The Best American Poetry

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Silent Notes [by Lera Auerbach]

Silent Notes. Photo by Lera Auerbah

 

When pianos are not played,
they become very sad,
they collect silent notes.
Unplayed music floats –
invisible dust of overtones.
The dead are waiting expectantly:
so many keys – 88 – all untouched. 
The day of silent music
sheds the signature of uncaptured Time.

(“What are you practicing now?”
my mother asks me quietly.
Her eyebrows raised. I shrug.)

 

You Choose: Two Versions of “Autumn Song” [by W. H. Auden]

Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last,
Nurses to their graves are gone,
But the prams go rolling on.

Whispering neighbours left and right
Daunt us from our true delight,
Able hands are forced to freeze
Derelict on lonely knees.

Close behind us on our track,
Dead in hundreds cry Alack,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.

Scrawny through a plundered wood,
Trolls run scolding for their food,
Owl and nightingale are dumb,
And the angel will not come.

Clear, unscaleable, ahead
Rise the Mountains of Instead,
From whose cold cascading streams
None may drink except in dreams.

-- March 1936 

Posted by  Stacey on November 03, 2013 aComments

Auden was not an American poet--and this version of "Autumn Song" is the better one.

Autumn Song

Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last;
Nurses to the graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.

Whispering neighbours, left and right,
Pluck us from the real delight;
And the active hands must freeze
Lonely on the separate knees.

Dead in hundreds at the back
Follow wooden in our track,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.

Starving through the leafless wood
Trolls run scolding for their food;
And the nightingale is dumb,
And the angel will not come.

Cold, impossible, ahead
Lifts the mountain's lovely head
Whose white waterfall could bless
Travellers in their last distress.

Posted by: James Obertino | September 30, 2014 at 03:48 PM

I prefer “able hands”, and “lonely” to “derelict “.
Also, the “thes” in these two lines can be omitted.

Posted by: Annette D'Arcy | October 06, 2018 at 06:59 AM

I, too, vote for "able hands," and I guess "lonely," while not ideal, is superior to "derelict." But I would contest the view that Auden was not an American poet. True, when he wrote this poem he had never been to America. There were two main periods, and there are those who feel that the English Auden of the 1930s is the authentic voice. But he came to America in 1939, settled in New York, wrote a couple of his greatest and most ambitious poems in the US (the Freud elegy, "Sept 1, 1939," "Under Which Lyre). He became a naturalized US citizen (in 1946, I believe). He is nearly as American as St. Louis native T. S. Eliot is English. -- DL

Posted by: The Best American Poetry | October 06, 2018 at 10:10 AM

I feel like the last two lines are much better in the first version. "From whose cold cascading streams None may drink except in dreams." conveys a sense of privation and bleakness that is in line with the rest of poem, and it's a much more powerful ending.

Overall, I feel like there are moments when the first version is better, and other moments in which the second version is better.

Posted by: Valerie Yip | November 29, 2020 at 11:27 AM

"Autumn Song" is a poem that shows Auden at his most British American or the other way around.

Posted by: William Barnes | January 28, 2021 at 10:39 PM

The second of these 2 versions is the one set to music by Benjamin Britten, in his song cycle, "On this Island." Britten and Auden knew each other.

Posted by: Frances Brock | September 10, 2021 at 06:58 AM

from the archive; first posted November 3, 2013

Listen: Tracy K. Smith Reads and discusses Kamilah Aisha Moon's "Irony" and Louise Erdrich's "Stone Love" from The Best American Poetry 2021

 

Louis Armstrong in 1934 & in Australia c. 1956 & on the Edsel Show

"I Cover the Waterfront" .  .

Now you has jazz. . .

with Crosby  & Sinatra & Rosemary Clooney: On the Sunny Side of the Street

An Introduction to Martin Johnston (Part 2) [by Thomas Moody]

Martin Johnston died in June 1990 at the age of forty-two having published three books of poetry: Shadowmass; The Sea-Cucumber; and The Typewriter Considered a Bee-Trap; a novel, Cicada Gambit; and a collection of translations of Greek Poems, Ithaka. His short life was marked by tragedy: his mother committed suicide in 1969 when Johnston was 21, and almost exactly a year later his father died in his sleep of tuberculosis. In 1974, Johnston's sister Shane committed suicide. A year before Johnston's own death his half-sister, Gae, died, also in tragic circumstances.

 

 

"The Sea-Cucumber" is an elegy Johnston wrote for his father, ostensibly dedicated to the painter Ray Crooke. Crooke, best known for his dust-colored landscapes of the dry Australian outback, ironically won the prestigious Archibald Prize for portraiture in 1969 for his painting of Johnston's father, George. "The Sea-Cucumber" details an evening in which Crooke shows George Johnston one of his new works in which the painter has "floated / a sfumato background almost in front of the canvas". Johnston's father is "garrulous as ever" but the young speaker knows there is something forced to his father's performance, as he presses "every word-drop, like the wine of a harvest not quite adequate." 

 

Ray Crooke North Queensland Landscape

The poem speaks to the limitations of art and centres on the metaphor of the sea-cucumber who, when touched, "spews up its entrails / as though that were a defence" to capture the futility of the writer who knows his work cannot save him. "The Sea-Cucumber" also gives us a taste of Johnston's eloquence, his erudition (which creates no impediment to a genuine intimacy), and brings to the fore a haunting melancholy which lurks in the corners of many of the poet's works. 

