The Best American Poetry

Borges: "Translators have impoved my stories"

Jorge Luis Borges said: "I respect translators, and my stories have sometimes been greatly bettered by them. One of them told me so himself. Besides, I am so fond of English that I like anything better in English than in Spanish." While the relevance of this quote to "No R" is not obvious, people of good faith can figure it out. Borges also declared unequivocally that Robert Louis Stevenson "is the most wonderful writer of all English writers, after Shakespeare."

Homage to "Laura" [by John Harbourne]

Diptych by John Harbourne. Copyright (c) 2022 by John Harbourne. All rights reserved.+
John Harbourne has made similar drawings of many other noir figures. www.johnharbourneartist.com

Laura

Then the doorbell rang.
Time for one more cigarette.
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
He is not in love with a corpse

Time for one more cigarette.
The venomous drama critic insinuates
He is in love with a corpse.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.

The venomous drama critic knows
He is sane.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.
He thinks she is dead and she thinks he is rude.

Is he sane?
Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
He thinks she is a ghost and she thinks he is rude
When the picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman.

Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
It hasn’t stopped raining.
The picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman:
Gene Tierney in Laura.

It hasn’t stopped raining.
“Dames are always pulling a switch on you,”
Dana Andrews says in Laura.
There was something he was forgetting.

“Dames are always pulling a switch on you.”
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
There was something he was forgetting.
Then the doorbell rang.

-- David Lehman

"Tea for Two" & other duets with Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Bing Crosby et al

Happy Thanksgiving!

Doug Lang, 1941-2022 [by Terence Winch]

My very dear friend Doug Lang, brilliant poet and beloved teacher, passed away at around 11:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 22 Nov. 2022, in his apartment at Springvale Terrace, the assisted living building in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, where he had been a resident for the last five-plus years. His health had taken a turn for the worse in the past month or so, and his legendary resilience failed him this time around.

Doug Lang was born in the town of Swansea in Wales, part of the United Kingdom, on 11 April 1941. His first years on the planet were thus spent as WWII was raging. He had one sibling, his sister Synde, who was about four years younger than Doug. The two were very close, and Synde’s death in 2013 in England affected Doug deeply. The two were raised by their mother under the harshest and most difficult of circumstances. There was often little to eat and, during one particularly rough time, Doug had to miss school for several weeks for want of a pair of shoes.

Doug received a basic education in England, but one of the most remarkable aspects of his biography is the extent to which he educated himself. He was known for his voracious appetite for learning and for his nimble and penetrating intellect. He fell in love with books, movies, and music when he was a boy, and wound up becoming incredibly knowledgeable in these areas and others.

After marrying an American poet Andrea Wyatt in London, Doug settled in the U.S. in 1973. His appealing personality and genial temperament gained him a wide circle of friends, most of whom were deeply impressed by the extent of his knowledge of fiction, poetry, film, music (especially jazz and rock ‘n’ roll), and the visual arts. He had an encyclopedic mind and photographic memory.

When the Corcoran College of Art in DC was looking for a new writing teacher in 1976, Doug was a natural choice. He had taught at an art school on a Greek island in the late ‘60s and had a natural gift for teaching. The Corcoran was also looking for a practicing artist, and Doug had already published two novels by the early ’70s. He was known as a catalyst on the Washington poetry scene.
An accomplished poet himself, he also ran a nationally celebrated poetry reading series in DC at Folio Books in Dupont Circle, attracting many of the leading poets of the day, who were usually paired with a local poet.

The Corcoran hired him, and Doug stayed for the next 37 years, becoming the most loved and respected member of the Corcoran faculty. His colleagues and his thousands of former students felt a tremendous debt to Professor Lang for his prodigious ability as a teacher and his generosity of spirit in all his interactions. In the literary world, he was known as a poet of fierce linguistic energy and technical skill. To his friends, he is an irreplaceable man of wondrous talent. A new selected poems of Doug Lang’s, called In the Works, is slated for imminent publication by DC’s Edge Books.

Doug Lang is survived by his close personal friend Sandra Rottmann, several nieces, nephews, and grand nieces and nephews in the UK, and by his many devoted friends and fellow writers.

A memorial event, in conjunction with the publication of Doug’s new book, is planned for early in 2023.

I talked with Doug every day on the phone & visited him once a week. Even while struggling with short-term memory loss, he remained the best of company---wise, funny, deeply knowledgeable, unpretentious, and charismatic. It's a much more barren world with him not in it.

 

Let's Talk Turkey

"Buffalo" [by Tom Disch]

He knew how he would die. We all know that.
Some day the same as any other he'd be chewing his cud
And ruminating about the larger weather patterns
The clouds spoke of when Whump! like the trump of Doom
He would be stampeding to his death
With the whole country around him, their pounding
Hooves sounding like the drums you sometimes
Heard when the herds of horsemen camped
In some canyon close by, the very canyon it might be
In which he was destined to die.
Aiee! they would cry, or words to that effect,
As they sat by their fires beating on the stretched skin
Of one's relatives, which was their way
Of saying We won! We won! They were
An intolerable presence and he prayed
That someday someone would come, someone
Even nastier, someone even worse than the wolves,
And kill them, level their smelly villages
And cover them with rocks, like the rocks
He would lie on and rot when it came
His time to join the great stampede and die.

