The Best American Poetry

Available Now: The Best American Poetry 2020

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. The 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” according to the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

The Best American Poetry 2020 is available for pre-order here.

--sdl

"Don't Ask Me About My Business. . ." [by Mitch Sisskind]

A dream project of mine is to write a literary biography of Mario Puzo. I admire him as a great writer in a very special category that includes Dumas (in both his life and his work,) Cervantes (life and work,) Hemingway (life,) Johnson (life,) and of course Shakespeare (work.)

Puzo succeeded in objectifying a world and its people that somehow had already existed in the collective mind in an unformed state -- as if waiting for someone to give it form.

Shakespeare did this many times, with Falstaff for example. Dumas did it with the Three Musketeers. And Puzo did it with Don Corleone, albeit with the collaboration of Marlon Brando and others, for the film is the highest realization of the story.

Although he is far from a great stylist, I consider Puzo a very insightful writer. One of his themes is the idea that real love must culminate in betrayal. If it's real, love is so powerful that betrayal is the only means of survival. In Puzo's own life I believe this theme was acted out in his relationship to literary work. He began as a "serious" writer, had limited success, and then turned to commercial fiction. Ostensibly the reason was money but I believe there was also heartbreak involved and, in his own terms, betrayal on his part. For the rest of his life he was in a love/hate relationship with "respectable" literature. When Joseph Heller suggested inviting the novelist James Salter to join an informal breakfast club that included Puzo and Bruce Jay Friedman, Puzo hesitated and then rejected asking Salter. "He's too good a writer," Puzo said.

There's much more to say about Mario Puzo and his creations. As a boy he read Dostoyevsky and hoped to recreate The Brothers Karamazov -- which in a roundabout way he actually came very close to doing. This guy was the real thing, a man of respect. (Not sure if he ever wrote a poem, though!) -- Mitch Sisskind

from the archive; first posted September 5, 2008

SF and NY Duke it Out [by David Lehman]

          In Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum says he used to live in New York and Rhonda Fleming says she’s never been there and Mitchum says that if she goes there, she’ll know one reason why he’s in San Francisco.

          San Francisco, because of its natural beauty, its hills and bridges and bay, may be the most popular location for film noirs and crime dramas. Think of The Lady from Shanghai, Dark Passage, Woman on the Run, Vertigo, Bullitt, Dirty Harry. These movies feature some of the distinctive landmarks of the city – Chinatown’s Mandarin Theater, the Steinhardt Aquarium, and Playland-By-the-Beach in The Lady from Shanghai; the Golden Gate Bridge in Dark Passage; Fisherman’s Wharf and the Embarcadero in Woman on the Run; the Presidio, Coit Tower, and Muir Woods in Vertigo; the Dodgers’ Don Drysdale on the mound at Candlestick Park in Experiment in Terror; Kezar Stadium in Dirty Harry; the many steep streets on which Steve McQueen drives his green Mustang in Bullitt.

          Still, as a New York native, I must put in a plea for the city of my birth. Jules Dassin’s Naked City comes to mind because of the producer’s pioneering effort to shoot the film entirely on the streets and sidewalks of New York (photo right). In Don Siegel’s Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Clint Eastwood is a deputy sheriff from Arizona who flies into the big city to nab an escaped killer in Fort Tryon Park and leave for the airport from the heliport on top of the old Pan-Am Building, now named for Met Life. In The French Connection, Fernando Rey eludes Gene Hackman on the subway and dine on French cuisine at an elegant midtown restaurant while Hackman shivers in the cold holding a cardboard cup of coffee.  

         Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street gives us the subway and a shack on the waterfront where our hero resides; Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street treats us to art galleries and a desolate Central Park bench at dawn; John Farrow’s The Big Clock situates us in a magazine empire’s midtown skyscraper. In Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, the Manhattan Bridge in the background is a constant reminder of where we are.

           Among neo-noirs and technicolor crime films, New York is home to The Manchurian Candidate, which features Sinatra’s favorite bar, Jilly’s, and the Central Park lake. In part one of The Godfather, Michael and Kay go to Radio City Music Hall on Christmas Eve. To elude a possible tail, the driver of the car taking Michael and his antagonists to the Italian restaurant with the best veal in the city begins to cross the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, then makes an illegal u-turn to deliver the group to the Bronx.

          Die Hard with a Vengeance is a virtual tour of the town with stops in Harlem, Wall Street, the FDR Drive, Central Park, and Yankee Stadium. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are laugh lines in this 1995 movie that does its bit to combat racial prejudice by pairing the Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. And you get to hear the odious villain say he loves “this country,” his words belying his scorn for Americans, such suckers, so trusting.  Mind you, this is a movie you’re not supposed to like; you’re allowed to call it a triumph – of “blitzkrieg action,” perhaps – but only after first denouncing it as “bombastic mush.”

