The Best American Poetry

"Pink Dust" by Ron Padgett [reviewed by Martin Stannard]

Ron Padgett, Pink Dust (New York Review Books, £14.99)

          Every time I approach a blank page
          the poems in it shout, “Oh no!
          Here he comes again! Run!”
          I grab at them as they flee
          like terrified little bugs.

Received wisdom: it is not a good idea to read a book of poems from cover to cover in one sitting. A poem is a work of art, it deserves your undivided attention, it deserves your time. It might be a good idea to analyse it. Reading a book of poems is not the same as putting a record –  e.g. The Monkees “The Definitive Monkees” – on the turntable while you do the washing up.

The last time I read a book of poems from cover to cover in one sitting was this afternoon. I’d ordered Ron Padgett’s “Pink Dust” from our local book emporium a couple of weeks ago, but had to wait for it because the publisher had originally been out of stock. I hope this was because the book is selling faster than the proverbial hotcakes. Somehow I doubt it. The world isn’t like that.

I don’t think this is a review. Not really. I mean, if you (the ‘you’ reading this) don’t know that Ron Padgett is a great, inventive, readable, entertaining, wise, often startling poet, we might be living in different worlds. It wouldn’t be the first time. And I’m not going to churn out a quick recap of his career. That’d be boring, even though it’s full of brilliant stuff. I mean it’d be boring to do. I’m so happy he’s still going strong.

This is not a review. Whatever it is, it’s because the book reminds me, though I should not need to be reminded, but the occasional wake-up call is not to be sniffed at, what was I saying? Oh yes, the book reminds me that poetry can get pretty complicated at times, that poets can easily lose sight of simple truths as they spend too long thinking about their place among their peers, or concentrate on saying what’s fashionable in a currently fashionable way, or (amazingly cleverly) look, for example, to interrogate language in a search for new ways of raging against the machine or, and this perhaps is more likely, try to get published. Someone I vaguely know recently tied themselves in knots trying to create their own school of poetry, as if anyone would care. I suppose they can’t be blamed: one longs, sometimes, to make a mark, and lose sight of some basic truths. And it’s not unusual to forget that writing a poem that says something so simply that the complexity of the poem and the something it says goes unnoticed is no mean achievement. It’s refreshing when one comes across it.

         It’s something of a relief
         to fritter away a few hours
         doing not much of anything
         other than walking around
         and looking at things
         that aren’t in any way remarkable,
         and to know
         that, of the diminishing hours
         left in your life,
         you are frittering some away,
         something you can’t remember
         ever doing before,

         relaxing into nothing in particular.

No, I am not reviewing this book. Those who know that poetry is simultaneously the most important thing in the world and the least important thing in the world, those who know that it’s possible to be playful, readable, and serious all at the same time, those who know that poetry is about human truths, truths that are big and small and all of equal importance, and that itching to turn the page to read the next poem is a good thing will probably already know what the poetry of Ron Padgett is, and what it does. They will know its delights, its pleasures.

When was the last time you read a book of poems by someone you would undoubtedly want to spend time with? On the back cover, Ann Waldman says “We want to stay with the person in these poems all day long.” She isn’t wrong.

NB: Padgett read from “Pink Dust” at The Poetry Project a few weeks back, and it’s watchable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05l-c0ems-0

Copyright © Martin Stannard, 2025

"Music, When Soft Voices Die" [by Percy Bysshe Shelley]

 

Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory—

Odours, when sweet violets sicken,

Live within the sense they quicken.

 

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,

Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,

Love itself shall slumber on.

 

An Autobiography in Cookbooks II [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

During a recent attempt to cull my cookbook collection, I discovered an old volume of Cooking for One is Fun by Henry Louis Creel, the book that taught me how to cook for myself.

For a period in the late 1970s, I lived in a studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights. I was working for a politician whose district office was in Bensonhurst, about as far from Manhattan action that you can get. At the time, Bensonhurst was a neighborhood of detached brick houses with neat yards, and small apartment buildings, populated mostly by Jews and Italians. Parts of the movie “Saturday Night Fever” were filmed there and one of my colleagues had a cameo as a bouncer in the Odyssey disco where Tony Manero ruled the dance floor.

