The Best American Poetry

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: March 29, 2023

For today’s post I want to congratulate Dong Li on his first poetry book The Orange Tree, winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize, to be published by the University of Chicago Press on March 31. Through the title poem, we get a speaker who recounts a family story braided with the history of the People’s Republic of China.  His writing is enthralling, ambitious, mythological.  And the book’s design embraces Chinese waymarks and the vertical typography. Congratulations to Dong Li. Here is a sample poem:

 

https://plumepoetry.com/when-it-is-time/

 

"Diary Poem: Uses of Frank O'Hara" by Jennifer Maiden [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

“Chatty abstraction” is how Eileen Myles described the defining quality of New York School poetry in an essay in the Fall 2003 issue of Mississippi Review. “John Ashbery heard John Cage's randomness of composition and was a fan of abstract expressionist painting and John Ashbery decided that we could do that in literature, too," Myles writes. "Abstraction. Let the sentences stop and start like one's attention. In Frank O’Hara’s poetry the abstraction took a vivid human form.”

Jennifer Maiden’s “Diary Poem: Uses of Frank O’Hara” moves seamlessly in and out of a number of conversations, which give the poem an architecture through which Maiden’s flow of speculation (on the nature of poets and poetry, the stubborn anxieties of influence, aging and more) can run. There are brief chats between the speaker and her contemporaries, Johns Frobes and Tranter, dialogue with a reviewer, her daughter, and, as the diary form encourages, with herself. These ”real” or “historical” conversations lead into, and set the stage for, the longer, imagined exchange with Frank O’Hara “on a gritty tenement balcony / on a star-chilled American evening / with drinks in our numb hands speculating / why poetry is so much about denying / what one is not.” It is this "chatty abstraction" which allows the poem to be so open to conjecture and so free to espouse.

 

 

Jennifer Maiden has published 28 collections of poetry and has won many awards including the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Age Poetry Book of the Year (twice), the overall Age Book of the Year, the Kenneth Slessor Award (three times), and the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. She has been described by Gig Ryan as “one of the most striking voices to emerge from a generation that included John Forbes, Martin Johnston, Robert Adamson and Michael Dransfield.”

 

Diary Poem: Uses of Frank O'Hara

 

Years ago when John Forbes praised
my later work, he said my Problem
of Evilwas influenced by Tranter’s
Red Movie, and being younger and furiouser,
I rang Forbes and explained P. of E.
was actually written first. The paper
printed an apology but wicked Forbes
started at once to speculate that Tranter
had based Red Movie on P. of E., a claim
of which I thought I’d better warn Tranter,
     who laughed:
‘Anxieties of Influence’, and that phrase
came back to me recently when a reviewer
said I’d learned a lot from Frank O’Hara.
I explained to my daughter I’d never
read O’Hara and she, the Fire Tiger,
defended me on those grounds, so the reviewer
professed shock that I had never read O’Hara.
I wondered: am I shocked myself
really that I’ve never read O’Hara? I do
not miss O’Hara, but I said I would
write a poem called Frank and Iabout us.
The imaginary O’Hara would confess
of course that he has not read me either,
despite which we would feel quite at home.
I see us relaxed on a gritty tenement balcony
on a star-chilled American evening
with drinks in our numb hands speculating
why poetry is so much about denying
what one is not, and why anxiety
about influence is stubbornly so scary.
‘I’ve heard you use long lines’, I
would say, and explain, ‘The longer
lines in my last book were two typos I
just missed and not an urge to run
some novel verbal marathon.’ He might
reply, ‘My long lines were a try
at showing poetry is still not prose, however
long the line and to avoid the slashes
which Olsen thought pauses for breath.’
I nod, ‘I’ve used slashes, too, but not
for that, just to intensify
and quicken the pace.’ We would
be getting on quite well by then. ‘Someday,’
I’d say, ‘I would like to read you, but
of course now there is my current worry
that influence might be retrospective,
and that I’ll recognise your hand
in everything I’ve written, anyway.’ He’d say,
‘I don’t think it’s likely – aren’t
you more into the lyrical? You look
sort of more lyrical but that
might be the light.’ I would wonder: have I
aged back to O’Hara’s age? He died
before he turned forty and maybe
one ages to the time and company.
Or maybe there are such lost creatures
as poets and each meeting each at first
in any place is nervous and newborn,
under erudite, angry cover. My daughter
thought the critic was doing the haka. I
might have done the haka with O’Hara
had I read him, but in the ever
new American night I would rather we
still sat there still, regaining self-
sense outside the great archives of torture.

 

                First published in Australian Book Review

 

La Biennale de danse du Val de Marne: “Célébration, transmission, imagination” + energy in creativity and happening [By Tracy Danison]

“Necesito, pièce pour Grenade”, Dominique Bagouet, Ensemble choregraphique Conservatoire de Paris. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Bordering Paris to the east and south, Vitry-sur-Seine in the Val de Marne department is a foot-of-the-wall town that was once the City of Light’s source for bricks. Like Bagnolet, where I now live, Vitry has a founding role in the development of contemporary dance in France.

Lorrina (Niclas) Barrientos, at the time director of Vitry’s Théâtre Jean-Vilar, and choreographer Michel Caserta set up La Biennale nationale de la danse in 1979, ten years after the late Jaque Charaund had set up Concours de Bagnolet, essentially launching the careers of many of today’s choreographic luminaries. Barrientos and Caserta aimed to bring together dance performance actors of all stripes and trends – much of which was getting its start in Bagnolet –  in one showroom.

The department of Val de Marne picked up sponsorship of Barrientos’ and Caserta’s La Biennale in 1981 and renamed it La Biennale de danse du Val de Marne. The department continues to assure the event’s long-term funding and survival through what would become today La Briqueterie - Centre de développement chorégraphique national du Val-de-Marne (CDCN). Lorrina (Niclas) Barrientos went on to found Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine Saint-Denis, in effect, internationalizing Charaund’s effort to open dance to new influences and wider audiences.

In the 2000s, in order to house La Biennale and its different dance development and dance-performance activities, Val de Marne transformed Vitry’s industrially historic but long-abandoned briquetrie (“brick works”) into today’s La Briqueterie.

La Briqueterie the building is a tour-de-force of restoration and historic conversion architecture. It highlights all the architecturally interesting and historic bits within a crowded urban space that was, in great measure, built to service the factory and its people, then mostly immigrants from Italy. Social history and architecture aside, it would be tough to find a better space to do dance performance of every stripe and trend than La Briqueterie.

This year’s La Biennale’s communication touts its themes of “la célébration, la transmission et l’imagination” as signaling continuing commitment to its historic mission of openness to the widest possible range of dance performance and creation. A glance at the venues, choreographers and performers featured, hints that that is justified bragging.

