Posted by The Best American Poetry on November 09, 2024 at 05:00 PM in Music, Sinatra | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The word means fleshy in a sensual, feminine way
though sometimes it just means extra-large.
It’s a word you may not know if you’re
not from New York but from the heartland,
the prairie, the plains. Let me illustrate.
Michael, the Yankees’ play-by-play man,
announcing a pitching change,
says the reliever has “a zaftig ERA,”
and the former player in the booth,
a goyische guy with a yiddishe name (Cone)
has a puzzled look on his Kansas-in-August
punim. “What,” Michael says,
“you never heard of zaftig?” And Cone,
humbled, mumbles, “Maybe in English class.”
-- David Lehman
photo from Mad Men: Christine Hendricks and Elizabeth Moss.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on November 08, 2024 at 05:00 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Sick of your compatriots after months of gazing anxiously into their inscrutable faces? Thinking of Paris as a place where you might get away from all that? It’s not all a bad idea. Remember, though, that, here-below, in the hell nobody’s yet out of, a body’s only defense against reality is absorption in something interesting.
Thus disabused, a body may, for a while, calmly say goodbye to the home front with a visit to an interesting exhibit called Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen, a life-time retrospective of the sculpture of Hans Josephsohn at the Musée de l’art modern de Paris.
It’s hard to find an adjective to describe Josephson’s work. He kept himself to himself pretty much; he has been little shown outside Switzerland. Albert Oehlen, a contemporary multi-materials artist who first came to attention as an art scene bad boy in Germany in the 1980s, and is curator of the exhibit, discovered Josephsohn’s work when he visited Kesselhaus Josephsohn, a dedicated storage and display space. Kesselhaus Josephsohn was founded in 2003 as part of the Sitterwerk arts and culture complex in St Gallen, Switzerland, where Oehlen lives. Oehlen’s adjective is to organize the show around the sculptor’s life-process of creation: chronological, closing with a totem by contemporary sculptor Rebecca Warren (b. 1964) - taken from Oehlen’s personal collection. Josephsohn’s all there, Oehlen’s adjective says, words just get in the way.
Oehlen’s right.
I was a little breathless when I got to the top of the stair where the exhibit begins. When I looked up, I stopped wheezing to goggle breathless: morsels of whole sense, visual haikus. Haikus, haikus everywhere and nothing to do but look. This Hans Josephsohn guy is about how eyes make feelings, processes of creation.
In plaster or bronze, bits of wall, classic-shape kores, faces and figures capture visual expectation and form. A little section of stone wall full enough image to make signs enough to make portents… But then, it’s a stone wall, natural, made, size, rock pieces, rock types, cracks, fissures, surfaces, fractures, filler, place. It’s a stone wall. I see not so much “essence” as the fleeting sense of the whole thing.
From beginning to end, I had the feeling that I was noticing each thing for the first time. Shape, texture, relief, light, associate into visual clues into perception, into posture (movement) into character, into personality. Toward the end I was looking at heads were mysterious, maybe ancient, because their personality had been lost to time.
If it’s hard to find a single adjective to define the work, it’s even more difficult describe the feeling that Hans Josephsohn and the experience of his work inspire in me.
Born in Konigsberg in 1920, Josephsohn died in Zurich in 2012. As a Jew in post-1933 Germany, the boy was refused entry to his local art school. In 1938, he got a scholarship to study in Florence. He arrived just in time to be expelled under Mussolini’s Leggi Razziali. Fleeing to Switzerland, he found a friend in sculptor Otto Müller (1905-1993) before he was interned at the start of the world war in 1939. Josephsohn began working again in 1943. In a film about him and his work, he remarks that he has never visited Auschwitz, where his family was presumably murdered as he began his career; he was afraid a memorial might distract attention from them.
Although this is the first Josephsohn exhibition in France (and perhaps in Europe outside of Switzerland), the contemporary artist and culture activist Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) featured certain of Josephsohn’s sculptures in Third Mind, a 2007 group show of contemporary artists at Palais de Tokyo. Rondinone wanted to build a heritage frame for the younger generation he was featuring.
From all this, my feeling creates Josephsohn as a created artist’s elder artist, genius honored by posthumous recognition rather than cold cash and a coffee. Josephsohn was sandwiched into the helpless tragedy of human existence both by natural routine,
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
Poor Solomon Grundy
… and a need to work and work and work, some work to keep thought at bay, some work to get the expression of vision just right. Like Emily Dickinson,
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –
None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –
________
Properly called “Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen”, the life-time retrospective is part of a triptych exhibition called “Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique/Josephsohn - Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices”: a museum-wide sweep of history, high art and contemporary inclusion culture. It runs through 16 February 2025 at Musée de l’art modern de Paris.
