The Best American Poetry

Available Now: The Best American Poetry 2021

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RIP Stephen Dunn, 1939-2021 [by Howard Altmann]

Stephen Dunn passed away in June of this year. He was 82 and had suffered from Parkinson's. An exquisite and life-affirming Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, he took the ordinary and made it extraordinary. He moved silence to new depths of sound. He touched the untouchable and handed us the treasure of what can be discovered in all that's buried between us; within us; in all that we have. -- Howard Altmann

Poem for People Who Are Understandably Too Busy to Read Poetry [by Stephen Dunn]

 

Relax. This won't last long.
Or if it does, or if the lines
make you sleepy or bored,
give in to sleep, turn on
the T.V., deal the cards.
This poem is built to withstand
such things. Its feelings
cannot be hurt. They exist
somewhere in the poet,
and I am far away.
Pick it up anytime. Start it
in the middle if you wish.
It is as approachable as melodrama,
and can offer you violence
if it is violence you like. Look,
there's a man on a sidewalk;
the way his leg is quivering
he'll never be the same again.
This is your poem
and I know you're busy at the office
or the kids are into your last nerve.
Maybe it's sex you've always wanted.
Well, they lie together
like the party's unbuttoned coats,
slumped on the bed
waiting for drunken arms to move them.
I don't think you want me to go on;
everyone has his expectations, but this
is a poem for the entire family.
Right now, Budweiser
is dripping from a waterfall,
deodorants are hissing into armpits
of people you resemble,
and the two lovers are dressing now,
saying farewell.
I don't know what music this poem
can come up with, but clearly
it's needed. For it's apparent
they will never see each other again
and we need music for this
because there was never music when he or she
left you standing on the corner.
You see, I want this poem to be nicer
than life. I want you to look at it
when anxiety zigzags your stomach
and the last tranquilizer is gone
and you need someone to tell you
I'll be here when you want me
like the sound inside a shell.
The poem is saying that to you now.
But don't give anything for this poem.
It doesn't expect much. It will never say more
than listening can explain.
Just keep it in your attache case
or in your house. And if you're not asleep
by now, or bored beyond sense,
the poem wants you to laugh. Laugh at
yourself, laugh at this poem, at all poetry.
Come on:

Good. Now here's what poetry can do.

Imagine yourself a caterpillar.
There's an awful shrug and, suddenly,
You're beautiful for as long as you live.

 

https://poets.org/poet/stephen-dunn

https://poets.org/poem/here-and-now

"The Two-Party System" [by Walter Carey]

The Republicans are like
a drowning man
who pulls down
his rescuer thinking
he's pulling him to safety

and the Dems are like
the girl on the shore
who pulls down
her boy-cut hipsters
when no one's watching

-- Walter Carey

"Bad Workshops" [by Alan Michael Parker]

In the Spring of 2013, I taught the worst undergraduate poetry workshop ever. The students were marvelous and curious and smart; the writing distinctive; the books were scintillating; the visiting poets I brought wow, wow, wowed us; the final projects demonstrated learning and promise; and the camaraderie was memorable. Everything came together. Why then was the workshop so awful? Because all of the above assessments were mine, based on my aesthetics, to make me happy, and far too much of the learning was merely parroted. And I didn’t realize until later that summer how much I had fallen for my own image in the mirror of my pedagogy. It wasn’t a workshop, it was a self-portrait.

Of course, criticism of the standard workshop method, the “workshop poem,” and the Po’ Biz remains a commonplace in higher education, low-hanging fruit. I have eaten such plums: they are not delicious. Nevertheless, I would like here to enumerate even more criticism of the workshop, in the name of teaching a better workshop. What follows is a critique of a peculiar system of learning in which I believe, and in which students prosper. I offer, then, some issues that I haven’t seen discussed as much as I’d like, and I do so trusting wholly that the internet will protect me from the spurious anti-intellectualism, ad hominen whining that runs rampant in so much of our social media. I trust, too, that many good teachers of writing have already addressed my concerns in their classes, and for these teachers, the oddments I offer will seem simplistic and self-evident. But maybe not.

Contrarily, ultimately, I shall offer my optimism: I believe that the workshop, and some version of the standard workshop method, are right for the teaching and learning of poetry writing. So there. As a graduate student colleague once declared of my poems in Denis Johnson’s workshop, millennia ago, even of this compost, a pretty petunia might yet grow. (Not to dishearten, but that colleague became a powerful literary agent.)

Here are a few of my concerns. Following each, I offer remedy, mostly approaches that I have begun to explore in my teaching over the past two years. My hope is that these musings inspire and incite more than dictate... the ideas, dear people, the ideas...