May 1, 2008

"Under the pink house" by Misbah Wolf [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Misbah Wolf is a Melbourne based poet. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of QLD. Her most recent collection of poems, Carapace, was published by Vagabond Press earlier this year. "Under the pink house" first appeared in Overland journal, along with another of Misbah's poems, which you can find here.

 

 

Under the Pink House

 

It was pornographic science fiction inside you. You stretched yourself onto the bed

and I was casually stationed as a headless fog. You undressed in the afternoon—the

chimerical atmosphere where chatting women turn into chittering insects. I felt you

scrape your tongue against my chin, the moment of vanishing inside you where I

could leave the forms of your different faces and hear the conversation you really

wanted with me. Your tits sent out whips that lassoed me to the bed, and your

pussy adopted the same penetrating gaze, a cabalistic cipher where occult forces

dimly sounded. Our lips strayed towards edges, idols and fiction, experience and

fruition. The room was pinned with veils, resounding with lengthening shadows

sweating through each syllable, each bluish charge against the inner thigh and 

neck,

accepting that I was not the gentleman you wished me to be. In the centremost

labyrinth of your labia, I unintentionally scried your future and saw echoes of tall

trees in gentle winds, fingers turning pages of burning books with images of hungry

baby birds that would be unlikely figures of your liberation.

 

                                         

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE NOVEMBER 23

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Enjoy Richard Blanco’s poem “America,” which portrays how his family celebrated the holiday.

https://richard-blanco.com/book/city-of-a-hundred-fires/america/

… and Débussy, too: Josephine Tilloy, Thi Mai Nguyen, Lisbeth Gruwez & Claire Chevallier

“Prémisse”, Thi Mai Nguyen. The Princess soliloquizes the “commemoratio dilemma”. A man of infinite jest. Photo © Danny Willems

Etoile du nord and Théatre de la Bastille recently gifted me a little trinity of dance jewels: Josephine Tilloy’s Evila and Thi Mai Nguyen’s Prémisse at Etoile and Lisbeth Gruwez who danced pianist Claire Chevallier’s Débussy’s Piano Works at Bastille.

Keep them all in mind.

Evila and Prémisse were part of Festival ZOA, Zone d’occupation artistique, a woman-centered production effort that is new to me and, at view, full of promise.

Because politics or culture issues tend to come down to positions, they don’t usually work for me as themes in movement art. I say this as a person who supported Bill Clinton’s position on criminal justice and now wonders every night how much of that cop’s weight on George Floyd’s neck was mine.

Anyhow, as poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin noted: “Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone!”. It’s is life experience plus imagination what does that. Movement art is the art of experience plus imagination. So movement art can’t really get across unrealized “positions” or “points-of-view”.

With well-thought out visual choreography and physical talent, Evila and Prémisse manage get to get well beyond positions and points of view to experience shared with spectators and a broad space for imagination. With the same result, like a magician who bears a flame in the palm of her hand, Lisbeth Gruwez manages to turn an interpretation of Débussy’s Piano Works into a moment where personality, material, movement and sound are music.

Josephine Tilloy’s Evila works on the plan of Wildman Fischer’s Merry go round (1968): once you realize that the up and down is intimately linked to the round and round, in the head a light comes on. Tilloy puts onto a carrousel and in harness and swimsuits the three delicate be-tutu-ed dancers who usually go up and down under glass with the minutes and hours on the mantelpiece. The carrousel turns and turns and these objects – they are objects! –  of housewifely charm churn to objects of sexual fascination, females, pole dancers, orderless cluster-fuckers… If I’ve got rollout, scenario and imagination all undone and mixed up, blame the transparency of the choreography. Also its effect: an existential nausée in the sense Sartre meant it – This here here is a construct.

Considering the affinity men and women generally feel for each other, the deliberate, enforced inequality of women and men puzzles me. Apart from forcing humanity into the roles freed-man overseers, camp guards, prisoners and, as Christine & The Queens put it, “Half-ladies”, inequality strangles love.

I think Thi Mai Nguyen’s pointing the baffled affinity from first to last explains a large part of my strong feeling for Prémisse (“Beginning”). The show notes of begin with “Kali est sans limites, s‘éclatant sur la piste de danse. Une main d‘homme la prend, elle le fait danser.” It is a really lovely solo dance performed with (an seeming preternaturally) beautiful body to a choreography that’s meant, I think, as narrative mime.
What I saw on stage was woman discovering desire, then its traps: dress, nakedness, affinity, dance, love … not a relationship… a situation she must, can’t, doesn’t want to, escape. Instead of sleep, she discovers blood and a bodiless male head in her bed … She must compose herself with that… situation, too… turns the dead head on its head, births it, turns the man into her baby, herself from object of love to giver of love – very psychoanalytic. But the long and short of it is that Thi Mai Nguyen’s dance makes a myth for today’s Kali  – paints a dilemma and its impossibilities that grabs the spectator by the throat. Good stuff.