"Operation Smart Blonde" [by Molly Arden]

I have never told anyone about this--that for years I worked for the Secret Service. I was part of an elite force consisting solely of blonde women. Once, I had to travel to the Middle East as a spy, or rather, a kind of special envoy for the U.S government. In preparation I dyed my hair platinum and bought several slinky outfits.  I complained to my supervisor of clothing that I was too smart to be marketed in this way to which he responded, au contraire.  My job, to seduce a militant religious leader, whose name I can never confide. He was influential in politics, a renowned scholar of poetry and philosophy who had spent some time in jail, and Uncle Sam wanted access to his inner lair, his secret thoughts and habits. Wherever he went, men with ski hats and masks followed.  I can’t tell too many details, of course, this being a top-secret thing, but I imagined myself impressing him with my own knowledge of philosophy. I was very nervous. I felt as if my hair glowed like a light bulb in the limo in which the scholar and I were driving to an unknown destination. When I asked, where are we going, he answered, in his heavy accent, all destinations are unknown, and then poured me a glass of wine.  He wanted to know if I knew the truth—why I was there. Before I had taken a sip, I admitted that I had studied poetry and philosophy, and had once believed truth existed. It was the wrong thing to say because he immediately began asking questions. All I could recall of philosophy were details of how certain philosophers related to women or the bedroom. How Aristotle thought women were less interesting than shellfish, for example. I drank quickly in hopes it would give me inspiration. Before I knew it I was babbling hopelessly about Montaigne’s theory of sexual impotence, Kierkegaard’s fear and trembling, his wish never to get hitched.  My head was spinning. The last thing I remember, I was talking about Descartes, laughing, “I don’t think like a blonde, even though I am one, so forgive me.” That’s when he began to recite poetry, or I think it was poetry, and I compared poems to men—how just when the going gets good, there’s this blank space coming up the page. I felt like an airplane being swallowed by a cloud. Or was I the cloud swallowing the plane?

On the value of being there with: Dance, the “art” of movement [by Tracy Danison]

Noe Soulier’s “Passages” in movement at the Gothic forest of the Conciergerie. Photo Patrick Berger ©Atelier de Paris

I met Huang by chance… In the line, quite by chance, Huang was… By chance, I met Huang in the line… to see Noé Soulier’s Passages at the Conciergerie on the île de la Cité… Passages was part of the Atelier de Paris’ brave post-lockdown Indispensable ! performances program concentrate.

Huang had a good place in line, so, full of bluff and bonhomie (thus fobbing off challenges to my cutting the line), I slithered in next to him. While we, as always, talked excitedly about the performance, underneath I was actually excited by the prospect of going inside the Conciergerie.

Until the Passages performance, I had only been able to cast my eyes through high grimy windows onto the Conciergerie’s vast sunken hall. I thought that it surely is true Gothic. Spiritual, you know. Though I told Huang it was about primeval forests and barbarian cultural memory, not something so damned woolly. I wouldn’t want him getting the wrong idea about me.

Even through dirty windows, I have to say, the profane eye travels up the plain squat stone pillars, rides the surge of arcing groins into the shadow of vaults high above. The eye rests there, surprised, as if by sudden light, startled into mind. Indeed, before it became Marie Antoinette’s death cell and a tourist attraction, the Conciergerie had once been the throne room of Clovis I, King of All Franks, a German tribe that pretty much ran this corner of northern Europe at the time.

Spirituality and history. Rejecting the Arian god-man theory of Jesus’ divinity, Clovis I subscribed the three-spirits-same-flesh or Trinitarian theory, thus ensuring a 1000-year primacy for the misguided theories of language of Augustine of Hippo, doctor of Christianity. I blame Augustine and subsequent Christian poohbahs for sanctioning the cruel habit of making reality from words : De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da. Augustine, not that sweet old Romantic Goethe, is responsible for “Those-are-not-bombs,-honey” Goebbels.

I expected Noé Soulier’s Passages would in some way flesh out the history and architecture of the Conciergerie, illuminate my mind’s eye with some unbid aspect of the place. Instead of Clovis or Augustine or the Police, Yasmine Hugonnet came to mind.

As good in her way as Sting, Hugonnet is a dancer and choreographer whose work I’ll have the pleasure to see at Atelier de Paris in October, and have seen at Regard du Cygne and Lafayette Anticipations – very different contexts.

Hugonnet calls her performance troupe Arts Mouvementés, thinking of how, as her web site has it, “form, image and sensation intertwine, how the imagination, becomes …” and how “the process of incarnation and appropriation” works through and how to get these things into or out of choreography.

