The Best American Poetry

David [poem by Marie Syrkin]

David
Marie Syrkin

Suppose, this time, Goliath should not fail;
Suppose, this time, the sling should not avail
On the Judean plain where once for all
Mankind the pebble struck, suppose the tale
Should have a different end: the shepherd yield,
The triumph pass to iron arm and thigh,
The wonder vanish from the blooming field,
The mailed hulk stand, and the sweet singer lie.

Suppose, but then what grace will go unsung,
What temple wall unbuilt, what garden bare;
What ploughshare broken and what harp unstrung!
Defeat will compass every heart aware
How black the ramparts of a world wherein
The psalm is stilled, and David does not win. 

 

  Marie Syrkin (March 23, 1899 – February 2, 1989) was an American writer, translator, educator, and activist. She emigrated to the U.S. from Bern, Switzerland in 1908 and earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Cornell University, then taught high school in New York City. In 1950 Marie Syrkin was named associate professor of English at Brandeis University, where she taught until her retirement in 1966 as professor of the humanities.

 -- sdl

John Taylor's Brilliant Essay on the Prose Poem

Here is an excerpt. from "Two Cultures of the Prose Poem" by John Taylor

Ponge's strategy for destroying concepts provides a telling parallel to T. S. Eliot's notion of "forcing . . . language into its meaning." [In "Great American Prose Poems," David] Lehman includes Eliot's strange and initially quite violent prose poem "Hysteria," dated 1917, about the narrator being so "involved" in a woman's laughter that he is "lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat.") These acts of linguistic and per ceptual violence—"destruction was my Béatrice," claimed Mallarmé—belong to the modern poet's and prose-poet's role. Proverbial French "abstractions" in poetry often represent a paradoxical desire to break through them and, by this act, to catch sight of unusual slices or levels of reality..

Elsewhere I have suggested that American poets tend to begin with a fact and work toward an idea, while their French counterparts begin with an idea and work toward a fact. In the French prose poem, one of these initial ideas may indeed entail smashing through ideas, as the poet—rather like Edson's taxi—would smash through a brick wall keeping him or her from an ardently desired reality. In other words, for a prose poet like Ponge, the objectifying poetic process, aiming at grasping the "thing-in-itself," must necessarily take into account the ab-original idea, the inconvertible starting point, which is often the Cartesian cogito ergo sum as well as its logical consequence: "Because I am, the outside world also exists." Because Ponge's poems are not so much about things as about how he endeavors to break through conceptual obstacles (beginning with the solipsistic Cartesian departure point) and thus about how he envisions writing about the things in question, the paradox of his ideally self-effacing strategy is that he emerges, as a narrator, all the more imposingly. Yet his point about concepts is well made, and his language is exceedingly well crafted. In The Garden of Languages, Macé similarly identifies a "cancer of sense," as he declares in one prose poem, that can hatch "its black eggs beneath a thousand metaphors of love." Could it be that somewhere in this neighborhood exists a meeting point for French and American writers, where the French aspiration to break through concepts and attain a kind of "reality" encounters the demotic proclivities that Lehman discerns in American prose poetry?

In any event, Lehman rightly underscores the French contribution to the prose poem. Like most commentators, he attributes its birth to Aloysius Bertrand's collection Gaspard de la Nuit, posthumously published in 1842. Such an attribution seconds remarks made by Baudelaire [pictured above], who paid homage to Bertrand as a mentor when he began composing his own prose poems in 1857. Baudelaire's efforts were eventually gathered in the now-famous volume Petits poèmes en prose, which was first entitled Le Spleen de Paris when an initial sampling of it appeared in 1864. Soon thereafter, Rimbaud arrived on the scene. He boldly added new dimensions to the genre with A Season in Hell and Illuminations. As Lehman aptly remarks,the prose poems in Illuminations are like dream landscapes and journeys, visionary fragments, brilliant but discontinuous. They represent a considerable advance in abstraction and compression, and they are revolutionary, too, in recommending a breakdown in order, 'a willful derangement of the senses,' as a necessary regimen.

Finally, Mallarmé, Max Jacob (1876-1944), Henri Michaux (1899-1984), Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960), René Char (1907-88), and the aforementioned Ponge, "made Paris the indisputable capital of the prose poem," as Lehman points out.

Add to that list Jean Follain (1903-71), a selection of whose mysterious, subtly crafted prose poems have now once again been made available in English, in the White Pine Press volume. (Some versions included in this important volume were originally published, long ago, in small press editions.) Follain strikes the perfect balance between stylistic grace and semantic enigma. He employs not the slightest formal trick. He does not need to: his gaze over the surface of the world actually (and discretely) probes very deep. Besides bringing out the "chant [that] goes up from every object"—with so much more naturalness than Ponge—and creating touching, melancholy atmospheres, Follain ponders time and again the significance of an everyday world that seemingly possesses no more coherence than a myriad of simultaneous disparate occurrences. He juxtaposes the occurrences in a way depicting life as a hodge-podge, at best a motley tapestry, of vanishing moments:

A boy is troubled on a day petals pour down and dogs are stolid. Girls get straight up out of bed, sun falls on their torsos, a wasp buzzes in the fold of a curtain; the calendar on the wall grows warm. Men are drinking in the blind alley where some feeble plants poke up. A conference searches for peace without finding it. In a bedroom, a turn-of-the-century breastplate gleams, well polished. When French regiments wore ones like it, Maurice Maindron wrote cloak-and-dagger novels; he loved armor, a love inspired by his taste for coleoptera. Now a May beetle the color of dead leaves proceeds across the glittering breastplate at this moment—possible as all things are possible—this moment which will never return.

(translation: Mary Feeney and William Matthews)

As precursors of the English-language prose poem, Lehman cites the King James Bible, Shakespeare's prose (in Hamlet), John Donne's sermons, Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and other pertinent examples. Let me add that similar prose-poem antecedents in French literature can be identified as far back as Aucassin et Nicolette (late twelfth or early thirteenth century), a love story alternating verse and poetic prose, and perhaps even in the metrically cadenced prose sermons of Saint Bernard (1091-1153). As to more recent (pre-Baudelairean) periods, prototypes of the prose poem emerge in certain prose passages of the plays of Molière (1622-73), in various "pensées" by Pascal (1623-62), in sermons by Bossuet (1627-1704), in Télémaque by Fénelon (1651-1715), in sundry descriptions of nature by Rousseau (1712-78) or Chateaubriand (1768-1848), not to forget in some of Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721).

Click here for the entire essay as pubnlished in Michigan Quartery Review, Spring 2005.
See, too, https://poets.org/poet/john-taylor

An Interview with David Keplinger [by Nin Andrews]

Anyone reading my recent posts might notice I've been talking/thinking a lot about David Keplinger's poetry. These last few weeks, his poems have been speaking to me. I see in his prose poems the influence of  French surrealists and prose poets  I adore, as well as the mystics I studied in college.  Also, as someone who grew up on a farm, I love how he writes/thinks about animals. And as a lousy Buddhist, I am a huge fan of his guided poetry meditations.  His poems have opened a little doorway in my mind I had forgotten existed. So, I thought I would interview him. I have so many questions to ask him, questions about his prose poetry, his thought process, you name it. 

