintuitive thoughts on dear Elizabeth Bishop (left), who for most of her life never had any job at all, real or otherwise. The quotation below comes directly from the famous Paris Review interview that Sandy McClatchy conducted with James Merrill (Summer 1982, Issue No. 84). This is Merrill speaking:

“Oh, I suppose I’ve learned things about writing, technical things, from each of them [Stevens, Auden, Bishop, a few others]. Auden’s penultimate rhyming, Elizabeth’s way of contradicting something she’s just said, Stevens’s odd glamorizing of philosophical terms. Aside from all that, what I think I really wanted was some evidence that one didn’t have to lead a “literary” life—belong to a ghetto of “creativity.” That one could live as one pleased, and not be shamefaced in the glare of renown (if it ever came) at being an insurance man or a woman who’d moved to Brazil and played samba records instead of discussing X’s latest volume. It was heartening that the best poets had this freedom. Auden did lead a life that looked literary from a distance, though actually I thought it was more a re-creation of school and university days: much instruction, much giggling, much untidiness. Perhaps because my own school years were unhappy for extracurricular reasons I didn’t feel completely at ease with all that… It was du côté de chez Elizabeth, though, that I saw the daily life that took my fancy even more, with its kind of random, Chekhovian surface, open to trivia and funny surprises, or even painful ones, today a fit of weeping, tomorrow a picnic. I could see how close that life was to her poems, how much the life and the poems gave to one another. I don’t mean I’ve “achieved” anything of the sort in my life or poems, only that Elizabeth had more of a talent for life—and for poetry—than anyone else I’ve known, and this has served me as an ideal.”

I sign off today on that happy note.

from the archive; first posted by John Foy on July 08, 2013 at 02:13 AM 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty): Dean Young [by Angela Ball]

Chaos Magic for Beginners

Don’t we all love when the announcer
gets choked up? When the roller coaster
gets stuck, that an octopus can eat
one of its own hearts when stressed enough
and aren’t we all? Don’t you like to know stuff?
Sperm leaves the penis at 28mph,
in many countries being bird-pooped-on
is considered lucky, Goya’s skull is still missing
although the last thing my mother said
no one understood and I’m okay with that.
Let’s try to take pleasure in the contradictory
heavy footfalls on the roof, whatever
the dog’s dug up. Let’s appreciate
the pyramid’s false floors, trap doors,
the detective who’s yet to realize
he’s stalking himself. It’s okay
to be a demon, to be a thrown angel
on the spectrum. Maybe you just feel
too much, too much serotonin so
even swans make you crazy, anyone
talking on their phone in the elevator.
Nothing needs a reason to happen,
the cause of all this has yet to occur
if it ever will. Often it’s like being fed
to raptor hatchlings or trying to get
information from a corpse, possibly
your own. Almost everything doesn’t work.
I like when the lovers can somehow
stay together. I like when the tower
collapses, that sense at the end
that it’s never over

--Dean Young

I think one of the most important lessons and permissions I have tried to absorb from the originals of the New York School is the sense that anything language can do can be in a poem, be it cri de coeur or blunt information, if the poem and the poet's receptivity is open and playful enough. –Dean Young

Dean Young's most recent book is Solar Perplexus.  His poems have appeared a dozen times in Best American Poetry.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty): Dean Young

The title of Dean Young’s “Chaos Magic for Beginners,” is a welter of contradictions—“magic,” as a skill, depends on utmost precision—what is “Chaos Magic” and how begin to impart its principles? Perhaps the way is demonstration, and “Chaos Magic for Beginners” is wonderfully demonstrative.

The poem’s outer subject is expressed in its title, its inner one in the pattern of its imagery: things being blocked or unblocked, expressed. Bird poop turned awkwardly proverbial, a famous skull on the loose. Extractions, ingestions. Its method is not so much “ultra talk” as ultra thought—expression so swift as to almost precede formulation.