 

The Sea-Cucumber

                                                        for Ray Crooke


We'd all had a bit too much that night when you brought out
your painting,
the new one, you remember, over Scotch in the panelled kitchen,
and my father talked about waiting. Well, he was doing that,
    we knew,
or it could have been the dust you'd painted, the way
    you'd floated
a sfumato background almost in front of the canvas
so your half-dozen squatting dark figures couldn't see it
that moved him in that moment softly, in damp stone,
    outside time.
He was as garrulous as ever, of course, but somehow
in a time of his own, it seemed that he was pressing
every word-drop, like the wine of a harvest not quite adequate,
to trickle in brilliant bridles across the stained table:
what sorts of eucalypt to plant—so that they'd grow quickly—
art dealers, metaphysics, three old me he'd seen
at Lerici, playing pipes and a drum under an orange sky.
Memory finds a nexus, there in your image,
people just waiting, not even conscious of it,
or of ochre and sienna pinning them in an interstice of hours.
None of this, you see, will really go into writing,
it takes time to leech things into one's sac of words.
The bloated sea-cucumber, when touched, spews up its entrails
as though that were a defence; my father's old friend
the gentle little poet Wen Yi-tuo, who collected chess sets
and carved ivory seals in his filthy one-room hut,
is gutted one night and flung into the Yangtze.
The dark river runs through your dusty pigments.
Ferns, moss, tiger-coloured sun beat at the window with banners
but the dust ripples between trees, and among the waiting
glints of each an meta are wiped from the fading hand.
This people of yours, Ray, they are that evening
when we first saw them, or the other one when my father 
planted nineteen saplings in our backyard, or when you looked
    at them
later and said, They're coming on, and his fingers
drummed a long nervous question on the table, though 
    he agreed.
And we were all waiting, though not in your style of art:
more of a pointillism in time, disconnected moments,
a flash of light over an empty glass, a half-finished volume 
    of Borges,
the cabbage plan stooping at dusk into the chimneys,
certain paintings, Corelli, or a morning like the fuzz
    of a peach,
all bright and disparate. But I think, remembering that painting
of yours, that if one could step away, ten yards, or twenty,
    or years,
at an angle perhaps, a frame would harden into cedar
and through a haze of dust we would see all the brilliant dots
merge into a few figures, squatting, waiting.

 

Berlioz & the music in "The Shining"

From Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," the music in "The Shining" by Stanley Kubrick:

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixteen): Elaine Equi [by Angela Ball]

FOR YEARS, I SUFFERED FROM A STRANGE MELODY

I couldn’t knit thistles into sweaters for swans,
nor spin straw into gold records.

I didn’t have a gingersnap or bluebird to my name.

The oven overheard me tell my story and called it
rumpled, stilted, and half-baked.

Then a dirty stinky fog came and sat down next to me.

But the moment I kissed its slobbering mist,
it turned into a handsome prince who dropped
the glass slipper he’d been carrying onto the floor

where it shattered into a million princes,
each more handsome than the last,

and everyone shouted, “L’chaim!”

--Elaine Equi

Elaine Equi’s most recent book is The Intangibles from Coffee House Press. Her other books include Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and on the short list for The Griffin Poetry Prize; and Sentences and Rain. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, and in many editions of the Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The New School.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixteen): Elaine Equi [by Angela Ball]

Its title, "For Years, I Suffered From a Strange Melody," suggests the piece was prompted by a spoonerism— a goofy felicity. The poem goes on to conquer all frustrations in its path with deliberate and delicious mistakes. One of its ancestors may be a cartoon show called Fractured Fairy Tales (1959-64), also based on the notion that the way to fix things—make them more fun—is to break them.

The speaker starts out feeling bereft, unable to “spin straw into gold records.” No “gingersnaps,” no “bluebirds” (of happiness or anything else). But the mysterious conjunction of confection and flight is a fine thing in itself; as is the oven talking smack: a slumgullion of anagram and idiom.

In this liquid atmosphere, tales survive as waking dreams that shelter the childlike: “Then a dirty stinky fog came and sat down next to me.” Words like “stinky” and “slobbering” are notably absent from traditional fairytales, with their low threshold for effluvia. At the speaker’s spontaneous kiss, the “slobbering mist” becomes the “handsome prince” of “Cinderella” fame, who drops the glass slipper of the foot test, and it becomes mother of many princes, “each more handsome than the last.” Elaine Equi’s “For Years, I Suffered from a Strange Melody” is word alchemy: a fertile muddle in which pieces become princes; and breakage, celebration; a climactic union in which “everyone” arrives from nowhere to deliver a final, life-affirming shout.

--Angela Ball

Perils of the Poetry Reading [by Katha Pollitt]

Am I the only person who finds it hard to follow an unfamiliar poem when I hear it read out loud and don’t have the text in front of me? Even when reading to myself at my own pace, I might have to go over a poem several times to really get it,  but  at a reading,  the poems whizz by  unstoppably-- no chance of a second hearing, and all the helpful visual cues of print , like punctuation, italics, quotation marks, and even line breaks,  are absent.  A stray thought enters my head --  I wonder why they painted this room turquoise? -- and in seconds I’ve lost the thread.  (I’m speaking of what you might call “literary poetry” here,  poetry written primarily to be read silently, not spoken word, which is intended for the ear from the outset.)

  I often find that the poems I’ve enjoyed most at a reading  seem oddly flat on the page when I hunt them down in a book.   What made the poem seem striking and fresh was  the poet’s performance: the energy and especially the humor was in the voice and manner and gestures, not the words themselves.  Or it was the story the poem told: the poetry reading as a series of anecdotes, with the poet placing and embellishing each one in his introductions: My uncle ran a chicken farm in Iowa,  and when he ran off with the Methodist minister’s wife my aunt killed all the chickens and  gave them to the nuns, and out of that comes this next poem, “Saint Rooster and the Holy Choir of Hens.”  it’s been suggested, in fact, that the proliferation of poetry readings, and their importance to a poet’s career, has actually changed the way poets --  “literary poets” -- write, encouraging verbal simplicity, talkiness, easy emotions, simple narratives, and punchlines. It’s the poet as stand-up comedian/tragedian. 

    Still, you can see why poets would try to shape their art to please their audience -- and notice how we now commonly speak of  poetry’s audience rather than poetry’s readers, which tells you something right there.   It can be painful and embarrassing to stand up before a small group of  miscellaneous strangers who expect you to entertain them and instead offer poems they might find bewildering, or remote.  I've given readings  at which I just want to say, oh well, never mind, let’s just go have a beer and talk about health care reform. 

