The Best American Poetry

Al Basile: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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Killers Before Breakfast

                                    New York City, 1974

It was the morning after. On the night

before, we'd played at Max's Kansas City,

with Stevie Wonder sitting in the house,

and Johnny Winter joining later. They

 

had come for Bobby Bland, for whom we opened,

but they heard our set. The room was small,

not deep, and we could see the audience.

When you really get them – you can tell.

 

For once we weren't driving overnight,

so we stayed up and crashed in the hotel,

and it was early, much too early, when

a few of us went out to find some breakfast.

 

We dragged ourselves into the elevator:

Duke in his fedora, Rich with locks

flowing long below his pork-pie hat,

as if Lester Young were Wild Bill Hickok.

 

John had his wig, and I just had my hair,

but motionless, eyes slitted against morning,

we four leaned back like tilted packing crates

against the back wall of the empty car.

 

We crawled down a few floors; came to a stop.

The doors slid open, and a woman peered

in at us and blanched, and paused; then, eyes

big with alarm, she stepped into our space.

 

She stood at the side wall, by the door,

and clutched a shopping bag, a kerchief on

her head, tensely alert, fully awake.

We made no remark. Our ride resumed.

 

After three more floors, she broke the silence.

“Please don't kill me,” she said. We assured her

we were just musicians who'd stayed up

and hadn't slept much, and we needed coffee.

 

This seemed to calm her down, and we descended.

Before the doors could open on the lobby,

solemn, plain, she spoke once more: “I have

to tell the truth. You look like murderers.”

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Poet/playwright, singer/songwriter, and cornet player, Al Basile is known to blues fans world-wide, with 20 solo albums and 8 nominations for Blues Music Awards. He has three books of poetry (the most recent is 2021's Solos, from Antrim House) and five verse audio plays (his 2021-22 plays Hill&Dale and Open Question won gold and platinum awards from the HEARnow national audio drama festival). He is a member of the Powow River poets and is the host of the online poets-in-conversation show Poems On. 

To hear Al Basile reading “Killers before Breakfast,” click

Killers Before Breakfast - Al Basile

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                                                                               Max's Kansas City, 1970s

Today's Playlist: The Toreador Song, Amapola, Frenesi, Volare, Granada

with Girogione's "Three Philosophers"

Maugham on writing, reading, friendship, and the inevitable selfishness of humanity

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life."

“Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."

“It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary.”

“You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life -- their pleasure.”   ― W. Somerset Maugham

Ben Jonson: Two Poems -- Great Poems of the World, episode 17 -- with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

My Picture Left in Scotland

I now think love is rather deaf, than blind,

          For else it could not be,

                    That she,

Whom I adore so much, should so slight me,

   And cast my love behind:

I'm sure my language was as sweet,

                    And every close did meet

                    In sentence of as subtle feet

                              As hath the youngest he,

          That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree.

Oh, but my conscious fears,

          That fly my thoughts between,

          Tell me that she hath seen

   My hundreds of gray hairs,

   Told seven and forty years,

   Read so much waist, as she cannot embrace

   My mountain belly and my rock face,

As all these, through her eyes, have stopt her ears.

On my First Son

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.

Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I lose all father now! For why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,

And if no other misery, yet age?

Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."

For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

 

see also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/06/sonnet-73-great-poems-of-the-world-episode-2-with-david-lehman-and-mitch-sisskind-.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/07/my-life-had-stood-a-loaded-gun-great-poems-of-the-world-episode-5-with-david-lehman-and-mitch-sisski.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/11/ulysses-and-the-gettysburg-address-great-poems-of-the-world-with-david-lehman-and-mitch-sisskind.html

Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s “One minute of dance a day”: Bearing witness to social transformation [By Tracy Danison]

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

As I write, Tuesday, 7 January 2025, the National Dance Theater at Palais du Chaillot has opened the season with a celebration of 10 years of dance performer and choreographer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s Une Minute de danse par jour (“One minute of dance a day”) project. In addition, Les Presses du reel has just published Une minute de danse par jour – 2015-2025 – Dix ans d'une œuvre pour notre temps.

During a talk published in The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in 2017, Vadori-Gauthier told me that she put together Une minute as “an act of poetic resistance”, incarnating, even as it does today, a radical affirmation of personhood, asserting the central place of the body, especially, the female body, in public life.

In the wake of the first of the particularly vile terrorist attacks that marred the beginning and the end of 2015, along with the remarkable show of public solidarity for the République – that is, the liberal values the republic embodies – Vadori-Gauthier looked at her “resistance” as a “micro-political gesture” accompanying “a co-evolution toward a sweeter way of living”.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

Her sense of Une Minute has evolved: she now sees it as a telltale for a broader mutation in human relations away from the immediate and physical to the mediated and virtual.