Even though my decision to live in the Heights meant that I had a long commute to the Bensonhurst office, there was no way that I was going to live in what was essentially a suburb of Manhattan and a distant one at that. I was young, single, and curious. Just across the river separating Brooklyn from Manhattan, the Heights was and is a posh neighborhood. A favorite pastime was to explore the neighborhood at dusk, when the rich people turned on the lights in their brownstones so I could figuratively press my nose against the windows for a glimpse of how I hoped to live one day.

My apartment was an alcove studio: one room with an added section where I fit my bed, and a bathroom. There was a tiny closet for clothing. The lilliputian kitchen was concealed behind French doors and comprised a small oven, a sink, and a strip of a counter. While I can’t picture it, there must have been a refrigerator.

The furniture, given to me by a friend of my mom’s, included a daybed, chair, and coffee table with hidden storage. I wish I had held on to it because it was good quality mid-century modern of the kind that today would fetch a fortune on Facebook marketplace.

The only window in the apartment was next to the kitchen, which opened to the fire escape. Consequently, an air conditioner was verboten. The rent was $125 a month. It would be kind to say that the apartment was a dump: neglected, cockroach infested, with a buildup of cracked cheap landlord paint on the walls.

Nevertheless, I was determined to make this “one little room an everywhere” and that meant that I would cook for myself.

Cooking for One is Fun had received a favorable review in the New York Times, so I picked up a copy and worked my way through it. At first I found the writing a bit too emphatically cheerful but after I had tried some of the recipes I discovered that planning meals and cooking for one was fun and still gives me pleasure. The book included recipes for an individual meatloaf with carrots, curried chicken wings, a single serving of rice pudding, among many others.

My favorite was the Blanquette of Veal. At some point during the day my mind would drift to dinner and I would often settle on this classic French dish. On my way home, feeling very much like an urban sophisticate doing her marketing, I would stop by the butcher shop in Bensonhurst for the veal, the produce shop for two carrots and one onion and oftentimes—bank balance permitting--the liquor store for an appropriate bottle of wine. Creel recommends that the stew be served with rice but I preferred a single roll from the Italian bakery a few doors down from my office. (In summer, the bakery made and sold Cremolata, an ice milk flavored with almonds and vanilla and served in a small pleated paper cup. To this day I’m haunted by the memory of that delicious concoction.)

Since I was determined to lead a civilized life, in good weather I would plate my veal, pour myself a glass of wine, and climb onto the fire escape to dine en plein air. So good.

I wasn’t entirely happy in those years. My father had recently died and the sudden loss set me on a bit of a downward spiral. I missed him. He loved New York City and dreamed of retiring there with my mother. It was not to be and I wondered what he would have made of my life at the time.

Many times I imagined we were meeting at my apartment on a Saturday to walk together, as I often did alone, from my apartment, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and all the way uptown to see a ballet at Lincoln Center. Google maps tells me it’s a roughly 7-mile walk. What fun we would have had!

 

 

To Sleep [by John Keats]

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,

      Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,

Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light,

      Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:

O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close

      In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,

Or wait the "Amen," ere thy poppy throws

      Around my bed its lulling charities.

Then save me, or the passed day will shine

Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—

      Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords

Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;

      Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,

And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.

"When we two parted . . ." [by Lord Byron]

When we two parted
   In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
   To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
   Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
   Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning
   Sunk chill on my brow— 
It felt like the warning
   Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
   And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
   And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,
   A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o'er me—
   Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
   Who knew thee too well—
Long, long shall I rue thee,
   Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met—
   In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
   Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
   After long years,
How should I greet thee?—
   With silence and tears.

Kary Wayson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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More of the Same

 

Even with my mouth on your thigh

I want my mouth on your thigh.

At the center bite of bread I want the whole loaf,

toasted. An orange. On a sunny day

I want more sun, more skin for the weather.

I'm in Seattle wishing for Seattle,

for this walk along the water, for her hand while I hold it:

I want to tie my wrist to a red balloon.

I'm counting my tips.

I'm counting the tips I could have made.

I want the television on, the television off.

In the ocean, I want to float an inch above it.

And when my father finally held me

like a stripe of seaweed over his wet arm,

I was kicking to get away, wishing he'd hold me

like he held me while I was kicking away. Listen to me.

I want to leave when I'm walking out the door.

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Kary Wayson is the author of The Slip (Burnside Review), winner of the Burnside Review Prize; American Husband (The Ohio State University Press), winner of the Charles B. Wheeler prize; and Dog & Me (LitRag Press), a chapbook. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Image, The Rumpus, Bennington Review, The Yale Review, and the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She lives in Port Orchard, WA, across the water from Seattle, where she's a reviews editor at Poetry Northwest.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                        Peter Paul Rubens, Abundance (Abundantia), ca. 1630, oil on panel

On Henry James's Stories of Artists [by David Lehman]

<<< The long New England winter is finally thawing, and here at The Common, we’re gearing up to launch our newest print issue! Issue 29 is full of poetry and prose by both familiar and new TC contributors, and a colorful, multimedia portfolio from Amman, Jordan. To tide you over, Issue 29 contributors DAVID LEHMAN and NATHANIEL PERRY share some of their recent inspirations, and ABBIE KIEFER recommends a poetry collection full of the spirit of spring. Click here for more.

Henry James’ short works; recommended by Issue 29 contributor David Lehman

I’ve been reading or rereading Henry James’s stories about writers and artists: “The Real Thing,” “The Lesson of the Master,” “The Death of the Lion,” “The Tree of Knowledge,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Aspern Papers,” et al. His sentences are labyrinthine, and you soon realize how little happens in a story; the ratio of verbiage to action is as high as the price-earnings ratio of a high-flying semiconductor firm. Yet we keep reading, not only for the syntactical journey but for the author’s subtle understanding of the artist’s psyche—and the thousand natural and artificial shocks that flesh and brain are heir to.

All that happens in “The Death of a Lion” may be the loss of a manuscript— or was it a theft?—at a time when there were no copying machines and the burning of a manuscript in a fireplace could mark the dramatic climax of a play. The paradox at the center of the story is that the author toiling in obscurity may produce masterpieces, but when they are recognized as such and he achieves belated success it comes with all the defects of celebrity: his time and solitude are taken from him. He dies two ways.

The stories are parables, but the lessons are ambiguous. That artists have defects, including egos that cannot bear the knowledge of their own mediocrity, is a subordinate theme of “The Tree of Knowledge,” a story about illusions.  That the relationship between mentor and student may include an unexpectedly competitive element is one theme of “The Lesson of the Master.” At the end of both these stories, a major character is gobsmacked by actuality.

Anyone who imagines that scholars and biographers are admirably virtuous will not survive a reading of “The Aspern Papers.” Anyone contemplating a career as an English teacher will profit from the fruitless pursuit of the key to an author’s lifetime work in “The Figure in the Carpet.”

What happens when reality and appearance are flipped? In “The Real Thing,” the aristocratic couple hired to model for a portrait of an aristocratic model look less plausible than the married couple who has been hired as servants. Sooner or later the painter has little choice but to flip their roles. The poor pass as noble; their visual appearance conforms to the Platonic patrician ideal. The rich are content to serve them with tea. Is the point that reality and appearance are often at odds? Can we justify fakery as the means to accuracy, itself an illusion? Does the inversion of the classes in “The Real Thing” have a secret subversive meaning? I have long believed that a good essay can be written about this much anthologized story in relation to the greatest Coke commercial of all time, the one proclaiming the soft drink to be “the real thing.” If I were teaching the story, I would give that assignment.

https://www.thecommononline.org/what-were-reading-april-2025/

Good and giddy, arty and philosophical: “Tout Léger” at the Musée du Luxembourg [By Tracy Danison]

Niki de Saint Phalle, "Nana santé". Photo © 2024 Niki Charitable Art Foundation

Musée du Luxembourg marketing describes Tous Léger ! Avec Niki de Saint Phalle, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Keith Haring...  as “highlighting the major artists of Nouveau Réalisme (“New Realism”) and the dialogue with the American scene”.

Marketing. Tous Léger! is more and better than that, with a concept and narrative that suggests to even an inattentive visitor a way of understanding how the visual arts gets from the warm and fuzzy Impressionism of Claude Monet to the puzzling good “bad art” of Keith Haring.

 

Fernand Léger, “Nature Morte, A.B.C.”. Photo © Grand Palais RMN

 

Tous Léger focuses on the very varied production of a bit more than 20 known and less known artists born after 1920 and working in Europe and the USA from 1945 and on into the 2000s. With the exception of Haring, born in 1958 and active only from the 1980s until his early death, featured artists such as Christo & Jeanne Claude, Arman, Daniel Spoerri, Niki de Saint Phalle, Robert Indiana, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein and Roy Lichtenstein, were most visible – not to say active or influential – in the 1960s and 1970s.

I used the range of paronomasia in Tous Léger – sorry, “punning” just doesn’t do the trick here – as my structuring lens. Think “Tous Charlie!” (“Everybody [is] Charlie!”). The slogan means to express solidarity and sympathy for the victims of the 2015 terror attack on the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. But like most slogans, it has a lot of complex rattles and tinkles, some intended, some unintended some a result of mysterious synchronicity.

 

Yves Klein, “Vénus bleue (Vénus d’Alexandrie)”. Photo ©JeanchristopheLett

Beyond personal memories such as veteran ’68ers calling reluctant thanks to the riot police as they marched, “Tous Charlie” may, for example, in some ears, suggest support of democratic values or have echoes of historical anti-clericalism. Or some may see a link between the fact that “Charlie” is the feminine of “Charles”, not the nickname, and the misogynist Islamist attackers’ choice of the magazine as a target. Or…

The first thing Tous Léger conjures up for me is something jokey such as “Everybody’s Giddy” or, applied to the 1950s or 1960s or 1970s, especially, “Wild Child”. “Léger” means of course “lighthearted”, “not heavy”, “giddy”, “carefree”, “immoral”, “irresponsible” and “foolish”: carefree and/but/or alarming.

 

Fernand Léger, “Les Quatre cyclists”. Photo © GrandPalaisRmn

 

But of course Tous Léger is an art show for serious and un-alarming people, so Léger actually points to: “Everybody [has a part of the esthetic heritage of] Fernand Léger [though trained as an architect, became a well-known early 20th-century post-Impressionist, Cézannist, Cubist painter, soldier, fascinated by film and the close-up, enthroned at MOMA in 1935, Yale professor, art teacher and philosopher of art, Vichy exile, communist, born 1881, died 1955, in France]”.

But to get back to my first feeling, “léger” as “lighthearted”, “not heavy”, “giddy”, “carefree”, “immoral”, “foolish” and “irresponsible” in a lot of ways does sum up the art scene in the 1950s - 1960s - 1970s, especially, public and critical reaction to junk cars run through a metal compactor and presented as sculpture (1961, César Baldaccini), blank walls as paintings (1958, Yves Klein), kiddy-toys treacherously inserted in plaster and representing notions of the unconscious (1959-60, Niki de Saint Phalle) or action-concepts such as signing public property (1963, Ben Vautier, “Fluxus Côte d’Azur”) or using a rifle as a paint brush (1961, Niki de Saint Phalle).

 

BEN, “Si l’art est partout, il est aussi dans cette boîte”. Photo © Ben Vautier 

Indeed, many, maybe most, of the artists and works on display for Tous Léger are more known to the public for the process of creating their different works or re- or de-contextualizing an ordinary thing than for the “product” of either.

Also, the paronomasiac gamut of “lighthearted-to-irresponsible” could pretty well be a proud self-description of a “moral generation” (+/-60 years) whose early experience of art included Dadaism and whose later cohort is supposed to have chanted “Sous-les pavés, la plage!”, whose dangerous “Danny the Red” (Daniel Cohn-Bendit) was so called both because of his supposed revolutionary politics and his fiery red hair.

 

Raymond Hains, “SEITA”. Photo © Ville de Nice

Cohn-Bendit’s political career began with a remark that a 300-page official government report on youth made not a single mention of sex.

In short, the artists of Tous Léger, including Léger himself, who joined the communist party in 1945, were people trying to put distance between themselves and, to navigate a path through,  culture represented as much by the city fathers of Argentan, Orne, Normandy, the cynical Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, the archbishop of Paris, and the not-quite fabulist André Malraux as by themselves, John Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and post-Impressionist painters and sculptors such as Fernand Léger.

 

Fernand Léger, “Visage à la main sur fond rouge”. Photo © GrandPalaisRmn - Gérard Blot © Adagp, Paris, 2025

What I come away from Tous Léger thinking is that Fernand Léger is, more than anything else, a vector for an evolving idea of how the individual person, his or her experience and vision, fit together when it comes to art.

When all is said and done, Léger shares with the Tous of Yves Kleins or Niki de Saint Phalles or Ben Vautiers a search for a nouveau réalisme (“new realism”) – not the technical orientations of a “school of painting” but, essentially, a longing for a new, much more lighthearted, even irresponsible and giddy way of looking at the world around.

This is a very broad and discussable statement, but I think that Léger is a pattern of the link between his generation – those who believed in the thing of art – and the generation represented in the exhibition – those who believe in creativity.

 

Keith Haring, “Untitled (n° 2557)”. Photo © Keith Haring Foundation, 2025

So, my post-Tous Léger feeling is that, although he does share broad ideas, Léger does not share with the de Saint Phalles, Kleins, Raysses, Harings, Christos, Armans, Bens, et al., of the exhibition any of the new forms of art and tools and processes for creating art that the latter come up with to practice an art that has become, essentially, a product of individual creativity.

Indeed, with a table called Histoire des Gestes, the curators of Tous Léger have to invent a whole new (at least to me) system of weighing, measuring and considering their work according to the semantic potentialities and critical contexts or narratives of the products of the creativity involved – Assemble! Burn! Accumulate! Wrap! Klein Bleu is about perception not color!

 

Gilbert & George, “Flower Worship”. Photo © Ville de Nice - Muriel Anssens © Gilbert & George, 2025

So, hey, presto! I come away from Tous Léger thinking that getting from Impressionism to the intriguing “bad art” creativity of Keith Haring is about the individual person, the nature of the world around and his or her experience of it – or even shaping a new world – is what “art” has been all about these past 100 years and more.

Ferdinand Léger and others of his generation held a portal open, but it is thanks to the deeds of the generation of these 20 or so artists of Tous Léger that nowadays we don’t talk so much about “art “things as about “creation”.  As Keith Haring put it in his journal in 1979, " … The importance of movement is intensified when a painting becomes a performance. The performance (the act of painting) becomes as important as the resulting painting".

 

Fernand Léger, “Le Tournesol”. Photo © GrandPalaisRmn

______

I visited “Tous Légers” on 19 March 2025. The exhibition is curated by Anne Dopffer,
Directrice des musées nationaux du XXe siècle des Alpes-Maritimes in collaboration with Julie Guttierez,
Conservatrice en chef du patrimoine Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot, France and Rébecca François, attachée de conservation du patrimoine
Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain de Nice (MAMAC), and runs until 20 July 2025 at Musée du Luxembourg, Paris. Exhibition design by Véronique Dollfus, with graphics by Claire Boitel of Atelier JBL and lighting by Philippe Collet of Abraxas Concepts

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List of Artists, “Tous Léger! Avec Niki de Saint Phalle, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Keith Haring...” 

Marcel Alocco, 1937, Nice – lives and works in Nice/ Karel Appel, 1921, Amsterdam – 2006, Zurich/ ARMAN (Armand Fernandez), 1928, Nice – 2005, New York/ BEN (Benjamin Vautier), 1935, Naples – 2024, Nice/ César (César Baldaccini), 1921, Marseilles – 1998, Paris/ Christo & Jeanne Claude: Christo Javacheff, 1935, Gabrovo (Bulgaria) – 2020, New York/Jeanne-Claude, 1935, Casablanca – 2009, New York/ Gilbert & George: Gilbert, 1943, San Martino (Italy)/George, 1942, Plymouth (England) – both live and work in London/ Raymond Hains, 1926, Saint-Brieuc (France) - 2005, Paris/ Keith Haring, 1958, Kunztown, PA (USA) – 1990, New York/ Robert Indiana, 1928, New Castle (USA) – 2018, Vinalhaven, ME (USA)/ Alain Jacquet , 1939, Neuilly-sur-Seine (France) – 2008, New York/ Yves Klein, 1928, Nice – 1962, Paris/ Fernand Léger, 1881, Argentan (France) – 1955, Gif-sur-Yvette (France)/ Roy Lichtenstein, 1923, New York – 1997, New York/ Martial Raysse , 1936, Golfe-Juan (France) – lives and works in Issigeac (France)/ Larry Rivers , 1923, New York – 2002, Southampton (USA)/ Niki de Saint Phalle , 1930, Neuilly-sur-Seine (France) – 2002, San Diego/ Daniel Spoerri , 1930, Galati (Kingdom of Romania) – 2024, Vienna/ Jacques Villeglé (Jacques Mahé de La Villeglé), 1926, Quimper (France) – 2022, Paris/ May Wilson, 1905, Baltimore – 1986, New York

Breasts [poem by James Cummins]

William Bailey "N" (Female Nude) c. 1965

Breasts

He never thought breasts antagonistic.
Unreachable, perhaps; unknowable, either
in the Biblical or secular sense. Mythic.
But the glorious revelations that exceeded
what he once would have optimistically

called expectations, more than made up
for the years of staring out windows.
Then to be admitted to the secret mysteries:
girls wanted him to look at their breasts,
to touch their nipples with his trembling

fingers, lips, rough palms—they even
displayed them sometimes, impatiently,
waiting for him to get it, at least a little.
Then comes the good stretch of life—
still tense, but with relaxed outings,

to movies, canoes, campfires. Quilt shows,
as the young couple searches for a flag
they can purchase together that stands
for the small country they’ve become,
& snugly covers their connubial bliss.

Ah, Sunday afternoons in Amish country ...
Smell of hay & manure, roast beef & potatoes,
the tang of fall making way for winter ...
Quilts cover sleep, the metaphor for death.
Quilts proclaim to the world this man,

this knight, is no longer on the quest—
for the Grail Castle, immortality, boobies ...
He just wants to rest in her arms as his wife
watches the gray window for them both;
and to know this place for the first time.

James Cummins' most recent book is Everyday Knowledge. 

"Evening Hawk" [by Robert Penn Warren]

 

 

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.
Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.

Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics.His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense.The star
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

Two Platitudes [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Easier said than done is almost always true:

For example, the act of getting out of bed.

On some days I find laborious to do,

But I got lots bigger worries in my head.
Like, making a tuna melt is effortless to say

But is there tuna in the house? What kind?

No Chicken of the Sea? If not, I may

Goddamn well simply change my mind.

Yet the smart boy wrote how dying

Is easier done than to talk about:

It happens by itself. Just take a breath,

Your last one, and the lights go out.

   Sometimes longed for, but sometimes cruel,

   Is the good old exception, that proves the rule.'

Shakespeare's sonnet #67 on the Bard's birthday

Ah, wherefore with infection should he live,
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve
And lace itself with his society?
Why should false painting imitate his cheek
And steal dead seeing of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
Why should he live, now Nature bankrout is,
Beggared of blood to blush through lively veins,
For she hath no exchequer now but his,
And, proud of many, lives upon his gains?
   O, him she stores, to show what wealth she had
   In days long since, before these last so bad.

"Hysteria" [by T. S. Eliot, 1885-1965]

 

 

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: "If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden..." I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

 

 

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven [by William Butler Yeats]

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Amy Dougher-Solórzano: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

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Still Life with Taylor Ham Sandwich

 

Anything can be an altar.

I skip Easter mass

to sit by the window

in my old bedroom.

(The walls are still pink

but the hospital bed

is new.)

April sun pools

on my father’s chest

& the tray of offerings

beside him:

a mug of coffee,

now cold;

quartered strawberries,

their red juices

seeping lazily

across the plate

toward the English muffin

with Taylor ham

& congealed eggs.

My father snores

& to me it is birdsong.

It reminds me

of an old photo

on my mother’s fridge:

him asleep in a beach chair

in Wildwood Crest:

mouth open,

one earbud dangling loose

like a new species of jellyfish.

Now he sleeps curled

in the nautilus shell

of his own spine,

coral pink bath towel

rolled & tucked

under his bad knee.

I like to imagine

he is being cradled

in the hand of a giant

I can’t see—

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Amy Dougher-Solórzano is a poet originally from Harrison, New Jersey. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark, and a BS in chemical biology from Saint Joseph’s University. She was selected by the Fine Arts Work Center as a 24PearlStreet Scholar for Fall 2024. Her poems have appeared in New England Review and Rattle. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband Aleck. [“Still Life with Taylor Ham Sandwich” first appeared in New England Review, Volume 46.1 in March 2025.]

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                                    A Sick Man in Bed, a Woman Praying to the Virgin and Child. Oil painting by Du Moulin, 1750.

"April 19" [by David Lehman]

On this day in 1996, I wrote:

 

We have too much exhibitionism
and not enough voyeurism
in poetry we have plenty of bass
and not enough treble, more amber
beer than the frat boys can drink but
less red wine than meets the lip
in this beaker of the best Bordeaux,
too much thesis, too little antithesis
and way too much New York Times
in poetry we've had too much isolationism
and too few foreign entanglements
we need more Baudelaire on the quai
d'Anjou more olive trees and umbrella pines
fewer leafless branches on the rue Auguste Comte
too much sociology not enough Garcia Lorca
more colons and dashes fewer commas
less love based on narrow self-interest
more lust based on a feast of kisses
too many novels too few poems
too many poets not enough poetry

 

-- April 19, 1996

“The Overture”: New "Next Line, Please" Prompts [by David Lehman]

 

On April Fool’s Day, which marks the opening of both “the cruelest month” (T. S. Eliot) and, since 1996, National Poetry Month, I reviewed the previous week’s Next Line, Please entries with some wonderment. The prompt I’d proposed on March 24— to write a “coded dialogue poem,” in which the words memory, dream, and affair appear in code—was even more difficult than I had anticipated, in no small part because I had not been sufficiently precise in my instructions.

But poetic logic has it that the more difficult the task, the greater the opportunity for a poet to conceive of an ingenious poem—not from a lightning strike of inspiration, but from truly exercising the imagination, solving a puzzle of the sublime.

****

For next time, a new prompt: I call it “the ironic title.” Take the title of an existing work of art, make it your title, and write a poem (or prose poem) that veers as far away as possible from the work of art you are raiding. For example, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain may refer to an amusement park north of Los Angeles, and The Magnificent Seven may head a piece about last year’s high-flying tech stocks

Here are some titles that strike me as promising:

• “The Lottery”
• Persuasion
• “The Necklace”
• The Wings of the Dove
• Under the Volcano
• Light in August
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• The Beautiful and Damned

But, of course, feel free to choose one of your own.

Ideally your poem should have nothing to do—except perhaps obliquely—with the work whose title you have appropriated. Incorporate just one formal device, be it a rhyme scheme, a metrical line, an acrostic, or even a repeated word or phrase. If you run out of inspiration, go to a favorite book, open it at random, pick out a phrase, and remember what T. S. Eliot said: “Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.”

Deadline: Ten days from the day this post goes up. Thanks, everyone.

from The American Scholar

Detail of Orpheus and Eurydice by Sir Edward Poynter, 1862 (Wikimedia Commons)

Unrest by Emily Fragos [by Nin Andrews]

Every now and then, I come across a quiet little poem that sticks in my head, like "Unrest" by Emily Fragos. Maybe because I worked at the local SPCA when I was a girl, or maybe because I lived on a farm where we received drive-by cats every spring,  this poem speaks to me. It settles in the heart, just so. 

 Unrest
By Emily Fragos

At the shelter, the cats are kept in glass-enclosed cases with just enough room to stand, walk a few steps, and eat; but strangers come on weekends to adopt them, take them to larger rooms and give them new names: James, Tabitha, Snowball, Molière, so you would never know how they began their lives, in abuse, grave hunger, and deprivation, or what strange turbulence lies coiled up inside their bodies, as they float to the top of  warm stone walls or sleep in a lone patch of sun on the newlyweds’ bed.

“As Above So Below”: Mark Leckey Does a Good Job [By Tracy Danison]

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

These days, as, each morning, a body must crouch up and frog run from the Huey Combat Utility Copter of Personal Belief into the unending Battle of The Whips and Scorns, they need metaphysical reassurance. Not an ethical dewicate wittle kissie-wissie, but, as it were, a hearty thumbs-up from a beefy philosophical Sarge or Sarge-equivalent. Mark Leckey, whose installation As Above So Below is at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, until 20 July, is, in at least one way, that Sarge.

Leckey is an artist who knows reality and transcendence of reality are rooted in more obscure mechanisms and broader cultural beliefs as well as personal experience. So, his work may very well provide an anxious body with that hearty thumbs up. If not, a body will provide themself with a couple or three wry smiles.

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Since the late 1990s, Leckey has been exploring culture, technology, music and memory. As he sees it, the current obscure mechanisms and beliefs from above have been here-below since the Renaissance. So, for As Above So Below, thematically, Leckey seamlessly integrates the tradition of the ecstatic vision into the 21st century quotidians of psychic displacements and dissociations, unexpected plague, future shock and louring technology. Artistically, Leckey links the technology, esthetics and media of marketing and advertising with, especially, broadly Renaissance and Baroque religious symbolism.

A large gargoyle-like statue of Job – an All-powerful God’s faithful servant and a vigorous Satan’s whiny plaything – is both at the topographical center of and media command post for the installation and source for an audio feed of mutter and lament. Job’s skin is explosively torn with fist-size and larger holes up and down and back to front of his body. Seemingly from the inside.

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

At first, I thought the wounds were versions of corrupt flesh, recalling popped buboes or boils and thought Job might be an ultra-vi or video-game version of Saint Roche, the Baroque plague saint. Radiated out from Job, what amount to “chapels”, or, considering the Job-ean lament in the air, maybe teched-up “stations of the cross”. These use graphic styles from gaming and public-messaging iconography to touch on themes such as fear or the ambiguity of reality. They contain what amount to “relics” (contemplative or holy-looking objects) that are evoked through thematic legends, video-painting, other multimedia or just or objects whose style or intent suggests a different era.

The highly contemporary mediums of the relics integrate such period- or use- symbolic materials-techniques as gold leaf or such period-themed objects as a labyrinth-map or iconography such as a recurring stylized shining sun stamp (as on Baroque-style illuminated maps).

 

“As Above So Below”, installation by Mark Leckey, Lafayette Anticipations. Photo © Aurélien Mole, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Though there is of course an implicit narrative in joining together old and new, Leckey’s approach is to let an on-looker’s visual, sound and tactile experience of the installation work out the sense they want to give to it. They are never pressed to understand anything. They can just have fun if that’s all they wanna do. The non-directivity is also true in terms of the approach to technology and technique: transistors, chips, VDTs, brushes, paint and canvas are used as equal tools in putting a piece together. In the end, in this very technology-intensive installation, there is very little or no accent on technology.

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Elsa Coustou is curator for Mark Leckey’s “As Above So Below” multimedia installation, which I saw at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, on 31 March 2025. “As Above So Below” runs until 20 July 2025.

Two Tragedies in Life [by Walter Carey]

What do it mean?

Trans studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, queer, and postcolonial theory, this class contends with how bodies of flesh and bodies of knowledge change over time. Bodies of Transformation takes a historiographic approach to the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of corporeal meaning, practice, and performance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Animating questions include: What is the "corporeal real"? If anyone can build a nuclear bomb, should we report him or deport her? Why is "cunt" less acceptable than "pussy"? How does bodily transformation map the complex relationships between coercion and choice? How might one approach nonhuman interiority? On the basis of what principle would you refute the Freud in "The Future of an Illusion"? How do you define "woman"? Have you ever heard a meadowlark?

-- Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan: "There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."

-- Shaw, Man and Superman: "There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it."

-- Did Voltaire have a mixed view of Plato? If Voltaire, despite ranting against the church, believedf in God, what attributes does that divinity have?.

Comment on four of the following:

-- “We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”

-- Auden, "The Age of Anxiety"

“You purchase pain with all that joy can give and die of nothing but a rage to live.” -- Alexander Pope, "Moral Essays"

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street."

--Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening"

 “What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.” -- Henry Miller

“I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.” -- Ruskin

“There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.” -- Disraeli

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic" - Joseph Stalin

And Dostoyevski on Lenin, Rousseau, Marx etc.:
“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”