The Best American Poetry

When Life followed Art, which returned the compliment

Life magazine, August 8, 1949. Jackson Pollock: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The artIcle that changed the art world. On the cover: Deborah Reynolds.

The Definition of Gardening [poem by James Tate]

So many people in my various social media feeds are posting pictures of their gardens these days. I'm reminded of this poem, by James Tate, from his wonderful book Shroud of the Gnome. sdl

The Definition of Gardening

Jim just loves to garden, yes he does.

He likes nothing better than to put on

his little overalls and his straw hat.

He says, "Let's go get those tools, Jim."

But then doubt begins to set in.

He says, "What is a garden, anyway?"

And thoughts about a "modernistic" garden

begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve.

He stands in the driveway a long time.

"Horticulture is a groping in the dark

into the obscure and unfamiliar,

kneeling before a disinterested secret,

slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,

birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and

destroy, pull out and apply salt,

hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,

where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,

the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love,

into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,

through the nose, the earsplitting necrology

of it, the withering, shriveling,

the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder

and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,

wireworms are worse than their parents,

there is no way out, flowers as big as heads,

pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently

at me, the me who so loves to garden

because it prevents the heaving of the ground

and the untimely death of porch furniture,

and dark, murky days in a large city

and the dream home under a permanent storm

is also a factor to keep in mind."

Martin Stannard: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Princess of Thieves

 

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine,

And I have something else I want to say:

That “Best of Phil Collins” CD you have is mine.

 

I have not slumped into a terminal decline

And Celia, I welcome each new sunshiny day.

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine.

 

It may be that you think I have no spine

But you’re wrong, and the truth is here to stay:

That “Best of Phil Collins” CD you have is mine.

 

Celia, I have never been the sort to whine,

And this is what I simply have to convey:

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine.

 

As I crack open another bottle of wine

The absence of that record causes me dismay.

Celia, that “Best of Phil Collins” CD is mine.

 

It is not in my nature to weakly repine

And every day I go out with my friends to play.

Since you left I’ve been absolutely bloody fine,

And Celia, that “Best of Phil Collins” CD is mine.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Martin Stannard lives in Nottingham, England, in quiet retirement with his cat, Xiao Mei. He was the editor/publisher of joe soap’s canoe magazine from 1978–1993, where he championed New York poets including Paul Violi, Tony Towle, and Charles North. His poetry and reviews have been published widely since the late 1970s, his most recent titles being The Review (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2020) and Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters (Leafe Press, 2020). “Princess of Thieves” is one poem in a short sequence now called “To Celia” that was originally written as a (slightly humorous but at the same time very serious) series of blog posts called “How To Write Poetry,” with tutorials on the sonnet, villanelle, triolet, sestina, and pantoum. These very useful guides can be found here.  

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"The Prophecy of an Assassination": On "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) [by David Lehman]

When The Manchurian Candidate, based on the novel by Richard Condon, was released in 1962, Pauline Kael called it “the most sophisticated political satire ever to come out of Hollywood.” Six decades on, the judgment holds, and I’ll go further. With its mind-bending plot, its celebrated brainwashing sequence, and stellar performances from a cast led by Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey, and Janet Leigh, director John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece remains supreme in the field of conspiracy-theory celluloid.

An honorable but inevitably lesser effort, Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, lacks the air of Cold War menace, not to mention the queen of diamonds in a game of solitaire as the trigger for a sleeper agent. Also lost is the cinematic magic of the original. Frankenheimer makes exemplary use of montage dissolve techniques to convey altered states of consciousness and depict the experience of hypnotic mind control. And, in retrospect, his 1962 movie seems almost to have anticipated either the earth-shaking events of November 22, 1963, or their interpretation.

Political scientists used to define politics as the art of the possible. If it has morphed into the craft of manipulative paranoia, the change dates back to the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission’s report satisfied few skeptics, journalists, or serious historians, and the credibility of politicians (who used to be called “statesmen”) keeps ebbing.

The Manchurian Candidate, which presaged the change, presents a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate by long-range rifle during his party’s nominating convention in Madison Square Garden. The movie’s conceit was so scary that studio executives at United Artists felt the project had to be cleared with the White House. Frank Sinatra dutifully called JFK, who greenlit the film, which Sinatra believed in so strongly that he volunteered the use of his private plane for an early scene in the movie.

Talk about serendipity: On October 22, 1962, only two days before the picture’s release, President Kennedy announced to the nation that he had ordered a naval blockade to repulse Russian ships, equipped with missiles, heading to the Caribbean. The Cuban Missile Crisis has been seen ever since as the tensest moment in the 45-year Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and here was a movie advancing the thesis that a Communist assassination plan was in the works.

The Manchurian Candidate is wickedly satirical. Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), a demagogue in the manner of Joe McCarthy, is revealed to be an imbecile under the thumb of his ambitious, intellectually superior wife, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury at her best). What happened to her first husband? The movie, mum on the point, offers an Oedipal triangle in which Mrs. Iselin controls her war hero son, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), and gets him to eliminate her rival, his bride (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of Senator Iselin’s fiercest, most principled opponent (John McGiver). Lansbury was less than three years older than Harvey. In the novel, she seduces him; in the film, just a kiss on the lips, but it’s enough.

What most distinguishes The Manchurian Candidate is its opening. If you miss the first five minutes of Hamlet, you can catch up (at the cost of some excellent verse), because the ghost does not appear to Hamlet until act I, scene 4 and doesn’t speak to him until scene 5. But, as the movie’s theatrical release poster accurately proclaimed, “If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about.” The film begins in Korea, 1952. Betrayed by a guide, an American army unit is ambushed. After Saul Bass’s marvelous title credits, featuring the queen of diamonds on an oversize political campaign button, we go to an American airport, where Sergeant Shaw, survivor of the ambush, is honored with hoopla for the valor he is said to have displayed under fire.

In the following scene, the camera slowly approaches Shaw’s commanding officer, Major Bennett Marco (Sinatra), asleep beside an insomniac’s paradise of books, among them The Trial, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Ulysses. Marco, who nominated Shaw for his medal, slides into a recurring nightmare of what really happened in Korea.