Neither Vadori-Gauthier’s commitment to dance as a radical incarnation of personhood – she originally intended to wind up Une Minute after a year –  nor the evolution of her thinking about the project’s sense and purpose are surprising. There are events – I am thinking of Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine on 24 February 2022 or the 7 October 2023 massacres in Israel – the effects of which are and will remain impossible to adequately describe or account for in history, or, for that matter, in words. But these effects, nevertheless, ripple and echo through the courses of lives and, through those lives, shape common reality.  

What was done in Paris between 7 January and 13 November 2015 is certainly one such event and Une Minute’s persistence and evolution are one of the effects.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

On Wednesday, 7 January 2015 – that is, 18 Nivôse CCXXIII An of the French République – a pair of religious fanatics attacked the offices of the satirical-political weekly Charlie Hebdo, murdered 12 people and wounded 11 others. For dissing the Prophet Mohammed, the killers said. On Friday, 9 January, 20 Nivôse CCXXIII An, a lone gunman murdered four people in a kosher grocery. For being Jewish, he said.

On Friday, 11 January, 22 Nivôse CCXXIII An, about two million people (the city of Paris has a population of about 2 million), in addition to nearly four million people across the country, rallied in support of liberal values under the slogan Je suis Charlie (“I am Charlie”).

On Friday, 13 November, 23 Brumaire CCXXIV An – interesting to reflect that the revolutionary year begins at the September rentrée, the new year for schools, theaters and most other public living –  about 11 months later, using automatic rifles and suicide vests, nine religious fanatics murdered 130 people and wounded another 416.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

These murders took place, essentially, at cafés where people were sitting outdoors and at a popular music hall in the 11^th arrondissement of Paris and in a crowd near the Stade de France sports stadium in the near-suburb of Saint Denis. They done it, the murderers said, because Paris is Babylon, cursèd whore of Abraham’s Big Three religions in retrospect – sounding a rather sinister ecumenical note.

Vadori-Gauthier originally intended Une Minute de danse par jour to last a year or so. But the sum of the events and, I suppose, doing Une minute day by day, she made her ask, she says, “What do you do when you can do nothing”?

And from there forward, Une minute, once a micro-political gesture asserting the body’s centrality became what she could do:bear witness an ongoing transformation in the way we relate to one another.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

While she’s been dancing her one minute a day, she observes, “The physical act of sharing and solidarity have been fading out”. She points out that, if, for instance, a smartphone means greater ability to keep in touch with friends or to access money, it also means changing the nature of the ancient acts of keeping in touch and accessing money.

“Personal identity has moved on-line,” Vadori-Gauthier says. And with the move, many of our most basic social interactions became virtualized transactions. “Buying a baguette or lending 20 bucks to a friend or getting a contact number, even giving change to a beggar, is no longer about touching hands or exchanging cards or scooping change on the counter or even tossing coins into an old hat*,” she observes.

Maybe the increasingly felt stress and alienation, along with real disorders of mood, all often blamed on “the internet”, are actually due to the loss of ordinary physical contact.

________________

Nadia Vadori-Gauthier is an influential and active performer, choreographer and teacher. In addition to her decade-long "Une minute de danse par jour project", she regularly works with such dance performance artists and organizations as Margaux Amoros or the experimental collective La Ville en feu, both of whose contributions to performance have been reviewed in the Best American Poetry/Beyond Words.

Unsurprisingly, Vadori-Gauthier has been including other dance performers and choreographers in Une minute de danse par jour. But it turns out that confronting “What do you do when you can do nothing”? is not just an increasingly pertinent question since 2015, answering it requires real personal investment, as well as Herculean commitment. “It takes four hours to make one minute of dance video”, Vadori-Gauthier told me. Getting more dancers contributing has her spending those four hours on the film editing application. More ironic still, she finds that she continues doing her minute of dance anyway, on her own. She calls it “shadow dancing”.

Contact Nadia Vadori-Gauthier through her dance company, Cie Le prix de l’essence or through the Une minute de danse par jour site, also home to a fantastic visual archive.

Returning from Purgatory [by Nin Andrews]

It was on this day a few years ago that my son had major GI surgery. A wet snowstorm had glazed the roads with ice, and Covid was raging across the state. No visitors were permitted in medical facilities, but I had been granted special permission.  After all, my son had almost died in the same hospital the summer before when a medical team failed to take his situation seriously. (A nurse had insisted for four days that his pain meant nothing—then his insides burst.) Needless to say, I pulled every string I could find in order to be there.

The surgery was successful. It marked the end of our time in Purgatory.

For two years we had lived in and out of hospitals, in and out of hope and despair, in and out of that place where time slows and sometimes pauses, where the souls of the almost-dead and almost-born share elevator rides, where dread and relief walk hand-in-hand, where there are no hours, no weeks or weekends, no months, and certainly no holidays,  where every door is guarded, where every window displays a view of another hospital wing, where once we watched a patient life-flighted in, where angels airlifted others out.

