The Best American Poetry

Larry Rivers, August 17, 1923 - August 14, 2002: A Master of Rhythm and Hues [by David Lehman]

Happy birthday, Larry Rivers. You'd have been 99 today.

Yitzchoch Grossberg, your given name, translates as Isaac Big Mountain

(on the model of Giussepe Verdi equals Joe Green)

and I love you and your saxophone, and how

you sang "Don't Worry 'Bout Me" in the green room

with Ashbery, Koch, and Jane Freilicher

for an event at the New School that I organized

and moderated, and I hope they taped it.

When was that? 1998? 1999?

At the Knickerbocker, Larry Rivers and the Climax Band played

and you sang:  "I'm afraid the masquerade

is over, and so is love," but our love is here to stay,

and I wish you were here to hear me say it.

 

Read about this wonderful painter here or below the picture, which is a detail of a larger photo from the late 1950s, in which, facing Larry, is Frank O'Hara. Tthey were collaborating on Stones, the poems and drawings that were released in an edition of twenty-five (described as a "portfolio of 12 lithograph[s] and title page on linen rag paper") that would set you back $45,000 were you to try to buy a copy today. On the table beteen the artistic collaborators are cans of Rheingold, the dry beer.

"A Master of Rhythm and Hues"
by David Lehman
Washington Post, December 27, 1992

LARRY RIVERS's life is as colorful as the spectacularly original canvases that have firmly established his place among the major avant-garde artists of our time. Born Yitzroch Grossberg in the Bronx, Rivers was an uninhibited, grass-smoking, sex-obsessed jazz saxophonist in his early twenties when he picked up a paintbrush for the first time. The year was 1945; the war was about to end, and New York City was on the cusp of becoming the art capital of the world.

Encouraged by such estimable painters as Jane Freilicher and Nell Blaine, Rivers soon "began thinking that art was an activity on a 'higher level' than jazz," because music is "abstract" and can't be done alone whereas painting is a solo performance that allows the artist to "make nameable things." Rivers took drawing classes with the great Hans Hofmann, but he always retained the improvisatory ideal of jazz, and the make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach has served him well. Even his most monumental constructions, such as "The History of the Russian Revolution" (1965) in Washington's Hirshhorn Museum, have a fresh air of spontaneity about them, as if they had just been assembled a few minutes ago.

Rivers had a meteoric rise. A Pierre Bonnard exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1948 proved to have a decisive influence on his sense of color and composition. No less an eminence than Clement Greenberg, then the nation's foremost art critic, declared in 1949 that Rivers was already "a better composer of pictures than was Bonnard himself in many instances" -- and this on the basis of Rivers's first one-man show. Though Greenberg would later modify his praise and then withdraw it altogether, he had launched the career of "this amazing beginner."

If one condition of avant-garde art is that it is ahead of its time, and another is that it proceeds from a maverick impulse and a contrary disposition, Rivers's vanguard status was assured from the moment when, at the height of Abstract Expressionism, he audaciously made representational paintings, glorifying nostalgia and sentiment while undercutting them with metropolitan irony. His pastiches of famous paintings of the past -- such as his irreverent rendition of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1953) -- seemed to define the playfully ironic attitudes of post-modernism years before anyone had thought up that term. And his paintings of brand labels, found objects, and pop icons -- Camel cigarettes, Dutch Masters cigars, the menu at the Cedar Bar in 1959, a French 100-franc note -- demonstrate what is vital about Pop Art while escaping the limitations of that movement.

Rivers has his own style of painting: He relies on "charcoal drawing and rag wiping." Also distinctive is his prankish sense of humor. In 1964 he painted a spoof of Jacques-Louis David's famous "Napoleon in His Study," the portrait of the emperor in the classic hand-in-jacket pose. Rivers's version, full of smudges and erasures, manages to be iconoclastic and idolatrous at once. The finishing touch is the painting's title: Rivers called it "The Greatest Homosexual."

“What Did I Do?,” Rivers's autobiographical ramble, conveys the excitement, the nervous energy, and the sublime agitation of life in New York City at a time when rents were cheap, Lester Young was president of the republic of jazz, and painters of the caliber of Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline hung out at the Cedar Bar, which thus became, in Rivers's phrase, "the G-spot of the art scene." Obsessed with "art and the quest for sex," Rivers left his wife for the floating Bohemia of Manhattan, where he shot up heroin, was openly bisexual, and lived with his two sons and his mother-in-law, Berdie, whom he painted -- sometimes in the nude.

Rivers had (and has) an adventuresome spirit, an appetite for notoriety, and a nose for publicity. He won a lot of money on "The $64,000 Challenge," one of the fixed television game shows of the 1950s, until he met his Waterloo when he was asked to identify the maiden name of Renoir's wife. Later, Rivers made the most of his opportunity to testify at a grand jury investigation of the program, acting as if the courtroom were an extension of show biz by other means. One of the show's producers, Rivers tells us, was his friend Shirley Bernstein, "sister of Lenny." When Rivers denied that she had fed him the answers, the assistant district attorney fired back, "Why are you protecting her, Mr. Rivers?" In response, Rivers writes, he "rose from the witness chair and said dramatically, 'Because I love her -- and I don't care if the whole world knows it!'"

Long on anecdote, short on analysis, "What Did I Do?" is full of juicy stories about Rivers's friends and associates, and he seems to have been chums with aesthetic experimentalists of all stripes, from the Living Theatre's Julian Beck and Judith Malina ("violent pacifists," Rivers calls them) to John Cage (whose music "was like a sermon by Spike Jones"), Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, not to mention the poets of the New York School, with whom Rivers became fast friends: Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Harry Mathews. He and O'Hara ("a charming madman") were intermittently lovers. They collaborated on several inspired projects, such as a hilarious send-up of an art manifesto, "How to Proceed in the Arts": "How can we paint the elephants and the hippopotamuses? How are we to fill the large empty canvas at the end of the large empty loft? You do have a loft, don't you, man?"

Rivers is a world-class talker, and reading “What Did I Do?” is like listening to a candid, manic monologue. It is an experiment in discontinuous narrative, with frequent flashbacks and flash-forwards, and it is an awful lot of fun. It isn't always easy to piece together the chronology -- Rivers places his trust in memory, that least reliable of fact-checkers -- but that isn't the point. The real subject of this book -- and its greatest pleasure -- is the personality of the artist: mercurial, profane, madcap, somewhat exhibitionistic, sometimes puerile: a wiseguy who gets a kick out of shocking the censor.

In the book's preface, Rivers introduces us to his collaborator on this project, the writer Arnold Weinstein: "I knew the three women he married, he probably slept with both my wives. What can I say? He's an old pal." That is the authentic Rivers tone, and it spices up every page. Some of his riffs are extraordinary. One of his sons is "deranged but normal in every other way." Rivers and his second wife, Clarice, "parted in 1967 and have been married ever since." Or consider this echo of the book's title: "For someone who has always had fantasies of living in a whorehouse like my heroes Pascin, Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Utamaro, what am I doing with five children, adding up to 252 pairs of shoes, 1,008 boxes of cereal, hot and cold, 8,660 quarts of milk, etc., plus 23 analysts, including mine?"

David Lehman's recent books include "Operation Memory," a collection of poems, and "Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man."

A review of

“WHAT DID I DO? The Unauthorized Autobiography of Larry Rivers”
By Larry Rivers with Arnold Weinstein
Aaron Asher/HarperCollins
498 pp. $30

Bukowski on His Birthday (August 16)

Many artists and writers gather their strength by opposing the established order, but sooner or later the successful ones are assimilated into the culture (Allen Ginsberg, the Beats, Black Mountain, San Francisco). Usually it happens belatedly but with hyperbolic claims as if to compensate for years of indifference or inattention. There are even times when the lag between rejection and celebration vanishes to nothing, as Gertrude Stein wrote in her brilliant lecture "Composition as Explanation." When the culture swallows the fashionable anti-establishment poetry of the moment, the result may be a mild case of indigestion. A good example is anti-war poetry of the 1960s, which was immediately accepted and glorified and is of absolutely no interest today.