NA: First, I want to post your poem, “Angels and Wounds.”

Angels and Wounds

A play called Angels and Wounds, by David Keplinger, that goes on for years and has no curtain, where the author plays one of the parts. In some scenes it is the wound in him that sees the wound in the other. What is re-enacted is an old disaster. In some scenes it is his Angel that addresses the other’s wound, or it is reversed, and he is the wounded one, drawn to the Angel. Codependence casts its green light on the stage. There is hardly any dialogue except the sound of silverware, bottlecaps, slamming doors. But in some scenes the Angel in him engages the Angel in the other. It’s the same play his parents put on, and he plagiarized everything.

I wanted to start with this poem because I think it is a great example of what I love about your work. It’s witty, a little dark—maybe a little self-mocking. And it’s also serious and universal. I had this silly thought after reading it—I thought I was the only one who keeps re-enacting an old disaster. And then, of course, the last line is perfect. But after reading about your parents, I started wondering about your history.

Could you say a few words about your mother and father: how they influenced you/your work? I guess I’m looking for an origin story. Where did the great poet, David Keplinger, come from?

DK: My parents were two very different people who learned, over the fifty years they spent together, how to recalibrate their often rocky relationship with humor. They were each very funny, but together they were the funniest one person I have ever known. I think my interest in the prose poem happened because I was so immersed in jokes in childhood. In my thirties I read Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, in which he takes many great jokes and just obliterates them by explaining them. I saw the relationship between the leaps required in the poem and the deeply familiar and completely surprising landing of a good joke. I saw how, when you were listening to a joke, the punch line was somewhere incubating in every line. You know it’s coming. You’re laughing already. But how do you know? When the punch line was approaching, I learned to anticipate, I reveled in the being fooled, I hoped that I wouldn’t be able to guess what would happen. When the punch line landed it was nothing like what I expected and at the same time could have been nothing else. I saw that jokes and poems—my kind of poems, that is—exist in the gaps between the broken parts of life. Poems pay attention to the broken parts because that’s in fact the life we’re living in the everyday. I like to say, “every metaphor begins in dissonance and ends in unity.” It would only be through brokenness that we get to what is real…only through the everyday that we could reach the eternal, the way Dante has to pass through the Inferno on his way to Paradiso.  

 “Angels and Wounds” was a poem I wrote a bit differently than the others here. Most of the poems in The World to Come revealed themselves to me slowly; they opened up before me and my job was just to carefully tear away the wrapping paper. But this poem began with an idea I’ve always had about my parents. Wound-wound relationships, which are so painful, because they feed on mutual resentment. Or angel-wound relationships which are co-dependent. And angel-angel relationships in which both parties are participating in the union as if they are one thing, doing the work for the work itself. I observed all of that in my parents. When they were funny, they were letting go so beautifully, they were becoming, as I said, one thing. When they were funny there was so much love. Even recognizing this, I can’t help acknowledging that I have plagiarized all those behaviors from my parents’ play.

NA: I remember you saying your father loved broken things, and later, I heard you say that grief is something you try to welcome and not push away. In other words, you embrace brokenness. You do this as a poet and as a Buddhist practice? Is that how your book, Ice, came about?  It seems to me that the collection has many layers of grief, of melting. 

DK: Yes, you’re right about that. It’s not that brokenness is more important than wholeness. It’s that brokenness is the way things appear and wholeness is how they actually are. To use the plural is even misleading, because things “aren’t.” Everything is. The original title for Ice was Is. I decided it would have been too hard to conduct a search for it. Ice, in my book, is is-ness in its blocked state. Congealed state. It begins with frozen bodies of Pleistocene wolves and puppies and woolly rhinos and cave lions recently discovered in the melting permafrost in Yakutia, a region in Siberia. There was one case where a nematode, a microscopic flatworm dating back to the last Ice Age 40,000 years ago, was thawed and brought to life and then reproduced in a lab. An animal that lived while Neanderthals were being slowly exterminated by Homo Sapiens. It lived in a not-alive, not-dead state all that time. These stories of animal bodies struck a deep chord in me. I began to think about the other bodies in me, the bodies of my infant self, my childhood self, my teenager self, and so on. I began to think about the ways they can be activated and rise to the present moment, not knowing that the world around them has changed. This is the trauma response. We think we’re still in the Pleistocene of our childhood, and so we react that way when someone pushes a button. Suddenly out of the ice comes this toddler.

 But the ice never really melts. Down they go again when the situation resolves. They might stay there forever. For me, what melted the ice was literature, poetry. It was a light that brought these parts of myself out of those chthonic realms and in the open air. Poetry melted everything. It helped release my embarrassment and anger and pain and resistance and to let much of that go. This is what I must have meant by welcoming grief, looking longer into grief, rather than looking away. Welcoming brokenness, looking longer into brokenness, rather than looking away. Because I begin to see that grief is just frozen love, love that is stuck and unable to be released. Until it is.

NA: I want to talk about another poem or rather, other poems, starting with this one:

Gazebo 

On the subject of tenderness, let us sit and discuss for an hour under the imaginary gazebo of meaning. It is like a moment in Pietro Lorenzetti, where what Jesus teaches at the table, the little cat and dog lapping up the extra bread, already know how to do.

As someone who grew up on a farm, I love how you write about animals. You seem to see the animals as teachers. You honor their lives.  I really admire your poem, “Reading Gilgamesh Before Going to Sleep,” in which you mourn the loss of your dog, Molly. There’s that the line I keep repeating to myself: “and when I had the chance to live I was distracted anyway—”

I wondered if you could talk a little about this. 

DK: You connected the animals in Ice to my general awe of animals, which began for me with Whitman:
 

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

 

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

                                                                        (“Song of Myself,” 32)

And then there were Rilke’s poems about animals like the panther and the insect and the black cat and the flamingos, and of course Mary Oliver’s depiction of the natural world, dogs and bears and foxes, which I came to love in my years of friendship with her and in my admiration of her genius.

The poem “Gazebo” is a little offering about the 14^th century Italian master Pietro Lorenzetti. He knew that to make Christ real, right on the seam between the transcendent and the everyday world, he had to create a scene that considered the ordinary people who looked on while the Last Supper took place. It’s a historical rendering of the event. But on the right side of the fresco, it’s all spooky and supernatural. There’s just stars, infinity, space, mystery. On the left side are these two waiters listening through the doorway as they wash dishes, and a little dog laps up food from God’s dinnerplate. And this Christ figure sits right in the middle, the interpreter between the human and the cosmic. It’s incredibly modern. It’s the birth of modernity, I believe. By the 16^th century, Breughel has advanced the idea so far that the ploughman practically takes up the whole picture, while the god, now, is little Icarus with his two tiny legs splashing in the waters of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. I can never get away from this lesson on the complementarity of the eternal and time. In my poems, the animals are more like Jesus in Lorenzetti; they’re interpreters from a realm before language and history. That’s why I associate them with childhood. But you’re right when you say that the animals are my teachers.

