The Best American Poetry

Introducing "Wednesdays with Denise"

Watch this space on Wednesdays for dispatches from Denise Duhamel. Denise’s most recent books of poetry are Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Find out more about these books and others here. A proponent of collaboration, she and Maureen Seaton have co-authored five collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Her nonfiction publications include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (with Julie Marie Wade, Noctuary Press, 2019). Denise was guest editor of the Best American Poetry 2013. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. Find more BAP blog posts by and about Denise here. 

Welcome, Denise. 

-- sdl

 

Grace Cavalieri's Milestone Birthday [Terence Winch]

Happy 90th birthday to the extraordinary & indefatigable Grace Cavalieri, an inspiration to all who know her. Poet, playwright, painter, and long-time host of “The Poet and the Poem” interview program from the Library of Congress, Grace deserves all the love she asks for.

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This Poem Is Asking for Your Love

This poem is not usually like this
I don’t know what came over it
It’s mostly violet under the sun
with a large yellow parasol and a pond
with a center that never freezes
I swear I had no idea
I’m so used to trees of hearts and
cherries within its branches
I can’t imagine
what woke this poem up
with a truth I never wanted
It called out the tower window and said
I was alone
That in itself is a morbid lie
I have long shadows in Autumn and clouds
anytime there is a sky
In fact everything was going so well until
this poem wanted to undress me
and bring back my love
and hold me close and rub
my forehead when I had fever
It had no idea what trouble could come
from this so I wrote it
then I ran from it
now I can erase it
to show I never needed it after all
because don’t you know, Poem,
if you have to ask for something
it’s no gift.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                                Autobiography, mixed media, by Grace Cavalieri

Jack Skelley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Skelley, photo by Gary Leonard

______________________________________________________

Green Goddess

 

Who made the salad

Whose tangy vinegar made me wince

Who played pouty Venus to my impudent Caesar

Who taught me to renounce meat

Who flowed forth lubricants

Who performed dark sacraments

Whose tart shrub tangled my tongue

Who with unctuous poses oiled me

Who received my verdant sacrifice

Who, as I reclined panting, poured herself into her dressing

Who lured me to the garden and dragged me into deep greens

Who instructed me on the use of the proper fork

Who inserted an oblong cucumber

Who shredded slender carrot sticks

Whose burning bush consumed the sky god’s timbers, shaking his heavens to the rafters

Who roused me in damp chambers, dousing reasonable fires to consume knowledge raw

Who at the crack of the vernal equinox, broke seasoned bread into bite-sized croutons

Who parted beet-red vestments

Who swelled my painted cave-beast proud and pregnant

Who put me in the red-pepper pink

Whose celestial power I would enviously drink

Who succored me when I lay pallid

Who made the salad

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Jack’s Skelley’s “Green Goddess” appears in his latest collection, Interstellar Theme Park: New and  Selected Writing (BlazeVOX books). Other books include: Monsters (Little Caesar Press), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press), and Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), spring 2023). He is also songwriter and guitarist for psychedelic surf band Lawndale which just released a new album, Twango.

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    “Product Placement”—one of nine collages by Erin Alexander for Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing by Jack Skelley.

Quote of the Day: Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz (1903-1989)

Born on this day, 1903, in Kyiv, Ukraine.

“Always there should be a little mistake here and there - I am for it. The people who don't do mistakes are cold like ice. It takes risk to make a mistake. If you don't take risk, you are boring.”

 

-- sdl

BAP 2009: The Gala Launch [by Liz Howort]

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 [2009] featured  prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

 David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

            “Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

 John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprising movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each line beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard does. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2009

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 [2009] featured  prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

 David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

            “Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

 John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprising movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each line beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard does. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2009

Two Poems (by Mitch Sisskind)

Explosion

An explosion is always right because 
Gramps can't argue with an explosion.
If he starts up at Thanksgiving dinner 
You and him might argue but he can't
Argue with an explosion you set off.

Same thing as when Gramps buys 
A cell phone and you have to set off 
An explosion or when Gramps goes
On a trip down memory lane again 
You have to set off an explosion. 

What if Gramps keeps continuously 
Bungling old time expressions like
It is two sides of the same horse?
You must set off another explosion,
You got to so stop your blubbering.