Posted by Paul Tracy DANISON on November 08, 2024 at 09:22 AM in Art, Beyond Words, Feature, Paris Performance Calendar, Tracy Danison, Paris correspondent | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Contemporary art
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Posted by The Best American Poetry on November 08, 2024 at 09:00 AM in Feature, Music | Permalink | Comments (0)
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I keep trying to figure out how we arrived here, and what country and planet we are now living in/on. When did this all begin? I grew up in the 60's in the midst of massive social change with integration and women's liberation and the Vietnam War protests and Martin Luther King and JFK and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Ram Dass and Timothy Leary. It was the Age of Aquarius, of peace and love and expanded consciousness. It was also the beginning of the end of the New Deal Republicans. I remember Barry Goldwater, whom my parents described as a political outlier with his extremely conservative and libertarian agenda and his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of
1964 . . .
I love this poem that takes me back to the 60's.
For the Slip’N Slide
by George Bilgere
For the WHAM-O Manufacturing Company
which in 1961 invented the Slip’N Slide.
For Brenda Harris’s shady back yard
with its long fairway of soft grass where she
and her sister whose name is now lost
set up the Slip’N Slide and attached it to the hose
under the burning summer sky of East LA.
How Brenda and her sister and I ran
in our swimsuits, took a flying leap, and skidded,
screaming bloody murder on our tummies.
How we did this ten thousand times, howling
our Tarzan cries and never tiring of it. For Brenda,
who invented the Double Decker, whereby
the two of us would run, Brenda just behind me,
and I would belly flop onto my stomach
and she would land on my back and we streaked
across the yard out of control and smashed
into her mother’s hydrangeas. For her mother,
who didn’t get mad. Who at lunch time put out
a pitcher of iced lemonade or Kool-Aid
and a bunch of Velveeta and Wonder Bread sandwiches
on the table under its green umbrella and we kids
sat there eating like royalty. How nothing
was better than those Wonder Bread sandwiches.
For the Safeway supermarket down the road,
which employed Brenda’s father in the produce department,
where he earned the salary that paid for the Slip’N Slide.
How he would fill a couple of shopping bags
with day-old lettuce and carrots and oranges
and onions and radishes and potatoes
destined for the dumpster behind the Safeway
and leave them on the front porch of our house
where my mother would find them when she got home
from her job as a guard at Fontana Women’s Prison,
the only work she could find after my father died
of booze and left her with the three kids
and a falling apart little stucco house. How
accepting the day-old produce hurt her
even more than working at the women’s prison
and collecting food stamps because in her former life
as socialite wife of a well-to-do drunk
she had employed people like Brenda’s father,
who entered from the back door when they came to work.
For the women incarcerated in Fontana Women’s Prison,
whose crimes, whatever they were, gave my mother a job.
How she never thanked him. For that summer
under the cobalt LA sky, where a place
called Watts had yet to ignite, and our Tarzan cries
echoed in the yard and the cold lemonade
made our heads ache and the days went on
forever, the Slip’N Slide like an endless river
which arrived one day at a fork which none of us
could see coming, and Brenda and her sister,
her mother and her father drifted off
into a place called African America,
and my mother and sisters and I drifted off
into something called gated communities,
the Slip’N Slide, the Wonder Bread sandwiches,
the bags of groceries long forgotten.
For Brenda, and the Double Decker that summer
a lifetime ago, and how the two of us now
keep on journeying deeper and deeper
into a country growing stranger,
less recognizable, more lonely every day.
Posted by Nin Andrews on November 07, 2024 at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
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Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.
from The Liberal Imagination
>>>
I would like to read an essay that takes us link by link from "enlightened interest" to pity, then to wisdom, and finally to the dictatorial will of the arrogant intellect. The essay should note that the writer includes himself in the liberal community he criticizes; his use of "we," "us," and "our" are not projections of a self that would speak for all; on the contrary, Trilling implicates himself in the tendency he addresses. It is possible that no one could be less in fashion than Trilling, but I turn to him now, as to very few others, in my effort to grapple with seemingly incomprehensible events. I find his essays go far to elucidate, ahead of time it seems, some of the crises that have dealt our culture blows that feel fatal. -- DL
from the archive; first posted by The Best American Poetry on September 09, 2019 at 09:28 AM.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on November 07, 2024 at 09:28 AM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, Spontaneous Aphorisms | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Tough day to be thinking about poetry, let alone Australian poetry.
Luckily, John Forbes has a poem for just about every occasion.
To the Bobbydazzlers
American poets!
you have saved
America from
its reputation
if not its fate
& you saved me
too, in 1970
when I first
breathed freely
in Ted Berrigan’s
Sonnets, escaping
the talented earache of Modern
Poetry.
Sitting
on the beach I
look towards you
but the curve
of the Pacific
gets in the way
& I see stars
instead knocked
out by your poems
American poets,
the Great Dead
are smiling
in your faces.
I salute their
luminous hum!