I still dream I am in the hospital beside my son who is lying in a bed, tubes up his nose and throat, monitors beeping and humming, nurses and doctors entering and exiting . . . Oh, how he wished for sleep back then. Real sleep, not the drugged-induced brand.  I wished I could give it to him--which now makes me think of this untitled poem by David Keplinger:

I made this paper boat for her, who finds it difficult to sleep. She imagines she is floating on its little stern,  here, under her sleeping mask, under the covers. All you’ll need is one plain sheet. It’s folded like the beak of a bird. With your fingers, pry the wide beak open. You are opening the beak. You are climbing inside.  

The world is so strange when you come back from Purgatory.  (Sometimes I wonder if I ever fully returned.) Nothing makes sense: the news, social media, everyday conversations. My mind was a blur. I couldn’t write. Or rather I couldn’t write coherently. The humorous poet I was had disappeared. Not only that, I couldn’t stand her poetry. Slowly I began to write my forthcoming book, Son of Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poems. When I read it now, I feel the presence of Purgatory, the mix of memory and dreams. And sadness, a salty, bitter aftertaste.

Sometimes, I look for books or poems that describe that feeling/space I lived in for those years. Murakami comes the closest.  I keep reading his work, underlying whole paragraphs. There is also this poem by a Danish poet, Carsten René Nielsen, that describes the hunger I feel when reading, expecting or hoping to find something in particular. And the overwhelm I experience when I succeed.

Book

    by Carsten René Nielsen, from House Inspections, translated by David Keplinger

I always rely on reason when I select works one can only understand with one’s feelings, but one day at the antiquarian bookshop I found myself in each and every book I opened. As always, I was only on the lookout for a word or two, those which seem to glow from below the horizon, but what a drama it’s become instead. Now the letters are towering around me, and at any moment the catastrophe can happen: that someone with a moistened finger will turn the page.

And there is this poem by Laurie Clements Lambeth, which describes the nether-world one enters when diagnosed with a chronic illness. 

Cusped Prognosis

    By Laurie Clements Lambeth

Time declines all, they say. Progression inevitable, they say. Hills that rise slant down. You have the floor, they say. How far down, I say. They say how low can you go. How steep a slope, I say. Slight drop, they say. Plateau. Slump, not flatline, they say. You understand, these were words before: up, down, I say, words I do not own but feel I should. Downward, they say, is normal, but plateau is where we’ll put you. Stay flexible. Incline toward this wind. Go ahead and zanaflex, they say. Progress, the way of the future, they say. We are inclined to say it’s relatively stable. Mesa, not mountain, they say. The fall-­off hills rise in masses, flat on top. White clouds bite down on them like teeth, I recall, chomping. What’s the grade of incline, I say. They say mild decline. They say they feel inclined to know. Come down here, I say. Take a tumble. Slide. Incline your ear. They decline my invitation. Making progress, they say. An upgrade. Very busy. Your health has reached its quota and is no longer available, they say. Have I been downgraded, essentially going downhill, I say. A positive result yields a negative outcome, they say. They decline to know for sure. Testing negative, they say, has a positive outcome. A decline in contrast sensitivity, I say. They say slow descent, the good kind. A little tip. Lucky dip. I assent and say all’s downhill from here. I say downhill into the flood. Dive, I say, not cannonball. Controlled fall. I am inclined to take a dip, I say, from time to time, but always rise to the surface. Dip down, they say. Tip forward. Don’t let us (drop now) push you, they say, a nudge. I say it is our policy to decline tips, a pleasure to — Arching off the incline, I incline to a different wind.

J'accuse: The "Charlie Hebdo" Outrage, Ten Years Later [by Walter Carey]

J'accuse

On January 7, 2015, thugs emboldened by appeasers murdered the editors of "Charlie Hebdo," the Paris-based satirical magazine. They also killed Jews at a nearby kosher grocery store.  From the BBC report: << The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has been attacked by gunmen, who have killed 12 people at its Paris offices. It is the worst attack on a magazine which has been hit by violence before. >>

Sometimes ideology gets in the way of common cause.  After the murders, PEN, an organization whose mission is to defend the rights of writers, editors, and publishers, decided to honor the fallen editors, and the surviving staff, with its "courage award." Not a truly controversial choice, you would think. Nevertheless, 224 writers signed their names to a petition protesting the award. Francine Prose and Teju Cole  circulated the petition, which argues that << Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering. Our concern is that, by bestowing the Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award on Charlie Hebdo, PEN is not simply conveying support for freedom of expression, but also valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.  >>

244 writers affilliated with the organization concurred with the statement that << What is neither clear nor inarguable is the decision to confer an award for courageous freedom of expression on Charlie Hebdo, or what criteria, exactly, were used to make that decision. >>

All they did, the murdered editors, was die for freedom of the press.
All they did was die.

