The Best American Poetry

On Coming to America [by Anne Lehman (1915-2009), as told to David Lehman]

David and Anne Lehman, in Vienna, 1998

When I was born the third child to my parents, they were not overjoyed, since they already had a daughter and a son. But my mother told me I was so pretty that they didn’t mind too much.

We lived in Vienna, in the 16^th district. It was not a very Jewish district. Jews lived mostly in the 2^nd and 20^th districts. And in my class in school were only three Jewish girls, out of thirty students. Of course from an early time we were made to feel different. Yet I had many gentile girlfriends and I remember one of them I was pretty close to. Her parents had a little garden with a hut in the outskirts of Vienna and she invited me to sleep over. Yet when Hitler came to power and I met her on the street, she acted funny and held her hand over her bosom until I found out she was wearing a swatstika! This was years before Hitler overran Austria—she must have been an underground member in order to have the swastika. This gave me a real shock.

The police came one day and asked for Adolf [my brother]. They had orders to take him to the police station. Why, we asked. We need him as a witness, they said. He was present at an accident, they said. We told them: as soon as he comes home we shall send him to the police station. But of course when Adolf came home he told us there had been no accident. He was on a list. The Nazis wanted to send him to a camp. You see, Adolf was the president of some idealistic university organization, a good socialist. And from that day on, he went underground until he got a visa to go to America.

It was a nightmare to live in Vienna at that time. Every time the doorbell rang, we were afraid—they’re coming for us!

A friend of mine got me a permit to go to England as a mother’s helper. This way I got out of Nazi Germany. These people, Wright was their name, lived in Southsea. He was a shipbuilder and she was a dentist. They treated me very well, and he gave me English lessons every day. But I was lonely there so after a few months I went to London, where I had some friends from Vienna. My friend Trude and I found work in the home of an English theater producer by the name of French. Trude was supposed to be the cook and I was the parlor maid. Once Rex Harrison came to dinner. He was very friendly, a real gentleman.

I was in England when the war started and we all received the gas masks and instructions for the air raid shelters. The American consulate closed and we had to move to a refugee home. When I saw how bad the situation was and my parents were still in Vienna, I tried to get them out to England. For America they had to wait too long, their quota was very small, since my parents were born in Poland. And we did not know when Hitler came how important it was to be registered in the American consulate. In March 1938 Adolf went to register himself and in April Bert [my younger brother] went. I only went in June to register, but at least while I was there I also got the papers to register my parents. Later I found out that each month meant one more year to wait for the visa. But it took even longer if you were born in Poland. So I asked the French people and they filled out a lot of papers which would have enabled my parents to come to England. Everything took so long, when I finally got everything together England was at war and my parents couldn’t come. I had no way of getting in touch with them. [Later, we learned that they were murdered by the Nazis.]

“But the American consulate finally opened its door again and I received my visa to go to America. How happy I was. Naturally I was worried to travel on an English ship, so my cousin from America sent me additional money and I changed my ticket to an American ship, the President Harding. I think it was the last Atlantic crossing it ever made. It took us ten days of the most terrible shaking. Everyone on board was sick and wanted to die. We were so sick that we weren’t even afraid of hidden mines, and as in a dream we did all of the safe drillings, etc. The last day was Thanksgiving. We had, and for me it was the first time, a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and all the trimmings, they played “Oh, say, can you see,” and when I finally saw the Statue of Liberty, I was really grateful to God, that he let me live and see America.

The Audience [by Lera Auerbach]

 

If I were dead, I wouldn’t want to stay around. I would fly to some other realm where I would no longer be myself but everything else at the same time. A happy, joyful radiance of a realm. 

But I wouldn’t be able to jump there if my heart was too heavy with worry for my loved ones who are still living in this world. I would have to stay around to see how they are coping. The living become the responsibility of the dead. Maybe, if I stayed around, I could still help them somehow. 

My dead grandparents and their parents and the parents of their parents und so weiter slightly move their invisible bodies making room for the new arrivals. They watch how I write these lines in English – the language they never spoke and slightly shake their heads.

 

Tim Dlugos [by Terence Winch]

The last time I saw Tim Dlugos was 30 December 1989. We met for dinner at Kramer Books & Afterwords, the first bookstore/café in the land (as far as I know). It’s one of the few independent bookstores still going strong in DC, but probably more because of the food than the books. Tim had been battling AIDS for a while, and I remember being a little apprehensive about seeing him, wondering to what extent the disease might have changed him. So his arrival came as a relief, a cause for optimism—he looked better than ever, and seemed full of energy and purpose.

Starting in the early 1970s, Tim and I were part of a group of poets who participated in an open reading every Monday night in a room over the Community Book Shop in Dupont Circle in DC. The readings, called Mass Transit, were started by Michael Lally in 1971.  Mass Transit was a poetry lab, where all experiments were welcome, or at least tolerated. Many poets came up through Mass Transit, and became friends—Ed Cox, Lee Lally, Beth Joselow, Tina Darragh, Pete Inman, Liam Rector, Lynne Dreyer, Phyllis Rosenzweig, and Bernie Welt, to mention a few. We hosted a reading series at the Pyramid Gallery, bringing poets like John Ashbery to town to read with local poets. We also started a publishing venture called Some of Us Press, bringing out chapbooks by everyone from Ed Cox to Bruce Andrews. Michael left for New York in 1975, and I think Tim left town around the same time. Fortunately, Doug Lang appeared on the scene and, in his capacity as manager of Folio Books, also in Dupont Circle, became the same kind of catalyst that Michael Lally had been. Doug’s Folio readings featured Ted Berrigan, Tom Raworth, Ray DiPalma, Barbara Guest, Maureen Owen, Susan Howe, Fielding Dawson, Ted Greenwald, and dozens of others, each usually paired with a DC poet. Doug, who started a small press called Jawbone and was part of another called Titanic Books, also hosted a number of workshops, whose participants included Diane Ward, Joan Retallack, and others.