The poem begins with schadenfreude prompted by a broadcaster’s fallibility. The late Jon Anderson once said, “The secret of poetry is cruelty.” It may also be the case that chaos is its secret. Who can explain the wonder of reading Young’s list of comic frustrations and striking oddities—the stuck rollercoaster, the heart-eating octopi (that we resemble), the speed of sperm, the great artist’s cranium, ending with the scalding mystery of a mother’s last words--lines that might also be read, as I did at first, as the mother saying, “No one understood. And I’m OK with that.”

With “Let’s try to take pleasure,” the poem turns to its teaching mission:

     Let’s try to take pleasure in the contradictory

     heavy footfalls on the roof, whatever

     the dog’s dug up. Let’s appreciate

     the pyramid’s false floors, trap doors,

     the detective who’s yet to realize   

     he’s stalking himself. It’s okay

     to be a demon, to be a thrown angel 

     on the spectrum.

Chaos is magic, is both question and explanation, and must be appreciated—celebrated, in fact—because it is what we have. Disorientation orders the day. We are reminded, perhaps, of T.S. Eliot’s overly-friendly April hound; and of Oedipus, old swollen-foot, the classic “detective yet to realize.” In a pop-psychology gesture, we learn that it’s ok to be expelled from heaven, afflicted by a malady that allies us with every color. Most of all, we learn the wonders of disorientation—a state celebrated by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Kenneth Koch, struck smart by a meaningful sign: “One Train May Hide Another.”

Our guide through a series of unpredictable occurrences, the poem primes us to enjoy how contemporary physics interprets the cosmos: the unknown unknown surrounds us. The unseen cat in the box is simultaneously dead and alive. The lines “Nothing needs a reason to happen, / the cause of all this is yet to occur / if it ever will” posit a retrograde world of reversals in which we are neophyte interpreters, and the corpse we interrogate may be our own.

The poem ends with two vastly different enjoyments, both owned by an “I”: The first, homely in its generality, “I like when the lovers can somehow stay together,” invokes pleasure at seeing cinematic and/or real-life romance grow durable. The second springs at us, its generality giving way to the nightmare of the World Trade Center attack, to schadenfreude recombinant with sorrow, its magic a startling kinesthetic image, specific and encompassing: “that sense at the end / that it’s never over” (period omitted).  Dean Young’s “Chaos Magic for Beginners” schools us not just in chaos, but in the tragicomedy and comic tragedy of our unbreakable fall.

--Angela Ball

"Girl Reading a Letter" [by William Carpenter]

A thief drives to the museum in his black van. The night
watchman says Sorry, closed, you have to come back tomorrow.
The thief sticks the point of his knife in the guard's ear.
I haven't got all evening, he says, I need some art.
Art is for pleasure, the guard says, not possession, you can't
something, and then the duct tape is going across his mouth.
Don't worry, the thief says, we're both on the same side.
He finds the Dutch Masters and goes right for a Vermeer:
"Girl Writing a Letter." The thief knows what he's doing.
He has a Ph.D. He slices the canvas on one edge from
the shelf holding the salad bowls right down to the
square of sunlight on the black and white checked floor.
The girl doesn't hear this, she's too absorbed in writing
her letter, she doesn't notice him until too late. He's
in the picture. He's already seated at the harpsichord.
He's playing the G Minor Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti,
which once made her heart beat till it passed the harpsichord
and raced ahead and waited for the music to catch up.
She's worked on this letter for three hundred and twenty years.
Now a man's here, and though he's dressed in some weird clothes,
he's playing the harpsichord for her, for her alone, there's no one
else alive in the museum. The man she was writing to is dead -
time to stop thinking about him - the artist who painted her is dead.
She should be dead herself, only she has an ear for music
and a heart that's running up the staircase of the Gardner Museum
with a man she's only known for a few minutes, but it's
true, it feels like her whole life. So when the thief
hands her the knife and says you slice the paintings out
of their frames, you roll them up, she does it; when he says
you put another strip of duct tape over the guard's mouth
so he'll stop talking about aesthetics, she tapes him, and when
the thief puts her behind the wheel and says, drive, baby,
the night is ours, it is the Girl Writing a Letter who steers
the black van on to the westbound ramp for Storrow Drive
and then to the Mass Pike, it's the Girl Writing a Letter who
drives eighty miles an hour headed west into a country
that's not even discovered yet, with a known criminal, a van
full of old masters and nowhere to go but down, but for the
Girl Writing a Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer
in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love.