Posted by Thomas Moody on November 06, 2024 at 09:25 AM in Australia, Feature, Thomas Moody | Permalink | Comments (2)
Tags: American Poetry, John Forbes, Thomas Moody
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Today, on the 16th anniversary of his death, I am thinking of my dear friend James Liddy. He was born and raised in Ireland (though his mother was born in New York), but spent much of his adult life as an English professor at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We first made each other’s acquaintance via the USPS in 1973, and corresponded frequently thereafter until his death on 5 November 2008. We were fans of each other’s work—I wrote the entry on James for The Dictionary of Irish Literature and he wrote one on me for The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Below is a short piece on his work that I wrote for a festschrift called Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice: A Tribute to James Liddy (ed. Michael S. Begnal, Galway, Ireland: Arlen House, 2006).
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James Liddy: Real Ideas from Living
There is no turning in the widening gyre, no sailing to Byzantium (except by allusion), no digging metaphors out of the Ulster bog. That’s not what goes on in James Liddy’s universe. Nor is the language he has invented a close relation to that of the stately anthology pieces of the Yeatsian-Heaneyan Irish mainstream. Liddy is cruising along in a very different vessel, one full of leaks and misdirection, but often making for a more exciting ride.
One reason for this is that James Liddy is the most American of Irish poets, his work clearly freed from worry about his place in the limited-membership ranks of the Irish Literary Establishment. There is a liberating, off-handed abandon to his poems, much more Whitman than WBY. But he is also funny (“I Hear the Wife of the Governor of Wisconsin Singing”) and in this way is more like New York School (O’Hara, Ashbery, Ted Berrigan) than anything found in the self-mythologizing of Yeats, the sincere expansiveness of Whitman, or the authoritative meaningfulness of Heaney. In some ways, Liddy is a closer relative to Oscar Wilde (“I want to find the Wildeness of everything”) and Allen Ginsberg (“Ginsberg bestowed liberation”) than he is even to Jack Spicer or Paddy Kavanagh. Pleasure, most often an extract of sex or alcohol, is always near at hand in his poems. The language shortcuts to the action, whether sexual, aesthetic, or spiritual.
Many of his poems are letters to friends, as many of his letters to friends are poems. He can’t seem to help himself:
I am in the waves of drink and love and drowning:
I wish the first stayed in the ocean the second in Ireland
and the last in Arcadia. The last is driving me to the others,
not for so long in my recorded history has this weary indoors heart been
so massaged.
[letter dated December 19, 1978]
You’ll be glad to know that my soul is being
looked after. I have discovered a huge church, across
the river, in a neighborhood of small taverns and
stores. It’s Polish, it has Polish services, Polish
confession. But every Saturday at 9:30 it has Latin
Mass. But there’s always a problem for a Christian.
The Saturday bars close at 3:30 a.m. Not enough
Time for the Lord’s grace to enter and settle in me.
After the soul the body.
[letter, March 1978]
“Or there is a poetry,” Liddy writes in another letter (“Open Letter to the Young About Patrick Kavanagh”), “in which real ideas from living come at us. This kind can be a direct statement with a reference behind to the story of what happened to the poet. It relies on the mind staying alive, on the man making the statement keeping his emotional intelligence alive.”
Direct but mysterious statements that seem to contain a world of reference behind them: this quality pervades A Munster Song of Love and War, the extraordinary chapbook published by White Rabbit in 1971. I came upon it in a bookstore in Boston in 1973 and was transfixed:
He’d be alive today if he wasn’t pretty
He was gorgeous.
His beauty overcame his enemies and the
enemies of Ireland
and it was jealousy
of his prettiness
that has lain him
On the floor with his head open.
There are not enough mirrors in the bath
Rooms of Munster to shout how nice looking
he was and awkward
with a gun.
This was my first encounter with James’s work, and I was deeply impressed that an Irish poet could be using language in such uninhibited, erotic, and anti-academic ways. Earlier, he had exhorted Irish poets to “park the paraphernalia out in the sunlight/ Do not let it into the poem.”
I also like that in Liddy’s paraphernalia-free poems, “The characters keep weeping to the accordion.” “The accordion doesn’t lie,” we learn elsewhere. Finally, the box, that ascendant instrument in which so much Irish music finds surprising and subtle expression, has an advocate:
Praying that God becomes tender enough
to take up his gold squeeze box
and play a set with the new arrival
who has no need for purification
because tunes are receipts for existence
and an Irishman believes in anything
more than he believes in nothing.
James Liddy has accomplished what many only aspire to: he has created a remarkable language and voice unmistakably his own.
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Here is a link to James Liddy’s papers, with more biographical information;
my own archive at Boston College contains 40 letters and 8 postcards from Liddy.