Beyond negotiating the twists and turns of choreographic culture and heritage to intertwine, incarnate and appropriate into a given performance, it seems to me that Hugonnet’s insight is that “dance” is definitively not, of course, about contextual bumping, grinding and flinging out the arms, however delicately, classically or expressively, but about movement. And in this, she – along with a lot of her sisters and brothers in dance – is going a bit farther than Isadora Duncan’s Dance-as-(sacred, human)-art, understanding it more as an access of universal primal force, quite beyond the first-take “shaking-up” sense of mouvementé to something more like prime mover, moving, moved, becoming, happening.

Those kids down on the corner, spinning on their hips, flipping over, fast as lightning, talking loud and completely unconscious that the nervous old white lady is calling the police on? They aren’t just having fun, they are doing truth in a quantum universe, a universe that exists because it moves. I hope the police don’t gas and whack ‘em too hard before the world changes cameras.

So, I think, as I wait on a bench in a medieval forest of stone pillars sculpted of yellow half-light, however Huang might experience the esthetics of Noé Soulier’s choreography or however I might myself experience watching this, being here with Huang and other dance-friends and strangers, all will, must, involve movement.

What’s important to performance is not how or to what end but the fact of movement. Soulier’s very fine troupe chase around plain stone pillars, Clovis’ ghost clanks in the torch-yellowed light shadows, my eye roves for mystery.

As I come out of the Conciergerie into the suffocating evening heat of what used to be early Fall and offer to walk a little way with Huang, I understand that “movement” is the core value of “Dance”. So the “art of Dance” is also “art of movement”. The “art” being what I hope Hugonnet (and Isadora Duncan) will forgive me for rhetorically shaping as the act and representation of the “intertwining of form, image, sensation, imagination, incarnation and appropriation into and out of choreography”.

Ballet Dancers in Quarantine: Introducing Tiny Garage Show [by Stacey Lehman]

When New York City Ballet dancer Claire Kretzschmar returned to Winston-Salem, NC to quarantine, she kept up her ballet practice in the family garage. To her, she was just doing what she does, but her mother thought it might be a good idea to invite a few neighbors to watch. Thus the Tiny Garage Show series was born. Kretzschmar, together with pianist Mary Margaret Johnson, perform music and dance before a lucky audience of friends and neighbors, all seated at a safe distance from the makeshift stage and each other. I'm reminded of the "Let's put on a show!" spirit of neighborhood kids everywhere, though Kretzschmar and Johnson are anything but kids. They're mature and gifted performers, overflowing with talent and generosity. I've watched all of the performances. My favorite is the delightful "Quarantina" set to music by Franz Schubert with choreography that brings to mind Jerome Robbins' comic "The Concert." 

Find out more about Tiny Garage Show here. And stay tuned for October performances. 

-- sdl

Jiwon Choi: Pick of the Week (x2) [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________________________________

Memoir Mori

 

In Part One, I will introduce my mother, butcher-in-chief

feasting on her young, bones and gristle, sauté

and sizzle with toothsome glee. Day-old tabloid soup

moving you on to

Part Two where I make my escape to a liberal arts college

and become afflicted with a condition known as poetry-writing

where I Ouija-board Plath nightly for instruction on restitution

and virgin suicides.

In Part Three I seek solace in philosophy (I fuck

therefore I am) also known as impersonating Freudian slips:

you’re not a family until you’re a tragedy.

How to begin Part Four?

Cue the tall, blond Tourette’s syndrome, a foolish moth

trapped inside my self-loathing. I pull his wings right off.

Must I make meaning of my stint at the 7-Eleven roasting wieners

for pimply boys seeking nirvana in Hot Pockets and Ding Dongs?

If I leave salvation unwritten, will it come in?

_______________________________________________________________________________________

 

Let’s Go Out Tonight

 

Charging from one neck of the woods to another

the cab driver pushes our chariot from one pothole to another

over patches of pigeons while the radio bleeds the blues

“Is that Blind Lemon?” I ask

“Lightnin’ Hopkins,” he says

“But Blind Lemon liked Hopkins to play with him sometimes,” I add

“How come you know about that?” he turns to look at me

He is an older black man, forehead furrowed with Socrates’s worries

“I like the blues,” I reply

By the time we pull up to the curb John Lee Hooker is cajoling

“Let’s go out tonight!”

so I pay my fare and do just that.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Jiwon Choi is a poet, teacher, and urban gardener.  She teaches preschool at the Educational Alliance, a multi-generational non-profit located on the Lower East Side of NYC.  She is a long-time gardener and coordinator for the Pacific Street Brooklyn Bear’s Community Garden located near downtown Brooklyn. She is also a poetry editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine. Jiwon is the author of One Daughter is Worth Ten Sons, published by Hanging Loose Press. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.  