As to Débussy’s Piano Works and its magician.

Gruwez’s “solo” is actually a quartet of pianist Claire Chevallier in play, Débussy’s music, the personality of Chevallier’s Erard pianoforte and the dance between Gruwez herself and Chevallier-the-pianist-at-play.

It’s been a while – and between pandemic, Putin’s war and the rising tempo of climate catastrophes, what a while it’s been! – so I can’t say if Dancing Bob Dylan was the last time I saw Lisbeth Gruwez perform or if it’s just the particular pleasure at the memory that makes me think so. However it may be, the magic she uses for Claire Débussy’s Piano Works is very similar to and has very much the same result as Dylan.

Gruwez has a choreographical sense grown out of what I think of her “casually precise” intensity. I’ve watched her off-stage in a crowd. She’s John Keats’ Empathy, smoking cigarette after cigarette, La Part de l’Autre moving within and away from friends, fans and strangers alike. Her intensity, I think, is made from an uncanny awareness of both what is on her plate and just how it gets eaten: awareness of the qualities of the space around, awareness of the presences of its human and not-human inhabitants, of phenomena happening, awareness of her own proprioceptive processes. It’s this casually precise intensity that makes me remember her dancing Dylan: a process of going from understanding the great poet, dancing his rhythm, seeing his images, to caressing the moment of making.

In Piano Works – Débussy, Gruwez uses her casual precision to show – as a magician shows a miraculous flame burning in the palm of her hand –  pianist Clair Chevallier within the complex of relations of people, things and sounds that shape into “music”.

For my money, in Piano Works, it’s opening the piece by “unsexing” herself and Claire Chevallier that works the initiating spell of the performance. Casually undoing an expectation about the duet, unsexing unlocks other energies: the same effect as Lady Macbeth’s invocation. Other energies make it easy to believe what you want to see, makes seem be.

Other energy enables dramatic tension, which, gives Gruwez the chance to casually and precisely distance herself from her interpretative role to give the performance its autonomy. Gruwez, who has strong natural equilibrium mixed with years of body training, wears a set of tippy-slippy deck shoes to falsify that. As well as the visual dissonance, the resulting slight physical tension has her say to onlookers, “I’m not interpreting Débussy, see. I incidentally heard a snippet of Preludes (or something!) from a window by chance open to the rain – makes me wiggle a little. I’m out for fags, actually”. In other words, forget the magician, look to the palm: there’s Chevallier’s straight back, concentration, her attention, her regard, herself, her bench, her limber fingers listening, hands like bobbins weaving the discerning sound of that ancient, enormous, looming piano. Piano Works – Débussy is itself. The moment you see is its music.

Whether she’s made of sugar and spice and intensity casual and precise, as I’ve suggested, or something even finer, Lisbeth Gruwez is a performer to see.  Be sure to look on her troupe’s site if you’re out exploring in France – you might catch her in one of those surprising local culture spaces. 

Andrzej Wajda: Ashes and Diamonds (1958) [by Lewis Saul]

Creeping authoritarianism. Teetering democracy. Dangerous political leadership.

No, I'm not talking about the U.S. of A. but the centuries of sadness which is synonymous with the historically chopped-up country of POLAND.

Specifically, the 24-hour period (May 8-9, 1945) during which this film takes place and the year it was made -- 1958.

**

Josef Stalin's death in 1953 ushered in a period which is sometimes referred to as the "Stalinist thaw." The ground was still pretty frozen, but a few sprigs were sprouting up in both the Soviet Union and its satellites. Shostakovich enraged the dictator with his Ninth Symphony (1945) which -- instead of a paean to the glorious victory of The Patriotic War -- was a lighthearted, short jokey affair. He saved the good stuff for his Tenth (1953), which at the same time as dealing with the tragedy of the war, also included a biting satirical portrait of the madman.

The Polish October (1956) ushered in a period of astonishing artistic freedom for Polish artists -- a mere three years after the death of Josef Stalin -- we get the outrageously cutting-edge music of Penderecki and Lutoslawski, and a trilogy of war films from the young Andrzej Wajda. [The first two were A Generation (1955) and Kanal (1957), about the Warsaw resistance.]

**

Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) have made a big mistake. In one of the many striking scenes in this film (influenced by Citizen Kane), Andrzej is on the phone with his superior -- Major Florian (Ignacy Machowski). The mistake must be corrected, but not before Wajda shows us the three important characters in deep focus -- Andrzej in the foreground on the phone; Maciek desperately trying to get Andrzej's attention and the survivor of the mistake in the far background, Szczuka (Waclaw Zastrzezynski).


Maciek -- looking so cool in his sunglasses (a result of spending so much time in the Warsaw sewers, he casually informs us) -- is the central character. He represents the anti-Communist freedom fighter, but Communism and the Communists (along with the aristocracy) all saddle up to the bar together. [Wajda had the censors so confused that they passed the film (to much subsequent consternation) after a few rounds of vodka.]

