The Best American Poetry

"Negative Capability" [By David Lehman]

"Negative Capability"

from THE COMMON

 May 5, 2025  Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By DAVID LEHMAN

Imagine the money the Keats estate would have made
if they could have copyrighted “negative capability” 
and charged permission fees for its use, nearly as priceyas Kant’s “categorical imperative,” which rests
     on the solidity 
of logic while “negative capability” stands for 
a destination you arrive at despite signs that say “dead end.”
A letter Keats sent to his brothers Tom and George
in 1817 is the ultimate authority, for it was there that he coined
“negative capability” for being in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, 
without any irritable reaching for fact.” Consider King Lear. 
The poetry is sublime and we love it despite the ugly atrocities 
without denying they exist. And therefore “beauty is truth,”
or “ripeness is all,” which, according to Yale’s Cleanth Brooks
in The Well Wrought Urn, means pretty much the same thing.

also see https://nasjournal.org/NASJ/article/view/2093/1829

Cardinal Zen [by Beatrice Leader]

Cardinal Zen took me under his wing.
Chicago-born Leo XIV beat the odds
fourteen to one in Vegas defeating
the Italian candidate, the hot favorite,
but remember the old conclave saw
"who enters as pope exits as cardinal."

As for Leo XIV, he is against
the state of "de facto atheism";
wears a red velvet cape
and ornate stole; roots for
the White Sox,
which shows he has faith.

filed by our Rome correspondent, Beatrice Leader. May 9, 2025. Painting by El Greco with thanks to the  El Greco-Roman Foundation.

Rae Armantrout: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

______________________________________________________

The Craft Talk

 

So that the best thing you could do, it seemed, was climb inside the machine that was language

and feel what it wanted or was capable of doing at any point, steering only occasionally.

 

The best thing was to let language speak its piece while standing inside it—not like a knight in

armor exactly, not like a mascot in a chicken suit.

 

The best thing was to create in the reader or listener an uncertainty as to where the voice she

heard was coming from so as to frighten her a little.

 

Why should I want to frighten her?

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Describing the poems in Rae Armantrout’s latest book, Go Figure, Library Journal says, ‘”she has honed enduring art on the ephemera that constitute a consciousness in motion through the present.” Charles Bernstein says, “Her sheer, often hilarious, ingenuity is an aesthetic triumph.” Armantrout’s 2018 book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year. In 2010 Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Harpers, The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology and several editions of The Best American Poetry.

____________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                                    Man in chicken suit, 1900                                                 

 

The Cloisters

The Cloisters museum in Fort Trryon Park is where I spent many afternoons growing up in Washington Heights and Inwood. -- DL

Come one, come all: Kenneth Koch's centennial, Saturday May 17 at Flow Chart Foundation (Hudson, NY)

organized by Jordan Davis, Justin Jamail, Eric Longo and the Flow Chart Foundation:

Kenneth Koch Centennial Gathering

 

SCHEDULE (subject to change) for 5/ 17 / 25

[10am—bagels & coffee]

11am–11:15am — Welcome by Eric Longo

11:15am–12:00pm — Presentation I: Working with Kenneth Koch - Andrew Epstein and Jordan Davis

[12:00pm–1:00pm — lunch break]

1:00pm–1:45pm — Presentation II: Art Collaborations - Anthony Atlas

1:45pm–2:30pm — Presentation III: Making Your Own Days: Kenneth Koch and Education - Dorothea Lasky [2:30pm–2:45pm — coffee break]

2:45pm–3:30pm — Presentation IV: Kenneth Koch and Biography- Emily Setina and Susannah Hollister

3:30pm–4:15pm— Presentation V: Remembering Kenneth Koch - David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

[4:15pm–5:00pm — break]

5:00pm–6:30pm — 1,000 Avant Garde Plays

A series of readings of Koch plays alongside the works ofcontemporary playwrights. Featuring (subject to

change): Corinne Donly, Diane Exavier, Jess Barbagallo, Ry Cook, Erin Courtney, Jess Barbagallo,

Karinne Keithley Syers, Kate Kremer, Lisa Clair, Lucas Baisch, Nazareth Hassan, and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.

7:00-7:30pm - Remembering John Ashbery with poetry readings

Join a small group to walkfrom Flow Chart on Warren St. to Christ Episcopal Church's churchyard

Flow Chart Space | 348 Warren Street | Hudson, NY

Woman invisibility #1 : The thing about Gabriele Münter’s pictures… [By Tracy Danison]

“À l’écoute (Portrait de Jawlensky)” (1909),
Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris, 2025

The thing about Gabriele Münter’s pictures is they reach out and grab my eye. And her expressionism is to her time’s Expressionism what Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry is to lyric poetry at the turn of the century. Also, her pictures are definitely hers. I have to read them as if they were.