What has changed? On April 22, 2024, the Washington Post reported that PEN America has canceled its annual awards ceremony, because a number of nominees said they would decline the prize. Why? Because, by failing to censure Israel harshly enough, PEN stands accused of “complicity in normalizing genocide.” What offends me most, I ask myself: the use of “genocide,” the hideous barbarism “normalizing,” the blatant virtue signaling, the presumption of foreign-policy expertise on the part of storytellers and bards, or the irrelevance of wars and disputes in assessing the quality of novels and poems?

See Lionel Shriver on this subject:
https://www.thefp.com/p/lionel-shriver-pen-america-rewards

and The Free Press
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/FMfcgzQZSZCCbrpVqzGMNlHSrqqGvqbh

The signatories thought they were on the right side of history. Eleven months and six days after the attack on Charlie Hebdo came Vendredi 13, Friday the 13th of November 2015, when terrorists killed 130 people in Paris, at the Bataclan theater, the Stade de Paris, and six cafes, including Le Comptoire Voltaire and Le Carillon.

Ron Charles on "BAP 2024" in the "Washington Post"

Some of you tell me this newsletter’s weekly poetry feature has got you reading poetry for the first time in years. But you wonder where to go next. 

I have an easy recommendation: “The Best American Poetry 2024.” This anthology, edited by Mary Jo Salter, includes work by 75 poets — some you probably know (Billy Collins, Ada Limón) and some you may not yet (Gabriella Fee, Richie Hofmann). 

The poems were selected from the usual places like the New Yorker and the Paris Review, little journals like Smartish Pace and Matter, and even recently deceased ones like Gettysburg Review and Freeman’s. In her words, this is a dinner party that includes enough familiar faces to make you feel comfortable and enough intriguing strangers to keep you mingling. 

Best of all, every poem in this collection has been selected by an extraordinarily fine and thoughtful poet. In her introduction, Salter writes, “I still find it almost impossible to come up with Universally Useful Criteria for evaluating a poem,” but reading the work she’s assembled here is a terrific way of broadening and understanding your own criteria.

Here’s a poem by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, a writer new to me:

Sentimental Evening

The pewter moon’s eyebrowed guise
circles a picture of my son. A Windex tear

falls to my son’s cheek, and I know
we will never fully know one another.

Message after message asking:
How is the breastfeeding going?

Let me tell you: Not great. Not great at all.
Everywhere advice to make the milk come:

plums, fenugreek, blessed thistle.
This morning each stream of water falling

from my showerhead was a knife ready
to gut me. The pewter moon’s smile

wants to eat me whole. Online strangers
tell me to love my postpartum body.

They say: You are tiger. You are zebra.
I am desperate to return to the numb feeling

of the surgical theater, the sound
of the doctor mispronouncing my full name.

In the mail a medical bill worth more
than a pickup truck arrives. It arrives before

the state gives my son a social security number,
a birth certificate, a sign of arrival.

Even at my most animal I am the price
of my bearded belly, the price of my crying

breasts, the price of being split,
excavated, vacuumed, and stapled shut.

This poem was first published in the New Republic. In the contributors’ notes and comments, Natalie Scenters-Zapico writes, “Much of ‘Sentimental Evening’ was drafted at a tray table on the back of hospital paperwork after I had an emergency C-section to deliver my son. I then revised it while struggling to breast feed and submitted it for publication still deep in my postpartum depression. I wrote this poem despite my own internalized misogyny telling me it was too sentimental.”

Excerpted from “The Best American Poetry 2024.” Mary Jo Salter, editor. David Lehman, series editor. Published by Scribner Poetry. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. ❖

"The Banquet Years" (in 1998) [by David Lehman]

from "The Bennington Five-Day Diary" (January 1998) by David Lehman

Roger Shattuck, author of The Banquet Years, is here [at Bennington College] giving lectures on Montaigne, Chekhov, and Proust. Shattuck, 72, in white turtleneck under a mint-green V-neck pullover, looks trim and fit, like a genial Jack Palance in mustache and goatee. Shattuck speaks naturally in maxims. I like it when he says that “It’s impossible to paraphrase any successful poem or story, and therefore we must do it.” Our assignment is to write fifty-word summaries of two Chekhov stories. Nashvillean Anne Doolittle summarized “Mire” in fourteen words: “A woman of wit and intelligence makes a living the only way she can.” Competitive as ever, I come up with a twenty-word reduction of Ulysses -- “Every man goes out on an odyssey every day, but not every man has a faithful wife to return to” -- but keep it to myself because Chekhov didn’t write Ulysses.