In fact, Some of Us Press published High There by Tim in 1973, which I believe was his first book, and in 1977, Jawbone brought out Tim’s chapbook For Years. In New York, Tim seemed to flourish. He became editor of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project newsletter for a while, his magnetism and openness as a person always drawing people to him. He also partied hard in the big city. Later, in poems like “Powerless,” he would write with great passion about getting sober.

Tim’s masterpiece is the poem “G-9,” named after the AIDS ward at Roosevelt Hospital in NYC. I’m not an expert in the literature to come out of the AIDS epidemic, but it’s hard to believe there is anything in that body of work more vivid and powerful than this poem (here's the text of "G-9"). In November of 1989, Tim sent me a fat envelope of poems—“Here are the fruits of my hospital stay and my first week out.” I was blown away the contents, which included “Powerless” and “G-9.” He was doing his best work in his final year of life.  “G-9” was accepted by the Paris Review not long before Tim died, of complications from AIDS on December 3, 1990, at age 40. He never lived to see the issue (#115) come out, but he was delighted to know that it would be in the magazine.

The good news is that Tim’s friend, the poet David Trinidad, is working on the first complete poems of Tim Dlugos. I’ve looked at a chunk of this manuscript, and I very much believe its publication will be a landmark literary event, bringing back to public attention an amazing and important writer. Like Whitman, Tim, through his poems, seems to be with us still. (Wikipedia entry on Tim: click here.)

In his research, David came up with a poem by Tim that I had no memory of, but was very grateful to have. I think the poem is from 1973, when I was the poetry book buyer at a shop called Discount Books:

THINGS I MIGHT DO
for Terry Winch

Might write a letter to Jim Carroll
this p.m., I finally found his address.
Might get an answer; probably not.
Might start crying when Joey calls
tonight. Might wonder if he slept
with Michael; probably won’t ask.
Some time might remember the name of
the star that the statue on the fountain
at the Circle resembles: not Leslie Howard,
but that’s pretty close. Might quit
work today, might dream about my job
again tonight, the 4th night in a row.
Might lose something if I keep on
working. Might forget to cash my check
again. Might go out dancing
with Billy whom I might call this afternoon,
and might go to bed with when parents split
for West Coast in just two weeks. Might
look for an apartment. Might make
a tremendous break and move to New York City

Might do the streets. Might get crabs.
Might be missing the world’s most beautiful
boy by writing now. Might get a sunburn.
Might go bald. Might fall asleep on the bench
like some old bum. Might leave the Circle.
Might check the poems out at Discount Books,
find Joe Brainard, find Geraud. Might wave
to Terry as I just walk past, his waving back
a p.m. highlight and distinct possibility.

-- Tim Dlugos

-- Ed. note: Terry's post with Tim's poem was originally posted on July 28, 2008, which was John Ashbery's eighty-first birthday; Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp, and Jackie Kennedy were also born on the 28th of July.

 

Before Kennedy (by Mitch Sisskind)

Each Saturday Lou's four hour pinochle
Game now in its thirtieth-first year,
Pinochle again on Monday nights
And on Fridays the family card games,
Men and women at separate tables.

To the downtown public library
I bore my briefcase after school
In Eisenhower’s last years to read
Old newspapers: WAR the full page
Headline of 1917 and again in 1941.

Here and there bent over tables
In the gloomy main reading room
Men wiping their eyes, coughing,
Blowing their noses until limping
Urgently to the awful bathroom.

These men, were they younger
Than Lou I found myself asking.
I saw his steps shortening until
He died like the silver dot on the
Turned-off television screen.

Yeats on Friendship (for Paul Violi)

Last evening, when listening to the late Paul Violi's friends, colleagues, students and admirers read his poems, I thought of the last two lines of Yeats's "The Municipal Gallery Revisited." Here are the culminating lines of this multi-part poem. DL

 You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.

From the archive; first posted December 2, 2011

An Interview with Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell [by Aspen Matis]

In celebration of Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s 75th anniversary, this November the venerable publisher will be releasing The FSG Poetry Anthology, a book comprising the wide range of poets FSG has brought to light over the decades. Edited by Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell, the collection includes work by every poet FSG has published in its 75-year history — not so much a compilation of “greatest hits” as a selection of poems that feel alive and vital to this day.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s initial forays into poetry included books by John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell. Over the years FSG has published international voices (Leopardi, Rilke, Pablo Neruda and Adam Zagajewski), Nobel Prize winners (Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, and Louise Glück), and emerging voices (Roya Marsh, Chet’la Sebree, and Valzhyna Mort). The FSG Poetry Anthology captures the spirit of the house’s diverse poetry list and makes for a vibrant celebration of the publisher’s rich poetic history.

I corresponded with Mr. Galassi and Mr. Creswell via email about poetry’s capacity to reveal “what is going on under the surface of the culture” and to say “things it doesn’t seem to be saying,” the act of reading poetry as akin to “listening to the noise in the wall.” We also discussed the fallibility of any given reader — how “great works often try to do something new, and are therefore hard to recognize right away as great” — and the inevitability of great poems once “their innovation catches on,” often in retrospect. 

The FSG Poetry Anthology is dedicated to the memory of Robert Giroux, who joined the firm headed by Roger Straus and John Farrar in 1955. Giroux signed up Berryman, Bishop, Jack Kerouac, Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, and Jean Stafford and, eventually, Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, and Louise Bogan. (And, some years later, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes.) How was Mr. Giroux so effective at identifying, attracting, and cultivating poetic talent?

JG: Giroux had had a long and distinguished career as an editor at Harcourt, Brace, one of the leading literary publishers of its time. Among his authors there was T.S. Eliot, who was also a central figure at Faber and Faber in London, which he’d made the leading poetry publisher in the U.K. (if not the world). Plus, Bob’s best friend in college, at Columbia, was John Berryman. So you could say he was ideally suited to publish poets, and no doubt they recommended their friends to him. He had the perspicacity to choose well.