Drewnowski (Bogumil Kobiela) -- the aide to the mayor, Swiecki (Aleksander Sewruk) -- seems to be swinging on the hinges of the door between the two sides. He had big prospects for advancement with the Communists, but blows it all by purposefully getting stinking drunk at the big banquet he was supposed to be organizing. His transformation of a fire extinguisher to a gun is one of the more hilarious moments in the film.

Last, but certainly not least, is the gorgeous Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska). She is all women, confounding the men's political work by intense, focused love. In the end, Maciek is obviously much more interested in her than any political theatre.

But alas ...

Cybulski

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Nine): C.T. Salazar [by Angela Ball]

FORGIVE YOURSELF FOR SEEING IT WRONG

 

     under the rosequartz clouds even a man glimmers

     like a bride his hatchet a bouquet       I am waiting

     for his tears to turn pearl      ache and its flag

     of unfurling twilight   the telephone wires make a strange harp

     over our heads  and if we weren’t here who

     would talk about heaven         root-ridden and a little afraid

     of the notion that light has a tendency to keep going 

     like my father on his motorcycle                    maybe I’ve spent too much

     time listening to the distant  rain on the rooftops of people who may

     kill each other and believed it’s not too late for me 

     to make this about love                       the man in the field and his farmtruck 

     even now I hear him his voice such a split of lark and lemon 

     this crooked intimacy how the last train mixes its smoke with the dusk

     and the cattle bed down around the chevy     taking it

     as one of their own     light sinking unable to chime and helpless to touch

     --C.T. Salazar                                                            

From Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking

This poem was written in wrestling with the strange and surreal violence that comes with a loved one experiencing rapidly developing Alzheimer's—C.T. Salazar

C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Books 2022) was named a 2023 finalist for the Theodore Roethke Memorial Award. His poems have most recently appeared in West Branch, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Nine): C.T. Salazar

C.T. Salazar’s “Forgive Yourself for Seeing it Wrong” is a poem of ructions and unions, of doubted and confirmed precision, of the tearing of heaven. It begins with surprising and lovely “rosequartz clouds,” a man (a farmer) astonishingly like a “bride,” his hatchet (violent, indispensable farm tool) “a bouquet” as the poet speaker waits for “his tears to turn pearl”—another unlooked-for transformation. Where do the tears come from? Like so much in this poem, we take it on faith that such a man of rough labor would have them, would fly “ache and its flag of unfurling twilight.” It’s a world, we are given to know, of scarce-acknowledged sadness, where, in another astonishing image, “the telephone wires make a strange harp over our heads.” People are speaking with one another, unseen and unheard, untouched by the thrumming solitude here, a solitude that somehow “makes” the poet’s lone voice, joined with a “we” that includes the reader, “talk about heaven," but are “root-ridden and a little afraid / of the notion that light has a tendency to keep going . . . .” Suddenly, for the first time, the ethereal summons the personal: “like my father on his motorcycle.” We are given a double beat to think about this before we are told, “maybe I have spent too much / time listening to the distant rain on the rooftops of people who may / kill each other”—what a telling evocation of romanticism and its antidote. I think that Salazar can be likened to Ashbery in his radically inconsistent meditations that surprise us out of one way of thinking and into another, and often back again; that navigate between ordinary life and a lustrous transcendence.

After more thought beats, the poem turns again: “and believed it’s not too late for me / to make this about love” [beat beat beat] –should we believe it now is “too late”?  The poem retrenches to its plainest scene: “the man in the field and his farmtruck.” But then it swoops outward into memory: “even now I hear him his voice such a split of lark and lemon” (this a voice we taste), “this crooked intimacy” a style of affection created in its clash of words. C.T. Salazar’s moving poem ends in powerful mixture of involuntary, mistaken, and thwarted intimacies that could be the story of our lives, telling “how the last train mixes its smoke with the dusk / and the cattle bed down around the Chevy  taking it / as one of their own   light sinking unable to chime and helpless to touch”—the cattle’s assumption as strangely affecting as Elizabeth Bishop’s famous moose's when she ("It's a she!") “sniffs at" at the traveling bus’s “hot hood.”

The final three words, "helpless to touch," radiate among light and the poet and us—sad and glad to be included in this poem as it passes understanding.

-Angela Ball

Kit Robinson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Eric Breitbard

_______________________________________________________

This Poem

 

This poem is incredible
You should immediately memorize it and tell it to all your friends
If you read this poem over and over
You will be better able to read and understand other poems
Any poem!
Life goes on and off
Death goes off and on
Shit happens
Just like in this poem
Which is like an elixir or vaccine

Sometimes this poem is like overhearing a conversation in the next yard
A moment of relaxation
In your otherwise busy day
Other times it’s more like thinking about something
Then thinking about something else
It never stops
Even when interrupted by a passing train
In that sense, this poem is immortal
In so far as it is always on the move
To no particular end

When you dream a poem
The poem is often odd
Weird, asyntactic or wild
This poem is totally normal
It teaches one how to live normally
Under the most abnormal of conditions
Put one foot in front of the other
Is how the ancestors put it
They even put it into this poem
So that anyone would be able to see what this poem of our life on earth is made of

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kit Robinson is a Bay Area poet, writer, and musician. He is the author of Quarantina (Lavender Ink, 2022), Thought Balloon (Roof, 2019), Leaves of Class (Chax, 2017), Marine Layer (BlazeVOX, 2015), and 20 other books of poetry. His essays on poetics, art, travel, and music appear online at Jacket2, Open Space and Nowhere. He plays Cuban tres guitar in the charanga band Calle Ocho.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                Autobiography, collage by Ray DiPalma ca. 2015

A poem from Tony Hoagland on his birthday [ed. Terence Winch]

 

My Father’s Vocabulary

 

In the history of American speech,

he was born between “Dirty Commies” and “Nice tits.”

