The Best American Poetry

L'Shana Tova: "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" [poem by David Lehman]

Molly with Stick, Cayuga Lake, 1981 (c) Glen Hartley

For I will Consider Your Dog Molly 

 

For it was the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah, New Year's Day, day of remembrance, of ancient sacrifices and averted calamities.

For I started the day by eating an apple dipped in honey, as ritual required.

For I went to the local synagogue to listen to the ram's horn blown.

For I asked Our Father, Our King, to save us for his sake if not for ours, for the sake of his abundant mercies, for the sake of his right hand, for the sake of those who went through fire and water for the sanctification of his name.

For despite the use of a microphone and other gross violations of ceremony, I gave myself up gladly to the synagogue's sensual insatiable vast womb.

For what right have I to feel offended?

For I communed with my dead father, and a conspicuous tear rolled down my right cheek, and there was loud crying inside me.

For I understood how that tear could become an orb.

For the Hebrew melodies comforted me.

For I lost my voice.

For I met a friend who asked "is this a day of high seriousness" and when I said yes he said "it has taken your voice away."

For he was right, for I felt the strong lashes of the wind lashing me by the throat.

For I thought there shall come a day that the watchmen upon the hills of Ephraim shall cry, Arise and let us go up to Zion unto the Lord our God.

For the virgin shall rejoice in the dance, and the young and old in each other's arms, and their soul shall be as a watered garden, and neither shall they learn war any more.

For God shall lower the price of bread and corn and wine and oil, he shall let our cry come up to him.

For it is customary on the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah to cast a stone into the depths of the sea, to weep and pray to weep no more.

For the stone represents all the sins of the people.

For I asked you and Molly to accompany me to Cascadilla Creek, there being no ocean nearby.

For we talked about the Psalms of David along the way, and the story of Hannah, mother of Samuel, who sought the most robust bard to remedy her barrenness.

For Isaac said "I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the offering?"

For as soon as I saw the stone, white flat oblong and heavy, I knew that it had summoned me.

For I heard the voice locked inside that stone, for I pictured a dry wilderness in which, with a wave of my staff, I could command sweet waters to flow forth from that stone.

For I cast the stone into the stream and watched it sink to the bottom where dozens of smaller stones, all of them black, gathered around it.

For the waterfall performed the function of the chorus.

For after the moment of solemnity dissolved, you playfully tossed Molly into the stream.

For you tossed her three times, and three times she swam back for her life.

For she shook the water off her body, refreshed.

For you removed the leash from her neck and let her roam freely.

For she darted off into the brush and speared a small gray moving thing in the neck.

For this was the work of an instant.

For we looked and behold! the small gray thing was a rat.

For Molly had killed the rat with a single efficient bite, in conformance with Jewish law.

For I took the rat and cast him into the stream, and both of us congratulated Molly.

For now she resumed her noble gait.

For she does not lie awake in the dark and weep for her sins, and whine about her condition, and discuss her duty to God.

For I'd as lief pray with your dog Molly as with any man.

For she knows that God is her savior.

David Lehman, "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" from Operation Memory (Princeton University Press, 1990)

-- sdl

"Made Bed" [by Beth Gylys]

Made Bed

He could have been my lover again that night—
a whisper of dress lifting over ears,
the tie unknotting, the sheets predictably white,

the fumbling urgency leaving us breathless, light
from lust tinged by guilt, the vanished years.
He could have been my lover again that night,

confusing past with present, desire with flight,
image with image: elbow, breastbone, sheers—
the tie unknotted, the sheets ironically white.

Entangled, our voices pitching like a kite
in a storm with vowels, bleats, stifled swears...
he could have been my lover again that night

if the night were only and alone, if right
and right had not had different names. Affairs:
the ties unknotting, the sheets iconically white

and damp, and something's broken, lost, bright
as shattered glass, as side-lit, backstage mirrors.
He could have been my lover again that night,
the ties unknit, the sheets shamelessly white.

-- Beth Gylys

from Verse Daily, September 26, 2019

http://www.versedaily.org/2019/madebed.shtml

Laura Orem: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Bald

 

Remember, remember that boy

who could not love you

because you were not pretty,

whose terrible honesty you’ve carried

for thirty years, the truth you mined from him

like some strange gemstone made of your

own desperation that you still wear

around your neck.

 

And now this boy, your boy, who carefully wields

the electric razor until, stroke by stroke,

your head is shaven, austere as a nun’s,

beauty or lack of it as irrelevant as it is to God. This is

about power. This is about mess. This is what you do

to claim some purchase on this absurd slide

down a hill of talus looking for meaning

or Jesus or some way to make sense.

The boy reminds you as he shifts

to a disposable razor and, surgically careful,

scrapes away the tiniest stubble, black and gray

as a prophet’s beard. Your choice, he says. My choice,

like forcing truth from another boy thirty years ago.

See, says my son. Look. It’s not so bad.

You can stand it. You already have.

Stand it some more.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Orem is a writer, artist, and educator. Currently a board member of the Baltimore Wisdom Project, a multi-faceted education program for inner city youth, she taught writing for many years at Goucher College. She is the author of two books of poetry, Castrata and Resurrection Biology.  She lives in Palm Coast, Florida.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This transformed image of the iconic Mona Lisa from a 2013 poster is the “perfect emblem of the upheaval that cancer brings with it, the enormity of its impact on the life of a person and of the inestimable stakes,” says the National Cancer Association Foundation of Italy, a nonprofit organization that provides free palliative care and pain management services to cancer patients throughout Italy.  

 

 

What are the Scariest Poems in the English Language? [by David Lehman]

            What is the scariest poem in the language? I wager that many would select Poe’s “The Raven,” and it is unquestionable that Poe has the ability, in his verse as in his stories, to scare the dickens out of you. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" will get votes, as it should. There are poems by Emily Dickinson that, like a Magnum .44 wielded by Dirty Harry, could "blow your head clean off." Byron's "Darkness" makes you shudder, and many poems from the Elizabethans and the Metaphysicals make you see a skull and bones on the other side of your pillow. You can, however, make the case that Robert Frost -- Frost, who was once habitually misread as a genial Yankee sage -- has written as dark and frightening a poem as we have.  The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal confessed himself terrified by the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces.” It is Frost who captures that silence.

            The brilliant sonnet “Design” – in which a spider makes a meal of a moth -- exemplifies the view of nature that informs Frost’s poetry. Nature at work is aesthetically satisfying; it has order, pattern, design; but there is nothing moral or ethical about it. Nature, as opposed to human nature, is indifferent to individual life. Put another way, nature feeds on itself, and life requires death, as the life of the spider requires the death of the moth.