Old New Critics

The standard workshop method assumes that the poem exists in a vacuum. Sure, readers are expected to Google what they don’t know, and provide a gloss on allusions or esoterica, but mostly we’re close-reading based on the idea that the text is self-contained, all of its meanings waiting to be divined. In this procedure, the poem could be a poem written in any moment, last year, five years ago, next month, and by anyone in the room; the poem’s hiding everything we need to figure out the poem, and we’re all scientists of the poem, committed to its self-contained (yielding and un-) truths.

I don’t know about you, but I gave up reading this way twenty-five years ago, when I discovered Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination—gosh, even the most doleful literary critics rarely default to New Criticism exclusively any more—and yet I continued to act as though such hermeneutics best suit the teaching of creative writing.

One way to address the matter: shift the conversation away from the assumption that the poem knows all. Which is not to suggest that the critique of the work be eliminated, but that “what works/what doesn’t” need not be handed to the poet like a prescription at the end of a class session. Instead of laying claim in the name of explicating try asking: What’s the poem about on the surface? What’s it really about? Distinguish between content and subject. What assumptions about language, and power, may be read in the poem’s procedures? Why this poem now? What’s been left out of the poem? What are the poem’s formal ambitions? What’s remembered about the poem later? What image abides? These questions necessarily recognize that the poem exists in a cultural context, in an historical moment, and aspires to a condition of art.

There are many such questions to ask, as a way to speak to the poem’s purview without sacrificing rigor—and ultimately, if the questions are well-asked and pursued thoughtfully, the poet may feel empowered fully to write, revise, and write again.

Real Poets

Oh, the lives we lead. No one believes that we’re pure products of our childhoods, and yet, that assumption pervades what’s not said in workshops. Autobiography necessarily complicates our abilities as writers to revise, given the connection between the life and the text, but even more of a problem, early poets usually believe they are the “I” in their own poems—this despite the workshop’s default terminology, using “the speaker” to differentiate between author and character, a move that for an early poet simply glosses over the problem. As such, early poets may read their colleagues’s poems as thinly veiled forays into the autobiographical, the presumption a cherished secret. Of course, these early poets are right, and the “I” is an attempt to contain and perform the “real” person—it’s true in my poems too, when I’m not fanatically inventing speaking selves, further complicated by my enthusiasm for fictional childhoods. But even still, there are other ways to think about the self, and other ways to approach an early poet’s work of art. The self in a poem is not only a palimpsest.

Ask the poet at the outset what she or he wants from readers, and from the workshop. Ask the poet to identify what she or he was trying to work on, what couldn’t be fixed, or what feels right. Yes, use the word “feels.” Ask the poet the “secret title” of the poem, that is, the title she or he uses when thinking about the poem. Ask the poet to identify the moment in the poem of greatest invention—and don’t define “invention,” so that the term can be treated formally or semantically. Ask the poet to identify who in her or his life should not read the poem, using initials if need be.

In other words, before the critique begins, acknowledge the living artist’s role in the production of the work of art. Turn the subsequent conversation to include these ambitions.

When validation of the living writer-in-the-room becomes part of the workshop, the opportunity arises to shift focus from the autobiographical past to the artistic present, while keeping an eye on the changeable future.

Medical Ethics

In the standard workshop method, the poet reads the poem aloud, shuts up, we talk, bingo, the poet takes home a broken poem, diagnosed, the poet unhappy. Are all poems broken? Need this be the only approach to a poem that’s not yet succeeding?

Any way you can, teacher, change it up. Conduct a workshop in which only the very best moments in each poem are up for discussion: ask the cohort “What’s the sequel to this poem?” Conversely, “What’s the prequel?” Lead a discussion of the poem’s use of silence—I know, irony abounds, but behave yourself. Ask the question Joseph Brodsky would ask us, when reading Auden, “For what moment was the poem written?” In other words, by any means, while critiquing the poem valorize the effort, and never default to the diagnostic, and never pathologize.

Professor for a Day

I wonder sometimes if I were to close my eyes, would my students still look at me when they speak? (And, of course, how would I know?) Students are so often so anxious to impress—which I certainly felt in the presence of my teachers. Too often, students critique a colleague’s poem while searching for my approval. My authority reigns, and I’m not only talking about the history of gendered power in the workshop environment. Paradoxically, when I move to correct the problem, I perpetuate its condition: by instructing people to talk with and to one another, I reify my ability to give orders.

It’s naturally a huge challenge for the teaching artist, to empower students without sacrificing expertise. Of late, I’ve been trying not to provide a summary at the end of each discussion, i.e. I don’t want the final say. I sit in a different chair each week, hoping to disabuse myself of the inevitability of my authority, and even more hopeful that the students will address one another. I appoint a Professor-for-the-Day—they’re encouraged to call on me as needed—or, alternatively, the person to the left of the poet becomes the primary respondent. I try not to digress on the use of the lower case ‘i’ in Lucille Clifton’s work, at least not in class, even though that information might appear relevant. Instead, I hope to note the phenomenon and then move to another subject, or better yet be moved. I wait an extra week to provide the poet with my written commentary, so that I don’t overwhelm the efficacy of the workshop discussion, or drown out anyone. It’s all so I don’t talk first and last.

