The Best American Poetry

"Reasons for Living": A new "Next Line, Please" poetry challenge

 

Our prompt this week was to write a poem based on an error, mistake, or slip of the tongue. Nearly as impressive as the poems that came in were the editing suggestions our NLP players made, which were unfailingly cordial and constructive.  It was even more difficult than usual to select among the entries.

Let’s start with poems based on typographical errors and the like. Josie Cannella’s “Prayer Against Autocorrect” begins:

Hale Merry, full of grease,
How does your garbage grow?
Wind sill or bells and cuckold’s hell
and petty maidens all in arrow

Paul Michelsen’s self-described “Tie Pose” capitalizes on mondegreens: “I always thought Jimi Hendrix / was such a ladies’ man / ‘til I heard him ‘scuze himself / to kiss this guy.” In “The Pledge,” Millicent Caliban recollects the columnist Art Buchwald’s first efforts to memorize the pledge of allegiance—“I led the pigeons to the flag”— and takes off from there to imagine the pigeons’ puzzled response to the “space marked out in red, white and blue / that did not yield any crumbs.”

Baruch November, a first-time contributor, came up with “Out of nowhere, a Shidduch,” beginning with Polonius’s famous line, twisted:

Neither a borrower nor a bungler be.
In love, the latter I’ve always been—

Having lived an eternity
alone for a Jewish man.

I posted online for a new
apartment in Crown Heights.
Out of nowhere, a shidduch

Was offered with a woman
whose sole descriptor was a love
for stray dogs.
That is just how
these days are— hounds visit

The soft rooms of women
while I busy myself bumbling

Plans for a date that’ll
only end with me

Turning on the darkness
of my empty bedroom.

It must have delighted Baruch to read that Josie Cannella loved the dog imagery and the last stanza, and was moved to look “shidduch” up in the dictionary—that is, to Google it. Learning that it meant “the offer of an arranged marriage” enhanced her pleasure in the poem.

My favorite of Millicent Caliban’s two poems is “The Poet’s Lament,” which appropriates Andrew Marvell’s majestic tetrameter and a few lines from “To His Coy Mistress” and applies them to the life of an office worker:

Had I but words enough and time,
I might write verse of love sublime.
But at my back I always hear
My supervisor hovering near.
I fear he will inspect my screen
Expecting images obscene.
So must I type this deadly dreck
From nine to five with stiffest neck.
I hate my job with all my heart,
But somehow I must do my part
To pay the bills and make the rent.
My famished soul is ne’er content

Greg Chaimov airs his fascination, which I share, with the way “sacred” becomes “scared” if we transpose two letters. “On Reading Scared as Sacred” was inspired by a line from Yannis Ritsos:

Alone with the moths on the ill-lit porch, he glances up
from Ritsos’s Monochords to track the lunar eclipse.
On his tongue, a phoneme flips—as bryd to bird
and hros to horse.  He’s startled his sense
of the verse as sacrament has led him to assume
a meaning the poet hadn’t pursued.

Assume. Ad plus sumere, for “to take,”
related to consume, like the shadow
that devours the moon, casts a pale rose glow
across the sliver that escapes
and the tattered wings that glide
like the word he’s chasing in his mind.

 Emily fearlessly edited the poem:

Alone with moths on the ill-lit porch,
he reads and tracks the lunar eclipse.
On his tongue, a phoneme flips—as bryd to bird
and hros to horse. Assume, related

to consume, like the shadow
that devours the moon, a pale rose glow
across the sliver that escapes,
like the word he’s chasing in his mind.

The impulse to condense is always worthwhile, though we would lose, in this case, “verse as sacrament.” Whether you prefer Emily’s revised version or not, I applaud the effort NLP players are making to critique, edit, and respond to one another’s poems without an inkling of rancor.

Christine Rhein wowed us all, I think, with “Voice Recognition.”

Global warming—turned global warning on my phone,
as I dictate notes about my friend—his cozy home
on the shore of eerie—the lake making its weigh up
his see wall, splashing past it—residence / resonance
in peril. And of course, climate scientists—science dissed,
their data obvious to sum / oblivious to others. How to
school / cool the planet—the question of the our, of mine
over matter, of dollars and sense—profits, pipelines,
the booms day / doomsday clock—so much time, wasted.
Oh, feudal world. Oh, futile trust in words. Monstrous
storms. Towns on fire. Paradise—a pair of dice.

 Christine’s wordplay—in which “paradise” is the obverse of “a pair of dice”—won plaudits. Michael C. Rush singled out “The question of the our.” Charise Hoge picked “Oh, feudal world.” The ending delighted both Emily, our critic of the week, and Byron.

For the rest of this post, and the new prompt, as well as the reason a detail of Paul Cézanne's "Still Life With Apples and Pears," ca. 1891–92 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) illustrates this post, please click here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/reasons-for-living/

 

Software Sonnet [by Mitch Sisskind]

Software Sonnet

We say that he or she does not have
The software whenever he or she
Is physically, mentally, or emotionally
Incapable of performing some task
Like if he doesn't have the basketball
Software to play in the NBA or if
She can't speak French she lacks
The French software of if he or she
Cries a lot and has bad insomnia
And in old age is preoccupied
With all the missed opportunities
Then he or she needs to download
Some new emotional software
Unless it may actually be too late.

from The Bonus Round

Yetzirrah Conference: June 23-29, in Asheville, NC

The New York School Diaspora: New Series [Part Two] Maureen Bloomfield [by Angela Ball]

 

Anchises

It was far away, not long ago,
As if time were a concurrent series of durations.
Pick the one you want; the others will be dragged
By the cursor to the space beyond the outlined page.
It was planned, like a book design,
The templates were in order.
“Don’t mess with the boxes,” the designer said.
“I forget what I did and then I have to redo it.”
O.K., I said. I understand.