Sleepless

Gramps is scared that he might 
Forget his Social Security Number
So tossing and turning like a ship 
Heavy laden he keeps reciting 
His Social Security Number to
Himself until the casement glows
A glimmering square (Tennyson.)

 

Wednesdays with Denise [by Denise Duhamel]

For this ‘Wednesdays with Denise,” I point you in the direction of Gulf Stream, Florida International University’s national literary magazine for which I am a faculty advisor.  Here’s a throwback to Ashley M. Jones (an alum of FIU’s MFA program and now Alabama’s Poet Laureate) interviewing David Lehman about the prose poem:

https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/archives/online-archives/online-8/features-8/gulf-stream-interviews-david-lehman/

Our latest issue is Spring 2022.  The editors will be reading submissions through November 3 for the next issue.

https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/issue-30/

The picture on top, from the issue, is "Marco Island" by Kevin Norwood.
Marco Island, Florida, November 2021
-- September 28, 2022

"Torrents of Spring" by Philip Mead [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

If T.S. Eliot had been writing in Australia, "The Waste Land" might have opened "September is the cruelest month". Spring has just arrived in the Southern Hemisphere, and on the east coast of Australia it looks likely the season will only compound what has been the wettest year ever recorded.

 

The great Philip Mead's "Torrents of Spring" seems superbly situated for the occasion, a spring poem more doleful than celebratory. Through the speaker's conversation with the dead Scottish poet Sorley Maclean, who is on his way to Calvary (evoking both one of Maclean's most well known poems and the Crucifixion and resurrection of Christ), we are reminded that loss is just as an essential element of spring's process of renewal as the blooming of acacias and bottlebrush. But how do we find renewal in the loss of a loved one? According to Maclean "there are no solutions" but to be in the world and know that it carries on:

What I always did was walk to the edge of the sea
and watch the fishermen where they haul their boats
in and the surge of the ebbless ocean.
Everything passes between islands, and take it from me
anything in art can be deferred, it’s free of the future.

The last line suggests that art exists outside of this carrying on; one step removed from life, it can be deferred. I like the idea that art is free of the future, that its temptation to exist lies not in time but in the eternal. It allows for us to meet dead poets in city laneways and have them assure us we continue to dream in death, as in life, "lonely as exoplanets".

 

Torrents of Spring

 

I thought I recognised Sorley Maclean
walking towards me down Niagara Lane.
As he came alongside he said look up,
you can see our friend the sky where the tall buildings
lean in towards each other. I can see some glyphs
floating across up there. The in-between goes all
the way back to the well of darkness.
Sorry but I’m an analogist, and out of area.
Back on the corner the tree shadows had seemed
to scatter around his ankles. He said he was on his way
through, from Antofogasta to Calvary, reminded me
that the lamps are a super important part of the
hanging universe. We keep dreaming he said,
lonely as exoplanets. The hard thing, I know,
is losing one of your own. That always takes up a lot.
Then after a very long pause he said, there are no solutions.
What I always did was walk to the edge of the sea
and watch the fishermen where they haul their boats
in and the surge of the ebbless ocean.
Everything passes between islands, and take it from me
anything in art can be deferred, it’s free of the future.
I know you’ve read about my afflictions. And I was different then.
I wanted to ask him about sudden gusts of wind,
and the cries of memory, the unexpected turns
in full lives, like his, and the enigma of where people end up,
but he was gone. Round the corner and down the street.
The last thing I remember was his scarf, the blue of flax lilies.

 

                                                                            first published in Australian Book Review

 

 

György Ligeti (1923-2006)

How many of you listen to "modern music" (i.e. Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Kurtág, Xenakis, etc.) for sheer pleasure? I've been into this stuff since very early childhood so it's just as pleasurable for me to listen to a Mahler symphony as a Stockhausen opera.

But I completely understand the fact that our 21st century ears are still plugged into the 19th century ... our "pop" music is diatonic, the TV jingle is diatonic, the scores for Star Wars are definitely diatonic (or sometimes chromatic ... chromaticism can be used in both a diatonic and dodecaphonic context).

Most people react to non-diatonic music with a feeling of having listened to noise, incoherent musical sounds, or -- often -- just an annoying waste of time.

So I propose this experiment. Listen to all or some of the following four compositions by György Ligeti and observe your reactions:

1. Atmosphères (1961)
2. Requiem (Kyrie) (1963-65)
3. Lux Aeterna (1966)
4. Aventures (1962)

The first work is for orchestra; the other three all involve singers.