These days, from the outset, I warn students that while I think I’m right, I’m asking that they help me to see how I’m not, and that doing so needs to be more than showmanship, or a game. I want us to be wrong together.

Robert Pinsky: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Pinsky, 2019. Photo ©Eric Antoniou.

__________________________________________________________________________

Poem with Lines in Any Order

 

Sonny said Then he shouldn’t have given Molly the two more babies.

Dave’s sister and her husband adopted the baby, and that was Babe.

You can’t live in the past.

Sure he was a tough guy but he was no hero.

Sonny and Toots went to live for a while with the Braegers.

It was a time when it seemed like everybody had a nickname.

Nobody can live in the future.

When Rose died having Babe, Dave came after the doctor with a gun.

Toots said What would you expect, he was a young man and there she was.

Sonny still a kid himself when Dave moved out on Molly.

The family gave him Rose’s cousin Molly to marry so she could raise the children.

There’s no way to just live in the present.

In their eighties Toots and Sonny still arguing about their father.

Dave living above the bar with Della and half the family.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Robert Pinsky’s books include The Figured Wheel (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); his translation The Inferno of Dante; and his Princeton Tanner Lectures, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry. He founded the Favorite Poem Project, with the videos here. His honors include the Korean Manhae Award and the Italian Premio Capri. He has appeared on The Simpsons and The Colbert Report. [For more information on, and poems by, Robert Pinsky, click here.]

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    

Robert Pinsky: “The gangster sexual style of my grandfather, Dave Pinsky, underlies this poem. I am the boy he is holding in the first photo. In the photo on the right, he is with his beautiful first wife Rose—as the poem tells, when she died after childbirth, he came after the doctor with a gun.”

 

 

Homage to Irving Berlin

with thanks to Rick Winston

And if you can, listen to Bruce Adolphe and Fred Child on NPR's "Great Performances": they may just take a Berlin standard ("Cheek to Chek," say) and have it performed as if it were a Mendelssohn piano concerto.

McClure Kick Blues [by Vincent Katz]

Tomorrow, at the California Shakespeare Theater, in Orinda, California, there will be a memorial to poet, playwright and thinker Michael McClure, who passed away in May of 2020. Along with Diane di Prima, of all the great poets we have lost in the past few years, Michael for me defines an era. It’s funny to think of it now, but it’s McClure and di Prima who somehow stand for a whole experiment in poetry and living that remains vital to me, and I imagine always will. I think it is partially the integration of their poetry with a way of thinking about living that is the key to their vitality.

In his introduction to the first edition of Ghost Tantras, published by City Lights in 1964, McClure wrote:

I WAS HERE AND I LIKED IT!

It was all O.K.

I suffered.

There were scents, and flowers, and textures, beautiful women.

I was a handsome man. I invented love.

I radiated genius for those who saw me with loving eyes.

I was happy — I laughed and cried. Constantly new

sights and sounds. I trembled and sweated

at the sight of beauty. I laughed at strong

things because I loved them — wanting to kick them in

and make freedom. When I go I’M GONE.

Don’t resurrect me

or the duplicates of my atoms.

It was perfect !

I am sheer spirit.

Tomorrow, poets, musicians, publishers, friends will celebrate this poet who some link to Shelley and Lawrence, and who I see as a human being able to intuit his living on earth in relation to all other living beings, and simultaneously to flesh that out in relation to the beauty, and sometimes terror, he sensed in the arts of painting, music, dance, theater. He wanted to reach most of all, to reach out, to resist, to feel the softness of the couch beneath his lover and himself, the dissolving of inside and out, the hummingbird, the bombs falling on Cambodia, consciousness creating and destroying itself each instant.

                     

As a kind of parting gift, Michael left us Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems, published this year by City Lights. Editor Garrett Caples’ account of how the book was put together makes clear both McClure’s fastidiousness when it came to form and his openness to such questions as sequencing and grouping poems. A sequence of four “Death Poems” in a section called “MORTALITIES” evinces one of the most joyful attitudes toward death I’ve seen in poetry, something perhaps not surprising to readers of McClure, but still a fantastic thing to have:

                                                            TO GROW OLD IS A JOY PRECEDING THE BIG ONE.

                                                                            Death is a dark chocolate cake,

                                                                      sweet, and filled with deep blue tortures.

Remember Michael tomorrow, remember joy, remember poetry.

The Layers of “To Be” [by Lera Auerbach]

Labyrinth - Ink on Handmade Paper by Lera Auerbach

The verb “to be” is very short, yet it contains layers of existence.
It is possible to hide in these folds – that’s the secret of survival.
You share hiding spaces with ghosts, and ghosts become you.
You speak for them because, generally speaking, ghosts cannot speak.
But you can. Words flood your mind, and your heart can’t mend
broken words and broken promises. Your heart murmurs between the beats,
and the dead encourage it to keep on beating.