In the Gilgamesh poem you ask about, I conflate the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu (an arrogant king and the wild person come from the woods, each teaching the other compassion and civility, respectively) with my relationship to Molly, a pit mix who was my best friend and who traveled to many places with me over the eleven years I got to be her person. Circumstances had it that I wasn’t present when she died. I went into deep mourning, because I had let her down. There’s a line in that poem where I write, “when she left I walked through oceans of myself/ like Gilgamesh searching for a way to stay in pain forever/ because I didn’t know how else to honor what had died for me.” Now and then, forces flow into our lives which we don’t deserve. The animals visit us in this way. I hope my poetry notices these visitations of grace.

This is very hard to talk about. I see myself as a poet who has to use the words to scoop under the words. The animals are like these Virgil figures who take you there. Now, not to say that animals don’t speak languages of their own—they do—but in the quiet communication between yourself and a great being like a horse or an elephant or a whale or a dog or a cat, you have to dig to a place where sheer, intelligent nature—not words—is the means of contact.  They sweep you down into their realm very quickly.

 NA: I’ve only been posting your prose poems here for a reason—I want to hear you talk about the form.  You described how you compose prose poems in an interview with Grace Cavalieri– I think you said that first there appeared to you the shape—in the case of prose poems,  the shape was a box, then all you had to was fill the box with words. I am picturing a toybox. Can you elaborate?

DK: Ah, it’s such a great topic and a lovely question. I started writing prose poems after working with Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen on his selected poems, which we published in 2007. Carsten names Simic’s The World Doesn’t End as a heavy influence. Me too. We already had a lot in common. We saw the French Symbolism in Simic, not surrealism, but something earlier that reflects the work of Max Jacob or Rimbaud. Once I crawled around in the attic of Carsten’s imagination, I was changed forever. My poetry had a stoop. I’ve written three books of prose poems, the earliest being The Prayers of Others (2006), followed by The Most Natural Thing (2013) and then The World to Come (2021). In all my books, though, there are prose poems. I love the form.

But is it a form? It’s a box, yes. Better to say, I have stripped away all formality here, all ostentation you connect with poetry. I have even stripped away beginnings and endings. Carsten used to say a prose poem “begins in the middle and ends in the middle.”  I’m even going to, in some cases, strip away the title. It’s just a window in a tenement, like the gray windows of Edward Hoppers’ paintings. Shadow figures, people sitting on the edges of their beds, reading letters, caught in the middle of the act. A prose poem is shaped like and is experienced like a photograph, a cacophony of images contained in the box of the form. I love how you compare it to a toybox. The toys have no relationship between them, other than that they are contained in this box. And the whole box, all the separate parts in inter-relationship, speaks of the child to whom it belongs. Such a metaphor for the psyche or the world. Mallarme said that things alone don’t carry symbolic meaning, but that meaning is only to be found in the interstice between images. Prose poetry emphasizes this for me. It is an escape from logic, from order, from reason. It is negative capability. It is a disappearing cabinet. It says: don’t look for answers here, but an experience. And that is just how it gets you. It haunts you. It sucks you in.

 I have this totally unprovable theory that prose poetry begins with Shakespeare. In Hamlet, Claudius and Gertrude speak in heroic couplets and the rest of the members of the court most often speak officially in verse. Yet when the gravediggers speak, it’s in paragraphs. They tell jokes. They are standing on the margins of the court and yet they know more about what’s going on within than the insiders do. They are free from formality. They’re glum but also joyful. They dig graves, but they are also very light. They are the agents of removal and release. The gravediggers are the voices of the prose poets.

NA: What do you think of Russell Edson’s view that prose poems should be funny?

DK: There’s a teasing smile behind the words. Look at Simic and Edson and Tate, all of them. Somehow, the words are smiling.

NA: Do you have ideas about the shape of a book before you write it?

DK: I usually have no idea what the book will be. Mary Oliver told me after my first book was published that the real work was ahead of me. She said the second book is much harder to write than the first book. In my case, she was right. It took me six years. What happens for me is that the book will take as long as it’s going to take. I wrote the next one (The Prayers of Others) in six weeks. And then the fourth one took me seven years. I have a friend, an artist named Jim Youngerman, who draws by making shapes on the paper until they begin to look like something. Then he draws in the direction of whatever that seems to be. Then, he’ll get into a series using those shapes in different ways. This is very similar to the way I work. Once I know what the book is trying to do (the ice metaphor and the Pleistocene animals, for example), the poems come very quickly. But it might require years of writing before I hit upon the notion or the metaphor that feels sturdy enough to build the book upon.

NA: Reading your books, I wondered if you were a Religious Studies major in college? I recognize so many references from my years of religion and philosophy classes.

DK: What a compliment to hear this. No, I was a poet from the start. I had one philosophy course in college, and I wasn’t interested in those writers until well after, until I started to perceive them as fuel for some fire that was cooking in me. I was twenty-five or twenty-six before I became a very serious reader. I don’t know what happened. As CK Williams said somewhere, I was a writer first, and the reading came after. But when it did, it lit up parts of me I hadn’t known were there. When I was twenty-six, I read Dante for the first time. When I was twenty-seven, in 1995, I left to teach abroad for two years in the city of Frydek-Mistek near the Czech/Polish border. There were only a few English books in our school library and I just ate them up. There was nothing else to read, no phones, no devices, not much television (I learned Czech but not well enough). The nearest internet cafe was forty-five minutes away. I checked email for an hour once per week. There was a movie theater that played Czech films. I loved seeing American musicals on TV because at least they wouldn’t dub over the songs. This was my education. I listened to stories in my broken Czech, old drinkers who told me about their trouble with the communists. I met survivors of the Holocaust in quiet nineteenth century looking parlor rooms. I played music, taught my classes, wrote poems in bars called Café Goethe and The White Raven. I wrote letters by hand. I read books. It was my school. The tuition was silence. My teachers were everywhere.

NA: So many of your poems make me laugh. Like “Politeness,” which made me wonder if you ever came to dinner at our house. I have four sisters, and when their suitors dined with us, it was just like this poem.

Politeness

I said very little during the meal. She and her father sat watching me. I remember the hard work of politeness, how it is done out of, not love, but surrender. How I sawed and sawed at the meat. How the deer did not flinch on the plate.

DK: Yes, this is the smile behind the words I was speaking about. And it’s an example, too, of how the work reveals itself to me. “Politeness” began several years ago as a poem about ghosts. Now there are no ghosts in it, but only this suitor and the poor deer, both coerced into surrender.