The poet who has resisted assimilation longest and most strenuously is Charles Bukowski. Bukowski is the real thing, like Mexican Coke, a simile he would not have embraced, being a man who sets store by bourbon, whores with good legs, and the twenty-dollar window at the track. His poetry resists the mainstream as, say, even the radical Ginsberg of the 1950s doesn't.  Bukowski is as enamored of himself as anyone else but he takes himself less seriously as a literatus. He keeps his brain in the post office where he labors as one of the proles. This humility is one reason he appeals to readers, and he has genuine and ardent readers. Bukowski has long led the league in one important category: more of his books are stolen than those of any other author, an enviable distinction.

Read The Continual Condition, the most recent of Bukowski's posthumous collections, and you will see how he manages to make the reader feel that what he is saying really happened and in just the way described. He uses his artistry to conceal his artistry. He depicts himself, in such poems as "Rejected" and "The Theory," as emphatically ugly -- and at the same time he insists upon his virility. In the former, an editor rejects a story on the grounds that "to infer that an ugly man your age / had sex with four women in one day / is simply infantile day-dreaming." So what does Buk do? He spends the rest of the poem fleshing out this very situation.

About poetry Marianne Moore wrote, "I, too, dislike it." Bukowski would revise that to read "I, too, shit on it." He had an outstanding bullshit detector, and his poems in scorn of the Beats and other celebrated authors ("Ginsberg was / brought in / petted and / dismissed. / Burroughs was / still o.k. / but hardly / interesting / anymore. / Mailer, well hell, / that's big publishing, and / Olson, you know, well, / those breath pauses were / out of date / but meeting him / was nice") are funny and, well, nice.

Bukowski's power lies in the fact that he acknowledges he is no better than anyone else and yet he remains the hero of his own life. His poems seem raw but are tightly controlled and secretly much more in the know than you might think. (Li Po and Catullus make sneak appearances in "as Buddha smiles"). I intend to write more about this fascinating, politically incorrect but irresistible personage soaked in alcohol but for now will leave you with these lines, the opening lines of a poem, which will arrest your attention and won't let it go: "the god-damned ants have come marching here / and are climbing into my wine, / I drink them down." 

It wasn't deliberate, but Stacey and I were married on Charles Bukowski's birthday.

DL

From the archive; first posted on the BAP blog on September 23, 2011

Happy anniversary to us!

Happy anniversary to us.
With thanks to Mahinder Kingra, who snapped this shot of us at Simeon's in Ithaca on August 10, 2022.

Tales of the Eighties: A Moment with Mal Waldron [by Alan Ziegler]

August 16 would be Mal Waldron's 97th birthday (he died in 2002). I spent a moment with him in 1983.

     “Look,” I say, pointing to a sign in a Greenwich Village club window, “Mal Waldron is playing.” Mal Waldron (when I first saw his name in print I thought it was a typo) was immortalized in the last line of Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died,” in which O’Hara recalls leaning on the john door of the 5 Spot while Billie Holiday “whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.”

    Someone who performed with Billie Holiday and was written about by Frank O’Hara is within reach. We get a table.

     Mal Waldron is in the middle of a set, playing melodic bebop. I am transfixed by his eyes, which seem to float in his head, not looking at the keyboard or the audience but seeing everything inside and out, past and present. We can’t see his hands, there is only Mal Waldron’s eyes and the music. I want to lean up against the john door and briefly stop breathing. 

    After his set he sits alone at a table with a drink. I muster the courage to approach him. I ask him about the O'Hara poem and he says that lots of people have mentioned it to him.

    “Do you remember the night—when Billie whisper-sang only for you?”

    "It could have been a lot of nights,” Mal Waldron says.

from the archive; first posted October 2015

"Woodstock '69" [by George Green]

The fabled festival began on August 15, 1969. Here is a link George Green's poem "Woodstock '69" on E-Verse Radio: 
https://www.everseradio.com/woodstock-69-by-george-green/?_thumbnail_id=35257

Woodstock '69 

  On the occasion of the 50th anniversary


Friday

Anne chauffeured us in her dad’s Ford Galaxy,
Linda and Judy and me, each born to be wild
with tickets to an “Aquarian Exposition."
When Ravi Shankar played that night, the teeming horde
grew oddly reverential, because samadhi,

so it seemed back then, is mass induced
by ancient ragas spun out in the rain,
though I stayed mad because Jeff Beck had cancelled.

Saturday

I dropped an obligatory cap of acid,
not brown, thank God, but Owsley, guaranteed

unspeedy, pure, and easy on the chakras.
After a year on the Barbary Coast (the Haight)
psychedelics weren’t that challenging,
so I sat against a fence surrendering
to Hieronymus Bosch in 3D Cinerama

for five or six eternities, while half a million
melting gargoyles did their unholy boogaloo.
Then came that long, incredible feedback note,
the "Born on the Bayou" note, and I rose to meet
the horde on the crowded plains of ecstasy,

and pastures of transcendence. Then came Janis!!!
I went back to the car to sleep, where Judy told me
that a zonked-out-Linda had been raped in a camper
by three jocks, and I mustn’t tell a soul,
or let on that I knew. The jocks were “straights,”

not “freaks” like us, and Linda was in another tent
or teepee on the ridge, with several “Healers.”

Sunday

I went out in heavy rain and ducked
under a jeweler’s awning, where tightly crammed
dripped members of the Woodstock Generation.

A girl snuggled against me with a joint,
and, so help me, she looked like a Burne-Jones model,
that is to say exactly like. We were
so squashed together I should have tried to kiss her,
but I was a gentleman, and an idiot.

Ten minutes later she announced her need
to visit the facilities, demanding that
I stay and “save her spot.” You know the rest,
she disappeared forever from my life,
and for 18 hours I searched the farm for her,

Woodstock’s Wandering Aengus on the trail
of King Cophetua’s willowy Beggar-Maid,
staggering on and on through the soggy grass,
only to collapse beside the road,
where I saw the boots-of-many-colors on

Mitch Mitchell’s feet, from whom I bummed a Marlboro,
and chatted with, down to the front of the stage,
where Gypsy Sun and Rainbows were tuning up
for my big moment in the history of the world.
Then it was over but the girls weren’t at

the car, I’d have to search the wikiups on
the ridge, where I found the current issue of Time
in a pile of trash, creased open to the news
that the eight-and-a-half months pregnant Sharon Tate
was slaughtered with some friends out in L. A.

Originally published in The Hopkins Review (Winter 2021 14.1)

George Green’s book, Lord Byron’s Foot, won the New Criterion Prize, The Poet’s Prize, 
and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems have
appeared in ten anthologies. He is from Trump County, Pennsylvania, but has lived 
in New York City for forty years. He is obviously a proud member of the Svengoolie cult.