            Humanity is stupid or destructive in Robinson Jeffers’s poems, which take the side of nature against human life. Frost doesn’t go that far, but in his poems the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Man is frail, and the loss of a man may be mourned, but the mourning lasts a mere moment. In Frost’s “Out, Out – “ a boy working with a buzz saw loses his hand in an accident. The results are surprisingly fatal: “No one believed. They listened at his heart. / Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.” But what truly shocks the reader is not only the death in quick stages -- brilliantly captured in that line with two dashes -- -- but also the moment when the boy, a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart,” pleads, “Don’t let him cut my hand off -- / The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!” We infer that brother and big sister lack parents, and this knowledge deepens the pathos. 

             The ending of “Out, Out –“ seems at first to indict humanity for its essential callousness. They – the same “they” that had listened at the boy’s heart – go right on living: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Callousness or realism? The ending is similar to the ending of Auden’s great “Musée des Beaux Arts,” in which Icarus, in Brueghel’s painting, falls from the sky to his death in the sea, “and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Both poems are superb, but Frost’s will give you the chills while Auden’s more analytical approach will make you ponder the thesis that humanity is necessarily indifferent to human suffering.

             Among the scariest of Frost’s poems is “Desert Places.” Compare it to Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” Both poems are about “nothing.” It may be that Stevens’s poem is the stronger of the two; it certainly requires enormous attention and rewards numerous re-readings. But “Desert Places” has something that “The Snow Man” with its “distant glitter of the January sun” lacks. “Desert Places” has terror.

              In his "Pensées" (i.e., thoughts), Blaise Pascal wrote: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Here is the final stanza of Frost's "Desert Places":

            They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
            Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
            I have it in me so much nearer home
            To scare myself with my own desert places.

 Take that, Pascal.-- DL

from the archive; first posted October 31, 2015

End [by Susan Brind Morrow]

I like having a fierce dog

Who barks and bites

And leaps at your head

The beauty boy who sleeps at my thy

Red fox red

My beautiful Ted. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What carnivore 

brought down the deer

Whose rib-cage stands red

In the brown spring fields below

 

Venus rising in the dawn

Frost on the lawn

This April morning.

                                                                 *

We sat and watched the sun go down across the lake below through the broken black outlines of the trees. The faint flicker of a rainbow formed for an instant in the low sky to the north as though it were the rim of something suddenly visible, the shining fragment of the rim of a halo. The last light fell in a wave of gold that swept quickly around the room settling for a moment on each of us in turn. We sat talking in the dark, in what seemed like a box of deep blue light as we had in summers past, so that the evening had about it a sense of timelessness.

I reminded Terry of how once he said that everything operates on the level of four basic elements, their combining and breaking down, and that we are all “just some spectacular sideshow,” as though all the desperate suffering of life were simply an elaboration of this basic principle.

“What is it that makes a human being?” He had said, “What defines being human? Falling in love. And what is that? Seeing something ordinary- as numinous. Seeing. The intensity of that focus, that concentration of energy, would be the heating up in which some significant transformation could take place.”

"I hadn't expected so intense a pleasure . . . " [by Edwin Denby]

looking at New York again, in the high white February sunlight, the childishly euphoric climate; looking down Second Avenue, where herds of vehicles go charging one way all day long disappearing into the sky at the end like on a prairie; looking up a side of skyscraper, a flat and flat and a long and long, and the air drops down on your head like a solid.  Like a solid too the air that slices down between two neighbor skyscrapers. Up in the winder sunlight the edge of such a building far up is miraculously intense, a feeling like looking at Egyptian sculpture.  Down in the streets the color, the painted colors are like medieval color, like the green dress of the Van Eyck double portrait in the National Gallery, intently local and intently lurid.  And New York clothes -- not a trace of charm, dressing is ritualistic like in Africa (or the Middle Ages); the boys are the most costumed; dressed men and women look portentously maneuverable; one set looks more dry-cleaned than the other, and those count as rich.  New York is all slum, a calm, an uncomfortable, a grand one.  And the faces on the street by day: large, unhandsome, lumped with the residue of every possible human experience, and how neutral, left exposed, left out unprotected, uncommitted.  I have never seen anything so marvelous."

from "A Letter on New York City's Ballet" by Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, Yale University Press, 1998)

Translation: Egyptian Poetry [by Susan Brind Morrow]

1970s

Songs of Baramhat

Salah Jahin

Baramhat is the first month of spring in the Coptic calendar, the calendar of ancient Egypt still in use today, along with the Islamic and the Gregorian. The most notorious months are Amshir (February/March) which is characterized by inescapable sandstorms, and Tuba (January) which is bitterly cold. The poem follows the progression of the year from midsummer (Abib, Melaoon) during which time it is often too hot to go around in the day time. Tut (toot) is September.

Sucked through the ribs 
Like milk from the breast
Unceasing, but not by a child-
Tears give way to blood
Give way to fire
Give way to words-
Red, resounding, terrible…
So the strength of the sun in summer burns out sweat.
And I-
My breast
Is a bronze fortress
That scorches the eyes
The heat increases
And melts its lock
And passes.

                  *

Malaun in all the books is silence,
Malaun in all the books is dumb.
The silence of branches webbed tight by spiders
Though horses trip through them.
Bright delicate birds sing,
They chirrup out their lives.
And I…
My heart is another bird
And if it doesn’t sing it dies.

                     *

Oh sweet wind, the month of Tut,
The lock of summer is melted and gone.
Fly away over the roofs, my heart,
To the house without ivy or jasmine,
To the mother of the eyes 
The eyes with hard words and sad smiles
And say to her,
“Oh friend to those who wander
Your friend who has loved you 
year after year has returned.
And by life- a night of longing,
By dawn and those who cannot sleep
By morning and those who hope
By noon and those who sweat
By evening and those who are tired
By Maghreb- and what is it
But a punishment for madmen?
Do not abandon a friend
Who was never false
And never- though love was lost
Cried out-
And never said, “But I…”
May the earth and sky be my witness.”

And around the shanties and the hovels,
Heart,when you go
Don’t go as a nightingale or as a bat-
Go as what you are,
A heart
With a thousand eyes 
and a thousand ears
And a thousand thousand tongues.
Crawl on your belly on the pavement in the dust
And if it is the cowardly month of Tuba, the brutal,
Listen and see what rises in the wind,
Oh heart, oh million,
Say to those in the house of tin,
“Wake up!
Your lost friend returns.
Your friend who wandered too far, forgive him.
Oh you who live in a house of tin,
Come out, rejoice!
I am not Christ,
But I’ll tell you something,
And I swear it to you,
I swear to you-
The world is lie upon lie
And you alone are true.”