NA: Then there are your translations—I have been reading your translations of the poet, Carsten René Nielsen. Could you tell me how these translations came about? 

Hammershøi

By Carsten René Nielsen

 

It’s been described to me: the way the light changes in the window in the background. But no matter how I concentrate, and as if by a will of its own, my focus is drawn into the picture, moving along the wainscoting, above the gray walls, toward the book on the table, the cut of the chair-back, then resting always for a moment on the luminous nape of the woman in the black dress, who sits turned away and with her head bowed. Exactly at this moment, either the sunlight suddenly changes quality, or someone’s shadow hastens past the window in the background. You hardly notice it, and when you look, it’s already gone.

 

         from House Inspections, translated by David Keplinger

DK: This, too, came about during those years I lived in the Czech Republic in the mid-1990s. I was visiting Copenhagen when a friend pulled from his bookshelf the new book of a young and up-and-coming poet. Right there on the spot he translated a poem for me. I was so taken with it, I wrote Carsten via his website, asking if I could see more. He told me there were no poems in English, but would I like to try my hand at translating some? So that is what we did. It took us three years to figure out what we were doing. But when I finally started sending his poems to journals, there was an immediate interest. So we kept going. That was almost thirty years ago. A new book, our fifth, called Miniatures, is set to appear later this year from Plamen Press.

NA: Finally, I wanted to ask about your Buddhist practice. What kind of Buddhism? Why Buddhism? How does practice influence your work? And then you lead guided meditations featuring poems?

DK: I grew up Catholic within my mother’s large Sicilian family. Sometime late in graduate school, I began to become interested (though I don’t know why or how this happened) in Christian mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Father Thomas Keating, Centering Prayer. It’s what led me, finally, to Dante. Then, Buddhism naturally emerged out of that interest in contemplative practices. I’ve been engaged in Buddhism since the early 2000s. I began to see, even back then, that the language I was using for where poems come from had its corresponding glossary in Buddhism. After being a sometimes student of Mahayana, specifically Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, I enrolled in Tara Brach’s and Jack Kornfield’s Mindfulness certification program in late 2020. That introduced me to Theravada Buddhism which bases its practice on the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha. After studying in the program for two years, I founded The Mindfulness Initiative at AU (MIAU), where every Friday in the semester, we sit with a poem for a half an hour. The poets aren’t Buddhists, necessarily. I’ve done sessions on Mary Oliver, Hopkins, Dickinson, Whitman, Rumi, and many contemporary poets, including our beloved Myra Sklarew, who passed away last month. I open with a guided meditation in the style of Tara Brach, speak a little dharma talk for about ten minutes on the poem, and then we return to the meditation with a question or a theme gleaned from the writing. Since 2022, the audience has grown. It’s expanded beyond AU. So I have begun to acknowledge that there’s a need for this little marriage of the literary and the luminous. Each week we have anywhere from thirty to fifty people join our group on Zoom. If anyone is interested in visiting or just getting onto the mailing list (where I send each week a link to the recording of the previous session, along with an essay in response to the theme), they can fill out the contact form at: http://eepurl.com/ilpwh9.

Videos archive over fifty of our meetings here: https://www.youtube.com/@davidkeplinger3236/videos

Sample poems, reviews, and news:

https://www.davidkeplingerpoetry.com

A Note on the Simile [by David Lehman]

Similes are as underrated in contemporary writing as Longfellow is underrated among his nineteenth century confreres. Well, maybe all rhetorical figures are underrated. The neglect of rhetorical devices, verse forms, rhyme, and other “adjuncts or ornaments” (as Milton would have it) is lamentable, but it does create a compelling opportunity for contemporary poets eager to embrace change and renew a past tradition. You can distinguish yourself from your peers just by making good use of similes.

 A great simile opens a poem or narrative in a vertical way—it doesn’t advance the argument or plot so much as it heightens or deepens it. Whether introduced by “like” or “as” or through some other means (“the size of a grapefruit,”"the length of a football field"), the simile adds a complicating element even as it appears to clarify matters. It can resemble a detour—or a shortcut. It should surprise and should not repeat expressions already in use. Paradoxically, the simile can work to illustrate a thought or image—which is, after all, its stated function—yet it can overshadow the thought or image to which it was supposedly a subordinate element. Like the bridge in a jazz standard, it can surpass in beauty or inventiveness the primary melody, as happens in “Body and Soul” and “Skylark.”

For brilliant similes, albeit in prose, I would recommend Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps—in which she tells us, for instance, that her heroine was the victim of a certain man’s “conscience, as Isaac very nearly was of Abraham’s.” The religious and philosophical concerns of this author are front and center in a sentence that very surprisingly uses scientific means to explain a moral proposition: “To know God and yet do evil, this was the very essence of the Romantic life, a kind of electrolytical process in which the cathode and the anode act and react upon one another to ionize the soul.” An enterprising professor could build half a college course around that sentence.

Nearly every page of A. J. Liebling’s great book on boxing, The Sweet Science, can boast a refreshing, inventive simile or two. Example: “But Attell, who looks at you with cold eyes around his huge beak that is like a toucan’s with a twisted septum, is not a sentimental man.”

from the archive; first posted May 12, 2015.

Who said it? [quote of the week #2, 2025 series]

"Hans was mediocre in the most honorable sense of the word."

"A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also the truth."

"Speaking French is, for me, like speaking without saying anything -- as in a dream." 

“Don't you like the sight of a coffin? I really do. I find it a handsome piece of furniture, even empty; when someone is lying in it, then, in my eyes, it is positively sublime.”

“Malice, my dear sir, is the animating spirit of criticism."

"Terror is what our age needs, what it demands, and what it will get."

"“Yes, like watching someone flog a dead horse into obedience,” Settembrini scoffed; to which Naphta replied that since for our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body’s receiving an occasional beating—which immediately brought them to the topic of cremation.”

[The picture is unrelated to the quotations.]

"Who Said It?" [quotes of the week: no. 1, January 20, 2025]

A novel's true suspense is felt not by the reader but by the author, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

Europe is the negative that American developed into the finished photograph.

Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex.

You mustn’t force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

Hell man, every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’."

The happy ending is our national belief..

Scratch a socialist and you find a snob.

A doubt would suddenly dart out of her, like a mouse from its hole.

One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Ed. note: Who wrote or said these things? The picture on the left contains no clues or hints.

Shelley Wong: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

When We Were Young

 

I was a month older. We both had

Chinese last names. She was also

 

Khmer, Thai & Vietnamese: a mix

of enemies. Thailand always

 

stealing temples along the border.

She identified as Khmer because

 

they needed her the most.