"G-D in a Cup" [by Loren Goodman]

The “o” in G-d
In “G-d in a Cup”
Is like the mouth
Of the universe
Into which G-d
Has from this world
Disappeared. This
Absence of the “o”
Is also like the coffee
That has been from
The cup faithfully sipped
The “u” in “cup” is like
The cup that holds the
Coffee while the “c”
Before the “u” is like
The handle you hold
Me with. The “p” at
The end is like the
Cup tipped to pour
Into you me. I went
Inside G-d in a Cup
Only once. It was
Empty and dark; the
Owner was as
Quiet and mysterious
As G-d and like the
Son of G-d, had long
Hair. Like G-d these
Days, he also looked
Sad. I didn’t go there
To drink coffee—
Just to cheer him up

from The Common (July 2020). Three other poems by Loren appear in this issue of The Common: "Dear Jeremy," "Due to the Light," "Dolphin Facts"

Loren Goodman was born in Kansas and studied in New York, Tucson, Buffalo and Kobe. He is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A professor of creative writing and English literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he chairs the department of comparative literature and culture and is creative writing director.

Just In Time For Rosh Hashana: The Jewish Food Society Podcast [by Stacey Lehman]

One of the highlights of 2017 was the opportunity to participate in Schmaltzy, a Jewish Food Society live storytelling event where celebrity chefs, grandmas, tech entrepreneurs and culinary mavens tell personal stories about when food, family and tradition converged in their lives.Before what seemed like an audience of hundreds, I told my tale of learning to cook for my husband following his cancer treatment and diagnosis of celiac disease. If you want to read about and listen to the event, which took place on November 6 in Greenwich Village, New York, you can do so here. It was fun! 

Naturally the Jewish Food Society has figured out how to flourish in this time of hardship. You can find lots of fantastic recipes on its website and now you can listen to its podcast, which launched this week. The podcast revisits live stories from past Schmaltzy events, and dives deeper into the storyteller’s experience of family, identity, and of course… food. I can’t wait to listen to the first episode featuring baker Zoe Kanan in preparation for Rosh Hashanah. And I'm looking forward to episodes from Adam Richman and Jake Dell, and more!

L'Shana Tova! 

--sdl

In Burlington, Vermont, September 2018

When we went to Burlington, Vermont, in September 2018, as guests of Major and Didi Jackson, we discovered Barr Hill gin (sublime), sipped a drink that a local cafe owner concocted in Major's honor, went to a party, chatted with Dan Fogel, got photographed with a US senator, and drank coffee in the window on Sunday the 17th, our last day, with a newspaper in my pocket and Stacey's camera capturing the moment:Photo credit: Stacey Lehman

"Too Much Information" [by Tony Towle]

As we are sitting down to lunch,
I observe that Poetry saved my life in 1960
and ”might be doing so again at this very moment” —
even though I wasn’t actually writing. While that
is being digested, I add that, although my “official”
name is Anthony, the intent was for it to be Tony, but Tony
wasn’t considered a “real” name — which has caused identity
and authority problems ever since, but on to another subject:

in Torrid Zone, with James Cagney and Ann Sheridan,
Rosario, Cagney’s wicked adversary, coolly splits an infinitive 
in mid-film, the same verb form that Cagney had voiced correctly
half a minute before. Thus Rosario mocks both the hero
and English grammar, while he stirs up unrest among the workers
whom, in an admitted faux-pas, I have invited to join us here for lunch.
Portrait of Tony Towle by Alex Katz.

"There she is, the woman. . ." [by Jill Bialosky]

There she is, the woman who once inhabited
these rooms, drank tea from this cup,
her shape in the cushion, isn’t that hers?
Those shelves filled with books from the bookshops
of her youth—Rilke, Plath Akhmatova, Stevens, Strand,
afternoons spent in worn leather chairs beneath
the dim yellow lamplight by the window, slow-motion
of curling leaves heralding a fallen season.