Allegory was a legitimate vehicle
For the recovery of ancient images, the art book said.
Pallas Athena, goddess as Madonna,
Encounters the centaur who recoils. Unrebuffed,
She winds around her finger a lock of his unruly hair.
In the dark wood there are mists that descend and
Rise again and the creatures seen there are slow-witted
And wend among the vapors slowly
So mortals can follow the pan shots of the dream.

My father does pretty well on his Alzheimer’s test.
He gets the month but not the year.
When he has to write a sentence, it’s one of praise
Of his doctor’s delicate beauty, ethereal and gold
In the style of Fra Lippo Lippi or Sandro Botticelli.
In the car on the way home, he tells a story
Then folds his hands, becomes animated,
And tells it, altering the emphasis, again.
They’re characters, the characters in all his stories.

From the Angle, Cleveland’s West Side Irish ghetto
Where his Achill-Island mother Lizzie made a bootlegger
Of his High-Church-from-Plymouth pa. Home was a business:
The lower floor a restaurant; the upper floor
A bar. Hale fellow, well met, the designated greeter,
A snappy dresser promenading along Lorain street
Hailing High Pockets, Shimmy Patton, Spuds Malloy, all
Right-off-the-boat greenhorns whose mothers, in the winter,
Walked the streets with blankets—searching for their sons.

On the eve of Saint Nick’s Day, the Salvation Army Lady
Is peeling the rind of a pomegranate with her teeth.
Her latticed fingers are stained red on the bell.
In one of Botticelli’s variations on a theme, the virgin
Holds a pomegranate, or is it the son, though cherries
Are the fruit of paradise, I’d have to tell you,
If this were a quiz. I remembered the father but not
The eponymous son. I remembered that he held his father,
Once a goddess’s lover, bundled like a packet on his back.

The land of the dead is reached by water.
They are restless, queuing on the miasmic shore.
From the kitchen window my five-year-old father
Watched as his favorite uncle, Johnny Mancuso, was gunned down.
What is this life but the intersection of two texts.
“Ain’t this the biggest mix-up that ye have ever seen:
Mi father he was Orange and mi mither she was Green.”
The swamp is foul; the sky plain; the neo-Platonic verdure,
Intricate and artful, for Reason illumines and casts away,

Allowing for precision in a context that’s barbaric.
He chose the ivory gate of sleep, forsaking false shadows.
He chose to wend backward through the gate of horn.
He was singing, the father, the true vision,
The one that he made up. From Lake Erie’s poisoned banks
The flaming city, oracular and perishing,
Kept vanishing. The time had come to wander.
Irish Sea, English Channel, Atlantic Ocean, Ohio River—
The hero’s task is always to find home.
                                                                --Maureen Bloomfield

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Maureen Bloomfield grew up in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida.  Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Paris Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, The Nation, Southern Review, and many other journals.  Her poem, "The Catholic Encyclopedia," was selected by Paul Muldoon for the Best American Poetry volume in 2005; her book Error and Angels was published by the University of South Carolina Press in the James Dickey Poetry Series.  She was for many years the editor of The Artist Magazine; her art reviews and essays have appeared in artforum, Art News, New Art Examiner, and Sculpture, among other venues.   She edited and wrote the introductory essay for Daniel E. Green Studios and Subways: An American Master His Life and Art (North Light Books, 2017).  Ms. Bloomfield has two daughters and three grandchildren; she lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Maureen Bloomfield’s “Anchises” performs an audacious feat: it deftly and resonantly joins her personal origins with Western civilization’s. More crucially, it demonstrates and celebrates how ancient stories inform ordinary life, joining the exalted and the quotidian—certainly an aesthetic priority of the New York school of poets as a whole and particularly of Frank O’Hara, for whom construction workers’ silver helmets were objects of desire and a casual louse was not only worthy of a name but of its own poem.

This poem is informally formal, its blank verse a coat not buttoned but casually thrown over the shoulders; its rhymes serendipitous. Its beginning is a case in point, at first impersonating a stock story-telling set-up, but immediately confounding any such easy invocation of the primordial: “It was far away, not long ago, / As if time were a concurrent series of durations.” In our cyber world, it turns out, where we are depends on the whereabouts of a blink. Patterns are pre-determined, “templates . . .in order,” and we shouldn’t mess with them. We rely on format the way the designer relies on her boxes.

But the second stanza tells us we may still resort to ancient shaping devices, like allegory, to reconstitute experience. No less an authority than “an art book” tells us so. And gives us a deathless scene in which the cerebral Pallas Athena encounters the instinctual centaur—who, though he recoils, finds himself attached as she “winds around her finger a lock of his unruly hair”—the line’s deliberateness mirroring the action as it’s performed. Stanzas enact scenes, and this stanza’s scene is completed in mists, its “slow-witted creatures” “wending slowly” so we dense mortals can follow the “pan shots of the dream.”

The poem we are inside is pan-ekphrastic, collaging painting and film, legend and family story.

The third stanza cuts to a vignette as ordinary as the second is extraordinary. A father is being tested for cognitive impairment. Neither completely in his time or out of it, he does “pretty well,” but is a genius at associating his doctor’s “delicate beauty” with that of women painted by “Fra Lippo Lippi or Sandro Botticelli.”  In fact, the painting referred to in the preceding stanza might well be Pallas and the Centaur, painted by Sandro Botticelli in 1452 and dramatizing the eternal struggle between intellect and instinct.

Like the great Tony Bennett, who in his final years returned to his classic self when singing, the poet’s father, a true Irishman, returns to vitality by telling stories: “They’re characters, the characters in all his stories.” This line reminds us of the link between the meanings of the word “character,” variously denoting liveliness, the possession of definite qualities; and, at its root, a mark conveying meaning.