We were opposites, like our two

 

eventual cats. I was the aloof one,

lithe & nervous in my Audrey

 

Hepburn sunglasses. She was

the teasing one, smoking cloves

 

slouched in her brother’s frayed

skater clothes, seemingly

 

carefree. After high school, we lived

in New York City, met every

 

Gen X Khmer person in the New England

& Tri-State Area. I shredded papaya,

 

marveled at ahmok. Dancing

at banquets, I flared my fingers

 

like gladiolas opening. Like our elders,

our leisure included free Atlantic City

 

hotel rooms & touring the buffets. She’d blow

through a snapped snow crab leg

 

& split it cleanly, giving me a perfect

piece of meat. Spoiled, she called me

 

against the casino chimes. Her mother called

me oun—daughter. Growing up, she didn’t

 

know which stories about Cambodia

were true. She could sweet talk

 

anybody, especially a security guard.

Four generations deep in America,

 

I was more afraid. Chinese waiters

were confused when she spoke

 

instead of me. I was the light-skinned

tall girl with a blank face, the one who

 

paid the bill & didn’t suck the bones clean.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (2022), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in San Francisco.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                    Tamara de Lempicka, The Girls, ca.1930, oil on canvas.

Who am I? The dermatologists want to know

 

Next Line, Please: 2 new prompts on "The American Scholar"

Above the River of Your Longing

Two new prompts

By David Lehman | January 16, 2025

Kudos, all! Our last “Next Line, Please” elicited 88 comments. The most popular of the three prompts I offered in that column (“What a Strange Path”) was the one highlighted in the title and photo-illustration, both taken from Robert Bresson’s movie Pickpocket, which concludes with these words: “Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take.”

Pamela Joyce Shapiro hit the ball out of the park with “The Road to Lumière”:

Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take.
I raced through bridges with Jules and Jim, the stairs scaffolding love
above the river of your longing and your end. Jeanne, I have
been both man and woman to know your shadowed face, the serene
silence of your brow. And I have wrecked a train for the art of
your downturned mouth. Jeanne! I rode an elevator to the gallows
that we might be lovers in the night and climbed beyond the clouds.
Your murderous truth chimes at midnight. Ours is an immortal
story, a trial of sorts. Jeanne, I sought to marry, but the bride wore black.

Pamela took the liberty of identifying the “Jeanne” of the quotation as Jeanne Moreau. The poem weaves together the titles of numerous movies featuring the great French actress: Jules and Jim, Elevator to the Gallows, The Bride Wore Black, Lumière, Chimes at Midnight, The Trial, The Immortal Story and doubtlessly other titles I missed. The result is a wonderful and mysterious tribute to a wonderful and mysterious film star..

To read more, please click on this,link to The American Scholar.

Painting by Henri Matisse

"Here We Go Again" by LA Poet, Rick Bursky [by Nin Andrews]

I keep thinking about the LA fires. Today is the first day I woke up and didn't see the fires at the top of my newsfeed. I hope that's a good sign. I've been thinking of all the LA poets I admire, hoping they are safe.  I thought I'd post a poem by LA poet, Rick Bursky,  in honor of these nightmarish times. 

Here We Go Again
by Rick BurskyIt’s hot. The empty sky begins to melt.
In the shade of a tree, a peregrine falcon
Is eyed nervously by a pigeon.
An old barber chuckles to himself as he searches
The backroom for bloody rags
And someone’s mother sweeps up the broken mirror.
When the sun sets, all hell will break loose.
After all, this is the end of world,
The credits are about to scroll on the clouds.
Whoever is left will have to start over —
A new pocket protector for their shirt,
A hunting rifle useless until gunpowder is invented again.

from 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 129 PREVIEW

 

‘Hiccoughs’ and ‘Angelica’: Two newly discovered poems by Virginia Woolf [in the TLS]

In the current issue of the TLS (London's Times Literary Supplement), thewre is news tat will delight fans of Vuirginia Woolf:

 

‘Hiccoughs’ and ‘Angelica’

‘Hiccoughs’ and ‘Angelica’: Two newly discovered poems by Virginia Woolf

By Sophie Oliver

 

Virginia Woolf with her niece Angelica Bell, 1932|© Ramsey and Muspratt via Peter Lofts Photography

January 17, 2025

Read this issue

Two poems by Virginia Woolf have resurfaced. I found them tucked in the back of a folder of letters to her niece Angelica Bell in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Light verse, quickly drafted for her niece and nephew (Quentin Bell) in pencil on two sheets of the same grey-blue paper, “Angelica” and “Hiccoughs” delight in fantasy and invention. Their animal imagery and gentle satire aimed at children, sometimes revelling in sound over sense, place them in the tradition of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Hilaire Belloc, and connect them to T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, written for his godchildren. The manuscripts join a handful of extant poems by this novelist, who as a young woman could not get on with poetry and as a mature author declared it “defunct”. This doggerel was not meant to revive it. Instead, like most of Woolf’s other known poems, it takes up poetry to do something; in this case to play, poke and charm, and to help with what Angelica thought was one of her aunt’s greatest gifts, creating intimacies with people.

Woolf’s earliest known poem is a quatrain written (c.1892) for the Hyde Park Gate News, the whimsical newspaper that she and her siblings produced. A mother looking after her sick son, as Woolf’s mother did for many in need, is compared to a predatory animal: “Like the vulture hovers / O’er the dieing horse / thinking ever thinking / that her boy is slowly sinking”. Already, at ten years old, Woolf understood the comic power of a perverse image and a dippy rhyme. “Ode written partly in prose on seeing the name of Cutbush above a butcher’s shop in Pentonville” (1934) is, as the immoderate title suggests, a narrative poem that exceeds the bounds of poetry. “Fantasy upon a Gentleman Who Converted His Impressions of a Private House into Cash” (1937), meanwhile, is a satire that uses occasional rhyme to skewer a journalist’s complacency (“his lack of attraction; his self-satisfaction”).

Equally, Woolf’s novels are full of poets and readers of poetry, from the Tennyson-quoting Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse to the pompous would-be poets Louis, Bernard and Neville in The Waves. She wrote original lyric poetry and dramatic verse for the pageant at the heart of her final book, Between the Acts. In fact, Woolf’s experimental achievement is sometimes said…

For more, see the Times Literary Supplement

"Blue-Collar Millionaire Athletes" [a word note by David Lehman]

When the literal meaning of a word disappears entirely into its figurative sense, it may become a dead metaphor or a journalistic cliché but may nevertheless be celebrated because it so aptly illustrates the way use ceaselessly modifies language. Such a word is blue-collar. It originated as a term for laborers who wore work shirts and no ties. They tended to work with their hands, or at a trade; toiled at a factory or a construction site rather than in an office; were underpaid relative to the executive class, and enthusiastically embraced the macho ideal. All that is in blue-collar, but the word long ago outlived its literal image. White collars, pink collars, blue collars – you can no longer tell anything from the color of anyone’s collar, but the words themselves say a lot about us. As pink is to the feminine, blue is to the masculine – which may help explain why blue-collar, detached from its original meaning, has acquired an extra layer of connotation. The word (or synonyms thereof) is now used often in the sports pages to describe a basketball team or baseball team of millionaires who play hard, are considered the good guys in a given contest and may make slightly less money than players on the most elite teams in the league. Game six of the 2003 American League Championship Series went in favor of Boston, and a beat writer wondered whether this meant that “the blue-collar Bosox finally stood up to the big, bad Yankees.” Another journalist, resisting such a formulation, opined that the “filthy rich” had defeated the “scruffy rich” when the Yankees prevailed. I have heard the Florida Marlins, the team that defeated the Yankees to win the World Series, described as having a “brown bag payroll.” That payroll consists of just under fifty million dollars divided, I believe, in twenty-five uneven ways. It’s true that the Yankees outspend any other team, but has blue-collar become so relative a term that it can modify the status of an infielder with a two-million-dollar salary or a middle-innings relief pitcher earning what used to be called “a cool million”? Yes, if only because of the term’s connotation. It connotes a tough work ethic, as if to say that, despite any temptation to loaf, these players are tough; they practice, prepare, and are, to use another term of the moment, “focused.”