                             *

Sucked through the ribs
The heat of noon unbuttons my breast,
My breast, still full of sighs,
Sighs and clanging iron and songs.
Oh come Baramhat- Spring, perfume,
Greenness, sparrows, silkworm.
Come here and see me without a mask.
For after Amshir, the father of wind,
And Tuba, the father of frost,
You come Baramhat, you gem,
You father of sun,
And my heart
Doesn’t know how to whisper.

The Falcon

Amal Donqal
Go round, winged falcon, go round
The year passes and the end will come
And when my death comes
It comes around, like the ravenous falcon.

The Pyramid Texts

2500 B.C.

The sword of Orion opens the doors of the sky.
Before the doors close the gate to the path 
through the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark,
As the falcon flies as the falcon flies
May Unis rise into the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark.
They make a path for Unis.
Unis takes the path.
Unis becomes the falcon.

 

1200 B.C. (?)

The Song of the Harper

Death is before me today
Like the smell of myrrh
Like sitting under sails in the wind
Death is before me today
Like the smell of lilies 
Like sitting on the shore of a drunken land
Death is before me today

Invocation to a Scribe

If you learn this profession 
You will become a writer
Think of the writers of the past
Their names have become immortal
Even though they are dead
And their descendants are gone.
They didn’t make themselves tombs out of copper
With tombstones of iron from heaven
They didn’t think about leaving heirs
In order to perpetuate their names.
They made heirs out of books
They had written themselves.
People they will never know are their children
For a writer is a teacher to all.
Their houses are buried, 
their servants are gone,
Their graves are forgotten, 
But their names live on 
In the books they made
While they were alive.
Be a writer. Take this to heart.
And your name will be like theirs.
Writing is better than something made of stone
Than a solid tomb
For it lives in the heart.
A man decays,
His corpse is dust
His family dies,
But his books live on.

Wednesdays with Denise

For my first post, I’d like to highlight Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast which began in December of 2021.  The hosts, James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith, offer insightful, hilarious, dishy (or “Bysshy” in the case of Percy Bysshe Shelley) commentary on all things poetry. These endlessly inventive hosts play literary games like “When Rita Dove Cries” (where listeners guess if a statement is by Rita Dove or Prince) and “More Moore and Moore” (where listeners guess if a statement is by Marianne Moore or Julianne Moore). So far, Hall and Smith have interviewed Maureen Seaton, David Trinidad, Carl Phillips, Miguel Murphy, Jacques J. Rancourt, Diane Seuss, and moi, with more interviews on the way. Breaking Form starts with a warning that the two hosts will gossip, interview, and throw shade, acknowledging “we are not for everyone.” If you have Victorian sensibilities or a low tolerance for raunch, maybe stick with NPR.  But if you are up for filth, poignancy, and belly laughs, you will be hooked. The hosts have an easy banter which makes you feel like you are at a party trying to keep up with really smart people …except you don’t even have to put on your lipstick (I’m looking at you Diane Seuss)! -- Denise Duhamel

https://breakingformpod.buzzsprout.com

The Eastern Forest [trans. by Susan Brind Morrow]

 

The horns of a deer are still soft in September
An owls face is mostly ear

 

Fire in the trees at the end of winter
When red tongues of color run under their skin

 

The season of death begins with strokes of red
Its cold breath pours over the hill that swallowed the sun

 

Beeswax and fruit
And honey that tastes like raspberries thick with crystal in the comb
The full to bursting days of leaves on East Lake Road
A map of color in the fall between the fields and lake,
Sharp prickling smell of winter-
Pale blues, crushed powder snow,
The early green of winter wheat
In upturned earth; and summer’s riches
Seaweed and fish slime and stones baked on the shore,
And wreathes of rainbowed gasoline that flow
Under the dock where the carp spawn at night
In the shallow water-
The good things about Geneva
Almost make me forget its gloom,
And how my heart was broken there-
Torn into a blossoming wound,
The rose grows out of the wound

                                *

Unsheathed deer gut by the stream
A black living rust licks it down to the soft stones
Soaked in green light.
A leopard frog froze in the water last night

 

Dozens of snails in rose translucent shells
And yellow
Plastered like closing flowers on the dead stems of reeds

Now in cinders
Cedar has leaves 
Like the skin of a salamander

 

Her hair was like the fur of a winter animal
And her hands were webbed like stars

 

Scraps of color in the forest
the head of the red-bellied woodpecker
satin against the dead wood

 

She made a pillow out of the dress
Dragonflies settled around it with a light papery scratch
Throbbing salamander bodies- and glossy prismed eyes
Funny how insects prefer certain colors

 

And beyond them the mirrory river
Full of forming stars

 

Soft as a newborn, milk fed fawn
Left in the woods by its horned mother and afraid

 

Black vultures shadowing each other around the white rock

 

Pale blue bone white days of winter
When the sun is warm and the wind is bitter

 

David found a luna moth- or had my mother found it for him
Pressed against the screen door of the kitchen, a left-over from the night.
It’s huge delicate wings were the most deliciously cool shade of green I had ever seen,
Such a fine unusual shade of green I could taste it in my mouth,
Feel it’s delicate tissue on the tips of my fingers.
How could I draw such a rare color into myself?
I could only do this, taste and feel the color, as I looked at the moth

 

Clouds closed the sky like a fist

 

The silver light has retreated onto the branch tips, silvering now only the shells of the trees.
It is November. The air is cold, and there is still a burning color to things
The red squirrels are whistling in the maples by the road.

 

On the dry stoney side of the creekbed in spring were efts the color of cinnabar flecked with gold, their eyed skin as soft as wet sand. The solitary stalk of a cardinal flower, its rare deep red the true scarlet of nature, would stand in the fresh green light of the wet wood like a hidden flag.

 

Would oh would I were a kingfisher
That flies among the halcyons
Along the breaking waves, 
With a fearless heart, that holy bird
The deep blue of the sea

Kingfisher detail, Nelson Shanks

-- Alcman; Susan Brind Morrow trans.

The Mets are in the post season [by Greg Pattenaude]

On Monday evening in Milwaukee, the Mets defeated the Brewers 7-2 and with the victory, guaranteed their first post season appearance in six years.  Max Scherzer, returning from the Injured List, was brilliant, retiring all 18 batters he faced with apparent little effort.  If not for wanting to limit the number of pitches, he may have been on his way to a perfect game.  He had to settle for two-thirds of one and his 200th  Major League victory.

The Mets broke the ice in a scoreless game in the 4th inning.  Pete Alonso connected with a 3-run homer, his 36th of the season. In the 6th, back-to-back triples by Brandon Nimmo and Francisco Lindor followed by a double from “cult hero” Daniel Vogelbach made it 5-0.  After Scherzer left the game in the 6^th, the Brewers plated two on a two-run homer by Rowdy Tellez.  But any thought of a Brewers’ comeback was put to rest in the 8th, when the Mets tacked on two more, thanks to RBI singles by Tyler Naquin and Tomas Nido.