 

He worked for Uncle Sam,

and married a dizzy gal from Pittsburgh with a mouth on her.

 

I was conceived in the decade

between “Far out” and “Whatever”;

 

at the precise moment when “going all the way”

turned into “getting it on.”

 

Sometimes, I swear, I can feel the idioms flying around inside my head

like moths left over from the Age of Aquarius.

 

Or I hear myself speak and it feels like I am wearing

a no-longer-groovy cologne from the seventies.

 

In those days I was always trying to get a rap session going,

and he was always telling me how to clean out the garage.

 

Our last visit took place in the twilight zone of a clinic,

between “feeling no pain” and “catching a buzz.”

 

For that occasion I had carefully prepared

a suitcase full of small talk

 

—But he was already packed and going backwards,

with the nice tits and the dirty commies,

 

to the small town of his vocabulary,

somewhere outside of Pittsburgh.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

For more on Tony Hoagland (19 Nov 1953--23 Oct 2018):

Wikipedia

Poetry Foundation

 

 

"Won't somebody tell me where's my Bess?" (Sinatra at the Waldorf, 1945)

Recorded for Columbia February 2, 1946.
Sang at the Waldorf-Astoria's Wedgwood Room, 1945.

<<<
Sinatra Takes Over Wedgewood Room and Wins Crowd Despite His Illness

The quality of laryngitis is strained these nights at the Waldorf-Astoria's Wedgwood Room where Frank Sinatra is making a belated start on a short engagement. It is painfully obvious that he shouldn't be singing until he has had proper rest yet he sang 14 numbers Wednesday night, the concluding one "Old Man River."

Ordinarily the slim technician of modern song-phrasing is in his element with a large band behind him-wasn't he once a swing band vocalist? And Dick Stable's 22-piece band, featuring numerous violins and a harp, lends splendid support, but the voice that has hypnotized millions was like a butterfly in a whirlpool.

It was a masterful performance, nevertheless. .  .

*

After rendering "My Romance," from the still-remembered "Jumbo," and "When I Marry Sweet Lorraine," he pulled the first surprise of the evening with "Bess, Where Is My Bess." A haunting, lovely tune, he sanit very well. >> f
rom Tips on Tables, by Robert W. Dana, Nov. 30, 1945. 

Milton Berle (by Mitch Sisskind)

Young lady, does the name Milton Berle
Have any particular significance for you? 
Does the name Milton Berle ring a bell?
I thought not, so I've got news for you.
Milton Berle in the early 1950s almost
Single-handedly multiplied the number 
Of American television sets from only
500,000 to 26 million of the boob tubes;
Without Milton Berle there would be 
No television as we know it, let alone
The TikToc, FlipTop, or what have you.
Alas, the wheel of life is ever turning.
You know nothing of Milton Berle. 
How about Cosmo Iacavazzi?

Happy 10th Anniversary Todos Santos Writers Workshop!

The Todos Santos Writers Workshop is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, with the winter 2023 session running January 28 - February 4 in Todos Santos, Baja California, Mexico.  Poet, author, journalist Christopher Merrill (above) is returning once again to lead TSWW’s poetry workshop, and there are still a few slots open! Details at www.todossantoswritersworkshop.com

And in case you need convincing, here's a series of posts about the wonderful experience that writers have had at this magical place. 

Grab your slot and pack your bags! 

Ad-Verse Reactions: Poets / writers Jerome Sala and Jack Skelley quiz each other on advertising, pop culture, late-stage Capitalism and monsters

Both Jerome Sala and Jack Skelley have just released “new and selected” volumes. Both writers have had careers in advertising and PR. Both use pop culture (and many other related subject matters) as thematic material. Now both are interviewing each other.

Jerome Sala’s book is How Much? New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books). Jack Skelley’s book is Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing (BlazeVOX books). Other works by Jerome include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books) and The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier). Jack recently released Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press), and Semiotext(e) will publish his “secretly legendary” novel Fear of Kathy Acker in April 2023. Sala lives in New York City, Skelley in Los Angeles.

Jerome Sala Though your poems use pop characters sometimes decades old, they never seem dated. I’ve noticed something similar when doing readings of my own work. I can read a poem that contains the pop culture of years ago, and yet people respond to it as if it’s written yesterday. This suggests that as much as culture has changed, something has stayed the same. What are your theories on the currency of your work?