2001: A Space Odyssey
directed by Stanley Kubrick

Yes, I'm certain most of you recognized the above music as part of the score of this cinematic masterpiece from 1968. Were you able to enjoy the music on its own merits, or did you immediately begin to associate the sounds with images from the film?

It's not an academic question, because audio and visual cues comingle in our brains, and sometimes fuse together!

• Atmosphères plays over the first three minutes of the film, before the MGM logo even appears. You could say that the music "sets the mood," or in its urgency, is subtly telling the audience to quit jabbering and prepare for the experience. But if you soak up this non-visual prelude, you will find a gigantic pay-off later in the film.
• The next Ligeti we hear is when the apes meet the monolith -- the music is the Kyrie from the Requiem. This music will accompany every appearance of the monolith, except the final one. We see the syzygy as the music reaches a peak and Kubrick cuts it off abruptly. The camera looks out on the African plains and the Moonwatcher episode begins, culminating in the bone/satellite Also Sprach section.
• Lux Aeterna makes its first appearance when Floyd's shuttle is approaching the monolith site. The music takes a break while the crew has sandwiches and coffee, and then resumes until it turns back into the Kyrie -- the leitmotif of the monolith -- and is overwhelmed by the high-pitched shriek of the radio signal.
• If your home-video version leaves out the Intermission, you've missed Atmosphères again. Shorter than the opening cut, but still an important cue to what will come next.
• A supertitle: "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite." Kyrie returns as we observe another syzygy -- this time from Jupiter. We hear almost the entire movement (Kyrie eleison = Lord, have mercy) -- nature's cosmic terror; mercy seems irrelevant!
• Now the payoff from having heard Atmosphères so often. As Bowman passes through the Star Gate, and we observe his face in a frozen scream, we hear ten minutes of music, accompanying one of the best-known scenes in cinematic history.
• In the alien apartment, we now hear Aventures for the first time. Strange vocal noises pierce what seems like silence.

The actual techniques Ligeti used to compose these works is fascinating, maybe a subject for a future post.

Oh yes -- Kubrick and all his lawyers somehow neglected to pay (or even correctly credit) Ligeti for his brilliant music. Ligeti sued; it was settled, and all must have been forgiven, for Christiane Kubrick accompanied Ligeti to the premiere of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), after Stanley's death.

The Proud Beggar [by Tom Disch]

Am I happy to have lived
When and where I did
America The 20th century
I've often said so
Grateful anyhow for my good luck
But I'll be happier soon
To have shed both when and where
My landlord has had me evicted
Katrina struck
As Charlie lay on the mattress
Of a New York hospice
And he had as little care
For the deaths of those other paupers
As for his own
May I achieve the same
Dark wisdom
Yet still I scrawl
These codicils and think
It matters who gets
Dibs on the dust
From my shitpile
Didn't I write
Just after he died
"Nothing we had
Was worth the having"
And isn't that still true?
These few disintegrating molecules
And then the mattress
Will be rotated
To receive the next deposit
Our chiefs may rejoice
For when they die
Their ships go down
In the same flames
They aren't evicted
They laugh at the poor in their rags
Pushing crook-wheeled grocery carts
Filled with moldy books
Please buy one, Sir
Just a dollar
Less for you

June 1, 2008

"Made Bed" [by Beth Gylys]

Made Bed

He could have been my lover again that night—
a whisper of dress lifting over ears,
the tie unknotting, the sheets predictably white,

the fumbling urgency leaving us breathless, light
from lust tinged by guilt, the vanished years.
He could have been my lover again that night,

confusing past with present, desire with flight,
image with image: elbow, breastbone, sheers—
the tie unknotted, the sheets ironically white.

Entangled, our voices pitching like a kite
in a storm with vowels, bleats, stifled swears...
he could have been my lover again that night

if the night were only and alone, if right
and right had not had different names. Affairs:
the ties unknotting, the sheets iconically white

and damp, and something's broken, lost, bright
as shattered glass, as side-lit, backstage mirrors.
He could have been my lover again that night,
the ties unknit, the sheets shamelessly white.