After the game, the Mets celebrated in subdued fashion.  Rather than the usual oft-repeated champaign spray madhouse in the locker room, players were seen holding flutes of bubbly, more like receiving Prosecco while heading into the cocktail hour of a wedding reception.  Clearly, they knew that more and bigger celebrations lay ahead, but nevertheless acknowledged a significant achievement.

What has been the difference this year’s success story, as opposed to other recent years?  The answer is manager Buck Showalter.  His old-school, no-nonsense approach is exactly what this young team needed.  Combined with adding veterans like Scherzer and infielder Eduardo Escobar, professionalism has returned while still allowing the team to shine with individuality and personality within those bounds.  An example of that is Edwin Diaz's 9th inning anthem of Narco by Timmy Trumpet which heralds in victories.  Gone are players giving thumbs-down gestures to fans or stuffed ponies in the dugout for riding after non-consequential home runs.  Having an owner Steve Cohen that actually cares about the team’s success other than the financial bottom line also helps.  

The Mets still hope to win the National League’s Eastern Division. May that be the next celebration with several more to follow.  Stay tuned!

"Affirmation" [by Donald Hall]

The late Donald Hall pictured here with his wife, Jane Kenyon

Donald Hall was born on this day in 1928. As guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1989 -- the second volume in the series -- he taught me much about the making of an anthology. As a man of letters, who felt as comfortable writing a profile of Henry Moore or a sports story about the Boston Celtics as a romantic poem for Jane or an essay in literary appreciation, he proved that the life of a poet and the career of a professional writer could coincide. He worked in a variety of genres and wrote for periodicals as different from one another as The Paris Review and Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe and Yankee, and showed by his example that all the writing you do helps all the other writing you do, and all the styles and forms of writing are valid: the interview, the children's story or poem, the textbook, the diatribe, the anecdote, the blessedly unself-centered memoir in which the emphasis is on Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Join me in saluting this masterly poet, teacher, editor, writer. -- DL

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

-- Donald Hall

Light in the desert articulates things very strongly . . . [by Susan Brind Morrow]

2. The Desert

I left home because my older sister Barbara was killed in a car crash. We were close enough in age to have that twin-like sense of the sibling who is always there. In her absence I became her- or at least moved into the pattern of what she was doing, going away to college. I always think of the vision in Ennius 

germana sorror, errare videbar, tardaque vestigare et quarere te, neque posse

my sister my twin, I seem to wander and track and search for you, but cannot (find you)

I found myself in the New York of the 1970s. New York was a wreck in those days. A woman was found cut up in a garbage can a few blocks down Broadway my first week of school, the Health Department closed the cafeteria, and I went and got my own apartment on 112th Street- for $140.00 a month, the tuition was $2500.00 a semester and I lived on thirty dollars a week.

But in that context of things falling apart I found myself among remarkable people to whom I owe a great deal. At the table in the little library of the Columbia Classics Department I read Plato, parsing it out line by line with my Greek professor, the great papyrologist Roger Bagnall. That is where I learned about writing. Plato wrote with such economy, was so clean, as we used to say, never an unnecessary word, and used the devices of poetry like anacolouthon and isocolon in his prose. Roger started me studying hieroglyphs, sent me to work on papyri at the Brooklyn Museum, and sent me out to work on an archaeological survey in the Western Desert when I was around twenty, a profound experience that affected me for the rest of my life. Within weeks of my coming back from that first time in the desert my brother David was killed in a car crash driving down to visit me in N.Y. 

I left, and went and lived on nothing, on the road, primarily in Africa, for two years. I was thinking about death and nature and language and eternity, an atmosphere that pervades the two prose poem/essays that I wrote below:

Light

There is a clarity of light in the desert that articulates things very strongly. It changes from moment to moment, and with it the colors change, the colors and tones of the shadows and the rocks- from violet to blue to gray. One might say that this light enables one to see in a way that is not possible elsewhere. The light itself has a kind of purity, and for some this is why the desert is a holy place. The desert eats everything, desert nomads say. And one might say, if this is death, this stark beauty, I’ll take it. For the desert is not a static thing, a place, but a process that is ongoing across the face of the earth. The Western Desert was once an ocean floor, peopled with fish and crinoids and oyster shells, whose remains are thickly embedded in the vividly colored layers of sea clay sculpted into isolated outcrops by the desert wind. Once it was a forested plain, and the shells of trees, turned to red and brown shards of stone, lie heaped in places among the fragments of bone scattered over the ground like a fine covering of soft white snow. If everything- oceans and forests and all living things, ultimately become this pure land of rock and light, one might think, if this is death I’ll take it, I am willing to be part of the inevitable transformation of all things into this stark absolute beauty. 

The Translation of Nature                                                          

Tongues in trees

Books in the running brooks

Sermons in stones

And good in everything

The great sea that surrounds us all is not death but life. We cannot see the radiant flow of animate minutiae that pervade the water, earth, and air around us. What we can see are the detailed symmetries of individual living things, and in these symmetries the underlying pattern that is the key to the mystery of eternal life. This hidden structure of life manifests in the Fibonacci lattices of growth that underlie the forms of plants and animals, and the dendritic mechanism of memory itself. The mind is a mirror, illuminating minute particularities even as it reflects in its very nature the universal flow.

The flow of radiolarians in the sea, shells and fragments left by drifting waves on the shore, masses of people drifting through airport corridors, rushing in waves toward departing planes. To capture these things is indeed to capture both beauty and insight as a bird in flight, to bring a sense of joy and motion to the intricate plethora of forms in nature, and to pass this vision on as a radiant gift to the world. 

Plants and animals are spun on the same pattern.

To see the human form as a fibrous mass of roots touches on this profound truth: A lace-like pattern of nerves underlies the skin of both, raising the question- when did these parallel life forms diverge?

The seed is what is left of the plant,

But the same cannot be said of us: you cannot plant the bones of an animal

This human dilemma, how to bring back to life what remains, 

has been universally solved by the book. 

 

What is involved is a conjuring trick. The electricity of the mind runs along vivid lines of association through its thread-like channels of memory. Hieroglyphs are not cryptic, but synecdoche: the sketch of an animal suggests some aspect of its nature. This animal particular conjures in the mind not merely itself, but its suggestion of a quality observed in other things. The flamingo is the hieroglyph for red, and blood; the crocodile for rage, and lightning- terrifying hidden things that strike. Forever hidden in the sign is the potential. The letter is the seed of the word. The word is the seed of thought.

Thus the very bones of language have the power to bring back what is gone.