      Wislawa Szymborska’s “Poetry Reading” (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)   may be the definitive account of a reading at its awful,  humiliating worst.  To paraphrase the old Jewish joke about the Catskills hotel (“The food is terrible!” “Yes, and the portions are so small!”), the audience is not only tiny, it’s not even listening.  And yet, Symborska disperses her pity, her warmth and her satirical humor so evenly among poets and audience members and even the muse, poor thing,  that what in lesser hands would be just another complaint about the world’s indifference to art becomes a gesture of understanding, forgiveness, love.

POETRY READING

To be a boxer, or not to be there
at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? 
Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare --
it's time to start this cultural affair.
Half came inside because it started raining, 
the rest are relatives. O Muse.

The women here would love to rant and rave, 
but that's for boxing. Here they must behave. 
Dante's Infemo is ringside nowadays.
Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.

Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet, 
one sentenced to hard shelleying for life, 
for lack of muscles forced to show the world 
the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists 
with luck. O Muse,
O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.

In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore: 
he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more, 
she's making him that tart she used to bake. 
Aflame, but carefully--don't burn his cake!
we start to read. O Muse.

-- by Wislawa Szymborska 
                (from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems Harvest Books, 1996)

from the archive; first posted August 19, 2009

    Still, you can see why poets would try to shape their art to please their audience -- and notice how we now commonly speak of  poetry’s audience rather than poetry’s readers, which tells you something right there.   It can be painful and embarrassing to stand up before a small group of  miscellaneous strangers who expect you to entertain them and instead offer poems they might find bewildering, or remote.  I've given readings  at which I just want to say, oh well, never mind, let’s just go have a beer and talk about health care reform. 

      Wislawa Szymborska’s “Poetry Reading” (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)   may be the definitive account of a reading at its awful,  humiliating worst.  To paraphrase the old Jewish joke about the Catskills hotel (“The food is terrible!” “Yes, and the portions are so small!”), the audience is not only tiny, it’s not even listening.  And yet, Symborska disperses her pity, her warmth and her satirical humor so evenly among poets and audience members and even the muse, poor thing,  that what in lesser hands would be just another complaint about the world’s indifference to art becomes a gesture of understanding, forgiveness, love.

POETRY READING

To be a boxer, or not to be there
at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? 
Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare --
it's time to start this cultural affair.
Half came inside because it started raining, 
the rest are relatives. O Muse.

The women here would love to rant and rave, 
but that's for boxing. Here they must behave. 
Dante's Infemo is ringside nowadays.
Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.

Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet, 
one sentenced to hard shelleying for life, 
for lack of muscles forced to show the world 
the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists 
with luck. O Muse,
O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.

In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore: 
he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more, 
she's making him that tart she used to bake. 
Aflame, but carefully--don't burn his cake!
we start to read. O Muse.

-- by Wislawa Szymborska 
                (from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems Harvest Books, 1996)

from the archive; first posted August 19, 2009

"Take the No Out of Now": Rozanne Gold in conversation with poet/multi-media artist Gerd Stern

Gerd Stern in front of Contact Is The Only Love, first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1963

Politics excepted, death and dying have become the meat of current discourse. As an end-of-life doula (with an MFA in poetry), trained to do “life reviews” that explore the vicissitudes of aging, I was excited to interview Gerd Stern, a renowned psychedelic artist and one of the world’s original Beat poets. Soon to be 93, Gerd eagerly awaits the 2022 publication of his fifth book of poetry, “Take the No Out of Now.” A colleague of Timothy Leary at Harvard, Gerd was Maya Angelou’s lover and manager, living together on a houseboat in Sausalito.

Gerd is a multi-media artist as well as a poet, and an emissary of the Beats. His book, First Poems and Others, was published in 1952. A second, Afterimage, appeared in 1965, followed years later by Fragmeants (2002), and WhenThen (2018). Stern was a founder of USCO, a group of pioneering artists, engineers and poets creating multimedia performances and environments that redefined art in the 1960’s. Their multimedia discotheque, named The World, was featured on the cover of Life magazine.  USCO’s work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Whitney, the Pompidou, the Tate Liverpool and museums in Vienna and Munich.   

Over the past decade, Gerd has been an artist-in-residence in Italy, Germany and the U.S. He has given talks and poetry readings on the Lower East Side, Woodstock, San Francisco’s Beat Museum (which celebrated his 90^th birthday), the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Utah State University, the National Gallery in Washington and the Fri Art Kunstalle in Switzerland. 

Until recently, Gerd lived in an 18^th-century house in Cresskill, New Jersey, and had a home in Jamaica (in the Caribbean) known as “POETREEF.”  He now lives in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, near Judith Sokoloff, his partner for fourteen years.  

At 93, Gerd still looks like the hippie he was, forever cool, and open to “what is.”  A father, great-grandfather, and artist-in-residence, Gerd joined me in a frank discussion about this sacred time of life. We called it end-of-life poetics, which, surprisingly, led him to forecast “possibility” and an optimistic view of the future.   

Gerd Stern (right) with Jim Kempner at Jim Kempner Fine Art during a show of Stern's multimedia work, February 2020.

RG: When were you first aware of death?

GS: It might have been my maternal grandmother’s. Her son, a doctor, inadvertently killed her. She had very bad asthma and they put radium pellets into her nose – they left a piece in her nose and that did her in. That affected me profoundly. I was a teenager mid-teens or late teens, I can’t remember. She was a piano teacher – a concert pianist in Europe. She was my first cultural contact in life – she would take me to the Metropolitan Opera. Her name was Oma Levinson and she was in her late 70s. My mother died when I was four, when we lived in Saarbrucken, Germany. I did not get to say goodbye.  

RG: Have you ever had an intimate experience with someone who was dying?

GS: I was with my father the minute he died in a hospital bed. He was in pain but also on morphine – it was a rather decent death. I witnessed a level of acceptance and I am comforted by that. On the other hand, my stepmother was angry that he died without her being there. And she died an angry woman. My father was 95 and my stepmother was 99. 

RG: How would you like to die?