-- Beth Gylys

from Verse Daily, September 26, 2019

http://www.versedaily.org/2019/madebed.shtml

L'Shana Tova: "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" [poem by David Lehman]

Molly with Stick, Cayuga Lake, 1981 (c) Glen Hartley

For I will Consider Your Dog Molly 

 

For it was the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah, New Year's Day, day of remembrance, of ancient sacrifices and averted calamities.

For I started the day by eating an apple dipped in honey, as ritual required.

For I went to the local synagogue to listen to the ram's horn blown.

For I asked Our Father, Our King, to save us for his sake if not for ours, for the sake of his abundant mercies, for the sake of his right hand, for the sake of those who went through fire and water for the sanctification of his name.

For despite the use of a microphone and other gross violations of ceremony, I gave myself up gladly to the synagogue's sensual insatiable vast womb.

For what right have I to feel offended?

For I communed with my dead father, and a conspicuous tear rolled down my right cheek, and there was loud crying inside me.

For I understood how that tear could become an orb.

For the Hebrew melodies comforted me.

For I lost my voice.

For I met a friend who asked "is this a day of high seriousness" and when I said yes he said "it has taken your voice away."

For he was right, for I felt the strong lashes of the wind lashing me by the throat.

For I thought there shall come a day that the watchmen upon the hills of Ephraim shall cry, Arise and let us go up to Zion unto the Lord our God.

For the virgin shall rejoice in the dance, and the young and old in each other's arms, and their soul shall be as a watered garden, and neither shall they learn war any more.

For God shall lower the price of bread and corn and wine and oil, he shall let our cry come up to him.

For it is customary on the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah to cast a stone into the depths of the sea, to weep and pray to weep no more.

For the stone represents all the sins of the people.

For I asked you and Molly to accompany me to Cascadilla Creek, there being no ocean nearby.

For we talked about the Psalms of David along the way, and the story of Hannah, mother of Samuel, who sought the most robust bard to remedy her barrenness.

For Isaac said "I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the offering?"

For as soon as I saw the stone, white flat oblong and heavy, I knew that it had summoned me.

For I heard the voice locked inside that stone, for I pictured a dry wilderness in which, with a wave of my staff, I could command sweet waters to flow forth from that stone.

For I cast the stone into the stream and watched it sink to the bottom where dozens of smaller stones, all of them black, gathered around it.

For the waterfall performed the function of the chorus.

For after the moment of solemnity dissolved, you playfully tossed Molly into the stream.

For you tossed her three times, and three times she swam back for her life.

For she shook the water off her body, refreshed.

For you removed the leash from her neck and let her roam freely.

For she darted off into the brush and speared a small gray moving thing in the neck.

For this was the work of an instant.

For we looked and behold! the small gray thing was a rat.

For Molly had killed the rat with a single efficient bite, in conformance with Jewish law.

For I took the rat and cast him into the stream, and both of us congratulated Molly.

For now she resumed her noble gait.

For she does not lie awake in the dark and weep for her sins, and whine about her condition, and discuss her duty to God.

For I'd as lief pray with your dog Molly as with any man.

For she knows that God is her savior.

David Lehman, "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" from Operation Memory (Princeton University Press, 1990)

-- sdl

Laura Orem: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Bald

 

Remember, remember that boy

who could not love you

because you were not pretty,

whose terrible honesty you’ve carried

for thirty years, the truth you mined from him

like some strange gemstone made of your

own desperation that you still wear

around your neck.

 

And now this boy, your boy, who carefully wields

the electric razor until, stroke by stroke,

your head is shaven, austere as a nun’s,

beauty or lack of it as irrelevant as it is to God. This is

about power. This is about mess. This is what you do

to claim some purchase on this absurd slide

down a hill of talus looking for meaning

or Jesus or some way to make sense.

The boy reminds you as he shifts

to a disposable razor and, surgically careful,

scrapes away the tiniest stubble, black and gray

as a prophet’s beard. Your choice, he says. My choice,

like forcing truth from another boy thirty years ago.

See, says my son. Look. It’s not so bad.

You can stand it. You already have.

Stand it some more.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Orem is a writer, artist, and educator. Currently a board member of the Baltimore Wisdom Project, a multi-faceted education program for inner city youth, she taught writing for many years at Goucher College. She is the author of two books of poetry, Castrata and Resurrection Biology.  She lives in Palm Coast, Florida.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This transformed image of the iconic Mona Lisa from a 2013 poster is the “perfect emblem of the upheaval that cancer brings with it, the enormity of its impact on the life of a person and of the inestimable stakes,” says the National Cancer Association Foundation of Italy, a nonprofit organization that provides free palliative care and pain management services to cancer patients throughout Italy.  