Posted by Terence Winch on November 05, 2024 at 10:00 AM in Feature, Terence Winch | Permalink | Comments (14)
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Posted by The Best American Poetry on November 05, 2024 at 09:00 AM in Feature, Photographs, Poetry Readings | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Called Back
Before she crossed the quarter mile between the homestead & town
cemetery, Emily Dickinson helped plan her own funeral. “Everything
was white,” one biography reports: white ribbons & textile handles,
flannel for the lining (“five-sixths of a yard of Russian white”) plus the
robe that Susan, her sister-in-law, designed & in which the poet would
be buried. According to further description, we should add the
circumference of the flower garden to the distance traveled by the
funeral party, then a single pass through the great barn that kept the
family’s horses. I’ve visited Emily’s grave more than any other & while
spring becomes summer in a snap, it was the beginning of the latter
when, late one night & a dozen sheets to the wind, I hoped to marry
past & present by launching my empty bottle toward what might’ve
been a field of buttercup, where some bystander surely caught sight of
six Irishmen (per Emily’s instruction) carrying the poet’s white casket.
- Michael Robins
[from The Bright Invisible (Saturnalia, 2022)]
Michael Robins is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The Bright Invisible (2022) and People You May Know (2020), both from Saturnalia Books. He lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he teaches in the MFA program at McNeese State University and serves as editor of The McNeese Review.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty): Michael Robins
Michael Robins’ eloquent and haunting tribute to Emily Dickinson hovers somewhere between poetry and prose, unjustified on the right in a way reminiscent of James Tate, whose poems seem to enjoy confounding the two. Its shape may suggest “postage stamp,” then “letter,” then “the poet’s room,” then “grave”—then, perhaps most aptly, “flower garden.” Robins’ poem begins in objectivity as he presents Dickinson’s funeral procession as a “crossing” detailed in advance by the poet herself:
. . .white ribbons & textile handles,
flannel for the lining [‘five-sixths of a yard of Russian white’] plus the
robe that Susan, her sister-in-law, designed. . .
How fitting that Emily’s color was and is white, an apparent absence embracing the spectrum.
A cheerful guidebook voice (“we should add”) reveals that the journey to the grave was not straightforward, but circled Dickinson’s flower garden and made “a single pass” through the barn holding the family horses, the procession a warmer, domesticated version of “I could not stop for Death” (poem 479). Notify the flowers, the horses, the barn flies that their Emily has turned toward eternity—this like the old custom of telling the bees, a charm of reconciliation between death and life.
Then things turn personal in the long rush of a single, passionate sentence:
. . . I’ve visited Emily’s grave more than any other & while
spring becomes summer in a snap, it was the beginning of the latter
when, late one night & a dozen sheets to the wind, I hoped to marry
past & present by launching my empty bottle toward what might’ve
been a field of buttercup . . .
The poem’s whiteness has become a hoped-for marriage of “past & present,” the warm snap between spring and summer the snap of taut sails as the poet, “sheets to the wind” (that metaphor that makes each drunk a boat) launches his messageless bottle “toward what might’ve / been a field of buttercup.” It is as if we are with the poet with Dickinson, when, in the cosmic expansiveness of her “wild nights,” she dreams of a “thee” to “moor in.”
As austere and intense as Emily herself, “Called Back” summons us, too, as Robins joins past and present in the sovereign apparition of her eccentrically ordained pallbearers: “six Irishmen.” * With them, we are privileged bystanders as time and eternity cross a small space into each other via the rectangle of a poem and the trim envelope of a casket.
– Angela Ball
*According to IrishCentral.com, Dickinson “shared her kitchen with an Irish maid [Margaret Maher] the last seventeen years of her life.” Scholar Aífe Murray is quoted as saying that Dickinson stored her poems in Maher’s trunk—'a trunk that had crossed the Atlantic’; and that after Dickinson died, Maher kept them safe.
Posted by Angela Ball on November 05, 2024 at 07:35 AM in Angela Ball, Feature | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Deposition
I love you the way waves love cliffs.
They fling lace skirts against rock,
can-can kicks rush the top,
fall back down; froth clings—a kiss.
Sometimes they wash worn things to shore;
sometimes, they roll silent, say nothing,
tunnel under, hide in echo-dark—
wait until there’s a horizon.
I love you in this way because
you are a planet in space that orbits
the sun coolly, allows for oceans.
I love you in this way because
you let me moon about as a pond,
or thrash and flail over piers.
You scoop me up, stone and soil,
sand I’ve made for you.
I love you, don’t mind if I whip in your eye,
erode a piece, I’ll make up for it –
silt and foam, my wedding dress;
spray and salt, my veil, bouquet of blue nets.
I love you because without you there is just sea;
a body all at sea, waving surrender to sky,
kicking and screaming against the line—
water, not going anywhere.
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Victoria Kennefick's debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Butler Literary Prize. A UCD/Arts Council of Ireland Writer-in-Residence 2023 and Poet-in-Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo 2022-23, Victoria is now Cork County Council Writer-in-Residence 2024. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a PBS Choice for Spring 2024 and BBC Poetry Extra Book of the Month for March.