GS: I’d like to die peacefully and somewhere where I’m loved. I’d like to die at home or I wouldn’t mind dying when I’m traveling (I spend a lot of time traveling – Venice, Germany, California). But home feels right – not a bad place. 

RG: Who is there with you?  What’s around you?

GS: Judith, my kids, my closest friends. I love all kinds of music, especially jazz since I was quite young, but there is nothing I would specify for that moment. I listen to music quite a lot but not as much as I used to. I prefer to be doing and thinking and working on papers. I am surrounded by piles of them – and they are important to me. But I have too many and can’t manage them like as I’d like  That’s part of end-of-life – I’m past the point of organization and can’t control it like I used to. I feel the pressure of facing up to some issues -- IRS stuff and raising money for the church building (the home of USCO) in Garnerville, New York, to become part of its local historical society. I’d like to turn it into an artist-in-residency venue. 

RG: Which poets feel meaningful, or inspiring, to you?    

GS: Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Ted Roethke, Dylan Thomas. Sylvia Plath, Rachel Hadas, T.S. Eliot.  And my erstwhile lover, Maya Angelou, but I actually preferred her prose. Also meaningful were my friendships – with Lenny Bruce, Chet Baker, Huey Newton, Philip Lamantia, as well as Dylan Thomas.

RG: Edward Said in “On Late Style” posited, “Late works constitute a form of exile.” Although perspectives vary greatly – from Sontag’s war-like posture to defeat death, to Freud’s willingness to go quietly but be in total control, and Dylan Thomas’s self-destructive, ignominious path -- what seems universal is their commitment to creating art until the very end, but in a manner quite distinct from their previous output. What do you think of this idea of late works in general?

GS: I think of “late works” in a strange way – as a time for me to recognize when a poem is mine because it sings and becomes attuned to my own being and knowing. (I’ve grappled with this from my late teens until my early forties, and seem to be grappling with it again). And so at this age my late works are not unlike the waves of the ocean. Each poem, or piece of art, distinct from any previous output.  This is not exile but the nature of things. Late works, then, is each poem, or piece of art, distinct from any previous output, but part of the flow.

(L to R): Vern Bennett, Ann London (Gerd's wife) Gerd Stern, Allen Ginsberg, Mimi London. In the front is Madge Bennett. Standing rear: Percy Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Photograph was taken at Gerd’s barge in Waldo Point, Sausalito in the 1950s. © Gordon Onslow-Ford.

RG:One of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s patients said, “I want to live through my dying.” I’ll paraphrase this as “I want to live through my aging.”  I know you are not dying but how might your poetry differ at the end-of-life?

GS: I think this is where I might now be in my writing because I believe that everything in the coming years will be end-of-life poems. In my 40s, I began recognizing who I was as a poet and what poems mean to be Gerd Stern poems. Ever since, I identify myself as the poet who wrote or writes those poems. Before that I was struggling to claim who I was. My titles tell their own story in a way: “My First Poems and Others;” “Afterimage,” and my most recent “WhenThen” -- wow, that really sounds like end-of life poetics! I’ve been obsessed with time in my poetry since I started writing. I try to place my poems in some particular time -- so that the inspiration is definite, defined – not just all over the place. The idea of possible futures keeps me laughing, while the consideration of them keeps me creating and very alive.  This may be the best way I can “live through my aging.”

RG: Since getting my MFA I have explored the work of artists and poets at the end of life and noticed great similarities: A pervasive awareness of diminution (shrinking or fading away), stylistic changes (including fragments of texts, weightier lines, erasures, Haiku). Does any of this apply to you or your work?

GS: My late works in collage may be the best example of a stylistic change. A collage in itself is a great metaphor for a life review – where fragments, layers, and the interstices of thought, ideas and memory – overlap, collide, become resemblances of my own cadences and rhythms – essential elements to who I am, and add what is needed now. 

RG: Tell me about your relationship with Maya Angelou.

Jane Clarke: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________

Blue Cards

 

Winter mornings he was gone before dawn

to fairs in Ballyhaunis, Claremorris, Ballinrobe.

He came home with muck on his coat,

smelling of Shorthorns and Herefords.

 

Sometimes he told us who he’d met,

the blind man who knew each of his cows

by their lowing, the widow who bargained

harder than any dealer. But mostly he sat

 

distracted by prices, cigarette smoke

spiraling to the kitchen ceiling, blue cards

spread around the table. Today, when everyone

else was away, I wrapped him warm,

 

pushed his wheelchair through the haggard,

up the yard to the sheds. The cattle lifted

doleful eyes from heaps of silage.

Hello lads, he said.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jane Clarke is the author of two poetry collections, The River and When the Tree Falls, as well as an illustrated chapbook, All the Way Home, (Smith|Doorstop 2019). Jane’s awards include the 2016 Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry and the 2016 Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year. Originally from a farm in Co. Roscommon, Jane now lives with her wife in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow, Ireland.  [“Blue Cards” is from Where the Tree Falls, published by Bloodaxe Books, 2015 & 2019; a blue card is a bovine animal passport.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                              Frank McElvey (1895--1974), Fair Day. Oil on canvas.

On Gene Kelly [by David Lehman]

Here's an excerpt from "To Dance an Exclamation Point," a "talking pictures" column in The American Scholar:

<<<
The best stanza of Carl Sandburg’s “Lines Written for Gene Kelly to Dance To” proposes a parallel between the languages of dance and speech: “Can you dance a question mark? / Can you dance an exclamation point? / Can you dance a couple of commas? / And bring it to a finish with a period?” Fred Astaire, my other favorite dancer, can climb the wall and dance on the ceiling, but if anyone can dance an exclamation point, it’s Gene Kelly.

Of Kelly’s four outstanding midcentury movie musicals, Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is the best-loved. In Hollywood history, the title number is second in popularity only to “Over the Rainbow,” and for sheer joy it’s hard to top “Good Mornin’” with Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor. In Singin’ in the Rain, the late Clive James felt he encountered “the absolute concentration of an entire popular culture at its most powerful.” As for Kelly, James said, “it took the whole of America, including all its modern history, to create one of him.