A deeper dive into the program and experiences of my chosen performances show that organizers, under a new director, Sandra Neveut, do what they say (and do what they say they have always done): focus on what distinguishes dance from other arts, recognize dance heritage and encourage dance creation.

“Dance”, Lucinda Childs, Sadler's Wells. Photo © Tristam Ranton

The heritage claimed is a pretty wide one, not so much in time as in the idea of it: between Lucinda Childs’ 1979 geometric Dance and a reconstruction of Dominique Bagouet’s 1991 Necesito, pièce pour Grenade, a dance meditation around the fall of Granada, last bastion of Al Andalus.

For Childs’ Dance, the ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon reprises a piece it adopted into its repertory in 2016 as an epitome of “pure” modern dance. The creative innovation is that a holographic projection lets us see the live performance quite literally side by side with, and through the lens of, the original. The effect is not just visually lovely, it’s intellectually intriguing, one of the only times I’ve seen video-technology work well with live performance.  

Lucinda Childs, a true American original, started bringing her purifying geometric twists to US ballet dance “tradition” to France in the late 70s – starting at the Avignon festival and then setting up in Paris. Dominique Bagouet, familiar with every dance trend and style of the 60s and 70s, brought Jaque Charaund’s Bagnolet to Paris. When Bagouet won first prize at the 1974Concours he’d already danced Balanchine repertory in Geneva, and studied or danced with Maurice Béjart in Brussels, Carolyn Carlson in Paris and Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown in New York. Dominique Bagouet died of AIDS in 1992.

In contrast to Childs, who is always very careful about getting her choreography (and music) into neat and entrancing parcels, Bagouet didn’t even write up his choreographies. He saw dance as a time-, people- and space-specific type of thing, was making a sort of “danse auteur”.

The contrast between the two masters is particular as well as general. Childs’ Dance is so thoroughly documented you can project an “original” on to it, while Necesito and his other works have to be “reconstructed” from observations and intentions in his notes and the experience of those who had danced them originally.

Necesito’s latest incarnation takes the form of Rita Cioffi, who danced the first Necesito, as well as many other pieces, with Bagouet and a band of young performers from the Conservatoire de Paris.

Between Lucinda Childs and Dominique Bagouet, there’s quite a lot of room for a range of approaches to dance performance. Then, again… Thinking over the La Biennale program – and going beyond the particular choices made by La Briqueterie’s new management,  I think all the performances on offer can fit, one way or another, into an approach that situates joyfully in middle and at both ends of La Biennale ’s heritage and mission.

I’d call that approach “energy in creativity”.  And I’d say that when all is sorted, energy-in-creativity is what Dominique Bagouet and Lucinda Childs have in common.

What I mean is that, whatever the approach, genre, trend or tradition a featured artist has chosen for their La Biennalecontribution, whatever the stated intention, they will focus their creativity on the “energy” (cf. “la célébration” and “l’imagination”) generated by their production. Let’s put it this way. In the end, La Biennale’s featured performances – all the creators have solid track records – are not about telling truths or showing beauty, but about what in the 60s they called “happening”.

“Necesito, pièce pour Grenade”, Dominique Bagouet, Ensemble choregraphique Conservatoire de Paris. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The choreographer that best exemplifies the energy-in-creativity-happening approach at La Biennale - La Briqueterie – and at other contemporary dance performance venues, too – is Aina Alègre. With its procession and parade, This is not “An act of love & resistance”, a 2022 creation and Alègre’s contribution, best brings into focus this approach that situates itself between unique expression à la Bagouet and pure form à la Childs.

Alègre’s piece finally “happens”, it seems to me, because of a “fitting process” that, in contrast to the practice of linking visual or narrative or symbolic logic or content, links each performer and each movement fragment, phrase and sequence according to the energy it generates.

The strength of Alègre’s “energy fitting process” and the effect the energy produces for the audience (“happening”) have a part, I think, in Alègre’s current success as a creator at La Biennale, surely, and more generally.

In view of the success of Alègre as both a thinking professional/activist – she, in tandem with Yannick Hugron, has been recently appointed director for the Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble (CCN2) , and charged with expanding dance presence in the communities of the region – and her choreographic creation, it is no accident that the original This is not “An act of love & resistance” will open the Atelier de Paris’ 2023 June Events program. She will also open the Festival de Marseille at la Citadelle de Marseille (Fort d'Entrecasteaux) with her Parades & désobéissances, a creation for 100 amateur dancers.

La Biennale comes only every second year, but La Briqueterie is a performance that happens all the time. Fans of the Movement Arts should keep a weather on it until La Biennale comes round again in 2024. 

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I saw Lucinda Childs’s “Dance”, music by Philip Glass in combination with a video of the original performance reconstructed by Marie-Hélène Rebois at Maison des Arts de Créteil (MAC) on 16 March 2023. The performers or substutes included Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon dance performers Marie Albert, Jacqueline Bâby, Edi Blloshmi, Eleonora Campello, Noëllie Conjeaud, Katrien de Bakker, Yan Leiva, Brendan Evans, Jackson Haywood, Marco Merenda, Chiara Paperini, Lore Pryszo, Leoannis Pupo-Guillen, Anna Romanova, Albert Nikolli, Erík Sosa Sánchez, Giacomo Todeschi, Merel Van Heeswijk, with Jocelyne Mocogni as maîtresse de ballet. A. Christina Giannini made the costumes and Beverly Emmons did lighting; staging and scenario were put together by Hélène Louvart, Anne Abeille, Jocelyne Ruiz, with special effects by Philippe Perrot. I saw "This is not 'An act of love & resistance'", on 22 March 2023 at Théâtre-Cinéma Paul Eluard, Choisy le Roi.

Squibs 488-497: The Bar Mitzvah Boy and the Photographer [by Alan Ziegler ]

488: THE BOOK

The great narrative and portrait photographer Paul Aniess died on May 13, 1970. There was a large decrease in the number of professional photographs taken on Long Island the morning of his funeral, as 100 cars driven by Paul’s colleagues joined the procession in Queens. Paul Aniess produced hundreds of photo books—each a day-in-the life gem—but not one was reviewed or placed in a bookstore or library, for each was a limited edition of one. I am the possessor—and subject—of an Aniess book, which, after 62 years, shows few signs of age despite countless viewings.




489: START AT THE END

Early Saturday October 8,1960, Mr. Aniess arrived—wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie—and turned our house into a studio. He unzipped his black bag, revealing a portable backdrop, two Nikon cameras, lights, batteries, and rolls and rolls of Kodak film. Since he wouldn’t be returning to the house, Mr. Aniess shot the closing picture first. I would later learn that movies are often shot out of sequence, which can be a challenge for actors. I think I nailed it. 