The eye is the hieroglyph not to see, but to create. The presence of the artist is implicit in this insight. Perception is the essence of creation. What eye first saw the world in translation? Who created the alphabet? The composite phrase itself supplies the answer: alpha, the head of a bull, and beta, house, a word that even today can simply mean a movable divided tent. These are the paraphernalia of herders in semi-arid lands, people to whom water is in motion: a wave. Is it a wave made by wind on the sea? or is it the wave-like line left on desert rock as the water left by passing rain evaporates? There is always something wistful in catching the fleeting thing and writing it down.

The fossil stands for the form. Language works in much the same way. That letters on a page are the remnant rags of things: fossils and bones whose fine symmetries yet contain the spark of life; that the page is on and of the earth itself, are truths that capture the magical essence of memory, of how it works, of what writing and representation are, and are for.

one can imagine standing on the shore of an ancient sea, picking up fragments of coral or stone and arranging these shapes with aesthetic delight on the beach- clearing the ground with the flat of a hand to make a smooth page out of dirt or sand, and letting aesthetic intuition create a thought, a storyline, with a fluid mix of suggestive objects. A fragment suggests a human hand (the hieroglyphic verb to give); another a face (the preposition upon), or the hoof of an animal (the sign to repeat, to do it again).

 Thus random objects become signs in the magical glow of the mind, in the endless flow of luminous living things, including ourselves. The skull, the simple remnant of a human form- no more complex than a seed pod that has lost its meaning once the seed is gone- comes to mean death itself. Not death but the fear of death, for death is an idea that belongs to the illusion of the solidity of the world. 

Shakespeare told the truth: 

nothing of him that doth fade, 

but doth suffer a sea change 

into something rich and strange.

 

Above are prose poems I wrote as essays on the work of portrait photographer E.C.Warner, and the artist Michele Oka Doner

The Eye

The Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison wrote in 1912, (to paraphrase from memory), “Always pay attention to the untranslatable word, for there you may rediscover the source of sanctity.”

To pursue a question about an untranslatable word:

What is the origin, hence original meaning, of the word Jehovah/Yahweh?  

I offer an answer to this age-old question from my own observations: it is the hieroglyphic word yahw, the life-giving light that shines through all things.

This principle, the relationship between light and life, is deified in Egypt. Images in relief can be giant hieroglyphs. In this relief of Akhenaten the yahw hieroglyph, the sun streaming light, gives life to plants and people on earth alike. The rays of light are hands holding out the sign of life to everything that lives. It is the image of Avalokteshvara, he who looks down, touching every living thing with a thousand life-giving hands, open hands with eyes on them that see all the suffering of the world, that the see the reality of the world. In the Pyramid Texts these two concepts occur together where the hieroglyph is doubled in the cryptic phrase the brilliant light is in the heart of his eye. The hieroglyphic eye is the verb to create, associating the Yahweh concept with creation, with yahweh, light, as the creator, the eye that sees and shines at once.There is much Astronomy in Egyptian religious poetry. Here the soul as an infant (the word for which in hieroglyphs is moses) is washed in the field of rushes, the eastern stars at dawn.

Pure is he who is washed in the field of rushes

Pure is the light in the field of rushes

Pure is he who is washed in the field of rushes

Pure is Unis in the field of rushes

You are born of dusk with Orion

You rise with Orion in the Eastern Sky

And descend with Orion again in the West

The third with you is Sirius, purest of places,

Who leads along the fair paths of the sky

Through fields of celestial rushes

 

The soul rises as Orion.

The stars are fields.

The stars are blossoming

The stars are green

Sew green stones

The turquoise, malachite stars

And grow green, that Tety grow green

Green as a living reed

The stars are the souls of the dead, blossoming like plants in the sky.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Five): Catherine Pierce [by Angela Ball]

 

The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes
       

And then we woke up. And our uncles
were still missing, our azaleas yanked

and gone, our dogs dashed against oaks.
But before we woke, we heard you say

in a voice that hummed without words
that you'd gone too far and would hold

that rushing hole at your center for the rest
of your life. Hearing that made us feel a little

like church. We are people who forgive, but
who can forgive something with no eyes,

no ribs, no head to bow in shame?
In the dream, though, we sat and spoke

somber. In the dream, we reached out
and took what must have been your hand,

vanishing and damp. You let us.
And when your whir-voice said, full

of torn-off roof shingles and children's
coin collections, that you were sorry,

we wanted, with all our blood and breath,
to believe you. So, for the span of a sleep, we did.

--Catherine Pierce

When a devastating natural disaster occurs, it’s so hard to reckon with the seeming arbitrariness of the destruction—why this town and not that one? Why this house, this car, this family? In this poem, I wanted to give the townspeople a chance to imagine, at least briefly, intention, remorse, and grace.—Catherine Pierce

Catherine Pierce is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and the author of four books of poems: Danger Days (2020), The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words, all from Saturnalia Books. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. An NEA Fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize winner, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Five): Catherine Pierce

Catherine Pierce’s revelatory poem begins with its title, “The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes.” “And then we woke up” dashes this fantasy, yet the poem obsessively continues it: working to anthropomorphize, even negotiate with, an impossibly brutal natural force that slams all it encounters, killing cowering people and animals and carrying photographs thousands of miles to where they are sometimes posted on social media and recovered. Catherine Pierce lives in Tornado Alley, as do I. Coined as part of a geographical research project in 1952, the term, with its Noir quality, suggests permanent destitution—and indeed, many towns must rebuild from zero, knowing that more tornados will spin towards them.

How to deal psychologically with this situation, let alone poetically? Though this is a more rural than urban problem, urbanity is needed—an approach with play in it—play that, far from trivializing the tornado’s impact, lets us, in part, get our minds around it. One model informing this poem may be Kenneth Koch’s brilliant addresses to large, abstract entities, such as World War II. Another may be Frank O’Hara channeling Mayakovsky in the famous sun-initiated conversation poem, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” 

A true literalist of the imagination, Pierce begins by dramatizing the phenomenon’s absurd violence: “And our uncles / were still missing, our azaleas yanked / / and gone, our dogs dashed against oaks.” Like O'Hara's sun, Pierce's tornado speaks first:

 

     But before we woke, we heard you say

 

     in a voice that hummed without words

     that you'd gone too far and would hold

 

     that rushing hole at your center for the rest

     of your life. Hearing that made us feel a little

 

     like a church . . . .

 

“We heard you say” reminds us that this is fantasy—but it is also reality: a tornado cannot live without its “rushing hole.” Feeling “a little / like a church” is a wonderful literalization of faith, akin to William Blake’s expose of hypocrisy in “London,” where “the Chimney-sweepers cry / Every blackning Church appalls.” Then there is the wonderfully funny and spot-on

     We are people who forgive, but

     who can forgive something with no eyes,

     no ribs, no head to bow in shame?