The brainwashing sequence begins with the captive GIs in their army fatigues on a stage. The audience appears to the men, in their trance, to consist of dowagers in sunhats who have gathered to talk about hydrangeas at a suburban garden party in New Jersey. In fact, the ladies in the audience are Russian and Chinese bigwigs, and Frankenheimer switches us back and forth between alternating versions, the harmless old women and the malevolent Communists in suits or uniforms. Then we watch in horror as, under orders, Shaw kills two of his fellow POWs while the other soldiers look on, affectless.

Like Major Marco, Corporal Al Melvin (James Edwards) has recurrent nightmares culminating in a public murder committed by Shaw. And, like Major Marco, he is programmed to say, when asked, that “‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Everyone says so, and it’s odd, because Raymond is a singularly cold, humorless fellow whom the men dislike..

The buried truth—that the recipient of a Congressional Medal of Honor, feted with fanfare, is a secret, trigger-ready weapon concocted by the enemy—created a mental shock to anyone who saw The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. (I was 14 years old, and amazed.) The plot: to engineer the nomination of the clownish Senator Iselin for the position of vice president, then to kill the man at the head of the ticket, paving the way for Iselin’s rise to that position. The paranoid paradox: the extreme right-wing John Iselin is really a clueless Communist placeholder. The brains of the operation: Eleanor Iselin, as icily ruthless as Lady MacBeth.

Marco, the veteran suffering from PTSD who tries to save Shaw from his predestined fate, looks like a man having a nervous breakdown, but he must have something going for him, because the glamorous and beautiful Rosie Cheyney (Janet Leigh) is willing to break her engagement to her fiancé on the basis of a shared cigarette with Marco on the train between Washington, D. C. and New York City. Although Leigh is extraneous to the plot, I have published a poem contending that the only justification needed for Janet Leigh’s presence in the movie is that she is Janet Leigh. More creatively, Roger Ebert argues that in the paranoid universe of The Manchurian Candidate, Leigh may secretly be Sinatra’s controller.

I will not give away other surprises and speculations except to say that the guises assumed by the queen of diamonds will endow that particular card with a rare significance if you are a part-time poker player. An amusing scene takes place in Jilly’s, Sinatra’s favorite New York hangout. When the bartender, telling a story, says, “Go up to Central Park and go jump in the lake,” Raymond—a solitaire addict who has just encountered the trigger card—does as told. Marco has to fish him out.

The Manchurian Candidate has altered political discourse, and the very word brainwashing has acquired a stink. The evil mesmerist-in-chief, Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), crows that Raymond Shaw’s “brain has not only been washed, as they say; it’s been dry-cleaned.” In 1967, George Romney shot his presidential candidacy in the foot when he said he had supported the Vietnam War because US generals had “brainwashed” him. Recently, Donald Trump has been depicted as a “Manchurian candidate,” allegedly willing to favor the Russians in exchange for lucrative real-estate deals.

But The Manchurian Candidate offers more than a linguistic afterlife, thrilling paranoia, and the cunning of Eleanor Iselin. It succeeds as well as it does because of the strong sense of the uncanny that informs it, as if we were watching our own history rendered as a spooky hallucination, delivered with the plausibility of a newsreel.

Click here for the "Talking Pictures" column on The American Scholar, January 22, 2022.

"A desire to capture events": Nick Courtright & Cynthia Good in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

I'm excited to introduce this conversation between Cynthia Good and Nick Courtright, who I've paired because of their shared investment in travel, documentary poetics, and entrepreneurship in literature and the arts.  Here, they discuss their latest collections, as well as the intersection of lived experience, craft, and the business of writing.  

Cynthia Good is an award-winning poet, journalist, and former TV news anchor. She has written six books including Vaccinating Your Child, which won the Georgia Author of the Year award. She has launched two magazines, Atlanta Woman and the nationally distributed PINK magazine for women in business. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Adanna Journal, Awakenings, Book of Matches, Brickplight, Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, Cutthroat, Free State Review, Full Bleed, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hole in the Head Review, Main Street Rag, Maudlin House Review, MudRoom, Outrider Press, OyeDrum Magazine, The Penmen Review, Pensive Journal, Persimmon Tree, Pier-Glass Poetry, Pink Panther Magazine, Poydras, South Shore Review, The Ravens Perch, Reed Magazine, Tall Grass, Terminus Magazine, They Call Us, and Voices de la Luna and Willows Wept Review, Semi-Finalist: The Word Works 2021, among others. Her debut poetry collection is available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press. 

Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light and Punchline, and he serves as the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, Nick lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel.

 

Cynthia Good: Why were you moved to focus on place, and what places in particular, since it is a bit mysterious in some of your beautiful poems?

Nick Courtright: I was drawn to place because the otherworldliness—and normalcy—of non-America called for a deeper exploration. I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to have seen a lot of the world, and what I found there was not just a bunch of tourist sites, but a reminder that the lives of others are just as rich and nuanced—and perhaps even more so—than ours in America, even though in America we tend to have a rather flat impression of the rest of the world.

IM Vin Scully (1927-2022) Laureate of Play-by-Play Poetry [by David Lehman]

When Kirk Gibson hit perhaps the most unlikely home run in baseball history – when, hobbled with injuries, he pinch-hit with two out and a man on first base, and the Dodgers were one pitch away from losing the game, and with one swing Gibson reversed the team’s fortunes – play-by-play man Jack Buck said “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Beautiful: a totally colloquial line of iambic tetrameter. Vin Scully, describing the same at-bat, let a few seconds of silence pass before saying, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened."

I am going from memory and I may have a word or two wrong there, but the point of this piece is an appreciation of play-by-play announcers and the memorable things they say. This (2016) is Vin Scully’s last year as the voice of the Dodgers, and I dedicate these musings to him, the red-headed gentleman who invites viewers to pull up a chair and join him in Dodger Stadium.

There were many anecdotes about Scully making the rounds as he completed his astounding career – having broadcast or telecast Dodger games since 1950. Everyone loves his call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. In October of that year, when Koufax on two days’ rest shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the World Series for his team, Vinny said, “Sandy, two days ago you said you felt like a hundred years old. How do you feel now?” “Like a hundred and one,” Koufax replied.

Every so often Scully will surprise you with a literary allusion, and he usually doesn’t repeat himself, though Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait” has served him well for years. When he broke the news of the untimely death of Don Drysdale, the great pitcher who had become his broadcast partner, Scully said, with simple eloquence, “Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart.”