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Claude Monet, Rough Sea at Étretat, 1883. Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon
Posted by Terence Winch on November 03, 2024 at 08:31 AM in Feature, Pick of the Week, Terence Winch | Permalink | Comments (13)
Tags: love poem
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David Shapiro and I corresponded by couplets in February 2003. Here are some previously unpublished exanmples. And here is a conversation with David Shapiro conducted by Kent Johnson http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-shapiro-d-ivb-kent.shtml
Subj: Kenneth said: We always make our own mayonnaise
Date: 2/12/2003 11:22:50 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: DaJoShap
To: DCLEHMAN
Good couplets make their point almost at once.
Like kicking a habit or calling your children runts.
The evil is done, and you are flawed forever.
But the couplet keeps returning, like Shelley's river.
An off‑rhyme doesn't daunt it, not the couplet.
We know whose dog we are, we rise and shit.
We could have said "we urinate" but we didn't.
The couplet seems to end with "Good riddance."
Oh Kenneth loved the couplet in Al Pope.
He said my taste at fifteen gave him hope.
Oh Janice, he said once, make mayonnaise.
This genius likes his Pope‑‑what higher praise.
I was fifteen‑‑had never downed such stuff.
His home‑made mayonnaise was strange enough. DS, 2 / 12 /03
Re: The consistency of the couplet: each couplet consists
2/14/03
From: DCLEHMAN
To: DaJoShap
[Sometimes six suffice]
Each couplet consists of an adult and a child.
I shall bring my lunch pail and dine in the wild.
Each couplet consists of a woman and a man,
But which is which? Who’s the European, who the American?
From the time we are teens we attempt to link
With others who exist because they think.
So I walk to the edge and I walk back alone
Except for the chirp of a cell phone.
Each couplet composes a contradiction
And resolves it like an uncanny prediction.>> DL, 2 / 14 / 03
My wife's mother is dying, innocent And who scapes whipping in this Tenement
Date: 2/13/2003 9:01:09 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: DaJoShap
To: DCLEHMAN
<< A couplet comes down on you like death's storm.
Afterwards, Dave, you're never quite so warm.
A couplet edges downwards like black snow.
But so dramatic! like snow in a Noh.
My mother's wife is dying‑‑innocent.
But who ‘scapes whipping in this Tenement?
You were a couplet, Lady, all day long.
At evening, you're a chorus for no song.
Then you were born, or was it just red clay?
Where are you? is the question of our day.
My wife's sweet Mother lay there without mind.
Was it a home, a hospice? Were we blind?
We want our beds to change, but our disease?
My wife could drive us home, like a white rose. >> DS, 2 / 14 / 03
Re: Like a white rose, or like red clay
from: DCLEHMAN
to: DaJoShap
I speak of my mother who called to console
Me when Sinatra died at 82. She said he wasn’t old.
In May ‘98 my mother was eighty three
Though she liked to tell people she was eighty, only.
After the female moon departed, leaving blood
In the snow, we left our nostalgia for the mud.
I have a new song, and it’s not a blues song,
You wake up, it’s spring, and you can’t go wrong.
What happened to that song? Where did it go,
That dream in a shabby dress I used to know?
We’ve got a right to sing the blues, to sign
The picture we can’t finish, to dash off the line.
Youth is the place where you greet the day with lust
And pledge your trust, but thence in the end comes disgust. DL, 2 / 15 / 03
Re: away, so I claim "eight" expansively: Protest and Fiona Shaw
Date: 2/15/2003 6:17:18 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: DaJoShap
To: DCLEHMAN
I forgive you David Lehman for being away.
Now write a couplet or I'll protest, pray.
I forgive you Lehman deep in jet lag or leg.
I saw the protests early and disagree to beg.
Billionaires for Bush was witty: a few others.
Susan Sarandon, Poitier, a few mothers.
I tried to get my young son arrested.
But his mother took him to Medea‑‑busted.
Medea spritzed big droplets on her Jason.
I bowed my head to the Irish‑Greco version.
I wouldn't want the part of bloodied child!
Psychoanalytically, I think it wild.
I want the part of the princess, off stage.
Pretty, burnt to death, welded to Dad in old age.
What a death! Have you heard of anything like it?
Or is it just napalm, our old friend Ike that. – DS, 2 / 15 / 03
photo by Chris Felver; copyright (c) 1999 by Chris Felver.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on November 01, 2024 at 10:30 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Collaborations, Feature | Permalink | Comments (2)
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I went out to eat this week with several friends, and I couldn't believe how complicated it was to complete our order. One friend has celiac; another is lactose intolerant; another is on a low fiber diet; yet another is allergic to peanuts. And then I have a friend with alpha gal syndrome. In these parts, someone always has alpha gal.
But ordering was the easy part. We had all promised not discuss politics. So we decided to talk about food instead--the foods we love and can eat. They asked me what my favorite food poem was. Of course, there are too many delicious food poems to choose from, but my first thought was of this one by Diane Ackerman.
THE CONSOLATION OF APRICOTS
by Diane Ackerman
Especially in early spring,
when the sun offers a thin treacle of warmth,
I love to sit outdoors
and eat sense-ravishing apricots.
Born on sun-drenched trees in Morocco,
the apricots have flown the Atlantic
like small comets, and I can taste
broiling North Africa in their flesh.