The anthology includes work by nearly all the poets FSG has published since Mr. Giroux’s arrival at the house, presented in broadly chronological sections. According to the anthology’s introduction, this structure “affords some sense of how the company’s editorial perspectives have evolved over the decades, and how the scope of FSG’s poetry has gradually expanded from Giroux’s classic core in widening, more or less concentric circles.” How has FSG’s editorial perspective on poetry evolved over the decades?

JG: New editors bring new enthusiasms, new interests. And as authors mature and age, new voices emerge, and the readers’ taste change, too. It’s a natural, you might say an actuarial process. I think you can see in the book how international poets became important on our list, and how our interest in new strains of American poetry developed and broadened over time. 

RC: One of the deep satisfactions of making this anthology was to discover the many hidden — and sometimes not-so-hidden — byways that run between poets of different generations and sensibilities. It begins with one of Berryman’s “Dream Songs” (number 22), a poem of quick changes, which mixes vernacular language with lots of other voices and registers. I hear echoes of Berryman in so many later FSG poets — so he’s one example of a widening but concentric circle. On the other hand, there are just as many poems that we hope will make readers think, “I’ve never heard a voice quite like that before.” A tradition is made of individual talents, after all.

What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this expansive anthology? 

JG: The anthology was planned as a way of celebrating FSG’s 75th anniversary this year, and of marking how central poetry has been to the entire company enterprise. As the two members of the editorial department currently involved in editing and publishing poetry, Robyn and I stepped up to the challenge. 

RC: The challenge and also the pleasure. It was wonderful to have an excuse, during the long hours of our endless quarantine, to read through the archive of FSG’s poetry. Maybe even more fun was to talk about the poems with Jonathan, who knows the nooks and crannies of this archive better than anyone. The hardest part, of course, was whittling down our choices. Our initial list was three or four times as long as the final selection. We chose poems that were characteristic of the individual poets, but we were also on the lookout for poems that somehow rhymed with others in the collection.

The anthology’s introduction expresses FSG’s conviction that “poetry is fundamental to literary expression, that it is here the writer strikes her distinctive note most powerfully.” What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

JG: Poetry, it seems to me, always reveals what is going on under the surface of the culture. It predicts developments; reading it is like listening to the noise in the wall. It can disturb, inspire, frighten, confirm our fears, and our hopes. It is always, I think, saying things it doesn’t seem to be saying. And I think it captures the spirit of a moment, of a culture. As Pound said, it’s news that stays news. 

RC: I’ll only add that I don’t think poetry ever has just one role to play — not in the present, and not ever. It’s impossible to say what poetry is in any final sense, because poets are always coming up with new things to do with it. This often happens through the translation of foreign poetry, which is something FSG has always been committed to publishing.

 What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

JG: I think true poetry is an authentic reflection of the poet’s mind. That is the most radical, the most fundamental thing. 

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

JG: We need more poetry criticism, not less. Great critics read below the surface and help open up what the poet is doing--sometimes better than the poet can. Poetry needs to be talked about, challenged, deeply responded to.  Real poetry can always meet the challenge. Lesser criticism fades and has no real lasting effect. But the reception of poetry is something that happens over time. It needs to be digested, mulled over, read and re-read. 

RC: It’s well known that the big critical outlets — with few exceptions — make less and less room for poetry. But poets and poetry readers have come up with ways to find each other: at readings, through independent presses and small magazines, on social media. I think our critical culture is more diffuse than ever, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s no shortage of passion — including invective! Let one hundred flowers bloom.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you both?

JG: To me, the poet’s voice is all-important, their angle of approach to the universe. That is the theme. They can be writing about toothpaste or birdsong; it doesn’t matter. It’s how it’s done that’s all-important.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

JG: Very often, the best books do not win the prizes. Because readers are fallible; they get distracted by externals, by fashion, by the heat of the moment. In my view, real things emerge in the long run. We’re all fallible, needless to say, editors as much as anyone, of course. I do believe though, that there is an absolute value, a fundamental integrity, that survives all our failings — very Platonic of me, I admit. 

RC: A different way of making the same point is to say that great works often try to do something new, and are therefore hard to recognize right away as great. Once their innovation catches on it seems inevitable, but of course it only looks that way in retrospect. And great books aren’t always perfect books. Berryman’s Dream Songs, to use that example again, is full of daring performances and many of them fall flat (or worse). Sometimes great books have to survive their own failings, too.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

JG: My only thought is that poets need to respond to whatever is impelling them to write. That listening, that following, is its own reward.

RC: My day job is teaching and studying Arabic poetry and there’s story about Abu Nuwas — the great, polyamorous eighth-century poet of Baghdad — that I especially love. The short version goes that when Abu Nuwas was a young man he approached a master of the tradition named Khalaf al-Ahmar and asked how he could become a poet. The master told him to go away and memorize 10,000 lines of verse. Abu Nuwas came back some time later and al-Ahmar asked him to recite all 10,000 lines. Abu Nuwas did so flawlessly. “Now forget them,” says the master. “Then you’ll be ready to be a poet.”

What is poetry’s greatest role in both of your inner lives? Why do you read poems?

JG:  From early on, poetry struck me as the most concentrated and powerful means of expression. I still believe that the contraption of the poem is a miraculous thing that often takes on a life of its own, and even drives the poet to make it.  It sounds mystical and I'm not a mystic. But I am always looking to be blown away. And it happens, again and again.

RC: For me, reading poetry isn’t a specialized activity. It isn’t something I do on the side or for any particular reason. I don’t think of it as belonging to my inner life any more than it belongs to my outer life: it’s part of both. Because there are poems for all occasions and moods. I read poems while waiting for the subway, or putting my kids to bed (or putting myself to bed); I read for wit or wisdom or consolation; I’ll read poems on the screen or the page (though I prefer the page); and I’m as likely to enjoy a poem about an exotic animal as one about Susan Sontag, or visiting the underworld, or falling in love. The anthology has poems about all these things, incidentally.  