Left: Sandy Koufax (center) and the late Tommy Lasorda at a ceremony honoring Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium, May 3, 2017

Added on August 4, 2022:

Vin Scully died this week, a year after his beloved wife passed. He was 94. The eulogists were justly extravagant in their praise of the Hall of Fame broadcaster, voice of the Dodgers from 1950 through 2016. Nor did the plaudits come exclusively fom Dodger fans. Honoring Scully, the team's bitterest rivals, the Giants of San Francisco,  did something very classy prior to Wednesday's evening's contest between the two squads. Jon Miller, the Giants' lead broadcaster since 1997 and one of the best in the business, calls him "the greatest broadcaster there ever was." Miller does a tremendous impression of Vin - in English,Japanese, and Spanish!

Here's Vin's call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on September 9, 1965. "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium is the loneliest place in the world right now" on 9:43 PM. Koufax ended the game with a strikeout; in fact he struck out the side in both the eighth and ninth innings. "Swung on and missed, a perfect game!" Andf then Vin had the wit to keep quiet and let the crowd noise take over "in the city of angels." 

When the Sandy Koufax statue was unveiled at Dodger Stadium in June of this year, the great southpaw said “Vin Scully is the greatest of all time, period." 

Some of Vin Scully's best lines, with thanks to Houston Mitchell of the Los Angeles Times:

“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theater, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!”

“He pitches as though he’s double-parked.” — on Bob Gibson

A Joey Gallo home run off Clayton Kershaw looked like "a marble" when it went way over the right field fence.

“He’s like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” — on Tom Glavine

“It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timers’ game.”

"Statistics are used the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination."

“Roberto Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pittsburgh.”

"Losing feels worse than winning feels good."

"Fernando ready, and the strike-two pitch is hit back to the box, dribbling to second, [Juan] Samuel on the bag, throws to first for the double play! Fernando Valenzuela has pitched a no-hitter at 10:17 in the evening on June three 29th, 1990. If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!"

Calling Hank Aaron‘s 715th home run: “What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. … It is over, at 10 minutes after 9 in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth. You could not, I guess, get two more opposite men. The Babe, big and garrulous and oh so sociable and oh so immense in all his appetites. And then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama — slender and stayed slender throughout his career. Ruth, as he put on the poundage and the paunch, the Yankees put their ballplayers in pinstripe uniforms, because it made Ruth look slimmer. But they didn’t need pinstripe uniforms for Aaron in the twilight of his career.”

His final words as a Dodgers broadcaster:

“You know, friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a 67-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family, and now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you. May God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every care, a promise; and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life seems, a faithful friend to share; for every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for each prayer. You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know, in my heart, I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball. So, this is Vin Scully wishing you a pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.”

So pull up a chair and listen to the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's greatest pitching feat.

There were many anecdotes about Scully making the rounds as he completed his astounding career – having broadcast or telecast Dodger games since 1950. Everyone loves his call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. In October of that year, when Koufax on two days’ rest shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the World Series for his team, Vinny said, “Sandy, two days ago you said you felt like a hundred years old. How do you feel now?” “Like a hundred and one,” Koufax replied.

Every so often Scully will surprise you with a literary allusion, and he usually doesn’t repeat himself, though Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait” has served him well for years. When he broke the news of the untimely death of Don Drysdale, the great pitcher who had become his broadcast partner, Scully said, with simple eloquence, “Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart.”

Left: Sandy Koufax (center) and the late Tommy Lasorda at a ceremony honoring Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium, May 3, 2017

Added on August 4, 2022:

Vin Scully died this week, a year after his beloved wife passed. He was 94. The eulogists were justly extravagant in their praise of the Hall of Fame broadcaster, voice of the Dodgers from 1950 through 2016. Nor did the plaudits come exclusively fom Dodger fans. Honoring Scully, the team's bitterest rivals, the Giants of San Francisco,  did something very classy prior to Wednesday's evening's contest between the two squads. Jon Miller, the Giants' lead broadcaster since 1997 and one of the best in the business, calls him "the greatest broadcaster there ever was." Miller does a tremendous impression of Vin - in English,Japanese, and Spanish!

Here's Vin's call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on September 9, 1965. "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium is the loneliest place in the world right now" on 9:43 PM. Koufax ended the game with a strikeout; in fact he struck out the side in both the eighth and ninth innings. "Swung on and missed, a perfect game!" Andf then Vin had the wit to keep quiet and let the crowd noise take over "in the city of angels." 

When the Sandy Koufax statue was unveiled at Dodger Stadium in June of this year, the great southpaw said “Vin Scully is the greatest of all time, period." 

Some of Vin Scully's best lines, with thanks to Houston Mitchell of the Los Angeles Times:

“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theater, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!”

“He pitches as though he’s double-parked.” — on Bob Gibson

A Joey Gallo home run off Clayton Kershaw looked like "a marble" when it went way over the right field fence.

“He’s like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” — on Tom Glavine

“It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timers’ game.”

"Statistics are used the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination."

“Roberto Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pittsburgh.”

"Losing feels worse than winning feels good."

"Fernando ready, and the strike-two pitch is hit back to the box, dribbling to second, [Juan] Samuel on the bag, throws to first for the double play! Fernando Valenzuela has pitched a no-hitter at 10:17 in the evening on June three 29th, 1990. If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!"

Calling Hank Aaron‘s 715th home run: “What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. … It is over, at 10 minutes after 9 in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth. You could not, I guess, get two more opposite men. The Babe, big and garrulous and oh so sociable and oh so immense in all his appetites. And then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama — slender and stayed slender throughout his career. Ruth, as he put on the poundage and the paunch, the Yankees put their ballplayers in pinstripe uniforms, because it made Ruth look slimmer. But they didn’t need pinstripe uniforms for Aaron in the twilight of his career.”

His final words as a Dodgers broadcaster:

“You know, friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a 67-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family, and now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you. May God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every care, a promise; and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life seems, a faithful friend to share; for every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for each prayer. You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know, in my heart, I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball. So, this is Vin Scully wishing you a pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.”

So pull up a chair and listen to the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's greatest pitching feat.

Auden's Predictions in "For the Time Being"

<<< Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, and the same for all, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions—feelings in the solar plexus induced by undernourishment, angelic images generated by fevers or drugs, dream warnings inspired by the sound of falling water. Whole cosmologies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of school children ranked above the great masterpieces.