-- from The Best American Poetry 1995 edited by Richard Howard

Why People Go To College [by W. Kirschberg]

"If the universities demolish the humanities by undermining their relevance or their validity, the immediate effect is to promote ignorance and laziness among students; the long term effect is to put into question the very idea of the centrality of college, which people attend for many reasons (alcoholic, athletic, sexual, psychopharmacological, fraternal) but not to learn about Western Civilization." -- W. Kirschberg, from his Salutatorian  Address (1972), Churchill College, Cambridge University, the first Cambridge college to admit women as undergraduates.

Thomas Mann:  " A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth." 

Thomas Devaney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Devaney. Photo by Patrick Montero.

_________________________________________________________________________

Oregon Ave

 

You can’t find a place to smoke anymore

Ro says, smoking and rifling

through her handbag looking for a number.

She sits in the backseat with Meg.

They’re not singing.

The ballgame’s on inside and outside

the game is always on.

Actually, sometimes they do sing.

What year is the car, a ’98?

A Ford? A Focus?

They always tip too.

 

There is dust, always; and terrible dirt;

but if that’s what you see you’re hardly looking.

We believe in the front stoop.

We believe in banging pots and pans and honking horns.

We believe that in the heat of day shadows come back.

Trashcan on fire says Things are hotting up.

The street’s a mix, water, water ice, LIVE CRABS,

jumbo jets, firecrackers.

Summer days are huge and often overlap late into fall.

Seriously, when you have a good spot, why move the car?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thomas Devaney is the author of You Are the Battery (Black Square Editions, 2020) and Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press, 2019). He wrote and co-directed the film Bicentennial City (2021) about the 1976 Bicentennial in Philadelphia. He teaches creative writing at Haverford College.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Philadelphia Muses by Meg Saligman. Photo by Steve Welnik.

"Cats" [by James Cummins]

When Eliot wrote his thesis at Harvard,
He said philosophers doing philosophy was “ridiculous”—
That two thousand years of this insanity had gone on
Because they tried to explain existence
From the point-of-view of a platform outside it,
Which didn’t, and couldn’t, exist.  One has only
One's sightlines; and wherever you find yourself,
You're in the middle; and your sightlines
Are better or worse depending on the intelligence
You bring to whatever it is you’re looking at.
Avuncular language-riddles infuriated him,
And he made his disgust quite clear in his thesis.
Harvard offered him a chair on the basis of these ruminations;
And after he said no, Bertrand Russell screwed his wife.

From Recalcitrant Actors by James Cummins (2021). Published by Dos Madres (www.dosmadres.com). T. S. Eliot is pictured above. 

Ant and Clown (by Mitch Sisskind)

The Ant

You could not call him the Ant to his face
And you would be dead if you made the
Mistake of calling him the Ant to his face.
Or what if you called him the Ant except
Not to his face, like you called him the Ant
To somebody and he only heard about it?
He wouldn't care. It meant nothing to him.

The Clown

It was the same way with Joey the Clown.
They called him the Clown because he 
Liked to clown around but you yourself
Could definitely not ever clown around. 
Or just like how he felt about the suburbs.
A lot of them moved to the suburbs but
His basic attitude was fuck the suburbs. 

Philip K. Dick [by Mitch Sisskind]

  

No telling what time it was

As he woke in darkness with

The sleeping cat’s warmth,

 A gift from God, on the back
 
Of his neck and, weeping,

He willed himself to perfect

Stillness lest the cat leave.

But wait. Here was a thought,

Here was another possibility:

He was dead and, willfulness

Be damned, could no more

Stir himself than trisect an angle!

Yes, that might be it --

And this was paradise!

from the archive; first posted June 23, 2014