If I raise my hand – would my fingers touch the invisible hand of my nanny Marianna?
Or my grandma Alichka? Can love just disappear with the departed
or some crucial nothingness stays around, protecting you in moments of despair?
You can’t see the thread in the darkness, but you can choose to believe it’s there –
to guide you through the labyrinth of your own making.

Relevant Nature [by Vincent Katz]

In 1928, André Breton published the novel Nadja, loosely based on a brief affair. Text from the back cover the Grove Press edition, translation by Richard Howard, calls the novel “the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life” and goes on to state, “The first person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work — pictures of various ‘surreal’ people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in Nadja’s presence and which inspire him to meditate on their reality or lack of it.” Breton invented a genre, the book as photographic prose poem, which has found new life today.

In Breton’s day, taking all the photos and having them printed and readied for publication were arduous tasks; today all that is almost an afterthought. Some creative artists today have been stimulated to try to reinvigorate the photograph in its relation to text, thereby heightening both the potential of image, usually produced via that mundane accessory, the smart phone, and the text, which often lingers in some nebulous zone, neither poetry nor prose, a different gambit from the blending of the two that entranced French authors last century.

When Claudia Rankine used photos in her epoch-marking Citizen, the images were usually in the mode of illustrations, or jumping-off points for her verbal manifestations. In her follow-up, the massive and in some ways more experimental Just Us: An American Conversation (2020), the photos are still illustrative, often historical in nature, but they are simultaneously more deeply embedded in the book’s meaning.

A more experimental approach, one with deeply satisfying results in terms of the co-habitation of word and image is s*an d. henry-smith’s Wild Peach, published by Futurepoem in 2020. henry-smith is an artist and writer, and everything about Wild Peach makes it clear the book has been thought about as an object in its entirety. The endpapers and dividers are a dusky mustard yellow. The typography and layout of the titles is raw and energetic. Eager to get to the first section, “in awe of geometry & mornings,” one turns the page and finds a centered photo of a hazy view of a dried-out field being moisturized by the obscuring fog above it. Turning the page again brings us to the book’s first text, “dirty nails,” which begins, “eat me Infinity Serpent High Priestess of Sun the flowers we ate went straight to my hips rosy red w/ sweet water linen draped I feel so squishy today…” An erotics of the word reminding me of de Kooning’s erotics of paint is quickly palpable. Yet this short text ends surprisingly, “…I inhale light dirty pupil learns today how mud purifies & an increased sensitivity to nightshades I lift my head from the train tracks it is nice to sweat it reminds me that I am open whether I like it or not the conditions will decide”. This book is open, “dirty nails” beseeches almost that, despite everything not in our favor, we too should lift our heads from whatever train tracks we may find them on, to live in the squishiness of our real.

As the book continues, it swerves and peaks, picks up velocity, then swoops. All along, it is bringing us, however we are: “if it doesn’t cost me my life, it doesn’t cost anything at all.” Suddenly that line reminds me of a line from a different context, but now they are inextricably bound. It’s from a rehearsal by the Grateful Dead; before they start, Jerry says, “We’ve got nothing to lose but our lives.” I love that line too, because our lives are the most valuable things we have (wait a minute, did I not know that before reading Wild Peach?), and yet we must risk everything in any moment if we (the planet) are to survive. As henry-smith puts it in “calm down calm down,” “I’ve wasted a lot more time than necessary looking for the tools / they’ve always been right before me”. Wild Peach is a lush volume, the poetry as much as the photos, which are mostly of nature, but viewed in a way that makes it contemporary. Relevant nature. The more I read and look, the more I am amazed by its generosity.

Sway with Me (Michael Buble) / Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps & Do Do Do (Doris Day)

My Parents on Yom Kippur, 1948 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Kora Lives! [by Vincent Katz]

WKCR is on, as it often is at this time of day, and they are playing selections from Miles Davis’s fusion period — “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” and “Splashdown,” to name two. It is providing the right vibe, as the radio often does, to composing thoughts about two books that are on my mind. When I was a teenager, a little after those Miles tunes were released, I had some favorite books of poetry. They were talismans, I carried them with me, they could ward off depression and evil by their mere presence, without even needing to be opened, or read. Part of that had to do with their physical presence. I remember the series of books Gary Snyder published with New Directions, especially, one summer, Earth House Hold. Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, published by Grove Press (the edition with the red and purple cover overlaying a photo of O’Hara seated on a Gothic stool). The same poet’s Lunch Poems, from City Lights Books’ Pocket Poets Series, back when the covers were not glossy. They were printed on soft card stock, each title in identifying format and design, differentiated by the color combinations. Lunch Poems will always recall the orange and blue in its layout. Another book I carried with me everywhere that summer I was 15 was another title from the Pocket Poets Series, William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations.