Idealism will be replaced by Materialism. Priapus will only have to move to a good address and call himself Eros to become darling of middle-aged women. Life after death will be an eternal dinner party where all the guests are twenty years old. Diverted from its normal and wholesome outlet in patriotism and civic or family pride, the need of the materialistic Masses for some visible Idol to worship will be driven into totally unsocial channels where no education can reach it. Divine honors will be paid to silver tea-pots, shallow depressions in the earth, names on maps, domestic pets, ruined windmills, even in extreme cases, which will become increasingly common, to headaches, or malignant tumors, or four o’clock in the afternoon.

Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish. Every corner-boy will congratulate himself: “I’m such a sinner that God had to come down in person to save me. I must be a devil of a fellow.” Every crook will argue, “I like committing crimes. God likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged.” And the ambition of every young cop will be to secure a death-bed repentance. The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums, and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with the animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Tragedy when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.

Naturally this cannot be allowed to happen. Civilization must be saved even if this means sending for the military, as I suppose it does. How dreary. Why is it that in the end civilization always has to call in those professional tidiers to whom it is all one it be Pythagoras or a homicidal lunatic that they are instructed to exterminate. O dear, Why couldn’t this wretched infant be born somewhere else? Why can’t people be sensible? I don’t want to be horrid. Why can’t they see that the notion of a finite God is absurd? Because it is. And suppose, for the sake of argument, that it isn’t that this story is true, that this child is in some inexplicable manner both God and Man, that he grows up, lives and dies, without committing a single sin? Would that make life any better? On the contrary it would make it far, far worse. For it could only mean this: that once having shown them how, God would expect every man, whatever his fortune, to lead a sinless life in the flesh and on earth. Then indeed would the human race be plunged into madness and despair. And for me personally at this moment it would mean that God had given me the power to destroy Himself. I refuse to be taken in. He could not play such a horrid practical joke. Why should he dislike me so? I’ve worked like a slave. Ask anyone you like. I read all official dispatches without skipping. I’ve taken elocution lessons. I’ve hardly ever taken bribes. How dare he allow me to decide. I’ve tried to be good. I brush my teeth every single night. I haven’t had sex for a month. I object. I’m a liberal. I want everyone to be happy. I wish I had never been born. >>>

from For the Time Being © The Estate of W. H. Auden

The speaker is King Herod, who has just ordered the massacre of the innocents, the slaying of the first-born of Judea. The question is whether Auden agrees with the predictions, particularly those in bold face. Is he, like Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, committed to the notion that that self-criticism is the writer's first obligation? When Herod says "I'm a liberal," is this a comment on Herod (self-delusion) or on liberalism? One could argue that Auden discredits these predictions by assigning them to the villainous Herod. Nevertheless, a case can be made that many of these negative predictions have come to pass.

The new two-volume set of W. H. Auden's complete poems, meticulously assembled and presented by Edward Mendelson, is highly recommended (Princeton University Press). DL

Poet Spotlight: Shane McCrae [by Kristina Marie Darling]

I'm thrilled to introduce this new poem by celebrated writer Shane McCrae.  As a longtime admirer of McCrae's work, I never cease to be amazed by his ability to bear the distinctive lineation of Frank O'Hara and the cadences of classic New York School poetry into new and unforeseen sociopolitical territory.  

Poet Shane McCrae grew up in Texas and California. The first in his family to graduate from college, McCrae earned a BA at Linfield College, an MA at the University of Iowa, an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a JD at Harvard Law School.
 
McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Mule(2011); Blood (2013); The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Gilded Auction Block (2019). His work has also been featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler, and his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

--Kristina Marie Darling 

A New Poem by Shane McCrae

“The Dreyfus Affair” [by David Lehman]

Louis Begley writes well and is a good guide to one of modern history's great tragic causes celebres, the court-martial of French artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus [left] on trumped-up charges of treason in 1894. The evidence was fabricated, the trial closed to the public, and Dreyfus was convicted and imprisoned on devil's island off the coast of French Guiana. His real crime was that he was a Jew and France was embracing anti-Semitism with the lust of a pimp eyeing Catherine Deneuve. Emile Zola (J'Accuse] and others rose to Dreyfus's  defense. Nevertheless, Dreyfus suffered five years of solitary confinement before the verdict was overturned. In 1906 the French high court exonerated Dreyfus. Despite his mistreatment by the French army, the assassination of his character, and the degradation and suffering he endured in prison, Dreyfus wanted nothing more than to return to active military service. He served at the front in World War I with an artillery command close to Verdun, was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and was decorated with the Legion d'honneur.

Begley's Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters is published as part of a "why it matters" series by Yale University Press. it is a cogent little book, certainly worth reading, though my disquietude was awakened by the jacket copy that asked whether the Dreyfus case was "merely another illustration of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti-Semitism." That merely bothered me, and I note that the preface of this brief book, the last eighteen pages of its opening chapter, and its coda strongly imply that the lesson of the affair, the reason it matters to us today, is that it warns us against such "crimes and abuses" committed against "some Guantanamo detainees" in the aftermath of the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001. 

Is that really what makes Dreyfus relevant to us here, now? Or isn't the resurgence of a virulent  anti-Semitism -- the demonizing of the Jews and of Israel (Islamic dictatorships and religious authorities make no distinction between them); the chorus of voices calling for the annihilation of Israel; the campaigns of hatred and violence targeting Jews; the re-surfacing of the vicious Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the murders; the beheading of an American journalist after forcing him to tell the camera that he is a Jew and that his mother was a Jew, as if that were a capital offense; -- isn't all that reason enough to recall the Dreyfus Affair in its unhappy detail? Do you mean to tell me that this infamous episode in modern history, this outrageous injustice, is not finally about the Jews and those who would vilify them but about something else entirely, the depredations of the Bush Administration? I fear that this sort of reasoning may itself be evidence of the phenomenon that it evades.

BTW, this is the publisher that has withdrawn, from a book just weeks away from publication, the Danish newspaper cartoons that offended Islamic bigots in 2005. The book, by a Brandeis professor named Jytte Klausen, is called The Cartoons That Shook the World. Reproduction of the illustrations would seem to be an inevitable and indispensable part of any study of them. To withdraw the pictures is a craven act of self-censorship founded on no principle nobler than the adage to let sleeping dogs lie, especially when they are killers. Let the pictures be published. If enough people make enough of a fuss, maybe Yale University Press will buckle to the pressure. They seem to be good at that.