The fourth stanza tells us the father’s (the allegorical Anchises) story in everyday, demotic speech. He’s “from the Angle, Cleveland’s West Side Irish ghetto / Where his Achill-Island mother Lizzie made a bootlegger / Of his High-Church-from Plymouth pa.” In this marriage, disparate, warring cultures collide and join. Intellect meets instinct again. The characters in this world have names that pronounce them unforgettable: “High pockets, Shimmy Patton, Spuds Malloy.” Though presumably tough guys, their mothers must seek them at night (possibly passed out on the streets) with blankets to keep them from freezing.

In the poem’s next vignette, a very unPersephone-like Salvation Army lady peels “the rind of a pomegranate with her teeth. She’s juxtaposed directly with “the virgin / In one of Botticelli’s variations on a theme,” and the poet jokily seems to confuse the fruit with her son.  They seem engaged in a cognitive quiz: “I remembered the father but not / The eponymous son. I remembered that he held his father, / Once a goddess’s lover, bundled like a packet on his back.” The ancient tale remembered is Anchises’ rescue from the burning Troy. His rescuer is Aeneus, his son with Aphrodite.

As we know, Anchises fathered Aeneus, founder of Rome, after Aphrodite saw Anchises grazing cows on the slopes of Mount Ida; seduced him; and bore a child.

Here I’d like to mention someone who has nothing to do with the poem except that he is another Ohioan: a comedian popular in the 50’s and 60’s named Cliff Arquette. His success came with the formulation of a cornpone character, “Charlie Weaver,” who became his permanent public face, a personification of a disappearing character, the down-to-earth country bumpkin who loves telling stories. Weaver’s stories came from a mythical “Mount Idy”—perhaps named for the Mount Ida where Aphrodite and Aeneus fell in love. Whatever the case, this town produced the ideal that gave dimension to Arquette’s character, the myth he needed to contrast with his here and now. Like “Anchises,” Weaver was a story that told stories—both a satisfier and a mystifier.

The poem’s next stanza fuses the Land of the Dead with the Angle, as the poet’s “five-year-old father / Watched as his favorite uncle, Johnny Mancuso, was gunned down.” Here the poem asks the rhetorical question that characterizes all experience: “What is life but the intersection of two texts.” This breathtaking statement is followed directly by dialogue showing Anchises/father as the character he is: “Mi father he was Orange and my mither she was Green.”  Orange, of course, is Protestant and British; Green, Catholic and Irish—the marriage a microcosm of the whole of Ireland. The stanza’s last two lines seem to revert, like the end of stanza two, to unsolvable mystery made of two texts in conflict: the real and the ideal.

Cleveland, with its once-burning river celebrated in a Randy Newman lyric, is an apt place for life to meet death and the underworld to meet remnants of heaven. It’s the father’s time to sing “the true vision, / the one that he made up.” But, like this poem and its story that encompasses the eternity of art and the constant vanishing of human life, the father finds himself through wandering. All waters the same: “Irish Sea, English Channel, Atlantic Ocean, Ohio River.” Maureen Bloomfield’s masterfully storied and immediate amalgam resolves itself in a simple statement that endows her father and all heroes with a straightforward, impossible purpose that transcends all others: “The hero’s task is always to find home.” -Angela Ball

 

Make Believe [by Frederica von Stade & Jerry Hadley]

 

Happy birthday to me! Max has arrived!

Bienvenue, Max!

You're too spectacular / to be in my vernacular

You're too spectacular / to be in my vernacular 

 

"June 11": Poem 076 in "Poems 180" ed. by Billy Collins for the Library of Congress

 

June 11

It's my birthday I've got an empty
stomach and the desire to be
lazy in the hammock and maybe
go for a cool swim on a hot day
with the trombone in Sinatra's
"I've Got You Under My Skin"
in my head and then to break for
lunch a corned-beef sandwich and Pepsi
with plenty of ice cubes unlike France
where they put one measly ice cube
in your expensive Coke and when
you ask for more they argue with
you they say this way you get more
Coke for the money showing they
completely misunderstand the nature of
American soft drinks which are an
excuse for ice cubes still I wouldn't
mind being there for a couple of
days Philip Larkin's attitude
toward China comes to mind when
asked if he'd like to go there he said
yes if he could return the same day

—David Lehman

David Lehman (1948- ) is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Yeshiva Boys (2009), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Evening Sun (2002), and The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (1998). Photo from 1997, the year after the poem was written.

"Lining-Up (for Charles North)" [by David Lehman]

"Lining-Up (for Charles North)" [by David Lehman]

This poem was inspired by a dream I had in which Amy Gerstler and I were on the same softball team, with her in lead-off position playing shortstop. Charles North has written many great “line ups” – for example, an all-philosopher team as well as teams consisting exclusively of diseases, vegetables, and famous couples – so I thought I would dedicate the poem to him, a confirmed Gemini, born on June 9. Charles tells me he is happy to be in the lineup, though he has reservations about the wisdom of playing him at first base. “I’m a righty,” he points out. But so were Gil Hodges and Steve Garvey, no?  But we took his reservations seriously, and are (as you will see) swirtching him to right field and Tony Towle to first base for game two of the series..