 

Toi Derricotte: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toi Derricotte. Photo by Ted Rosenberg

__________________________________________________________________

Lauds

 

Good morning, fat chair.  Your frame is slight-

Ly askew, your wooden bones tilt, but padded

With foam & polka dotted, you seem sprite-

 

Ly, good-natured.  I’ve known a chair to rise

Out of a night’s darkness & provide a ride

For me, above the furry carpeting, defy-

 

Ing gravity.  Even one cock-eyed, cheap,

Can be a tilted ship climb-

Ing waves of mourning.  Whatever light

 

Shines through this morning’s slatted blinds—

Smoky with undelivered rain—I’ve turned aside

To praise my last-legged you, for (like Jessye

 

Norman’s lungs) your soul breathes blithe

Operatic air, & your polka dots climb

Atmospheric strophes like poems I memorized

 

In school.  Do not go gentle, fat chair.  What we write

About we are, so you are me, plumped with an extra

Twenty pounds, a bear, lumbering. But, in a poem, we

Dance with a relic of imagination &, by imagination, live.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Toi Derricotte is the recipient of the 2021 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, for outstanding artistic achievement in the art of poetry over a poet’s career, and the 2020 Frost Medal from Poetry Society of America for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry.  Her sixth collection of poetry, “I” New and Selected Poems, was published in 2019 and shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award.  Other books of poetry include The Undertaker’s Daughter, Tender, Captivity, Natural Birth, and The Empress of the Death House.  Her literary memoir,The Black Notebooks,won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. With Cornelius Eady, Derricotte co-founded the Cave Canem Foundation in 1996. She is Professor Emerita from University of Pittsburgh and a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                      Susan F. Campbell, Armchair, color pencil drawing, 1987 

Kenward Elmslie, 1929-2022 --- Poet, Lyricist, Publisher

What I want to know is:
When I'm dead and gone.
Who'll prop me up in the dawn? -- Kenward Elmslie

Born on April 27, 1929, in New York City into a distinguished family—his grandfather was Joseph Pulitzer—Kenward Gray Elmslie grew up in Colorado Springs, CO, attended St. Mark’s preparatory school, and then Harvard, receiving a BA in English in 1950.

In 1952 his passion for musical theater led to a romantic relationship with Broadway librettist John Latouche, who wrote “Taking a Chance on Love,” “Lazy Afternoon,” and a number of Broadway shows and operas. Latouche's vibrant New York City artistic salon was frequented by Truman Capote, Lena Horne, Jack Kerouac, Gore Vidal, Marlene Dietrich, Frank O’Hara, Lotte Lenya, and Duke Ellington.

Shortly after arriving in New York, Elmslie wrote a song (“Love-wise”) that Nat King Cole recorded.. Over the years Elmslie wrote librettos for musicals and operas with composers Ned Rorem, Jack Beeson, Thomas Pasatieri, Steven Taylor, and Claibe Richardson, which were performed by the NYC Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Seattle Opera, Glimmerglass, York Theatre Co., on PBS, and at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre. 

In 1953 Elmslie and Latouche bought an 1840s farmhouse and surrounding property in Calais, VT. The two divided their time between New York City and Calais until Latouche’s death in 1956. Elmslie retained the property, spending increasing amounts of time there and finally becoming a resident of Vermont. Although for many years Elmslie maintained a low profile in the community, he opened his home to his many writer, actor, and artist friends, such as John Ashbery, Alex Katz, Richard Thomas, Ruth Ford, Harry Mathews, and Joe Brainard. In 1963 Brainard and Elmslie became not only romantic partners but also artistic collaborators. Brainard spent months every year with Elmslie in Calais, painting and writing. It was there that he wrote his classic, I Remember, while Elmslie and Richardson worked on what has become a cult favorite Broadway show, The Grass Harp.

It was also in Vermont that Elmslie founded Z Press, a nonprofit literary publishing company whose authors included Ashbery, James Schuyler, Edwin Denby, and others associated with the New York School of Poetry. When the Calais post office was in danger of being closed due to a low cash flow, Elmslie rescued it by funneling all Z Press business through it. Elmslie also organized a series of local poetry, film, and musical events. Early on in Calais he had become friends with culinary expert and writer Louise Andrews Kent, perhaps better known as Mrs. Appleyard, but he was also very close to local people who worked for him, notably the loyal handymen Ralph Weeks and Harold Clough, who in turn found him to be a remarkably cordial, entertaining, and slightly eccentric fellow. In the 1970s, the Town of Calais surprised him by renaming the dirt road he lived on: Elmslie Road.

Elmslie published ten books of poetry, including Motor Disturbance (Frank O’Hara Award, Columbia University Press) and Routine Disruptions: Selected Poems and Lyrics 1960-1998, and gave numerous poetry readings and performances around the country. Those who saw his funny and moving performance—he had a very fine singing voice—at the St. Johnsbury Atheneaum have never forgotten it. He also published a novel, The Orchid Stories (Doubleday/Paris Review) and saw his play City Junket performed by New York’s Eye and Ear Theatre, with sets by Red Grooms. Two of Elmslie's most memorable lyrics are "They" and "Change Your Name to Woolworth," which he performed for an admiring audience at Hamilton College in Fall 1978.

As a Pulitzer heir, Elmslie was able to make many charitable gifts to needy writers, poetry organizations, and civil rights groups, as well as to the Town of Calais and the Vermont Land Trust. In doing so, he always maintained a strict anonymity. He was a shy man. He owned a house in Greenwich Village and thre great parties there in the 1970s and 80s.

In his later years Elmslie’s health declined, due to dementia, and on June 29, 2022, he died peacefully of natural causes. He is survived by his half-sister Alexandra Whitelock of Calais, VT, nephew William Weir of Marathon, FL, nephew Gordon Weir of Cambridge MA, and niece Vivien Russe, of South Portland, ME. His ashes will be scattered in Vermont, as he wished.

Adapted from VTDigger . See, too, W. C. Bamberger's moving obituary in Rain Taxi. From gunslinger Neil Genzlinger's obit in the New York Times:

<<< In New York in the 1950s and ’60s, [Elmslioe] mixed easily with an artsy crowd. A 1965 article in The Times about a trendy party in the Bowery had him among the guests, with [Andy] Warhol, the photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, the pioneering electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, all gathered to hear a reading by William S. Burroughs.

The year before that party, Warhol had given Mr. Elmslie one of his Heinz ketchup box sculptures, a classic example of Warholian Pop Art. More than four decades later, in 2009, the work was stolen, along with other valuable items and several million dollars. “Pulitzer kin hit in pop art scam,” the headline in The Daily News read.

In 2010, James Biear, who had been Mr. Elmslie’s chauffeur and caretaker, was indicted in the thefts. News accounts at the time said he took advantage of Mr. Elmslie’s dementia, which was already in its early stages. In 2012 Mr. Biear was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

In 1963 Mr. Elmslie began a long relationship with Joe Brainard, an artist and writer with whom he also collaborated on various projects. Mr. Brainard died in 1994. Mr. Elmslie is survived by a half sister, Alexandra Whitelock. >>>

Alfred Hitchcock's Fate Was In His Stars [by David Lehman]

At 3:15 in the morning, in London, England, one hundred and twenty-something years ago today, the great film director Alfred Hitchcock was born, a solid Leo with a macabre imagination (moon in Scorpio). When August 13 falls on a Friday, as in 1993, 1999, and 2021,you may expect bats to fly in through the slightest opening in the bathroom window, and the phone will ring at 11 PM and it will be someone you have never met, who asks you for a job and sounds drunk. Hitchcock was short (5'5) and stout and perhaps unaware that he shared his birthday with both Annie Oakley and Fidel Castro.

There is a tremendous amount of fire in his natal chart (see below): more than 50%. This accounts for his energy, drive, ambition. The water in his chart, topping 18%, indicates a man of subtlety and sensitivity. He has three times as much yang as yin in his personality, and no one should be surprised to learn that a man whose dominant planets are the sun, Venus, and Mars may luxuriate in bathtubs in the English manner and have an almost phobic distrust of showers, which comes through in such movies as "Vertigo" (in which Kim Novak does not drown in the Pacific Ocean) and "Pyscho" (in which Janet Leigh meets her shocking fate behind a torn curtain). Leo, Sagittarius, and Scorpio are the predominant signs of a man whose self-confidence can lead him to commit the sin of pride. I hear that Janet Leigh greatly prefers baths to showers and has ever since working with Hitch.