What inquiry or exploration — if any — unifies the anthology? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

JG: This anthology, like any anthology, represents a winnowing of a particular field, in this case the field of poets FSG has published over its history. It might well have been different, but this was the particular path that the house ended up taking. There’s so much that's not here, but there are a lot of great moments--of perception, expression, deep surprise, real beauty. It’s exhilarating to come on these. We hope readers enjoy doing just that, just as we did. We want them to be blown away, too.

Ellen Kozak's New Paintings at David Richard Gallery

Ellen Kozak’s exhibition, Vigil: New Paintings, will be on view from November 27 through December 23, 2021, on the Ground Floor at David Richard Gallery located at 211 East 121 Street, New York, NY 10035, Phone: 212-882-1705. Email: info@DavidRichardGallery.com and website: DavidRichardGallery.com. Images of the artworks, installation views and videos will soon become available for viewing at the following link https://davidrichardgallery.com/exhibit/559-ellen-kozak.

Studio View, Reflections on water surface from passing river traffic, Hudson River, New York. Click here to view the exhibition

About Ellen Kozak:   The Artist’s Statement: I grew up near water, learning to swim at an early age in the nearby Long Island Sound and on family vacations in Maine. Water is the source of life—it goes where it wants— at its own speed, in varied states, marking time, in an indifferent universe. It is the element that has always made the most sense to me.   In 1994 I began to paint on a field easel beside bodies of water. My studio sits on the shoreline of the Hudson River in Greene County. Prior to painting I worked in video during the mid 70s through mid 80s. During these decades video was an analog medium, the video signal traveling in a fluid stream of electrons. Fluidity is a shared property of both paint and video, the materials, and methods with which I work. This commonality creates a sympathetic relationship and an ongoing dialog between the concepts and inherent craft in each medium. Recently I’ve noticed an inverse relationship between my paintings and video; while my paintings collapse hours of observation into ostensibly still surfaces, my video pieces are typically composed from still images of the same subject, water, which by nature is in constant motion.

Ellen Kozak Barges, Tugs and Tankers No. 23 Oil on panel 2021 13 x 22" Click here to view the artwork

Bodies of water are my subject, but I also depend upon their surfaces to perform a functional role, acting as an intermediary for indirectly observing the world above. Like a lens, the surface of a river can assimilate reflection, color, and pattern. The surface collects activity from the sky above, the movements of clouds, fog, foliage, planes in flight, and on the Hudson, barges that transport crude oil and hazardous material. Water and oil paint share properties of viscosity. I explore paint as a mimetic medium—it has an honest relationship with my subject.   Reflections, like mirrors, show us a version of the visible world, but they can also impose ambiguity about where things are and where one stands in space. This recalls sensations that I felt as a child while swimming. Uncertainty can undermine one’s sense of knowing, and the water’s transparency can cause displacement, bestowing optical illusions. I use this disorientation to confound my point of view and to help me step out of my own way as an observer. Indirect observation can create collisions and magnify attributes by imposing distance, both perceptual and psychological. Mediated observation can suggest metaphor and render what is known equivocal.

Ellen Kozak Barges, Tugs and Tankers No. 26 Oil on panel 2021 13 x 22" Click here to view the artwork

Brief Bio: Ellen Kozak received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts and earned her MA in Visual Studies at from MIT, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Cambridge, MA. She has had 21 solo exhibitions and numerous group presentations in New York, nationally and internationally including multiple exhibition in France, Japan and Cuba. Kozak has received review in the The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art In America, Art & Antiques, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, The Boston Globe and Boston Herald among others. Kozak was a Professor at Pratt Institute for more than 20 years and at Princeton University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago at Oxbow, University of Massachusetts. Boston, and Art New England at Bennington College.

 

"The Joy of the Gamble: A Conversation with David Lehman" [by Aspen Matis]

Here are excerpts from Aspen Matis's piece "The Joy of the Gamble: A Conversation with David Lehman" that the Los Angeles Review of Books published on Saturday, November 27:

ASPEN MATIS: Congratulations on The Morning Line. What would you like to share about the origins and creation process of this newest collection?

DAVID LEHMAN: The Morning Line is really a gathering of the best and most ambitious poems I’ve written (or completed) in the last five years, which has been a particularly fruitful period for me, perhaps because it followed my bout with cancer and brush with death. The book consists of poems (and a prose poem) that represent a range of my interests — everything from love to lunch, gambling to stamp collecting, music and martinis. I am inspired — to the point of writing poems — by the lives and works of Villon and Mayakovsky, Talmudic tales, jazz standards, Schubert’s Rosamunde overture, verse forms and word games, puzzles, wisecracks, big philosophical questions, the life of the mind versus what the French call la vie quotidienne. In college and since, I took seriously what we used to call a “liberal arts education,” the idea that an educated person should have an active relation with art, music, literature, history, and philosophy.

Some poems come easily, some take forever. It took me 20 years to write “The Complete History of the Boy,” which is a sort of biography-in-progress of a 15-year-old poet.

Learning you had just defeated cancer makes the vitality of the poems in The Morning Line all the more stunning — thank you for sharing about that difficult fight. This context makes the book all the more triumphant. Why, I wonder, is the period following devastation so often beautifully vital? And how, in your experience, might death’s presence in our lives contribute to our greatest awakenings and birth our truest work?

Your questions cut to the quick, Aspen. I guess if I could put it in one prosaic sentence, I’d say: All the things you usually take for granted, whether driving past a field of corn or admiring the nobility of your dog standing guard at the door, well, you take them less for granted. Okay, I can be less prosaic. I’ve come into contact with death and as a result I have wounds but also strength I never knew I had.