Lining Up
for Charles North 

SS Amy Gerstler
2B David Lehman
3B David Shapiro (L) 
LF David Trinidad
IB Tony Towle
RF Charles North *
CF Elaine Equi
C Ted Berrigan
P Ron Padgett (L)
Relief pitcher Vincent Katz (ROY)**
PH NL / DH AL Jerome Sala ****

General manager: Harry Mathews
Front office wise men: Bob Hershon, Mitch Sisskind
Scouts: Edwin Denby, Tim Dlugos, Maxine Chernoff, Paul Hoover, Angela Ball

Manager: Paul Violi
Bench coach: John Ashbery
First base Koch: Kenneth Coach
Third base coach: Frank O'Hara
Trainer: James Schuyler
Pitching coach: Joseph Ceravolo
Batting coach: Larry Fagin
Bullpen coach: Bernadette Mayer
Press Relations: Terence Winch
TV announcers: Paul Auster (and a former player to be named later)
Radio play-by-play persons: Phillip Lopate, Andrei Codrescu, Anne Waldman
Broadway adaptation: Lehman Engel, Kenward Elmslie

Uniform design: Joe Brainard
Critic: Tom Clark

L  Left-hander
* To be played by Chris Noth in the TV version.
** Winner, rookie of the year award.
*** Switch hitter; to be deployed as a pinch hitter in the National League and as a designated hitter in the American League.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on June 09, 2020 at 12:01 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Birthday Poems, Feature | Permalink

From the archive; first posted June 09, 2020

Joan Kwon Glass: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

________________________________________________

Exit Plans

 

My ex-mother-in-law hates my guts.

I still have the cooking pot she gave us

as a wedding gift. It has lasted longer

than both of my marriages, & this fact

is definitely not lost on me. I use it

now to make hard-boiled eggs,

until my kitchen smells like death.

I bury grudges in cookie jars

& beneath floorboards the way

my grandmother stashed cash

from her husband, the way some men

stow side chicks. The only thing more

human than wanting to believe in love,

is having a secret exit plan.

At some point, don’t all of us hope

for a way out of whatever we’ve chosen?

Near the end of my first marriage,

I caught my husband in a lie so elaborate,

so astonishing, that my shock gave way

to reverence. It’s impossible to know

how far we can go until we arrive.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Joan Kwon Glass is a diasporic Korean poet, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize, and Night Swim, winner of the 2021 Diode Book Prize. Her poems have been featured in Poetry, The Slowdown, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Terrain, Poetry Northwest, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Joan has been a finalist for the Tupelo Press Helena Whitehill Book Award, the Poetry Northwest Possession Sound Series, and the University of Akron Poetry Prize. She is a 2025 Writer in Residence for SWWIM, a visiting writer at Amherst College, Smith College, and Wesleyan University, and serves as a teacher for several writing centers throughout the country. 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                              Casey Niccoli, Last Exit to the Strawberry Stars, mixed media collage, ca. 2024

Happy birthday, Dino (June 7)

 

"Comedy of Remarriage" [by Erin O’Luanaigh ]

Comedy of Remarriage

She sticks out her leg to trigger their fall.
(Felix culpa!) He, heir to a mug of beer—no, ale—
believes in the magical thinking of passive voice:
that the apple, the cards, the woman contains the vice,

while he hovers safely above the flesh of grammar.
(She speaks in paragraphs; he can only stammer
about jungles, his father, the innocence of his snake.)
Oh, she knows his type. The foot will slip. A mistake

can’t make itself (but she can help). Then he’ll begin
again, outfitted with the knowledge of his sin
and shame at having hoarded what was his to give:
a break, a fuck, a second chance. Himself. A rib.

And as the searchlight of a projector is beamed
out of itself, onto the satin slip of the screen,
so she’ll split like an atom, cleave like a cell,
creating other women from the one that fell.

-- Erin O’Luanaigh 

Erin O’Luanaigh worked as a jazz singer before receiving her MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. Her poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Bad Lilies, AGNI, The Southern Review, Subtropics, 32 Poems, Nimrod, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a doctoral candidate in poetry at the University of Utah. Her debut collection of poems, Avail, is forthcoming from Paul Dry Books in January 2026.

"Comedy of Remarriage" appears in the Summer 2025 issue of Nimrod, edited by Boris Dralyuk.

June Events 2025: Look to the richness to find the diversity [By Tracy Danison]

“Monga” by Jéssica Teixeira, June Events 2025. Photo © Ligia Jardim

What can dance do?

Jessica Teixeira’s Monga might make US Attorney General Pam Bondi shout “Off with his head!” and make a lunge for Dorothy’s ruby slippers. “Monga” is the Brazilian phrase for “monkey-woman”. And what sex is that, pray? Louise Vanneste’s Mossy Eye Moor could certainly raise the short hairs on US Florida Governor Ron Desantis’ neck. Climate change is a myth and a damp and solemn moor can have nothing to say.

Presented back to back, Monga, around the experience a person other than one's self, and Mossy Eye Moor, around potential feelings in another species, might very well call up an ox-like bellow from the eternal Colonel Blimp down in the Mastodon Coffee Room at le club Old White Guys’. All three scenarios are entertaining. 

That ox-bellow, those bristly hairs, that crazed lunge, dance is doing those. Dance can entertain, too, or at least provoke the stuff that brings on a snicker.

 

“Chansons mouillées” by Nina Santes, June Events 2025. Photo © Nina Santes

Most of all, though, what dance does is imagine and perform; the rest is consequence.

 

In Monga, Jessica Texeira takes on the historical character of a freak-show singer, playing, her note says, both “a body that looks and a body that acts”. That is, a mirror performance that is meant to make spectators be between the grotesque and the erotic of Monga. Anne Sauvage, director of Atelier de Paris and programmer for June Events 2025, notes that real, personal history such as Monga is especially a performance tour de force: the creative force of concentration (or artistic focus), choreography (arrangement) and body (movement).