When blue-collar was used regularly to describe the New York Knicks of Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, and Anthony Mason, it was a euphemism for “physical,” itself a euphemism for playing basketball as if it were hand-to-hand combat under the basket. But it also left the lingering sense that, riches aside, these guys play hard and are unafraid to get hurt, for deep down they remain the kids who played with daring and amazing energy on a playground in a neighborhood they’d like to forget.

Ed. note: This is one  of twenty "word notes" written in 2003 for The Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus (2004). David Lehman was one of a number of writers who contributed such notes.

from the LA Times, January 14, 2025:
<< Chargers players quietly packed up their lockers Sunday, collecting a season’s worth of Jim Harbaugh’s blue collar-themed gifts into plastic bags. They left signed jerseys in their teammates’ lockers like classmates inscribing yearbooks after the school year, except the end came much more suddenly than any planned graduation.>>

Saul Bellow and Günter Grass Duke It Out at the PEN Congress [by Edwin McDowell, New York Times, January 15, 1986]

After reading this account of an acrimonioius session of the PEN Writers' Congress n New York City in January 1986, sip a Manhattan and guess which famous participant turned out to be a forgetful ex-Nazi.

<<<
A day of relatively calm literary discussion was shattered yesterday at the International PEN Congress when Günter Grass forcifully challenged Saul Bellow on his appraisal of the American dream.

By the time the session ended, a half-dozen prominent writers, including Nadine Gordimer, Allen Ginsberg, Salman Rushdie and Susan Sontag, traded charges and countercharges before an overflow audience.

Until Mr. Grass's statement, the afternoon session had been winding down much as had the morning session, after earnest and sometimes philosophical discussions by a variety of writers on their interpretations of alienation.

The audience heard Toni Morrison, the black American writer, declare that ''at no moment of my life have I ever felt as though I were an American,'' and George Konrad, the Hungarian novelist, assert that the Communist Party could not have come to power in his homeland had it not been for the Soviet Army. He added that the authoritarian regime in Hungary could not have lasted except for the military power of the Warsaw Pact.

Exiled Writers Speak

At the afternoon session, exiled writers from four countries expressed their sense of alienation. Comments ranged from a poignant description by Vassily Aksyonov, the exiled Russian poet, of how the exiled author feels when he is deprived of his home, culture and language, to a description by Manlio Argueta, a Salvadoran writer living in Costa Rica, of what it is like for Central American writers to ask questions of life and death when they are regularly faced with ''the very real possibility of death.''

It was during this session that Mr. Bellow spoke. By contrast, he described alienation as something to which American writers sometimes ''have a fatuous attachment.'' Toward the end of his talk he discussed Rousseau, Stendahl and Marx and added that the American middle class has been preoccupied with ''common sense desires,'' such as clothing, shelter and health care.

Mr. Bellow's talk, which included reminiscences of Robert F. Kennedy and of the author's own childhood as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants growing up in French Canada and Chicago, drew heavy applause.

But at the start of the question and answer period, about an hour later, Mr. Grass walked to the microphone in the center of the Casino on the Park in the Essex House and challenged Mr. Bellow.

Invokes Poverty of the Bronx

Speaking in accented English, Mr. Grass, author of ''The Tin Drum'' and other novels, said that while listening to Mr. Bellow talk about democracy giving Americans not only freedom, but also food and shelter, he had to wonder where he was.

''Three years ago when I was here I was in the South Bronx,'' Mr. Grass said. ''I would like to hear the echo of your words in the South Bronx where people don't have shelter, don't have food, and no possibility to live the freedom you have, or some have in this country.''

Mr. Grass, who has frequently criticized the United States in the past, added that America is a powerful country that protects dictatorships in Turkey and Pakistan.

Seated at the head table, with five foreign writers and the moderator, Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher, Mr. Bellow replied:

''I was talking about the majority situation in this country. I was not trying to include every exception one could think of. Of course there are exceptions. I was simply saying the philosophers of freedom of the 17th and 18th centuries provided a structure which created a society by and large free, by and large an example of prosperity. I did not say there are no pockets of poverty. I did not say this is a land of full justice. I didn't try to justify America as a superpower. I was simply saying there was no particular concern in the foundation of the country with the higher life of the country.''

Battle Is Joined

Mr. Grass returned temporarily to his seat, but at that point the literary and political battle was joined.

Breyten Breytenbach, a South African writer living in Paris, and a member of the panel with Mr. Bellow, said the ''freedom and prosperity of the United States rests possibly on the unfreedom and the poverty and the exploitation of many large parts of the world, including South Africa.''

Another panelist, Adam Zagajewski, a Pole who also lives in Paris, praised Mr. Bellow, saying ''he spoke as an old master'' who is a defender of liberty.

Mr. Aksyonov, who lives in Washington, said it puzzled him why West German writers ''are always so eager to criticize the United States.'' He urged them ''to think twice before making parallels'' between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Mr. Ginsberg, the poet, criticized the Soviet bureaucracy and ''the totalitarian grip it has taken on its client states.'' But, speaking of Nicaragua, he wondered what the United States could do ''to correct the devastation we have wrought in Latin America and elsewhere?''

By this time a line was forming behind the microphone, as much to make statements as to ask questions.

Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer, said that hearing Mr. Grass speak reminded her of the role he played in West Germany after the war - a role ''that he played not in his public speeches but in his imaginative writing to re-establish the honesty of the German language to clear it of the garbage that came up during the Hitler time.''

Mr. Grass, back at the microphone a second time, said he has ''a lot of struggles with Communist countries,'' and that he resented in the West having ''to tell everybody I am anti-Communist.''

William Phillips, co-founder and editor of the Partisan Review, added that he was ''rather baffled by some of the remarks that seem to equate terror and repression in this country with terror and repression in Bulgaria, the Soviet Union and Cuba.''