490: PAUL ANIESS, AS TOLD BY HIS SON KEVIN

A couple of years ago I became curious about Paul Aniess, but he had virtually no digital trail. I did find a Kevin Aniess in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and emailed asking if he was related to Paul. Kevin's response was stunningly moving and expansive. Here it is, lightly edited:

Yes, he was my dad and photography was his life. He first became a photographer in the Air Force during WW2, however he never talked about it. It wasn’t until years later we found large aerial pictures of Paris as well as pictures of stacks of dead bodies, which appeared to be from Germany. [note: stock footage, not by Aniess]

After the war he got married to my mom. They opened up a studio in the Bronx and sometime in the early 1950’s moved into a Levitt house in Wantagh where our living room was converted into a photography studio. Then in the 1960’s they built a custom home at Merrick Ave in East Meadow. We lived on the top floor, and the bottom floor was a large studio, sales area, darkroom, and a finishing room. He spent every night in the darkroom printing pictures the old fashioned way.

Mine and my older brother’s Bar Mitzvahs were both held in our house. All of the furniture was removed and a caterer came in with tables, etc. I always wanted a big Bar Mitzvah at one of those fancy catering halls but I think my dad wanted it just the opposite since he was there every weekend. I guess being thrifty was also high on the list as we never had much money but remember never doing without anything. We were the first of all my friends to buy a Magnavox color TV when I was 13. I remember the remote control was attached with a long cord and you continuously had to kick the TV because the color would suddenly change to B&W. That was the same TV we watched the JFK Assasination, the Moon Landing, and of course the 1969 Mets.

During those years he photographed hundreds of weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. He rarely was home on the weekends at night. As a young teenager I attended many of those holding the auxiliary light. I was thrilled as we were usually seated for dinner with the band (I don’t think DJ’s existed then) and if lucky the groom or his father would give me a dollar or two. I also remember every weekend big shiny limos pulling in front of our house as those days most brides, grooms, the wedding party, as well as Bar Mitzvah boys would come and take portrait pictures between the morning ceremony and the nighttime party. On Sunday mornings tons of young girls came to our house dressed like brides who I later learned were confirmation girls. My dad's specialty was portraits of young kids and babies and they smiled when he would act like he was turning his nose and then squeak it.

I also remember all the local politicians of both parties as well as some B-List celebrities came to our house for publicity pictures. Our neighbor facing our back yard was the Bonanno Family, of Mafia fame. They had all their pictures taken by my dad and unusually insisted on buying their proofs by cash. Maybe 20 years ago I did a Google search of my dad’s name and a listing popped up for a book of the life of Bill Bonanno that credited my dad as taking one of the pictures.


Chucky (Charles) was my best friend for a while. He was the only adopted child of the Bonannos. They escaped a rival Mafia gang in the middle of the night and I never got to say so long. We heard the house was riddled with bullet holes inside after they left. When the book Honor Thy Father came out we learned how bodyguards slept on the floor next to the parents' bed. From our little deck we used to watch groups of men sitting around the pool smoking big cigars. We never knew who they were. One day the swimming pool was covered in wood and what we were told was they were afraid one of the kids would drown. Never did find out the real reason. Also read in a book later written by Bill Bonanno how he had an affair with the young lady who rented a room in the house right next to us with the dental office. She also escaped in the middle of the night.

When not doing affairs my dad was mainly a portrait photographer. He was an officer of the Long Island Professional Photographers Association and won tons of ribbons at their conventions. One was for a self portrait of a huge Great Dane with its paws on my dad’s shoulders giving him a kiss because he had a dog treat in his mouth.

I remember the Dog’s name was Nevr-Dull of Jonah. The owner was George Basch, who owned the Nevr-Dull cleaner company.

Basch lived down the block from us and we considered him rich. For several years he would drive a new Cadillac and after a couple of years my dad would buy his used car and we would drive around looking rich. My dad’s license plate was 19-PA. The PA was for Paul Aniess. I remember when I was little we were riding along the Parkway and I had to pee real bad. My dad stopped on the side of the road and a cop pulled behind us with his lights flashing. He asked what was going on. My dad explained and then the cop looked at the car and the low license plate. He must have thought my dad was a big shot and walked away apologizing like crazy.

Another ribbon was awarded for a full length picture of a beautiful girl that my dad mounted on a widow shade, which was sent to her husband in Vietnam so it could be rolled up before the Sergeant came in the barracks. I remember she wanted it to be nude but my mom had none of that; I think she wound up wearing a full bathing suit. This was the 1960’s. [Update: When I got your latest email I searched my closet and found a memory book about my dad that I hadn’t seen in at least 45 years. It included the window shade girl. I remembered her wearing a bathing suit but the pic shows it was a sun dress which I guess was sexy at the time.]

My dad was never sick a day in his life but at a photographers convention at the Concord Hotel in 1970 he had a heart attack. A few months later he decided to get an aortic valve transplant, which we were told was not real risky. He died the next day. It was quite a shock and I was only 15. His funeral took place in Queens and I recall that almost every photographer on Long Island attended and the car procession was maybe 100 cars long.

Several months later my mom had a tag sale where many of those same photographers came and bought all his equipment. Somewhere around that time I went in the attic and there were envelopes with the proofs from hundreds of weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. They only had names and no addresses and I went through phone books to try to match them up. Then I hand-wrote many postcards to say we had their proofs and I would sell them. If I remember it was $25.00 for all the proofs. Possibly you received one but I don’t remember. Maybe 10 or 20 people responded to my mailing.

I think about my dad almost every day. You are the only person who has contacted me in maybe 50 years so it is nice to know someone else remembers him. I would be honored if you wrote about him.

491: MORNING SHOOT

Mr. Aniess guided us through a series of poses, establishing the "becoming a man" narrative.

Today I pretend to become a man so I pretend to shave. No blade.

Today I pretend to become a man so I pretend to drink whiskey. With the cap on the bottle.

Posing four people of different sizes on steps requires precise positioning.

We were not a hand-holding family—I didn't notice this detail until recently.

Shari Lewis's Lamb Chop: I didn't remember we had you. Now I miss you.

Like Fay Wray reacting to a nonexistent (yet) King Kong. I think I nailed it.


When shooting an old-fashioned double-exposure, make sure there are no objects in the middle.

 

492: PRE-CEREMONY

Because no photography would be allowed during the service, once again I posed out-of-sequence.