Ed. note: Chosen by Major Jackson for Harvard Review (#56), "There she is, the woman.  ." is the first poem in Jill Bialosky's 102-part lyric sequence Asylum. Excerpt from ASYLUM  by Jill Bialosky. Copyright © 2020 by Jill Bialosky. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

 

Stanley Moss Remembers Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, and Stanley Kunitz

<<<
Hard years. I learned to disguise myself to earn a living. Wherever I went I carried my desperately thin production of poems and Wallace Stevens. I was sure Hitler was anti-satyr. I joined the Navy at seventeen. A sword wound and the G.I. Bill got me through college in style. I had a recurring nightmare that, like the satyr Marsyas, I was flayed—just for being a satyr, for no reason at all, not for challenging Apollo at music. I leapt around graduate women’s dorms, broke windows and doors. Police were called. I was expelled for “subversive activity.” Now history: I was hired by a detective agency to spy on organizing workers. I became a counterspy for Local 65. I sang in a band, played the bass, waited on tables; I was a sailor on a Greek merchant ship (I got the job through Rae Dalven, the translator of Cavafy); I grazed a while at New Directions; for mysterious reasons, Dylan Thomas and I became passionate friends—I loved his poetry and his deep-throated Christianity. I remember his saying “the truth doesn’t hurt.” He could and would talk intimately to anyone, regardless of class or education, not a habit of American or English intellectuals. He drank, he told me, because he wasn’t useful, which I understood to mean he could not relieve human suffering. Anyone who really cared about him knew how profoundly and simply Christian he was. Dickens was a favorite teacher. He gave away the shirt off his back. The turtleneck sweater Dylan wore in that picture was mine, knitted for me by my Aunt Tilly. We discovered an Italian funeral home on Bleecker Street where, after the bars closed at 4 a.m., we drank whiskey on a gold and onyx coffin. He introduced me to Theodore Roethke, his second-favorite living American poet. His favorite was e.e. cummings—“he can write about anything.” Dylan, Ted and I spent an evening with townspeople from Laugharne, trolls who whitewashed the town. What a concert of Welsh accents and laughter. Dylan had his boathouse, Roethke his greenhouse, I had my apartment house in Queens.

*

I met Ted Roethke again in Rome when I was munching on the review Botteghe Oscure. We both had passed dangers. We hit it off. We met again two years later by chance at a Pinter play in London when I was heading back to the States after Rome fell. We joined up to see Hamlet and Gielgud in The Tempest (we did not drown our books). Eight seasons passed. Ted and Beatrice came to stay with me at 57th Street at a barn I was living in. I gave Ted big breakfasts and my homburg, he gave me his famous raccoon skin coat. He liked my fish and turtle tank in my small dining room. He told me he was once in love with a snake. Ted brought me to dinner at Stanley Kunitz’s. I remember that first long, long, long evening. Thinking back, I didn’t quite know how lucky I was. They were in their fifties, Stanley had almost fifty years to go, Ted had six. Dylan had crossed the Styx a handful of years before. On still another evening, Roethke came with his not-quite-finished manuscript of The Far Field. He went off one evening to show it to Stanley Kunitz. He put on a blue serge suit and my homburg for the occasion. Just before dawn, he rolled back in.

“What did Stanley say?” I asked.

“He liked it a lot.” Then a look of pain crossed his face and I knew that Ted, who had been in the mood to be crowned heavyweight champion and nothing less, was disheartened. I thought Kunitz had found something not quite right, that he had been demanding and not just celebratory. Suddenly, Ted said, talking half to me and half to the world, “Stanley Kunitz is the most honest man in America.” I told this story in an introduction to a book of Kunitz conversations. More years. Roethke long dead, after a formal Roethke celebration at which Kunitz, an aged ex-Roethke sweetheart and I were the only three people in the room who knew him, Kunitz asked me to repeat the story at dinner to a young poet. I was pleased my story had touched Stanley.
>>>

from "Satyr Song" by Stanley Moss. Click here for the rest of this autobiographical piece. Stanley is now 95. Here he is as a young man:

Bill Nevins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

photo (detail) by Tony O’Hara

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

No Prisoners

What can I say?
We met in Santa Fe.

She’s got everything she needs,
She’s an artist
And she knew John Berryman.

Poets
are worse
than lawyers
she said
worse
than mosquitoes
Like those big flying cucarachas
down south
they get in your hair

Poets!
Poets tell you stories!
Stories about
anarchist painters
who won’t take cash
from the cruel corporate state
so
they live in boxes
made of cardboard
under bridges
without berets
without brushes
without canvas stretchers
without grants
without patrons

without brushes

Poets
she said
are like syrup
on a pancake
they soak in
until they wipe out all the taste
of the pancake itself
and fill it in with words
words
words
sweet, sticky
words!
Poets make everybody else
taste
what they taste
she sighed.

I
hate
fucking
poets
she said

First,
she hissed,
after the revolution
we’ll kill
all the poets!