In a response to Mr. Phillips, Miss Sontag, who had been chairman of the morning session, said: ''No one would entertain the preposterous idea that the United States is at fault for all the difficulties and oppressions and tyrannies in the world. That's not even a notion worth discussing.'' >>>

-- Edwin McDowell, New York Times, January 15, 1986

On memory and remembrance in contemporary dance: Restart the present, wonder about it, and – Why not? – revive it [By Tracy Danison]

“iLaUNA” by Bilaka. Photo © Charlotte Costa

There’s a fin de siècle schadenfreude in our air du temps. YouTube spiritualists see souls fleeing the coming travails of those still earthbound.

But the frisson that comes when the past becomes the past while the future rustles someplace in the shadows doesn’t have to be one of apprehensive nostalgia or of excitable fortune-telling. At least, not for contemporary dance performance.

And certainly not for Christophe Martin, founder and director of Paris' annual Faits d’Hiver winter dance performance festival. He looks at the present, it seems to me, as the operating system and the past as an upgrade.

Noting that contemporary dance is now 60 years old and that it’s never too late to do something well, Martin announced last year that, for the first time in its history, Faits d’Hiver would have a theme: memory and remembrance. Twenty-twenty-five marks the festival's 27th edition.

 

“Ulysse”, Jean-Claude Gallotta/ Josette Baïz. Photo © Leonard Ballani

“Why bother to remember the past,” Christophe Martin writes in his introduction to 2025 program, “If not to restart the present, wonder about it, and – why not? – revive it? The work on Notre Dame shows how much restoring something requires adapting to the moment and discovery.”

 

“About Love and Death” by Emmanuel Eggermont. Photo © Jihye Jung

Memory, then, marks a dance artefact: a title, persons, places and sounds, along with, sometimes, choreographic notations, visual evidence, and/or community memory. Dominique Bagouet’s Nécessito, piece pour Grenade comes to mind. Likely as true for classic Swan Lake as for contemporary Nécessito, Bagouet viewed experience as the primary vector of dance performance: a performance, like an individual, is a singularity within a complex genealogy.

For contemporary dance performance (and maybe for classic and modern dance, too) remembrance is both stitching together and reverse engineering memory (or repertory). “… The issue goes well beyond [memory] to techniques, themes, evolutions…” Martin observes. “And all the rest of what we call contemporary-ness in dance performance needs continuous airing... Creation, re-creation, reprises, re-discoveries, homages and historic revivals are rich soils for an iteration of today’s choreographic concerns (and reflections of our society’s concerns, too)”.

___________

Faits d’Hiver 27th edition, Choreographers and Performances, 20 January - 15 February 2025

Dance performances take place in 20 venues in Paris and its near suburbs. A slash (“/”) between names indicates a collaborative work. “Re-creation” indicates a work in repertory; “Creation” indicates a premier.

Emmanuel Eggermont • About Love and Death, elegy for Raimund Hoghe …Jean-Claude Gallotta / Josette Baïz • Ulysse, re-creation ... Aurélie Berland / Christine Gérard • Automnales, Nu perdu, La Griffe, re-creation ... Raphaël Cottin • L’Éloge des possibles, creation ... Nathalie Pernette • Wakan - Un Souffle … Betty Tchomanga • Histoire(s) Décoloniales (Portraits croisés), creation ... Odile Duboc / Léo Lérus / Ioannis Mandafounis, and Ensemble chorégraphique du CNSMDP (Paris Conservatory) • Panorama danse, creation ... Carole Bordes • GIANTS, creation ... Geisha Fontaine & Pierre Cottreau • Ne faites pas la moue #1 ... Compagnie Mossoux-Bonté • Les nouvelles hallucinations de Lucas Cranach l’Ancien ....  Elodie Sicard • les Aspirants, creation... Sharon Eyal & Gai Behar • Love Chapter 2, creation … Samaa Wakim & Samar Haddad King • Losing it ... Bilaka • iLaUNA ... Thomas Lebrun / Bernard Glandier / Christine Bastin • 1998 … Perrine Valli • Kantik … Groupe FLUO / Benoit Canteteau • FOSSIL miniature (in situ format) ... Daniela Clementina De Lauri • LE FAS_BE, creation .... Sylvie Pabiot • Mes autres ... Structure-couple • L’Été … Tom Grand Mourcel • Solus Break … Maëva Lamolière • Looking for Carlotta and Yumi Fujitani / Naomi Mutoh • Hommage à Carlotta Ikeda, creation…

Love Sonnet by John Updike [by Moira Egan]

Love Sonnet

In Love's rubber armor I come to you;

                                                       b

                                                  oo

                                                        b.

                                                c,

                                                   d

                                                   c

                                                   d:

                                                e

                                               f--

                                                  e

                                                    f.

                                                       g

                                                    g.

[R.I.P.]

 

from the archive; first posted January 27, 2009

Love Sonnet

In Love's rubber armor I come to you;

                                                       b

                                                  oo

                                                        b.

                                                c,

                                                   d

                                                   c

                                                   d:

                                                e

                                               f--

                                                  e

                                                    f.

                                                       g

                                                    g.

[R.I.P.]

 

from the archive; first posted January 27, 2009

Al Basile: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

_____________________________________________________

Killers Before Breakfast

                                    New York City, 1974

It was the morning after. On the night

before, we'd played at Max's Kansas City,

with Stevie Wonder sitting in the house,

and Johnny Winter joining later. They

 

had come for Bobby Bland, for whom we opened,

but they heard our set. The room was small,

not deep, and we could see the audience.

When you really get them – you can tell.

 

For once we weren't driving overnight,

so we stayed up and crashed in the hotel,

and it was early, much too early, when

a few of us went out to find some breakfast.

 

We dragged ourselves into the elevator:

Duke in his fedora, Rich with locks

flowing long below his pork-pie hat,

as if Lester Young were Wild Bill Hickok.

 

John had his wig, and I just had my hair,

but motionless, eyes slitted against morning,

we four leaned back like tilted packing crates

against the back wall of the empty car.

 

We crawled down a few floors; came to a stop.

The doors slid open, and a woman peered

in at us and blanched, and paused; then, eyes

big with alarm, she stepped into our space.

 

She stood at the side wall, by the door,

and clutched a shopping bag, a kerchief on

her head, tensely alert, fully awake.

We made no remark. Our ride resumed.

 

After three more floors, she broke the silence.

“Please don't kill me,” she said. We assured her

we were just musicians who'd stayed up

and hadn't slept much, and we needed coffee.

 

This seemed to calm her down, and we descended.

Before the doors could open on the lobby,

solemn, plain, she spoke once more: “I have

to tell the truth. You look like murderers.”

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Poet/playwright, singer/songwriter, and cornet player, Al Basile is known to blues fans world-wide, with 20 solo albums and 8 nominations for Blues Music Awards. He has three books of poetry (the most recent is 2021's Solos, from Antrim House) and five verse audio plays (his 2021-22 plays Hill&Dale and Open Question won gold and platinum awards from the HEARnow national audio drama festival). He is a member of the Powow River poets and is the host of the online poets-in-conversation show Poems On. 