In It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), the most underrated of the quartet, Kelly dances down the street in roller skates, Dan Dailey does a nifty tipsy song and dance, and the two of them and Michael Kidd—Army buddies who reunite 10 years after the end of World War II—dance on trash can lids in one number, and, later on, sing of their plight (as civilians of different classes and backgrounds, who don’t like one another) to the tune of the Blue Danube waltz. Add a Dolores Grey showstopper (“Thanks a Lot, But No Thanks”) and the dancing feet of Cyd Charisse, plus lyrics of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and well, if it’s a lesser masterpiece, it’s a masterpiece nevertheless.

John Updike believes that On the Town (1949) was the freshest and had the most energy of the group. Kelly himself felt that “we”—the unit assembled by MGM genius producer (and lyricist) Arthur Freed—may have “made better movies,” but On the Town “was the apex of our talent.” Purists may register reservations if only because some of Leonard Bernstein’s sublime songs (“Some Other Time,” “Lucky to Be Me”) were dropped from the Broadway version and replaced with lesser, albeit still good, tunes by Roger Edens. Still, the film is giddy with infectious delight from the moment Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin, playing three sailors on 24-hour shore leave, get off their ship, take in the sights of New York City, and pair off with Vera-Ellen, Betty Garrett, and Ann Miller, respectively. In the exhilarating opening sequence, shot on location in or near Chinatown, Rockefeller Center, Central Park, Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty and other such landmarks, the fellows sing their hymn of praise to “New York, New York, a wonderful town.”[1]

While I love all four movies, I would press the case for An American in Paris (1951) as Kelly’s best. He plays a painter named Jerry Mulligan, a GI who stayed in Paris after the war because, he says, if you can’t paint in Paris, brother, you might as well go home and marry the boss’s daughter. Jerry is pursued by Milo Roberts (Nina Foch), a wealthy American expat, who looks smashing in a dress she is “almost wearing” and in a brown suit with elegant earrings. She wants to sponsor Jerry; she rents him a studio and arranges a one-man show. But Jerry’s heart belongs to Lise (Leslie Caron), who is engaged to acclaimed music-hall singer Henri Burel (George Guettary).

Like Victor Lazlo in Casablanca, Burel may have the greater claim on the lady, because he protected her during the war after her parents, active in the Resistance, were deported by the Nazis. But being a man of honor, and not having a world war to fight, he lets true love take its course. The movie ends with a masquerade party, which segues into a full-scale ballet presentation of An American in Paris, arguably George Gershwin’s second greatest work for piano and orchestra. Vincente Minnelli directed the film, which won the Academy Award for best picture. Alan Jay Lerner wrote the Oscar-winning script.

Why do I defy the consensus in casting my ballot for An American in Paris?
>>>

for the answer & for the rest of this article, click here

https://theamericanscholar.org/to-dance-an-exclamation-point/

"Retronym time" from "Time Pieces" [by Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967-2009]

from "Time Pieces" by Rachel Wetzsteon

Cheering: it was done.
But soon the Great War would be
renamed World War One. 

"Time Pieces," a brilliant sequence of haikus, firstappeared in The New Criterion and was selected by Kevin Young forThe Best American Poetry 2011 and by Robert Pinsky for inclusion in The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition, which Scribner published in 2013. A Yale alumna, Wetzsteon did her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. She taught at Barnard College. A poet of great intelligence and formal ability, she had just been named poetry editor of The New Republic when she died by her own hand on or just before Christmas 2009.

-- sdl (11/11/18)

"Time Pieces," a brilliant sequence of haikus, firstappeared in The New Criterion and was selected by Kevin Young forThe Best American Poetry 2011 and by Robert Pinsky for inclusion in The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition, which Scribner published in 2013. A Yale alumna, Wetzsteon did her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. She taught at Barnard College. A poet of great intelligence and formal ability, she had just been named poetry editor of The New Republic when she died by her own hand on or just before Christmas 2009.

-- sdl (11/11/18)

Bob Guccione [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

Oh, don’t mind me. I come from a time

When new issues of Playboy magazine

Sold out in one day, when the windows

Of coffee shops on Broadway were piled

High with Playboys at eight o’clock in

The morning and by early afternoon

Not one Playboy was anywhere to be had.

I also lived to see the day when Playboy

Was the kiss of death for any enterprise

Foolish enough to display the rabbit while

A million sodden cab drivers had rabbits

Hanging from their vehicles’ mirrors

And then of course Guccione appeared

With his willingness to show pubic hair.

Rachid Ouramdane’s national dance theater: making space for imagination [by Paul Tracy Danison]

A couple of Johanna Faye’s Black Sheep dancing at, in, a point of transition  – Palais de Chaillot, 18 September 2021

I wonder if our civilization’s habit of building everything as an impossible play on a log cabin will be flushed out by the boiling floods and freezes of climate change? Will we come up with something that responds to our current needs and environment instead of harking back to forgotten fears of a big, chilly oak forest inhabited by grumpy gods?

I began wondering about this when I was at a program called Chaillot Experience, one of the events that Rachid Ouramdane, newly director of the newly-officialized Théâtre National de la Danse at the old Palais de Chaillot, is using to set a tone for a dance performance that, as he told Arte TV earlier this year, picks and chooses energies and movement in the world around.

Chaillot Experience used access and waiting space as performance space; there was no attempt to transform the palace’s restored art deco corridors, foyers and entries into anything else, just to show that dance can happen in them, too. Come to think of it, maybe those ordinary movements - entry, exit, waiting, watching - are dance essences, too …

Rachid Ouramdane, director of the Théâtre National de la Danse at the Palais de Chaillot, points to the dance in places, people and things where where before there was only movement

My part of the Experience was catching tightrope walker Nathan Paulin in the corner of my eye from the plate glass windows of the palace’s grand foyer while glancing around to see where the acrobatic troupe Cie XY was and what it was doing as it messily tumbled through the stairs and hallways. Johanna Faye’s Cie Black Sheep dancers covered the palace’s transitional spaces – breaks, branchings, landings, thresholds – with a Spectacle déambulatoire which winkled out this’ll-do-nicely niches for a variety of short, thrilling performances. Over the public address system, Paulin, barely a speck against the ironwork of the famous tower, continuously commented his 700-meter progress from the Eiffel tower to the palace’s esplanade, even as the rope swayed and gave way in the gusting wind.