At lunch Shattuck and I talk about how much we abhor the displacement of literature by critical theory. I must have made some crack or pun, because Shattuck turned to me and said, “Has anyone ever told you you resemble Woody Allen?” “No,” I lied. “You’re the first.” This prompted two other people to compare me to Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story, adding, once they saw the stricken look on my face, that they meant it as a compliment.

Inspired by Shattuck, who would outlaw “text” as a term for poem or story, George Packer thinks we ought to make up an index of forbidden words. He would ban “place” (as in “I’m coming from a different place”) and “voice” (“she has found her authentic voice”) in workshops. Tom Ellis despises “issues” (“there are issues of homophobia here”). As for me, the words I most hate hearing at a poetry reading include the verbs “cupped” and “cradled,” the noun “scrim,” and the three-poem-warning: “I’ll just read three more poems.” Tonight is my turn to read. I’ll be reading a bunch of short poems. I relish the moment when I can say, “Just thirty-three more.”

Last night I had to introduce the readers. This is always an odd assignment, since the persons to be “introduced” are already well-known to us. I like doing it in verse. “If I were a consonant looking for a vowel, / or Allen Ginsberg on the day he wrote `Howl,’ / or an employee of Bell & Howell, / tempted by the spoonerism Hell and Bowel, / I’d have exhausted nearly all the rhymes for Robert McDowell. / But I’ll not throw in the towel.”

Had meetings with two of the students I’m going to work with over the next six months. Very excited about some ideas for poems that Sloane Miller and I came up with together: a poem about forks; a prose poem called “Aida,” narrating the plot of the opera as imagined by a teenager watching a performance without preconception, preparation, or Italian; a poem beginning with the line, “This is the most serious poem I have ever written.”

For the time I’m here I’m using an office belonging to a faculty member on leave, who fearlessly annotates his books. About Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler”: “very weak book.” Much of “Ulysses” he considers confused, but at one point he interrupted his reading of “Dubliners” to exclaim with evident surprise, “three good stories in a row!”

PS The picture chosen to illustrate this piece has no evident relationship to the text. What does this prove? 

-- David Lehman (January 1998; first published by Slate)

See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2013/10/the-slate-diary-4-bennington-college-jan-14-1998-by-david-lehman.html

and https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/02/the-benington-diary-1-january-1998-by-david-lehman-.html

January Gill O’Neil: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

______________________________________________________________________

Manifesto

 

You can’t eat your cake and have it, too, says my boyfriend

and Ted Kaczynski, turning cliches into bombs. My boyfriend

who is not the Unabomber loves me from 1,300 miles away.

We dream over the phone, count the days until our next visit.

At Whole Foods before Valentine’s Day, I buy a red velvet cake

I’ll eat alone. A man walks out with a double dozen red roses

wrapped in cellophane. I miss my boyfriend. Can I eat my cake

and have it, too? Transposed verbs are what got Kaczynski caught—

his use of language, his arcane mind, but he wasn’t wrong.

What good is having a cake if you can’t eat it? That clumsy

phrase comes straight out of Middle English, straight from

my valentine’s red mouth. He long-distance laughs as I puzzle

the meaning but isn’t that the point? Love is a kind of syntax,

a soft rhyme, prison time. I’m eating my cake and having it, too.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

January Gill O'Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Glitter Road was a finalist for the 2024 New England Book Award. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O'Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She currently serves as the 2022-2025 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).  [Author photo by John Andrews.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ellen Kozak's Latest Work (Opening January 10, David Richard Gallery)

 

December 26, 2023

Press Release - Ellen Kozak and Scott D. Miller River-Rising

ELLEN KOZAK AND SCOTT D. MILLER
River-Rising

January 10 through February 8, 2024

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 11, 2024 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM

David Richard Gallery
508 West 26 ST, Suite 9F
Chelsea, New York City
David Richard Gallery is pleased to present River-Rising an exhibition of Ellen Kozak and Scott D. Miller’s collaborative 4-channel video and music installation, as well as a series of Kozak’s night paintings created in 2022-2023. This exhibition is the second time Kozak’s paintings and work in video have been shown together. The first was her solo show at the Katonah Museum of Art, which commissioned a single channel video in 2009.

River-Rising is filmed from the shorelines of three river estuaries, the Garonne River in France, the Bilbao Estuary, and the Hudson River. Also, interspersed throughout the channels are recurring rhythmic passages of nighttime illumination filmed along the Venice Lagoon.

River-Rising is comprised of intimately observed and gradually changing images that inspire an identification with the river as a living organism. Abstract in their appearance, the images convey the movement and luminosity of rivers without offering views or realistic representations. Kozak uses the surface of the river as a giant aquatic lens and synthesizer that assimilates reflection, color, movement and pattern.