I loved Kora in Hell. Just gazing at its cover was of inestimable benefit to me, and I enjoyed reading it. It felt very adult, its jokes easily understood, its thought-connections sublime and not necessarily accessible to all. It represented a kind of secret knowledge. This was unlike some of Williams’s better known poetry, which prided itself on using everyday language and meeting the reader halfway. That poetry was modern, in that it didn’t always feel like what poetry was supposed to feel like, but it was anti-modernist, or maybe non-modernist, in its ratcheting down of degree of difficulty. Anybody could read those poems (though not anybody can write them!). Kora was different. I liked the classical reference in the title, the Greek word kora itself, coupled with that word “Improvisations.” I think that was the one that got me the most. I was listening to a lot of jazz; the idea of improvising a book, or sections that made up a book, was thrilling to me.

Looking around last year, I realized I no longer had that copy of Kora, so I ordered another one. I made sure to order one from one of the earlier printings, a first edition it looks like. I just wanted to make sure I got one that looked and felt like the originals, as though it was made of cotton, dyed red. “March had always been my favorite month…” the prologue tells us. And, “What I had permitted myself could not by any stretch of the imagination be called verse.” I agree with Williams that these are not like French prose poems, but to my mind they are poems in prose, or rather, one long poem in prose:

“Fools have big wombs. For the rest? — here is pennyroyal if one knows to use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further : if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.”

That is the first section of the first “chapter”. Each chapter is composed of three numbered sections, some have which have corresponding texts in italics. I was going to say that my reading this time, some forty-odd years later, showed that these early experiments of Williams’s were not as successful as I remembered. But the reading, the looking at the text, does not allow me such an easy assessment. A poem can be made of anything we are told in Chapter XX. In the final chapter, we learn, “The particular thing… dwarfs the imagination, makes logic a butterfly, offers a finality that sends us spinning through space, a fixity the mind could climb forever, a revolving mountain, a complexity with a surface of glass; the gist of poetry.” A little more on imagination’s transformative power (“How ridiculous!”), how leaves blowing on the ground have forgotten the branch on which they grew, yet "somehow invoke a burst of warm days  not of the past  nothing decayed : crisp summer!” And the final paragraph informs us:

“Seeing the leaves dropping from the high and low branches the thought rises : this day of all others is the one chosen, all other days fall away from it on either side and only itself remains in perfect fullness.”

Maybe it’s the way I read it that needs to change. Instead of starting at the beginning and attempting to forge straight through, I should glimpse things here and there, creating my own patterns within those suggested by the poet in his improvisations. Kora was first published in 1920 by the Four Seas Co. of Boston. At that time, Williams was half the age he would be (74) when the next edition, published by City Lights, came out.

Anne Waldman has a granddaughter named Kora. Anne the adept of so many traditions, including the Greek. I’ve been reading her many books, trying to keep up with her, delighted. Lately, I got focused on her 2004 book, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, published by Penguin in the Penguin Poets series. The books Waldman has published with Penguin form a remarkable series in that they are not so much collections of separate poems as book-length meditations on specific areas of consciousness: Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World, Manatee/Humanity, Gossamurmur, Trickster Feminism.

Structure may be the most particular of all, as it is devoted to a specific subject, a specific location, a specific object, a specific man-made holy sanctuary devoted to the veneration of the divine: the Borobudur stupa, built in the 9^th century CE in Java, Indonesia. An introductory note explains: “Designed as both mandala or psychological map for the Buddhist pilgrim, as well as a spiritual challenge to the curious layperson or secular aesthete, Borobudur was built on a hill that sits on Java’s lush Kedu plain. It has a long and complex history and was almost lost until its ‘discovery’ in the nineteenth century… Most powerful at this site perhaps is the narrative sequence of reliefs carved into the million stones, narratives which teach a spiritual, gentle, and harmonious way of life. The reliefs are arranged so that as one ascends the stupa the stories turn complicated and abstract… Borobudur is essentially an image of the world according to the Buddhism of the Mahayana.”

Waldman’s book is not so much about the stupa as it is a guide to Mahayana in the form of experimental poetry for which the poet has become known. Waldman has taken cues from Williams’ In the American Grain, his epic poem Paterson, and Charles Olson’s call for “a saturation job,” applying study to a wide range of topics. In Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, the reader is treated to Waldman’s takes on the “Four Noble Truths,” “Walking out of Six Styles of Imprisonment” (hell realm, hungry ghost realm, animal realm, human realm, warring god realm, god realm), 4^th century stories of the Buddha, “Mantra” (with paraphrase of Milton), “Steps of a Bodhisattva,” “Mudra,” “An Aside on Karma,” “Peregrinations of the Dakini” a Glossary and Bibliography. A Magnificent, Beneficent Tome! All should carry it with them! Come to the River, Put Down your Book, and Dive!