Faye’s this’ll-do-nicely niche-ing reminded me of the emerging erotic energy around my high-school friend Evie’s at-homes before parents and school authorities noticed and stamped it out. Faye’s Black Sheep can dance. Cie XY seems to have eliminated gendering in their show, putting women on the bottom as well as on top of those dare-devil climbs and muscle clusters acrobats do. I thought it a sign or portent, if Janus-faced. Strong, delighted ladies, look sharp! If the Texas Taliban doesn’t forbid sinful clothes and declare y’all pregnant-in-principle, anyhow, I predict, gasp, adequate, if not yet free, public toilets in the very near future.

What got the log-cabin architecture riff into my brain the first place was a chance remark by an architect. She works on the team tasked with reconverting the Palais de la Porte Dorée from a place to admire, as the legends on the restored frescoes in the main hall put it, “France’s contributions to its colonial subjects” to a Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration. More an about-face than a reconversion, surely. But the architect – unafraid of a drink and a guffaw - remains sanguine.

She says that in building design – at least where the conceptual building blocks are lofty oak logs laid upon other oak logs – everything is potluck anyhow. Our log cabins almost never work as intended because, as a general proposition, our architecture is just about as un-adapted to environment it exists in as a green-grass lawn in the desert around Phoenix, Arizona, and generally resistant to anything Imagination might suggest. No need to sweat. Nobody’s to blame. Drink up.

All this baggage suggested to me that Chaillot’s Ouramdane is quite right: as it responds to our collective need for Imagination, dance bursts out of traditional forms and fills all the spaces available. Chaillot’s auditoriums (and those almost anyplace else) can’t accommodate an ordinary tightrope walker, let alone the sense at the heart of a Cie XY performance.

When you come to think of it, even Johanna Faye’s this’ll-do-nicely niche-ing where-you-can staging stretches the dramatic possibilities of log-cabin architecture to the limit. And what about the dancers and choreographers growing out of an ever- broadening vision of dance-performance?

It seems to me that at some point very soon, they’ll need space that is made for life – either dance will own all space as it does all movement or it will force us to introduce more diversity in how we can consider space.  

Whatever. Put Ouramdane’s dance program on your getting-back-to-Paris list. You’re likely to be intrigued by the life and imagination in anything you sign up to see.

An Interview with Rachel Hadas [by Aspen Matis]

Rachel Hadas is the author of more than twenty books of verse and prose, including the acclaimed poetry collections Poems for Camilla, Questions in the Vestibule and, most recently, Love and Dread. Her poems appear in many magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, and she is a frequent reviewer and columnist for the LondonTimes Literary Supplement. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and she has taught courses in literature and writing at Columbia and Princeton and is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she has taught for many years. She lives in New York City.

I corresponded with Ms. Hadas via email about poetry’s power to offer “the life raft of language by fusing the private and the universal. We also discussed imagination’s ability to press back against the pressure of reality and the gritty nature of the poetry that feels most alive — that these poems are “often made of mundanity and suffering,” not merely sterile sentiments and “truths.”

And through the poet’s transcendent work, we glimpse the complex weave of love and dread called life. 

Photo credit: Shalom Gorewitz

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Poetry has always meant for me the place where inner life and outer world meet. It helps and challenges me to express, observe, clarify, get a second chance. At different stages of my life, poetry has enabled me to remember; to replay; to find courage; to tell the truth. Although I haven’t always been aware of this salient role poetry has played, I’ve been writing steadily for well over half a century, and poetry has always offered what James Merrill, a friend and guiding light, called “the life raft of language.” So even if I didn’t always know why, I turned to poetry from an early age and never stopped.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

I’m wary of making grandiose claims for poetry. (Would that it were, that anything were, a unifying force!) Poets have always loved to talk about how powerful and important poetry is, and I’m no exception. Poetry’s power to fuse the private and the universal always amazes me, as does its ability to offer a reprieve (as you aptly phrase it) from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence. But poetry’s role is more complicated than that. Poetry is often made of mundanity and suffering; if it excludes or flees them, it risks being empty, generic, sentimental. Each poet has to manage their own balancing act, whether in formal or thematic terms, or both, between the mundane and the visionary, the public and the private — one could add so many pairs. A complicating factor is that poets come with their own talents and temperaments, their own obsessions and models, their own reading and experience.

Your most recent book of poems, Love and Dread, was published by Measure Press in July of this year to widespread praise. Poet Jessica Greenbaum describes the collection as “contemplative and joyous,” writing that — in this collection — you have “set up shop at the borders of inside and out, past and future, life and death, the conscious and the subconscious,” and your “wares from these liminal thresholds are those rarest of treasured souvenirs that absolutely cannot be found anywhere else.” Poet and translator A.E. Stallings describes the collection as prophetic, its tone and content evoking the pandemic months before it ravaged the globe, writing that the work “seems to speak already to that world of closeness and anxiety,” and poet Andrés Cerpa writes that the book finds “the quiet truths that exist in the everyday ceremony of love,” calling the book “poised and ecstatic.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

Finding titles for my books used to pose a challenge — not anymore.  Since I fell in love with Shalom Gorewitz early in 2013, and later that same year was quite sick, and then when Trump started to loom on the horizon, and since, the twin themes or poles of love and dread have seemed incredibly clear. They’re even clearer now, in our time of unremitting disasters: lots of daily dread, yet not only dread.

To step back a bit, my poems have addressed mortality, have tended toward the elegiac, since my father’s death when I was seventeen. In the decades since then, the largeness, the universality both of our sense of attachment and of the fear of losing what we’re attached to — this has felt increasingly like my master idea.  Often this doubleness has played out in a single poem — not only the title poem of “Love and Dread” but in, say, “A Poultice” or “Midair,” and other poems in the collection, most of which was written between 2015 and 2017.  Originally I thought of dividing the manuscript into a Love section and a Dread section, but it seemed truer to life and art to weave the dark and the light together — as they are woven together every day.