In what context can this happen? In dream, of course. There, the tornado has a “whir-voice” that Pierce, in an inspired move, fills with “roof shingles and children’s / coin collections”; a voice that says “sorry,” a bare-bones apology that the town wants desperately “with all our breath and blood” to believe. Catherine Pierce’s riveting “The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes,” a poem that reminds us of the radically communal nature of weather, ends with a modest Shakespearean sentence—one that encompasses much of human nature: “So, for the span of a sleep, we did.”

--Angela Ball

Diane Burns's "Sure You Can Ask Me a Personal Question" [ chosen by Terence Winch]

 

I can't remember when I first encountered this poem.  I know I stumbled on it accidently, I think while doing some on-line research during my days as an employee of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.  We had launched a poetry feature called "Pulling Down the Clouds"  for our membership magazine, and I was always on the lookout for interesting Native work to run as the focus of the feature.  

I knew immediately I wanted this poem in the magazine.  I loved its directness, its snarly, unapologetic, in-your-face attitude. Its completely sophisticated, contemporary use of language.  This was not work that catered to white assumptions and stereotypes: just the opposite, in fact.  Hers is a complex voice in which humor, bitterness, and hipness all coexist in service to the poem. This was a voice like that of many of my Indian friends and colleagues, but one rarely heard by the non-Native world (at least beyond the pages of a Sherman Alexie book).     

Further investigation revealed that the poem was written in 1989 and that Diane Burns, a Lac Courte Oreilles/Chemeheuvi, was born in 1957 and had passed away in 2006. She "first emerged," we told our readers, "as a powerful literary voice in the 1970s working as a poet and model in New York City. Burns’s first and only book of poetry, Riding the One-Eyed Ford (Contact II Publications, 1981), further established her reputation as a unique talent by challenging Native American stereotypes through sharp wit and honesty. In the 1980s, Burns joined a circle of poets and writers in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, reading her work at the renowned Bowery Poetry Club and Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery." 

________________________

Sure You Can Ask Me A Personal Question

How do you do?
No, I am not Chinese.
No, not Spanish.
No, I am American Indian, Native American.

No, not from India.
No, not Apache
No, not Navajo.
No, not Sioux.
No, we are not extinct.
Yes, Indian.

Oh?
So that's where you got those high cheekbones.
Your great grandmother, huh?
An Indian Princess, huh?
Hair down to there?
Let me guess. Cherokee?

Oh, so you've had an Indian friend?
That close?

Oh, so you've had an Indian lover?
That tight?

Oh, so you've had an Indian servant?
That much?

Yeah, it was awful what you guys did to us.
It's real decent of you to apologize.
No, I don't know where you can get peyote.
No, I don't know where you can get Navajo rugs real cheap.
No, I didn't make this. I bought it at Bloomingdales.

Thank you. I like your hair too.
I don't know if anyone knows whether or not Cher
is really Indian.
No, I didn't make it rain tonight.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Spirituality.
Uh-huh. Yeah. Spirituality. Uh-huh. Mother
Earth. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Spirituality.

No, I didn't major in archery.
Yeah, a lot of us drink too much.
Some of us can't drink enough.

This ain't no stoic look.
This is my face.
__________________

For more information on Burns, check out this obituary. I don't know if this is Burns herself reading the poem in this clip, but perhaps someone else out there would know.

"Everything falls apart, but poetry lasts . . ." [by Susan Brind Morrow]

1. Water

I realized in my teens that the only thing I was really interested in was poetry, and everything I did had to do with that. My mother had a reverence for poetry and knew a great deal by heart, and we were trained to memorize at a young age and grew up with the Oxford Book of English Verse and American Verse as primary books in the house. Her Aunt was a Canadian poet who lived very simply in a wilderness retreat called Abbey Dawn with her husband, a Canadian gunner in the RAF who was shot down over Germany in WWI, and after a long time in a German prison camp just wanted the life of a woodsman in the Great Lakes. So for us from the beginning poetry was connected with nature, and with a kind of religious feeling too- a traditional perspective I think, and very American. It had to do with looking closely at things, with the translation of the visual world. There was an awareness, probably coming from WWI, that everything falls apart, but poetry lasts. Later as I looked at other languages I was keenly aware of words having a tactile quality, a closeness to the physical thing.

Like a lot of people of my generation, I imagine, as I look back I am very happy to have been alive when I was, when there were no cellphones and you could go anywhere and nobody knew you, and those who did didn’t know where you were. I spent a long time in Egypt, a spectacular environment not unlike the Finger Lakes where I come from, an environment dominated by water.

I am publishing a book of poetry and watercolors next year. The book is called Water, and begins with something I wrote on the beach at Exuma where we used to go in the wintertime, a poem in which I am just describing what I see. The book is a sort of American Zen album like the albums of China and Japan with images from nature and poems beside them. I published a book like this called Trees in the middle of my second book Wolves and Honey and include pages from both books below:

Water: Conch shell watercolor, Stocking Island

Trees: Cicada, Cicatrix, Thaw 

The Alta California Chapbook Prize from Gunpowder Press is open! [by Emma Trelles]

 Gunpowder Press invites emerging and established Latina/x/o/e poets (age 18+) residing in California to enter the 2nd Alta California Chapbook Prize. The deadline is October 3, 2022.

Two manuscripts will be selected and published in bilingual editions. Send 8-12 pages of poetry written in either English or Spanish.The judge is Francisco Aragón and the series editor is Emma Trelles.  

Click here for complete details about the contest and to submit your work!


This year's prize is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Mellon Foundation.

Joe Wenderoth: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

___________________________________________________________________

My Life

after Henri Michaux

Somehow it got into my room.

I found it, and it was, naturally, trapped.

It was nothing more than a frightened animal.

Since then I raised it up.

I kept it for myself, kept it in my room,

kept it for its own good.

I named the animal, My Life.

I found food for it and fed it with my bare hands.

I let it into my bed, let it breathe in my sleep.

And the animal, in my love, my constant care,

grew up to be strong, and capable of many clever tricks.

One day, quite recently,

I was running my hand over the animal's side

and I came to understand

that it could very easily kill me.

I realized, further, that it would kill me.

This is why it exists, why I raised it.

Since then I have not known what to do.

I stopped feeding it,

only to find that its growth

has nothing to do with food.

I stopped cleaning it

and found that it cleans itself.

I stopped singing it to sleep

and found that it falls asleep faster without my song.

I don't know what to do.

I no longer make My Life do tricks.

I leave the animal alone

and, for now, it leaves me alone, too.

I have nothing to say, nothing to do.

Between My Life and me,

a silence is coming.