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Bill Nevins has two books of poetry from Swimming With Elephants Publications: Heartbreak Ridge and AWE. Bill is an Iona College graduate who has lived in New Mexico since 1996. He is profiled in the 2007 film Committing Poetry in Times of War. He is also a widely published cultural journalist. He may be reached at bill_nevins@yahoo.com.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mitch Sisskind's Collected Poems, 2005-2020

From the book, this poem, which we first posted on February 8, 2015:

Balzac Speaks of Salvation Through Sexual Intercourse

How else to keep alive the spirit
Of sans souci, the flame of youth,
But with sexual intercourse?
That sphere of glowing delight
To which, once I acceded to it,
The luminous channel has never
Closed to me – as all my work
Is wrought there, charity obliges
That I advertise its pleasures and
Fairly attribute the curious vitality
Derived there that each night
Invents names and faces for me
As if my heart were still a boy’s
And my pen were the prick of one.

You can order Mitch Sisskind's Collected Poems, 2005-2020 here.

How else to keep alive the spirit
Of sans souci, the flame of youth,
But with sexual intercourse?
That sphere of glowing delight
To which, once I acceded to it,
The luminous channel has never
Closed to me – as all my work
Is wrought there, charity obliges
That I advertise its pleasures and
Fairly attribute the curious vitality
Derived there that each night
Invents names and faces for me
As if my heart were still a boy’s
And my pen were the prick of one.

Lt. Pete Campanelli, NYFD [photograph by Bill Hayward]

lt. pete campanelli, nyfd

photo(c)Bill Hayward

"Letter from American Airspace" [by Elizabeth Powell]

Today is the pub date for Elizabeth Powell's excellent new book Atomizer by Elizabeth Powell (Louisiana State University Press). Here is "Letter from American Airspace," a poem from the book:

The end of romance was what the teenage girl
was telling you about on a bench in the Jardin
in San Miguel de Allende, giving you T.M.I.,
but you realized she might need a Father who is not in heaven.
She gasps: Tinder is even sleazier in Mexico, how could it be
nostalgic? You listened the way your poems do when you write
them down in the cafes of Kerouac’s time here. You are Angelico
Americano with Instagram-troubled children of your own back home.
You are the only man I know who seriously loves his wife. Dios mio.
Right now this makes you the best Volta in any sonnet. Yearning
is a kind of loss, a desire that’s never filled. It is the drunk to his drink.
Never enough. Victim or victorious? Chasing yearning, I have discerned,
is like chasing a kind of poison.  The Popol Vuh says in the beginning
there were corn people here and love was a YES at every turn against
death. The end of romance knows this, no love letters, no mysteries,
holding out for another swipe, like a pull at the casino. The sun texts
its setting over the city. Back home children shoot other children
Screens in every face. Savagery in the invisible, the Holy Ghost
weeping over new desires. My young female friend told me how nuclear
her hook ups are, how they like to choke and shag. Isn’t it not romantic.
My hairdresser confirms the same story. I think I am lonelier
than lonely, for which there is no word or Proustian reference.  I drown
and swoon in Mariachi music with no relief. May tenderness deliver
us. Maybe the only recall I have is this, my other friend home safely
from Afghanistan, telling me of the surgical tents where the world is
like triage and you order the grunts to lay it down, those who are
the chorus screaming: unfuck it, unfuck this.

Performing by ear, Paris venues open doors, point the sky [by Tracy Danison]

“Cold Blood”, state-of-the-art live performance by Michèle Anne De Mey, Jaco Van Dormael and Kiss & Cry collective, La Scala Paris, 2019. Photo©Julien Lambert

Here comes the sun, do, dun, do, do/ Here comes the sun, and I say/ It's all right Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear/ Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here/ Here comes the sun, do, dun, do, do/ Here comes the sun, and I say/ It's all right - Here Comes the Sun – George Harrison, 1969

France just reached nine thousand daily infections again, I hear. There are uncertainties but, under rational government, a bit of risk, even delicately calculated risk, is a reasonable bet – especially in something as important as the performing arts.

Gwénaël Morin’s Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies opens Atelier de Paris’s ten-day wonder Indispensable! program, heavy on new creation, with performances in open and closed space until mid-September. Indispensable! is my foot in the post-pandemic waters but also opens the 49^th annual Festival d’Automne, the Paris theater, film, music, dance and visual and tactile arts program – which runs into February 2021.

Over the coming week I’ll be seeing, among others, artists who should have been featured in the Spring, at the Atelier’s June Events or the Printemps Arabe programs, or that, like Gwénaël Morin’s piece are also part of the Festival d’Automne. Performers on the Atelier’s Indispensable! program include  Noé Soulier (at the Conciergerie); Thomas Hauert, Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard, and Carolyn Carlson, who proves that dance makes getting old unnecessary at any age. In late September, if all goes well, I’ll be seeing new circus performance by Bartabas, who demonstrates better than anyone the links of potential between species, dance by choreographers such as Jérôme Bel and Boris Charmatz. Charmatz is this year’s Festival d’Automne. I’m looking most forward to the psycho-perceptual genius playwright Nathalie Béasse new work Aux Eclats, a work she introduced as a WIP last Fall.