A picture of the master of suspense emerges from a study of Hitchcock's chart. He is a Roman Catholic; a lover of blondes (especially American blondes); and a prankster of the imagination who knows that a straight face is best for effects either comic or scary and that the best way to get an actor and an actress to understand their parts as quarreling lovers is to handcuff them together and lock them in a room overnight, as in the filming of "The 39 Steps."

When he was a boy, Hitchcock's dad sent him to the local police constabulary with a note instructing the officer on duty to lock the boy in jail for a few hours. This experience had the desired effect on the lad, who worked out his guilt complex by dispatching heroes, heroines, and villains to their deaths from the top of a church tower or the Statue of Liberty; from a moving train, or in a wood stove, or by an attack of killer birds, or in an out-of-control merry-go-round at an amusement park, or by a nasty piece of goods who uses his necktie as a strangling device, or sometimes with a gun, a knife, or a pair of handy scissors. The leonine Hitchock had his sun and his Venus in Leo. This makes him a most logical man, a constant man, generous in his affections but domineering, and almost tyrannically loyal to his lovers and friends.

Given this man's stellar combination of assertive confidence and deep-seated guilt, it comes as no surprise to students of the great man's chart that (1) the great Hitchcock actors (male) tend to be old-fashioned types (James Stewart, Cary Grant) rather than the method-trained new breed; (2) in some (not all) of the best Hitchcock movies, the villain is either more interesting than the hero (Robert Walker versus Farley Granger in "Strangers on a Train"), suave and attractive(James Mason in "North by Northwest," Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder") or exceptionally complicated in an attractive way (e.g., Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt,"  the birds in "The Birds," the real imposter in "Spellbound")); and (3) the perfect Hitchcock heroines are Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Teresa Wright, and Tippi Hedren. Hitch shows us the craziness inside every man and his (almost invariably) blonde fantasy lady.

A tip of the fedora to Bernard Herrmann, a June Cancer, who wrote the music of Hitchcock's mind as well as soundtracks for such movies as "Citizen Kane" and Brian de Palma's  underrated "Obsession." -- DL

Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.

from the archive; first published August 13, 2015

Dante, Near and Far [by Robert P. Baird]

There is much strange in La Vita Nuova, the libello or “little book” that Dante composed fifteen or so years before starting in on the Divine Comedy. Take, for starters, the form of the book, an alternation of prose and poetry that produces effects as dizzying as any in Williams's Spring and All. Or take the central narrative, which describes a love—young Dante’s, for the slightly younger Beatrice—so intense that it causes the poet to faint in public and forces him, poor lad, to write lying love poems to the donne dello schermo, the “screen ladies” he uses to hide the real object of his affection. Take even Beatrice herself, who begins the book as a girl in a girdled dress only to reveal herself not long after as a miracle made flesh.

All of this is strange for us to read, or should be, even if, grinning behind our commentaries, we spot in the donna dello schermo an unacknowledged ancestor of the celebrity beard. After all, when Dante says that Beatrice is a miracle, he isn’t indulging mere hyperbole, the way Roxette did in that song I remember too well from seventh grade. Nor does he mean it less merely in the manner of an established trope, as John Donne did at the end of “The Relic.” Uniquely for the time and all but blasphemously, Dante meant that his beloved’s appearance on earth was a miracle that repeated (and maybe even competed with) Christ’s Incarnation itself. In the young poet’s eyes, Beatrice was the agent of his religious salvation and the summit of all Creation, the radiant filament that binds together heaven and earth. 

Dante’s strangeness, his distance from us in time and cultural space, is the reason Eugenio Montale took T.S. Eliot gently to task for suggesting that the Commedia was “extremely easy to read…for a foreigner who does not know Italian very well.” It’s not that Montale felt any need to defend the reluctant intricacies of his native tongue. His point was to insist that “Dante is not a modern poet…and that the instruments of modern culture are not ideally suited to understanding him.”

And yet even if we accept Montale’s reminder as well warranted, and I do, I don’t think it’s careless or unfair to say that there are times when Dante can feel close to us, “strangely close,” as Montale admitted. Graduate school is far enough behind me that I won’t bother you with theories of transhistorical subjective affiliation. My effort here is only to point out, a little like a finger before the moon, a single small moment that I love in the Vita Nuova.

The moment I mean happens early in the libello. At the start of the third chapter, Dante is describing his second encounter with Beatrice. (The first occurred nine years earlier.) The meeting is brief and profound: eighteen-year-old Dante sees Beatrice in the street, she waves hello, and her greeting causes the young poet so much giddy distress that he decides he can only go home and put himself to bed. 

That night Dante has a dream, and—perhaps predictably, dreams being dreams—this is where things get weird. In his sleep the poet sees uno segnore di pauroso aspetto emerge from a fiery cloud. Despite his fearful aspect the lord is happy, very possibly because he is carrying in his arms a naked woman asleep beneath a crimson drape. After Dante realizes that the woman is Beatrice, the lord holds up a burning object and tells the dreaming poet, in Latin, Behold your heart. At that moment the lord wakes Beatrice and starts to force-feed her Dante’s flaming heart. With understandable reluctance, Beatrice eats the thing until the lord’s happiness mysteriously turns to grief and he carries her away, presumably to heaven. 

As I said: weird. 

It was weird for Dante, too. So weird, he tells us, that he woke immediately afterward and decided to write a sonnet about what he saw. Not only did he write a sonnet but he told his readers, in the poem's second and third lines, that “these words I have composed are sent for your elucidation in reply.” And not only did Dante include this request (which I like to think of as the thirteenth-century equivalent of a self-addressed stamped envelope) he also decided to send the sonnet to molti li quali erano famosi trovatori in quello tempo, “many of the famous poets of that time.”

And here, finally, we get to the moment I love, the slender moon my finger’s been wagging after all this time. Here we see Dante—newly a poet, desperately in love—appealing to the judgment of his literary betters. Ostensibly, of course, the point was to ask about the dream, but who could doubt that what Dante really wanted was a judgment on his poem? What writer, what person of any ambition whatsoever, can’t remember that feeling of wanting to know—wanting to test—the quality of her nascent talent? 

It’s in this way that Dante comes to occupy, in my mind, anyway, the head of a secret history of such events, the benedictions or baptisms that link one poetic generation to the next. This is the history in which a young Walter Whitman sends Ralph Waldo Emerson an unsigned and unattributed copy of Leaves of Grass. This is Emily Dickinson asking T. W. Higginson, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” This is Paul Muldoon sending Seamus Heaney a sheaf of poems topped with the question “What's wrong with these?” (“Nothing,” the older poet responded, or so the story goes.) 

Among those who responded to Dante, the Vita Nuova acknowledges only Guido Cavalcanti, whose response “Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore” marked the start of the poets’ friendship. On the reading of his future primo amico, Dante’s dream was a vision of “all value, every joy and goodness that one can feel.” Cavalcanti suggests that the lord “who rules the world of honor” wanted to bring Beatrice back from near-death with the flaming food of Dante’s love.

It’s no surprise that Dante would choose this response to quote in his Vita Nuova, even while he would insist, as well, that “the true meaning of the dream I described was not perceived by anyone then.” As scholars have argued, Cavalcanti’s interpretation of the dream, while not strictly coincident with Dante’s own, was nevertheless close enough to buttress the latter’s dramatic sense of his love’s significance. 

Not all of Dante’s respondents, however, were so encouraging. Of the three reply-sonnets that survive, one, by the Tuscan poet Dante da Maiano, is about as far from Cavalcanti in spirit and tone as we can imagine. In so many words da Maiano tells Dante that it’s simple love-sickness that’s got him bothered, and probably bad hygiene besides. If Dante really wants to heal himself he needs to get rid of the noxious vapors infecting his brain. And the only way to do that, da Maiano says, smirking down the centuries, is for the young poet to go and give his testicles a good washing.