And then, when the Pams and Rons and Blimps have moved on, “diversity” is just another way of saying “richness” – of imagination and in performance. Louise Vanneste’s Mossy Eye Moor is rich. It bets on imagination and performance. Five performers in their setting give entangled form to “Mossies”, a presence which arises from the connection of essentially “geological” phenomena. Like Jessica Texeira, Vanneste mobilizes the power of live performance (focus, arrangement, movement) but she also imagines the elements of her set (sound, light, matter, space, human and other species’ bodies, the visible and invisible) with equal existential weight. The sensibility sought for is a concert of difference, showing out the diversity of the connecting tissues of creation.

 

“Fragmented Shadows” by Wanjiru Kamuyu, June Events 2025. Photo © Metlili

Diversity (or, as I think it should be expressed, “richness of imagination and in performance”), Anne Sauvage observes, does not have to be narrative, does not have to be literal, to nourish spectators and performers.

Richness has a through-time side that implies things like personal and professional change. As I noted in my earlier essay on may talk with her, Anne points out that Marie-Caroline Hominal’s move from solo performance to “ballet” (Her Numéro#0, Scene III) has its richness in unfolding a performance esthetic that happens as an artist progresses with their art.

 

“Onion Man” by Victoria Côté Péléja, June Events 2025. Photo © Patrick Berger

There's the richness of exploring objectives. With Fragmented Shadows(2024), on the strength of her notes and video snippets, Wanjiru Kamuyu seems to have moved from performing stories with movement (Stepping through that door: "An Immigrant’s Story" by Wanjiru Kamuyu, 2022) to performing movement to go beyond stories.

There's the richness of persistent focus, too. Pierre Pontvianne says his performance là-SEXTET (“the-there-SEXTET”) ignites from a line from Georges Didi-Huberman’s Sentir le grisou (“Smell the odorless”): "Nothing makes for a better catastrophe than the apparent normality in passing time". I don’t know where SEXTET will take a spectator yet, but I do know that Pontvianne seems always trying to explore far into the Stein-ian theres in the there's he's spotted (Were it given to all to see into the heart of each! Pierre Pontvianne’s “Motifs”).

What can dance do? Make us rich!

__________

Other artists on the June Events 2025 program

Click on the name to find out more: Habib Ben Tanfous, Julie Botet, Jeanne Brouaye, Puma Camillê, Gilles Clément et Christian Ubl, Victoria Côté Péléja, Rosalind Crisp, Florencia Demestri et Samuel Lefeuvre, Simon Feltz, Geisha Fontaine et Pierre Cottreau, Cassiel Gaube, Yan Giraldou et Amélie Malleroni, Linda Hayford, Rémy Héritier, Mohamed Issaoui, Rebecca Journo, Daniel Larrieu, Joanne Leighton, Candice Martel, Ikue Nakagawa, Alban Ovanessian, Dilo Paulo, Manuel Roque, Nina Santes, Liz Santoro et Pierre Godard, Vânia Vaneau.

Three Sonnets on Lines of John Ashbery [by Mitch Sisskind]

1.
We've heard lots of names here
Tonight but I'll tell you one name
We have not heard which is the
Name of Slobodnik who was
The janitor at the high school
Where I worked and one day
He said swimming is good for
You because swimming gets
The crud out of your pores so
I have not forgotten his words
Spoken around 1975 just like
Neither have I ever forgotten
The line “Here a scarf flies,
There an excited call is heard.”

2.
We have heard a lot of names
But one name we have not heard
Yet is Smolarek the math teacher
I used to play basketball with
And he always won but once
I won so the next week he won
Again and he stated how he
Wanted to win that day so he
Did not fuck his wife last night
Or that morning either in 1975
Which I remember so clearly like
”Whose wind is desire starching
A petal, whose disappointment
Broke into a rainbow of tears.”

3.
The last name we have not heard is
Greene and how in 1965 we were on
The drill field with Greene screaming
Supplementary get your goddamn
Ass out here where the fuck shit is
Supplementary get your slack ass
Out here Supplementary and we
Had no idea what he was yelling
About because nobody was named
Supplementary and then somehow
It dawned on everybody at once like
A miracle that he meant Sulloway
Which I have never forgotten like
”Now I let you go, signed The Dwarf.”

On Tony Towle's “Late Sketches & Studies” [by Martin Stannard]

“Late Sketches & Studies” by Tony Towle, pub. Kulvert Books, 48pp. £12.99.

Let’s begin this with a quotation:

          you come by to type
          your poems and write a
          new poem instead on my
          old typewriter while I sit
          and read a novel about
          a lunatic’s analysis of
          a poem by Robert Frost
          it is all suffocating
                         Frank O’Hara, from “The Light Presses Down”  (July 26, 1963)

and point out that the “you” O’Hara is addressing here is Tony Towle.

Follow it with this:

          I know from Frank O’Hara that the poem and its setting
          are completely at your disposal,
          from Kenneth Koch that the resources of language
          are greater than oneself and thereby liberating,
          from John Ashbery that the mysterious and beautiful
          are still supremely possible,
          and supremely inspiring–
          and James Schuyler’s blinding exactitude of observation,
          its serene and tremendous burden
                           from “Addenda” (1971)

— this being from the poet under review here, once described as “a lyrical poet with a taste for the surreal”¹, a description I have no idea if Towle would go along with, and one about which I have some reservations. But let’s get to the main event:

In her Introduction to Talking To The Sun, the anthology of poetry for young people she edited with Kenneth Koch in 1985, Kate Farrell wrote that “Every good poet writes a kind of poetry that is new and different from the poetry of any other poet, because it comes from an imagination that isn’t like anybody else’s.” Those are my italics, by the way, because the good there makes all the difference: without it, the statement would be nonsense, because it’s a truth not universally acknowledged that quite a lot of the time one finds oneself (unless one is very careful) reading some poet or other who sounds much like a lot of other poets, and it can be dreadfully dispiriting. And although we might remark, in our wisdom, that what Farrell says is stating the obvious, it really isn’t, because we cannot be reminded often enough that one of the things that makes good poetry good is that no other poet could have written what that poet wrote. Some like to call it voice.