Perennials like Atelier de Paris and annuals like Festival d’Automne are not alone in opening in spite of different health-safety, programming and box-office challenges. Only under my hand here, among many other interior-only spaces, the privately-run La Scala Paris’ sophisticated contemporary performance space; the Palais de Chaillot’s Art Deco experience inside an esthetic experience and the gemütlich garden party atmosphere of Le Monfort in its nice little park way down south. Nathalie Béasse’s will open the 2020-21 program at Théâtre de la Bastille, intimate and polyvalent, a theater’s theater’s typical theater, with a nice little bar, too.

Right now at Chaillot you could see, free, among the expressionist splendor, Jann Gallois and Emmanuel Gat rehearsing absolutely new performances. At end of September, there’s the Echelle humaine dance-performance program in the tight and very unconventional space of Lafayette Anticipations. Echelle Humaine is also part of the Festival d’Automne’s performance program. There’s also the reprise of Micadanses with its Bien fait! program of new and in-progress work in the dance-school’s Arthaud-type basement space.

And there’s more quality work in quality venues starting up outside Paris such as the Ballet de Lorraine in the lovely 18^thcentury town of Nancy. The eclectic intelligence of a program of Tharp, Tokugawa and Cunningham – For Four Walls, Flot, Transparent Monster, Plaisirs inconnus, The Fugue… – tells you all you need to know about the Lorraine ballet.

The return of the mountebanks to Paris: the imperative pleasure of live performance [by Tracy Danison]

A mountebank tries her hand for the Compagnie Gwénaël Morin’s “Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies” performance, which opened the post-lockdown season in Paris. Photo©Emile Zeizig/mascarille.com

Yeah baby, I like it like that/ You gotta believe me when I tell you/ I said I like it like that/ You gotta believe me when I tell you/ I said I like it like that …  - I Like It by Cardi B, Bad Bunny & J Balvin, 2018                                                      

The brakes on Karine’s electric bike squeak abominably as I twist nervously through Vincennes and Montreuil, pedaling back from the Atelier de Paris, behind the Parc Floral in the Bois de de Vincennes. The morning is still grey. It’s about 8. Poor thing. The bike, I mean. I’ve taken it because it’s an advantage when I’m up early, feeling old and living in a city humpy and made narrowly but with broad ideas, like Paris.

Compagnie Gwénaël Morin open Atelier’s season with a dawn performance of his Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies (my guesses : “One bizarre moment more” or, maybe, “In one brain, many moments bizarre”). The performance knits together Ajax, Antigone and Heracles. Distraught, determined, destined, each was responsible for their own death.

Dawn is just the right note to open on in the Covid-era; there’s a new day between sun up and sundown –  anything is possible. I think “rosy-fingered dawn”, Odyssey, Odysseos. I laugh, remembering swotting Greek. I remember that every single day begins all on its own… Live Dance does that, too – I think of Morin’s piece as “Dance”, for instance, because I’ve concluded all “performance” grows from the fundamental art of Dance. Dance begins and proceeds and beginsunique, like the days of our lives, like remembering, like the reincarnating soul is said to do.

This apprehension of its one-time-only quality is why live Dance is as universally sacred as it is profane. The Catholic Mass is a Dance of Remembrance, Passion and Resurrection; the Passion is the mother of plays and all true mountebanks. Playing Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies as the sun rises is a natural homage to the Dance in ourselves.

We onlookers are masked-up, raggedly distanced, flopped or tailor-legged or leant against the bigger trees in a trampled little meadow just outside the doors of Cartoucherie’s Aquarium theater. Local families often gather here for soccer and impromptu picnics. The rain this morning hesitates often enough that, playing or looking on, the performance stays outside throughout, damp but not soaked.

Fat grey clouds roll above as we look on. Lit by one giant globe lamp, the stage is carved from onlookers by a circle of reddish DayGlo spray paint, dimensioned by a big board on which somebody has written “AJAX ANTIGONE HERAKLES”. Twenty-something mountebanks in jeans, one cream molding-sack dress, sneakers, some in ponchos, one bare-chested, chorus, fall on their own sword, just say ‘no’ to wrongness and finesse their own pyre, all with pomp and style that wouldn’t surprise Sophocles or Molière.

The house offers coffee and croissants after.

Back on the e-bike, I am wondering, Is Gwénaël Morin’s piece suggesting we are responsible for our deaths as well as our dreams, bêtises and attendant guilts?

Wishing to get around a delivery truck in a narrow street, I take the curb too much lengthwise, take unwingèd flight, bang and abrade brow ridge, knee and nose. My good old left hand doesn’t stop the pavement from recreating me an old, has-been Palooka, but she does save me. She’s throbbing like a bastard but fully mobile. Likely just a strain. I’m not ambidextrous, but I lead left, often. Karine responds to Palooka’s post-beating selfie: “Bist du zuuuu schnell gefahren?”, a variant of an offhand “Bist du sicher?”. Then she asks after her e-bike.

The incident is worth every bruise, however. I’m hysterically glad to get back in among the mountebanks in spaces that were uncomfortable before fear of getting this viral salopérie gave us all these experiments in national lockdown, masks and social distancing.

With little exceptions, like a particular music-dance video or two (for instance, Philip Chbeeb & René Kester) and a drowsy appreciation of TV butt, cleavage, bump and grind as I stretch along Karine as she watches her Saturday-night ballroom dance TV contest, Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies is the first live performance I’ve set eyes on since 15 March 2020.

And, if the pandemic has proved one thing to my satisfaction, it’s that, even snuggled up to my honey-squeeze and drowsily appreciative of the family-rated content, un-live and un-in-person, audio-visual reproduction of Dance-performance can’t work for me. It’s physical and also intellectual – “moral”, in the French sense of the word.

Not by accident or even disdain, I haven’t had a TV since I left home for good in 1972. The flicker rate of TV and films make me feel weird – in the old days an “alienist” would have said “alienated”, like one feels in the first few moments of an acid trip. I have to steel myself to see a film. This may seem to you “odd”. It probably seems “unusual” but not “odd” that I also taste all sweeteners but sugar as bitter, hear very high-pitched sounds like dog whistles, am 65 years old and do not need glasses, though I can’t spontaneously tell my left from my right.

For me, the long and short of the effects of audio-visual technology on people is that people are naturally very variable and sensitive to the movements and evolutions of the world around. It stands to reason that the variability and sensitivity would extend to the technological environment. For the rest, a brother of mine was in a rocket attack that blew out his ear drums, burned his skin and drove a bone splinter from a comrade deep into his body. The experience left him permanently “nervous”. When it came to compensation, there was much ink exchanged over whether his was mental or physical disability. I’ve concluded that when we say “unusual”, we mean we don’t want to say not much is known about humans or the rest of the natural world and “odd” when a we don’t want to know about it.

I like the content of the recorded and reproduced performance as much as I do live performance content. Sometimes, even more. But, intellectually, reasoning from experience and values, not only do I suspect that audio-visual reproduction technology is the source of a number of psychic ills subtler than my own marginal schizophrenia, I also feel certain that the technology does not reproduce, but rather produces a thing quite different from the once-and-only that is the soul of Dance performance.

Physically – psychically, intellectually – morally, live Dance-performance is just not the same as recorded or reproduced performance. In the future, we need to better value that difference.

Diane Ward: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diane Ward, McGinty's Pub, Silver Spring, Maryland, Oct. 2018. Photo by T. Winch

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Never Walk Out of Your Life

 

consumer, you are biologically

natural and acceptable

 

and I am imitating a man

imitating a toddler’s attempt to walk

 

there are tiny white shoes that

fit my fingers – yet they’re useful to me

 

I am the armchair spectator as my life

collapses under the weight of desire, one deepest level

 

the flight circumnavigates my bed,

my table, my toilet, my self

 

your one syllable is sentence to me

your no-more-forgetting, a world

 

the lap is lost when you stand – a joke

until the body’s consumed by lap when it’s down

 

there’ll come a time: no amount of

bracelet enhances the arm devoid of content

 

there’ll come a time: to mention the name will be

proof of no claim to its object

 

I am bound by doors so seriously, to enter your

apartment is to enter the creation of your life from your body

 

in anticipation of the burst declaring movement

imperceptively portrayed, we, for one, can wait

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Diane Ward was born in Washington, DC, and currently lives in Oakland, California. She attended the Corcoran School of Art in DC and earned a doctorate in geography at UCLA. Her publications include a collaboration with Tina Darragh and Jane Sprague, #8 in the Belladonna Elders series; No List (no list) from Seeing Eye Books, Los Angeles; Flim-Yoked Scrim, Factory School; and When You Awake, New York: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. Several of her poems have been set to music by the Los Angeles composer Michael Webster, including “Fade on Family,” which was performed in 2005 as part of The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound series at the Schindler House in West Hollywood. “InHouse,” a constructed poem, appeared in Kindergarde, the first avant garde anthology for children.

"After Love" [by Jack Gilbert, 1925-2012]

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
The having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.

-- Jack Gilbert (The New Yorker, July 7-14, 2009)