Here, too, we get the chance to meet Dante at his most queasily familiar: not as a prodigy reveling in the warm validation of his peers, but as a callow poetaster hearing harsh words from a poet he respects. It’s probably too easy to admire da Maiano’s sonnet for its precocious snark, but I appreciate his poem even more for the rare gift it affords: the chance for once to meet Dante outside the glare of his own genius.

Under Fire [by Terence Winch]

Under Fire       

Stop looking at me.  I didn’t do anything
wrong.  I don’t know the words to the song.
That’s all.  I wandered around the mall
with my broken watch.  I had all my receipts.
But no one would take anything back.
I am stuck with the whole mess.  Saved
phone messages, archived email, notes
you wrote on your hand.  The hand you once
held out to me,  the bed where we once slept
together. The dirty underwear in the hamper.
I don’t know how I will get home.  I don’t
need you to tell me I’m an idiot.  I need you
to remember where I came from so I can get
back there and put out the fire and go to sleep.

—Terence Winch
from i.e.  anthology

from the archive; first printed 8/8/09

Ben Jonson tells investors to face the music [by David Lehman]

Ben Jonson, England's first poet laureate, wrote great poems conjoining wit and powerful feeling. Consider "My Picture Left in Scotland") about which I have written a short essay, which you will find here).  His poetry, his plays. his great influence have overcome its one-time state of being universally admired and universally ignored, as T. S. Eliot wrote a hundred years ago. He is a great poet and I should do a little column on his elegy for his son, "child of my right hand, and joy." Ben and the son who predeceased him had the same first name. Benjamin, in Hebrew, means "son of my right hand."

Less well known is that avatars of Ben continue to perform in important and unexpected ways in our culture. In The Wild Bunch, for example, Ben was Warren Oates's brother. 

Now (according to the September 2022 issue of Kiplinger's) Ben Johnson is head of global ETF research at Morningside, the financial data firm, and he has this to say to nervous investors: Worry "is part of the price of admission. If it's too hard to watch, then step out and look at the trees, which at this time of year are mostly green, unlike the markets."  Note the simile's elegant allusion to Ben Jonson's book Timber, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641).

PS. On a separate but related note from

Ben Jonson, England's first poet laureate, wrote great poems conjoining wit and powerful feeling. Consider "My Picture Left in Scotland") about which I have written a short essay, which you will find here).  His poetry, his plays. his great influence have overcome its one-time state of being universally admired and universally ignored, as T. S. Eliot wrote a hundred years ago. He is a great poet and I should do a little column on his elegy for his son, "child of my right hand, and joy." Ben and the son who pre-deceased him had the same first name: Benjamin, which, in Hebrew, means "son of my right hand."

Less well known is that avatars of Ben continue to perform in important and unexpected ways in our culture. In The Wild Bunch, for example, Ben was Warren Oates's brother. 

Now (according to the September 2022 issue of Kiplinger's) he is head of global ETF research at Morningside, the financial data firm, and he has this to say to nervous investors: Worry "is part of the price of admission. If it's too hard to watch, then step out and look at the trees, which at this time of year are mostly green, unlike the markets."  Note the simile's elegant allusion to Ben Jonson's book Timber, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641).

PS. On a separate but related note from the department of onomastics, a double of the late Philip Levine is the former mayor of Miami.

slippage (un)fixed by Bridget Gilmartin [introduced by Thomas Moody]

Brigit Gilmartin achieves a lot within sixteen short lines. “Louis Buvelot is painting” is the kind of opening you’d expect from a Frank O’Hara poem: both casual and direct, and there is an easy brevity to “slippage (un)fixed” that masks the significance of what it addresses. The poem is ostensibly about the artifice in art, the distance between the artwork and that which is being represented, no matter how faithful the attempt. Ironically, the landscape painting Louis Buvelot is working on is continually interfered with by the landscape being captured. “A mammoth gust of wind blows a twig onto the canvas” to mess up a branch of the painting's eucalypt. “Louis / picks out the twig with his thumb and forefinger.” Next a tooth appears in the painting's foreground. The tooth signals a shift (a volta?) in the poem's themes, as Gilmartin masterfully moves us away from representation in art and towards Australia’s colonial history.

Louis Buvelot was a Swiss-Australian painter best known as Arthur Streeton’s tutor, a founding member of the Heidelberg School. Inspired by European Naturalism and Impressionism, the Heidelberg School was a movement in Australian art during the late 19th century which favored painting en plein air and claimed to be the first set of (settler) artists to see Australia “through Australian eyes.” (Up to that point, landscape painting in Australia had neglected the great tonal idiosyncrasies in the Australian countryside.) The movement coincided with the county’s push towards federation, and there is a fair amount of nationalism associated with it—these are the paintings you find reproductions of in textbooks, on the walls of pubs, and as symbols of “Australian-ness.”

 

Louis Buvelot "Summer Evening Near Templestowe"

 

What these artworks refused to include was any representation of Indigenous Australians, their culture or their violent mistreatment by colonial Australia. The exclusion of Indigenous representation was symptomatic of Australia’s historical amnesia, or as W.E.H Stanner termed it “The Great Australian Silence,” in which Australians do not only fail to acknowledge the atrocities of the past, but consciously choose not to think about them, to the point of forgetting they happened at all. In “slippage (un)fixed” we get Louis Buvelot literally "clearing" the landscape of this history from his canvas in real time as he paints “Louis goes on picking out teeth / until finally he pulls a whole skull out of his /canvas. He tosses it away and puts the finishing / touches on the landscape”.

What makes “slippage” (un)fixed” such a terrific poem is that an ignorance of the history it references is no impediment to its enjoyment. Gilmartin's casual tone immediately welcomes us inside the poem, and the deftness of her transitions mean we never linger too long in any one place. It is such a visual poem, and the imagery so exact that once we arrive at pulling skulls from a canvas, we can see it so clearly it is hardly fantastical, an achievement which also might be mimetic of the ease in which history is erased (this process itself a fantasy), and the ease in which we accept this erasure.

 

 

slippage (un)fixed

 

Louis Buvelot is painting. It’s a quarter past

midday and you wouldn’t know out here unless

you looked at the sun but Louis doesn’t look

at the sun because he’s squinting at the trees.

A mammoth gust of wind blows a twig onto the

canvas. It lodges itself in a glob of oil paint. Louis

picks out the twig with his thumb and forefinger.

It messes up a branch of his painted eucalypt.

There’s something else stuck to the grass in the

foreground. It looks like a tooth; human or

animal, Louis doesn’t know. He picks it out but

once he’s done that he sees another appear.

And another. Louis goes on picking out teeth

until finally he pulls a whole skull out of his

canvas. He tosses it away and puts the finishing

touches on the landscape. Calls it The Clearing.

 

[First published at Cordite Poetry Review]

 

Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom) [with Perry Como and the Ray Charles Singers, 1956]

This was high on the charts when I was eight and riding a bicycle to impress a little girl. I am still fond of the song.

If you're hearing Emmanuel Chabrier's España (1883)
you're not wrong O
America we serve 
hot dogs to the King
and Queen of England
and did you know It was Al Jolson
who launched "hot diggity dog"
in the 20s, a decade famous for phrases,
like digga digga do and making whoopie.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Two): Diana Goetsch [by Angela Ball]

YOU COULD

I stood in the middle of my kitchen eating butter.
It was 11 a.m. on an overcast morning
I was wearing—well, let’s not worry about
what I was wearing. I don’t make a habit of this—
I’d never done it before. It wasn’t a whole stick,
though a good half inch. Popped it in
and let it melt into the flesh under my tongue,
the place where you’d insert nitro-glycerin,
if that’s what you needed. I won’t describe
the taste—you’ll have to try it for yourself.

Perhaps when you’re thinking about goals,
that would be a good time to let some
butter have a ride on your tongue,
or stick a thumb in a bowl of icing,
scarf a pie with no hands, like a wolf—
whatever pulls you in from, or shoves you out on the ledge
you might need to come in from, or go out on.
You don’t have to climb Mount Everest,
unless you find yourself in front of it
and can’t come away. Unless something’s
calling you to do something your friends
wouldn’t understand in a million years.