In a clear-eyed and familiar voice, The Morning Line paints a nostalgic impressionistic masterwork that at once entertains the imagination and illuminates the big questions we’re now facing as a society. The book embraces, in John Hennessy’s words, “subjects ranging from the perfect martini and accompanying jazz recording to profound questions of faith.” In your mind, what inquiry or exploration unifies the work? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

Good questions. What unifies the book, I think, is the poet’s sensibility and craft and a certain quantity of joie de vivre and heartfelt happiness despite the uncertainty, noise, ugliness, and even misery that threaten to defeat the impulse to celebrate, an impulse fundamental to all creation. As to what the reader is left with, you’re in the best possible position to answer that question.

In the book’s eponymous poem, “The Morning Line,” you write of gambling as an aspect of human nature — and of human folly. With intensity and grace, the speaker evokes a seductive picture of chance as “abstract art,” observing how “the gulf / is sometimes wide between the odds / set by the handicapper for the morning line / and the betting public at the track / when the horses reach the starting gate.” Why do you suspect that — as the speaker expresses — “[g]ambling is a natural human instinct”? Are you yourself a gambler, in some sense of the word?

Life is a gamble. Even when you don’t realize it, you are making a wager. Crossing a busy city street, you are betting that motorists are rational and sane, undistracted, and obedient to a system of alternating green and red lights. That’s a trivial example, but think of the choices we make when it comes to colleges, companions, relationships, and careers.

When I quit the academic world to become a full-time freelance writer, I took a huge gamble. It worked out, though at the time the odds were long. I feel like my life is a gamble, and perhaps that is why I don’t gamble in casinos.

In the same poem, the speaker draws a stunning connection between instability and religion, evoking God in “the risk you feel / when you are so deeply involved with another person / that you cannot imagine living your life without her.” That powerful stanza concludes: “The inevitability of loss, a much-misunderstood aspect / of gambling, is not a deterrent but an attraction.” Why, in your view, is instability so compelling? Why is risk-taking (such as risking love) a joyful high?

Life without risk, even if possible, wouldn’t necessarily be desirable. What makes a baseball game exciting to a fan is that the outcome is unknown. It is happening, it is real, and it can go either way. If love came with a lifetime guarantee, would it still be love? Would it be love if it didn’t have the fear of loss?

Graham Greene once said that he went to Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam, Haiti, Africa not “to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity” to which the London blitzes had addicted him. That makes sense to me.

For the entire piece, please click here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-joy-of-the-gamble-a-conversation-with-david-lehman/
Photo credit: Stacey Lehman. Cover art by Ricky Mujica. The Morning Line was puiblished bby the University of Pittsburgh Press in September of this year.

The Assignment [by Walter Carey]

“The only virtue in life is survival,” Sanders said with his typical swagger and thick irony. “There is nothing heroic about the ‘survival of the fittest,’ a blasphemous notion and not a democratic one. Business is business. Television killed not only the radio but the movies, too. The movies had already taken care of Broadway. Messages with multiple syllables went obsolete. All that and the downsizing too had already gone down. Only one commodity retained its inflation-proof value."

And now? Now he was making a big bet on cloud computing. “As alternating current was to the rise of electricity, so fiber optic technology spelled out the death of the p.c.”  He smiled arrogantly. “Can you make a story out of that?”

The job was to write up the story in a one-line poem of one hundred words or less with lots of pictures, actors, women crying, men going out of business, a brutal election campaign going down to the wire, a scenario no stranger than reality but better-looking and happy-seeming as the faces in the ads for Miss Subways in the 1950s. You hung at the straps at seven in the morning, closed your eyes, married your secretary and kept her in fur from Fred Leighton with an occasional bracelet from Harry Winston. A man accompanying a woman to such a place was a hero. 

But now we do not have heroes. We do not have secretaries, let alone marry them. We have assistants and we have business associates and some of them are making big bets on Bitcoin or on disruptive technologies while I toil on my one-line poem of one hundred words or less to advertise a fake reality.

November 2011

Ed. note: Walter Carey is at work on a cultural history of the 1960s.

Reuben Jackson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________

November Poem

 

It’s the first cold November evening.

I am out driving

And there is a hitchhiker 

Bearing a sign

At a quiet intersection.

I ignore the Cecil Taylor on the radio

To read it.

Perhaps they are bound for some

Exciting destination,

Or a place that I have been.

 

As I drive closer, the words become legible.

DESTINATION, REUBEN JACKSON’S ARMS.

OH, HOW I MISS THEM SO.

 

I am jubilant, flustered.

I squeal to a stop. It’s Donna!

I thought she was married and happy in Philadelphia.

 

We do not speak, but embrace.

I produce tears, she produces a butcher’s knife

And quickly accomplishes her deed.

 

She is careful to wipe the blood

From the seat covers,

And places each finger in sanitary gauze.

I still love you, she cries.

A final kiss and that still potent smile.

 

She still loves me, I moan before dying.

She is still neat and considerate as ever.

My pupils lock on her lovely thumb pointing northward

Across the avenue.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Reuben Jackson is the Archivist with the University of the District of Columbia’s Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, Fingering the Keys (Gut Punch Press, 1991) and Scattered Clouds (Alan Squire Publishing, 2019). His poems have been included in more than 40 anthologies. From 2012 to 2018, he was host of “Friday Night Jazz” on Vermont Public Radio, and currently co-hosts “The Sound of Surprise” on WPFW in Washington, DC.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Rest in Poetry and Peace, Robert Bly (1927-2021)

Robert Bly died last week. He was 94. I heard the news on November 22, 2021 and wrote:

Yesterday was Robert Bly’s last morning.
It was he who gave me the idea of
writing a poem each day, which is what he was doing
in January 1996, the coldest January in years
at Bennington College. He wrote first thing in the morning,
before coffee (if he ever drank coffee)
while curtains remained drawn.
He would sit up in bed, in close contact
with what he called his reptilian brain, and write when
travel across the Maginot Line of consciousness
went both ways on uncongested highways
and took unpredictable turns --- not a metaphor
Bly would have liked, by the way, not only
because he didn’t go to history for his rhetoric
but also because, dreadful as it was,
the world did not face what France faced in May 1940.