For more about Rabbi Saperstein and the lead-up to my Bar Mitzvah, see: Bar Mitzvah Blues.

 A mensch.

All I remember from my Bar Mitzvah Hebrew is the blessing over wine.

Not a clue.

493: THE SERVICE 

I was pleasantly shocked when these turned up in the album. Not easy to be stealthy with a big camera.

After the service, I overheard Rabbi Saperstein tell my father that he had been worried about me. My crest started to fall until the Rabbi went on to explain that because three boys were involved (instead of the usual two), he had to utilize all three Torahs, and he had entrusted me to carry the extra-heavy one.

494: RECEPTION 

Yes, I remember, they used to call me Al, and I was the kid with the drum. I played the snare drum in the marching band (I can still tap out cadence #2 with my fingers), but this was my first time playing a whole drum set. Based on the crowd's reaction, I nailed it.

 

Today I pretend to be a man, so I pretend to smoke. 

No need to pretend. 

In the back on the right is my father's uncle from Chicago, whom I hadn't met before and never saw again. I know who he is due to his resemblance to my grandfather, a career criminal (specializing in safe-cracking), who had died several years earlier:

For a lot more about my father's relationship with his father, see Observation Deck. For my grandfather's rap sheet, see Grandfather resume.

Faces.


My parents poker game. (See Poker Faces)

 

The dais. Everyone has a story. Here are a few snippets:

Richard Jacobs (upper left): Walk-to-school friend and political ally. Senior year, we brokered a deal to co-chair Class Night. 

Jacobs was a fine athlete. When we set up a makeshift wrestling ring in Abby Terris's (lower right) backyard, I tried fighting him once, then opted to be the announcer, improvising witty (I hoped) commentary. In the mid-70s, my mentor David Ignatow introduced me to his open-secret lover, Virginia Terris—poet, scholar, and Abby's mother! She said, "I used to watch you in the backyard. What a clever boy." Robert Middleman (lower left) and I did the folk music scene throughout high school and beyond, playing guitars together, scooping up folk albums as soon as they hit the Sam Goody racks, hitching to Boston and Cape Cod, and even playing a Hoot night at Gerde's Folk City. We are Facebook friends, and mourn the mounting deaths of our folk heroes while celebrating the ones who endure. 

Conga line, close to reaching dominoes territory.

 

My father giving me an assist.

My mother's father saying the Hamotzi blessing, which is, essentially "God gave you this bread and all He asks is that you wash your hands before eating it." Click here for my fantasy of my grandfather hanging out with Max Jacob and Picasso Grandfather in Paris

 

495: A TALE OF TWO CLASSMATES

Another Aniess setup: Paul Guyer distracts me while Bobby Humphrey administers a hot foot. Two friends whose paths diverged to opposite ends of the psyche. 

In fifth grade, Bobby Humphrey presented me with a silver mesh "friendship ring." I liked wearing it. One day, I noticed Bobby didn't have his on. He said he lost it and would buy a replacement. He never did. By senior year, we presumed Bobby was gay. He was the only boy working on the costume committee for the Class Night skit, and he lent me a blue shirt because Richard Jacobs and I were  cops. Bobby died in July 1968, apparently of an overdose. Five years later, while clearing out my childhood closet in Lynbrook, I found a manila envelope on which my mother had written "Bobby's shirt. To return."

Paul Guyer—known as The Brain—called me meathead a decade before All in the Family.

One Sunday I was at Paul's house and he invited me to go to the beach with his family. Paul's mother asked him to "pack the book review." I didn't know what that meant, and I was puzzled when I saw it was a whole section of The New York Times. I could imagine someone reading a review of a book, but an entire publication with nothing but book reviews? And to bring that to the beach?! Paul and I remained friends and co-founded a fraternity when the cool fraternity turned down all of our friends. Paul was valedictorian, and I visited him at Harvard, but we gradually lost touch. Six years later, I was working the decollating machine on the night-shift for the Consolidated Computer Company (while writing during the day) and was taking the 3 a.m. train to Lynbrook when I ran into Paul, who was returning to his parents' house after attending an academic conference. My hands and clothes were ink-stained; Paul was wearing a three-piece suit. He said he was doing his dissertation on "Kants Aesthetics," which I heard as one word and asked if he was learning physiology. Paul held back a laugh as he explained he was studying Immanuel Kant, probably wondering how I had failed so miserably to live up to my potential.

The writing thing worked out for me, and the Kant thing worked out for Paul.

But the world thing didn't work out for my brief best-friend Bobby.

 

496: ARTIFACTS

497: POSTSCRIPT 

On May 4, 1970, I am walking on campus, dazed, having just heard the news. “What’s wrong?” a classmate says. “They just killed four of us at Kent State,” I reply. A few days later, we huddle around a fuzzy television screen and listen to Walter Cronkite narrate the memorial service. In the background, amidst the static, I can make out the mellifluous intoning of, “All they were saying was give….peace….a ….chance.” It is the cadence I tried so hard to emulate nine years earlier. “I know him,” I say with pride. “You know Cronkite?” “No, the Rabbi.”

Happy birthday, Robert Frost

 

Who said poetry makes nothing happen? -- SDH

 

Anniversary of Walt Whitman's Death [Terence Winch]

131 years ago today, Walt Whitman died at age 72. 

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Here is one of his most famous exhortations, from the preface to Leaves of Grass:

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

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Many years ago, I worked at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum, located in the historic Patent Office Building in D.C., the very same place where Whitman himself tended to wounded Civil War soldiers. You could sense his presence there. The museum owns the 1875 chalk on paper drawing, shown above, of Whitman by Thomas Wilmer Dewing. The drawing is not often on display, but I would regularly ask the curators to retrieve it and let me have a look. I've never known another drawing to have such life to it. 

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For a reading of the above text, watch this video:

 

Maurice Manning: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Steve Cody

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The Slate

 

Way back, the men had funny names

like Tiny, who was anything

but small, and Tiny’s son was called

Tiny Too or Double T,

and Tiny’s wife who was big and mean

was known as Honey, and everybody

called Honey’s sister, Birdie, and Birdie,

who couldn’t talk much less whistle,

was beautiful but touched in the head,

so Birdie lived with them way down

in Fog Town Holler, beside

the green waters of Shoestring Branch,

and only the land was rightly named,

for it was foggy half the day down there

and the branch was skinny and whipped across

the mossy roots and rocks like a snake;

but by the time I came along,

Tiny and Honey were already planted

and Birdie was bent-over and old

and Tiny Too was getting on

and sleeping in the chicken coop

with fourteen chickens and a rooster

named Mister Sump, and Sump was short

for Something, and Tiny Too just said

he liked the company, and besides

he had to guard the chickens against

Redleg Johnny who was a fox,

because Mister Sump was only good

at making chickens, and Tiny Too

would have winked about that sort of thing,

and all of this—I learned it young,

when I was just a scratch of a boy

and I skipped down Shoestring Branch

to Fog Town Holler and found

Old Tiny Too, who told me where

I was from, and who my people were,

and how they named the world around them.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Maurice Manning's eighth book of poems, Snakedoctor, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2023.  His fourth book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, and his first book, Lawrence Booth's Books of Visions, was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.  A former Guggenheim fellow, Manning lives with his family on a small farm in Kentucky and teaches at Transylvania University.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

                      Angelo Maria Crivelli, Animals Scene. 17th-Century. Oil on canvas.