 

 

What are the Scariest Poems in the English Language? [by David Lehman]

            What is the scariest poem in the language? I wager that many would select Poe’s “The Raven,” and it is unquestionable that Poe has the ability, in his verse as in his stories, to scare the dickens out of you. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" will get votes, as it should. There are poems by Emily Dickinson that, like a Magnum .44 wielded by Dirty Harry, could "blow your head clean off." Byron's "Darkness" makes you shudder, and many poems from the Elizabethans and the Metaphysicals make you see a skull and bones on the other side of your pillow. You can, however, make the case that Robert Frost -- Frost, who was once habitually misread as a genial Yankee sage -- has written as dark and frightening a poem as we have.  The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal confessed himself terrified by the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces.” It is Frost who captures that silence.

            The brilliant sonnet “Design” – in which a spider makes a meal of a moth -- exemplifies the view of nature that informs Frost’s poetry. Nature at work is aesthetically satisfying; it has order, pattern, design; but there is nothing moral or ethical about it. Nature, as opposed to human nature, is indifferent to individual life. Put another way, nature feeds on itself, and life requires death, as the life of the spider requires the death of the moth.

            Humanity is stupid or destructive in Robinson Jeffers’s poems, which take the side of nature against human life. Frost doesn’t go that far, but in his poems the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Man is frail, and the loss of a man may be mourned, but the mourning lasts a mere moment. In Frost’s “Out, Out – “ a boy working with a buzz saw loses his hand in an accident. The results are surprisingly fatal: “No one believed. They listened at his heart. / Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.” But what truly shocks the reader is not only the death in quick stages -- brilliantly captured in that line with two dashes -- -- but also the moment when the boy, a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart,” pleads, “Don’t let him cut my hand off -- / The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!” We infer that brother and big sister lack parents, and this knowledge deepens the pathos. 

             The ending of “Out, Out –“ seems at first to indict humanity for its essential callousness. They – the same “they” that had listened at the boy’s heart – go right on living: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Callousness or realism? The ending is similar to the ending of Auden’s great “Musée des Beaux Arts,” in which Icarus, in Brueghel’s painting, falls from the sky to his death in the sea, “and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Both poems are superb, but Frost’s will give you the chills while Auden’s more analytical approach will make you ponder the thesis that humanity is necessarily indifferent to human suffering.

             Among the scariest of Frost’s poems is “Desert Places.” Compare it to Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” Both poems are about “nothing.” It may be that Stevens’s poem is the stronger of the two; it certainly requires enormous attention and rewards numerous re-readings. But “Desert Places” has something that “The Snow Man” with its “distant glitter of the January sun” lacks. “Desert Places” has terror.

              In his "Pensées" (i.e., thoughts), Blaise Pascal wrote: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Here is the final stanza of Frost's "Desert Places":

            They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
            Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
            I have it in me so much nearer home
            To scare myself with my own desert places.

 Take that, Pascal.-- DL

from the archive; first posted October 31, 2015

End [by Susan Brind Morrow]

I like having a fierce dog

Who barks and bites

And leaps at your head

The beauty boy who sleeps at my thigh

Red fox red

My beautiful Ted. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What carnivore 

brought down the deer

Whose rib-cage stands red

In the brown spring fields below

 

Venus rising in the dawn

Frost on the lawn

This April morning.

                                                                 *

We sat and watched the sun go down across the lake below through the broken black outlines of the trees. The faint flicker of a rainbow formed for an instant in the low sky to the north as though it were the rim of something suddenly visible, the shining fragment of the rim of a halo. The last light fell in a wave of gold that swept quickly around the room settling for a moment on each of us in turn. We sat talking in the dark, in what seemed like a box of deep blue light as we had in summers past, so that the evening had about it a sense of timelessness.

I reminded Terry of how once he said that everything operates on the level of four basic elements, their combining and breaking down, and that we are all “just some spectacular sideshow,” as though all the desperate suffering of life were simply an elaboration of this basic principle.