Your stunning poem “In the Cloud,” published in The New Yorker in May of this year, beautifully evokes two dual abstractions: language and digital technology, such as Zoom and the cloud, where contact and content exist — but virtually. You write: “Words deeply pondered start to freeze — / as when before our tired eyes / Zoom stalls and stops (and no surprise), / leaving a dark screen, a blank hour / to fill with after and before.” What moment or interaction — or ongoing experience and feeling — sparked the light of this powerful poem?

“In the Cloud” had the original and very flat title “The List,” and it really was inspired by a list, which I really did lose, of words my poetry students (in a Gen. Ed. Poetry course I was teaching remotely for Rutgers-Newark in the fall of 2020) didn’t know. Once I began to jot down those words from memory, the rhyme and meter carried me swiftly along.

A lot of the poems I’ve written in the past few years are rhymed tetrameter couplets. A.E. Stallings, in her Foreword to Love and Dread, writes that “the indicative mood of this volume is the couplet, the wedding of opposites, as if translated from a language where “love” and “dread” do indeed rhyme.” I’d only add that for better or worse, I rarely overthink (or even think consciously at all about) formal matters; the decision tends to make itself, and off I go.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

In the seventeenth century I especially love George Herbert (I’m hardly alone in that), and in the eighteenth, perhaps following in Merrill’s footsteps, Alexander Pope.  Compression, elegance, wit.

Your new book of essays, Piece by Piece, was published by Paul Dry Books in June of this year. Scholar David Mikics calls the work “haunting and intensely memorable,” and the publisher describes the collection as a book “about paying attention.” In the introduction, you write that you are “interested in…the obliterations and transformations of memory,” and, in this exploration, you pose the questions, “What and how do I recall what I’ve read, sometimes many years before? How, at different times in my life, did books help me?” What is the role of literature in your life? And how do reading and living well and fully relate to one another, in your eyes?

Piece by Piece is in many ways a memoir of reading: what I read, what I remember, how it helped. What Wallace Stevens said about the imagination, that it helps us to press back against the pressure of reality, comes to mind; reading does that, it can offer or seem to offer us a safe place, an escape. But just as I said earlier that mundanity and suffering are crucial elements of poetry, in the same way the very reality against which reading might seem to exert a saving counter-pressure is also found in books. 

Sharing a book, reading to a child, teaching a text to students — I don’t know a better way of caring, of human helping, person by person, page by page — whether with a toddler on one’s lap or staring at a screen full of faces. I’m the child of bookish parents, the mother of a bookish son, sister of a bookish sister, and the fortunate teacher of hundreds of students.

Piece by Piece, I hope, is about all these things.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

I’m not the only older person to opine that young poets should read.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

I’ve recently finished a collection of poems entitled Pandemic Almanac. Also, my translation of one of forty-eight sections of the Dionysiaca, a zany and baroque Greek poem from late antiquity, should appear next spring. Working on this translation kept me happily occupied during the first stages of the pandemic.

“Translating,” says my husband Shalom, “is your Sudoku.”

Brian Clements Presents a Poem by Morton Marcus

The First Laugh 

The first laugh was God creating the universe. That guffaw is still exploding in all directions, hollowing out and filling the farthest reaches of space.

What could have been so funny? The idea of light and sound after all that darkness and silence? After the eons of brooding and grumbling?

It must have been something bigger than we can imagine, something that elicited more than a cackle, a chortle, a chuckle or giggle, a snicker or titter.

Something say as big as a billion chandeliers of stars, millions of spinning galaxies with super nova popping like flashbulbs inside them.

Or maybe not. Maybe something as small as an ocean or a mountain, a whale or an elephant, or even us.
>>>

<<<
About 18 months ago, when Morton Marcus knew that he was terminally ill and was preparing the manuscript for his phenomenal final book, The Dark Figure in the Doorway (White Pine Press), Mort sent me a batch of poems that he wanted to include in Sentence, which he had so generously supported with his work, his money, and his good will. Because I have always admired Mort’s humor, intelligence, humility, and reaching after “something bigger than we can imagine,” it was my pleasure and my honor to be able to include some of Mort’s final work as a tribute to a long and various career, which included not only poems and prose poems (see his excellent Pursuing the Dream Bone from Quale Press) but film criticism and a public radio interview show in California. One of his many guests on that show was Christopher Buckley, who says of Mort:

I was always impressed with his poems, and equally with his writing on poetry—clear, direct, accessible, specific, accurate, historical, all in service of poetry rather than the poet himself—whether in interviews, informal or formal critical evaluation/appreciation. But the great energy and character of the man was the thing. I found that especially evident in the prose poems, but regardless of form, what I always found was a generosity and a wide-ranging embrace of experience of life on the planet.

Near the end, when the diagnosis was bad, but before he was feeling the worst effects, he sat down and wrote up his essay, “My Life with Weldon Kees”, for the anthology in homage to Kees that Christopher Howell and I were editing. He worked hard and consistently and sent me a hard copy with a disc and a note saying he wanted to get this done before he was done—he was dedicated to the work, to contributing to the larger project of poetry. Mort always worked hard, on his own work and on appreciating the work of others. I recall the radio interview I did with Mort for his NPR radio show from Santa Cruz —I was amazed and a little embarrassed that he had invested so much time and attention on my new book, was so supportive. He always made time for you and let you know he was focused on you, something I am sure his students appreciated for over thirty years. Mort had the great character it takes to make great poems. He is missed by many.

Morton Marcus passed away at his home in Santa Cruz in October, 2009.
-- Brian Clements

from the archive; first posted October 3, 2010.

Woman and Skeleton [by Albert York]

The Winning Entry: "When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan" [by Angela Ball] with judge Jim Cummins's comments & runners up

Charles Bukowski in One Corner; in the Other, Bob Dylan

If anyone should take eighteen-shot Dylan Thomas’s name,
it’s me. I challenge you to a duel
with two bottles of Four Roses.