 

 

Friday, March 31, 2023, at 6:30 pm: An Evening with Terence Winch at the Arts Club of Washington [by Stacey Lehman]

Put this on your calendar and be there! 

Terence Winch, September, 2022. Photo by Tom Goodwin

An Evening of Poetry

By and With Terence Winch

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Friday, March 31, 2023,   at 6:30 pm

That Ship Has Sailed, Terence Winch’s ninth collection of poetry, synthesizes the serious and comic to address sex, love, loss, death, belief, the afterlife, and the past. In February 2023, the University of Pittsburgh Press published this latest collection by Winch as part of its fabled Pitt Poetry Series.

ACW Members Free  -  Non-members $15

Reading and Wine Reception

Arts Club of Washington, 2017 I St NW Washington DC 20006

Find more information about this event here

Find out more about Terence Winch here.

-- sdl

Two poems by Lee Upton from "The Day Every Day Is"

POLITICAL AMBITION

 A pig swallowing an entire
apple tree
then sleeping under covers
Politics must be hard
You can’t step into
the same politics twice
I take off my boots
When I try to put them back on
they won’t let me
Politics is wearing them now
Politics can always step into a victim twice
Here’s Pharaoh
here’s a basket
and inside the basket
is the death of Pharaoh’s son.

MY FJORD

I will sail through my own fjord and I will name the fjord My Fjord.
I know it’s incorrect to say that the Vikings wore horned helmets,
but I will wear a horned helmet, for my job is to correct history.
I’ll leap over vats of mead and let libations drench my puffy skirt. 
(I like mead, but it’s amazing how refreshing milk directly from the cow can be.) 
And then I will sail on My Fjord plowing through every flaming
funeral.  Enough celebrations of victory over life. 
And who will stop my marauding?
For these are my violent decades,
and everyone everywhere from all time:
those are my own people.

from The Day Every Day Is by Lee Upton. Saturnalia Books

Willis Reed, Legendary Center of the World Champion N. Y. Knicks, RIP [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Basketball great Willis Reed spoke about his literacy project. David was eager to get his predictions for the upcoming Knicks season.

In 2003, then chairman of the NEA Dana Gioia, invited David to join him in Washington for the annual Washington Book Festival, hosted by Laura Bush. It was a great event. Dana had even arranged for David's mom Anne to come along and for all of us to join him at the White House for the breakfast ceremony preceding the Festival. 

Just as the guests were taking their seats for Bush's opening remarks, David saw former Knicks great Willis Reed enter the room. He was impossible to miss, of course; at 6'10" he towered over just about everyone in the room, with the exception of former Detroit Pistons center Bob Lanier (6'11"), also in attendance. 

Reed was on hand to talk about his literacy project. 

I watched David from across the room (he was seated among the day's speakers; I was elsewhere, with Anne). He lit up when Reed took the podium. When the proceedings adjourned and guests made their way to the exits, David practically lept over seats with the finesse of a point-guard making a layup shot with two seconds on the clock. I've seen him focus on an objective, but this was masterly. 

He reached Reed and I snapped the photo, above. 

As it so happened, my office in New York City was at One Penn Plaza, across the street from Madison Square Garden. On a whim, I phoned the Knick's publicity department with the request that Reed sign the photo, which he graciously agreed to do. I've given David many gifts over the years, but I think this signed photo of the basketball great ranks among his favorites.

-- sdl

The moment no Knicks fan will ever forget: when Willis Reed hobbled onto the court in the deciding game of the 1970 championship series with the LA Lakers. When Reed came out, the crowd roared. Reed, injured, played well. The great unselfish Knicks of Reed and Walt Frazier, Dave DeBuschere, Bill Bradley, and Dick Barnett, coached by Red Holtzman, won the game, the series, and the hearts of New Yorkers.

-- DL

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: March 22, 2023

Did you ever wonder who your favorite poet would be if she weren’t a poet? A rock star maybe? Here’s Anne Waldman (part Debra Harry and part Madonna) in a music video from 1982!  I first heard about this on my favorite podcast Breaking Form (hosted by James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith) and now I’m hooked. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHX-PU9SN8A

And who can resist Anne Sexton performing (in the 1960s) the song "Woman with Girdle" with her band Her Kind? If only there were music videos back then!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O33wdQnN7Y

And here, Anne says in this wild impromptu video: Better than a poem! Music beats us!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqes93PxO7g&t=73s

"It Might As Well Be Spring" [with Dick Haymes in 1972]

 

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Six): Dorothea Lasky [by Angela Ball]

 

The Ballet

The dancers
In a terribly bright
Light blue gauze
Retained the mystery

Skating on a lake
Blue and ice
An illusionary time
Where poetry feels inevitable

The terrific clown
Who lies inside
Every blue dress
Does he see me

Always a star
Always a root
Horrible auras
At the door

But no matter where we start
It all ends in an ocean
Hard and fast
On the approaching blue dawn

Until then
A deep low whisper
What is language anyway
An ending that never happens

-Dorothea Lasky

"The Ballet" was originally published in American Poetry Review in 2021. It is from a book called The Green Lake, which is forthcoming from Wave Books. The book is in conversation with the horrors of our time, particularly in regards to climate change and its effects. -Dorothea Lasky

Dorothea Lasky is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including Animal (Wave Books). Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry in the MFA program at Columbia University School of the Arts, where she directs the Poetry program.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Six): Dorothea Lasky

In her luminous “The Ballet,” Dorothea Lasky both caresses the idealization art brings and exposes its divided nature. Her address to ballet reminds us of Emily Dickinson’s address to God as “burglar, banker, father.” We are also perhaps reminded of Frank O’Hara’s love of ballet as embodied by his lover, dancer and dance-historian Vincent Warren; and of O’Hara’s frequent comic alternation between idealism and realism (“we love you get up”).