The video channels and musical score vary in length; they play as non-synchronized loops, so that viewers experience ever-evolving configurations. In continuous play, any composition of all four channels will not repeat for more than 11 years.

Embedded in this lyrical work is deep unease about the ecological damage that we continue to inflict upon our living waterways. Close observation deepens our connection to the environment. This connection is viscerally underlined by Scott D. Miller’s musical composition. Miller's score is written for 11 wind instruments—a singular ensemble of clarinets, trombones and tuba. It is conceived as a series of larger and smaller wave forms.

Each note lasts the duration of one long breath, in most instances between 12 and 16 seconds, and consists of a gradual crescendo followed by a gradual decrescendo. This languorous phrasing mirrors the slow transitions of Kozak's imagery. Ever-shifting pitch relations are evoked through the emergence/dissolution of distinct instrumental groupings and their associated dynamic profiles. Microtonal tunings and an absence of vibrato create eerie, almost-major, almost-minor tonalities. At times, ominous ascending phrases suggest the sea-level rise that we have provoked. The music is performed by Miller’s Tilted Head Ensemble, conducted by Carl Bettendorf.

Kozak’s paintings take visual inspiration from close study of the surface of bodies of water. While her primary source has long been situated in the landscape, Kozak’s work is chiefly abstract. Working only from reflections in the river’s lens-like surface, her paintings do not have views and they include no horizon. Although we may not recognize the specific motif (landscape, river, sky) the authority of perception in her series of night paintings is tangible.

At the time Kozak began this series, she was mesmerized by the reflections of the illuminated nighttime river traffic, the barges, tugs and tankers passing her studio on the bank of a narrow stretch of the Hudson River in upstate New York. Responding to the drama of the silent radiant reflections, her paintings focus in a reductive way on the phenomena of color, light, and a sense of pulse and meter. Working in an intimate scale, the paintings compress the monumentality of her subject and linger between weightlessness and gravity. Both water and oil paint share the property of viscosity. Exploring paint as a mimetic medium, Kozak uses its physicality to perform in ways that are similar to her subject.

About Ellen Kozak:

Ellen Kozak (b.1955) is a painter and video artist living and working in NYC and the Hudson River Valley. She received a MS in Visual Studies from MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where she worked primarily in video and in 1979 created “Information Space”, her first 4-channel video installation. Kozak continued as a Center Fellow. She received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art. Between 1982 and 1984 she worked in Japan and studied shod? (traditional Japanese calligraphy).

Kozak has had twenty solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in the US and abroad including the Hudson River Museum; the Katonah Museum of Art; the Osaka Contemporary Art Center and the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Art, in Japan; the Elizabeth Harris Gallery and Katarina Rich Perlow Gallery in NYC and Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties, NY.

Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hudson River Museum, the Museum of Fine Art Boston, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among others. She serves on the Board of Directors of Riverkeeper, Inc. This is her second exhibition at the David Richard Gallery.

 

See https://davidrichardgallery.com/artist/1418-ellen-kozak/exhibits
https://ellenkozak.com/about/artist-s-comments

"The Mouse's Nest' and "Solitude" [by John Clare, 1793-1864]

The Mouse’s Nest

I found a ball of grass among the hay
And proged it as I passed and went away
And when I looked I fancied something stirred
And turned again and hoped to catch the bird
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat
With all her young ones hanging at her teats
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me
I ran and wondered what the thing could be
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood
When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood
The young ones squeaked and when I went away
She found her nest again among the hay.
The water o’er the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.

*

Solitude

There is a charm in Solitude that cheers
A feeling that the world knows nothing of
A green delight the wounded mind endears
After the hustling world is broken off
Whose whole delight was crime at good to scoff
Green solitude his prison pleasure yields
The bitch fox heeds him not--birds seem to laugh
He lives the Crusoe of his lonely fields
Which dark green oaks his noontide leisure shields

*

Clare on grammar: “do I write intelligable I am generally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons &c & for the very reason that altho they are drilled hourly daily weekly by every boarding school Miss who pretends to gossip in correspondence they do not know their proper exercise for they even set grammarians at loggerheads and no one can asign them their proper places.”

Shelley's Music

Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory—

Odours, when sweet violets sicken,

Live within the sense they quicken.

 

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,

Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,

Love itself shall slumber on.

 

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

Matthew Arnold's judgment:  Shelley was "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."

"Walter Chrysler" [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

What about the legend of Walter Chrysler

Disassembling a Model T in 1908 and putting

It back together 50 times? Um, yes and no.

First, it was a Locomobile -- and 50 times?

That seems unlikely. Nor is it clear whether

Chrysler took apart the whole Locomobile

Or only the engine. We simply don't know.

We do know that both Walter Chrysler

And Andrew Carnegie are buried in

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery along with

Washington Irving whose short story

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820)

Featuring the Headless Horseman is

An early example of a horror story!