-- DL 

from the archive; first posted on September 18, 2009 at 07:12 PM

"Intellect, anxiety, philosophy, history, art": Rachel Abramowitz and Tina Cane in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

It is a pleasure to introduce this conversation by two outstanding and generous literary citizens:  Tina Cane and Rachel Abramowitz.  In both writers' bodies of work, we see a poetics powered by community, enriched by conversation and emboldened by dialogue across genres and mediums.  

Rachel Abramowitz is also the author The Birthday of the Dead, which just launched from Conduit Editions, as well as the chapbooks The Puzzle Monster, winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2022), and Gut Lust, the winner of the 2019 Burnside Review prize (Burnside Review Press, 2020). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Tin House Online, The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Oxonian Review, POOL, jubilat, Sprung Formal, Transom, Colorado Review, and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Oxford, and has taught English Literature at Barnard College in New York. 

Tina Cane was born in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC in 1969 and grew up in the city’s East and West Village. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne and completed her master’s degree in French Literature at ​the University of Paris X-Nanterre and Middlebury College.  She is the founder and director of Writers-in-the Schools, RI, for which she works as a visiting poet. Over the past twenty-five years, Tina has taught French, English, and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island.  Her poems and translations have appeared ​in numerous publications, including Spinning Jenny, The Literary  Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, Poem-a-Day.  Her work,The Fifth Thought, was the 2008 Other Painters Press chapbook winner. Her books include The Fifth Thought,Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work. Tina was the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and their three children. In 2020, Cane was named a poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Tina is also the creator/curator of the distance reading series, ​Poetry is Bread.  Alma Presses Play, Tina's debut novel-in-verse for young adults readers, will be released in September 2021 with Penguin/ Random House Books.

Tina Cane: There's a poem I keep returning to called "Vantablack" from your new collection, The Birthday of the Dead. It's named for that blackest shade of paint ever made, but manages to encapsulate the book's exploration of how, in your words, "any human interaction" with the natural world "turns out  to be devastating in unexpected ways." The thrust of this observation pervades your book, which is a place where "the forest fills and unfills, drops itself down root tubes and turns to dark lace." Where does this vision of our relationship with nature spring from? How would you characterize your relationship with the natural world?

Complain, Complain: Poems about writing poetry [by Katha Pollitt]

    Complain, Complain: Poems about Writing Poetry
    by Katha Pollitt (pictured below left, reading at KGB Bar)

Have you ever noticed how many modern poems there are in which the poet complains about the difficulty of writing poetry?  I suspect this is a relatively recent addition to the long list of poets’ complaints, perhaps replacing the traditional lament that the poet’s girlfriend won’t sleep with him. Now chances are she’ll do that, at least for a while.  Back in the day poets  wrote scads of poems about about how cold and heartless or just mysteriously uninterested the desired woman was, but at least the poem itself was not the problem.  Poets  were always comparing themselves to shepherds tootling on flutes or panpipes, which sounds restful and pleasant and not very musically challenging, or to madmen raving, birds warbling, or other images of spontaneous and untutored communication.  Perhaps it was easier when you had the Muse to do the heavy lifting.

  I thought about this because of a dinner party I recently attended, to which each guest was asked to bring a poem to read around the table. Most of the guests were writers, although I was the only poet.  I am embarrassed to say how long it took me to choose my poem -- so many of my favorites I had to disqualify as too long, too sad, too intimate, too familiar,  or inviting an inaccurate autobiographical reading.  I mean, nobody wants to have to hear the whole “Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” before they get to eat dessert. 

     Aha, I thought, Stevie Smith (pictured above)! A poet I love. She’s funny, she’s poignant, she has lots of short poems.  Lots of short poems about Christianity (no), death (no), ridiculous people (no) and unhappy love(no!).  Just when I was about to have a fit -- because did I mention that I left all this to the last moment and had persuaded myself that I was about to make a great fool of myself in front of a whole roomful of people I admired and esteemed and even, in one or two cases, was a bit afraid of, and I was beginning to wonder if  possibly, my humiliation was the whole secret point of the exercise --  I found  this wonderful poem:

Mrs. Arbuthnot

Mrs. Arbuthnot was a poet
A poet of high degree,
But her talent left her;
Now she lives at home by the sea.

In the morning she washes up,
In the afternoon she sleeps,
Only in the evenings sometimes
for her lost talent she weeps,

Crying: I should write a poem,
Can I look a wave in the face
If I do not write a poem about a sea-wave,
Putting the words in place.

Mrs. Arbuthnot has died,
She has gone to heaven,
She is one with the heavenly combers now
And need not write about them.

Cry: she is a heavenly comber,
she runs with a comb of fire,
Nobody writes or wishes to
Who is one with their desire.

   As it happens, another guest brought  a poem on the same theme, Brenda Shaughnessy’s "A Poet’s Poem":

If it takes me all day,
I will get the word freshened out of this poem.
I put it in the first line, then moved it to the second,
and now it won’t come out.
It’s stuck. I’m so frustrated,
so I went out to my little porch all covered in snow
and watched the icicles drip, as I smoked
a cigarette.
Finally I reached up and broke a big, clear spike
off the roof with my bare hand.
And used it to write a word in the snow.
I wrote the word snow.
I can’t stand myself.

  If Mrs. Arbuthnot had written a poem about not writing that poem about the sea wave, it might have been this very poem.   

   So if nobody writes or wishes to who is one with their desire,  has the poem itself become the elusive, resistant love object, the modern  Phyllis or Clorinda?

Posted by Katha Pollitt on August 02, 2009 at 06:18 AM

Said Disraeli to Gladstone. . .

 

At a social gathering, Gladstone said to Disraeli, "I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease."

Disraeli replied, "That all depends, Sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

Poet Spotlight: Cole Swensen [by Kristina Marie Darling]

It's truly an honor to introduce this new work by acclaimed poet Cole Swensen.  Here, she offers a complex and gorgeously lyrical phenomenology of perception, deftly interrogating the ways that language shapes one's experience of the senses and the world around us.  In Swensen's newest work, the unique artistic opportunities of poetry - performative language, metaphor, and the image - are brought to bear on these philosophical questions with incredible skill.  It is the associative logic that Swensen implements that allows her to present inquiries into the nature of language and perception in a visceral way. Indeed, "New Green" involves and implicates the reader in the speaker's efforts to understand - and delineate - a clearer boundary between self and world.  This is a stunning addition to an already accomplished body of work.  

Cole Swensen is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017), Gave (Omnidawn, 2017), and Landscapes on a Train(Nightboat 2015), and a volume of critical essays. Her poetic collections turn around specific research projects, including ones on public parks, visual art, illuminated manuscripts, and ghosts. Her work has won the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and the founding editor of La Presse Poetry (www.lapressepoetry.com). She teaches at Brown University.

New Green by Cole Swensen 

What is the unseen, and how do we see it before it emerges? That is the nature of earliest things, and you try to observe what comes first—a blade of grass, a livening of the moss, an outbreak of leaf—looking out the window and then walking outside in search of emergence. It really does have a different color—which is also what’s puzzling your child as she runs out of the house holding up a crayon, asking “What does New Green mean? Haven’t all colors been around forever?” And I think of the translation that I’ve just finished for a catalogue in which the artist, among a list of colors, included verd, which turned out to be old French for vert, and, sure enough, Old English has grene, but despite this clear illustration, the child refuses to believe that it’s possible to invent a new color simply by inventing a new word.

Fifteen Years On: Bezanson, Bibbins, Deming, Lehman, Yeager Remain in Fashion

In 2007, the Italian magazine Io Donna devoted a section of their men's issue to what New York poets were wearing. Here's the evidence. Top row: Mark Bibbins (left), Matthew Yeager. Second row: David Lehman (left), Taylor Mead and Chris Martin. Third row: John Deming (left), Graeme Bezanson.

 

"The real movement is through ideas": Beth McDermott & Maya Sonenberg in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

In writings on her time as editor of The Dial, Marianne Moore coined the term "conversity" to describe the inherently dialogic nature of poetry.  In that spirit, I'm pleased to present the following conversation between two contemporary writers who are both intriguing in their critiques of traditional genre categories:  Maya Sonenberg, a masterful storyteller, who frequently places the tools of poetry in the service of narrative, and Beth McDermott, whose ekphrastic poems often apply performative language and lyricism to the task of engaging with, and thinking through, the questions posed by works of visual art.  As this conversation unfolds, McDermott and Sonenberg consider such compelling topics as the gender politics of judgment, the relationship between writing and family, and the interplay of innovative writerly technique and the deeply personal.  

Maya Sonenberg (above left) grew up in New York City and lived in Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, California, Oregon, and Paris, France before settling in Seattle, where she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington.  Her newest collection of short stories, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters has received the Sullivan Prize and will be published by the University of Notre Dame press in August 2022. Her previous collections are Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature) and Voices from the Blue Hotel. Other fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, New Ohio Review, The Literarian, Hotel Amerika, and numerous other places.

Beth McDermott’s poetry appears in Pine Row, Tupelo Quarterly, Terrain.org, and Southern Humanities Review. Reviews and criticism about art and ecology appear in American Book Review, After the Art, Kenyon Review Online, and The Trumpeter. She’s an Assistant Professor of English at the University of St. Francis and recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, an Illinois Speaks Micro-Grant, and first place in the Regional Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest.  Her first book, Figure 1, just launched from Pine Row Press. 

Beth McDermott: We both write about parenting. In a couple of my poems, i.e. “Judgment” or “Getting Ready,” I consider what it means to be judged as a parent. I see common feelings among my speakers and your character in “Painting Time,” for example. In that story, written from the second person point of view, we get the partner’s perspective of the “she,” who has spent most of her time as a parent looking for time to paint. How does the choice of that viewpoint speak to what it means to be a “bad mother”? 

Maya Sonenberg: When I started writing “Painting Time,” I gave myself the challenge of using second person point of view, which I had never really done before, not that type of second person anyway where a narrator addresses one of the characters, rather than one character addressing another. I think I chose to address the husband/father as the “you” for a couple of reasons. The woman in that story is working so hard at being a “good” mother that she fears/feels she’s become a “bad” artist, and I wanted to see this struggle from the outside, through her spouse’s eyes but without the potential solipsism of the first person point of view. I hope the reader can see that he doesn’t think she’s a bad artist or a bad mother; she has internalized those judgments. However, while he’s extremely sympathetic towards her plight, and in fact tries to do whatever he can to help, he’s ultimately completely clueless about what she’s going through and also sort of jealous of her connection to the children. I carefully chose to present the male characters in this story and in “Hunters and Gatherers” in as sympathetic a light as I could muster to highlight the fact that misogyny, sexism, and expectations around motherhood are systemic rather than the actions or beliefs of isolated “bad” men.

Kristina Marie Darling, Guest Author, August 1-5, 2022

This week we welcome back Kristina Marie Darling as our guest author. Kristina is the author of thirty-six books, which include Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group; Daylight Has Already Come:  Selected Poems 2014 - 2020, which will be published by Black Lawrence Press; Silence in Contemporary Poetry, which will be published in hardcover by Clemson University Press in the United States and Liverpool University Press in the United Kingdom; Silent Refusal:  Essays on Contemporary Feminist Writing, newly available from Black Ocean; Angel of the North, which is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry; and X Marks the Dress: A Registry (co-written with Carol Guess), which was just launched by Persea Books in the United States. Penguin Random House Canada has also published a Canadian edition.  

Dr. Darling serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly.  Beginning in the fall of 2022, she will also serve as Publisher-in-Residence at the American University in Rome. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she divides her time between the United States and Europe.  Find out more about Kristina here. 

Welcome back, Kristina. 

--sdl

Alicia Jo Rabins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Alicia J. Rose

_________________________________________________________

Sunday School

 

Look around this cafe, everyone is reading the New York Times and talking,

which all adds up to a clamor of breakfast noises and a mosaic of Sunday papers.

Look at this messy cartoon I call my “life,” which does not know

whether it is living or being lived

It happened again on the way here:

a man looked at me on the subway, directly, meaningfully, brazenly.

This is a different way of being a woman,

which I always disdained, complained, refrained from and now

something must cry look at me, look at me!

And the thrill of being looked-at quivers me to attention.

Being noticed, like noticing, has a sharp blade.

I too cannot help but notice all the beautiful women who populate this restaurant,

it seems they are too beautiful to possibly be real;

and what is it all for anyway, all this ungraspable perfection, because

although right now their beauty is as full as a ripe boysenberry,

crushable, staining, straining their own edges, aching

to be popped in the mouth and tasted

(and they offer it as such)

soon it will be over, their beauty, and only the desire will remain.

All the fucking in the world never erases desire,

and moreover it creates a Next Generation with desire of their own.

So any cessation of desire becomes futile, impossible.

And so we keep putting on our strappy heels day after day,

just “not feeling right” if we wear sneakers or flip flops,

offering ourselves up for this one day:

offering our beauty on the altar of this particular Sunday

like a coffee and a newspaper, to be swallowed and read

and left behind on the cafe table,

leaving faint black smudges on our one-day-older fingertips.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, performer, and Torah teacher. She is the author of two poetry books, Divinity School (winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize) and Fruit Geode (a finalist for the Jewish Book Award). As a musician, Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah currently being developed into a musical. Most recently she is the creator, star, and composer of A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, an indie feature film based on her one-woman chamber-rock opera, which The Atlantic calls “a blessing.” 

_______________________________________________________________________________________

   Francis Luis Mora (Uruguayan-born American, 1874-1940). Subway Riders in New York City (AKA Evening News), 1914.

2022 Baseball Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony [by Greg Pattenaude]

On Sunday July 24, I made the trip to Cooperstown to be part of the induction ceremony of this year’s class to the Baseball Hall of Fame.  I was there to watch Gil Hodges, who I wrote about in January, be inducted posthumously. In addition to Gil, there were six other former baseball players being honored: three posthumously - Minnie Miñoso, Bud Fowler and Buck O’Neil – and three others who were present – Jim Kaat, Tony Olivia and David Ortiz aka Big Papi. 

If you are a baseball fan, but have never attended the induction ceremony, it is celebration of the best baseball can offer.  Fifty-thousand or so travel many miles to be part of the festivities.  The huge, open field of the Clark Sports Center, located about a 15 minute walk south of the village’s Main Street, is dotted with lawn chairs, umbrellas, tents, signs, and uniforms of many teams.  This year, there were plenty of flags from the Dominican Republic, the native land of Big Papi, being waved proudly from those of Dominican heritage.

The field is already crowded when I arrive at 11:30, two hours before the scheduled start time of the ceremony.  I put my folding chair down on an open spot near the center but pretty far back from the stage.  When I return from a quick walk to get water, I’ve been surrounded.  To my left are three chairs with those seated wearing a Mets, Yankees and Red Sox jersey, respectively.  I commented that this is a great mix.  The Mets fan said that they have a fourth person with them, a Phillies fan, but he forgot a chair.

To their left are a large group of Dominicans.  They are having an animated conservation, talking loudly, smiling and laughing, and enjoying some really big cigars, whose smell reminded me of my youth at Shea Stadium.  To my right are five people who quietly sat there with a large cooler of Coronas.  My only judgement on them was that they had no idea who Tommie Agee was, but I refrained from telling them to go on YouTube to watch Game 3 of the 1969 World Series.

The ceremony gets underway on time with the usual welcome to Cooperstown by Jane Forbes Clark, Chair of the Hall of Fame and introduction of today’s master of ceremonies, Brian Kenny from the MLB Network.  He noted that due to bad storms forecast for later in the afternoon, some usual features, like video montages for each for the inductees shown on the huge screen and across the live televised feed, would be omitted to get the crowd out of there before the thunderstorms arrived.  It was greatly appreciated; the ceremony still lasted three hours.  And it was a good call; the ceremony was over at 4:30pm and Cooperstown was drenched by 5:15pm. Then comes what can only be described as a living “Field of Dreams” moment.  The previously-inducted Hall of Famers are introduced one by one – a who’s who of those that were the best in the game.  As noted in the introductions, only 1% of ballplayers are selected to the Hall of Fame.  It’s a surreal experience seeing all these greats in one place.  Included in that group was Sandy Koufax, inducted in 1972 and the oldest Hall of Famer attending at 86 years old.  He started the first major league game I attended against the Mets in 1966 and I was glad I returned to my house before leaving to grab some extra tissues.

Now it’s time for the newest honorees or those representing them to be introduced followed by the plaque presentation ceremony and a speech by the inductee or those selected to speak on his behalf.  Former pitcher Jim Kaat thanked his catchers over his twenty-five year career; several were in attendance.  Tony Oliva thanked his adopted city of Minneapolis where he met his wife despite he not knowing any English and she no Spanish.  Minnie Minoso’s wife talked about her late husband’s enduring love of baseball and the organizations who supported him.  Hall of Famer Dave Winfield spoke about Bud Fowler, whose life I knew little of.  As an African-American born in Fort Plain, New York and raised in Cooperstown, Bud played professional baseball in the late 1800s, going from team to team before owners established a “gentleman’s agreement” that only white ball players should have that privilege.  Buck O’Neil’s niece, Dr. Angela Terry, thanked the selection committee for its broad interpretation of selection criteria to include the totality of contributions to the game, not just statistics and mentioned his favorite phrase “man oh man, nothing could be better.”  Today’s marque inductee was Big Papi, the larger than life ballplayer who helped the Boston Red Sox end their long World Series championship drought in 2004, then helped contributed to two more World Series titles in 2007 and 2013.  He spoke glowingly about the island nation he grew up, encouraged those present and watching to visit the island and its pristine sandy beaches, and thanked his Boston teammates, many of whom were in attendance.

In the middle of these speeches was Irene Hodges, Gil’s daughter.  She spoke of her humble father who would have been proud to be there.  He loved baseball, but didn't get to play it right away; after his major league debut for the Dodgers in 1943, he enlisted in the Marines, and saw combat in Okinawa, earning a bronze star.  While there, he showed the native children the game of baseball.  Irene spoke of her father’s character, never any pretense or thought he was better than anyone.  During the 1950s, he was the premiere first baseman, with the most home runs, runs batted in, hits and games played.  He always wanted to win, but as Irene said, never to the point of putting himself above anyone else. “Never lie” was his credo according to Irene; you should look into a mirror and respect the person you see.  He demonstrated this ethic with his Dodger teammates, with his players while managing, and with his family.   He was part of the Brooklyn community.  She noted that, while managing, some players feared him.  Some complained about his managerial style of platooning players.  But they all respected him.  Four of those players from the world championship 1969 Mets were there, as well as the widow of the aforementioned Tommie Agee and the late Tom Seaver’s daughter Sarah.  At Seaver’s induction 30 years earlier – my first induction ceremony – Seaver closed his speech tearfully noting his two greatest regrets where that neither his late mother or Gil Hodges were there.  

Irene noted that he was a supporter of teammate Jackie Robinson and shared this story; one I had not heard.  One game, the opposing dugout was “heckling” Jackie, but I assume it was much more than heckling.  Gil, a quiet but imposing figure at six foot one, had had enough.  He walked over to the opposing dugout and said “if anyone else has anything to say, come out right now and we’ll settle it.”  No one came out or said anything.  This powerful moment might be the reason Jackie wept at Gil’s funeral in April 1972, saying that next to his own son, it was the worst day of his life.  Jackie passed away several months later.

When the ceremony was over, I gathered my belongings and walked back to town, along with most of the gathered who decided not to wait for shuttle buses.  On the way back, someone on his Victorian front porch was giving away beer to passersby.  While tempted, I opted for the free bottles of water the kids across the street were giving away in exchange for a donation to a children’s hospital.  Refreshed, I saw someone ahead of me with a Hodges jersey so I struck up a conversation.  He had flown up from Virginia to be there.  A native Brooklynite, he saw Gil play when he was a kid and promised that he would never step foot in Cooperstown until Gil was in the Hall of Fame.  He made good on his promise.

"I look like I paint. Who am I?" [by David Lehman]

Rhapsodic blues. . taciturn Cal Coolidge. . ."you lose"
as the market reaches record highs, speculators buy on margin,
Babe Ruth makes more money than the president, having had a better year,
Lucky Lindy to Paris, Showboat on Broadway, Al Jolson on screen,
Bernice bobs her hair and wears the diamond bigger than the Ritz,
Flappers flirt, philosophers drink bootleg gin,
And this singular fellow may be looking out the window
Of a hotel room with luggage beside the bed
A woman, maybe his wife, puts on her lipstick,
There's neon at night in the city, but where he is
The people turn their back and look at the sea.

Clues:

1) Dennis
2) William
3) Edward
4) Hedda

The Ashbery Amusement Park Initiated on His Birthday

 Where else but in Asbury Park, New Jersey, would we find the prototypical Ashbery Amusement Park? The "Haight-Ashbury" ride has been compared to a cyclone with a mentally challenging multi-level polyphonous  vocabulary, for richer or poorer, for better or verse, bringing candles to the cathedral of esthetic bliss, indifferent to political debate. The soundrack consists of Buxtehude, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Prokofiev, and hard-to-spell types like Penderecki and Schnittke. There's also a library, a collage gallery, and a Firesign Theater.

I interviewed John Ashbery more than once. Sometimes it was for a newspaper or magazine. Later, when I hosted “poetry forums” at the New School, at which the visitor would read for thirty minutes and then take questions from the moderator for an equal amount of time, John appeared in our series maybe half a dozen times. 

In a public setting, he was a fun interview  but not an easy one. He could, keeping a straight face, make me and the audience laugh. "Jack Benny was my role model," he confided. John was shy, guarded, even sometimes suspicious, and I would endeavor to reorient the conversation after one of his spontaneous witticisms brought us to a cul de sac. Sometimes he delivered a brilliant line in the most off-the-cuff manner. Always cordial, John was happiest when the ordeal was over and we could repair to Cafe Loup for martinis.  

Nicole Santalucia and Dante Distefano are working on a book of "Dear John" letters they are writing. I offered to introduce such a book with a list of questions to ask JA now that he can no longer dodge them. Here's what I came up with:

Ask JA

Ask JA about rejections.

Ask JA whether anyone still calls him JA.

Ask JA whether anyone still calls him “Ashes” (Deerfield).

Ask JA whether he feels an affinity with others who have the initials JA, such as Joan Allen, who played Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone’s movie, and John Anderson, who ran for president in 1980, or John Adams who writes operas, and Jane Austen, who wrote great novels, and Joan of Arc, who saved France.

Ask JA for his frank opinion of Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I know I’m not supposed to like but I like it anyway.

Ask JA whether he feels an affinity with other Leos born on July 28 such as Jacqueline Kennedy, Marcel Duchamp, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Ask JA whether he, a southpaw, admires other lefthanders such as Sandy Koufax and Whitey Ford.

Ask JA about 1938 when he was eleven. Ask him if life then seemed “more real,” for the satisfaction of hearing him say “stop asking me all those biographer questions.”

Tell JA about the copyeditor of The Last Avant-Garde who said Ashbery is a homophobe.

Ask JA what if anything he remembers about “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” which we watched on TV in 1976.

Tell JA about the student who said “the more I understand John Ashbery, the less I understand his poetry.”

Ask JA if “understanding” is the booby prize.

Ask JA whether he can smoke in heaven and does he still favor unfiltered Gitanes?

Tell JA about Ashberyland, the amusement park in southern California, and the comic-strip character named Ashbery.

Dear John, I always enjoyed giving you good news and the latest po-biz gossip during a late morning phone call.

Tell JA that Nicole and Dante are writing him “Dear John” letters.

Dear JA, They love you, and isn’t it wonderful?

Ask JA about the game of word association in which each of us has to respond to “fear,” “near,” “queer,” “mere,” and “rear,” each a typo for “John.”

Dear JA, Is the secret of “The Skaters” that you were homesick for your boyhood, boring though it was at the time, full of snow and the loneliness of your diary?  

Ask JA about the train ride to Chicago.

Dear JA, If you meet Nicole and Dante on Tuesday, Delmore Schwartz will come along for the ride.

Dear JA, did Norman Mailer’s ghost visit your rooms at Dunster House in your junior year at Harvard?

Dear John, What’s your opinion of “dear John” letters? As a genre, I mean?

Ask JA how he knew that Eurydice would have disappeared even if Orpheus didn’t turn around.

Ask JA why he likes Freud’s titles – “The Problem of Anxiety,” “Civilization and Its Discontents” – though you know he will dodge the question.

Ask JA if life is but a dream.

Ask JA whether his favorite stock is still Tootsie Roll, as he told me it was in 1988 or ’89 but has since denied it.

Ask JA what he really thinks.

-- David Lehman