To hear Al Basile reading “Killers before Breakfast,” click

Killers Before Breakfast - Al Basile

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                               Max's Kansas City, 1970s

Today's Playlist: The Toreador Song, Amapola, Frenesi, Volare, Granada

with Girogione's "Three Philosophers"

Maugham on writing, reading, friendship, and the inevitable selfishness of humanity

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life."

“Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."

“It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary.”

“You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life -- their pleasure.”   ― W. Somerset Maugham

Ben Jonson: Two Poems -- Great Poems of the World, episode 17 -- with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

My Picture Left in Scotland

I now think love is rather deaf, than blind,

          For else it could not be,

                    That she,

Whom I adore so much, should so slight me,

   And cast my love behind:

I'm sure my language was as sweet,

                    And every close did meet

                    In sentence of as subtle feet

                              As hath the youngest he,

          That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree.

Oh, but my conscious fears,

          That fly my thoughts between,

          Tell me that she hath seen

   My hundreds of gray hairs,

   Told seven and forty years,

   Read so much waist, as she cannot embrace

   My mountain belly and my rock face,

As all these, through her eyes, have stopt her ears.

On my First Son

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.

Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I lose all father now! For why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,

And if no other misery, yet age?

Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."

For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

 

see also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/06/sonnet-73-great-poems-of-the-world-episode-2-with-david-lehman-and-mitch-sisskind-.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/07/my-life-had-stood-a-loaded-gun-great-poems-of-the-world-episode-5-with-david-lehman-and-mitch-sisski.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/11/ulysses-and-the-gettysburg-address-great-poems-of-the-world-with-david-lehman-and-mitch-sisskind.html

Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s “One minute of dance a day”: Bearing witness to social transformation [By Tracy Danison]

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

As I write, Tuesday, 7 January 2025, the National Dance Theater at Palais du Chaillot has opened the season with a celebration of 10 years of dance performer and choreographer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s Une Minute de danse par jour (“One minute of dance a day”) project. In addition, Les Presses du reel has just published Une minute de danse par jour – 2015-2025 – Dix ans d'une œuvre pour notre temps.

During a talk published in The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in 2017, Vadori-Gauthier told me that she put together Une minute as “an act of poetic resistance”, incarnating, even as it does today, a radical affirmation of personhood, asserting the central place of the body, especially, the female body, in public life.

In the wake of the first of the particularly vile terrorist attacks that marred the beginning and the end of 2015, along with the remarkable show of public solidarity for the République – that is, the liberal values the republic embodies – Vadori-Gauthier looked at her “resistance” as a “micro-political gesture” accompanying “a co-evolution toward a sweeter way of living”.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

Her sense of Une Minute has evolved: she now sees it as a telltale for a broader mutation in human relations away from the immediate and physical to the mediated and virtual.

Neither Vadori-Gauthier’s commitment to dance as a radical incarnation of personhood – she originally intended to wind up Une Minute after a year –  nor the evolution of her thinking about the project’s sense and purpose are surprising. There are events – I am thinking of Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine on 24 February 2022 or the 7 October 2023 massacres in Israel – the effects of which are and will remain impossible to adequately describe or account for in history, or, for that matter, in words. But these effects, nevertheless, ripple and echo through the courses of lives and, through those lives, shape common reality.  

What was done in Paris between 7 January and 13 November 2015 is certainly one such event and Une Minute’s persistence and evolution are one of the effects.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

On Wednesday, 7 January 2015 – that is, 18 Nivôse CCXXIII An of the French République – a pair of religious fanatics attacked the offices of the satirical-political weekly Charlie Hebdo, murdered 12 people and wounded 11 others. For dissing the Prophet Mohammed, the killers said. On Friday, 9 January, 20 Nivôse CCXXIII An, a lone gunman murdered four people in a kosher grocery. For being Jewish, he said.

On Friday, 11 January, 22 Nivôse CCXXIII An, about two million people (the city of Paris has a population of about 2 million), in addition to nearly four million people across the country, rallied in support of liberal values under the slogan Je suis Charlie (“I am Charlie”).

On Friday, 13 November, 23 Brumaire CCXXIV An – interesting to reflect that the revolutionary year begins at the September rentrée, the new year for schools, theaters and most other public living –  about 11 months later, using automatic rifles and suicide vests, nine religious fanatics murdered 130 people and wounded another 416.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

These murders took place, essentially, at cafés where people were sitting outdoors and at a popular music hall in the 11^th arrondissement of Paris and in a crowd near the Stade de France sports stadium in the near-suburb of Saint Denis. They done it, the murderers said, because Paris is Babylon, cursèd whore of Abraham’s Big Three religions in retrospect – sounding a rather sinister ecumenical note.

Vadori-Gauthier originally intended Une Minute de danse par jour to last a year or so. But the sum of the events and, I suppose, doing Une minute day by day, she made her ask, she says, “What do you do when you can do nothing”?

And from there forward, Une minute, once a micro-political gesture asserting the body’s centrality became what she could do:bear witness an ongoing transformation in the way we relate to one another.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

While she’s been dancing her one minute a day, she observes, “The physical act of sharing and solidarity have been fading out”. She points out that, if, for instance, a smartphone means greater ability to keep in touch with friends or to access money, it also means changing the nature of the ancient acts of keeping in touch and accessing money.

“Personal identity has moved on-line,” Vadori-Gauthier says. And with the move, many of our most basic social interactions became virtualized transactions. “Buying a baguette or lending 20 bucks to a friend or getting a contact number, even giving change to a beggar, is no longer about touching hands or exchanging cards or scooping change on the counter or even tossing coins into an old hat*,” she observes.

Maybe the increasingly felt stress and alienation, along with real disorders of mood, all often blamed on “the internet”, are actually due to the loss of ordinary physical contact.

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Nadia Vadori-Gauthier is an influential and active performer, choreographer and teacher. In addition to her decade-long "Une minute de danse par jour project", she regularly works with such dance performance artists and organizations as Margaux Amoros or the experimental collective La Ville en feu, both of whose contributions to performance have been reviewed in the Best American Poetry/Beyond Words.

Unsurprisingly, Vadori-Gauthier has been including other dance performers and choreographers in Une minute de danse par jour. But it turns out that confronting “What do you do when you can do nothing”? is not just an increasingly pertinent question since 2015, answering it requires real personal investment, as well as Herculean commitment. “It takes four hours to make one minute of dance video”, Vadori-Gauthier told me. Getting more dancers contributing has her spending those four hours on the film editing application. More ironic still, she finds that she continues doing her minute of dance anyway, on her own. She calls it “shadow dancing”.

Contact Nadia Vadori-Gauthier through her dance company, Cie Le prix de l’essence or through the Une minute de danse par jour site, also home to a fantastic visual archive.