The poem’s short, heavily stressed lines carry candor close to the unspeakable. In the first stanza, “terribly bright” is a first suggestion of a deformed reality that jealously retains “the mystery.”

The second stanza, moving from a specific past to a sweeping present, works a little like an old toy in which figures are slotted into a base, below which the player’s hand moves them unseen, so that that they glide from one position to the next, “Skating on a lake / Blue and ice.” By now, it’s clear that this is a poetry of constraint, of frightening concentration, of the breaking of the “illusionary time / Where poetry feels inevitable.”

“The terrific clown / Who lives inside/ Every blue dress / Does it see me? brings a coterie of associations. The circle of blue gauze  (the poem’s central color)  hides the dancer’s sex, with its horrific mysogenized lips, so like a clown’s—like Lon Chaney’s rictus in the silent film, Laugh Clown Laugh, in which Chaney’s character is terrorized by desire for his innocent, beautiful ward (Loretta Young, in her first film role).

We may think of the custom, in the 19^th-century foyer de la danse of the Paris Opera Ballet, of devoting the hours from five to seven to assignations between impoverished dancers and the aristocratic “patrons” who make of them divided creatures, ethereal and hungry, gliding and grasping.

This is a world tied to two horses who gallop in diametrical directions:

 

     Always a star

     Always a root

     Horrible auras

     At the door

 

The ocean’s blue is “hard and fast”—impersonal, impregnable, riding the “blue dawn”: a destiny, the sadness and travail of age.

The poem’s absorbing fatality, accomplished in “a deep low whisper,” is altered at its close, denying closure: "What is language anyway? / An ending that never happens."

In these lines, the feigned offhandedness of “anyway” carries an excruciating Dickinsonian “zero at the bone.” Dorothea Lasky’s sui generis “The Ballet,” a masterpiece of mixed feelings, sears and purifies with honesty and the unreasonable comfort of an apt surprise.

-Angela Ball

Steve Reich: The Cave [by Lewis Saul]

REICH, Steve (1936-       )

The Cave (1993)
The Steve Reich Ensemble
Paul Hillier, cond.
(1:43:29)

The Cave is a multimedia opera in three acts with a libretto by Reich's wife, Beryl Korot.

The Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron

This is a sacred place where Muslims, Jews and Christians pray. The music and libretto is derived from, and includes spoken responses from Israeli, Palestinian and American interviewees who were asked questions about the story of Abraham. The sound track also includes readings from the religious texts that detail the story of Abraham, and a recording of the ambient sound that is found in the ancient building that surrounds the sacred site.

Why everything is going to be OK. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I’m supposed to be cleaning!  I was given a specific task: straighten up the kid’s bookshelves for Jessie’s birthday party this weekend.  But then my husband, who suggested this task, took the kids and went to Goodwill to get rid of some of the heaps of stuff of which we’re getting rid, leaving me alone to sneak like a thief back to my computer to write you guys a quick post.

I figure as long as I finish by the time he’s back, I’m good.  So.  What I want to tell you is pretty important.  I spent the weekend in Omaha and now have another Homaha in these United States.  What great people I met.  Ridiculously cool people.  Ridunkulous.  And they gave me roast beast, and took me to hear Yo Yo Ma, and made jokes about Exit 420.   If you don’t get it, don’t pay it no mind, but if you do get it, you get that it is good to know.  I gave 6 talks in four days!  One to a synagogue full of clergy, mostly Catholic priests, collared and mostly grey-haired.  Some rabbis, some ministers, some visitors, a lovely woman who said she’d driven six hours to see me.

I told them that I’d come to tell them about Poetic Atheism.  There is no God, but as Durkheim said a hundred years ago, what we thought was God, was the community.  What we feel when we are gathered together, that there is something larger than us, that feeling is true.  It’s us. 

We can add to it that what we thought of as faith is love.  We have to try to believe in each other, in our mutual misery and compassion.  

The solace we have to offer one another is sufficient to our wounds.

Our feelings of meaning are sufficient to the definition of meaning.

There is no hidden world of meaning.  The feelings of meaning are the meaning.  It’s all true.

Human beings need community, meditation, and ritual.  We need to come together and pray that we will do the right thing, that we will help each other, and that we are capable of helping one another.  It’s a long shot, but it’s better than trying to believe in some third party and hoping that he will do the right thing. 

Am I telling you that all this time you’ve been alone in the dark?  Yes.  Come sit with us.  We're right here.  Turn on the light.

We must look after one another.  There is no heaven.  We are all going to die, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe two years from now, maybe forty years from now, maybe sixty.  It doesn’t matter all that much.  There is an eternity on either side, an eternity, so who cares?  Life is not theater, you can’t miss the end.  You are here.  It’s wonderful.  We made it into existence together. 

We have to start coming together and singing, celebrating.  Health Care, people!  Gorgeous African-American president and presidential family!  Now is the time to lift our voices up.  We are all there is.  We don’t have it for very long.  We have it right now.  America is a lot of things.  I know.  Tea party.  I know.  Beck, and not the good kind.  But it’s okay.

We are here together.  We can keep each other company.  We can see that if this is the world, if our consciousness is what we have of consciousness, than what we feel and what we make is very important indeed.  You’re sacred because you are, and it’s my job to support your awareness of the true and glorious reality that is.  It’s your job to support this awareness in the rest of us.  We are getting better at this.  We are going to get even better.  That's why everything is going to be okay.

Excellent work staying alive since last week, most of you.  Let’s try to do even better next week.

By the way, on my way home from the airport we got stopped on the Brooklyn Bridge and there we stayed for two and a half hours, my whole little family and me, from around 12:30 am to 3 am, when they finally backed us off the bridge.  Meanwhile we got out of our cars.  We heard someone had jumped and saw boats and helicopters shining lights.  Then we heard there was a woman who had climbed up into the bridge girders and was going to jump.  John encouraged me to walk down to where it was all happening; given what I’d been writing about lately, I should just go down and see.  So I did, there was a woman up there, a cop up there near her, I saw him hand her a cigarette, I saw him light it for her, I saw her talking to him, I saw her move her long, brown hair behind her ear. 

Like I said, she hadn’t come down when we left, they’d turned us around to get out, but I felt sure she’d come down, she was talking calmly for hours, there were tons of people everywhere.  We googled it when we got home but saw nothing of it.  Then yesterday saw a report.  She’d jumped.  After we were home in bed.  She’s in critical condition.  A 41-year-old woman from Long Island.  Like so many of us, or thereabouts.  So forgive me, bleaders, for repeating myself.   Stay, everybody.  No more going off the deep end.  Stay.  Let’s all give up together, right here, right now, and have chocolate cake.  But don’t give any to the dog, because chocolate isn’t good for dogs.

