The Best American Poetry

Riddle for June 8th

What do they have in common:

Robert Schumann

Frank Lloyd Wright

Barbara Bush

Nancy Sinatra

& Julianna Margulies?

Happy birthday, Dean Martin (June 7)

 

Happy birthday, Dino. Ain't that a kick in the head?

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: June 7, 2023

Peter Johnson’s While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems was just published by MadHat Press. Johnson has long been a champion of the prose poem, twisting and working it into hilarious truths. Russell Edson, in fact, coined his certain kind of prose poem as “The Peter Johnson Prose Poem.” Johnson’s advocacy of the form—his magazine and two anthologies—and his brilliance as a practitioner, make this collection a “must have” for any reader interested in prose poetry.

Cassandra Atherton has published a wonderful essay in Plume about the importance of his career.

https://plumepoetry.com/the-life-and-times-of-big-mr-prose-poem-while-the-undertaker-sleeps-collected-and-new-prose-poems-by-peter-johnson/

Congratulations, Peter!

D-Day, June 6, 1944: "I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle."

Order of the Day, June 6, 1944

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!

You are about to embark on the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground.

Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Good luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

 

Bach [by Lewis Saul]

Today, I'm here to talk about my favorite Bach ensemble -- The Netherlands Bach Society and their "All of Bach" project -- particularly Bach's long-form works.

The St. Matthew Passion (2:44:31) is at the top of the list for me. 164 minutes may seem like a long time, but the music is so sublime, the time just flies by. At the bottom of the above link is another link that says "into the weeds with me," which will take you to my first post here -- 13 years ago -- where I compare and contrast five different recordings of the Passion.

Equally demanding is the great Mass in B Minor (1:48:42).

 

**

Less demanding are the 250 cantatas (index). They average 20-30 minutes in length, and demonstrate Bach's consistently fabulous part-writing. The first 200 or so are sacred, and the rest secular (wedding, hunting -- even tax collectors [#212]).

But today, I'll speak of the magnificent Magnificat from 1733, a mere 28 minutes long. Click on the Luke links to see the English translation of each movement.

Magnificat, BWV 243 (1733)
1. Magnificat anima mea Dominum
2. Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari mea
3. Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent
4. omnes generationes
5. Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est et sanctum nomen ejus
6. Et misericordia ejus a progenie in progenies timentibus eum
7. Fecit potentiam in brachio suo dispersit superbos mente cordis sui
8. Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles
9. Esurientes implevit bonis et divites dimisit inanes
10. Suscepit Israel puerum suum recordatus misericordiae suae
11. Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros Abraham et semini ejus in saecula
12. Gloria Patri, et Filio et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Netherlands Bach Society
Jos van Veldhoven, cond.
(28:29)

 

 

 

 

In 1723, after taking up his post as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, Bach set this text in 12 movements for Christmas in the key of E-Flat Major.

A decade later, Bach revised the work, dropping the Christmas hymns, altering or expanding some instrumentation, and changing the key to D Major for the trumpets -- their natural key. The probable date for the first performance of this version was July 2, 1733, for the feast day of Visitation (although some scholars believe it wasn't until the following Christmas). That year there had been a period of mourning (February to June) after the death of Augustus the Strong, during which no concerted music was allowed in the churches.

 

The choir is in five voices: SSATB.

 

The arch symmetry is magical:

• Mvmnts 1/2 & 11/12 in tonic
• Mvmnts 3 & 10 in relative minor
• Mvmnts 5 & 9 in major keys other than D
• Mvmnts 6 & 8 minor key
• Mvmnt 7 tonic

1. Magnificat anima mea Dominum
Luke 1:46

2. Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari mea

Luke 1:47

 

All arias are non-da capo. This is sung by Soprano II, with string accompaniment, continuing the joyful feeling of the opening.

 

3. Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent

Luke 1:48

 

Soprano I -- accompanied only by an oboe d'amore and continuo -- sings this magnificent aria. Spitta:

 

"Scarcely ever has the idea of virgin purity, simplicity, and humble happiness found more perfect expression than in this picture of the Madonna, translated, as it were, into musical language."

 

4. omnes generationes

 

The completion of the sentence (all generations) is given to the chorus.

 

5. Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est et sanctum nomen ejus
Luke 1:49

 

This short aria for bass is accompanied only by the continuo.

 

6. Et misericordia ejus a progenie in progenies timentibus eum

Luke 1:50

 

This exquisite duet (alto/tenor) is accompanied by muted strings and flute doubling, in a gentle 12/8 ... the vocalists frequently pause for instrumental sections.

7. Fecit potentiam in brachio suo dispersit superbos mente cordis sui
Luke 1:51

 

He shows Strength! All five voices repeat a melisma on the word potentiam, from tenor, alto, soprano II, bass and soprano I. The conclusion (mente cordis sui) is adagio, illustrated by long chords, with trumpet accents.

 

8. Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles
Luke 1:52

 

Tenor aria accompanied by unisono violins and continuo only.

 

9. Esurientes implevit bonis et divites dimisit inanes
Luke 1:53

 

Alto aria, accompanied by two flutes and continuo. Stretch out your imagination and you can almost hear a jazz bass player, as the continuo plucks out notes in a steady on-the-beat rhythm! The flutes decorate the alto with compassionate word-painting (he has filled the hungry with good things) ...