Together, we will not get through this.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Joe Wenderoth has published a variety of books, all of which are available for sale. He is from Baltimore.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                                Lion Man, Photograph by Bilal Arslan

Susan Brind Morrow Guest Author September 19-23

Susan Brind Morrow is an author and poet who has written extensively on language and metaphor drawn from the natural world. Morrow studied Greek, Latin, Arabic and hieroglyphic texts as an undergraduate and graduate student in Classics at Columbia University in New York. Morrow first went to Egypt as an archaeologist on the Dakhleh Oasis Project, and continued to live and study in Egypt and Sudan, ultimately as a fellow of the Institute for Current World Affairs, living with the nomadic population for two years, studying the Arabic language and desert traditions with a particular interest in the origin of hieroglyphs in the desert environment. This decade of work became her first book The Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert, one of three finalists for the Pen Award in 1998. Morrow’s analysis, translation and commentary of the hieroglyphic text in the Pyramid of Unis, The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts, was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in 2015. Morrow is the author of Wolves and Honey: A Hidden History of the Natural World. Morrow’s work has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Nation, The Seneca Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Her papers are in the Sowell Collection at Texas Tech University.
Susan Brind Morrow is a recipient of the 2022 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Morrow is a fellow of The New York Institute for the Humanities and a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation.

Find out more about Susan Brind Morrow here.

Welcome, Susan. 

--sdl

"Jack Benny's Violin" [by James Cummins and David Lehman]

Jack Benny’s Violin

I have always wanted to write a poem called Jack Benny’s violin.
How often have I begun a poem with that title.
At a key moment a mugger intercepts our man in sin
with a gun. “Your money or your life?”
There follows the longest pause in the history
of stand-up comedy.  “I’m thinking!  I’m thinking!”

Jack Benny’s violin was the thinking
man’s violin,
as if a scratchy sound symbolized Jack’s whole history,
metonymic for the man who wore the title
“King of Comedy” for most of his working life.
No, he couldn’t play it like Henry Mancini;

he played it straight.  Yet in his mind he was a man seen
hurling the javelin in the glory of his youth, not thinking
of his job, his boss, his wife, or of what life
after sixty has to offer.  At night he plays the violin
badly (Brahms’s concerto), but Y. A. Tittle
passes to Del Shofner when he dreams his story

is metonymic for the whole Giants’ story,
even as he might say Del was his main man in sin:
their opponents thought it a sin, to rob them of a title.
Could the mugger have been thinking
it was a sin to rob Jack of his violin?
Or was he just giving Jack the straight line of his life?

“Jack Benny was my role model,” John said.  Life
has been good to the deadpan master of the double-take.  History
to him was like a theme for solo violin:
playing it he proved that the love of god and the need to sin
can coexist.  It defied reason, but thinking, real thinking,
was like that—like a poem abandoned without a title.

We were listening to a new rapper, Li’l N Title,
when John said, apropos nothing and everything, “Life
was a joint, and the Firesign Theater, and poems that did their thinking
at warp speed, and on vinyl.  But I guess all that’s history
now.  Jack Benny shuffled off the stage as Charlie Manson
shuffled on — we should’ve listened better to Jack’s violin.”

And you, dear reader, are entitled to hear this violin
duet and imagine it is a hymn to life, to man and woman in sin,
because it wears its thinking on its sleeve and calls it history.

-- James Cummins and David Lehman (2012)

When Insults Had Class [by Terence Winch]

With thanks to Terence Winch, here are some well-turned insults from back in the day before the era of the ubiquitous four-letter word.

Lady Astor: "If you were my husband I'd give you poison."
Churchill: "If you were my wife, I'd drink it"
[Note: it has to be said that Churchill is the Yogi Berra of witty British repartee; when you're not sure who came up with the bon mot, Winston's your man.]

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or  of some unspeakable disease."
"That  depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your  mistress."

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -- Winston Churchill

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.." -- Oscar Wilde

"I  am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend. . . if you have one."
-- George Bernard Shaw to Winston  Churchill
"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second. . . if there is one." -- Winston Churchill, in response.
[This exchange has been attributed to Shaw and James Whistler.]

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." -- John  Bright

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" -- Mark Twain
[A retort a philatelist has to love.]

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." -- Mae  West
[In a fit of remorse, a convicted murderer said, "my father should have used a condom!"]

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." -- Oscar  Wilde

"He  uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts . . . for support rather  than illumination."
-- Andrew Lang  (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." -- Billy Wilder

"I've  had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." -- Groucho Marx

from the archive; September 16, 2009

from "Duke Rhino," a work in progress [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Louie Balin
When my nephew Norb Berlowitz was drafted into the army,
Norb’s younger brother Seymour enrolled at the University of
Wisconsin. That was in 1943. 

If there was no father in the home, the government at that time
wasn’t drafting two brothers from the same family. There was
no father in Norb and Seymour’s home. My sister Lenore was
the boys’ mother. Lenore and I raised Norb and Seymour after
Lenore’s husband, Moe Berlowitz, abruptly disappeared. Moe
happened to be a professional magician so there was a bit of
humor in his disappearance.

We lived in an apartment on Douglas Boulevard with my other
sister, Bess Turk – her husband also disappeared – and Grandma
Minnie, the bubbe. Grandpa Victor had long since passed away

By the end of the war the bubbe too had passed away, Seymour
had joined a fraternity at the University of Wisconsin and Norb
was back from Europe after getting badly wounded fighting the
Nazis. I was doing well at the Harrison Wholesale Company with
my partner Albert Arenberg. The summer was hot so we sold lots
of fans.

Early in 1946 my secretary Evelyn Modeen caught the flu and she
decided to stop working. This was a shock. I took her out to lunch
and said, “I don’t know what I’ll do without you.”

She said, “Oh, you’ll manage just fine.”

I put an ad in the Tribune for a private secretary. I knew I would hire
the first person who came in. I just wanted to get it over with. The last
time I ran an ad in the Tribune Evelyn Modeen was the first person who
came in and she was at Harrison Wholesale for ten years.

A woman named Leah Esken came in. She didn’t call, she just came in
. Evelyn Modeen talked with her for a minute and then brought her over
to me. 

I don’t have a private office, just a desk among all the other desks. There’s
a little wooden fence with a gate around my desk so I stood up when she
came through the gate. 

She was an attractive woman. Without even thinking about it I remarked
that she looked like the actress Barbara Stanwyck. 

‘Oh, from Double Indemnity. Thank you, that’s so flattering.’ 

Then she added, “You look a little like Edward G. Robinson!”

“Not Fred MacMurray?” We both laughed. 

“Barbara Stanwyck was an orphan,” I said. “Maybe that’s why I’ve always
liked her. I was an orphan too.’

Why was I talking about Barbara Stanwyck and being an orphan? Leah
already seemed like an old friend or a member of the family.

She asked, “Were you in an orphanage?” 

“Yes, in Cleveland. The Jewish Orphan’s Home.”