I love you like crazy,

 Jennifer

from the archive; first posted March 24, 2010

Joanna Fuhrman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________

The Poetry Reading

 

The mustached cowboy-hatted thrice-divorced

old-man poet famous for sleeping with flaxen-haired

(or was it flax-seed eating) quote-unquote

nubile graduate students is at the podium

reading his poem personifying a wedding dress—

how sad it is, all alone in a dusty closet, how

it longs to be laid on a funeral pyre or set ablaze

next to the replica of Plath and Hughes’ robin’s-

egg-blue Terra Cruiser gas range, or was it     

the neglected moonlit member of the old man

poet “breaking into blossom” or recoiling

from the memory of time passing faster than

the dust can settle on his brand-new Honda

Civic LX or ranch-style remodeled sunroom?

The audience is trying to remember what

ingredients they need to pick up for tomorrow’s

paella, what that email said about the time

of that meeting with Suzanne about assessment.

They are alternately trying to remember

if they remembered to order that Minecraft book

for a nephew’s 8^th birthday party and worrying

if their Facebook-level “friends” notice that

their purple cat socks clash with their scuffed

burgundy clogs, and at a certain point, the poem

has gone on for so long no one can tell if

the old-man poet is still personifying that

wedding dress or if a headless wedding dress

has taken his place at the podium. We look up

from the cell phones we are hiding in our laps,

and there it stands—smoky and lacy

in front of the glowing microphone

in the corner of the basement bookstore,

104 miles from the nearest artist colony,

the flaming dress is burning like a 12-hour

candle, or like the lost poetry of an elderly

Rimbaud written on the slats of sunken ships,

and the dress itself has grown a mouth

and in the middle of its flames its lips

belt out a new poem, about fake

cowboy poets, how sad they are, how alone.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Joanna Fuhrman is an assistant teaching professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and the author of six books of poetry, most recently To a New Era. Her next book, Data Mind, a collection of surreal, darkly comic prose poems about the internet, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. After publishing with them since she was a teen, she recently became editor at Hanging Loose Press.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                          Lorette C. Luzajic, The Blood Jet Is Poetry---Sylvia Plath, acrylic, collage on canvas, 2022

"Saturday" [by Mark Ford]

After bursting through the allusion-barrier so dramatically, as related on Thursday [Oct. 16, 2008], there has been no stopping me, and I would like to conclude my very enjoyable stint as your guest-blogger with a poem in a genre my young self would have despised, ie. the poem about another poet –- which, come to think of it, was exactly what the poem imagining Whitman’s youthful conquests in my last post, was too. Oh well…. This one is about Hart Crane, and is in prose – to be precise it’s in the form of a letter addressed to the editor of a literary journal. The rest, I hope, explains itself. Thanks for having me, and for the many entertaining responses I’ve received; it’s been a ball…. I should perhaps say in preface to this piece that Crane was christened Harold, but shortly after deciding to become a poet adopted his mother’s maiden name of Hart.

The Death of Hart Crane

Sir / Madam,
I was intrigued by the letter from a reader in your last issue that recounted his meeting, in a bar in Greenwich Village in the mid-sixties, a woman who claimed to have been a passenger on the Orizaba on the voyage the boat made from Vera Cruz to New York in April of 1932, a voyage that the poet Hart Crane never completed. According to her Crane was murdered and thrown overboard by sailors after a night of such rough sex that they became afraid (surely wrongly) that he might have them arrested when the boat docked in Manhattan. This reminded me of a night in the early seventies on which I too happened to be drinking in a bar in Greenwich Village. I got talking to an elderly man called Harold occupying an adjacent booth, and when the conversation touched on poetry he explained, somewhat shyly, that he had himself published two collections a long time ago, one called White Buildings in 1926, and the other, The Bridge, in 1930. I asked if he’d written much since. ‘Oh plenty,’ he replied, ‘and a lot of it much better than my early effusions.’ I expressed an interest in seeing this work, and he invited me back to his apartment on MacDougal Street. Here the evening turns somewhat hazy. I could hear the galloping strains of Ravel’s Boléro turned up loud as Harold fumbled for his keys. Clearly some sort of party was in progress. At that moment the door was opened from within by another man in his seventies, who exclaimed happily, ‘Hart! – and friend! Come in!’ The room was full of men in their seventies, all, or so it seemed, called either Hart or Harold. The apartment’s walls were covered with Aztec artefacts, and its floors with Mexican carpets. It dawned on me then that Hart Crane had not only somehow survived his supposed death by water, but that his vision of an America of the likeminded was being fulfilled that very night, as it was perhaps every night, in this apartment on Macdougal Street. At the same instant I realized that it was I, an absurd doubting Thomas brought face to face with a miracle, who deserved to be devoured by sharks.
Yours faithfully,
Name and address withheld.

(Mark Ford)

from the archive; first posted October 18, 2008

Yehuda Amichai, From an interview with Lawrence Joseph (1992) and a Poem ("Memorial Day for the War Dead")

Lawrence Joseph interviewed the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai for The Paris Review, Spring 1992. Amichai was born in Germany in 1924. With his family he fled from Hitler  in 1936, emigrating to Palestine with his orthodox Jewish family. He fought form the British in World War II, for the Haganah uderground in 1948, and for the Iarseli army in 1956 and 1973.

"I really have the feeling that I am the result and very contents of the twentieth century," he tells Larry Joseph.

<<< 

I was [raaised a Zionist], but my family’s Zionism wasn’t ideological in any intellectual sense. It was the Zionism of religious orthodoxy, a practical Zionism—going to Palestine. For my parents, going to Palestine was typically romantic, motivated in part by their sense of Orthodoxy and in part by the longing to be in their own country. I had cousins who may have seen Zionism in utopian socialist terms, though my parents did not. There was, of course, zealous anti-Semitism before Hitler, which also had something to do with my family’s going to Palestine. Some people think that anti-Semitism didn’t really exist in Germany until 1933. I certainly don’t want to take anything away from Hitler’s guilt, but the anti-Semitism I grew up with predated Hitler. We were called names. We had stones thrown at us. And, yes, this created real sorrow. We defended ourselves as well as we could. Funny thing, the common name we were called was Isaac—the way Muslims are called Ali or Mohammed. They’d call out, Isaac, go back to Palestine, leave our home, go to your place. They threw stones at us and shouted, Go to Palestine. Then in Palestine we were told to leave Palestine—history juxtaposed can be very ironic. But I do remember in 1933 when the Nazis came into power the anti-Semitism had been religiously based. Then it became political and economic. Before that the two hadn’t merged—there was a kind of horrible limbo—but you could feel what was happening. I remember my parents telling me to keep away from the military parades, not to become mesmerized by the music and marching. I was also told—Würzburg was a very Catholic town—to keep away from the Catholic processions on certain feast days. All Saints’ Day, I remember in particular. The processions were very somber, very German in a way, with students, priests and nuns carrying banners and holy icons and figures. Once—I was nine or ten—I was watching a Catholic procession because I liked its colorfulness and pageantry. Since I was Orthodox I was wearing a yarmulke. Suddenly, someone hit me in the face and shouted, 'You dirty little Jew, take your skullcap off!' >>>

Memorial Day for the War Dead

Yehuda Amichai  (1924-2000)

Memorial day for the war dead.  Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you.  Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.

Memorial day.  Bitter salt is dressed up
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.

The flautist's mouth will stay like that for many days.
A dead soldier swims above little heads
with the swimming movements of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.

A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

A great and royal animal is dying
all through the night under the jasmine
tree with a constant stare at the world.

A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”

From Amen by Yehuda Amichai, published by Harper & Row. Copyright © 1977 Yehuda Amichai.

Crocus & Daffodil welcome you to Clare College

What you see when you approach the gate at Clare College, Cambridge, in March:

The vew of the bridge and the old court in the near green future:

"The Other Sestina" [by Janice Erlbaum]

Janice Erlbaum participated in the group reading we did for "The Best American Erotic Poems" at KGB Bar on March 10. 2008. She read her sestina ("The Temp") from the book, but time constraints stopped her from reading a second sestina, which she has posted on her own blog and which you will find below, along with a few prefatory sentences from Ms. Erlbaum.
-- DL

The "Other" Sestina by Janice Erlbaum

Janice Erlbaum at KGB Bar March 10, 2008

Because I am fanatical about not running over my alloted time at readings, especially when there are nine other people on the bill, I didn't read this other sestina, which I'm dying to read in public, especially after it was rejected by McSweeney's for being, and I quote, "too much." I present it to you now, for your consideration for the Best American Completely Unerotic; In Fact, Makes You Never Want to Have Sex Again anthology:

How do married people masturbate?

How do married people masturbate?
What do they picture when they come?
They think of the guy at the office, the girl
In the video, her asshole stretched, wincing;
Ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, the ones they still hate.
There’s nothing safe to think about, they fall asleep.

This is how you prepare to go to sleep,
How you wake up, how you run home and masturbate.
Everybody does it! Why can't you? You hate
Me for wanting to fuck when you just want to come –
I turn to stroke you, you turn away, wincing.
I don't care if you think about another girl.

I would want to fuck her too, that girl,
Anybody but me, laying next to you asleep,
A big fat fucking obstacle to your wincing
Nightly ritual: Pop in a tape and masturbate,
Watch that girl get drilled. Two minutes to come.
You mop up, drift off. You burned off some hate.

Not me. I walk around with mine. I hate
What I saw on that tape. I thought, poor girl,
She's in pain and she has to pretend to come.
I lay next to you that night, unable to sleep,
Therefore you were unable to masturbate.
The clock shined mean and bright in the dark. We winced.

Some nights I straddle a pillow, wincing,
Squeezing at thoughts I don't want to think, I hate
The way you come to me when I masturbate.
Face down on my belly, I look like that girl.
I writhe a while. I give up. I go to sleep.
I don't come. It's okay. I don't need to come.

I don't care what you think about when you come,
As long as it's me you're fucking, wincing,
Waiting for you to get off and slump, fall asleep.
You are faithful. I have no right to hate
You, hate myself, hate the hundreds of girls
With their assholes stretched, so you can masturbate.

I know who you are when you masturbate. I come
Into the room, kiss your forehead, your lover girl. Why are you wincing?
Your toes curl in silence. I hate you. I love you too. Let's go to sleep.

--- Janice Erlbaum

from the archive; first posted  March 20, 2008.

Happy Birthday Ern Malley! [With an introduction by Thomas Moody taken from David Lehman]

Yesterday marked the 105th birthday of Ern Malley, who remains one of Australia’s most internationally renowned poets and our greatest ever literary hoax. After I disclosed that I'm Australian in our first ever email exchange, David immediately wanted to know where I stood on the whole Malley affair. While the hoax overall has legions of fans, many people feel that the poems themselves cannot possibly possess any quality due to the nature of their genesis. In his review of The Complete Poems of Ern Malley published in Jacket in 2002, David offers a comprehensive introduction to Ern’s formative years and a lucid and insightful commentary on his poetry, arguing that Ern’s oeuvre has merit beyond the hoax, no matter the dubious motivations behind the poems’ creation. You can read David’s review here. Happy birthday Ern!

The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax by David Lehman

"THE greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943. The uniformed noncombatants, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart, were a pair of Sydney poets with a shared animus toward modern poetry in general and a particular hatred of the surrealist stuff championed by Adelaide wunderkind Max Harris, the twenty-two-year-old editor of Angry Penguins, a well-heeled journal devoted to the spread of modernism down under.

In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised (‘not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others’), they rapidly wrote the sixteen poems that constitute Ern Malley’s ‘tragic lifework.’ They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.

Later, the hoaxers added a high-sounding ‘preface and statement,’ outfitted Malley with a tearjerking biography, and created his suburban sister Ethel. The invention of Ethel was a masterstroke. It was she who sent Malley’s posthumous opus, ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, to Max Harris along with a cover letter tinged with her disapproval of her brother’s bohemian ways and proclaiming her own ignorance of poetry."

 

 

Petit Testament

In the twenty-fifth year of my age
I find myself to be a dromedary
That has run short of water between
One oasis and the next mirage
And having despaired of ever
Making my obsessions intelligible
I am content at last to be
The sole clerk of my metamorphoses.
Begin here:

In the year 1943
I resigned to the living all collateral images
Reserving to myself a man’s
Inalienable right to be sad
At his own funeral.
(Here the peacock blinks the eyes
of his multipennate tail.)
In the same year
I said to my love (who is living)
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian Tree
Not having learnt in our green age to forget
The sins that flow between the hands and feet
(Here the Tree weeps gum tears
Which are also real: I tell you
These things are real)
So I forced a parting
Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness.

Where I have lived
The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach
Inhabits the crack and the careful spider
Spins his aphorisms in the comer.
I have heard them shout in the streets
The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich
And in the magazines I have read
The Popular Front-to-Back.
But where I have lived
Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray
Guernica is the ticking of the clock
The nightmare has become real, not as belief
But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo.

It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.
Set this down too:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence
Traces the inevitable graph
And in conclusion:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.
I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.