I know Münter’s pictures grab my eye because, when I can, I usually try to avoid getting my eye grabbed by pictures at exhibitions. What I do is sidle up like a disheveled crack dealer approaching a nerved-up sex worker. That’s to say, come on the picture indirectly, suddenly. The trick usually gives me the opportunity to grok the picture before the art in it captures me but it didn’t work with Münter, early or later work. I actually experimented in getting around her eye-grab but couldn’t.

I say the pictures are “definitely hers” because even after my first encounter with her art as likely being a possible unique contribution to esthetic evolution in our times at the Sturm-Frauen show in Frankfurt – 10 years ago ! – the talk around and about Münter has always seemed to put that potentiality in doubt: “Good painter, that Gabriele Münter, but the unique contribution belongs to Kandinsky”. The underlying dismissal is there even when the “Münter was K’s girlfriend, you know” has been censored out and her work is featured. The association has been questioned but the work of clearly identifying her achievement as hers has a way to go.

 

 “Trois femmes en habit du dimanche, Marshall, Texas”
(1900), Gabriele Münter. Photo © Adagp, Paris, 2025

The exhibition Gabriele Münter: Peindre sans détours at Musée de l’art Moderne de Paris, with a thoughtful selection of 150 of Münter’s works as evolved over 60 years of a life dedicated to visual art gave me the visual meat and the mental space to imagine for myself the painter’s particular creative achievement. The exhibition follows on efforts over the last 10 years to present modern-era woman artists, including Sonia Delaunay, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Anna-Eva Bergman. This one is the best yet.

It seems to me that were it not for Woman invisibility, Münter’s artistic significance would have long since gone without saying just on the evidence of what she was involved in as a professional painter. Determined from her teenage years to make art her profession, at the turn of the 20^th century, Münter was out and observing and extensively photographing the “burgeoning” USA and “exotic” Arab North Africa. When the visual arts world was starting to embrace new tools, Münter, too, was experimenting with techniques such as the lithography that develops, for instance, into the distinctive poster art of the entre-les-deux-guerres and into groundbreaking work by people such as Alexander Calder and M.C. Escher.

 

“Aurélie” (1906), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris

Although forbidden by law to attend art school, thanks to inherited money and determination, Münter was there and alive with fellow-artists in the dawn of the post-Impressionism, when artists were thinking about creativity and art and beauty and the individual. She was interested in the roots of human creativity:  took a strong interest in “child art” and popular or folk art.

Münter became a founder of Der Blaue Reiter group, was a colleague and friend of many of the period’s other defining creative personalities, including the remarkable art and literary promoter Herwarth Walden and the painter, professor and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky – in whom she recognized, as many others did, an excellent teacher and, as others would also, also, found a rather agreeable “bad-boy” boyfriend in him.

Münter was, literally, an attending midwife at the birth of European Expressionism. She presented for the first time at the Paris Salon des indépendants in 1907. Along with writers such as Alfred Döblin, Anatole France and Knut Hamsen, she contributed words to Walden’s Der Sturm, the reference literary and art journal from 1910-1932. With painting peers such as Franz Marc, Kandinsky, Kokoschka and August Macke, she had solo in Walden’s gallery. Münter also, apparently, kept a written trace of her thinking about life, art, her work and the work of peers, throughout her life.

 

“Nature morte au saint Georges,” (1911), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris, 2025

Targeted as a “degenerate artist”, Münter preserved the art of her peers, including her former boyfriend’s, during the Hitler time, at considerable risk to herself.

Her career may be enough to make her significant in early 20^th century painting, but her particular way of painting is what makes her significant as an artist. As I wrote earlier in this essay, Gabriele Münter: Peindre sans détours gave me the space to make a stab at it.

I’ve said Münter’s pictures “grab my eye”.

While most painters have a predilection for one or another element in their composition, broadly, for line, color or texture as well as their approach to the “ghost image” (the way people tend to construct visual images: think, “upside down” map or “Where’s Waldo?”, Münter does not seem to. For instance, it seems to me that in a composition, Picasso tends to stress his line a little bit more than his color or texture. Line seems his privileged way of giving a looker a lot of ways of looking at an image – it’s this particularity that makes a body point and say, “That’s a Picasso”! Both August Macke or Wassily Kandinsky, tend to privilege color because, I think, that’s where they locate visual beauty or interest. Franz Marc loves texture or, I should say, textured color, because he seems to like the movement in things.

 

“Enfant endormi (vert sur noir)” (1934), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris, 2025

Münter can, as Enfant endormi (just above) shows, stress her line, just like Picasso.

 

“Rue du village en hiver” (1911), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris

And she can texture color like Franz Marc, too, as Rue de village en hiver (above) shows.

 

“Le Lac bleu” (1954), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris

And she does color, too – look at Le Lac bleu (just above).

In fact, Münter’s mastery of color is often praised to the skies. But, from this exhibition, at least, I just can’t find that Münter consistently privileges color, line or texture to consistently achieve a particular visual effect, as do, I think, Picasso, Macke, Kandinsky or Marc or any other of the many other painters of her time and afterward who sought an individual or “original” vision.

I think, in fact, the praise of Münter’s colors is wrong-headed. It leads us to believe that Münter’s artistic take on “expression” was more similar to her peers than it actually is.

First, color is an inherently unreliable telltale in general and in particular in painting – usually, when I discuss it, I discuss an artist’s theory of it approach to it, arrangement of it, not color itself. And then photography, the medium where most people meet painting, systematically transforms color, these days most often toward highly saturated over-brightness. Second, Woman invisibility is likely at work in an over-association of Münter and color. Kandinsky, her boyfriend during her twenties, was of course big on color. Since it’s well known that birds of a feather flock together, especially when one of the birds is a girlfriend, Gabriele must have been as besotted with color as she was with her Wassily. No?

 

“Autoportrait” (1909-1910), Gabriele Münter. Photo
© Adagp, Paris, 2025

The lack of visual evidence for a defining predilection in the elements of composition is why I am now thinking that Münter’s creative effort was psychological or perceptual, not visual.

Münter, it seems to me, was aiming to give the looker her full sense of the thing looked at, not to demonstrate a technique or state a belief. Indeed, Wikipedia, quoting the painter’s notebooks as worked up by the art historian Reinhold Heller, has her writing essentially what I’m suggesting:

“My pictures are all moments of life – I mean instantaneous visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly and spontaneously…”.

Ironically, this clear declaration of esthetic aim is embedded in an explanation of why she’s so grateful to Kandinsky for teaching her to use a palette knife “with assurance”. The palette knife let her paint faster which let her stay closer to the moment she was painting.

With her declared intention as validation, it’s safe to say, from the immediate evidence of the exhibition, that when Münter was composing, she was trying to compose “expressively”, as the thoughtful poets of the time were trying to do, and with the same aim – capture life, not a “slice of life” but the anima or movement in a moment of life.

 

“Paysage avec cabane au couchant” (1908). Photo
© Adagp, Paris

The (self-) expressive, individualized, “lyric” poetry getting born in the period, such as that of Rainier Maria Rilke (1875-1926), is said, in any case, to be at the origin of the notion of “expressionism” in painting in Germany and in the rest of Europe. In English-language terms, I am thinking of Rilke as I think of Robert Bridges’ slow-leak of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “expressionistic” or “lyric” compositions of finely balanced sense, sound and rhythm into the early 20^th century.  Lyrics such as The Windhover (published 1918) or Binsey Poplars (written 1879?), conjure the experienceof the apprehension of “God’s presence”, the anima or flow, in the world.

I'm kidding on the square; just a bit, but there is something of the sublime Emily Dickinson in Münter's own sense of her regard. 

In her search to create a visual analog to expressive or lyric poetizing, Münter would have put her greatest effort into the equipoise of line, color and texture around the anima and the sense of it in the moment. It would be, through this compositional equipoise, I think, through this very firm control over composition that “grabs my eye”.

________

I saw Gabriele Münter: Peindre sans détours at Musée de l’art moderne de Paris on 3 April 2025. It is part of a summer program that includes three other exhibitions. Peindre sans detours runs until 24 August 2025.

Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices; Matisse et Marguerite, Le regard d'un père; Philippe Perrot brought into the permanent collection

 

“Untitled” (2005), Philippe Perrot. Photo © Aurélie Dupuis/Azentis Technology

The museum has inducted works by Philippe Perrot (born in Paris 1967, lived and worked in the Paris suburbs, died in Paris 2015) into its permanent collection. Of Perrot’s works, I wrote in my notebook “like contemplating static”. Perrot makes cartoon geometries in a narrative style recalling for me a Shadok-like-, but grittier, alternative comic-book-, telling of the intriguing half of an untold, perhaps, bizarre hidden story. It had me gritting my teeth. But agreeably. Really agreeably. Perrot’s work shows that static is worth some contemplation – especially around his use of mediatized popular art forms? Perrot’s on show until 2 November 2025.

Concept artist Oliver Beer’s interactive child-centered installation Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices turns around, at least for the moment, a fascinating cycle of recopying of Nina Childress’ sublime Sylvie – grosse tête (2018).  Reanimation Paintings runs until 13 July 2025.

Matisse et Marguerite, Le regard d'un père, a lovely exhibition, to be sure, with virtual reality installation to go with it, but to be sure, God help me, I was introduced to Matisse by my older brother’s godmother, mater’s best friend, early in the 1960s – the godmother prospered in family and community life, became a federal judge and died, but it seems to me not a day has passed that I haven’t heard something of this Henri Matisse, painter and now père. I feel sure that others will write more and more intelligibly about it than I ever could. Matisse et Marguerite runs until 24 August 2025.

Charlie Simic and the "Great Poets' brawl of '68"

Charles Simic files this report in the NY Review of Books blog.

<<
Back at Louis Simpson’s house in Stony Brook, during the farewell party on the last night of the conference, a fight broke out. People were standing in pairs or groups on the huge lawn sipping their drinks and, without any hint that something was about to happen, fists started flying. When a few tried to break it up, a punch would head in their direction and they would in turn join the melee. I stood on the porch watching in astonishment with the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra and the French poet Eugène Guillevic. They were delighted by the spectacle and assumed that this is how American poets always settled their literary quarrels; I tried to tell them that this was the first time I had seen anything like that and it scared the hell out of me, but they just laughed. Looking back, I, too, have to admit that what we saw was pretty funny.
>>>

From the archive; first posted April 27, 2024. Photo from The Best American Poetry launch reading, 1992. For more, click here. -- DL

<<
Back at Louis Simpson’s house in Stony Brook, during the farewell party on the last night of the conference, a fight broke out. People were standing in pairs or groups on the huge lawn sipping their drinks and, without any hint that something was about to happen, fists started flying. When a few tried to break it up, a punch would head in their direction and they would in turn join the melee. I stood on the porch watching in astonishment with the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra and the French poet Eugène Guillevic. They were delighted by the spectacle and assumed that this is how American poets always settled their literary quarrels; I tried to tell them that this was the first time I had seen anything like that and it scared the hell out of me, but they just laughed. Looking back, I, too, have to admit that what we saw was pretty funny.
>>>

From the archive; first posted April 27, 2024. Photo from The Best American Poetry launch reading, 1992. For more, click here. -- DL

There's a certain Slant of light [by Emily Dickinson]

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

 

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference –

Where the Meanings, are –

 

None may teach it – Any –

'Tis the seal Despair –

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air –

 

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, 'tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

 

Great lyrics: Frank Loesser, "They're Either Too Young or Too Old"

<< This sheet music is for the song “They're Either Too Young or Too Old,” from the film Thank Your Lucky Stars. The music was written by Frank Loesser and composed by Arthur Schwartz, and the sheet music was published by M. Witmark and Sons of New York, New York in 1943. The cover features a blue and white striped inset that reads “Thank Your Lucky Stars” with portrait photographs of stars like Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, and Olivia de Havilland.  >>

sung by Bette Davis in Thank Your Lucky Stars.

One of the greatest World War II songs. -- DL

They're either too young, or too old,
They're either too gray or too grassy green,
The pickings are poor and the crop is lean.
What's good is in the army,
What's left will never harm me.

They're either too old or too young,
So, darling, you'll never get stung.
Tomorrow I'll go hiking with that Eagle Scout unless,
I get a call from grandpa for a snappy game of chess.

I'll never, never fail ya,
While you are in Australia,
Or otu in the Aleutians
Or off among the Rooshians,
And flying over Egypt.
Your heart will never be gypped,
And when you get to India,
I'll still be what I've been to ya.
I've looked the field over
And lo and behold!
They're either too young or too old!

They're either too bald or too bold,
I'm down to the wheelchair and bassinet,
My heart just refuses to get upset.
I simply can't compel it to,
With no Marine to tell it to.

I'm either their first breath of spring,
Or else, I'm their last little fling.
I either get a fossil or an adolescent pup,
I either have to hold him off,
Or have to hold him up.
The battle is on, but the fortress will hold,
They're either too young or too old.

PS There are many additional stanzas as you will hear if you listen to Bette Davis sing it.

Jimmy Dorsey's band, with Kitty Kallen's vocal .https://youtu.be/ai71VRXz48Q 

"That Harp You Play So Well" [by Shannon Doyne]

 

from The New York Times

Poetry Pairing | ‘That Harp You Play So Well’

By Shannon Doyne

 May 13, 2016 7:09 am

Credit Peter Arkle

In this, our last Poetry Pairing for the school year, Marianne Moore’s “That Harp You Play So Well” is matched with the essay “Sing to Me, O Muse (But Keep It Brief),” by David Lehman.

To view all of the Poetry Pairings we’ve published in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation since 2010, and to find activity sheets to help with teaching them, visit our collection.

 

Editor of the influential literary magazine The Dial and author of several collections, Marianne Moore achieved both literary success and a degree of celebrity, famous for her tricorn hat and cape.

That Harp You Play So Well
By Marianne Moore

From “Pouters and Fantails”

Oh, David, if I had
Your power, I should be glad–
     In harping, with the sling,
     In patient reasoning!

Blake, Homer, Job and you,
Have made old wine-skins new.
     Your energies have wrought
     Stout continents of thought.

But David, if the heart
Be brass, what boots the art
     Of exorcizing wrong,
     Of harping to a song?

The sceptre and the ring
And every royal thing
     Will fail. Grief’s lustiness
     Must cure that harp’s distress.

---

Times Selection Excerpt

In the 2014 Sunday Book Review essay “Sing to Me, O Muse (But Keep It Brief),” David Lehman writes about what could be lost in a technology-oriented culture.

Maybe I dreamed it. Don Draper sips Canadian Club from a coffee mug on Craig Ferguson’s late-night talk show. “Are you on Twitter?” the host asks. “No,” Draper says. “I don’t” — he pauses before pronouncing the distasteful verb — “tweet.” Next question. “Do you read a lot of poetry?” Though the hero of “Mad Men” is seen reading Dante’s “Inferno” in one season of the show and heard reciting Frank O’Hara in another, the question seems to come from left field. “Poetry isn’t really celebrated anymore in our culture,” Draper says, to which Ferguson retorts, “It can be — if you can write in units of 140 keystrokes.” Commercial break.

The laugh line reveals a shrewd insight into the subject of “poetry in the digital age,” a panel-discussion perennial. The participants agree that texting and blogs will influence the practice of poetry in style, content and method of composition. Surely we may expect the same of a wildly popular social medium with a formal requirement as stringent as the 140-character limit. (To someone with a streak of mathematical mysticism, the relation of that number to the number of lines in a sonnet is a thing of beauty.) What Twitter offers is ultimate immediacy expressed with ultimate concision. “Whatever else Twitter is, it’s a literary form,” the critic Kathryn Schulz has written. True, the hard-to-shake habit causes its share of problems, “distractibility increase” and other disturbing symptoms. Nevertheless there is a reason Schulz got hooked on this “wide-ranging, intellectually stimulating, bighearted, super fun” activity.

The desire to make a friend of the new technology obliges us to overlook some major flaws: The Internet is hell on lining, spacing, italics; line breaks and indentation are often obscured in electronic transmission. The integrity of the poetic line can be a serious casualty. Still, it is fruitless to quarrel with the actuality of change, though in private we may revel in our physical books and even, if we like, write with pencil on graph paper or type our thoughts with the Smith-Corona to which we have a sentimental attachment. One room in the 2013 “Drawn to Language” exhibit at the University of Southern California’s Fisher Museum of Art was devoted to Susan Silton’s site-specific installation of a circle of tables on which sat 10 manual typewriters of different vintages. It was moving to behold the machines not only as objects of nostalgia in an attractive arrangement but as metonymies of the experience of writing in the 20th century. Seeing the typewriters in that room, I felt as I do when the talk touches on the acquisition of an author’s papers by a university library. It’s odd to be a member of the last generation to have “papers” in this archival and material sense. Odd for an era to slip into a museum while you watch.

The one-minute poem may not be far off. With its need for speed, Twitter’s 140-character constraint brings the clock into the game. Poetry — a byte-size kind of poetry — has been, or soon will be, a benefit of attention deficit disorder. (This prediction is not necessarily made in disparagement.) Unlike the telephone, social media relies on the written, not the spoken, word, and I wonder what will happen when hip-hop and spoken-word practices tangle with the virtues of concision, bite and wit consistent with the rules of the Twitter feed. On the other hand, it is conceivable that the sentence I have just composed will be anachronistic in a couple of years. Among my favorite oxymorons is “ancient computer,” applied to my own desktop.

https://archive.nytimes.com/learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/poetry-pairing-that-harp-you-play-so-well/

Freud Quiz No. 32: Willie Mays weighs in

Heartfelt happy birthday wishes to the late Willie Mays born today, on May 6, 1931, echoing the birthday of Sigmund Schlomo Freud on May 6, 1856. The fact that the father of psychoanalysis and the Giants' great center-fielder shared a birthday

(1) would have been deemed inevitable to a student of their natal charts who was also a watcher of the skies.
(2) begs the question and / or dares one to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.
(3) makes you wonder whether either knew that Robespierre was also born on May 6 
(4) proves that the best and most natural of center-fielders was playing unconscious in a sense Freud may be said to have uncovered in his studies of geniuses who had been naughty boys, like Goethe
(5) leaves even the most ardent advocates of the children of Taurus convinced that the two had nothing in common but their greatness, but Isn't that enough?

-- DL

(1) would have been deemed inevitable to a student of their natal charts who was also a watcher of the skies.
(2) begs the question and / or dares one to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.
(3) makes you wonder whether either knew that Robespierre was also born on May 6 
(4) proves that the best and most natural of center-fielders was playing unconscious in a sense Freud may be said to have uncovered in his studies of geniuses who had been naughty boys, like Goethe
(5) leaves even the most ardent advocates of the children of Taurus convinced that the two had nothing in common but their greatness, but Isn't that enough?

-- DL

The new issue of "The Common" is here -- and uncommonly good

Dear Readers, It's a rainy spring day here in Western Massachusetts, the kind that seems to portend flowers, growth, and green. A perfect day to launch our spring issue, #29!   We excited to share a special portfolio of photography and translated prose from Amman, Jordan, a fascinating look at culture, history, and modernization in one of the Middle East's most diverse and booming cities. Browse online or order your copy now. If you're a fan of print, this one's a bright, beautiful, lime green color, and the inside cover and flaps are lemon yellow!  Check out these highlights:   Writing translated from the Arabic about the city of Amman, Jordan Full color and black and white photography of the architecture, business-owners, culture, and sheep (yes, sheep!) of Amman   Fiction about the US military bombing on the Hawaiian island of Kaho‘olawe, Hinduism's elephant-headed god Ganesha, and a motley cast of characters in an Austin boxing gym   Nonfiction about ritual indigo-dyed fabric-weaving in Cameroon Poems by Mary Jo Salter, David Lehman, Erica Dawson, Rick Barot, Terra Oliveira, and many more

Self-Doubt with poems by Diane Raptosh, David Tucker, and Peter Johnson [by Nin Andrews]

My book, Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poems, was just released from Etruscan Press. I   am very excited. I am also enormously grateful to Etruscan Press, which is one of my all-time favorite presses. Not only do they publish many of my favorite authors including Tim Seibles, Dante di Stefano, Diane Raptosh, Claire Bateman, Colum McCann, but also, they are easy and enjoyable to work with. And the editorial assistance they offer is spot-on.

As thrilled as I am by this book making its way into the world, I am also filled with the familiar nauseating feeling of dread that I always experience when a book is published. The minute I hold a new book in my hand, I question everything I’ve written. No matter if I’ve receive a nice review, like this one, Southern Review of Books: Hidden Farm Life in “Son of a Bird”, or if I have enjoyed writing up an interview, Mackinaw Interview with Nin Andrews: Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poetry, or an essay, Eden Lost: Nin Andrews on the Pains and Rewards of Writing a Memoir About Her Father, I still feel overwhelmed with doubt.

I am especially doubtful now that I’ve waded into the genre of memoir. I find poetry much safer because it doesn’t claim to be the self in any literal way. How can any piece of writing really represent oneself? As Diane Raptosh puts it, “the self is a thousand localities.”  

[The self is a thousand localities]    

The self is a thousand localities
            like a small nation—assembly required: borders and roads;               

armies; farms; small and large pieces of parchment. I stand by
            all the territories I have ever been, even as I can’t

remember them. I am a locum—ear to the emperor penguin, a banner ad
            blinking to the hoi polloi. Since I’ve become John Doe, I swear

I can feel most objects with sixty digits
            instead of five. This makes me think

of my wife. Makes me miss her left collar bone. Her hips’ wingtips.
            A train moans from a far hummock.

Which reminds me that everyone I have to live without
            I must help to find a place within. Which is an act

of granite will. A strain. A ditty.
            An exercise in utmost beautility.

I often wonder: do other poets feel overwhelmed by doubt as I do? In this era of social media, it appears not. But then social media is an illusion, right?

I remember when my first book, The Book of Orgasms, was published by Asylum Arts. A large box of books arrived in the mail. I ripped open the box, picked up one book, read a poem, and then quickly put the book back, sealed the box back up, and carried it to the basement. I told no one about the book in my basement. Shortly after, the basement flooded. All the books had to be taken to the dump, along with the carpet and an array of boxes filled with childhood memorabilia. I was so relieved to get rid of those books. I thought, now that’s the end of that book.

This was back in 1996, before social media, before all the pressure was placed on writers to promote themselves. I miss those years! Somehow, in spite of myself, the book made its way into the world. I gave only one reading from the first edition of The Book of Orgasms, and it was to an audience of fifteen people.  

So why, after all these years and many books, do I still feel so unsure of myself?  I don’t know, but I think it might have something to do with the difference between writing and promoting your work. Or maybe it's just stage fright, as portrayed in this poem by Wislawa Szymborska.

 For me, writing poetry is a private act. Writing poetry is like dancing alone in an unlit room to music only I can hear. Because no one is watching, I can transform into the prima ballerina. I am so graceful, the air becomes my friend—it lifts me up and up. I orbit the ceiling a few times then, fly out of the window and into the heavens and beyond before I come back again and land noiselessly on the page. I have so much fun, I think, this should be illegal.  Then, someone turns on the light. I realize I am in a room with a one-way mirror, that everything I’ve done has been recorded. People can see in, but I can’t see out. It’s like a nightmare written by Sartre.  

The dance metaphor I used (and I do think writing poetry is like practicing ballet) reminds me of this beautiful poem by David Tucker. And, in a very different way, of a surreal poem fragment by Peter Johnson, master prose poet, whose humor and gift keeps me afloat in times like these.  

The Dancer by David Tucker

Class is over, the teacher
and the pianist gone,
but one dancer
in a pale blue
leotard stays
to practice alone without music,
turning grand jetes
through the haze of late afternoon.
Her eyes are focused
on the balancing point
no one else sees
as she spins in this quiet
made of mirrors and light—
a blue rose on a nail—
then stops and lifts
her arms in an oval pause
and leans out
a little more, a little more,
there, in slow motion
upon the air.

From Observations at the Edge of the Abyss by Peter Johnson

The dancing instructor who swears he is my brother. Who pretends to have read my translations of Catullus and walked my pug in a rainstorm that was so violent it forced the words “cyclone” and “bomb” to be used together. The guy who could argue about the length of Freud’s beard, and who once said, “What choices would you make if you lived your life hovering above the earth in a hot air balloon?” The dancing instructor who right now hands me a pair of shiny winged toe shoes and a coin guaranteed to grant me only half of what I might wish for.

Free download of Observations at the Edge of the Abyss is available here:  “Observations from the Edge of the Abyss” by Peter Johnson (bepress.com)

"Zaftig" [by David Lehman]

The Lehrhaus

Zaftig by David Lehman

 -

 June 26, 2024

The word means fleshy in a sensual, feminine way,
though sometimes it just means extra large.
It’s a word you may not know if you’re
not from New York but from the heartland, 
the prairie, the plains. Let me illustrate.
Michael, the Yankees’ play-by-play man,
announcing a pitching change,
says the reliever has “a zaftig ERA,”
and the former player in the booth,
a goyishe guy with a yiddishe name (Cone)
has a puzzled look on his Kansas-in-August
punim. “What,” Michael says,
“you never heard of zaftig?” And Cone,
humbled, mumbles, “Maybe in English class."

Donald Platt: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________________

Poem Written in Winter after Midnight at a Gas Station in Poe, Ohio

 

                        Death has always

been here in the blind spot of my driver’s side wing mirror

                        as I travel west

 

on I-90, cruise control set at eighty. Death is the pair of headlights

                        that follows me

these five hundred miles between Albany and Cleveland. One hour ago

 

                        I passed a semi

on the left in thick traffic but didn’t see the sign that said LEFT LANE

                        ENDS. The truck couldn’t

 

change lanes to let me through. I had to floor it, hit

                        110 miles per hour

as I squeezed between a concrete barrier and the braking truck

 

                        with inches to spare.

Life is the adrenalin rush when you have passed so close to death

                        that all you smell

 

is its diesel exhaust. Life is the bright crescent moon that waxes,

                        hangs above

the horizon, rises. Life is the long litany of towns on my night journey

 

                        west—Schenectady,

Amsterdam, Herkimer, Utica, Rome, Verona, Cicero, Canastota,

                        Cazenovia, Chittenango,

 

Memphis, Montezuma, Waterloo, Canandaigua, Avon, Albion,

                        Angola, Dunkirk,

Chautauqua, Ashtabula. Names so freighted with history or euphony

 

                        or dissonance that they are

larger than life, larger than any small town could ever hope to be.

                        Let death be no more

 

than the Dead Man’s Curve near downtown Cleveland, that not quite

                        ninety-degree turn

marked with transverse rumble strips and yellow caution signs that tell me

 

                        to slow down

to 35 miles per hour. One hundred thousand vehicles take that curve

                        every day.

 

Death is a daily event that we will live through or not. I stop

                        for gas with only

fourteen miles left in my tank and see a cube van filling up

 

                        at the pumps. Across

its thin, orange, aluminum hide is printed in an arc of blue letters

                        POE EMS,

 

which I misread for a split second as POEMS. How wonderful

                        to think

that there is a vehicle whose only cargo is poems. That it will deliver

 

                        poems

to the loading docks of box stores. But then I realize that it’s

                        an ambulance

 

offering Emergency Medical Service. It carries all of us

                        who are hurt

and in pain. Those with broken arms, legs, or collarbones.

 

                        Those suffering

heart attacks or strokes. Those inhaling slowly through oxygen

                        masks their last

 

breaths. Poems, too, should be vehicles that carry all our suffering,

                        our exhalations, exaltations,

our living, our dying. They, too, should heal us. I get back on the interstate

 

                        in the early hours

of the morning. When I nod off, I wake to rumble strip, that raucous

                        rock music I keep driving to.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Donald Platt’s ninth book of poetry, Tender Voyeur, will be published by Grid Books in the fall of 2025.His eight previous collections include Swansdown, winner of the 2022 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, One Illuminated Letter of Being (Red Mountain Press, 2020), Man Praying (Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press, 2017), and Tornadoesque (Cavankerry Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The Nation, Poetry, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Tin House, Iowa Review, Southern Review, New Criterion, and Paris Review, as well as in Best American Poetry 2000,2006, 2015 and 2025. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches in Purdue University’s English Department.  

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                      Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

Allan Bloom on Higher Ed. Today

I asked President Cuckold about antisemitic campus violence last year,

and what did he do? He shrugged. Were any of the victims covered

by LGBTQ+ proteection? Did they wear skullcaps?

Masks? Well, he hadn't read the great books, like Homer and Milton,

that's for sure, and was caught between Iraq

and the hard left, whom he was loath to offend, if indeed he had

his son's laptop, which is in doubt. And the party of animals?

They've spotted the cheese and are acting like rats

and this I told you long ago

yet I refrained from saying I told you so

and they'd be up in arms if it was their house their flesh on fire

vandalism and arson . The takeaway: no way, Jose. 

That's all i have to say to the fakers today.

-- from The Closing of the American Mind, pp xii-xiii.  intro by  Maurice Ravelstein

May [poem by Tom Disch]

 

 

May

Such beauty, you say
Let us stop & admire
A moment, a day
The fields & the fire

God the great spider
Has caught you again

-- by Tom Disch

Shostakovich's "Tahiti Trot" [by Lewis Saul]

SHOSTAKOVICH, Dmitri (1906-1975)

Tahiti Trot (1928)
Staatsoper Berlin
Daniel Barenboim, cond.
(4:08)

Vincent Youmans composed Tea for Two for his musical No, No, Nanette in 1927.

 

Shostakovich and his friend, the conductor Nicolai Malko, recalled hearing the tune in '27 at the Meyerhold Theatre in Moscow in a play called Roar, China. In one of the scenes some Americans on a ship are dancing to the tune, which Malko recalled as being named Tahiti Trot. (It was -- of course -- Tea for Two.)

At some point before October, Malko jokingly suggested to Shostakovich that he should orchestrate Tea for Two and proposed a bet:

"If you, Mitenka, are as brilliant as they all say, then please go into the next room, write that song down from memory, orchestrate it, and I will play it. I will give you an hour to do this."

 

It only took Dmitri 45 minutes, and he dedicated the score to Malko as a "token of his best feelings."

The premiere at the Moscow Conservatory was on November 25, 1928. Then came the problems.

The Central Committee of the CPSU, People's Commissar of Education Anatol Lunacharsky said that no task was more urgent for Soviet culture than to rebuke the "aggressive, jazzy syncopations of the foxtrot."

 

"The bourgeoisie would like man to live not so much by his head as by his sexual organs. The fundamental element of the foxtrot derives from mechanization, suppressed eroticism, and a desire to deaden feeling through drugs. We do not need that kind of music."

Just-Say-No Anatol

 

By 1930, Shostakovich was furiously spinning his wheels repudiating the stupid thing. Letting Malko perform it had been a "political mistake." He had meant it as a movement for The Golden Age (1930, not likely) -- a satirical take on such music (it was censored anyways), and he kinda blamed Malko for the fiasco. [Nobody ever said Dmitri was perfect!]

The score was withdrawn and quickly forgotten until Gennady Rozhdestvensky  reconstructed it in 1984.

Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" -- Great Poems of the World, Episode 20, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

Desolation Row
    -- Bob Dylan

 

They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tightrope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad, they're restless
They need somewhere to go

As Lady and I look out tonight from Desolation Row

Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pocket
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he's moaning
"You belong to me, I believe"
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend
You'd better leave"
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go

Is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row

Now, the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortune telling lady
Has even taken all her things inside
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody's making love or else expecting rain
And the good Samaritan, he's dressing
He's getting ready for the show

He's going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row

Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her 22nd birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an ironed vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah's great rainbow

She spends her time peeking into Desolation Row

Einstein disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
Now, he looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago

For playing the electric violin on Desolation Row

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They are trying to blow it up
Now, his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have mercy on his soul"
They all play on the penny whistle, you can hear them blow

If you lean your head out far enough from Desolation Row

Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest
They are spoon-feeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the phantom shouting to skinny girls
"Get out of here if you don't know"

Casanova is just being punished for going to Desolation Row

At midnight, all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
And they bring them to the factory
Where their heart attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles by insurance men who go

Check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on?"
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the doorknob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mentioned
Yes, I know them, they are quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can't read too good, don't send me no more letters, no

Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row

 

Click here to see what the fellows have to say about Gerard Manley Hopkins.

And here for their discussion of Shelley.

Here for Coleridge and "Kubla Khan."

Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb [by Mitch Sisskind]

Gene asked Jesus for a moment of his time
& they got together at the bottom of a mine
& Gene asked Jesus for a couple of bucks
& Jesus said ducks quack & chickens cluck
& Big Daddy Lipscomb fears no man
So be who you are to the best you can
Like Big Daddy Lipscomb is always mean
He calls me Jesus & I call him Gene
& we drive together on the unlit streets
To a boom-a-lay boom-a-lay old time beat
On the radio, Big Daddy Lipscomb & me,
Picking up chicks & being wild & free
   & Big Daddy Lipscomb is always mean,
   & he calls me Jesus and I call him Gene.