The reason I mention this is that I happened to be browsing the anthology (I am a young people, though actually I had just bought a copy as a birthday gift for my granddaughter) at the same time as I was reading Tony Towle’s new little book, and my longstanding admiration of and fascination with Towle’s poetry is due in no small part to the fact that the poems take one to places no-one else is ever going to take you, by which I mean places conjured from the Towle imagination, not somewhere you’d find in an atlas. And while I’m well aware that I could say much the same thing about every poet I love – and at the risk of going around in circles and rewriting my first paragraph in different words – I have to say I have no idea why I should think to say this particular thing about this particular poet and his poems when I could have said it any number of times about other poets I love who make me want to be alive. Perhaps I just needed to say something about the imagination to kickstart things (again) . . . Let’s face it: if we knew what we were doing all the time, this poetry lark would be dull, wouldn’t it?

Towle is now in his mid-80s, with an impressive body of work through some 60 years or so that, if you don’t know it, you really should. And, all cards on the table, I should say that I’ve known him – albeit not closely – since 1984 when I met him with Paul Violi and Charles North in New York, and we have a (very) intermittent and friendly relationship via email. I’m only going to mention in passing his friendship in the 1960s with Frank O’Hara, and his subsequent part in the history of New York School poetry. All of that is well-documented, and I take it as a given. You can look it up. John Ashbery has said – and it’s quoted on the book’s rear cover – “Tony Towle is one of the New York School’s best-kept secrets”, though he’s no secret to anyone who knows anything about this particular area of American poetry beyond the usual suspects.

Given all that, “Late Sketches & Studies” is an age-appropriate and, as significantly, a typically elegant (and painterly?) title (a title continued within, incidentally, as “contained between apocalyptic parenthetical ‘covers’”) for this little collection: 20 poems, prefaced by a “Global Prelude (Front Cover, opened)”, and followed by an “Annulment”, a “P.S.”, and rounded off with a “Universal Postlude (Back Cover, closing”), and the whole dated “2019-2024”. Towle actually sent me a manuscript of the text at the back end of 2023, though it’s undergone a few edits since then, and to me it’s interesting to see how long this work has been in the making and evolving, through time and in spite of often trying personal circumstance.

The 5 italicized lines of the aforementioned “Global Prelude” might go some way to justifying that “lyrical with a taste for surrealism” tag I mentioned earlier, but surrealism (capital S?) these days is too often used lazily to describe some imagery or linguistic strategy that might be considered a bit wacky, and I have discussed with my therapist over and again the question of what constitutes the lyric in 21^st century poetry, and she tells me that she’s discussed it with countless other sad people and has come to no real conclusions. Anyway, here are those 5 lines:

          “Now get going, Bigshot,”
          whispered the louche enchantress
          to the prime minister of the elements
          she had nursed back to savagery,
          deleting the extraneous moons from our eyes . . .

The colloquial first line followed by 4 lines that might be described as elusive (or perhaps ‘disorienting’ would be a better word) is something of a characteristic Towle move that I’d argue is engaging and intriguing, and keeps the reader on their toes, and the reader really must stay alert, as the opening poem proper (“Recreation, or Re-creation”) over the page makes clear:

          Listen carefully: All that was imagined
          you must now reimagine, or you will never
          reach the next level,
          and you must reach the next level
          or you will remain on this level
          bereft of reimagination until the end
          of an empty, monoplane existence.

The poems that follow, as one familiar with Towle’s poetry might expect, are laced with autobiography (“Now 81 years young, as the Euphemists would have it”); with the (for want of a better word) inventively exotic (“the Three Graces: / Gossip, Revision, and Ambiguity”); with popular culture (“When Clark Gable delivers the line. . . “); with history, a long-standing interest of Towle’s (“Apropos the Holy Roman Empire . . .”) . . .

 . . . but wait up! This list of “ingredients” threatens to become a tedious read, and it could go on for a bit, because the poet has the world to use, and a list of this sort risks boring you (the reader) as well as me, along with tending to paint the poet as concocting his poems much like a chef creating a dish using a list of strategies he has in the cupboard, which may or may not be an apt analogy but it sounds condescendingly and unnecessarily reductive. It is, as ever, too easy for so-called critical writing to descend into self-satisfied jibber-jabber, a long way distant from describing the experience of reading the poetry itself.

A few years back, writing about Towle’s friend Charles North, I spoke of North’s poetry as making one feel intelligent just by reading it, by which I meant that involving oneself in it, taking pleasure in the ideas and the language, the play, the erudition, the emotions, and never feeling at all talked down to by someone more erudite than you – the entire artistic pantry, if you will – in short, the poetry as a rewarding aesthetic experience . . . and I shall allow that sentence to wander off over the horizon, because it occurs to me that I would like to point out how the Three Graces on page 12 are so wonderfully echoed a dozen pages later by “the Three T’s: Terror, Trauma, and Tendentiousness”, which I just love, and among everything else the poems have to offer it’s moments like that, of sheer and sharp delight, that melt me.

At back of all this lurks Towle’s dry and wry humour, and I’m tempted to use the word “sardonic”, which I thought perhaps I should check on its exact meaning, one of the definitions I found being “disdainfully or sceptically humorous”, which I think is not too far off the mark, though I won’t be surprised if Towle emails me to put me right.

David Shapiro, in conversation with John Tranter², said that “There’s an awful lot of content in New York poets — in a way they’re very figurative and imagistic.” After reading that, I went looking for a quotation from these poems to see if I might illustrate the point, but I couldn’t find one, because it’s not about a few lines here and there, but that here is a poet who has always paid attention to all and any- and every-thing, and all and any- and every-thing is available to the poem as, to refer to Shapiro once more, the New York School poet makes ”the decision not to make merely personal confessions . . . [and] to press forward with some openness to humour.”

           This is your brain on autocracy:
           smooth and unfurrowed
           like a species of melon, but harboring
           seeds of resentment, complaint
           and sarcasm — don’t neglect sarcasm

When I interviewed Towle in 2016 and asked him what, for him, makes a poem “pass muster”, he said “If it’s really good, an aesthetic pleasure starts to spread over me as I read, in a way that is subtly physical as well as intellectual.”³ This “physical as well as intellectual” pleasure is what I get from these poems. It's a pleasure and an experience that does not – cannot – be explained away by a neat paraphrase of a poem, or a formulaic analysis of what the poet is up to. Rather, one has to settle (settle!) for saying that the poetry is so welcoming and the experience of reading so pleasurable (not something you can say about loads of poems, and I don’t care that I’m over-using the “pleasure” word here, because it happens to be the correct word) that you want to go back and experience it again, and it won’t disappoint you, because it’s rich enough to offer more than a single moment of pleasure, in illustration of which I give you “Here & Now”:

          Before you leave, would you like to know
          how much your credit card is worth in gold,
          or in spontaneous luminescence, or in idolatry?
          Seek the answer to the first from the mysteries
          on the commodities exchange; the second, through
          discovering the miraculous app; and the third,
          by traveling through the dark processings of
          your ancient soul, which you ransack against
          your will under the fullest moon.



Notes

1. Andrew McCarron in “3 New York Poets: Charles North, Tony Towle, Paul Violi” (Station Hill Press, 2015)

2. The conversation is reprinted in “You Are The You (Writings and Interviews on Poetry, Art, and the New York School)”, by David Shapiro, edited by Kate Farrell (MadHat Press, 2025). The book is excellent, and there is an equally excellent review of it here: https://artsfuse.org/310866/book-review-life-in-a-state-of-sparkle-the-writings-of-david-shapiro/

3. The full interview is online in Issue 2 of Decals of Desire: https://decalsofdesire.blogspot.com/

The Broken Eyeglasses [end of part 1 of Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"]

<<<He turned the handle and opened the door and fumbled for the handle of the green baize door inside. He found it and pushed it open and went in.

He saw the rector sitting at a desk writing. There was a skull on the desk and a strange solemn smell in the room like the old leather of chairs.

His heart was beating fast on account of the solemn place he was in and the silence of the room: and he looked at the skull and at the rector’s kind-looking face.

—Well, my little man, said the rector, what is it?

Stephen swallowed down the thing in his throat and said:

—I broke my glasses, sir.

The rector opened his mouth and said:

—O!

Then he smiled and said:

—Well, if we broke our glasses we must write home for a new pair.

—I wrote home, sir, said Stephen, and Father Arnall said I am not to study till they come.

—Quite right! said the rector.

Stephen swallowed down the thing again and tried to keep his legs and his voice from shaking.

—But, sir...

—Yes?

—Father Dolan came in today and pandied me because I was not writing my theme.

The rector looked at him in silence and he could feel the blood rising to his face and the tears about to rise to his eyes.

The rector said:

—Your name is Dedalus, isn’t it?

—Yes, sir.

—And where did you break your glasses?

—On the cinderpath, sir. A fellow was coming out of the bicycle house and I fell and they got broken. I don’t know the fellow’s name.

The rector looked at him again in silence. Then he smiled and said:

—O, well, it was a mistake, I am sure Father Dolan did not know.

—But I told him I broke them, sir, and he pandied me.

—Did you tell him that you had written home for a new pair? the rector asked.

—No, sir.

—O well then, said the rector, Father Dolan did not understand. You can say that I excuse you from your lessons for a few days.

Stephen said quickly for fear his trembling would prevent him:

—Yes, sir, but Father Dolan said he will come in tomorrow to pandy me again for it.

—Very well, the rector said, it is a mistake and I shall speak to Father Dolan myself. Will that do now?

Stephen felt the tears wetting his eyes and murmured:

—O yes sir, thanks.

The rector held his hand across the side of the desk where the skull was and Stephen, placing his hand in it for a moment, felt a cool moist palm.

—Good day now, said the rector, withdrawing his hand and bowing.

—Good day, sir, said Stephen.

He bowed and walked quietly out of the room, closing the doors carefully and slowly.

But when he had passed the old servant on the landing and was again in the low narrow dark corridor he began to walk faster and faster. Faster and faster he hurried on through the gloom excitedly. He bumped his elbow against the door at the end and, hurrying down the staircase, walked quickly through the two corridors and out into the air.

He could hear the cries of the fellows on the playgrounds. He broke into a run and, running quicker and quicker, ran across the cinderpath and reached the third line playground, panting.

The fellows had seen him running. They closed round him in a ring, pushing one against another to hear.

—Tell us! Tell us!

—What did he say?

—Did you go in?

—What did he say?

—Tell us! Tell us!

He told them what he had said and what the rector had said and, when he had told them, all the fellows flung their caps spinning up into the air and cried:

—Hurroo!

They caught their caps and sent them up again spinning skyhigh and cried again:

—Hurroo! Hurroo!

They made a cradle of their locked hands and hoisted him up among them and carried him along till he struggled to get free. And when he had escaped from them they broke away in all directions, flinging their caps again into the air and whistling as they went spinning up and crying:

—Hurroo!

And they gave three groans for Baldyhead Dolan and three cheers for Conmee and they said he was the decentest rector that was ever in Clongowes.

The cheers died away in the soft grey air. He was alone. He was happy and free: but he would not be anyway proud with Father Dolan. He would be very quiet and obedient: and he wished that he could do something kind for him to show him that he was not proud.

The air was soft and grey and mild and evening was coming. There was the smell of evening in the air, the smell of the fields in the country where they digged up turnips to peel them and eat them when they went out for a walk to Major Barton’s, the smell there was in the little wood beyond the pavilion where the gallnuts were.

The fellows were practising long shies and bowling lobs and slow twisters. In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl. >>>

Amapola & Besame Mucho, Cielito Lindo & Granada [sung by Juan Diego Florez] & Benny Goodman's "Amapola"

Great singer. . .and also listen to Benny Goodman on the clarinet

 

How Reviewers at the NY Times treated Fitzgerald, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, et al

YThis is how reviewers at the NY Times treated certain books:

Scott Fitzgerald:
“Bad news is best blurted out at once: ‘Tender Is the Night’ is a disappointment. Though it displays Mr. Fitzgerald’s most engaging qualities, it makes his weaknesses appear ineradicable, for they are present in equal measure and in undiminished form. … His new book is clever and brilliantly surfaced, but it is not the work of a wise and mature novelist.” Reviewed by J. Donald Adams, April 15, 1934

Henry James:
“In ‘The Golden Bowl’ we find, standing for subtlety, a kind of restless finicking inquisitiveness, a flutter of aimless conjecture, such as might fall to a village spinster in a ‘department store.’ … How like ancient and tedious cronies the ‘wonderfullys’ and ‘preciselys’ and ‘adequatelys’ and ‘competentlys’ turn up on these pages — as a rule in places where no self-respecting adverb would choose to be discovered.” Reviewed by H.W. Boynton, Nov. 26, 19

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out:
“Aside from a certain cleverness — which, being all in one key, palls on one after going through a hundred pages of it — there is little in this offering to make it stand out from the ruck of mediocre novels which make far less literary pretension. As for the story itself, it is painfully lacking, both in coherency and narrative interest.” Unsigned, June 13, 1920

E. M. Forster, Howards End:
“As a social philosopher, evidently, Mr. Edward M. Forster has not yet arrived at any very positive convictions. … He evinces neither power nor inclination to come to grips with any vital human problem.” Unsigned, Feb. 19, 1911

Irving Berlin's score for Annie Get Your Gun: "Irving Berlin's latest score is routine composing.. . . The only theatrical achievement that you can be sure is basically American is the large, noisy, lavish, vulgar, commercial musical show, like 'Annie Get Your Gun,' with Ethel Merman blaring undistinguished tunes by Irving Berlin."-- Brooks Atkinson, 1946

If, on the other hand, you want to go against the grain in a big way, hire Vladimir Nabokov to take on Jean-Paul Sartre:

“Whether, from the viewpoint of literature, ‘La Nausée’ ['Nausea'] was worth translating at all is another question. It belongs to that tense-looking but really very loose type of writing, which has been popularized by many second-raters … Somewhere behind looms Dostoevsky at his worst.” Reviewed by Vladimir Nabokov, April 24, 1949

The Ashbery Influence [by David Lehman]

Do not underestimate JA's influence. In 1989 I wrote a poem titled "One Size Fits All: A Critical Essay." It appeared in the New York Review of Books and has been anthologized in The Oxford Book of Comic Verse. 

I have critics, one of whom wrote that I stole the phrase "one size fits all" from Ashbery.

Isn't that wonderful?

One Size Fits All: A Critical Essay

Though
Already
Perhaps
However.

On one level,
Among other things,
With
And with.
In a similar vein
To be sure:
Make no mistake.
Nary a trace.

However,
Aside from
With
And with,
Not
And not,
Rather
Manifestly
Indeed.

Which is to say,
In fictional terms,
For reasons that are never made clear,
Not without meaning,
Though (as is far from unusual)
Perhaps too late.

The first thing that must be said is
Perhaps, because
And, not least of all,
Certainly more,
Which is to say
In every other respect
Meanwhile.

But then perhaps
Though
And though
On the whole
Alas.

Moreover
In contrast
And even
Admittedly
Partly because
And partly because
Yet it must be said.

Even more significantly, perhaps
In other words
With
And with,
Whichever way
One thing is clear
Beyond the shadow of a doubt.

-- David Lehman

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1989/07/20/one-size-fits-all-a-critical-essay/

 

Happy Birthday, Marilyn Monroe, June 1, 1926!

D. Nurkse: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________

Dominant Harmony

 

In that dream I pinched myself

and my father said No! You cannot wake by suffering.

 

So how will I wake? How will I know I‘m alive?                                            

And how will you know me?

My father showed me:

bulky furniture covered with a tarp

he whisked away: a rented Bechstein.

 

I said: what shall I practice?

The scales, the voicings, the remote minor?

My father said: practice the dream and perform it.

 

All night I watched my hands trying to escape.                    

Breathless summer. Pollen hung in the no-breeze,

a dry pang high in the nostrils.

 

Outside the crickets were building an empire

itchy as the night sky.

 

The universe was a mumble of prompts:

Maestoso. Accelerando. Apartando.  

 

Venus waited with pursed lips.

 

And my father listened critically,

legs crossed, two fingers against his cheek,

a tall man determined to take up no space,

his knees up to his chin—at last

a light came to the window. Dawn.

I had played it.

            I had coaxed my little finger

to forget Narva, my cherished griefs,

my father fading in his frayed blue robe.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

D. Nurkse's twelfth poetry collection A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems was published by Knopf in 2022. 

[note: Narva---competition in Estonia dedicated to the works of Polish composer Frederick Chopin.]

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

                    Margaret Isabel Dicksee, The Child Handel Discovered by His Parents, 1893. Oil on canvas. H 91.5 x W 122 cm.