Somewhere between a peach and a prayer,
they taste of well water
and butterscotch and dried apples
and desert simooms and lust.
Sweet with a twang of spice,
a ripe apricot is small enough to devour
as two hemispheres.
Ambiguity is its hallmark.
How to eat an apricot:
first warm its continuous curve
in cupped hands, holding it
as you might a brandy snifter,
then caress the velvety sheen
with one thumb, and run your fingertips
over its nap, which is shorter
than peach fuzz, closer to chamois.
Tawny gold with a blush on its cheeks,
an apricot is the color of shame and dawn.
One should not expect to drink wine
at mid-winter, Boethius warned.
What could be more thrilling
than ripe apricots out of season,
a gush of taboo sweetness
to offset the savage wistfulness of early spring?
Always eat apricots at twilight,
preferably while sitting in a sunset park,
with valley lights starting to flicker on
and the lake spangled like a shield.
Then, while a trail of bright ink tattoos the sky,
notice how the sun washes the earth
like a woman pouring her gaze
along her lover’s naked body,
each cell receiving the tattoo of her glance.
Wait for that moment
of arousal and revelation,
then sink your teeth into the flesh of an apricot.
Posted by Nin Andrews on November 01, 2024 at 01:43 PM in Feature, Nin Andrews Comics | Permalink | Comments (2)
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The dance performance Grande Mess by Clémence Baubant starts with three young woman dance performers of color from Guadeloupe standing front of stage, left. Grande Mess, local French for “high mass”, the choreographers say, does not reference the Christian ritual. The performers wear black molding leotards, are in among two unequally-high white pedestals, like high steps; they stand on the blocks, stretch and gesture elegantly, drape themselves in the air, show themselves off, fun each other; there’s drum music in the distance. When they move off, I notice there are long, braided cords slung over their athletic shoulders.
Sugar island, dark skin, auction blocks, braided cords, showing themselves off. Why, that must be. Slave sale, with bullwhip.
Of course!
However, when the women have sashayed to the center stage and segued into costumes of white panties over black leotard with banana leaf halters and the far off music has become whole-stage present, the slave market story doesn’t make much sense.
With my casual racism out of the way as well as taken into consideration in terms of my reflections, in my experience of Clémence Baubant’s (and Lenablou’s) pieces, I think I’ve discovered something I had never thought about. It never occurred to me to imagine a body schema not centered around itself but rather from a point of contact in movement space. It seems to me that in Grande Mess, the three women’s dance begins at the soles of their feet, at the contact point with the ground, not, or at least it has seems to me, from the first or, root, chakra – as for instance you see in Martha Graham’s dance technique. As they progress through Grande Mess, the performers, Clémence Baubant, Naomi Yengadessin and Lisa Ponin, do not so much balance their bodies as shape them in the air, as if dancing a reflexology foot chart.
In experience, though, Grande Mess makes a unique demonstration of dance feeling. There is no mention of a particular technique or of dance feeling in the Grande Mess notes. However, the notes do declare the intention to explore the intimate relation of the body to walking while recalling (chthonic) figures such as such Ladjablès (“La Diablesse”) a Wild Woman, who re-balances the man-woman relationship gone to whack, or Mûlatresse Solitude(“Mulatta Solitude”), a real-life “mixed-race” anti-slavery leader turned Guadeloupe origin myth.
All this of suggests to me “point of contact” and fusion, rather than “center” as technical approach. Indeed, Baubant’s choreography fuses different movements into a body’s natural rhythm. As I watch, I see shades of traditional dancing from Africa with maybe even a jig from Europe with break attitude with Rock&Roll exuberance with line-dance execution with ballroom kaleidoscoping with personal expressionism with … I don’t know what-all! This is not to say, Grande Mess is potpourri de danse bouncing here and there: Grande Mess is all vertical motion, ether-wards, rippling up out of the Earth and pulsing through the air.
I felt the “point of contact/soles of the feet/vertical motion” theme as equally present in the second piece of the evening’s double bill, Le Sacre du Sucre (“The Rite of Sugar”), featuring the celebrated Guadeloupe dance performer and choreographer, Lenablou (or Léna Blou). Again, the notes make no mention of a particular approach, but explain that Le Sacre du Sucre is in the tradition of GwoKa, a dance practice that uses call and response and Ka-drum rhythms to initiate then shape a “spontaneous” dance. It strikes me that the premise is “The waters are not divided, so make the world”.
Le Sacre du Sucre, the notes declare, means to bring spectators into a story that is rooted, on the one hand, in the de-humanization of the body that historical slavery requires, on the other hand, in the unexpected, the unlikely and the unforeseeable in that same history.
As experience, Le Sacre du Sucre works out as an origin story. The question is: how does music exist? The answer is: contact with the world around and its rhythms.