I don’t understand butter. I know it
comes from cows, who have given so much
for so long. But it’s a person I picture,
the first to try it. Others in the tribe
discarded the floating globules, but this one
opted to taste the world, the same world
that has us so worried and confused.
You could do it, and afterwards write it down:
Today was overcast. I put on a full slip, just because.
Oh and I ate butter—incredible!

--Diana Goetsch

Poems come out of nowhere and then you see what went into them. “You Could” is a carpe diem/anti-bucket list type poem. I knew a bucketlister whose goal was to see a baseball game in every major league stadium. This same person also said he wanted to die by age 60—which actually makes sense because been-there-done-that-ism is more about dying (“kicking the bucket”) than living. “You Could” was also influenced by Nazim Hikmet’s great poem, “Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison,” which recommends against certain activities (“to think of roses and gardens inside is bad”) in favor of others (“to think of seas and mountains is good”) in order to stay truly alive. Hikmet’s rating system may be cryptic to some, though the incarcerated kids I used to teach had no problems relating to the poem. “You Could” also elevates some experiences (butter tasting) over others (mountain climbing). And yet it ends with a journal entry, which makes every life look like a bucket list. –Diana Goetsch

Diana Goetsch is the author of several poetry collections, including Nameless Boy (Orchises, 2015) and In America (Rattle 2017), and also the memoir This Body I Wore (FSG, 2022), which was pronounced “achingly beautiful” by The New York Times Book Review. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.  She used to teach at Stuyvesant High School. Her website is www.dianagoetsch.com

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Two): Diana Goetsch

In her important “You Could,” Diana Goetsch treats us to the miraculous ordinary, like Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch when they thrill at “the park full of dancers and their tights and shoes / in little bags . . .” or at staring into, as into a musical telescope, “a bottle of sparkling pop.” Like both O’Hara’s and Koch’s work, “You Could” instructs by delighting.

The poem begins with a bald announcement of the kind a Noir narrator might make, complete with place, time, and weather: “I stood in the middle of my kitchen eating butter.” The speaker begins to tell what she was wearing, then rejects this as unimportant, launching instead into rationalization: it’s something she doesn’t do often and “wasn’t a whole stick / though a good half inch.” The butter dissolves into, in disconcerting coincidence, “the place you’d insert nitro-glycerin, / if that’s what you needed.” The poet declines to usurp our experience of butter by detailing her own encounter.

The poem’s second stanza introduces goals only to supply anarchic ones sure to be rejected by America’s ultra-serious dieters and exercisers, including “scarf a pie with no hands, like a wolf.” There’s no call to go all death-defying—“You don’t have to climb Mount Everest, / unless you find yourself in front of it / and can’t come away.” It broaches matters mysterious and serious, though mentioned casually: “Unless something’s calling you to do something / that your friends wouldn’t understand in a million years.” Something, perhaps, like changing your métier, your name, or your sex, as eels do going to or from the sea?

Then the poem makes a strange and wonderful pronouncement: “I don't understand butter.” Normally, butter does not offer itself to our understanding, not even on cooking shows that display its behavior as an ingredient, but tell us nothing of its inner life, its thisness. After a nod to the all-important cow, the poet moves to what truly interests her, the discoverer of butter—the explorer who, despite unfamiliarity “opted to taste the world, the same world / that has us so worried and confused.” The poem dares us to dare—to assume an MO arcane merely because so few have followed it—among them Frank O’Hara, who in in his poem “Autobiographia Literaria” transforms from reject to poet:

     And here I am, the
     center of all beauty!
     writing these poems!
     Imagine!

“You Could” ends by relating the author’s journal entry for the day as possible model, generous example, happily including the detail withheld at the start, what she is wearing:

     You could do it, and afterwards write it down:
     Today was overcast. I put on a full slip, just because.
     Oh and I ate butter—incredible!

The slip here, a garment now sadly in neglect, is the same one worn by the young Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront, and by the character Alison in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger; garment whose very mention (as “shift”) provoked riots during the run of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 Dublin. In putting it on, the poet puts on its feminine power, its fierce delicacy “just because”—the very reason we dare to indulge our dangerous and life-affirming impulses, the reason we enter an irresistible poem like Diana Goetsch’s “You Could” not knowing who we might be when we leave.

--Angela Ball

When Life followed Art, which returned the compliment

Life magazine, August 8, 1949. "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The artIcle that changed the art world. Merely by asking the question, Life made it a self-fulfilling prophecy, demonstrating the power of the media and the tendency of journalistic questions (like "Is God Dead?" on the cover of a 1966 issue of Life's sister magazine, Time) to slide into declarations. "Life -- consider the alternative" is attributed to Marshall McLuhan. I had erroneously thought the phrase served as an ad campaign for Life, the alternative to which was either Look or death. -- DL

 On the cover: Deborah Reynolds.

The Definition of Gardening [poem by James Tate]

So many people in my various social media feeds are posting pictures of their gardens these days. I'm reminded of this poem, by James Tate, from his wonderful book Shroud of the Gnome. sdl

The Definition of Gardening

Jim just loves to garden, yes he does.

He likes nothing better than to put on

his little overalls and his straw hat.

He says, "Let's go get those tools, Jim."

But then doubt begins to set in.

He says, "What is a garden, anyway?"

And thoughts about a "modernistic" garden

begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve.

He stands in the driveway a long time.

"Horticulture is a groping in the dark

into the obscure and unfamiliar,

kneeling before a disinterested secret,

slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,

birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and

destroy, pull out and apply salt,

hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,

where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,

the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love,

into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,

through the nose, the earsplitting necrology

of it, the withering, shriveling,

the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder

and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,

wireworms are worse than their parents,

there is no way out, flowers as big as heads,

pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently

at me, the me who so loves to garden

because it prevents the heaving of the ground

and the untimely death of porch furniture,

and dark, murky days in a large city

and the dream home under a permanent storm

is also a factor to keep in mind."

Martin Stannard: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

_________________________________________________________________________

Princess of Thieves

 

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine,

And I have something else I want to say:

That “Best of Phil Collins” CD you have is mine.

 

I have not slumped into a terminal decline

And Celia, I welcome each new sunshiny day.

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine.

 

It may be that you think I have no spine

But you’re wrong, and the truth is here to stay:

That “Best of Phil Collins” CD you have is mine.

 

Celia, I have never been the sort to whine,

And this is what I simply have to convey:

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine.

 

As I crack open another bottle of wine

The absence of that record causes me dismay.

Celia, that “Best of Phil Collins” CD is mine.

 

It is not in my nature to weakly repine

And every day I go out with my friends to play.

Since you left I’ve been absolutely bloody fine,

And Celia, that “Best of Phil Collins” CD is mine.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Martin Stannard lives in Nottingham, England, in quiet retirement with his cat, Xiao Mei. He was the editor/publisher of joe soap’s canoe magazine from 1978–1993, where he championed New York poets including Paul Violi, Tony Towle, and Charles North. His poetry and reviews have been published widely since the late 1970s, his most recent titles being The Review (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2020) and Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters (Leafe Press, 2020). “Princess of Thieves” is one poem in a short sequence now called “To Celia” that was originally written as a (slightly humorous but at the same time very serious) series of blog posts called “How To Write Poetry,” with tutorials on the sonnet, villanelle, triolet, sestina, and pantoum. These very useful guides can be found here.  

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"The Prophecy of an Assassination": On "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) [by David Lehman]

When The Manchurian Candidate, based on the novel by Richard Condon, was released in 1962, Pauline Kael called it “the most sophisticated political satire ever to come out of Hollywood.” Six decades on, the judgment holds, and I’ll go further. With its mind-bending plot, its celebrated brainwashing sequence, and stellar performances from a cast led by Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey, and Janet Leigh, director John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece remains supreme in the field of conspiracy-theory celluloid.

An honorable but inevitably lesser effort, Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, lacks the air of Cold War menace, not to mention the queen of diamonds in a game of solitaire as the trigger for a sleeper agent. Also lost is the cinematic magic of the original. Frankenheimer makes exemplary use of montage dissolve techniques to convey altered states of consciousness and depict the experience of hypnotic mind control. And, in retrospect, his 1962 movie seems almost to have anticipated either the earth-shaking events of November 22, 1963, or their interpretation.

Political scientists used to define politics as the art of the possible. If it has morphed into the craft of manipulative paranoia, the change dates back to the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission’s report satisfied few skeptics, journalists, or serious historians, and the credibility of politicians (who used to be called “statesmen”) keeps ebbing.

The Manchurian Candidate, which presaged the change, presents a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate by long-range rifle during his party’s nominating convention in Madison Square Garden. The movie’s conceit was so scary that studio executives at United Artists felt the project had to be cleared with the White House. Frank Sinatra dutifully called JFK, who greenlit the film, which Sinatra believed in so strongly that he volunteered the use of his private plane for an early scene in the movie.

Talk about serendipity: On October 22, 1962, only two days before the picture’s release, President Kennedy announced to the nation that he had ordered a naval blockade to repulse Russian ships, equipped with missiles, heading to the Caribbean. The Cuban Missile Crisis has been seen ever since as the tensest moment in the 45-year Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and here was a movie advancing the thesis that a Communist assassination plan was in the works.

The Manchurian Candidate is wickedly satirical. Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), a demagogue in the manner of Joe McCarthy, is revealed to be an imbecile under the thumb of his ambitious, intellectually superior wife, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury at her best). What happened to her first husband? The movie, mum on the point, offers an Oedipal triangle in which Mrs. Iselin controls her war hero son, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), and gets him to eliminate her rival, his bride (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of Senator Iselin’s fiercest, most principled opponent (John McGiver). Lansbury was less than three years older than Harvey. In the novel, she seduces him; in the film, just a kiss on the lips, but it’s enough.

What most distinguishes The Manchurian Candidate is its opening. If you miss the first five minutes of Hamlet, you can catch up (at the cost of some excellent verse), because the ghost does not appear to Hamlet until act I, scene 4 and doesn’t speak to him until scene 5. But, as the movie’s theatrical release poster accurately proclaimed, “If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about.” The film begins in Korea, 1952. Betrayed by a guide, an American army unit is ambushed. After Saul Bass’s marvelous title credits, featuring the queen of diamonds on an oversize political campaign button, we go to an American airport, where Sergeant Shaw, survivor of the ambush, is honored with hoopla for the valor he is said to have displayed under fire.

In the following scene, the camera slowly approaches Shaw’s commanding officer, Major Bennett Marco (Sinatra), asleep beside an insomniac’s paradise of books, among them The Trial, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Ulysses. Marco, who nominated Shaw for his medal, slides into a recurring nightmare of what really happened in Korea.

The brainwashing sequence begins with the captive GIs in their army fatigues on a stage. The audience appears to the men, in their trance, to consist of dowagers in sunhats who have gathered to talk about hydrangeas at a suburban garden party in New Jersey. In fact, the ladies in the audience are Russian and Chinese bigwigs, and Frankenheimer switches us back and forth between alternating versions, the harmless old women and the malevolent Communists in suits or uniforms. Then we watch in horror as, under orders, Shaw kills two of his fellow POWs while the other soldiers look on, affectless.

Like Major Marco, Corporal Al Melvin (James Edwards) has recurrent nightmares culminating in a public murder committed by Shaw. And, like Major Marco, he is programmed to say, when asked, that “‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Everyone says so, and it’s odd, because Raymond is a singularly cold, humorless fellow whom the men dislike..

The buried truth—that the recipient of a Congressional Medal of Honor, feted with fanfare, is a secret, trigger-ready weapon concocted by the enemy—created a mental shock to anyone who saw The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. (I was 14 years old, and amazed.) The plot: to engineer the nomination of the clownish Senator Iselin for the position of vice president, then to kill the man at the head of the ticket, paving the way for Iselin’s rise to that position. The paranoid paradox: the extreme right-wing John Iselin is really a clueless Communist placeholder. The brains of the operation: Eleanor Iselin, as icily ruthless as Lady MacBeth.

Marco, the veteran suffering from PTSD who tries to save Shaw from his predestined fate, looks like a man having a nervous breakdown, but he must have something going for him, because the glamorous and beautiful Rosie Cheyney (Janet Leigh) is willing to break her engagement to her fiancé on the basis of a shared cigarette with Marco on the train between Washington, D. C. and New York City. Although Leigh is extraneous to the plot, I have published a poem contending that the only justification needed for Janet Leigh’s presence in the movie is that she is Janet Leigh. More creatively, Roger Ebert argues that in the paranoid universe of The Manchurian Candidate, Leigh may secretly be Sinatra’s controller.

I will not give away other surprises and speculations except to say that the guises assumed by the queen of diamonds will endow that particular card with a rare significance if you are a part-time poker player. An amusing scene takes place in Jilly’s, Sinatra’s favorite New York hangout. When the bartender, telling a story, says, “Go up to Central Park and go jump in the lake,” Raymond—a solitaire addict who has just encountered the trigger card—does as told. Marco has to fish him out.

The Manchurian Candidate has altered political discourse, and the very word brainwashing has acquired a stink. The evil mesmerist-in-chief, Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), crows that Raymond Shaw’s “brain has not only been washed, as they say; it’s been dry-cleaned.” In 1967, George Romney shot his presidential candidacy in the foot when he said he had supported the Vietnam War because US generals had “brainwashed” him. Recently, Donald Trump has been depicted as a “Manchurian candidate,” allegedly willing to favor the Russians in exchange for lucrative real-estate deals.

But The Manchurian Candidate offers more than a linguistic afterlife, thrilling paranoia, and the cunning of Eleanor Iselin. It succeeds as well as it does because of the strong sense of the uncanny that informs it, as if we were watching our own history rendered as a spooky hallucination, delivered with the plausibility of a newsreel.

Click here for the "Talking Pictures" column on The American Scholar, January 22, 2022.

"A desire to capture events": Nick Courtright & Cynthia Good in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

I'm excited to introduce this conversation between Cynthia Good and Nick Courtright, who I've paired because of their shared investment in travel, documentary poetics, and entrepreneurship in literature and the arts.  Here, they discuss their latest collections, as well as the intersection of lived experience, craft, and the business of writing.  

Cynthia Good is an award-winning poet, journalist, and former TV news anchor. She has written six books including Vaccinating Your Child, which won the Georgia Author of the Year award. She has launched two magazines, Atlanta Woman and the nationally distributed PINK magazine for women in business. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Adanna Journal, Awakenings, Book of Matches, Brickplight, Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, Cutthroat, Free State Review, Full Bleed, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hole in the Head Review, Main Street Rag, Maudlin House Review, MudRoom, Outrider Press, OyeDrum Magazine, The Penmen Review, Pensive Journal, Persimmon Tree, Pier-Glass Poetry, Pink Panther Magazine, Poydras, South Shore Review, The Ravens Perch, Reed Magazine, Tall Grass, Terminus Magazine, They Call Us, and Voices de la Luna and Willows Wept Review, Semi-Finalist: The Word Works 2021, among others. Her debut poetry collection is available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press. 

Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light and Punchline, and he serves as the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, Nick lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel.

 

Cynthia Good: Why were you moved to focus on place, and what places in particular, since it is a bit mysterious in some of your beautiful poems?

Nick Courtright: I was drawn to place because the otherworldliness—and normalcy—of non-America called for a deeper exploration. I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to have seen a lot of the world, and what I found there was not just a bunch of tourist sites, but a reminder that the lives of others are just as rich and nuanced—and perhaps even more so—than ours in America, even though in America we tend to have a rather flat impression of the rest of the world.

IM Vin Scully (1927-2022) Laureate of Play-by-Play Poetry [by David Lehman]

When Kirk Gibson hit perhaps the most unlikely home run in baseball history – when, hobbled with injuries, he pinch-hit with two out and a man on first base, and the Dodgers were one pitch away from losing the game, and with one swing Gibson reversed the team’s fortunes – play-by-play man Jack Buck said “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Beautiful: a totally colloquial line of iambic tetrameter. Vin Scully, describing the same at-bat, let a few seconds of silence pass before saying, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened."

I am going from memory and I may have a word or two wrong there, but the point of this piece is an appreciation of play-by-play announcers and the memorable things they say. This (2016) is Vin Scully’s last year as the voice of the Dodgers, and I dedicate these musings to him, the red-headed gentleman who invites viewers to pull up a chair and join him in Dodger Stadium.

There were many anecdotes about Scully making the rounds as he completed his astounding career – having broadcast or telecast Dodger games since 1950. Everyone loves his call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. In October of that year, when Koufax on two days’ rest shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the World Series for his team, Vinny said, “Sandy, two days ago you said you felt like a hundred years old. How do you feel now?” “Like a hundred and one,” Koufax replied.

Every so often Scully will surprise you with a literary allusion, and he usually doesn’t repeat himself, though Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait” has served him well for years. When he broke the news of the untimely death of Don Drysdale, the great pitcher who had become his broadcast partner, Scully said, with simple eloquence, “Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart.”

Left: Sandy Koufax (center) and the late Tommy Lasorda at a ceremony honoring Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium, May 3, 2017

Added on August 4, 2022:

Vin Scully died this week, a year after his beloved wife passed. He was 94. The eulogists were justly extravagant in their praise of the Hall of Fame broadcaster, voice of the Dodgers from 1950 through 2016. Nor did the plaudits come exclusively fom Dodger fans. Honoring Scully, the team's bitterest rivals, the Giants of San Francisco,  did something very classy prior to Wednesday's evening's contest between the two squads. Jon Miller, the Giants' lead broadcaster since 1997 and one of the best in the business, calls him "the greatest broadcaster there ever was." Miller does a tremendous impression of Vin - in English,Japanese, and Spanish!

Here's Vin's call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on September 9, 1965. "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium is the loneliest place in the world right now" on 9:43 PM. Koufax ended the game with a strikeout; in fact he struck out the side in both the eighth and ninth innings. "Swung on and missed, a perfect game!" Andf then Vin had the wit to keep quiet and let the crowd noise take over "in the city of angels." 

When the Sandy Koufax statue was unveiled at Dodger Stadium in June of this year, the great southpaw said “Vin Scully is the greatest of all time, period." 

Some of Vin Scully's best lines, with thanks to Houston Mitchell of the Los Angeles Times:

“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theater, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!”

“He pitches as though he’s double-parked.” — on Bob Gibson

A Joey Gallo home run off Clayton Kershaw looked like "a marble" when it went way over the right field fence.

“He’s like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” — on Tom Glavine

“It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timers’ game.”

"Statistics are used the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination."

“Roberto Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pittsburgh.”

"Losing feels worse than winning feels good."

"Fernando ready, and the strike-two pitch is hit back to the box, dribbling to second, [Juan] Samuel on the bag, throws to first for the double play! Fernando Valenzuela has pitched a no-hitter at 10:17 in the evening on June three 29th, 1990. If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!"

Calling Hank Aaron‘s 715th home run: “What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. … It is over, at 10 minutes after 9 in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth. You could not, I guess, get two more opposite men. The Babe, big and garrulous and oh so sociable and oh so immense in all his appetites. And then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama — slender and stayed slender throughout his career. Ruth, as he put on the poundage and the paunch, the Yankees put their ballplayers in pinstripe uniforms, because it made Ruth look slimmer. But they didn’t need pinstripe uniforms for Aaron in the twilight of his career.”

His final words as a Dodgers broadcaster:

“You know, friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a 67-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family, and now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you. May God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every care, a promise; and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life seems, a faithful friend to share; for every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for each prayer. You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know, in my heart, I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball. So, this is Vin Scully wishing you a pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.”

So pull up a chair and listen to the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's greatest pitching feat.

There were many anecdotes about Scully making the rounds as he completed his astounding career – having broadcast or telecast Dodger games since 1950. Everyone loves his call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. In October of that year, when Koufax on two days’ rest shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the World Series for his team, Vinny said, “Sandy, two days ago you said you felt like a hundred years old. How do you feel now?” “Like a hundred and one,” Koufax replied.

Every so often Scully will surprise you with a literary allusion, and he usually doesn’t repeat himself, though Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait” has served him well for years. When he broke the news of the untimely death of Don Drysdale, the great pitcher who had become his broadcast partner, Scully said, with simple eloquence, “Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart.”

Left: Sandy Koufax (center) and the late Tommy Lasorda at a ceremony honoring Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium, May 3, 2017

Added on August 4, 2022:

Vin Scully died this week, a year after his beloved wife passed. He was 94. The eulogists were justly extravagant in their praise of the Hall of Fame broadcaster, voice of the Dodgers from 1950 through 2016. Nor did the plaudits come exclusively fom Dodger fans. Honoring Scully, the team's bitterest rivals, the Giants of San Francisco,  did something very classy prior to Wednesday's evening's contest between the two squads. Jon Miller, the Giants' lead broadcaster since 1997 and one of the best in the business, calls him "the greatest broadcaster there ever was." Miller does a tremendous impression of Vin - in English,Japanese, and Spanish!

Here's Vin's call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on September 9, 1965. "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium is the loneliest place in the world right now" on 9:43 PM. Koufax ended the game with a strikeout; in fact he struck out the side in both the eighth and ninth innings. "Swung on and missed, a perfect game!" Andf then Vin had the wit to keep quiet and let the crowd noise take over "in the city of angels." 

When the Sandy Koufax statue was unveiled at Dodger Stadium in June of this year, the great southpaw said “Vin Scully is the greatest of all time, period." 

Some of Vin Scully's best lines, with thanks to Houston Mitchell of the Los Angeles Times:

“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theater, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!”

“He pitches as though he’s double-parked.” — on Bob Gibson

A Joey Gallo home run off Clayton Kershaw looked like "a marble" when it went way over the right field fence.

“He’s like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” — on Tom Glavine

“It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timers’ game.”

"Statistics are used the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination."

“Roberto Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pittsburgh.”

"Losing feels worse than winning feels good."

"Fernando ready, and the strike-two pitch is hit back to the box, dribbling to second, [Juan] Samuel on the bag, throws to first for the double play! Fernando Valenzuela has pitched a no-hitter at 10:17 in the evening on June three 29th, 1990. If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!"

Calling Hank Aaron‘s 715th home run: “What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. … It is over, at 10 minutes after 9 in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth. You could not, I guess, get two more opposite men. The Babe, big and garrulous and oh so sociable and oh so immense in all his appetites. And then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama — slender and stayed slender throughout his career. Ruth, as he put on the poundage and the paunch, the Yankees put their ballplayers in pinstripe uniforms, because it made Ruth look slimmer. But they didn’t need pinstripe uniforms for Aaron in the twilight of his career.”

His final words as a Dodgers broadcaster:

“You know, friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a 67-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family, and now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you. May God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every care, a promise; and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life seems, a faithful friend to share; for every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for each prayer. You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know, in my heart, I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball. So, this is Vin Scully wishing you a pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.”

So pull up a chair and listen to the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's greatest pitching feat.