 

“Nations are narrations

Spiritual sites are narrations

Ineluctable witnesses to other narrations

Are the panoptic meditators in their own bell jars…

A connotative splendor resides here…”

Now published: "The Morning Line" by David Lehman

September 15, 2021. Pittsburgh, PA. -- The University of Pittsburgh Press announces the publication of David Lehman's new book of poems:

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The Morning Line is David Lehman’s most ambitious book to date, combining wit, quotidian charm, and off-the-cuff spontaneity in poems that proffer candid and moving meditations on life, love, aging, disease, friendship, chance, and the possibility of redemption in a godless age.

"The Morning Line arrives like some miraculous rendition of your favorite tune, only stylized and torqued to his jocular spirit and encyclopedic range," writes Major Jackson. "Buoyant, wildly funny and terrifically alive, his poems summon that forgotten age where wit and learnedness reigned and the reader, enriched by a jetsetting speed, reemerged soulfully fortified."

A poetic ventriloquist, Lehman expertly imitates Catullus and François Villon in new poems and offers his fresh translations of Mayakovsky's “Cloud in Trousers” and Hölderlin’s “Half-Life.” The element of joie de vivre in Lehman’s work is distinctive and unusual in contemporary poetry.  

The Morning Line includes such tours de force as “Tales Told To Tevye,” which The New Yorker published in its flash fiction series, and “The Complete History of the Boy,” a loving look at the growth of a son’s mind. The title poem is a prose meditation on gambles, wagers, risk, and the high stakes of the Corona virus pandemic.  >>> 

You may order the book from online vendors or directly from the University of Pittsburgh Press:
https://upittpress.org/books/9780822966616/
$18 paperback.

Praise for The Morning Line:

“’Everyone was supposed / to be miserable:’ but here are these poems—poems that, like Emerson before them, are most serious when they’re most playful, most profound when they sound childlike.  David Lehman is a writer of many kinds of poetry, many kinds of prose, but whatever he writes is unmistakably his—and ours. Lehman lets us become who we are, which sounds as if it should be easy: we need him, and, until he writes even more, The Morning Line is his best book.

--James Longenbach

In The Morning Line, David Lehman engages us at his most companionable. His voice is inclusive and intimate, his intelligence inexhaustible, embracing subjects ranging from the perfect martini and accompanying jazz recording to profound questions of faith. These poems bring us into conversation with Baudelaire, Catullus, Mayakovsky, Voltaire, and Elaine Equi, are often humorous and always joyful. Reading David Lehman is an antidote for loneliness.

--John Hennessy

Ever the bon vivant and sophisticate, David Lehman is too savvy to write boorish poetry, purely sentimental lyrics furiously sodden with all the lumps life hands us. Instead, he hears the melodies and plays the keys. The Morning Line arrives like some miraculous rendition of your favorite tune, only stylized and torqued to his jocular spirit and encyclopedic range. Buoyant, wildly funny and terrifically alive, his poems summon that forgotten age where wit and learnedness reigned and the reader, enriched by a jetsetting speed, reemerged soulfully fortified.

-- Major Jackson

Chris Mansell [introduced by Thomas Moody]

I'm on vacation this week, but I thought I'd leave you with this classic by Chris Mansell. Just a few notes: Penrith is a city to the west of Sydney (technically it is a part of Sydney) and heats up in the summer as only inland Australia can; while the Blue Mountains are a nearby mountain range, which get their name from their greyish-blue tinge. As for the rest, as my friend Bob Hershon used to say, you can thank me later.

 

 

Darwin discusses Tierra del Fuego

you pace out an Australian hot summer
devoid of air at Penrith
with some lime light artificial member
of the new aristocracy
the dry skin of grass cracking under boots
grass grey stalks like thin glass vials
hold some therapeutic acid break like needles
in a nightmare before the operation

you, you garrulous old metronome
peeling off the layers of our secret wishes
like the skin of the face of an aging actress
to insist on evolution
we liked the geology of our mountains
we wanted only to pat the earth with our flat hans
and feel its body shifting        mumbling dialogue
from dreams under its old clotted-cream breath

we resent your careful notebooks
on stratification of our blue mountains
the knife between the layers
the prising out collectable pimples
want you to go back to the discussions of the geology 
of Tierra del Fuego        surely exotic enough
to satisfy an Englishman

Get your imaginations out: the case for a performance cure in Paris [by Paul Tracy Danison]

 

"Les Merveilles", Clédat&Petitpierre. Photo© Y.Clédat

Belmondo is dead!