The piece opens with what I think of as a dance floor in a poor, hot, country café. Two men, one woman. Drum sound in the wind, but no music. Too poor a place, I reckon, for a Victrola record player; must be a ménage à trois in the vein of Porgy & Bess, maybe Frankie & Johnny. Lenablou and her two men begin rough, awkward, slow. I think, like a couple dealing with an interloper who is by no means a third wheel.
And here is where it turns from a chronology to an ontology: all three are such practiced performers, their awkwardness also hints of them as guests at a party thrown by people who are new to them. This is not after all a story of what happens but of taking shape.
The drum sound takes on rhythm as the three continue together, are there, become practiced, letting in the sound of the world around through contact with their little space and with each other, by creating… The performers, Lenablou, Félix Flauzin and Allan Blou don’t just pick up the sound, they find it in the world around.
The men begin to rhythm the poor tables as if they were drums, bringing in effect what is distant near… With feet on the ground and hands searching the air, Lenablou makes their rhythm into dance, into a place where she can be together … They put on “sound shoes” (designed by performer Félix Flauzin). These transform the point of contact with the earth to music with their movement.
By the time the performers are taking their bows, they have defined themselves as individuals synching and falling out of synch, that is, they have gone from movement to rhythm, to dance to music …
Lenablou shows creation: it is a dance we all do.
_________
I saw “Grande Mess” and “Le Sacre du Sucre” at Carreau du Temple 10 October 2024.
“Grande Mess” is a creation of Clémence Baubant, with performance by her, Naomi Yengadessin and Lisa Ponin; dramaturgy by Mathilde Rance; scenographic creation by Anais Verspan; sound by Yannick Berbié; light by Marion Jouhanneau. Click for more on Clémence Baubant.
“Le Sacre du Sucre” is a creation of Lenablou (also written Léna Blou) with performance by her, Félix Flauzin and Allan Blou, assisted by James Carles; with music directed by Daniel Trépy; sound by Steeve Lancastre; and sound accessories by Félix Flauzin; light by Roger Olivier. Click for more on Lenablou.
Posted by Paul Tracy DANISON on November 01, 2024 at 11:55 AM in Beyond Words, Dance, Feature, Paris Performance Calendar, Tracy Danison, Paris correspondent | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Movement arts, Performance
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Sipping a dry martini, with a garlic-stuffed olive,
I am thinking how happy I am to be
clinking glasses with you, my friend,
in this virtual universe where virtue is rare
and you've got it. “The valiant never taste
of death but once,” may not be true but is
magnificent rhetoric, defined broadly
as an argument with everyone, which
the valorous will inevitably lose, though,
as in a chess game, one can always resign
rather than face the music if checkmate.
is inevitable. Writing a happy hour sonnet,
you aim at levity, but the levitation
cannot defeat the earth's gravitational pull.
David Lehman 11 / 1 / 24 [Happy birthday, TPW]
Posted by The Best American Poetry on November 01, 2024 at 09:00 AM in Birthday Poems, Feature, Terence Winch | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 31, 2024 at 06:00 PM in Great Poems | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Bitchin' with Nin and Whitman [by Nicole Santalucia]
I've been bitchin’ with Nin Andrews about what it’s like to live like a gypsy, about how being a poet has led to a vagabond life.
I got a degree (hurray!), made a move for a job (at least I am lucky to get a job), and now I can’t help but think of how a lot of poets live out of a suitcase. And, it’s a little scary.
As I was in the last stretch before my move—I had till Monday, July 14th to finish packing—the sea of boxes and clutter and exhaustion consumed me. I was already worried: will I have to do this again and again?
I always feel vulnerable in the process of upheaval... I know it's normal to get nervous before starting something new. But it's all new: the job, the school, the town, the people, etc.—and for me that brings up self-doubt. I have this fear, what if I can never write again? Sorry to be dramatic. Moving brings out the drama in me, too. I wonder how many poets are out there, thinking these thoughts as they, too, move to another college town.
To calm myself, I started bitching to myself, and then I started bitching to Nin, and then to Whitman as if he were my friend on Facebook. And that perked me up. Just the idea of Whitman on social media made me laugh. I am jealous of Whitman because he didn't have to worry about a classroom of freshman staring at him. And I am jealous of Emily Dickinson, too. She just stayed in one room as long as she liked.
As I was preparing to make my big move, it was a late afternoon, a Sunday, and Walt had just updated his Facebook status, There is no loss of time in the mountains! I sing on this day: happy birthday to you, Fanny Fern. On the off-chance that Walt had his iPhone while he was riding the ferry back to the main island, I sent him an instant message because I worried that no one would ever read my first book. I wanted him to promote me, loud and gregarious man that he is. But I evaded the topic; instead, I started questioning him about what all of this means.
NS: But Walt, what about the loss of identity? I fear that I am really no longer here, in the flesh. If I exist at all, how is it that I no longer know how to splay myself on a grassy knoll and look out at the emptiness?
WW: Answer.
Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world (“Continuities”).