 

Maud Blandel: the naked eye of powerful dance experience [By Tracy Danison]

“L’Oeil-nu” by Maud-Blandel. Photo © Margaux Vendassi_Camille-D_Tonnerre

Maud Blandel’s dance performance L’Oeil nu (“The Naked Eye”) is a brilliant piece of choreographic flow, sensibility and Imagination, creating a special place of sight, sound, emotion, sense and personal meaning.  

L’Oeil nu is a case study in how space is shaped into place through set and how that shaping determines how performance (i.e., performers with spectators) will generate sense. I discussed this topic in an earlier post on Aurélien Dougé’s Aux Lointains, Magic movements, body and space. Like L’Oeil nu, Aux Lointains was a feature of Swiss Dance Week, which took place from 21 to 28 November 2024.

L’Oeil nu set is a fairly narrow rectangle with the entry on one end, where I’ve come in, a long open space between spectator chairs set in five rows on each of its two long sides and, on the far end, a reel-to-reel tape recorder in front of an open wall. The set is narrow enough to ensure that no spectator can get a vision of the whole. Performers are already there, spread along, rather than formed into, a performance center, always in some way nearer or farther from some spectators. It seems they are playing at the supremely ordinary picnic game of bowls.

 

“L’Oeil-nu” by Maud-Blandel. Photo © Pascal Gély

I’m a bit late coming in. I am hurrying along, sensitivity a bit heightened. In contrast to the spectator nearest the door and partially in common with 99% of the others, in order to find my place as a partial observer, I have to walk along the set as more or less “observable, observed, observing” by spectators and performers alike. The thirty seconds or less realtime involved here is three minutes felt time.

Rather than complement a performance that is essentially posture and interaction as at an elegant picnic – players playing: solo/solos/Individual/individuals, duo/duos/couple/couples, trio/trios/triangulars, small groups – light, sound and sense intrude into L’Oeil nu as agents of chaos or order rather than chaotic or orderly elements. Lighting is more like moon or star or sun light, stolidly there because it is there. The reel-to-reel recorder plays an audio loop of the zany, noisy, pointless aggressiveness of the old Looney Tunes cartoon characters, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. The loop thrashes in the air, builds and builds and rebuilds on itself, uncovering and evolving its possibilities, is an event within the performance happening.  

T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men is projected in bilingual edition text, nearer me, on the farther wall. Since a spectator must turn their head far left just to see a bilingual format and un-focus from the performance to make some sense of what it says, identification and sense are made in follow-up mode: Aha! Multifoliate rose ... We grope together/Between the desire And the spasm… The Hollow Man! Men. Hollow Men. This is the way the world ends. That must be it. Mistah Kurtz-he dead/A penny for the Old Guy”/ / Remember us-if at all-not as lost/In death's dream kingdomThis is cactus land/As the perpetual star.

 

“L’Oeil-nu” by Maud-Blandel. Photo © Margaux Vendassi_Camille-D_Tonnerre

And all this, as best as I can describe it, I think shows just exactly the sensibility that Maud Blandel intended, associating the experience of the death of her father with “astrophysical phenomena…”, with “rotation, gravity and periodicity [and entropy]”. In the experience of L’Oeil nu, I do possess the experience of that death or death like it in the place where her piece takes me.  There, I feel its entire relativity, its inexpressible inevitability, normality, theanchorless happening – of a star, a person, a group – that seems always suddenly to collapse into its own significance(s), to become a hole dragging the dark and the light into it.

Before seeing L’Oeil nu, I had been listening to the New Yorker writer Derek Thompson and practitioner and academic Adam Mastroianni discuss the replication crisis in experimental psychology. After Blandel’s piece, brooding in understanding beyond words, I conclude once again that the ineffable gossamer of human experience for the time being makes scientifically valid experimental psychology mostly impossible.  Even if only because it’s impossible to cheat on it, we are all better off with dance performance than experimental psychology.

_______________

­­­­­­­­

I saw Maud Blandel’s “L’Oeil nu” 28 November at Theatre public de Montreuil, sponsored by Swiss Dance Week 2024, directed by Maud Blandel and performed by Bilal El Had, Karine Dahouindji, Maya Masse, Tilouna Morel, Oscar M. Damianaki, Romane Peytavin, sound by Flavio Virzì, Denis Rollet and Maud Blandel, lighting by
Daniel Demont and Florian Bach.  “L’Oeil nu” performance was a feature of Swiss Dance Week Paris, 2024, and included dance performance by Ruth Childs, Tabea Martin, Tiran Willemse and Nina Berclaz, as well as by Aurélien Dougé and Maud Blandel from 21 - 28 November 2024.

Schopenhauer can cheer you up at any hour

Human satisfaction is "like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow."

We find out what we wanted not when we get it, but when we don't get it.

The brain is a slave of the will. Consciousness follows the whims of  cock in pursuit of pussy..

What I call will, Freud would call the triumph of the id.

[The painting on the right is by Gail Campbell, 2016.]

"Like a White Blouse": Couplets from "The Two Davids" [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

Happy birthday, David Shapiro  (born January 2, 1947)

These poems are from February 2003, when David Shapiro and I collaborated daily in couplets. - DL

Re: Like a white blouse, or like red crowds in a face 
Date:   2/17/2003 10:28:38 AM Eastern Standard Time       
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

The apparition of those snowflakes in a crowd:
Petals on a wet white black bough.

The apparition of some poison in a crowd:
Petals on a white black and blackened shroud.

The apparition of those crowds inside a crowd:
Crowds of petals on a wet white black snow‑plow.

The apparition of these apparitions in a wheelbarrow.
Yellow yellow yellow on a white black bough.

The apparition of these umbrellas meeting machines:
Faces on a white wet black blue‑green.

The apparition of our couplets in a crowd:
Metal on a wet white blue‑green black bough unbowed.

The chance encounter in a beautiful crowd:
Pages reduced to a white wet black blouse.  ‑‑ DS, 2 / 17 / 03

from: DCLEHMAN
to: DaJoShap

The apparition of these buds in the dark:
The eyes of a teenage American Jeanne d'Arc.

The petals of a crowd of strangers in the ground:
The buds in the blouse are pink on a white mound.

The apparition of snow as a black bird circles overhead:
The cars wait. The lights don't change from yellow to red.

The chance encounter of a mustache and a tear:
The accidental beauty of a desultory cheer.

Nothing's an accident, nothing's left to chance.
One girl sits in the corner while two others dance.

A blizzard of sparks from the sky and tomorrow
The white of the snow will blot out your sorrow.

Whatever you do, don't forget your gun.
And teach your son not to fly too close to the sun.   -- DL, 2 / 17 / 03

 

Re: Heroically incorrect, David Lehman receives the melancholy Couplet award  

Date:   2/19/2003 10:38:27 AM Eastern Standard Time       
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

The proper study of mankind is a crowd:
Duct tape on a white wet black shroud.

The chance encounter of convulsive love and chance:
Petals on David's first evening in Paris, France..

Says surgeon: I have stitched you and you're mine.
Umbrella squeaks. Sewing faints.  5 of 9.

Says Breton: I'm ship's doctor! What a chance!
Sewing Machine to Umbrella: Oh well, let's dance!

Says Artaud: You're cruel to pull wool over a crowd:
Says petal to petal: Let's come coming through aloud.

Says Edward Lear Umbrella: I'm not proud.
I've only stopped  rain falling on your shroud.

Says Umbrella to the Snark insider the park:
Spring's got nothing but Silence, and a Boojum's not a quark.   DS, 2 / 19 / 03

"The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on" [Oscar Willde]

and therefore:

 

"The Right Ratio" [by David Lehman]

The Right Ratio

The birds in a V-pattern
and the denuded tree with a dozen mighty branches
skeletal against the light blue sky
three varieties of purple in the distance
as the sun sets, and the birds exchange notes.
My dog Johnny falls asleep at my feet
on the terrace. I sip my drink and think:
just as having an even tiny portion of your portfolio
in bonds can help your long-term performance,
so even a few drops of dry vermouth
will improve your martini.

from Literary Hub 
December 21, 2022 

Michael Palma’s new translation of The Divine Comedy [by Terence Winch]

                    Dante, as depicted by Domenico di Michelino in 1465. This painting is located in Florence Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore.

 

The end of the year brings with it a stunning new translation of the entire Divine Comedy by the poet/scholar Michael Palma, already celebrated as the preeminent translator of Italian poetry into English. What he achieves in this monumental volume is quite extraordinary---"As a poet myself," he writes in the frontmatter, "I have sought to re-create the poetry of Dante's Commedia, as I see it on the page and hear it in my head when I read the original. To me, a large and necessary part of what this means is an attempt to re-create the terza rima structure."  This he accomplishes brilliantly, as I discovered when I read the first canto aloud at my desk last night. Here is a 700-year old poem in Italian, in a complex verse form, springing to life in 21st-century English with all of its structural grandeur intact. A miracle of rare device indeed.  I should also mention that his introduction is as good an overview of Dante and his work as you will find anywhere.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I was delighted to discover that NPR did a short piece on the new book, which you can listen to here. I should further note that Michael and I go back a long way, to our meeting as college freshmen in 1963. Even back then, at 18, he was an impressive repository of literary knowledge, clearly destined for the kind of achievement that his new translation of The Divine Comedy represents. 

                                                                                       Michael Palma, 1967