Robert liked images, a turtle, a spear, an onion, a castle,
and wishes, like the desire to travel far or
to be in Paris on a Thursday on your last day alive.

A big man, the author of “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,"
among other aresting titles, 
Robert was said to be cantankerous but I found him generous,
loyal, an excellent teacher and raconteur,
and it was a joy to work with him on The Best American Poetry 1999.

On publication of Robert's Morning Poems, the product of his practice of writing a poem a day first thing on the morning, I wrote,

<< Morning Poems is a sensational collection — Robert Bly's best in many years. Inspired by the example of William Stafford, Bly decided to embark on the project of writing a daily poem: Every morning he would stay in bed until he had completed the day's work. These 'little adventures / In Morning longing,' as he calls them, address classic poetic subjects (childhood, the seasons, death and heaven) in a way that capitalizes fully on the pun in the book's title. These are morning poems, full of the delight and mystery of waking in a new day, and they also do their share of mourning, elegizing the deceases and capturing the 'moment of sorror before creation.' Some of the poems are dialogues where unconventional speakers include mice, maple trees, bundles of grain, the body, the 'oldest mind' and the soul. A particularly moving sequence involves Bly's imaginative transactions with a great and unlikely precursor, Wallace Stevens. The whole is a fascinating and original book from one of our most fascinating authors. >>>
— David Lehman, January 1998

"The Tempest" [by Alexander Lazarus Wolff]

Each shock and shudder pummels the ship
as it cleaves through the waves. The updraught
billows the sail, and combers flood
the storm-struck deck. Our crew, flayed by spray,
squint ahead through the onslaught,
making way to that island of isolation.
The ocean begins to batter again:
a pulsation reverberates throughout the ship,
causing the wood to creak and bend.
Lightning strikes the water like a damnation.
Not a single place of solace for our crew to crawl into.
Yet again, the ship ripples and pulses, and the wind
rips the spindrift from the crest of each wave.

The captain beaches the hull.
Rain and wind weaken,
giving way to night’s mist.

The crew steps onto the island before them.
In the distance, they hear a song swimming
through the night, and into their view comes
a winged figure, its song unwinding from a rock.

(Ed. Note: The image above is "The Tempest" of Giorgione.)

Making an Inventory [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Bruegel's Sky - Fragment [Photo by Lera Auerbach]

To live, one must make an inventory:

Item 1: The sky. It is everywhere.

 

Item 2: People. There are many of them.

 

Item 3: It is hard to believe, but there are still birds. They occupy space between people and the sky. Sometimes they touch the heavens; sometimes they touch the earth.

 

Item 4: Conceptual thinking.

 

Item 5: Garbage cans. Discarded objects, personal treasures no longer loved such as broken limbs of dolls.

 

Item 6: Cars. Be aware of them.

 

Item 7: The rest of the world.

 

The dead are watching the shadows caused by light. 

Inside of each shadow, a small invisible death is practicing the art of dying.

 

Performing time present - Petter Jacobson’s Ballet de Lorraine [by Tracy Danison]

Petter Jacobson’s “Air condition” opens the Nancy Opera’s “Ready Made” 21-22 season. Photo©2021 Emilie-Salquebre

Originally laid out to impose rational charm on what I get the impression was a rather higgledy-piggledy daily reality, there is a lot to be said for 18th-century provincial cities such as Nancy. That rational charm remains hard at work in our topsy-turvy 21^st century. From the (tidy, practical) rail station to the picture-postcard place Stanislaus, the French take on “appreciate” comes to mind: the eye weighs without judgement, our sensibility pleased but not teased by well-kept and commodious Art-Nouveau buildings added into, around and within the softened but well-ordered lines and stylized gorgon-medallions of the little city’s Age-of-Reason-style baroque.

Inside and out, Nancy’s opera house, on the place Stanislaus, the destination of my walk and where I was to see Petter Jacobson and Thomas Caley’s brand new Air Condition dance performance for the Ballet de Lorraine, recalls this same rational charm. Reconstructed with the new materials and methods developed and used by Art Nouveau and with its place in the urban environment as esthetic baseline, the turns on spectator experience and performance needs seriously: it calls attention to itself only as its design, space and decoration lend themselves to experience and need. Nice place, Nancy!

In the mix of wider cultural themes – the Baroque, Art Nouveau – it seems to me that Nancy enjoys a continuity of local intentions and perspectives that create the city’s present moment. Nancy is its own unique place. And without my being able to put my finger on exactly why, this sense of continuity needs the breaks and punctuations of the randomly preserved fractions of mine-worker housing and randomly-sited contemporary metal-plastic-glass-on-asphalt-in-grass residence-asteroids glimpsed from the train. Also the fashionable clothing in the shop windows, the people on the streets and cafés and the unexpected surge of people coming into the opera house to see the show. Maybe the continuity needs pointing so we can make sense of it as a “present moment”.

As I went in the door of the opera, got my tickets and looked around, I was actually thinking: Is continuity of intention a continuity of place and people shaping each other over time?; is “past” a pastiche of intention that consciousness automatically orders to keep me sane?; is past therefore a retroactive simulacrum of present?

By synchronicity, as I lounged in my seat and went over the program, I learned that “Ready Made”, the 2021-22 thematic for the Ballet de Lorraine’s four performances and Air condition, the first of the four, turn around “movement of the visualized world”. In other words, the pieces explore qualities such as “continuity”: “time”, “duration”, the “present”, “past” or “time” with bodies in movement.

Air Condition starts up Ready Made’s exploring of the time theme with a production based on Yves Klein’s 1954 unproduced ballet, La Guerre (de la ligne et de la couleur). Klein wanted La Guerre to materialize in bodies and movement the immateriality of his work on line and color. Which Jacobson’s does with aplomb.