“Did you ever think of running away?”

“Never. It was a wonderful place. We played baseball every day. In the
winter we played inside.”

I showed Leah around the Harrison Wholesale building. Almost anything
you could imagine was there. “Customers come in with catalogs and give
their orders to the order pickers,” I said. “The order pickers find the items
and bring them down to the customers. It looks messy but that’s the whole
idea. This isn’t Marshall Fields on State Street. It’s supposed to be a secret
place, like a speakeasy.”

“Your wife must like this place. She can get anything she wants, right?”

‘Oh, I’m not married.’

Leah looked hesitant. Maybe she thought my wife had died.

I said, “I’ve just never been married.” I wanted to sound reassuring. Back
at my desk I thanked Leah for coming in and gave the latest Harrison
Wholesale catalog

She said, “Thanks but we already have a catalog. My brother-in-law
Irving was here the other day and bought some tire chains. I live with
Irving and my sister Dorothy.'

That was all. I walked her to the door. 

“It was nice to meet you, Mr. Balin,” she said. 

“Well, you’ve got the job.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leah Esken
Dorothy and Irving got married in 1939. Nate, who is younger
than Dorothy and I, got married to Ina Kirsch in 1938. He was
just eighteen years old and Ina was seventeen. If they’d had
children before the war started, Nate would not have gotten
drafted. But it was only after Nate returned from Texas and
started Same Day Cleaners that Ann gave birth to Shula and
Myrna, the twin girls. 

During the war years Dorothy and I worked at the torpedo factory
in Forest Park. That’s where she met Irving, who was not drafted
because he worked at the torpedo factory. Thousands of people
worked there but not too many Jews. I had a few boyfriends but I
could never be serious about a non-Jew.

I shared an apartment in Douglas Park with Dorothy, Irving, and
Nate’s wife Ina. It was only a few blocks from where Louie lived
with his sisters but of course I didn’t know that at the time. Dorothy
got pregnant when the war still had a year to go but as soon as it
was over Dorothy, Irving, and I moved to an apartment at Cornelia
and Halsted on the North Side. Dorothy’s baby Victor was only about
six months old. Then Nate returned from Texas and also moved to the
North Side with Ina. He started Same Day Cleaners. 

Nate thought Irving was not good enough for Dorothy. He said Dorothy
had settled for Irving. He told me not to make the same mistake. He
said I was smarter and better looking than Dorothy and I shouldn’t
settle for some nudnik. 

Meanwhile Nate had twin girls, Dorothy had a husband and a baby who was
almost a year old, and I had nothing even though I was the oldest. I was
waitressing at the Walnut Room in Marshall Fields and helping Dorothy with Victor. 

When I saw the want-ad for Harrison Wholesale I thought I would give it a try.
Why not? I knew nothing about being a secretary but I was a good student at
Austin High School. I could certainly read and write.

When I met Louie at the interview I was surprised that he wasn’t wearing a
wedding ring. But Jewish men don’t always wear one. 

I was more surprised when he said he had never been married. 

I was also surprised that he didn’t have a private office. He didn’t need an office
but he needed a private secretary.

I wasn’t surprised when he told me I had the job. I was glad to hear it though. 

I saw a new world opening for me in the interview at Harrison Wholesale.
I didn’t see every little detail yet, but so what? It was more like a dream that
you remember the next morning and you know it will come true. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rabbi Frankenstein 
I first met Louie Balin when I was invited to Chicago to audition
for the office of associate rabbi at the old Washington Boulevard
Temple. I conducted High Holy Day services and I met some
prominent members of the congregation, including Louie. Well,
I passed the test. My family and I were soon on our way to the
Windy City.

Although I’d had my own pulpit in New Orleans, I was intrigued
by the possibilities in the North. Chicago’s Jewish community –
second largest in the United States – was in transition both
physically and financially. In the first years of the twentieth century,
large numbers of Jews who had been born in the Maxwell Street
ghetto migrated northwest to the West Side area around Douglas
Boulevard and Roosevelt Road. For several decades all was well
and good. During the 1940s and 1950’s, however, owing to racial
and economic changes on the West Side, a new, two-pronged
migration began. Middle class Jews, financially stable but not
necessarily wealthy, recreated the West Side in Rogers Park, or
they became pioneers in suburban Skokie and Lincolnwood.
Those who could afford it, meanwhile, moved close to the lakefront,
forming a high net-worth Jewish population along North Lake Shore
Drive and Sheridan Road.

While all this was taking place, the Washington Boulevard Temple
had found a new location and a revised identity as the Oak Park Temple,
moving decisively in the discretion of Reform Judaism. I wholeheartedly
endorsed this trend. 

Suddenly the position of senior rabbi at Temple Sholom became available.
This was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Temple Sholom, on North Lake
Shore Drive, was and remains one of the premier Reform Jewish
congregations in America, comparable to Temple Emanu-el in New York
City. Furthermore, as well-to-do Jews from the West Side were relocating
to the lakefront, there was a chance to greatly enlarge Temple Sholom’s
membership and financial base. In the eyes of Temple Sholom’s Board
of Directors, this should be a top priority for a new Senior Rabbi. I promised 
the Board that I shared this goal and I also described exactly how I would
achieve it. 

Once again, thank God I passed the test. Departing the Oak Park Temple
was painful, but like Abraham in the Book of Genesis I felt called to leave
where I was and go to the place that was shown to me. 

I immediately made changes at Temple Sholom to attract the affluent new
arrivals from the West Side. I replaced the traditional siddur with the Reform
Jewish Union Prayer Book. I replaced Friday night services with Sunday
morning worship, although I did retain Shabbat observance for those few
who wished to take part. I entirely dispensed with aliyot. I incorporated
orchestral and vocal accompaniment into the Sunday services and very
fully into the High Holidays. Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah remained
available, but group confirmation for fifteen year olds became the preferred
choice. 

Louie Balin had been an early arrival on the lakefront, having left the West
Side right after his marriage to Leah in late 1946. I’d had the merit of performing
their ceremony at the Oak Park Temple, and when Louie mentioned his plans
to relocate I assumed we were parting ways for good. But when I scanned the
membership rolls at Temple Sholom, I was happy to see Louie’s name. I called
immediately and invited him to come in for a chat.

To make a long story short, Louie wound up commissioning a new Torah scroll
for the Temple as well as a beautiful stained glass window with a scene from the
Book of Ruth. Louie also assured me that his son Irwin, less than a year old at
the time, would in due course enroll in our Sunday school with an intention of
continuing all the way through confirmation. Last but not least, Louie paid
membership dues for his sisters Bess Turk and Lenore Berlowitz, who were now
also living in our neighborhood, as well for Louie’s nephews Norb and Seymour Berlowitz.