NS: But Walt, every time I am on Facebook I feel lost in space and time. It’s as if my senses have been removed—carved out of my being by a motherboard manufactured in some foreign country.
WW: Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. (“O Me! O Life!”)
NS: But Walt, I am faithless and foolish and full of myself—there is nothing but emptiness in front of me, behind me, between my fingers, between my ears, my breath.
But then the conversation stopped. Later Walt mentioned how he almost dropped his phone overboard, just as the ferry was approaching the port at the tip of Manhattan. He was on his way to pay back Fanny Fern the five bucks he borrowed from her over a year ago. I think he was telling me how his debts never go unpaid as a way to enlighten me. He also said it’s not good to burn people with a high profile.
High profile. Is that what we're all looking to become?
from the archive; first posted October 30, 2014
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 30, 2024 at 03:00 PM in Feature, From the Archive, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Joe Brainard is the only painter whose work adorns the cover of two volumes of "The Best American Poetry"
For Joe Brainard
The road sign said snow
‘Well, I never said it was spring’
in 1968 in whose loft downtown
under a cobweb of windshield
a butterfly beneath a branch within
a border of blue 1953 Easter Seals
the sun surrounded by streaks
of blue and white in a frame
and a wave crashing against it
the logic a rhyme of college and collage
the logic a rebus the message simple
Nancy a blueprint bingo cherries
and two fragments of letters
handwritten big block letters neat
I looked and the three hairs
in the sink spelled out Joe
David Lehman, 12/ 20 / 2000
On October 30, 2024, at 7 pm at St Mark's Church in NYC there will be a reception in honor of Joe Brainard's Love, Joe: Selected Letters (edited by Daniel Kane; Columbia UP). .The evening will include readings by Brad Gooch, Vincent Katz, Anne Waldman, Keith McDermott, Michael Lally, Ron Padgett, and Ann Lauterbach.
Paul Auster and others remember Joe Brainard here.
https://youtu.be/I2Znn0oGrfE?t=304
See, too, this "Homage to Joe Brainard."
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 30, 2024 at 09:00 AM in Art, Feature, Poetry Readings | Permalink | Comments (1)
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For Nin Andrews's must-read "Learning to Write the MFA Poem," click here. We printed the poem in its entirety on February 22, 2010, as you'll see if you use this link, but I can't resist offering this excerpt:
there is a certain kind of poem I was taught to write
when I was earning what my husband calls my mail-order degree
from a low-res program in the Northeast. And I guess
I would call this kind of poem an MFA poem,
though the truth is, I never learned to write one very well
(though this is one of them, or is trying to be),
but I do see them everywhere now, these MFA poems,
which I despise, not because the poems are bad
but because I was taught how to write them
by this asshole professor (he was such a creep)
who was abusive to women, mostly,
fucked with their heads if not their bodies,
you know the type. Back then
the women took whatever he dished out
because he was famous I guess.
I hated that, and how he would write poems
about being an asshole, which he was and is,
and about everything and anything else
because, he would explain, everything is happening at once,
so everything is happening in his poems, and happening so fast,
that the past, present, and future are all there in the poems
though nothing is ever really happening
because the poems are usually in some static place
The next stanza takes the poem to that particular place and does amazing things with the set-up. It's a tour de force -- the truth, the poetry, and the parody are one. Mega kludos, Nin.
I remember writing a poem called "The Guggenheim Poem," aping the kind of poems people used to write on their fellowship year funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The poems uusally took place in Italy -- in Venice, often, but sometimes Florence or Rome, with side trips to Siena, and maybe Arezzo, and certainly Rapollo, and once in a while Naples. The poet had gone to a museum in a flimsy skirt in the fierce heat and the eyes of the men were upon her as she walked on the hot brick or cobblestone streets and she wore sunglasses and imagined she was Audrey Hepburn but all pretense and fantasy fell away when she came face to face with the Titian of Venus and Adonis or the David of Donatello in Florence or Piero's Madonna and baby Jesus in Urbino or a Giorgione self-portrait in Venice, which she saw as a vision of her father or her husband, she's not sure which, though she has spent many hours analyzing the possibilities, but this she knows this: it was a sudden flash, an epiphany even, like seeing a broken statue and realizing you had to change your life. -- DL
from the archive; first posted May 30, 2012
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 29, 2024 at 09:01 AM in Feature, From the Archive, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (0)
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From 2014 to 2019, David Lehman helmed one of our most popular columns: “Next Line, Please,” which resulted in a finished, crowdsourced poem every week. Lehman’s prompts attracted professional writers and amateurs alike, who contributed sonnets, haiku, sestinas, centos, and other formal poems. Eventually these pieces were published together in an anthology, “Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers.” Five years have elapsed since Lehman’s “valediction forbidding mourning,” but fans of the column have held out hope that it would return. Today, Lehman finally brings it back—with a twist.
https://theamericanscholar.org/in-reprise-next-line-please/
Click here to take part!
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 28, 2024 at 09:00 AM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, Next Line, Please | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman