The Best American Poetry

Major Jackson: "On occasion though, a devastating feeling hits me . . . "

(Ed note: Every volume of The Best American Poetry includes contributors' notes for which the poets share something about the inspiration for the poem chosen for the book. Here's what Major Jackson writes about "Why I Write Poetry," which Denise Duhamel selected for The Best American Poetry 2013. -- sdh)

Some mornings, I wake and say to myself: “I am a poet.” I say this mostly in disbelief, but mostly it is an utterance that connects me to writers of poetry (some of them friends, many not) in other countries and throughout the ages who have decided to courageously break through the anonymity of existence, to join the stream of human expression, to stylize a self that feels authentic, and quite possibly, timeless. The kinship is palpable; the rewards are many; and the act of writing and reading poetry is one that has afforded me endless hours of meditative pleasure and contentment. Other people’s poems afford me the greatest pleasures. On occasion though, a devastating feeling hits me, not unlike that absurdist moment during puberty of looking into a mirror and being startled by the person looking back. “I am a poet.” How did I end up here, in this life? I’ve talents in other areas: why not a career as an orthopedic surgeon or a foreign service diplomat or a partner in some firm? Yet, my life could not have been scripted and nor would I change it. Attempting to identify the significant decisions that have led me here is mostly futile. Over the precious years, the person returning my gaze in the mirror has become increasingly familiar, an old friend and interrogator. But occasionally, I need to write poems that point to the mysteries and attempt to explain the unexplainable.

You can read Major Jackson's poem "Why I Write Poetry" in The Best American Poetry 2013.

Join Major Jackson and David Lehman at the New School (66 W. 12th Street, NYC) on Wednesday, December 11, at 6:30 pm for the final poetry forum of the season. After reading from his work, Major will join David Lehman in conversation and take questions from the audience. FREE More information here.

Some mornings, I wake and say to myself: “I am a poet.” I say this mostly in disbelief, but mostly it is an utterance that connects me to writers of poetry (some of them friends, many not) in other countries and throughout the ages who have decided to courageously break through the anonymity of existence, to join the stream of human expression, to stylize a self that feels authentic, and quite possibly, timeless. The kinship is palpable; the rewards are many; and the act of writing and reading poetry is one that has afforded me endless hours of meditative pleasure and contentment. Other people’s poems afford me the greatest pleasures. On occasion though, a devastating feeling hits me, not unlike that absurdist moment during puberty of looking into a mirror and being startled by the person looking back. “I am a poet.” How did I end up here, in this life? I’ve talents in other areas: why not a career as an orthopedic surgeon or a foreign service diplomat or a partner in some firm? Yet, my life could not have been scripted and nor would I change it. Attempting to identify the significant decisions that have led me here is mostly futile. Over the precious years, the person returning my gaze in the mirror has become increasingly familiar, an old friend and interrogator. But occasionally, I need to write poems that point to the mysteries and attempt to explain the unexplainable.

You can read Major Jackson's poem "Why I Write Poetry" in The Best American Poetry 2013.

Join Major Jackson and David Lehman at the New School (66 W. 12th Street, NYC) on Wednesday, December 11, at 6:30 pm for the final poetry forum of the season. After reading from his work, Major will join David Lehman in conversation and take questions from the audience. FREE More information here.

On Archie [Ammons] on His Birthday [Feb 18]

Archie 

I’m listening to Eric Dolphy without understanding a word

there are no words but I know what you mean

on the drive back to Hamilton College

after visiting Archie for the first time

in Goldwin Smith Hall in 1976 I brought my hardcover copy

of Diversification he signed it and took me

to Epoch headquarters we took a walk

around the Cornell arts quad he showed me

the one building on campus he liked (was it Barnes Hall?)

because it “has some diversity to go with its unity”

he complained of bad health bad teeth bad skin

well, I said, you look good

well, he said, I fuck a lol

11 / 19 / 17

from Playlist by David Lehman (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Photo of A. R. (Archie) Ammons.

Who said it? (2025 series, #5)

"You can be free if you want to be."

"Don't kill the criminal; make him work for you."

"Don't kiss the fool; ignore his opinions Opinions have killed more people than earthquakes and vocanoes."

"The public is a ferocious beast that can never be satisfied."

"If god didn't exist, it woud be necessary too invent him."

"You are gulty of all the things you could have done but didn't."

"If I had more time, this would have been a shorter letter."

[Picture of La Grenouille in NYC contains no hints or clues.]

Susan Barba: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________

Player Piano

 

My face is a case study

in gravity. A face study. A grave.

Effaced, I introduce myself

by name, a quippy

delegate, ceci Susan,

this lifelong stand-in.

Named after my mother

or rather, the pseudonym that hid

her foreign origin. Shoushik.

She’d take her breakfast

on the balcony. Tehran

1943. Feeding the ants

and plants her onion-tisane

milk. My little mother.

From her ovaries

came I. An alloy.

Reproduction reproduces

inexactly, doesn’t it?

Soldering like to unlike,

an off-rhyme, like me

and time, the clock ticks.

Those aren’t notes but holes

that make the music.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Susan Barba is the author of two poetry collections, Fair Sun and geode. She is the editor of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide, which won the 2023 American Horticultural Society Book Award. She earned a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University and works as a senior editor for New York Review Books. [“Player Piano” appeared in the New York Review of Books, 1/16/25.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

     Golnar Adili (Iranian American),The Organization for Documenting The Mood of The Country, 2013. Printed Japanese paper,hand-stitched thread, batting, canvas. 42 x 60 x 1 inches. Used by permission of the artist.   

How People Reacted to Jackson Pollock's Paintings [by David Lehman]

Abstract art seemed to fly in the face of good old American horse-sense. The standard response to a reproduction of a Pollock [pictured above] was, "Why, my five-year-old could do that." Or, “It looks like inedible spaghetti.” To this day, the works of the Abstract Expressionists retain their power to disturb if one measure of that power is the still-widespread impulse to mock them. In the movie An Unmarried Woman (1978), Alan Bates playing a famous New York painter tells Jill Clayburgh that when he was six his mother threw a pickled herring at his father. It missed its target and splattered against the wall. “At that moment I became an Abstract Expressionist,” Bates says, to which Clayburgh replies that his work does resemble pickled herring. That occurs in a movie sympathetic to the myth of the Abstract Expressionism. There are less friendly ways of responding. A prizewinning biography of Jackson Pollock maintains that his “drip” paintings originated in the haunting boyhood memory of standing on a flat rock beside his father urinating. Pollock is supposed to have said to himself, “When I grow up, am I ever going to do that!”^[i] Others have tried to put that reductive psychoanalytic theory into practice. At a show at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions in Los Angeles in 1995, a painter by the name of Keith Boadwee presented fifty pieces of so-called body art that he had produced by giving himself enemas of egg tempura paints and then squatting over canvases. Boadwee had the Abstract Expressionists in mind. "I wanted to prove that I can make just as good a painting as they can, with my butthole," he said.^[ii]

[i]. See Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Life (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), for an alaborate version of this theory.

[ii]. Above the paintings in the gallery were TV monitors showing videotapes of Boadwee in action, including his squatting nude over canvases. Buzz, August 1995; Art in America, October 1995.

"Bright Star" [by John Keats]

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–

No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever–or else swoon to death.

When I Was Straight, A Tribute to Maureen Seaton, Edited by Dustin Brookshire [by Nin Andrews]

Tears in Sleep

All night the cocks crew, under a moon like day,
And I, in the cage of sleep, on a stranger's breast,
Shed tears, like a task not to be put away—-
In the false light, false grief in my happy bed,
A labor of tears, set against joy's undoing.
I would not wake at your word, I had tears to say.
I clung to the bars of the dream and they were said,
And pain's derisive hand had given me rest
From the night giving off flames, and the dark renewing.

― Louise Bogan

As I wrote yesterday, I feel as if we have just entered a new era, an era of tears, an era that defies belief in which one might want to cling to the bars of dreams. Or if not dreams, then poetry that can remind one that they have souls, a conscience, an ability to bear witness. Poems like those collected in Dustin Brookshire’s anthology, When I Was Straight, a Tribute to Maureen Seaton, a lovely celebration of both Maureen Seaton’s legacy and the LGBTQIA+ experience. And Maureen Seaton is truly a poet we all miss.

In his heartfelt introduction, Dustin Brookshire writes: “I fell in love with Maureen Seaton’s work when she read at Java Monkey Speaks in the fall of 2004. I was taking poetry classes as electives at Georgia State University, and Maureen was the first rockstar poet that I had met. I can still close my eyes and see Maureen on the Java Monkey stage and hear her reading her poem “Furious Cooking,” I sat in the audience in awe of Maureen. I’ve remained in awe of her since that day, and I’ll remain in awe of everything she accomplished and who she was until the day I die. If you also knew Maureen, then you’re nodding your head in agreement because you know exactly what I mean.”  I do know. And I am nodding my head now.

This collection is not only brilliant, and necessary, it is also a gathering of exquisite poets/poetry. Like this one by Julie Marie Wade.

And this poem by Diamond Forde, which beautifully captures the adolescent experience.

          When I Was Straight by Diamond Forde

The van mumbled in rush hour, a cemetery yawning gray teeth across the hillside to our right. “Hold your breath,” the birthday girl said, & all the five girls ‘cept me clap shut, hands smacking their happy mouths, matching bracelets nibbling red marks in their cheeks

& it wasn’t because I couldn’t afford a bracelet. & it wasn’t because this was my first sleepover (thought it was, twelve & never spent a night not home)

or that when I entered the birthday girl’s home I stumbled on the stairs that went forever, stiffened hallways, a white couch, a stand mixer, one lilac room, all hers—the birthday girl—who made us play celebrities, so I stilted into Ashanti (because her song carried me through all my imagined heartaches—the first, that none of you knew her name—)

and it wasn’t because there was a girl playing Justin who smelled like soap & smiled when she flicked bangs from her brunette eyes (I sighed, leaning my head into the basket of her thighs, when we claimed a minute, hoping my heartbeat didn’t clang its bell)

but because the birthday girl was Britney & each time their hands fluttered like dizzy birds to meet, I swallowed honey, spoke a quiet sweet enough to drown. What did I know about myself that wasn’t a key in the wrong lock? This desire, unaffordable—the dusty pocketbook of my heart clamped shut.

And this poem by Kelli Russell Agodon, which also takes one back to the life of a teen girl’s sexual awakening.  

When I Was Straight by Kelli Russell Agodon

I thought everyone was easy
to love. The boys who brought me

bouquets of bluebells, the girls
braiding daisies into my hair at slumber

parties—the girls I couldn’t tell.
When I was straight, I was mostly curved,

a windy road of fading firs, a sunset
on a dead-end street holding the Indigo

Girls in one hand and Elvis Costello
in the other. Remember how I always wished

to be Tom Sawyer, maybe for the raft,
maybe to be closer to the perfect

Becky Thatcher. Looking back, it’s easy
to understand how I was in enchanted

with every pathway, how each exit was also
a possibility. Everyone is easy to love, I told him,

I told her, I told them—a garland of forget
-me-knots blooming around my waist.

And I can’t resist posting one more on the same theme.

When I Was Straight by Alison Blevins

When I was straight, my body was detached. My face, a portrait in every mirror, changed each night, some new arrangement of drip and swirl, watercolor hair, my lips thin pastel rose then absurdly large and quirked at each corner. My body now still resists recognition, insists on new arrangements of color and sound. But when I was straight, my eyes sand most mornings, sang a language of green and gold—something felt promised to me then, at 13, at 15, so young, fresh mourning in my mouth and breath, even behind closed doors, even afraid, even flat and still in my best friend’s bed, our fingertips only just so, our hips pulling and pulling. Silent in her bed, her fingers touched my arm—gentle as blue and sweet corn and pond water lapping. Nothing would ever be the same after—that pain promised—how want burned, want wetted our lips and teeth. In Japan, they have a word for when your mouth is lonely. Pain promised to never let go at 16 in her bed, on our backs, barely touching skin. When I was straight, I hoped that pain might last forever.

"Love’s Philosophy" [by Percy Bysshe Shelley]

The fountains mingle with the river

   And the rivers with the ocean,

The winds of heaven mix for ever

   With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;

   All things by a law divine

In one spirit meet and mingle.

   Why not I with thine?—

 

See the mountains kiss high heaven

   And the waves clasp one another;

No sister-flower would be forgiven

   If it disdained its brother;

And the sunlight clasps the earth

   And the moonbeams kiss the sea:

What is all this sweet work worth

   If thou kiss not me?

On being human: dancer, choreographer Xavier Lot talks about Alice Davazoglou’s “Danser ensemble” [By Tracy Danison]

“Danser ensemble” dance performance by Alice Davazoglou. Photo © L’échangeur-CDCN

Carreau du Temple has some of the best dance performance programming in Paris. Its annual Festival Everybody, from 14- 18 February in 2025, is dedicated to the proposition that every body – every shape of individual, they mean – has a place in the sun. A "woke" festival if ever there were.

Since just after the end of the pandemic, the festival has managed to offer a little something for every penchant while exploring, through dance, performance, plain fun and information, the multiple senses of “difference” – Festival Every Body 2024: Performing with difference.

The festival offers fitness and dance workshops, intelligent discourse and masques à la Christopher Marlowe (that are now called “voguing balls”), but I mostly stick to live performance. This year I’m seeing Pour Sortir au Jour by Olivier Dubois, around his personal experience of the dancing body; Figuring Age by Boglarka Börcsok and Andreas Bolm, around body memory and remembrance; Chemical Joy by Lenio Kaklea, around consumption as pleasure; and Danser Ensemble, a dance performance by Alice Davazoglou, a performer and, now, choreographer, with Down syndrome.

I am familiar with Dubois’ work and Börcsok, Bolm and Kaklea will be new to me. Alice Davazoglou, though, was the featured performer in Mickaël Phelippeau’s De Françoise à Alice at the first annual Festival. I covered the piece in About Alice, me & every body: difference and disability. She returns to the festival as a choreographer for Danser Ensemble.

In a telephone conversation earlier this week, I asked Xavier Lot, a member of the piece’s all-star cast, himself a 40-year veteran of modern and contemporary dance and performance, about Davazoglou’s transformation from performer to choreographer.

I thought I heard swallowed indignation – a muttered “What a question!” – before he answers that, basically, people are not test monkeys in some Superman’s laboratory of capitalism.

“Everybody has a right to try”, he tells me, “Everybody has a right to err”.  And, he continues, trial and error are not about discovering some “unrealized talent” or uncovering some “hidden performance potential” or even “doing your best”.

 

“Danser ensemble” by Alice Davazoglou. Photo © L’échangeur-CDCN

In the big picture, Davazoglou’s role as choreographer is about the freedom to be a human being, Down syndrome or whatever or not.

Lot has a long association with Art21, an arts development group for Down people – Davazoglou contacted him through the group about trying out for Danser Ensemble.

In then accepting to join, he remarks, his biggest worry was that he or other cast members might steal Alice Davazoglou’s show. The Danser Ensemble cast includes choreographers and performers from across the top of the spectrum of modern, contemporary and hip hop dance performance, including Lot himself,  Gaëlle Bourges, Lou Cantor, Bruce Chiefare, Nathalie Hervé, Marc Lacourt, Bérénice Legrand, Béatrice Massin, Mickaël Phelippeau and Alban Richard.

Lot says these worries were just that, worries.

Danser Ensemble is a team affair like another, he says. “It is very constructed and carefully directed” by Alice Davazoglou, he says, with a base of 26 drawings and an interpretative script to respect, as well as her sound choices and her directorial commentaries on different scenes or movements. She has [two] assistants who work with her to make sure her wishes are clear and understood.

“Developing Danser Ensemble was the easiest and least tense process I’ve ever experienced” Lot says, lingering wonder in his voice. “We put it all together in two weeks and there was no tension. Amazing.”

“I was [also] worried that my partner, Bruce Chiefare, might be a bit mismatched with me – he’s a hip hopper at the top of his career and I’m … a contemporary dancer near retirement”. It turns out that, as a choreographer, Davazoglou has the flair for matchmaking. Lot says it seems spectators also feel as comfortable with the duo with Chiefare as he does: “People say that it looks like we’ve danced together for years...”. He observes that while Chiefare is an energetic hopper at the top of his game, he’s also a bonsai hobbyist, which says a lot about his ability to work well with others.

Xavier Lot feels honored to have been chosen for Danser Ensemble. He has spent a good part of his career working with such underserved populations as immigrants or prisoners, who, he says, like himself, are not born into the circles where contemporary dance is understood as a possible career path.

“I’ve always seen myself not so much as a dance performer but, rather, as an artist dialoguing with creation-creativity using dance…Someone who opens doors for those who might not otherwise have access to the movement arts and who want to be actors and masters of their own movement”.

 “Working with Alice is a privilege”, he says, “A sort of homage to my career in movement art”. Until now, Lot notes, he’s been working with ‘exterior body movement’. In retirement, he says, he will be working on “interior body movement”, developing an existing but part-time Feldenkrais and acupuncture practice.

“Danser ensemble” dance performance by Alice Davazoglou. Photo © L’échangeur-CDCN

Midnight Tears with Denise Duhamel, Gary Young, and Beth Gylys [by Nin Andrews]

“At midnight tears
Run into your ears.”

― Louise Bogan

I feel as if we have just entered a new era, an era of midnight tears, an era that defies belief and sleep. Maybe that’s why I keep looking backwards instead of forward, reading books that pay tribute to times and loved ones who have passed, books like Denise Duhamel’s Pink Lady. Gary Young’s American Analects, Beth Gylis’s After My Father, Dustin Brookshire’s anthology, When I Was Straight, a Tribute to Maureen Seaton, which I will discuss tomorrow.

Last night I read Pink Lady, Denise Duhamel’s heart-wrenching book about her mother’s last year and found myself weeping unconsolably. And when I fell asleep, I dreamt I was talking to my own mother who was seated in her favorite flowered chair, looking like her younger self, but then I realized she wasn’t there.  Is this a common dream of loved ones who have passed?

Death Dream by Denise Duhamel

In the dream I keep losing my mother—
the nursing home hallways are crowded,
and when I look at the wheelchair I’m pushing,
it’s empty. I turn around and press through,
afraid she’s slipped out. I go to the main desk
where an orderly tells me he thinks
he saw her in Room 104, so I hurry there
to find my mother, young again,
sitting upright, biting into a pear.
When I wake, I go to my dream dictionary—
eating the pear indicates success.
But nothing about the significance of 104.
A quick Google search brings me
to an “Angel Number” site, which tells me”
Your angel is close to you now,
looking for ways she can assist.

 

I’ve always been a fan of Gary Young’s prose poetry. His short untitled poems can frame a moment or capture an insight in a way that lingers in the mind for days. In his most recent collection, American Analects, Young magically weaves together poems about his friends and family, the Japanese painter Buson, and his mentor, the painter, Gene Holton to create a meditation on art, aging, and loss. I was particularly taken with the poems about Gene Holton.

Gene said, a love affair in old age is what the world is all about. Everything is more expanded—you find yourself surprised to have feeling that you didn’t have the day before, and you discover new ones every day. He said, when Elizabeth died, the vacancy was overwhelming; I couldn’t recognize the world. Things are very still here, he said. The stillness of impossibility is one thing, but this stillness is everywhere. He said, lately there’s been a change: Elizabeth is becoming a reference point rather than a reality, and her absence is oppressive, unbearable. I have her pans, her hat, but I want Elizabeth back.

 

Gene kept painting after Elizabeth died, but said, I've lost my audience. He said, at least I haven't lost interest in the conversation with the work, but there's no reason for doing it, and who's doing it is unknown to me. 

 

 

 

 

 

Then I want to mention Beth Gylys’s chapbook, After My Father, a  Book of Odes. Glyys, who is known for her mastery of the villanelle, is almost a mistress of the ode. I especially love her “Ode to My Father’s Manhattans.”

Ode to My Father’s Manhattans by Beth Gylys

Clink
of ice
in a glass,
crack
of the cubes
as he poured,
bright red
eye
of a maraschino
bobbing
in the brown
gold
slosh
of Jim Beam
and sweet
vermouth.

Surely
we could
swim
in a lifetime,
of those drinks,
gallons
upon gallons
swirled, sipped,
swilled
and swallowed,
sticky
on the counter,
the twinkle
of his high.

My father’s
Manhattans
sometimes
made him
want to dance,
to tell
the latest joke.
My shy father
lit
from within
becoming
someone                                 
other
than himself,
sloppy-jolly,
sometimes
standing
(or that
is how
I remember it—
him at the table
standing,
hands
moving
like an Italian
from my mother’s
side of the family),
my father
and the glass
empty
but for
soft stones
of melting ice,
my father
abuzz,
chatty,
full of stories—
then
my father,
spent,
his chin
on his chest.

Chesterton Issues a Poetry Challenge

 

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

-- G. K. Chesterton.

 

Can you prove him wrong?

"Clouds" by Francis Webb [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

This past Saturday, 8 February, marked the centenary of the birth of Francis Webb, one of Australia’s major poets. A devout Catholic, Webb’s poetry is infused with a mystical, redemptive Catholicism, whose transcendent spirit might find a precursor in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Webb struggled for much of his life with mental illness, and today is recognized as the first Australian poet to address such issues in their poetry. One of his most accomplished poems, “Ward 2”, set in Parramatta Psychiatric Hospital, opens: “Tight scrimmage of blankets in the dark; / Nerve-fluxions, flints coupling for the spark; / Today’s guilt and tomorrow’s bent; / Passion and peace trussed together, impotent”. The eight-part poem is a major achievement, I urge you to seek it out in full.

Toby Davidson, the editor of Webb’s Collected Poems (UWA Publishing, 2011), has written an illuminating essay celebrating Webb's centenary for The Australian Book Review, which offers a valuable introduction to Webb's biography and poetry (you can find it here). Davidson, who has written superbly about the tradition of Christian Mysticism in Australian poetry, argues in the essay that Webb’s asylum poems “‘On First Hearing a Cuckoo” (1952) and “A Death at Winson Green” (1955),  “represent a quantum leap in how mental health was represented in Australian poetry.” 

 

 

Admirers of Webb’s poetry stretch from Judith Wright to Bruce Beaver, Gwen Harwood to Robert Adamson. Les Murray, writing Webb’s obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald, called him ‘the gold standard by which complex poetic language has been judged.”  Adamson, in a lecture given as Chair of Australian Poetry at the University of Technology Sydney, urged his listeners "not forget how deep a grasp of poetry Webb had, his intellectual agility as a technician, his deep knowledge and experience as a poet.”

I have chosen to share Webb’s poem “Clouds” as it is, I think, as good a representation as any of the poet’s “intellectual agility as a technician.” The final two stanzas in particular display Webb’s rhetorical powers most fully—a cadence that swells with the force of his imagery, reminiscent of early—that is to say, peak—Auden.

 

Clouds

 

1. Inland

The rich surplus of consciousness rots at the wharves.

That one big bird will not preen his shallow shoulder

Nor peer at his ghost in water - there is none.

For the stooping gaffer daylight only serves 

To bear in his muggy dungarees the moulder 

Of mare's-tail (or teacake) and that old boiled lolly the sun.

All assignations of brooding grain with earth, 

All childhood, manhood among diehard trees 

As litter of string, paper, and leather are wound 

In the hot palms of the wind, sent thrumming forth 

To whirl above shoaling plains and memories 

And drum you, tissue of waters, out of mind.

2. The Town

The entrance to the Hall 

Is two splayed marble calves

Propping a lap of stone.

Plumb in the centre of all 

Itinerant hatreds, loves,

Is this mentor, but all alone.

Woolworths and Lyonses lean

All askew at twelve 

(Time for a beer or tea)

And watch the flittering scene 

Of scamper and gabble, delve 

Into known asymmetry

For their children to buy and buy 

Colours and tinny stars;

They are going too fast it seems,

No one looks at the sky

With all its department stores 

Auctioning thuds and gleams 

And greasy meccano cloud, 

Oaths rattle in heaven,

Big lists clear away:

No one has heard a word, 

No signals, omens even 

In the town this day,

3. Airliner

I am become a shell of delicate alleys

Stored with the bruit of the motors, resolute thunders 

And unflagging dance of the nerves.

Beneath me the sad giant frescoes of the clouds:

Towerings and defiles through intense grey valleys, 

Huge faces of kings, queens, castles — travelling cinders, 

And monuments, and shrouds.

A fortress crammed with engines of warfare swerves

As we bank into it, and all the giant sad past 

Clutches at me swimming through it: here 

Is faith crumbling - here the engines of war 

In sleek word and sad fresco of print, 

Landscapes broken apart; and here at last 

Is home all undulant, banners hanging drear

Or collapsing into chaos, burnt.

And now we are through, and now a barbarous shore 

Grimaces in welcome, showing all its teeth 

And now the elder sea all wrinkled with love 

Sways tipsily up to us, and now the swing 

Of the bridge; houses, islands, and many blue bushlands come.

Confine me in Pinchgut, bury me beneath 

The bones of the old lag, analyse me above 

The city lest I drunkenly sing

of wattles, wars, childhoods, being at last home.

 

"To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage" [by Rober Lowell]

"To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage"

"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."
- Schopenhauer

"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms.  Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust—
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick?  Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."

Matt Hart's heartfelt Review of Paul Violi

From Matt Hart’s review of Paul Violi’s Overnight in ColdFrontMag:

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Violi has a penchant for creating works which WOBBLE back and forth between being formal-ish, language-game type poems and snapshots of language forms not ordinarily considered poetry at all. For example, in addition to the three "Acknowledgments" poems in Overnight, there’s also the hilarious "Counterman" which is a sort of Abbot and Costello-ish "who’s on first" routine consisting of sandwich orders given and taken at a deli counter, "Finish These Sentences" which is a list of interrupted sentences that need to be finished (endlessly by the reader), and the marvelously cagey "I.D. Or, Mistaken Identities" -- which is essentially eleven "who am I" style riddles. Here, each riddle/section of the poem is a deliberately ambiguous and wildly uttered monologue of clues about its unnamed speaker – ostensibly some famous figure from history or culture – which ends with the question "Who am I?" Here’s number three:

For handing over Philologus
To the widow of the man
I’d commanded him to murder
(She then made him slice off bits
Of his own flesh, roast them
And eat them)——For this,
Plutarch commended me
For at least one act
Of understanding and decency.

Who am I?
>>>

Ed, note: For more of the review, click here. Answer to the brainteaser will be given after a twenty-four grace period in which guesses ranging from Macbeth to Coriolanus will be entetained. There's a clue in that sentence, but you'd need to be either Zorba the Greek or the Mighty Quinn to puzzle it out. 
from the archive; first posted February 10, 2015. Violi is pictured above with Star Black at the KGB Bar.

<<
Violi has a penchant for creating works which WOBBLE back and forth between being formal-ish, language-game type poems and snapshots of language forms not ordinarily considered poetry at all. For example, in addition to the three "Acknowledgments" poems in Overnight, there’s also the hilarious "Counterman" which is a sort of Abbot and Costello-ish "who’s on first" routine consisting of sandwich orders given and taken at a deli counter, "Finish These Sentences" which is a list of interrupted sentences that need to be finished (endlessly by the reader), and the marvelously cagey "I.D. Or, Mistaken Identities" -- which is essentially eleven "who am I" style riddles. Here, each riddle/section of the poem is a deliberately ambiguous and wildly uttered monologue of clues about its unnamed speaker – ostensibly some famous figure from history or culture – which ends with the question "Who am I?" Here’s number three:

For handing over Philologus
To the widow of the man
I’d commanded him to murder
(She then made him slice off bits
Of his own flesh, roast them
And eat them)——For this,
Plutarch commended me
For at least one act
Of understanding and decency.

Who am I?
>>>

Ed, note: For more of the review, click here. Answer to the brainteaser will be given after a twenty-four grace period in which guesses ranging from Macbeth to Coriolanus will be entetained. There's a clue in that sentence, but you'd need to be either Zorba the Greek or the Mighty Quinn to puzzle it out. 
from the archive; first posted February 10, 2015. Violi is pictured above with Star Black at the KGB Bar.

Dan Rosenberg, Suzanne Brody, David Lehman: Poetry Reaading, Feb 11, 6 PM in Ithaca

"Days of 1896" [by C. P. Cavafy]

Days of 1896

He became completely degraded. His erotic tendency,
condemned and strictly forbidden
(but innate for all that), was the cause of it:
society was totally prudish.
He gradually lost what little money he had,
then his social standing, then his reputation. --
Nearly thirty, he had never worked a full year --
at least not at a legitimate job.
Sometimes he earned enough to get by
acting the go-between in deals considered shameful.
He ended up the type likely to compromise you thoroughly
if you were seen around with him often.

But this isn’t the whole story – that would not be fair.
The memory of his beauty deserves better.
There is another angle; seen from that
he appears attractive, appears
a simple, genuine child of love,
without hesitation putting,
above his honor and reputation,
the pure sensuality of his pure flesh.

Above his reputation? But society,
prudish and stupid, had it wrong.

[Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard]
first posted January 26, 2021

He became completely degraded. His erotic tendency,
condemned and strictly forbidden
(but innate for all that), was the cause of it:
society was totally prudish.
He gradually lost what little money he had,
then his social standing, then his reputation. --
Nearly thirty, he had never worked a full year --
at least not at a legitimate job.
Sometimes he earned enough to get by
acting the go-between in deals considered shameful.
He ended up the type likely to compromise you thoroughly
if you were seen around with him often.

But this isn’t the whole story – that would not be fair.
The memory of his beauty deserves better.
There is another angle; seen from that
he appears attractive, appears
a simple, genuine child of love,
without hesitation putting,
above his honor and reputation,
the pure sensuality of his pure flesh.

Above his reputation? But society,
prudish and stupid, had it wrong.

[Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard]
first posted January 26, 2021

Tom Davis: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

____________________________________________________

Homage to Helen Maynor Scheirbeck

 

I used to tell the story of how Helen,

when I was so young I hardly knew who I was,

would call us to DC during the effort to get

 the Indian Education Act drafted and passed

and work us until 1 or 2 in the morning

and then get disgusted when, bleary-eyed,

we stopped making sense.

She’d tell us it was obvious we couldn’t concentrate

anymore and might as well go to bed.

Then she would be knocking on our doors at 7:30 a.m.

to make sure we knew our assignments

even though she lived over an hour away.

 

Helen Maynor Scheirbeck  became one of the 20th Century’s

most significant Indian leaders,

showing no fear, and occasionally no sense,

talking her way into a job at the Washington office of Senator Sam Ervin,

getting the Bible- and Constitution-quoting racist,

who helped bring President Richard Nixon down and became a national hero,

to support the only desegregation legislation he ever supported, the Indian Civil Rights Act.

 

She got her fire from her father.

 

In 1957 and 1958, the Ku Klux Klan staged two cross burnings

in the yards of Indians as a threat, and on Saturday nights, sent caravans

of black sedans through Robeson County, home of the Lumbee Indians.

 

Then Klan leader James “Catfish” Cole, fiery radio evangelist,

planned a rally at Hayes Millpond, after promising the Master

of all Klan Masters he would strengthen the Klan in North Carolina.

Fearing armed resistance from the Lumbee community,

local and federal officials tried to persuade Cole to hold the rally elsewhere,

but Cole was a messenger of the Lord.

On the night of January 18, 1958, as Cole began to speak to fifty Klansmen,

after the thousands he’d invited failed to show up, a Lumbee man shot out

the light bulb near Cole’s head, and hundreds of Indians fired weapons into the air.

Klansmen fled into the dark pond and woods.

 

Later Cole was arrested for inciting a riot. 

He appeared before Lacy Maynor, Helen's father,

the sole Indian judge in Robeson County,

and was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison.

 

Lacy Maynor refused to let threats keep him from driving the Klan

from Eastern North Carolina even though Black people were hanged, drowned, burned,

or dragged behind pickup trucks as examples,

and the Klan had decided purity meant purity,

and Indians were not white.

God didn’t like them.

Grand Dragon Catfish Cole said so.

 

And now Judge Maynor, Grand Dragon Catfish Cole,

and even Helen Maynor Scheirbeck are gone.

 

And those of us who remember do not know how to mourn what has passed

since in our mourning we too are passing

through days and events that sweep emotions and thoughts

into the river of individual histories, written and unwritten,

that eventually  flow into the terrible emptiness of loss.

 

Helen would say that none of what she accomplished was done alone,

that she was just a bit player. “A little old Indian grandma

from North Carolina,” she’d call herself.

 

Helen Maynor Scheirbeck died in Maryland in a nursing home—

not famous like she should have been,

her legacy left inside those who knew her.

 

We walk through our days and wonder where time goes.

We walk through our days and grow a past

and remember those who have made a difference in our lives,

who transformed our world in ways that last.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thomas Davis has spent his career in education as the President or Chief Academic Officer of five different tribal colleges or universities.  He also was important in the founding of both the College of the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin and the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium.  He has published two books of poetry, two epic poems, seven novels, and a book of nonfiction.  His literary honors include the Edna Ferber Fiction Award and an Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award from the Wisconsin Library Association.  He and his wife, Ethel Mortenson Davis, are the proprietors of Four Windows Press and are also the current Poet Laureates in Door County, Wisconsin.  [For more on Helen Scheirbeck, click here.]

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________     

Helen Maynor Scheirbeck (in blue jacket, holding cup) and colleagues at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, early aughts.

Who said it? (quote of the week 2025, no.4 )

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

"You don't reason with intellectuals. You shoot them."

"History is an agreed-upon lie."

"The leader deals in hope (as does the dope dealer )"

"If you fear defeat, you will surely lose."

"Death I can endure. Buit to live conquered and humiliated is unbearable."

"In war, as in prostitution, amateurs are often better than professionals."

For other posts in this "quote of the week" series, click here:
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/quote-of-the-week/

[Picture -- Franz Kline with one of his canvases -- contains no hints or clues.]

“Ulysse” – Josette Baïz and the gifts of today’s un-classic ballet [By Tracy Danison]

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

O! Muse! apart, the only words I remember from the Odyssey, blind Homer’s adventures of Ulysses after the destruction of Troy, is the epithet “rosy-fingered Dawn”.

I’ve been sweetly bouncing off it since I first heard it. Dawn’s long, flexed, pale-pink fingers on the pillow, her tapering index, a bit of red polish stuck to the nail, her, somehow, competent thumb, her closed mouth, somehow, smiling. A morning as calm as Dawn’s breathing, a world outside as easy as her body here inside with me, asleep.

The sense of bouncing sweetly off was my first experience as Josette Baïz’ child-performed version of acclaimed choreographer and dancer Jean-Claude Gallotta’s 1981 Ulysse unfolded on the stage at Carreau du Temple the other evening, a demonstrator part in the dance festival Faits d’Hiver’s 2025 memory and remembrance theme.

Ulysse is an – is, maybe, the – Ur-choreography of la nouvelle danse française (contemporary dance in France). Josette Baïz, like Gallotta, a winner of Jaque Chaurand’s Concours de Bagnolet (1982), was one of the original performers of the piece.

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

In 1989, Baïz went to work with children in the immigrant-dominated north suburbs of Marseille and, in 1992, she founded the child-centered choreographic development Groupe Grenade, working with children from 6 to 18 on contemporary, urban and traditional dance. Groupe Grenade also did Ulysse in 2007.

A loose and refreshing ballet pour demain (“ballet for tomorrow”), as they said back then, Ulysse has everything a body loves in classic ballet: elegant arms stretching high, smoothly pumping legs, whirling, twirling, pointing, leaping eyes, fingers, fingers, breasts, bellies, knees to toes. Internal energies of body and mind made visible.

But Ulysse is and was (at the very least, one of the first examples of) un-classic ballet. Un-classic ballet is a movement-centered version of “modern dance”, a ballet pour demain, a nouvelle danse française, but is, especially, a “contemporary dance” that is, at its heart, an expression of an individual or group of individuals, on this occasion, on 24 January 2025, as we experienced it at Carreau du Temple, today’s dance.  

Contemporary dance fits with time differently than classic ballet. Ballet operates outside of time, is meant as the Platonic, the eternal, the perfect. Contemporary dance makes its own time; today’s dance is meant to be the flow of a moment, more or less, I reckon, à la Heraclitus.

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

And, if hard to put into words, the difference between classic ballet and contemporary dance is a very real experience. If a circa 1877 Swan Lake fills a stage with the vision and emotion of a story, the 1981 Ulysse fills a space with movement and individual expression. If, like classic ballet, today’s dance – contemporary dance – is complex and challenging, contemporary dance is somebody’s real-body-to-somebody else’s-real body. Contemporary dance is intimate, intra-reactive, not, like classic ballet, gesture to gesture, not call and response. In contemporary dance, even synchronization is improvisation.

But most of all, as I sit watching Baïz’ child-danced Ulysse, I remember that contemporary dance is an avatar of the world people aspired to live in the “after 1968”. From memory, iconic slogans such as Sous les pavées, la plage and Il est interdit d’interdire, are calls for more expression: more equality, less authority, more pleasure.

The far-reaching culture initiatives of François Mitterand’s presidency, which began in 1981, including the unique (in the world, I believe) regional dance centers (CCN) set up in 1984, have socio-cultural complements in the abolition of the death penalty, the creation of a 39-hour workweek, higher minimum wages and enhanced income assistance; in what contemporary dance carries as an expression of culture.

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

The long-drive for “child-centered learning” and against corporal punishment in schools took firm cultural and institutional shape in the 1980s. And, as I watch child-danced Ulysse, it is the social achievement  of that drive forward that I am seeing in it that gives me the deepest pleasure.

Disciplined, earnest, practiced and concentrated, the children of Baïz’ Groupe Grenade express themselves as childrenbetween 8 and 12 years old – that’s what they are, after all, children between 8 and 12 years old, not apprentices, learners.

Among them, not a trace of strain or suffering. No bared teeth, no fearful grimaces.

And, as I congratulate Josette Baïz on the performance, I reflect that her Groupe Grenade is still going strong and that over almost 40 years she must have had hundreds, even thousands of youngsters who have learned un-classic ballet, contemporary dance.

“Ulysse”, performance Groupe Grenade. Photo © LéIo Ballani

And after learning, most of them have gone off to do other things elsewhere in society.

So, contemporary dance has given each one of the child dancers of Groupe Grenade, past and present, the experience of creating time, initiating, responding, synchronizing, improvising, expressing themself as themselves and as themselves. They’ve brought that experience, will bring that experience forward into the world.

Good news when there isn’t so much to go around.

Thanks, Josette Baïz, for the gift of children dancing as children.

_________

I saw Ulysse by Jean-Claude Gallotta, with original music by Henry Torgue & Serge Houppin, as adapted by Josette Baïz with assistance from Stéphanie Vial, Jeanne Vallauri, Sinath Ouk and Camille Cortez, on 24 January 2025 at Carreau du Temple. The piece was performed by members of Groupe Grenade, all between  8 and 13 years old, including Nour Belmekki, Jules Bertolo, Margaux Bourrel, Elena Chevereau, Ella Christophers, Manon Collins, Anatole Derieux, Marius Duseaux-Olive, Lilas Lautrey, Chiara Menard, Issam Ousseini, Antoine Palazzo, Olivia Rothschild, Salomé Rudloff, Maxence Siol, Lise-Marie Sumian, Sandro Villena. Claudine Ginestet was costumer, Lucas Borg handled sound and Erwann Collet did lighting and staging.

“ Ulysse de Jean Claude Gallotta” a study of the historic choreography by journalist Nathalie Yokel, part of the “Collection Chefs-d’oeuvre de la danse”, editor Philippe Verrièle, is available from publishers micadanses-Paris/Nouvelles Éditions Scala, Paris.

"Chorus Sacerdotum: from Mustapha" [by Fulke Greville]

O wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth nature by these diverse laws?
Passion and reason, self-division cause.
Is it the mark or majesty of power
To make offenses that it may forgive?
Nature herself doth her own self deflower
To hate those errors she herself doth give.
For how should man think that he may not do,
If nature did not fail and punish, too?
Tyrant to others, to herself unjust,
Only commands things difficult and hard,
Forbids us all things which it knows is lust,
Makes easy pains, unpossible reward.
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
We that are bound by vows and by promotion,
With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,
To teach belief in good and still devotion,
To preach of heaven’s wonders and delights;
Yet when each of us in his own heart looks
He finds the God there, far unlike his books.

Ed note: Aldous Huxley uses the first six line as an epigraph for his novel Point Counter Point.