Tomás Saraceno sets Klein’s concern in a peculiarly imperfect white-grey flicker of what might be a pre-1960s movie. The flicker is bisected by a black line that projects enough visual umph to make a spectator imagine “line of horizon” but recalls “separating” rather than actually separating or distancing anything. Saraceno’s setting is well-washed with a deliberated soundscape composed by Eliane Radigue. Like line of horizon, the composition has just enough music umphto determinedly lead up to some brilliant apotheosis without ever bumping triumphantly (tumbling disconsolately away from) into it.

“Air condition” picks up Yves Klein's war against color and line. Photo©2021 Emilie-Salquebre

Dressed in shades and facets of the set’s lights by Ballet de Lorraine costumer Birgit Neppl and her team, Air condition’s twenty-four bodies in movement eventually collide, provoking emotional shape and substance in the process.

With a body pressing into an elastic horizon as multi-point of reference, bodies suddenly spin into the air and disappear from the roiling movement up and down the stage. Once recovered from the first, unexpected, plunge into the void, I’m asking, Losing grip or willing to go? and editorializing, All that separates the living and the dead is time?

Meanwhile, the horizon transforms from line to space to surface, the set from black sun to white light setting – could be vice versa, too – from an inside to an outside.

As a meticulously conceived and executed choreography, Air condition is a great success.

But it owes its success as a performance to the individuals of the Ballet de Lorraine. That’s because Jacobson’s vision of how to perform turns on encouraging diversity, turning away  the old idea of unity embodied in “one from many” toward a new type of unity: ‘many ones” in which performers in movement find each other again and again in the movement of each and then of all.  The sense of the choreography articulates and projects itself through performer diversity – the expression of an individual’s quality as a body, a personality and a flow movement.

So I came away from Jacobson’s  Air condition as I came away from the Jacobson’s Plaisirs inconnus: a bit stunned by the strength of feeling “many one” deploys.

The Sunday afternoon I saw Air condition, Petter Jacobson was named to the Ordre des arts et lettres for his contributions to dance performance. Though the citation named many of the choreographer’s admirable qualities, doings and deeds, it didn’t mention achieving a “many ones” performance team among them.  For my money, it should have been at the top of the list.  

Poets on Thanksgiving: A Roundup [by Stacey Lehman]

Some favorite Thanksgiving poems, starting with this one by Terence Winch:

Thanksgiving

Later, after dinner, we examine your uncle’s photos

of trees, flowers, waterfalls, birds

until I just can’t stand it another second.

I am not at one with nature.  Never was.

Some of the people can be fooled all of the time,

even when you yawn right in their faces.

Guests, or ghosts, have taken over the house,

lounging in the living room, watching t.v.

Ugly images of war and politics are all I see.

Cancel the rest of the holidays, please, until this

knot can be untied and our hearts released.

-- Terence Winch

 

Happy Thanksgivukkah from Over Here [by Moira Egan, 2013]

"I'm already sick of turkey" (by Karen Resta, 2012)

Boxed in, Blue Humorous and Bleary Eyed (Bildungsroman Holiday by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

How to Chop a Fuckton of Onions (more Bildungsroman Holiday, by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

Bildungsroman Holiday (by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

Thanksgiving, 1977, Albany NY (by Stacey Harwood, 2010)

A Poem for Thanksgiving (by Martha Silano, 2009)

Happy Thanksgiving (by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2009)

A Poem for Thanksgiving Week (by Laura Orem, 2009)

Venerdi Nero (?) by Moira Egan (2009)

Happy Thanksgiving (2009 - photograph)

"We Gather Together" (2009 - video)

A Thanksgiving Post (by Laura Orem, 2008)

Thanksgiving and Black Friday (by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2008)

Your Brain on Turkey and Fixings (by Martha Silano, 2008)

Live Poetry Blogging on Thanksgiving (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

(Not so) Live Blogging, 10:54 pm [(by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Live Thanksgiving Blogging 12:26 pm (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Happy Spanksgiving, from the flarflist (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Pre-Thanksgiving Emergency Narrowly Averted (by Martha Silano, 2008)

https://theamericanscholar.org/addressing-the-universe-or-one-aspect-of-it/

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2019/11/the-best-thanksgiving-ever-by-jennifer-l-knox.html

from the archive; first posted November 25, 2015

The Heart Has Reasons [by John Skoyles]

And I wrote those reasons 
on the ruled grid

of an index card
to preserve the moment, Madam,

when the panels of the hotel
elevator closed,

leaving just us.
A sigh and a kiss

did nicely, Lady,
but when the doors

opened again,
you were again nowhere

near, and now
the file card’s lost too,

with its logical
numerical slate.

I’ve misplaced this and that 
over the years, Dear,

but the things I miss most, Miss,
are listed on that card.

from Yes and No by John Skoyles (Carnegie Mellon University Press)

"Voyage" by Bella Li [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Bella Li has published three collections of poetry, Maps, Cargo (2013); Argosy (2017), winner of both the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards 2018 for poetry, and the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2018 for poetry; and Lost Lake (2018). Born in China, Li emigrated to Australia at the age of three. Her work is often a unique assemblage of collage, poetry and photography, and, as the titles of her collections suggest, often deals in themes of exploration and loss—the shadow of Australia’s colonial history always looming near.

 

“Voyage” calls to mind Baudelaire, whose own “Voyage” trails Li’s as a kind of ghost ship. “Sullen days”, as Li’s poem opens, is just one of the bitter truths Baudelaire thought our travels brought us, not an opening up of perspective but a realization that the world is “tiny and monotonous” and we are but “oases of fear in the wasteland of ennui”. Or as Li phrases it “my eyes reeked of distance”. Baudelaire’s themes take on new stakes in Li’s writing, as she pitches her work against a national history of exploration leading to dispossession and her own migratory past.

 

 

The Most Underrated Poet in America

<<< 

I remember a poet's writing to me several years back, You are the most underrated poet in the country. But then, he added, that's better than being the most overrated poet in the country. I was and remain impressed by the short distance between the two extremes.