Jack Skelley. It’s funny how popular culture, long considered ephemeral, has persisted and infiltrated high culture. And not just Boomer-era figures, either. (Boomer culture is rightly condemned, I think, for its domination.). But more recent stars, moguls, etc., if iconic enough, may attain “pop archetype” status, despite the atomization of the culture at large. It has something to do with an inherent, trans-historical, human need to idolize. So I am inspired by current figures too: Divas such as Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus and Lana del Rey appear in my book. The attempt is not simply to cash-in on their name recognition – not that there’s anything wrong with that! – but to extract from them – or even assign to them – an imaginative resonance.

Jack Skelley: You milk current trends and icons as well. How Much? has meditations on sitcoms, a wide range of movies, sports stars (Charles Barkley) and, perhaps most prominently commercial products. A series of entertaining poems analyze the marketing missteps of Coke products. How do you explain your attraction to these themes?

Jerome Sala: The Oulipo Group of writers, who designed a collection of wildly creative writing experiments, devised one called “translexical translation.” The way it works is that you recast any text in a new vocabulary, such as rewriting a classic in the language of today (their example was a piece entitled “Skinhead Hamlet”). When I read this, I realized a lot of my own poems did something similar but on a conceptual, rather than strictly linguistic, level. Instead of philosophizing about the meaning of life, for example, I have written poems debating the meaning of Coke, as you mentioned. I’m fascinated by how the spiritual values of our world have been secularized by media, commodification, and simulation. To explore this, I like to take what seem like the most fleeting instances of culture and write about them as if they were holy monuments, carved in stone. I think the same sort of dialectic, a mock-heroic mode really, is the source of the humor in both of our works.

Jerome Sala. We have both been professional writers of ads, PR, web “content”,etc., rather than follow the usual path of the poet/teacher. What are some of the ways this has affected your work? And how has writing poems and fictions influenced your business writing?

Jack Skelley. Like you, I draw a lot of absurdist humor from “ad-speak.” But also, on a formalistic level, there is an epigrammatic concision to good ad copy. For me, the most impactful taglines are the shortest: seven words or fewer of pure definition or motivation. (I tend to break taglines into two types: definitional or inspirational types.) And although I love a poem or story that veers into wild, uncharted spaces, I also want every word to count. Which is why puns and wordplay – where a turn of phrase packs more than one meaning, providing a little brain-orgasm – are so important in both verse and advertising. I also like to toy with marketing forms. My poem “Athena del Rey” is composed as a press release, for example.

But I want to hear your thoughts on the same question… Can you detail how your creative writing has influenced your business writing and vice versa?

Jerome Sala: Somewhere in John Dewey’s classic Art as Experience, he writes that advances in one art are sometimes accomplished by borrowing the forms and practices of another. It’s fun to take this idea literally. So, like you, I’ve borrowed the forms of advertising for poems. I’ve incorporated TV commercial formats (“Variations on a Theme by Subaru”), sweepstakes letters (“Dear Potential Millionaire”), and product proposals (“The Individuals Club”). I used to write a form of advertising called “Direct Response,” which asks for an action in a blatant, almost confrontational way. In keeping with this approach, sometimes I dare my own poetic writing to be as direct as possible. As for my business writing, I’ve employed many poetic practices—such as elaborate, sometimes bizarre metaphors. These work especially well as lead paragraphs in “thought leadership” articles.

Jerome Sala. One of the joys of Interstellar Theme Park is how it not only makes fun of pop excess but celebrates it. Some poems are dark and dystopian, others ecstatic and utopian—and many with aspects of both. I wonder if the book is saying our culture could go either toward doom or heaven. Care to comment on this mix of moods?

Jack Skelley. The tension between dystopia and utopia constantly vexes.  As a supposedly enlightened (post) Modernist, I feel a responsibility to confront suffering and existential anguish. The darkness is always there. And yet something guides me (and many others) back to transcendence and resolution. If you look through the literary canon, it’s an ever-present thematic mixture. Percy Shelley wrote some of the most lyrical poesy of the Romantics. But it’s in the service of hardcore political, social and sexual liberation. Riffing on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in my title poem “Interstellar Theme Park,” I wrote the line, “I want thick, chewy anarchy in a candy-colored shell,” which kind of sums up this conflict. At the opposite end of the cycle, there are dark Modernists such as Samuel Beckett. But even his plays circle – endlessly, nauseatingly sometimes – around a yearning for transcendence.

Jerome Sala. In a poem like “The Gospel of Elon” you rewrite a Gnostic myth using contemporary business and pop culture. This creates a satiric tone. At the same time, it translates a mystic text into our contemporary, secular culture. I’m fascinated by the integration of the visionary and the mundane in your writing. Your work is both funny and illuminating. Are you, like Blake, following “the road of excess to the palace of wisdom”?

Jack Skelley. That Blake reference – from The Proverbs of Hell – is classic. There certainly are palatial excesses in business rhetoric. I mock for many reasons. Priests of money such as Elon Musk drape themselves in false grandeur. And the language of Gnostic Gospels gets wildly grandiose. Psychedelic. Among Gnosticism’s spectacular tropes are long lists of higher beings. One passage of my “Gospel of Elon” poem adds brand names:

                        Metatron was also called Enoch,

                        The Lesser Yahweh, Yaldabaoth,

                        Verizon, Celebrex, Alcatel,

                        Lucent and 700 other titles.

Jack Skelley. Of course, Jerome, you explode the language of business and advertising much farther than I do. A major section of How Much? includes your “Corporate Sonnets.” These 30 formally satisfying and amusing poems layer clichés to gather gravitas. And their high irony channels sonneteers from Edmund Spencer to Ted Berrigan. Can you tell how you landed on this cool concept?

Jerome Sala: I remember an art director once told me, “I’m going to strangle the next person who tells me to ‘think outside of the box.’” Moments like that wake your ears up to the degree that everyday working life is structured around cliché. A line made of two clichés instantly came to me— “I don’t know if I still have the bandwidth / To think outside of the box…” and I wrote a short poem composed of such expressions. People enjoyed it so much I thought why not a sonnet sequence derived from such language.  When I read these poems aloud, people who worked in offices or freelance burst out laughing. Some even thanked me, as if these poems were a sort of public service. In fact, people from all types of work have told me their daily life is filled with such jargon. Those who work in factories, academic departments, even social work could all do their own version of “Corporate Sonnets.” I think hearing such language formalized helps free you from its influence. Work occupies most of our waking life. Shouldn’t it be the center of our poetry?

Jack Skelley. Extending the gleeful mockery of corporate speak, several of your poems address economic issues, and tie them back to the subject of art or poetry. One example is “The Second Coming of the Stimulus Checks.” Both communism and capitalism are targets. Tell us about your attraction to commodities, monetary policy, etc? Does it spring from political positions or what?

Jerome Sala: In that poem, I was fascinated by how quickly the shift happened from one kind of economic policy to another. Before the pandemic, we were in the era of neo-liberalism—austerity, entrepreneurialism, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, “rugged individual” ideology. These doctrines were preached obnoxiously from all corners of the culture. Then, when the pandemic hit, even the most rightwing economists seemed to realize the economy needed to be fed cash, and lots of it (“restorative financial yoga”) if we were to avoid a meltdown. In the poem, I was making fun of the old entrepreneurial ideologies of right wingers, but I was also getting impatient with more leftist thinkers—with whom I usually identify. The reason: even though the old neoliberalism was dead, many couldn’t let go of it. There was very little theorizing about the new post-Keynesianism, accompanied by loudmouth authoritarians. Also, I was fascinated by MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) that, instead of seeing money as “evil,” was now exploring its use as a social good. Wallace Stevens once quipped that “money is a kind of poetry.” I think poems inspired by that idea can become subversive in interesting ways.

Jerome Sala. How have L.A. and Disneyland inspired your work? It seems these locales, as “Disneyland Dreams” suggests, are especially adept at blending dream with reality. Your writing suggests there’s an inherently trippy quality to the city. Can you elaborate?

Jack Skelley. Oh man. I could go on forever about the Los Angeles creative milieu. For starters, this is where I was born and mainlined the “dream machine” entertainment ethos of TV, movies and music. Growing up here – where location shoots are a daily occurrence – gives one a healthy, behind-the-scenes snark towards the business. But the impact of Disney and theme parks – what I call “Disneyfication” in my Author’s Intro – goes deeper. My first childhood memory is seeing Mickey Mouse and Pluto wall decorations from my baby crib. That’s some powerful pre-verbal branding! And to this day I dream variations on dark rides and theme parks. These archetypal forms mirror parts of the psyche. The book title, Interstellar Theme Park, satirically posits the amusement park as a metaphor for cosmology, the essentially literary act of creation. I nearly included a second epigraph: Paul Valery’s belief that “the universe is built on a plan, the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.”

That symmetrical plan manifests as a Jungian, mandala-like map of Disneyland. In this context, much of my stuff references the universe as an ultimate narrative – a Divina Commedia… accent on comedy.

Jack Skelley. Tell us about your literary influences. I love how many of your poems make a rhetorical argument about a certain topic, often in a compressed, conversational style. Not unlike Frank O’Hara, Joe Brainard and others of the New York School. But there are also poets and writers who doubled as copywriters. You even clued me in to Beat poet Lew Welch, who is rumored to have come up with the fantastic tagline “Raid Kills Bugs Dead!” Is this a genre?

Jerome Sala: I seem to remember the philosopher Theodor Adorno once commenting that the challenge Brecht set for himself was to create didactic art in an age that was suspicious of it. The milieu in which my own writing came of age has looked down on the “message” poem. This inspired me to try to go the other way—to write poems where “message” was blatant—and still work as poetry. “Message” poems are my own version of “agit-prop,” a genre of writing that was abandoned after the 60s. And I think there is a connection with commercial writing. Vladimir Mayakovsky, aside from being a revolutionary poet, was also, of course, a copywriter. I think he saw the discipline, a sort of writing technology really, as excellent training for literary pursuits. Add to that the fact that poems are ads for themselves: they’ve got to sell you on reading them!

Jack Skelley. Lightning Round: 15 words max per question.…

Who is your favorite monster?

Jack: Bride of Frankenstein. What a hottie!

Jerome: Godzilla—who reminds us to stop screwing around with the planet.

Can drugs and poetry get along? If yes, which drugs?

Jerome: I rely on dense philosophical books and meditation—great mental highs.

Jack: Lately I steal from psychedelic botanist Terence McKenna. Mushrooms spoke to him.

Who is your favorite pop artist?

Jerome: St. Vincent—Bowie… at least for today!

Jack: Dua Lipa. Such great remixes! Also for today at least.

How do you use social media to market your writing?

Jerome: I’m old-fashioned. I still have a blog: https://espressobongo.typepad.com/

Jack: On Instagram I’m @HelterSkelley. My kids will disown me if I join Tik-Tok.

"Ode to the Other Woman's Ass" [by Denise Duhamel]

Ode to the Other Woman's Ass

You have occupied my husband’s imagination
when he otherwise might have been bored.
You gave him pretty shapes to behold
at the mall, in the supermarket, when he peered
from behind his Newsweek at the airport.
Oh thong-wearer, the strings rising
from your crack like bird’s wings in flight.
Oh pencil skirt, snug jeans, short shorts,
bikini bottoms, capris and the circles
they contain.  Oh billboard buttocks,
magazine tushes, movie star derrières.
Oh porno fannies, soft core rumps,
the heinies of whores, the gluteus maximus
of the girl-next-door.
                              Oh Asses of Other Women,
our relationship, I know, has not been one of ease.
For years I feared you, feared that my husband
would follow your wiggle and leave me
for your high-branch peach, your airbrushed apple.
I also feared the eyes of your men, their animal glances,
their whistles when you were not with them.
I have put up with their flirting, as I hope you put up
with my husband’s.  If you are like me, I know you will not
always like it, but on a bad day it can almost be welcome,
remind you of what can sometimes be lost
in a long marriage.
                            Oh Asses of Other Women,
you are beautiful, with or without a stranger’s validation.
You know that, and your men know it too.
Yet, if you are feeling kind,
please ask the face attached to you
to humor my husband with a smile
should he look up to find eyes
and when your husband looks my way
I will try to do the same.

from Ecotone and from the archive, December 2, 2012

And here is an interview with Denise Duhamel:
https://inspicio.fiu.edu/interviews/denise-duhamel/

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: NOVEMBER 16, 2022

In the latest issue of Persimmon Tree, Cynthia Hogue curates a suite of poems on “Lament, Rage, and Resistance” focusing on the voices of second wave feminist poets Karen Brennan, Aliki Barnstone, Patricia Spears Jones, Kathleen Winter, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Frances Payne Adler, Monifa Love, Pamela Uschuk, Ronna Magy, Mary Gilliland, and Tess Gallagher. Check out Tess’s exquisite poem.

THE POETS DECIDE TO KEEP THE MOON

Although the general imaginative capacity
might seem to have been plundered by a man
having set foot on the moon, poets decided,
without deciding, to just keep dropping it
into their poems as if nothing much had
happened. They let it shine down on lovers
as an ancient power and, in the bedtime stories
of children, you still had to say goodnight
to it. My part Cherokee mother was alive

at the time this man-step took
place. I remember her black hair falling
to her waist like a horse-hair shawl when
she took it in: “So a man walked on the moon,”
she said. “They have been walking on women
for years and haven’t discovered them. I
think the moon is safe.” She could be severe,
like someone who would leave you to die

on the mountain when your time came. “The moon
carried your great-grandmother out of a river once
when it flooded her bed in the night,” she said.
“She climbed on its back and it floated her
to shore.” Then my mother went back to her
astonishment that while men could walk on the moon
they continued to walk on women, years into
years, moons into moons, without realizing
step into step, they were on sacred
soil, the far off flesh of their birth into death into

birth mothers. We sat silent together
trying to take in such ignorance and star-fall.
Soon it was time for breakfast. The moon
had forgotten us altogether. I shook out some
Cheerios into our bowls, those dependable moons
with holes in the middle that miraculously
float in milk. We took up our spoons
like two planetary insurgents, women
brave enough, every day, for the journey.

You can read all the poems here:

https://persimmontree.org/special-issue-2022/poetry/

"Days at the Races" [by Boris Dralyuk]

Days at the Races

“Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.”

            — Groucho Marx

Away they go, with their outlandish names,
saddled with human baggage, desperate wagers —
enough to make a thoroughbred go lame,
be it a strapping colt or spry old stager.
Away they go, with Monday in the lead,
and Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday gaining speed.
Friday and Saturday, poor things, are off the bridle,
while Sunday, bless its heart, is simply idle.
Some like to be there — tremble at the crack
of every whip, eat dust, bathe in the lather
and feel the press of flesh. Me? I would rather
keep my distance, make my bets off-track.
Each week I pony up a little dough,
although I seldom win, or place, or even show.

First published in Raritan. Photo credit: Jennifer Croft.