I’ve put up mosquito netting around the bed to protect Karine and, though mosquitoes have heretofore been thought to turn their proboscises from a knave’s corruption, to protect myself. At 06.30 hours in the second week of September, at 48.8566° N, the sky already lours hot and grey. At 08.00 hours, as I set out Karine’s tisane, the celestial scowl disperses before a pitiless sun. Heretofore, the sun trope has been stock for bright Timbuktu, not gray Paris.

As the day smolders towards evening, showers of hot, fat raindrops eruct; the drops are heavy enough to slap, all too apt to turn to hail.

About 40 years ago now, an article in the NYRB observed that the only known example of a planet-scale runaway greenhouse effect is Venus. It is 800°Celsius inside the planet’s perpetual methane-cum-co2 self-generating storm system. “Self-generating storm system” suggests to me that the milder effects coming up here on Earth are more likely to have driven our species to extinction well before things get as warmed up and wild as on our sister planet.

If the pandemic has proved anything at all, it’s that pure motives and reasonable plans notwithstanding, changing circumstances and a full third of people will oppose you and your damnable, liberty-killing plans.

"Panique", Clédat&Petitpierre. Pan cannot play his pipes yet. He can get on his legs and hump. Some say Pan is the son of Hermès. Photo©Y.Clédat

No matter that denying climate change has clearly failed to prevent obvious and dangerous climate change. The third is now spreading the depressing lie that it’s too late to act against the inevitable catastrophe: Be free! Consume, for tomorrow you die! When the depression tactic fails, the third will turn to applauding sabotage. Out of a spite that the third will dress up as an understandable “human need for revenge”.

As Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and He is Us”.

Given the complexity of the phenomenon and the human challenge, the junk exercise of “thinking outside the box” won’t do.  Positivism backed by little hops in good, solid science by good people just will not compass hot spells that cripple the young and kill the old or cold snaps that can freeze-dry woolly mammoths. Nor can solid science by good people inspire the Trotsky-like determination to execute and defend a social action plan that might let the species survive in the face of immanent catastrophe.

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation story, the shower-obsessed space buccaneer hero Trevor is given a choice between melding with Earth and or remaining a “free” individual, “remaining human”. Trevor chooses to remain a space buccaneer hero, rejecting sexual freedom and powerful women, and flying off to conquer the universe and become as gods, presumably. 

"Les Mariés", Clédat&Petitpierre. Parc de Bercy. Photo©Y.Clédat

Asimov was presenting the choice and the outcome as most of the species still frames it (for more on this type of stuff, see my essay on ordinary-folks’ philosopher Michel Onfray’s otherwise inexplicable hatred of Greta Thunberg).

Of course, the real choice the species is confronted with is not “remaining ‘human’”. And it doesn’t imply becoming as gods and flying off to terraform Mars or capture comets. It’s about saving our species from its self-definition of itself thus far. The choice to be made is more like taking an engineering post or not at General Electric’s silicon plant in Waterford, New York, to feed and house and educate a large, varied and troublesome family than being or not a space buccaneer out to conquer the universe. Do we take up, or not, the responsibility for the complex system we call “Earth”?  The bottom line is: Is the species a variable, like Trevor, along for the ride, or do it strive to become a constant, co-responsible with system Earth? I’ve voted for co-responsibility.

And now the only way forward is Imagination.

Imagination is the seed of the leaps in outlook and science that our species needs to decide what to do. Imagination is the wit to, or the unbearable lightness of heart to, rip up the box just outside of which we’ve been orbiting too long, click together those ruby slippers and choose.

From scratch.

Not by chance, the function of dance is to enable Imagination.

"Les Baigneurs”, Clédat&Petitpierre. Taking some sun in the Jardin de Reuilly, Paris.

Hegel (or is it Kant?) was right: our species does have a mechanics of the whole that spontaneously responds to our collective becoming. Since the art of dance is the seed of Imagination, dance – and, so, as I’ve argued, dance-performance–  has been growing ever more present in our lives. It is no accident, either, that the most popular and practiced form of dance – hip-hop – is a values set and global movement that touches on every aspect of a free and responsible life among equals.

This idea came to me this past weekend.

I had decided to watch the six well-crafted performances by the veteran troupe Clédat & Petitpierre. The troupe opened the Atelier de Paris’ 2021-22 season, which, like many other venues, is full of lots of post-pandemic treats.

Fun, clever and beautifully made, Clédat & Petitpierre performance systematically achieves art as well as entertainment. In conception, the river is always flowing, Schrödinger’s Cat is shamming and not. Each performance is on the real event horizon. Sensibilities are engaged. Feeling is studied and distinct. Territory engaged transforms spectator into participant.

As I watched and ruminated on this, I realized that as each of the troupe’s performances was able to achieve the quality of art, it enabled access to Imagination in its participants.

As the mechanics of the whole and becoming would have it, quality performance such as Clédat & Petitpierre’s, along with increasingly strong performance programming  have made Paris, and France, a showcase for performance and dance performance.