10. Suscepit Israel puerum suum recordatus misericordiae suae
Luke 1:54

 

Here, Bach shows his mastery of composing just the right amount of orchestration -- this is a trio for the two soprani and alto, accompanied only by an oboe and a continuo of only cello.

What is of primary interest here is the oboe part, which is a cantus firmus of Luther's German translation of the Magnificat: Meine Seele erhebt den Herren (My soul exalts the Lord) -- from the original plainchant in the Aeolian mode (today's minor scale). Note how the chant starts on F-Sharp (dominant) and ends on B (tonic):

 

11. Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros Abraham et semini ejus in saecula
Luke 1:55

 

All five voices enter in a fugato from bottom to top. The complex part-writing is typical of Bach's genius in weaving the main motif in and out of a flowing accompaniment that is musical perfection.

 

12. Gloria Patri, et Filio et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Doxology

 

The complete ensemble concludes the work with a glorious fugato and then -- changing to a 3/4 meter, the second part of the text (Sicut erat ...) repeats material from the opening movement.

"The Laughing Heart" [by Charles Bukowski]

The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-- by Charles Bukowski

Read more about Charles Bukowski here. We first posted this poem back in 2008, and we continue to get comments on it.

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-- by Charles Bukowski

Read more about Charles Bukowski here. We first posted this poem back in 2008, and we continue to get comments on it.

Gregory Pardlo: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

Raisin

 

I dragged my twelve-year-old cousin

to see the Broadway production of A Raisin

in the Sun because the hip-hop mogul

and rapping bachelor, Diddy, played

the starring role. An aspiring rapper gave

my cousin his last name and the occasional child

support so I thought the boy would geek to see a pop

hero in the flesh as Walter Lee. My wife was newly

pregnant, and I was rehearsing, like Diddy

swapping fictions, surrendering his manicured

thug persona for a more domestic performance.

My cousin mostly yawned throughout the play.

Except the moment Walter Lee's tween son stiffened

on stage, as if rapt by the sound of a roulette ball.

Scene: No one breathes as Walter Lee vacillates,

uncertain of obsequity or indignation after Lindner offers

to buy the family out of the house they've purchased

in the all-white suburb, Walter might kneel to accept,

but he senses the tension in his son's gaze. I was thinking,

for real though, what would Diddy do? "Get rich

or die trying," 50 Cent would tell us. But my father would

sing like Ricky Scaggs, "Don't get above your raisin',"

when as a kid I vowed to be a bigger man than him.

That oppressive fruit dropped heavy as a medicine

ball in my lap meant to check my ego, and I imagined

generations wimpling in succession like the conga

marching raisins that sang Marvin's hit song. Silly,

I know. Outside the theater, my cousin told me

when Diddy was two, they found his hustler dad

draping a steering wheel in Central Park,

a bullet in his head. I shared what I knew of dreams

deferred and Marvin Gaye. (When asked if he loved

his son, Marvin Sr. answered, "Let's just say I didn't

dislike him.") Beneath the bling of many billion

diodes I walked beside the boy through Times Square

as if anticipating a magic curtain that would rise,

but only one of us would get to take a bow.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Gregory Pardlo is the author of Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include Totem, winner of the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize and Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden, and a visiting professor of creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. His third poetry collection, Spectral Evidence, is forthcoming in 2024.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"Do I Have Opinions?" [by Molly Arden]

Yes! Yes to "Blue Poles"!
Yes to the pool table's six holes!

I believe in Romeo, as Juliet said
when she lay in the coffin pretending to be dead.

That Tonto is no good, said the ambush chief
and I, guzzling gas, can get no relief.

The father figure who looked like Charlie Chan
walked like Charlie Chaplin when he kicked the can.

Lindsay Lohan is an also-ran, 
not an alloy but a metal impure,
and the disease will have no cure
when my reasoning, sound but obsolete as bonnets,
has gone the way of Sir Thomas Wyatt's sonnets.

Because you can't strut your stuff
when you're old and gray
and there isn't time enough,
there'll be some changes made
beside the hemlock tree today
in the sweetness of the shade.

So I say yes, and I pray
for a change of heart or in the weather
or the bread and butter eaten by Werther
who has to decide whether
or not or rot or snot or tit or tot
nobody wants you when you're doubt and out
and this I know without a doubt,

Soon we''ll be without the moon
let the luck that was once a blaze remain an ember
I swear to be true to you come December
as long as we're together in June.

-- Molly Arden

In Praise of Idleness" [by Paul Violi]

For the second time this week
I've watched snow fall at sunrise,
dawn arrive on a breeze
(the way I think it always does).
I don't know which, time or the weather,
woke me, charmed me out of a dream
where a few of us floated around,
gravity's jokers,
face-up in the quiet water
and the jetsam of a slow life.
I had one line that I'd saved
and let it go as though it were mine,
calling for “Darker days and brighter gods!” 
Then I only had my waking instant,
but it opened with that same shadowless light,
a sense of change, of something both near
and remote, first and last,
blowing with the wind and snow
through my reflection in the window.
And then I lost it.

So here I am, with cigarettes and cold coffee,
an unfinished ode to idleness,
cobwebs in high places,
a spider that rappels down the bookshelves,
and a commotion recollected in tranquility;
sunlight pouring through,
and another bright page
with a peculiar darkness flowing over it
—shadows of heatwaves from the radiator,
or my thoughts going up in smoke.

The glass, when misted over,\
reminds me of store windows,
how they're swathed with soap,
shrouded in secrecy
before a grand opening
or after an ignominious closing.
Either way, not very interesting
except, perhaps, when the grafitti,
the anonymous messages appear
scrawled across them
by some child of the air,
words you can see through
or a clear smear.

And at twilight I'm still here,
the same place, the same light.
Nothing to do but move with the view:
snow, wind over soft ruins,
unfinished buildings that loom
like monuments to a spent curiosity.
I'm in the tallest, up here with the Nopes
roosting on soggy flunkgirders.
Want a cigarette? Nope.
Got a match? Nope.
See any alternative to solipsism? Nope.
Hedonism? Nope. Sloppy stoicism? Nope.
Did you know that Maryland
has no natural but only man-made lakes? Nope.

The creatures of idleness
are pure speculation.
They follow the weather,
shadow the wind, fill in the blanks.
Some are big and clumsy and sly
and like to lick my watch;
others, like gerunds,
have already drunk themselves
into a state of being.
Another, with time on his hands
and the sense of how windows
are both inside and outside a place,
stands there watching his silhouette
change to a reflection
as the light shifts
and he moves forward or back,
plays like a god
stepping in and out of himself,
and hears the wind as the breath of change
when the last flurry whirls away in the light. 

The last flake grows larger
as it descends, and presents
when it lands in a burst of brilliance
the floorplan for a new building
where every wet, beaded window
is a picture of pleasure and expectation.
The drops ripen, moments in the light,
questions that, answered by a feeling,
slide away as clear as my being,
a drop at a time down the glass.
When the wind blows this hard
it's about to say something at last.
The earth down to its bare magic,
wind and glass, water and light.

Paul Violi, "In Praise of Idleness" from Likewise. Copyright © 1988 by Paul Violi. 
Reprinted by permission of Hanging Loose Press
Pictured above: Paul Vioili and Star Black at the KGB Bar 1998. Photo by David Lehman.

Marilyn Monroe as Chanteuse [by David Lehman]

We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday it is ) sang -- and sang well. Unlike Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak in Pal Joey, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, she needed no dubbing. (They shouldn't have dubbed Ava Gardner in Show Boat but that's another story.) See Marilyn as the very embodiment of curvaceous sexuality in Niagara, or making the most of a minor role in The Asphalt Jungle, or fighting with her beau in Bus Stop, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Ethel Merman and Donald O'Connor on the Irving Berlin bandwagon in There's No Business Like Show Business, or cavorting with cross-dressers Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. She sings in each of these movies and the songs are noteworthy, each and all. 

Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as "Heat Wave," are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. You can't keep your eyes off her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice. Her rendition of Irving Berlin's "After You Get What You Want You Don’t Want It," is a seductive masterpiece based on a profound insight into human nature. In her rendition of the same songwriter’s "Lazy," she lies on a divan while Donald O'Connor and Mitzi Gaynor dance around her. Mitzi is mighty pretty, mighty talented, but Marilyn is in a different league of voluptuousness.

Listen to her sing "I'm Through with Love," or "I Wanna Be Loved By You," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" or "Bye Bye, Baby" -- but listen to the songs without looking at the visuals. You'll hear a melodious voice of limited range, thin but accurate, with a husky low register, a breathy manner, and a rare gift of vibratro. When her voice trembles over a note -- over "you" or "baby" -- the effect is seductive and yet is almost a caricature of the seductress's vamp. The paradox of her singing is that she reveals her sexual power and flaunts her vulnerability -- to flip the usual order of those verbs. She can be intimate and ironic at the same time.

Compare her version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" with Carol Channing's definitive Broadway treatment, and you get the essential difference between theater and cinema, New York and Hollywood. Channing's is the superior theatrical experience: funny, charming, a show-stopper of the first order. But Channing serves the song where Monroe makes her songs sound like illustrations of her life. Monroe's treatment of "Diamonds" may not be as effective as Channing's in its service to Leo Robin's marvelous lyric for Jules Styne's delightful tune. But Monroe's version is younger, friskier, sexier. When she sings it, the song is about her. Music is the food of love, and sexual ecstasy is on the menu, for dessert.

Nowhere is she better than "I'm Through with Love," which she sings in Some Like It Hot. Gus Kahn's lyric, which rhymes "I'm through" with "adieu," is as apt for Marilyn as "Falling in Love Again" was for Marlene Dietrich. In "I'm Through with Love," the singer feigns nonchalance, affects an uncaring attitude. But melodically during the bridge, and lyrically in the line "for I must have you or no one," the song lets us know just how much she does care. Monroe implies this pathos in "I'm Through with Love" at the same time as she struts her stuff. She vows that she'll "never fall again" and forbids Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to "ever call again." But we don't quite believe her, because we know temptation is just around the corner. In a sense, her voice thrusts out its hips when she sings. It's a feast for all the senses.

 -- DL   June 1, 2019; from the archive

On the ideal novel: Latent in every sentence is an alternative [By Sean Ashton]

All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

                                                                                                – Nabokov, Speak, Memory

I’ve come across this quote more than once as an epigraph to novels, most recently at the beginning of Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin. Perhaps novelists are drawn to it because it sheds light on the business of writing fiction. Nabokov is discussing his mother’s religious faith – specifically, her conviction that another world lies beyond this one – but that ‘glimpse’ of ‘something real’ is also a good description of the wider world we subconsciously assume lies beyond the dreamscape of any novel. A novel is an account told from a particular perspective, but I’m surely not alone in feeling, as I read any given example, that there is another novel, an Ideal Platonic realm that subsumes it, an ‘ordered reality’ that could be reported transparently without the author’s idiosyncrasies. In fact, that’s the challenge facing the novelist: to convince us that this place already existed before they came along. This Platonic novel is pure moonshine, yet tantalisingly real: latent in every sentence of Middlemarch is an alternative Middlemarch that might have been written. Literary criticism probably has a term for this that I should know about. For all I know, there are exercises being done in creative writing classes as I speak, for which students were asked to rewrite the opening of Middlemarch. Individually, their submissions would perhaps lack the purpose of the original, but collectively they would constitute a virtual Middlemarch that might be worth reading.

I suspect the only good novels I’ve written show an acute awareness of this virtuality. Living in a Land, discussed in a previous essay in The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words, is a fictional memoir of a man who can only construct sentences in the negative. Basically, the conceit is that the speaker, by describing lots of things he’s never done, is able to describe them more vividly than if he had done them. It’s all voice. Or rather, only voice. No plot or characters.

Courtesy Sean Ashton

My latest novel, The Way to Work, is more conventionally plot-based, but the structural conceit still allows the Platonic bedrock to show through. A man boards his morning train, only to find his normal 8:08 service redirected into unfamiliar lands. When he asks where the train is going the other passengers ignore him. The train is sentient, able to prevent him going backwards by sealing the sliding doors shut, once he has passed through any given carriage. Thus, it is only possible to go forwards. But progress induces amnesia in most passengers: the further they go, the less they remember of their past life. The narrator seems immune to this, and is therefore able to advance further. His initial intention – ‘to locate the Guard, reach the Driver’ – turns into a quest of epic and ultimately spiritual proportions, the ‘Guard’ assuming the status of God in most passengers’ eyes, the Driver akin to Christ. However, as he approaches the front, he realises this theology is misbegotten, a symptom of their amnesia. 

The train appears to be of infinite length, and as he passes through thousands of carriages he reflects on his job as a sales executive with a cat litter manufacturer, and on his relations with his colleagues, one of whom he suspects is also on board. He is seduced by a woman called Heobah, who is in league with a man named Marlowe, the two of them comprising the sole resistance to the locomotive regime of the 8:08 service. They persuade him that he is the right man to overturn the train’s unidirectional tyranny, setting him the task of obtaining Universal Dispensation, i.e., the ability to go both forwards and backwards. This, she says, can only be done by making contact with the Guard or the Driver.

However, the Guard, far from being in control of the train, turns out to be the 8:08’s most accomplished lunatic. He puts the narrator to work as his secretary, answering his personal emails – which consist entirely of spam. But the narrator escapes and succeeds in reaching the front of the train. A revelation awaits him in the Driver’s cab, but does he interpret it correctly? His concluding remarks suggest that he sees himself, not as a prisoner of the train, but as an extension of its physical character: the human agent of its ‘completion’. The implication is that he has entered a kind of Purgatory, doomed to repeat the same journey again and again.

I now see that this implied repetition is a veiled acknowledgement of the ‘alternative’ versions of The Way to Work that might have been written instead of the one I wrote. It seemed to me that the writing had to have a generic tone in order to allow us to imagine how the narrator’s journey might pan out a second or third time, perhaps in the hands of another author. Some of the oldest tales in literature – in particular The 1001 Nights  – have a similarly generic feel, as though the original authors were conscious of making narrative templates that might be taken up by writers of the future. The recursive or circular form is like a handing on of the baton. One of my favourite examples is the short story ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’ by the late Martin Amis. Right at the end, after Atta has steered the plane into the World Trade Centre, the story’s opening sentence is repeated: ‘On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m., in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta’s last day began.’ For all the praise heaped on Amis as a stylist, in this story he is quite restrained, as though sensing that too much flair will impede our willingness to imagine Atta’s last day played out again and again.

_______________

The Way to Work (Salt) is Sean Ashton’s latest novel. A sister article around its creation, entitled “A novel isn’t just a narrative, it’s an environment, a habitat that cultivates characters” appears in the 23 May edition of the Irish Times newspaper. The novel The Way to Work follows on Sampler (Valley Press, 2020), a selection of pieces from an imaginary encyclopaedia written entirely by poets; Living in a Land (Ma Bibliothèque 2017), a fictional memoir written in sentences constructed in the negative; and Sunsets (Alma Books 2007), a collection of reviews of imaginary artworks. Ashton has contributed poems, essays and stories to many other periodicals, including “Oxford Poetry”, “Poetry London”, “Poetry Ireland” and the philosophy journal “Collapse”. Ashton’s essay “ Performance art meets literary étrangeté” appeared in The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 22 August 2022.  

Order The Way to Work (ISBN 9781784632922) in Britain from publisher Salt or from uk.bookshop.org, which specializes in distribution to independent booksellers. The Way to Work is also available from most international sites.

Poetry is Bread: Bob Holman with David Lehman

https://youtu.be/itNFcdjj6cw

 

"No, the System Did Not Work For Me" [by Jill Jones]

Jill Jones was born in Sydney and has lived in Adelaide since 2008. Her latest book is Acrobat Music: New and Selected Poems, published in 2023. Other recent books include Wild Curious Air, winner of the 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, A History Of What I’ll Become, shortlisted for the 2021 Kenneth Slessor Award and the 2022 John Bray Award, and Viva the Real, shortlisted for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the 2020 John Bray Award. In 2015 she won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry for The Beautiful Anxiety. Her work is widely published in Australia and internationally and has been translated into a number of languages, including Chinese, French, Italian, Czech, Macedonian and Spanish.

 

 

No, the System Did Not Work For Me

I landed among delusion, with a lag
and a dogsbody. I was hauled within a millimetre
of someone’s brown balaclava.
I was a deb in line with a litre of jackpots
holding a new key and a gypsy.
I blundered past the icing, the pioneer pasties
until it became confusing.
There was some mug serving vol-au-vents
in the event of an accident.
The dogsbody left for a two-up game back east
and though I wrote to the mug
there were questions about indemnities.
I couldn’t tell if the lag had the only weapon.
They looked like blackballs or something
you’d wear in an airlift. I did not lose
though the vortex was faulty
too many yes-men hamming it up
for too many yobbos. The dollars shook down
their own catastrophe. I became a debacle
in pearls with a litter of Jaffas. I dropped
the lucky cards
the horizon got shonky. I gave up crystals
and tea leaf methodologies. I could not lose
though the yardstick was dodgy.
It was a blast in the blunders.
And thanks for the bluffs.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: May 31, 2023

Bread and Circus by Airea D. Matthews was published yesterday by Scribner.  This inventive, searing, and political treatise-in-poetry uses erasure techniques to transform texts by Adam Smith (author of The Wealth of Nations) and Guy Debord (Marxist philosopher). These work of these heady, intellectuals are juxtaposed with Matthew’s personal poems where everything is at stake. There is no erasure in the intimate vignettes Matthew gives us, economic hardship often at the forefront. There is violence within the childhood home, more violence as an adult facing the police brutality that haunts our present day America.  Here is a sample poem:

https://www.vqronline.org/poetry/2021/06/ars-poetica-1979

Congratulations, Airea!

 

Is the New SAT the Adolescent Equivalent of the Tax Code? [by Samuel Johnson]

They're reforming the SATs again, which means the columnists are duking it out about the efficacy of standardized testing, the merits of the venerable scoring sytem in which 800 aces the test, and the question of whether multiple choice questions, in which you are rewarded for guessing even if you don't know for sure, are systematicaly biased against the have-nots.

We asked Silys Tompkin Comberback of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies for his opinion, and he countered with a multiple-choice exam that would function as a rebus except that deciphering the message correctly will offer unambiguous rewards whereas surviving an IRS audit, which has been likened to going through an autopsy while still alive, assures one only of survival, a dubious merit, like being an author and getting to call your villian after the name of the single biggest asshole you know. Here, try Professor Comberback's questions for yourself and see whether you agree with the solution formed by the pattern that results:

“Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, [the idea of college for all is] now doing more harm than good.” Vocational training is better than "dumbed down college.” Who said it?

a) The former drug czar who foresees the divorce of private education from public subsidy
b) Jennifer Lawrence, who graduated high school two years early in Kentucky and collected an Academy Award for Best Actress
c) Duke Ellington, Earl Warren, or Count Fleet
d) Coleridge in Biographia Literaria as translated by a modern computer program named -- with the exuberant irreverence of Silicon Valley -- Plato
e) Hillary Clinton

2) When Ernest Hemingway defined critics as "men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors," he was thinking of
a) Brooks Atkinson and Howard Taubman of the New York Times
b) "The whole bullshit New York tradition, from Edmund Wilson to Susan Sontag"
c) Carlos Baker of Princeton University
d) Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson (see The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas )
e) Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh

3) Which of the following didn't happen in the last week of May 2012:
a) The impresarios of Indonesia canceled Lady Gaga's sold-out concert in Jakarta because her "needleslly provocative" advocacy of homosexuality makes her the "devil's messenger"
b) A Muslim woman argued in the Guardian that wearing the hijab is the ultimate feminist act
c) The Syrian giovernment attacked the village of Houla 
d) Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin's baby, tweeted his indgination to his 400,000 followers when John Edwards was acquitted
e) A poll of New Yorkers determined that 97% did not know why John Edwards was on trial but were sure that he is guilty, thus demonstrating that

1) Campaign finance reform laws are impossible to understand
2) Screwing your media adviser is one thing, impregnating her is another
3) Screwing her is one thing, doing it while your wife is camaigning for you is another
4) Screwing her is one thing, but doing it while your wife is dying of cancer is another
5) Nobody will remember John Edwards in ten years' time.

Extra credit if you suspend your disbelief, identify the fellow in the picture on top and explain his oblique relevance to this post.

from the archive; first posted 2012, and does anyone remember John Edwards?

2) When Ernest Hemingway defined critics as "men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors," he was thinking of
a) Brooks Atkinson and Howard Taubman of the New York Times
b) "The whole bullshit New York tradition, from Edmund Wilson to Susan Sontag"
c) Carlos Baker of Princeton University
d) Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson (see The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas )
e) Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh

3) Which of the following didn't happen in the last week of May 2012:
a) The impresarios of Indonesia canceled Lady Gaga's sold-out concert in Jakarta because her "needleslly provocative" advocacy of homosexuality makes her the "devil's messenger"
b) A Muslim woman argued in the Guardian that wearing the hijab is the ultimate feminist act
c) The Syrian giovernment attacked the village of Houla 
d) Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin's baby, tweeted his indgination to his 400,000 followers when John Edwards was acquitted
e) A poll of New Yorkers determined that 97% did not know why John Edwards was on trial but were sure that he is guilty, thus demonstrating that

1) Campaign finance reform laws are impossible to understand
2) Screwing your media adviser is one thing, impregnating her is another
3) Screwing her is one thing, doing it while your wife is camaigning for you is another
4) Screwing her is one thing, but doing it while your wife is dying of cancer is another
5) Nobody will remember John Edwards in ten years' time.

Extra credit if you suspend your disbelief, identify the fellow in the picture on top and explain his oblique relevance to this post.

from the archive; first posted 2012, and does anyone remember John Edwards?

2) When Ernest Hemingway defined critics as "men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors," he was thinking of
a) Brooks Atkinson and Howard Taubman of the New York Times
b) "The whole bullshit New York tradition, from Edmund Wilson to Susan Sontag"
c) Carlos Baker of Princeton University
d) Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson (see The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas )
e) Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh

3) Which of the following didn't happen in the last week of May 2012:
a) The impresarios of Indonesia canceled Lady Gaga's sold-out concert in Jakarta because her "needleslly provocative" advocacy of homosexuality makes her the "devil's messenger"
b) A Muslim woman argued in the Guardian that wearing the hijab is the ultimate feminist act
c) The Syrian giovernment attacked the village of Houla 
d) Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin's baby, tweeted his indgination to his 400,000 followers when John Edwards was acquitted
e) A poll of New Yorkers determined that 97% did not know why John Edwards was on trial but were sure that he is guilty, thus demonstrating that

1) Campaign finance reform laws are impossible to understand
2) Screwing your media adviser is one thing, impregnating her is another
3) Screwing her is one thing, doing it while your wife is camaigning for you is another
4) Screwing her is one thing, but doing it while your wife is dying of cancer is another
5) Nobody will remember John Edwards in ten years' time.

Extra credit if you suspend your disbelief, identify the fellow in the picture on top and explain his oblique relevance to this post.

from the archive; first posted 2012, and does anyone remember John Edwards?

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-One): Anselm Berrigan [by Angela Ball]

What the Streets Look Like

Mom: the sweet rotted
summer stench still
taps the nasal cavity
inside breezes several
times per block. I have
a greater empathy for
pigeons after two months
at work in the unnatural
country, & find it
instinctively nerve-
wracking to remove my
wallet from its pocket
here in town despite
the general lack of threat.
The streets look grey
nonplussed, post-
pubescent relative to
ancient times but
nonetheless grid-wizened
in the face of an ever-
changing lineup of
banks, bars, and specialty
shops with their weak
signs and distant tones
(lighting). Second Ave
is giving up, slowly
its cheap depth store-
front by storefront.
One feels less than
nostalgic for the like-
lihood of being mugged
but likelihood itself
feels less than evident
unless one is being
unstable and unspoken
coming to dreaming
while pushing a stroller
over the variously cracked
slabs of concrete each
block yet greets the
wheels with. The right
part of the y heading
west on tenth between
2nd and 3rd is still
tree-lined and aristocratic
as feint, though its
sidewalk looks like
late Auden's smoked
cheeks. I loathe it,
amiably, when Sylvie
is asleep.
                -Anselm Berrigan

Anselm Berrigan is the author of several books of poetry, including Pregrets (Black Square Editions, 2021), Something for Everybody (Wave Books, 2018), Come in Alone (Wave Books, 2016), Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). With Alice Notley and his brother Edmund Berrigan, he coedited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2011).

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-One): Anselm Berrigan

Anselm Berrigan's "What the Streets Look Like"—perhaps a letter to “Mom,” also a poet—employs a somatic/psychological Rimbaud-like intoxication—the speaker, immersed in the city, entrains us. A special feature is New York City’s “summer stench,” inseparable from the perception of it, as it “taps the nasal cavity / inside breezes.” Like most raptures “coming to dreaming,” this one is both personal and impersonal (“one feels less than / nostalgic”), both full-throated and guarded. The poet’s time “working in the unnatural country” has not only affected his “empathy for pigeons” but renders it “instinctively nerve-wracking” to take out his wallet “here in town despite / the general lack of threat.” The poem’s compact lineation and hard enjambment make the city’s press more than palpable, audible. We receive a vivid précis of the neighborhood's commercial background and prospects, its tired variety show:

     The streets look grey
     nonplussed, post-
     pubescent relative to
     ancient times but
     nonetheless grid-wizened
     in the face of an ever-
     changing lineup of
     banks, bars, and specialty
     shops with their weak
     signs and distant tones
     (lighting).

The oddly-wonderful "grid-wizened" captures so much of the American city street, its "line-up" of putative entertainment also suggestive of crime's usual suspects.

Two-thirds of the way through our walk, we discover that the poet pushes a stroller. This poem, part of a genre Ron Padgett usefully terms “The Walk,” is—because it happens in a city—also a flaneur poem. Who has heard of a flaneur with a baby? A lobster on a string, maybe, but not progeny. And why not? In its twisty, inward/outward progress, this walk rehearses and refreshes tradition.

The poem’s “variously cracked / slabs of concrete each / block yet greets the / wheels with” are the clunky opposite of free association, are planes for walking forced by weather into a union of fissures that brokenly leads, following the course of “right” as opposed to sinister, of letters (“y”), and Arabic numerals (“2^nd and 3^rd is still / tree-lined and aristocratic / as feint”), this latter an accurate and surprising characterization that comically frustrates our expectation for another “f” word and supplies one that suggests half-hearted pretense. The city is a place of artifice. A reason to love it; a reason to be wary.

The Y’s “aristocratic” arm is a sidewalk surprisingly resembling a great poet’s face: one who once flaneured the same streets; once advised, I’m told, that “the secret of walking in New York is jaywalking.” How killingly accurate, those “smoked cheeks”—the mask of tobacco combined with age, a look both preserved and ravaged.

A languorous, pleasurable word for dislike appears: “loathe,” surprisingly followed by “amiably”—and this walk has received its full and rightful depiction.

But wait,  in the quietus of her sleep, the baby must be named. Because “Sylvie” means “woodsy,” she is angel of the city and of the poem. In “What the Streets Look like," Anselm Berrigan masters the improvisational essential, which is to say, the right kind.

-Angela Ball

Jacob Collier [by Lewis Saul]

On August 2 1994, in North London, Suzie Collier -- a violinist, conductor, and professor at the Royal Academy of Music -- gave birth to a boy, Jacob.

To compare this genius of the 21st century to Bach or Beethoven might seem like a fanboy exaggeration or even blasphemy -- but I do so without hesitation.

Suzie gave her son a room in their home, where he was given free rein to develop his talent. In 2011 -- aged 16 -- Jacob recorded himself in multiples, doing a cover of Pure Imagination from Willy Wonka:

 

Two years later came this cover of Stevie Wonder's Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing:

 

 

Here you can see that this teenager has taught himself to play many different instruments with astonishing fluency.

In 2016, he released his debut album, In My Room. Here's the Flintstones:

 

In an imaginative idea, JC encouraged fans to send in short clips of them singing something -- which he then would harmonize/orchestrate. This is Volume I (20 songs) of his "IHarmU" series ...

In 2018, JC announced a sprawling project of 50 new songs, divided into four volumes, titled Djesse. To date, he has completed three volumes:

Djesse Vol. 1 -- a Lionel Richie cover All Night Long:

 

 

Djesse Vol. 2 -- Lua. Look for his mother, playing second violin!

 

And Moon River.

The video begins with JC admirers (did you spot David Crosby?) singing notes which form an F dominant seventh chord, which will finally resolve to the opening key of B-Flat Major.

Notice there are no instruments other than Jacob's voice (look for a JC holding a guitar, but putting it aside) ...

There is a good reason for this -- Jacob is using microtonal harmonies and just intonation throughout.

 

 

This transcription by June Lee, shows where he modulates to microtonal keys.

 

 

And this guy explains it to you:

 

 

Finally, from Djesse Vol. 3 -- Sleeping On My Dreams:

"To World War Two" [by Kenneth Koch]

To World War Two 

Early on you introduced me to young women in bars
You were large, and with a large hand
You presented them in different cities,
Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk
On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafes.
It was a time of general confusion
Of being a body hurled at a wall.
I didn't do much fighting.  I sat, rather I stood, in a foxhole.
I stood while the typhoon splashed us into morning.
It felt unusual
Even if for a good cause
To be part of a destructive force
With my rifle in my hands
And in my head
My serial number
The entire object of my existence
To eliminate Japanese soldiers
By killing them
With a rifle or with a grenade
And then, many years after that,
I could write poetry
Fall in love
And have a daughter
And think
About these things
From a great distance
If I survived
I was "paying my debt
To society" a paid
Killer.  It wasn't
Like anything I'd done
Before, on the paved
Streets of Cincinnati
Or on the ballroom floor
At Mr. Vathe's dancing class
What would Anne Marie Goldsmith
Have thought of me
If instead of asking her to dance
I had put my BAR to my shoulder
And shot her in the face
I thought about her in my foxhole--
One, in a foxhole near me, has his throat cut during the night
We take more precautions but it is night and it is you.

The typhoon continues and so do you.
"I can't be killed-- because of my poetry.  I have to live on in order to
    write it."
I thought-- even crazier thought, or just as crazy--
"If I'm killed while thinking of lines, it will be too corny
When it's reported" (I imagined it would be reported!)
So I kept thinking of lines of poetry.  One that came to me on the beach
    on Leyte
Was "The surf comes in like masochistic lions."
I loved this terrible line.  It was keeping me alive.  My Uncle Leo wrote
    to me,
"You won't believe this, but some day you may wish
You were footloose and twenty on Leyte again."  I have never wanted
To be on Leyte again,
With you, whispering into my ear,
"Go on and win me! Tomorrow you may not be alive,
So do it today!" How could anyone win you?
How many persons would I have had to kill
Even to begin to be a part of winning you?
 You were too much for me, though I
Was older than you were and in camouflage. But for you
Who threw everything together, and had all the systems
Working for you all the time, this was trivial.  If you could use me
You'd use me, and then forget. How else
Did I think you'd behave?
I'm glad you ended.  I'm glad I didn't die.  Or lose my mind.
As machines make ice
We made dead enemy soldiers, in
Dark jungle alleys, with weapons in our hands
That produced fire and kept going straight through
I was carrying one,
I who had gone about for years as a child
Praying God don't let there ever be another war
Or if there is, don't let me be in it.  Well, I was in you.
All you cared about was existing and being won.
You died of a bomb blast in Nagasaki, and there were parades.

                    -- Kenneth Koch
                        from New Addresses (Knopf, 2000)

To World War Two 

Early on you introduced me to young women in bars
You were large, and with a large hand
You presented them in different cities,
Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk
On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafes.
It was a time of general confusion
Of being a body hurled at a wall.
I didn't do much fighting.  I sat, rather I stood, in a foxhole.
I stood while the typhoon splashed us into morning.
It felt unusual
Even if for a good cause
To be part of a destructive force
With my rifle in my hands
And in my head
My serial number
The entire object of my existence
To eliminate Japanese soldiers
By killing them
With a rifle or with a grenade
And then, many years after that,
I could write poetry
Fall in love
And have a daughter
And think
About these things
From a great distance
If I survived
I was "paying my debt
To society" a paid
Killer.  It wasn't
Like anything I'd done
Before, on the paved
Streets of Cincinnati
Or on the ballroom floor
At Mr. Vathe's dancing class
What would Anne Marie Goldsmith
Have thought of me
If instead of asking her to dance
I had put my BAR to my shoulder
And shot her in the face
I thought about her in my foxhole--
One, in a foxhole near me, has his throat cut during the night
We take more precautions but it is night and it is you.

The typhoon continues and so do you.
"I can't be killed-- because of my poetry.  I have to live on in order to
    write it."
I thought-- even crazier thought, or just as crazy--
"If I'm killed while thinking of lines, it will be too corny
When it's reported" (I imagined it would be reported!)
So I kept thinking of lines of poetry.  One that came to me on the beach
    on Leyte
Was "The surf comes in like masochistic lions."
I loved this terrible line.  It was keeping me alive.  My Uncle Leo wrote
    to me,
"You won't believe this, but some day you may wish
You were footloose and twenty on Leyte again."  I have never wanted
To be on Leyte again,
With you, whispering into my ear,
"Go on and win me! Tomorrow you may not be alive,
So do it today!" How could anyone win you?
How many persons would I have had to kill
Even to begin to be a part of winning you?
 You were too much for me, though I
Was older than you were and in camouflage. But for you
Who threw everything together, and had all the systems
Working for you all the time, this was trivial.  If you could use me
You'd use me, and then forget. How else
Did I think you'd behave?
I'm glad you ended.  I'm glad I didn't die.  Or lose my mind.
As machines make ice
We made dead enemy soldiers, in
Dark jungle alleys, with weapons in our hands
That produced fire and kept going straight through
I was carrying one,
I who had gone about for years as a child
Praying God don't let there ever be another war
Or if there is, don't let me be in it.  Well, I was in you.
All you cared about was existing and being won.
You died of a bomb blast in Nagasaki, and there were parades.

                    -- Kenneth Koch
                        from New Addresses (Knopf, 2000)

"Just Walking Around" [by John Ashbery & new bio notes]

Just Walking Around

What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is no name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

-- John Ashbery

John Ashbery is like a John Ashbery sentence. A John Ashbery sentence is lived unconsciously, and its “meaning” in retrospect is another thing -- if a cluster of words can constitute a "thing."

John Ashbery wrote a poem with the title "Like a Sentence."

John Ashbery chuckled like Popeye at the thought of a prose poem in which every sentence begins with his name followed by an unexpected predicate.

John Ashbery will check in on you before he leaves.

John Ashbery, a Quiz Kid alumnus, felt he had a good understanding of such matters as shame and loneliness.

John Ashbery's scarf was his Rosebud.

John Ashbery enjoyed goofy American things like the song "Mairsy Doats" sung by the Merrymnakers in the 1940s. 

John Asdbery completed the last sentence that began "John Ashbery."

John Ashbery had very little interest in baseball and jazz.  He spoke from the margin.

John Ashbery never got used to being photographed.

John Ashbery did not recognize the voice of John Ashbery.

John Ashbery did not march in the St. Patrick's Day parade.

John Ashbery read at the Best American Poetry 2008 reading at the New School's Tishman Auditorium (66 West 12 Street in NYC) on Thursday evening, September 25, at 7 PM.

Tara Borin: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________

List of Duties in a Subarctic Dive Bar

 

If the temperature outside is twenty-five below

            or colder

leave all faucets running and flush the toilets

            hourly.

 

R. has a two-drink limit. A. likes a coaster. Remember,

            Mrs. O. takes a chilled pilsner glass

with her bottle of Blue. Never

            keep her waiting.

 

If someone reveals residential school horrors,

            listen with your whole body.

 

If a customer becomes unresponsive,

            and overdose is suspected,

 

call the nursing station, then administer the naloxone

            kept behind the bar.

Be sure to write everything down in the incident book.

            This is your therapy.

 

At the end of each shift, pour a kettle of boiling water

            into the ice well drain. It keeps down the bioslime.

 

Wrap your cash in the blue vinyl bag and feed it

            to the Snake.

 

You are entitled to one staff drink. Choose wisely.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tara Borin is a poet and writer living in the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Dawson City, Yukon. Their debut full-length poetry collection, The Pit, was published by Nightwood Editions in March 2021; their poetry has been anthologized in the League of Canadian Poets Feminist Caucus in Conversation chapbook (LCP Press, 2022), Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021) and Best New Poets in Canada 2018 (Quattro Books), as well as published in various literary journals both online and in print. Tara is the 2022 winner of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes Borealis Prize: Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

      Emily Rapport, Wednesday Night, 30x40, aqua-oil on canvas, ca. 2004. Used by permission of the artist.