-- Howard Nemerov, Journal of the Fictive Life (1963)
>>>

On the other hand, keep in mind what R. G. Collingwood wrote in 1924:

". . . in art, a school once established normally deteriorates as it goes on. It achieves perfection in its kind with a startling burst of energy, a gesture too quick for the historian's eye to follow. He can never explain such a movement or tell us how exactly it happened. But once it is achieved, there is the melancholy certainty of a decline. The grasped perfection does not educated and purify the taste of posterity; it debauches it. The story is the same whether we look at Samian pottery or Anglian carving, Elizabethan drama or Venetian painting. So far as there is any observable law in collective art history it is, like the law of the individual artist's life, the law not of progress but of reaction. Whether in large or in little, the equilibrium of the aesthetic life is permanently unstable."

Didn't Paul Valéry say poetry was language beyond paraphrase, language so vital it is irreducible?

Therefore, I shall return to thee, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "  poem is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.”

The New York School Diaspora (Part Nineteen): Amy Gerstler [by Angela Ball]

Night Life

How can this equal rest or peace, this garble of gasps, snuffles,
and horse-like snorts? His lips flutter as though he’s blowing
bubbles, his moans so choked he must be drowning…or are
his legs being sucked in by quicksand, the way a restaurant
critic sucks the bones of her osso buco? In my overheated,
night-gowned silence I watch him flinch in a puddle of bedside
light. A range of ages and plights wash over his face. Who is
this sleeping, unshaven male, this slab of snoring meat, this
leaky ship of divinity? I stare across the chasm which divides
each waking or sleeping creature, whether they’ve touched
each other or not. He’s a magician who made an orchard
disappear, an unhinged shooter from St. Louis, a plum
colored shadow, a handful of chameleon teeth, one of god’s
toboggans, a tree denuded of leaves bleeding beads of amber.

--Amy Gerstler (from Index of Women)

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. The most recent is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts CD Wright Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her previous books include Scattered at Sea and Dearest Creature. She is currently working on a musical play with composer/arranger/actor Steve Gunderson.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Nineteen): Amy Gerstler

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Biograpia Literaria of 1817, draws a signal distinction, declaring that “the objects of fancy are fixed and dead”; whereas the objects of imagination are imbued with “esemplastic power.” In Amy Gerstler’s humorous and revelatory poem, “Night Life,” the object of her imagination, her sleeping partner, is anything but “fixed and dead.” In fact, the poem embodies a rare quality I’ll call “logo-plasticity,” in which a poem’s images, made of words, rise from the page to model a sculptural and kinesthetic likeness. The poem’s speaker watches in “overheated, nightgowned silence” as whole swathes of human and animal peril are enacted to appalling dramatic effect: “. . . or are / his legs being sucked in by quicksand, the way a restaurant critic / sucks the bones of her osso buco?” With the speaker, we grow transfixed as “a range of ages and plights wash across his face,” and wonder “Who is / this sleeping, unshaven male, this slab of snoring meat, this / leaky ship of divinity?” Coming after what may be the poem’s most hilarious comparison, “this slab of snoring meat,” “this / leaky ship of divinity” announces a turn in Gerstler’s free-wheeling sonnet. The partner’s disordered repose becomes an entrée into mystery, “the chasm that divides / each waking or sleeping creature, whether they’ve touched / each other or not.” What a direct, modest, and thus effective way to describe the isolation in which we move. Observer turned sculptor, the speaker cycles the dreaming man through deeds and identities, including the astonishing, tragi-comic “God’s toboggan,” shifting him to shapes that contain us all: murderous, yet powerless; decaying, yet primordial in beauty: “a tree denuded of leaves bleeding beads of amber.” Amy Gerstler’s “Night Life” is the work of a poetic magus.

--Angela Ball

A Woman's Laughter [by Charles Coe]

On a recording of the Bill Evans trio,
Live at the Village Vanguard,
late June '61, during a slow, haunting version
of "I Loves You Porgy," at the quietest moment,
in the background, soft but clear, 

a woman's laughter.

At first the sound seems jarring, even sacrilegious.
But then again a jazz club's not a concert hall,
listeners in polite rows, knees together,
waiting to cough in the space between movements.
Jazz is cash registers and clinking glasses
and chairs scraping the floor.

And besides it's a pleasant laugh, full of promise.
Easy to see her hand reach out to rest on her
companion's arm. Easy to catch the whiff of lilac or lavender . . . 
Always, so many worlds within worlds.

In one world,
A man who follows Evans from gig to gig
sits at the bar alone, transfixed,
ice melting in the forgotten drink.

In one world,
The bartender counts his cash
while dreaming of the waitress's embrace.

In one world,
A woman's laughter.

In one world,
Evan's leans over the keys, oblivious to all
but the slow heartbeat bass,
the splash of brushes on cymbal and snare,
fingers poised for what seems like forever
before they settle gently over the final chord. 

                               -- from Memento Mori: Poems by Charles Coe

In addition to Memento Mori: poems, Charles Coe is the author of two previous volumes of poetry, both with Leapfrog Press: All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents (2013) and Picnic on the Moon (1999). He's also the author of Spin Cycles, a novella published by Gemma Media. Charles is the winner of a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and was selected by the Associates of the Boston Public Library as a "Boston Literary Light in 2014." He teaches poetry in the MFA programs at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, and Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Coe is a jazz vocalist who has performed and recorded with musicians throughout New England. 

Der Blaue Reiter [by Wassily Kandinsky]

Cover of Der Blaue Reiter by Wassily Kandinsky (1911)

The blue rider rode on the blue horse
Franz Marc painted in 1911.
World War I killed Marc and returned Kandinsky to Russia
until 1921 when Walter Gropius summoned him
to the Bauhaus in Germany where he worked
until 1933 when the Nazis nixed it and he went to France,
painted and died just as the Battle of the Bulge was about to begin,
sparing a thought for Franz Marc and his large blue horses.