--Chuck, that may be you, but
me, I crossed the green mountain
I slept by the sea.
you’re walkin’ in dreams
where black is the color
and nothing the number.

Bob, I got to tell you
I’m sorry for my wife
I’m sorry for anyone’s wife.
If you want me, find me clinging to a freight car,
Find me underground.
But you’ll never find me
vagrant in the rain, nabbed by a rookie cop,
a skirt, no less,
in Long Branch, New Jersey.

-- Angela Ball

James Cummins writes:

As with most of David's prompts, this one resulted in some terrific entries.  I went with Angela Ball's poem for the first prize, but there was a good pool to pick from (I counted eight entries as possibles).  It came down to some great lines.  Angela wrote (in Buk's voice) "I'm sorry for my wife / I'm sorry for anyone's wife" which seemed to me to combine the compassion B. tried to keep hidden with the world-weariness we love about the guy.  And the ending, referring to Dylan's run-in with the police in 2009, who thought he was a homeless vagrant, was perfect; the word "skirt" was inspired.  George Schaefer's prose-poem "scene" takes second; it combines the grittiness of many of the entries with a lyric grace I love.  "The bluebird in him allows him to order a round for the idealistic young troubadour" and "Poetry only happens when nothing else can" are two examples.  And again, the ending is perfect.  Finally, Adam Baron's poem gets honorable mention for the use of the word "dumb," the moon sitting on Bukowski's solipsistic rim, and the friendly atmosphere of two schmucks having a moment together.  The difference between these three and at least four or five other entries is as thin as the bill Buk slides into his favorite pinball machine.  Thanks to all.  

George Schafer's prose poem (second place):

When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan

A jaded old bard pounds a shot of J.D. and mocks an idealistic young troubadour. “So just how many beers must one man drink before he’s allowed to pass out?” The bartender chuckles at the joke. The young troubadour debates if Jesus will ever forgive these sins. Loose leaf papers holding his poems gets blown away in the wind. With a soul deader than a dead Christmas tree, the jaded old bard orders another beer and another shot. The bluebird in him allows him to order a round for the idealistic young troubadour. After all, poetry only happens when nothing else can. The sooner this kid learns the ways of the world the better. The young troubadour claims everyone gets stoned so he can abide. He pulls up a stool and throws down the shot. Old poet says “Don’t try.”

Adam Baron's poem (third place)

When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan

Night fell, broke.
One day they'll reward you old man.
Chuck laughed. Me? Not me, but I'll tell you
this: if I knew guitar I'd strum the
moon out of the dumb sky. I'd make it sit on
the edge of my glass - and stare
at me for a change.
But you don't, Bob said
and Chuck laughed. Then I'll leave it
where it is, which he did, and
though Bob tries now and then, he
can't shift it.

Anne Sexton: On the Anniversary of her Death [ed. Terence Winch]

 

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

 

The end of the affair is always death.   

She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,   

out of the tribe of myself my breath   

finds you gone. I horrify

those who stand by. I am fed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

Finger to finger, now she’s mine.   

She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.   

I beat her like a bell. I recline

in the bower where you used to mount her.   

You borrowed me on the flowered spread.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

Take for instance this night, my love,   

that every single couple puts together   

with a joint overturning, beneath, above,   

the abundant two on sponge and feather,   

kneeling and pushing, head to head.   

At night alone, I marry the bed.

 

I break out of my body this way,   

an annoying miracle. Could I   

put the dream market on display?   

I am spread out. I crucify.

My little plum is what you said.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

Then my black-eyed rival came.

The lady of water, rising on the beach,   

a piano at her fingertips, shame   

on her lips and a flute’s speech.

And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

She took you the way a woman takes   

a bargain dress off the rack

and I broke the way a stone breaks.

I give back your books and fishing tack.   

Today’s paper says that you are wed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

The boys and girls are one tonight.

They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.   

They take off shoes. They turn off the light.   

The glimmering creatures are full of lies.

They are eating each other. They are overfed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

 Anne Sexton studied with the poet Robert Lowell at Boston University and also worked as a model and a librarian. Although she had written some poetry in childhood, it was not until the later 1950s that she began to write seriously. Her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960. The book won immediate attention because of the intensely personal and relentlessly honest self-revelatory nature of the poems recording her nervous breakdown and recovery. Their imagery was frequently brilliant, and their tone was both sardonic and vulnerable. Her second book of poems, All My Pretty Ones (1962), continued in the vein of uncompromising self-exploration. Live or Die (1966), a further record of emotional illness, won a Pulitzer Prize and was followed by, among others, Love Poems (1969), Transformations (1971), The Book of Folly (1972), and The Death Notebooks (1974). Sexton taught at Boston University in 1970–71 and at Colgate University in 1971–72. She also wrote a number of children’s books with her close friend, poet Maxine Kumin.  Sexton died by her own hand on Oct. 4^th, 1974. The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), 45 Mercy Street (1976, edited by her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton), and Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978) were published posthumously. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, edited by Lois Ames and Linda Gray Sexton, was published in 1977 and No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose in 1985.      [from the Encyclopaedia Britannica]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

"Modernist Lament" [by James Cummins]

Modernist Lament

When his gods are fragments, man’s of a piece;
But once he put his Higher Self in charge,
Man languished in a dualistic grief,
Always seeking a demon he could purge.
The desert was empty, so Self learned late
It didn’t have to bellow like a Fool—
Dark rants about its destiny and fate,
Prostrate before a statue of a bull.
Then ‘new man’ rose—hypocrite lecturer—
And the Obsequious found they could sway
Whole empires, built on fault-lines of the Slave.
Now artists are agents-provocateur,
Returning home to Ithaca’s blue bay,
Lashed to the mast against the song and wave.

 

From Recalcitrant Actors (2021, Dos Madres Press) by James Cummins, who judged this year's BAP poetry challenge. Tomorrow we will post his pick for the best submitted poem titled "When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan."