The Best American Poetry

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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.

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

Yes!

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.   

Four Amazing Quotes from Schopenhauer

Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

*
All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

*

For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

*

[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

>>>

The painting is by Gail Campbell, 2016.  
From the archive. First posted by The Best American Poetry on September 05, 2019 at 03:07 PM.

Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

*
All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

*

For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

*

[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

>>>

The painting is by Gail Campbell, 2016.  
From the archive. First posted by The Best American Poetry on September 05, 2019 at 03:07 PM.

The end of the semester: a farewell address [by DL]

Working with you has been a pleasure from start to finish. I’d like to leave you with a few thoughts:

-- You can do anything. When planning your future, do not limit yourself to the conventional career paths and to academic jobs dependent on advanced degrees. You can combine anything with poetry; you can be a poet and also a librarian, an advertising copy-writer, a corporate executive, a lawyer, a doctor, a computer specialist, a publisher, an arts administrator, or a journalist.

-- Keep trying new things in your poetry. And keep doing the same tried and true things. If you can, write every day, even if it is only a few sentences in a notebook. Collaborate with friends on poems and projects. If you’re in a fallow period, accept it; sometimes the brain needs time to absorb new experiences. If truly blocked, you can break it by assigning yourself a prompt that has worked for you (like a translation from a language you don’t understand, or an abecedarius, or a poem in imitation of A. R. Ammons). Sometimes a simple reversal of course is all you need to do; if you've been writing present-tense, first-person point of view poems, see what happens when you adopt a third-person POV and the past tense.

-- Read poetry. Be generous, but stick to your own lights. This may require some effort at diplomacy. But remember that you don’t have to love a person’s poetry in order to be courteous to and supportive of that person. Let posterity decide whose work will endure. We won’t be around anyway. Remember that another person’s success does nothing to diminish your own achievement. Don’t get hung up on prizes. They’re great to get; prestige is nice, money is nice; but you should spend your time on your writing, your reading, your friendships, and not on angling to get a lucrative fellowship. There will come a time when someone else will win the award you deserved, or the job you coveted, or the publication you were banking on. It might even be the person sitting next to you right now. And you will feel envy, you will feel resentment -- you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. But you cannot afford to give in to these feelings, because envy and resentment, if allowed to fester, can turn easily into bitterness and even spite, and these things are poison to a writer. To ward them off, you will need to go deeper into yourself, into your heart, into the sources of your poetry.

-- Your poems don’t have to change the world. They just have to give pleasure. Don’t feel you need to make sense all the time. Nor should you shy away from sentiment and feeling.

-- Figure out what you need from the world in order to continue as a poet. Sometimes all you need is one magazine editor who believes in your work.

-- Pay no attention to hostile reviewers. Many of them are classic bullies, sadists, who need know nothing about a subject to write about it. And when it is your turn to write about others, resist the impulse to give pain – it’s not good for your soul. And you do have a soul – otherwise you would never have committed yourself to the vocation of a poet.

-- When you read your poems aloud, do so with conviction. Read slowly and clearly. Read one poem fewer than the time allowed. Rehearse so you don’t stumble over your own words, the mark of an amateur or an academic.

-- L'chaim!

-- DL   from the archive; first posted 2008

Big Daddy Lipscomb [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.
I asked Jesus for a moment of his time,
We got together at the bottom of a mine
And when I asked Jesus for twenty bucks
He said ducks quack and chickens cluck
But Big Daddy Lipscomb feared no man
So be who you are to the best that you can,
Like Big Daddy Lipscomb was always mean,
He called me Jesus and I called him Gene
When we drove together on unlit streets
To a boom-a-lay boom-a-lay old time beat,
Big Daddy Lipscomb and little old me
Picking up chicks just being wild and free,
Big Daddy Lipscomb was always mean,
He called me Jesus and I called him Gene.

2.
There goes Big Daddy tooling 'round the bend;
He used to play for Baltimore, I knew him when
Him and Artie Donovan drank before the games
There in the locker room without any shame
About it either, and Big Daddy sure loved his car 
So when they played in NYC he drove way too far
Off of what used to be called the scenic route,
Picking up girls in Delaware and other ones to boot
In Philadelphia simply by saying that his name was
Big Daddy Lipscomb and he nearly missed the game
But he distinguished himself in a goal line stand 
And when last seconds ticked away he said hey man
To Artie Donovan, you want to shoot horse with me?
Artie said you go ahead, I know how the end will be.

3.
Big Daddy didn't play no college ball,
The Marine Corps was pretty much all
The experience he had on defensive line
Till he joined the Rams but then he signed
With the Colts and took his car for a whirl 
All by himself except for picking up girls
In towns where girls just want to get out
And go to New York City or how about
Memphis or Chicago, or anywhere is fine;
Nights by the motel pool drinking wine
Big Daddy wonders if maybe he'll quit
Football before the start of all that shit,
Two a day practices out in the sun  
Is plain old work but girls are fun.

Richard Wilbur at the Y (in 2009) ([by David Yezzi]

Richard Wilbur gave a splendid reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y last night. After a knockout selection of poems new and old, he capped the evening with a bit from his forthcoming translation of Corneille's The Liar, which will be out in August in a volume that also includes his new translation of Le Cid. Dorante's long speech from Act Two absolutely killed!

I had the priviledge of introducing him, which was a bit like your little brother's garage band warming up for Radiohead. The audience was patient, and I tried to keep it short. Here is what I said:

<< Richard Wilbur makes it look so easy. His poems are as close as we are likely to come to teasing out of our contemporary speech a classical poise. But don’t be fooled. As T. S. Eliot said of the poems of Ben Jonson, their “polished veneer . . . reflects only the lazy reader's fatuity.” Which is to say his surface tensions span shadowed depths, if we have eyes to see them.

Yet so close do Wilbur’s poems come to seamless utterance, to perfect expression – in their music, argument, energy, wit, and sense (which in Wilbur’s case also means “good sense”) – that one could almost forget that they are hard-won and do not shrink from challenging their own formal elegance. The poems convince us that they have achieved their ideal form, that they could not be written any other way. But their pleasing air of inevitability is by no means inevitable.  Wilbur’s poems are the mysterious product of the poet’s lifelong mastery over the momentary: they are stays against transience. 

Here’s how the poet Philip Larkin once described the purpose of poetry. “Most people say that the purpose of poetry is communication: that sounds as if one could be contented simply by telling somebody whatever it is one has noticed, felt, or perceived.” “I feel,” Larkin said, that “it is a kind of permanent communication better called preservation. . . . Of course, the process of preservation does imply communication, since that is the only way an experience can be preserved.” Larkin wants to put the emphasis on language-as-preserver rather than language-as-means-of-communication, because, he says, “it makes it sound harder, which it is!” As Robert Frost knew well, “to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of” is the poet’s ultimate ambition. And Wilbur has lodged with us an extraordinary number of poems, indelible and unforgettable.

The teaming list of “moments” that Wilbur has preserved will be different for each reader, since all of his poems perform the function in some way: The bibulous mind-reader at the café table in Rome comparing a sun-hat wafting from a parapet to a thought being forever lost. (The mind-reader, like the poet, is a preserver of moments.) Or the bird that has flown in at a window, “humped and bloody,” making its way, finally, back out to freedom as a father and his daughter look on. Or, outside another open window, a clothes line that fills the morning air with angels, some in bed-sheets, some in smocks. Then there is the marriage of true minds that Wilbur likens to a rose window or the firmament. Indelible moments, unforgettable.  

How does he do it? It’s a mystery. Howard Nemerov once proposed an ideal for poetry based on mystery. Good poems posses three indispensable qualities, he believed. “1) a poem must be very mysterious, 2) but it must have an answer (in other words, a meaning) which is precise, literal, and total; that is, which accounts for every item in the poem, 3) it must remain very mysterious, or become even more so, when you know the answer.” Wilbur pulls off this essential bit of wizardry again and again. Take as only one example his classic poem “The Ride”: a journey on  horseback “Through shattering vacancies / On into what is not,” which becomes a dream that the poet wakes from and yet inhabits long into waking. Wilbur’s mysterious states of consciousness – in poems such as “The Ride,” “The Mind-Reader,” “A Digression,” “This Pleasing Anxious Being,” are among the clearest views we have of these shadowed depths. As Randall Jarrell once wrote of Wilbur’s work, he “obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing.” Wilbur sheds light on the mysteries of experience, preserving these mysteries by finding the exact words for them for the first time. >>

from the archive; first posted May 22, 2009

Woman invisibility: Ann-Eva Bergman, Glinda the Good Witch, ruby slippers, Gretchen’s Faust, Emmy Klinker and the fate of woman painters, etc., etc.

Marianne von Werefkin, Herbst (Schule), "Autumn (School)", 1907. Photo Courtesy Wikipedia

It’s Glinda, Good Witch of the West, who says the solution to a problem is as simple as closing your eyes and clicking together your personal pair of ruby slippers. I took Glynda at her word almost every day of my army career, hoping to wake up and out of it, safe and free, with soldiering an ugly, but fading, dream. It didn’t work.

The ruby slippers, Glinda’s estate lawyers say, are essential to the effectiveness of her hollow positivism... It won’t work for people in street shoes, let alone combat boots.

Glinda-style solutions come up because I’ve been thinking about why artistic retrospectives that feature woman as painter, such as the ongoing Anna-Eva Bergman exhibition at Paris’ Museum de l’Art Moderne (MAM-Paris), are so rare.

I say “’woman’ (singular) as painter” to imply that gender is an external force in a painter’s experience.

Emmy Klinker, "Landscape", 1918. Photo Courtesy Berlin 1918 - 1933

Closing my eyes – despite the harsh truth from Glinda’s estate mouthpieces, I still close my eyes when I scour my memory –  I remember only a 2014 Sonia Delaunay retrospective that included more than 400 (!) works, also at MAM-Paris. The show did a lot to show her paintings but nothing memorable in respect to her as painter.

I also remember that Delaunay featured in the 2015 Schirn art museum exhibition STURM-Frauen. Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde in Berlin 1910–1932 (“Storm Women. Women avant-garde artists in Berlin 1910-1932”), curated by Ingrid Pfeiffer in, as it turns out, appropriately, Frankfurt-am-Main, the birthplace of Goethe and, thereby, of Gretchen.

The set up for STURM-Frauen returned the mostly fragmented oeuvre of its featured artists to their native scene, using as guides the notebooks and catalogs of the legendary gallerist, editor, promoter and painter Herwarth Walden, as well as the archives of the famous Sturm magazine.

I understand that most of the documentation was conserved by Nell Walden (1887–1975 - also featured in the exhibition). Luckily for us, Nell Walden had a Swedish passport, settled before the second big war in Switzerland, was able to weather her couple of husbands. When you look at it, she was also co- founder and -editor of the Sturm magazine and gallery. In addition to suggesting the name Herwarth Walden as a professional handle, Herwarth was her first husband.

It also seems that STURM-Frauen picked up on a 2012 exhibition called Sturm - Zentrum der Avantgarde (“Sturm - Center for the Avant-Garde”) in Wuppertal, Germany – by the way, home and performance space to Pina Bausch, the contemporary dance ur-choreographer. This exhibition, in turn, seems to have benefited from Germany’s late-post-war efforts to pick up the cultural pieces.

The STURM-Frauen exhibition bowled me over.

I was a man who suddenly discovers he has a long-hidden, parallel family of magical sisters, all of ‘em obvious blood plus spiritual relations.

I even met a previously unknown favorite sister among them, a certain Emmy Klinker (1891-1969). I noticed her because she painted people I have known along with a lot of my emotional color and landscape.

Klinker’s eye has Franz Marc color fluidness in it; her hand makes me think of Marc Chagall, but seems less emotionally contrived, more esthetically nuanced, than the great man’s stuff. She struck me as a pure painter in the same way as Emily Dickinson is pure poet: staying out of the way and to let me look.

The Herwarth-Nell Waldens represented European artists active in the Expressionist, Cubist, and Constructivist movements. Visual artists in the Sturm gallery stable included then- and now-renowned artists such as Kandinsky, Marc, Kokoschka, Klee and Chagall as well as the 30 woman artists presented in the STURM-Frauen exhibition.

In addition to Sonia Delaunay, wife of painter and color theorist Robert Delaunay, and the single and childless Emmy Klinker, the better known among these artists included Natalja Gontscharowa (1881–1962), Gabriele Münter(1877–1962) and Hilla von Rebay, ((1890-1967), respectively, wife of Mikhail Larionov, “founder” of Russian abstraction; first wife of Wassily Kandinsky; and  co-founder of the Guggenheim. 

Artists less- or un-known to me were Vjera Biller (1903–1940), Marcelle Cahn (1895– 1981), Marthe Donas (1885–1967), Alexandra Exter (1882–1949), Helene Grünhoff (1880−?), Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876– 1923), Sigrid Hjertén (1885–1948), Magda Langenstraß-Uhlig (1888– 1965), Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), Lavinia Schulz (1896–1924), Maria Uhden (1892–1918), and Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938).

Because I had been so moved by STURM-Frauen and the work I had discovered there, until recently I had been closing my eyes at least once a week and wishing the exhibition would show up here in Paris.

Yesterday, Monday, I was having a pint with a dear friend of mine, a man of wit and talent from Germany. I mentioned Anna-Eva Bergman and STURM-Frauen and all that. He said, “Really? Interesting. Bergman’s the wife of Hans Hartung, isn’t she?” Then he asked the server for more chips.

So, there it is.

As far as I know, STURM-Frauen has not traveled, been reproduced or been picked up on or otherwise copied anywhere. The catalog, STURM-Frauen. Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde in Berlin 1910–1932 by Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein(ISBN : 9783868322774), is out of print. STURM-Frauen has tumbled, perhaps, into a ruck of positivist solo retrospectives of those woman painters with sufficient remaining oeuvre to highlight painting by women in the past.

I now reckon the void and failure of my STURM-Frauen wishes comes faute de ruby slippers – I have no power and money to make it otherwise.

In my wishing, I should have remembered that Gretchen, as earlier noted, born in Frankfurt with Goethe, is obviously the subject and hero of Faust.

But I was about as attentive to that fact when first I heard it as my friend was to me yesterday. It may even have been this friend who had made the remark .

Anyhow, it is just so difficult to pay attention to woman stuff when it comes to art, is it not?

Thinking about Glynda, Good Witch of the West and hollow positivist, Gretchen’s Faust, Anna-Eva Bergman as painter, Sonia Delaunay and her 400 works, the disappeared STURM-Frauen exhibition, me and my inattentive friend and the paintings of Emmy Klinker, has made me think that the dearth of woman painters is owing to woman “invisibility” more than anything else.

Invisibility is the tool of consciousness that enables groups and individuals to selectively blank out categories of real things, people, deeds, feelings and ideas, according as a given structure of consciousness requires.

Invisibility is the perceptual mechanics behind “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” Cutting is its short form.

Invisibility does not interfere with the actual physics of reality. Say, building explosive spy drones.

The fate of Emmy Klinker and her works and days is a good example to help in understanding how woman invisibility works. It shows that there is a sort of rippling traffic light, a trinary flicker, that selects her out of consciousness even while leaving a “biography” of materialized traces of a life lived or just later projections by others.

Emmy Klinker’s creative and social lives were suggestive, novel- or Netflix-like, both showing real genius and fine character.

Klinker, they say, began painting at 16 – youthful interest apparently being a prime legitimating factor for woman painters. She was good enough to attract Kandinsky’s attention and became a part of that man’s famous Der Blaue Reitercircle. She was represented by Herwarth and Nell Walden, was particular friends with people such as fellow-creators Gabriele Munter, Der Blaue Reiter co-founder Franz Marc and the American “witness” to the period, Albert Bloch …

Apparently single, Klinker was also apparently wed to her creation. She was quite normally productive as we can deduce from her experience in Germany’s 1933-45 Bully-Boy Zeit. Klinker was culturally prominent, as well as a principled mensch.

The boys apparently saw enough of her to make Emmy Klinker a suitable whipping girl. She was named, along with her friend Franz Marc, already dead (killed in the First World War) and many others, including, just for instance Kokoschka and Matisse, a degenerate painter.

Klinker’s work Weiss Pferde (“White Horse”), for example, was original and popular enough to merit destruction to enthusiastic public contumely. Klinker’s cultural notoriety was such, I read someplace, as to merit a warning visit from indignant “Brown Tide” stalwarts.  

Because Klinker had courage enough to hide a Jewish friend at her house, she was sent to Dachau concentration camp for a three-month warning visit.

Although fairly soon after 1945 Klinker seems to have won prizes for her past work, it is unclear if she was producing and showing new work. Her work, from before 1936 or after, I can’t determine, but I think not, has featured in a few collective retrospectives in the past 20 years.

Why does painter Emmy Klinker touch me so? Because her self-portrait makes me think of Rimbaud reassuring his mother as to his respectability? No. It’s the woman invisibility that brushes out contexts and connections. For instance, I can think of no mention of Klinker in any Wikipedia entries for her painter friends and colleagues … All that is left of her is a lonely curriculum vitae, the CV isn’t the person who did that painting and the woman who did the painting is not my secret sister.

Worst of all, I’m as implicated in woman invisibility as anybody else. I’ve also cut people.

Invisibility is Glinda, Good Witch of the West: positivist solutions that really address a problem don’t really exist.

Invisibility is how Gretchen creates and shapes a book that even the author called Faust. Invisibility is my friend’s and my slip-slide attention to subjects that concern us.

And the STURM-Frauen painters?

A good, solid case study in how woman invisibility works. And that’s why STURM-Frauen, like woman painters generally, has slipped and slid down into an entry on its very fine curator’s CV.

Still, in the same way as the Waldens’ Sturm notes made the STURM-Frauen, the exhibitions’ 30 painters, can take you on a course in invisibility mechanics. No matter what the number of works on show and the esthetic and cultural merit, taken together, each “biography”, from Vjera Biller, euthanized, to Hilla von Rebay, philanthropist, to Marianne von Werefkin, stateless noble, to Maria Uhden, dead in childbirth, tells a story the mechanics of woman invisibility.  

The portraits, on the left, from top to bottom, are from the Schirn Museum's Sturm-Frauen and Flikr. From top to bottom, Emmy Klinker, Selbstbildnis ("Self-portrait"), 1918; Natalja Gontscharowa, Selbstbildnis ("Self-portrait"), 1908 © Tate, London, 2015 ; Lavinia Schulz, Selbstbildnis ("Self-portrait"). Photo Courtesy Wikipedia; Maria Uhden, Frau mit Vogel "Woman with bird") 1917; Emmy Klinker, Bildnis einer jungen Frau (“Portrait of a young woman”) 1921; Marianne von Werefkin, "Self portrait". Photo: Google Art

 

"Trigger Warning" [by D. A. Powell]

Trigger Warning

I dated an x ray tech
But he never saw me
Dated a magic act
But he never sawed me

Had a lover who was a painter
He drew everyone around him
And he claimed he’d drawn me too
But where were my sketches

I went out with amphetamines
We couldn’t sleep with each other
I had a fling with a boomerang thrower
Didn’t see that coming

And then there was the date with destiny
Who stood me up
Till he couldn’t stand me no more
Didn’t see that coming either

Endings suck
Better duck

 

D. A. Powell

from the new issue of Literary Matters