“What is it that makes a human being?” He had said, “What defines being human? Falling in love. And what is that? Seeing something ordinary- as numinous. Seeing. The intensity of that focus, that concentration of energy, would be the heating up in which some significant transformation could take place.”

"I hadn't expected so intense a pleasure . . . " [by Edwin Denby]

looking at New York again, in the high white February sunlight, the childishly euphoric climate; looking down Second Avenue, where herds of vehicles go charging one way all day long disappearing into the sky at the end like on a prairie; looking up a side of skyscraper, a flat and flat and a long and long, and the air drops down on your head like a solid.  Like a solid too the air that slices down between two neighbor skyscrapers. Up in the winder sunlight the edge of such a building far up is miraculously intense, a feeling like looking at Egyptian sculpture.  Down in the streets the color, the painted colors are like medieval color, like the green dress of the Van Eyck double portrait in the National Gallery, intently local and intently lurid.  And New York clothes -- not a trace of charm, dressing is ritualistic like in Africa (or the Middle Ages); the boys are the most costumed; dressed men and women look portentously maneuverable; one set looks more dry-cleaned than the other, and those count as rich.  New York is all slum, a calm, an uncomfortable, a grand one.  And the faces on the street by day: large, unhandsome, lumped with the residue of every possible human experience, and how neutral, left exposed, left out unprotected, uncommitted.  I have never seen anything so marvelous."

from "A Letter on New York City's Ballet" by Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, Yale University Press, 1998)

Translation: Egyptian Poetry [by Susan Brind Morrow]

1970s

Songs of Baramhat

Salah Jahin

Baramhat is the first month of spring in the Coptic calendar, the calendar of ancient Egypt still in use today, along with the Islamic and the Gregorian. The most notorious months are Amshir (February/March) which is characterized by inescapable sandstorms, and Tuba (January) which is bitterly cold. The poem follows the progression of the year from midsummer (Abib, Melaoon) during which time it is often too hot to go around in the day time. Tut (toot) is September.

Sucked through the ribs 
Like milk from the breast
Unceasing, but not by a child-
Tears give way to blood
Give way to fire
Give way to words-
Red, resounding, terrible…
So the strength of the sun in summer burns out sweat.
And I-
My breast
Is a bronze fortress
That scorches the eyes
The heat increases
And melts its lock
And passes.

                  *

Malaun in all the books is silence,
Malaun in all the books is dumb.
The silence of branches webbed tight by spiders
Though horses trip through them.
Bright delicate birds sing,
They chirrup out their lives.
And I…
My heart is another bird
And if it doesn’t sing it dies.

                     *

Oh sweet wind, the month of Tut,
The lock of summer is melted and gone.
Fly away over the roofs, my heart,
To the house without ivy or jasmine,
To the mother of the eyes 
The eyes with hard words and sad smiles
And say to her,
“Oh friend to those who wander
Your friend who has loved you 
year after year has returned.
And by life- a night of longing,
By dawn and those who cannot sleep
By morning and those who hope
By noon and those who sweat
By evening and those who are tired
By Maghreb- and what is it
But a punishment for madmen?
Do not abandon a friend
Who was never false
And never- though love was lost
Cried out-
And never said, “But I…”
May the earth and sky be my witness.”

And around the shanties and the hovels,
Heart,when you go
Don’t go as a nightingale or as a bat-
Go as what you are,
A heart
With a thousand eyes 
and a thousand ears
And a thousand thousand tongues.
Crawl on your belly on the pavement in the dust
And if it is the cowardly month of Tuba, the brutal,
Listen and see what rises in the wind,
Oh heart, oh million,
Say to those in the house of tin,
“Wake up!
Your lost friend returns.
Your friend who wandered too far, forgive him.
Oh you who live in a house of tin,
Come out, rejoice!
I am not Christ,
But I’ll tell you something,
And I swear it to you,
I swear to you-
The world is lie upon lie
And you alone are true.”

                             *

Sucked through the ribs
The heat of noon unbuttons my breast,
My breast, still full of sighs,
Sighs and clanging iron and songs.
Oh come Baramhat- Spring, perfume,
Greenness, sparrows, silkworm.
Come here and see me without a mask.
For after Amshir, the father of wind,
And Tuba, the father of frost,
You come Baramhat, you gem,
You father of sun,
And my heart
Doesn’t know how to whisper.

The Falcon

Amal Donqal
Go round, winged falcon, go round
The year passes and the end will come
And when my death comes
It comes around, like the ravenous falcon.

The Pyramid Texts

2500 B.C.

The sword of Orion opens the doors of the sky.
Before the doors close the gate to the path 
through the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark,
As the falcon flies as the falcon flies
May Unis rise into the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark.
They make a path for Unis.
Unis takes the path.
Unis becomes the falcon.

 

1200 B.C. (?)

The Song of the Harper

Death is before me today
Like the smell of myrrh
Like sitting under sails in the wind
Death is before me today
Like the smell of lilies 
Like sitting on the shore of a drunken land
Death is before me today

Invocation to a Scribe

If you learn this profession 
You will become a writer
Think of the writers of the past
Their names have become immortal
Even though they are dead
And their descendants are gone.
They didn’t make themselves tombs out of copper
With tombstones of iron from heaven
They didn’t think about leaving heirs
In order to perpetuate their names.
They made heirs out of books
They had written themselves.
People they will never know are their children
For a writer is a teacher to all.
Their houses are buried, 
their servants are gone,
Their graves are forgotten, 
But their names live on 
In the books they made
While they were alive.
Be a writer. Take this to heart.
And your name will be like theirs.
Writing is better than something made of stone
Than a solid tomb
For it lives in the heart.
A man decays,
His corpse is dust
His family dies,
But his books live on.

Wednesdays with Denise [by Denise Duhamel]

For my first post, I’d like to highlight Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast which began in December of 2021.  The hosts, James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith, offer insightful, hilarious, dishy (or “Bysshy” in the case of Percy Bysshe Shelley) commentary on all things poetry. These endlessly inventive hosts play literary games like “When Rita Dove Cries” (where listeners guess if a statement is by Rita Dove or Prince) and “More Moore and Moore” (where listeners guess if a statement is by Marianne Moore or Julianne Moore). So far, Hall and Smith have interviewed Maureen Seaton, David Trinidad, Carl Phillips, Miguel Murphy, Jacques J. Rancourt, Diane Seuss, and moi, with more interviews on the way. Breaking Form starts with a warning that the two hosts will gossip, interview, and throw shade, acknowledging “we are not for everyone.” If you have Victorian sensibilities or a low tolerance for raunch, maybe stick with NPR.  But if you are up for filth, poignancy, and belly laughs, you will be hooked. The hosts have an easy banter which makes you feel like you are at a party trying to keep up with really smart people …except you don’t even have to put on your lipstick (I’m looking at you Diane Seuss)! -- Denise Duhamel

https://breakingformpod.buzzsprout.com

The Eastern Forest [Susan Brind Morrow]

 

The horns of a deer are still soft in September
An owls face is mostly ear

 

Fire in the trees at the end of winter
When red tongues of color run under their skin

 

The season of death begins with strokes of red
Its cold breath pours over the hill that swallowed the sun

 

Beeswax and fruit
And honey that tastes like raspberries thick with crystal in the comb
The full to bursting days of leaves on East Lake Road
A map of color in the fall between the fields and lake,
Sharp prickling smell of winter-
Pale blues, crushed powder snow,
The early green of winter wheat
In upturned earth; and summer’s riches
Seaweed and fish slime and stones baked on the shore,
And wreathes of rainbowed gasoline that flow
Under the dock where the carp spawn at night
In the shallow water-
The good things about Geneva
Almost make me forget its gloom,
And how my heart was broken there-
Torn into a blossoming wound,
The rose grows out of the wound

                                *

Unsheathed deer gut by the stream
A black living rust licks it down to the soft stones
Soaked in green light.
A leopard frog froze in the water last night

 

Dozens of snails in rose translucent shells
And yellow
Plastered like closing flowers on the dead stems of reeds

Now in cinders
Cedar has leaves 
Like the skin of a salamander

 

Her hair was like the fur of a winter animal
And her hands were webbed like stars

 

Scraps of color in the forest
the head of the red-bellied woodpecker
satin against the dead wood

 

She made a pillow out of the dress
Dragonflies settled around it with a light papery scratch
Throbbing salamander bodies- and glossy prismed eyes
Funny how insects prefer certain colors

 

And beyond them the mirrory river
Full of forming stars

 

Soft as a newborn, milk fed fawn
Left in the woods by its horned mother and afraid

 

Black vultures shadowing each other around the white rock

 

Pale blue bone white days of winter
When the sun is warm and the wind is bitter

 

David found a luna moth- or had my mother found it for him
Pressed against the screen door of the kitchen, a left-over from the night.
It’s huge delicate wings were the most deliciously cool shade of green I had ever seen,
Such a fine unusual shade of green I could taste it in my mouth,
Feel it’s delicate tissue on the tips of my fingers.
How could I draw such a rare color into myself?
I could only do this, taste and feel the color, as I looked at the moth

 

Clouds closed the sky like a fist

 

The silver light has retreated onto the branch tips, silvering now only the shells of the trees.
It is November. The air is cold, and there is still a burning color to things
The red squirrels are whistling in the maples by the road.

 

On the dry stoney side of the creekbed in spring were efts the color of cinnabar flecked with gold, their eyed skin as soft as wet sand. The solitary stalk of a cardinal flower, its rare deep red the true scarlet of nature, would stand in the fresh green light of the wet wood like a hidden flag.

 

Would oh would I were a kingfisher
That flies among the halcyons
Along the breaking waves, 
With a fearless heart, that holy bird
The deep blue of the sea

Kingfisher detail, Nelson Shanks

-- Alcman; Susan Brind Morrow trans.

The Mets are in the post season [by Greg Pattenaude]

On Monday evening in Milwaukee, the Mets defeated the Brewers 7-2 and with the victory, guaranteed their first post season appearance in six years.  Max Scherzer, returning from the Injured List, was brilliant, retiring all 18 batters he faced with apparent little effort.  If not for wanting to limit the number of pitches, he may have been on his way to a perfect game.  He had to settle for two-thirds of one and his 200th  Major League victory.

The Mets broke the ice in a scoreless game in the 4th inning.  Pete Alonso connected with a 3-run homer, his 36th of the season. In the 6th, back-to-back triples by Brandon Nimmo and Francisco Lindor followed by a double from “cult hero” Daniel Vogelbach made it 5-0.  After Scherzer left the game in the 6^th, the Brewers plated two on a two-run homer by Rowdy Tellez.  But any thought of a Brewers’ comeback was put to rest in the 8th, when the Mets tacked on two more, thanks to RBI singles by Tyler Naquin and Tomas Nido.

After the game, the Mets celebrated in subdued fashion.  Rather than the usual oft-repeated champaign spray madhouse in the locker room, players were seen holding flutes of bubbly, more like receiving Prosecco while heading into the cocktail hour of a wedding reception.  Clearly, they knew that more and bigger celebrations lay ahead, but nevertheless acknowledged a significant achievement.

What has been the difference this year’s success story, as opposed to other recent years?  The answer is manager Buck Showalter.  His old-school, no-nonsense approach is exactly what this young team needed.  Combined with adding veterans like Scherzer and infielder Eduardo Escobar, professionalism has returned while still allowing the team to shine with individuality and personality within those bounds.  An example of that is Edwin Diaz's 9th inning anthem of Narco by Timmy Trumpet which heralds in victories.  Gone are players giving thumbs-down gestures to fans or stuffed ponies in the dugout for riding after non-consequential home runs.  Having an owner Steve Cohen that actually cares about the team’s success other than the financial bottom line also helps.  

The Mets still hope to win the National League’s Eastern Division. May that be the next celebration with several more to follow.  Stay tuned!

"Affirmation" [by Donald Hall]

The late Donald Hall pictured here with his wife, Jane Kenyon

Donald Hall was born on this day in 1928. As guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1989 -- the second volume in the series -- he taught me much about the making of an anthology. As a man of letters, who felt as comfortable writing a profile of Henry Moore or a sports story about the Boston Celtics as a romantic poem for Jane or an essay in literary appreciation, he proved that the life of a poet and the career of a professional writer could coincide. He worked in a variety of genres and wrote for periodicals as different from one another as The Paris Review and Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe and Yankee, and showed by his example that all the writing you do helps all the other writing you do, and all the styles and forms of writing are valid: the interview, the children's story or poem, the textbook, the diatribe, the anecdote, the blessedly unself-centered memoir in which the emphasis is on Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Join me in saluting this masterly poet, teacher, editor, writer. -- DL

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

-- Donald Hall