Allons'y! By tingling in the monkeys' thumbs, Imagination this way comes”. "La Parade Moderne", Clédat&Petitpierre, opened the Atelier de Paris’ 2021-22 season. Photo©Y.Clédat

Performance and dance performance from small, developer-feeder venues such as Atelier de Paris, Regard du Cygne or Le Générateur, local theaters in and outside central Paris and in the regions and even the national dance theater are making city and country a must-do destination for the Imagination cure the species will be needing through the years to come.

"No Day Without Revision" [by David Shapiro]

Date: Sep 15, 2007 9:44 PM

No Day Without Revision

 for DCLehman

How fast do you write
as if that means anything
haiku, slowly crawl

if Zeno's correct
we will never reach Fuji
high views of New York

Braudel said: There's holes
in the heart of this New York
will it heal – Never!

I told Phillip, friend
they have murdered New York now
to make it Lausanne

Phillip said, David
New York is not an old cow
to be tipped over!

He left Manhattan.
My friends moved away--
nostalgic for land--

New York's not Lausanne
thank god but rents leapt, artists
disappeared like smoke

But why speak estates
Well, for a few years artists
spoke of real estate--

***

Meyer Schapiro said:
Art and money are systems
utterly at odds

He hated Berenson
because wealth was secret
plumbing in his life

****

I took a tea hour
if you permit the bubbling
syllable – bitter!

yuck! froth! green gloop! tea!
But the ceremony charmed
me relaxed me Divine

I like one flower
one ritual one sweet note
Internal God – Tea!

the way of flowers
they say the great movie man
went back to flowers

Woman in the Dunes!
but he went back to father's
flowers arranging!

Think of the double!
A man makes a great movie
then.....chrysanthemums!

***

Everything speaks
to me; it bursts my brain when
blossoms speak to me

Her thigh speaks to me
Christ's thigh spoke to Angelo
Cressid's foot has speech

What are we doing
writing haiku in dark age
belated lateness

The critics tone-deaf
the art critics color-blind
all we have's madness

Negative Keats goes
emptied out of moral self
he becomes a....gnat!

and gathering haiku
cluster in the sky pink clouds
Clouds my master loved

Clouds that Kenneth loved
he told me: don't be afraid
of planes – look! torn clouds!

Kenneth said: afraid
of planes! but you'll never see
anything this good!

On earth as it is
I say thanks for not killing
the first-born – myself!

My father's warmest
tones – Judaism attracts
We don't kill first-born

And of my son, said:
There's only one problem – he's
only one – make more!

***

So it turned out you
haiku-lovers that father
did not kill me, died

I say if friends die
I can do it too who's scared
well, apprehensive

If my dear friends die
I can even take coffins
"I die and smile"

****

This chain of haiku
which could be three syllables
is a bit unclear

Am I just mumbling
abstract phobias or does
insight burst wild geese!

In school my son knew
Hamlet’s soliloquies and
school was mad at me!

Inappropriate
my little boy 3 loved Latin
"Good for Jewish pope"

said Kenneth or priest
or cardinal I thought But
Ovid's your favorite!

squooshing syllables
I remember Catullus
hating to love love

I hated loving
I'm so glad to love less, less
then not at all, all

let haiku echo
KO or a season on earth
earthwards where Frost fell

and Crane dived down deep
and raised his hand up to scream
Help, hello. goodbye

He swam strongly then
just as Ray Johnson swam out
Some never think that

Padgett said Never
have I thought of suicide
funny his friends did

Ted killed himself fast
Allen killed himself slowly
fire, ice, speed, coke

I have twenty books
like twenty snowy mountains
still to write Oh snail!

write slowly always
then throw the paint like blossoms
then dry. now, revise

Oh deliberate
sex inside a haiku – yes
fucking is OK

it’s called wild wisdom
Americans so regressed
we can learn bodies

Internal bodies --
are the way to understand
Cezanne, Picasso!

the body felt from
inside not like driving cars
We don't know bodies

Too abstractly haiku
lie down like sodden hosts, guests
all drunk on ideas

I like old haiku
the bee emerging all drunk
from inside the rose

I throw bread, old pond
don't be scared of many sins
Blame it on bodiers

Blame it on clouds, late
in the afternoon of life
almost evening, friend

– David Shapiro

Stephanie Paterik: Finding Success in Business & Creativity with the Editor-in-Chief of Adweek

Stephanie Paterik, editor in chief and senior vice president of Adweek (as well as a contributor to the BAP blog), on the role the study of poetry has played in her career:

Why Not Now? with Amy Jo Martin

Stephanie Paterik is editor in chief and SVP of Adweek. In this episode, Stephanie shares a Why Not Now? story with Amy Jo that shaped the journey of her life and career. She had been working as a journalist in Phoenix for several years when she made the decision to quit her job, move to New York City, become a poet, and start an editorial consulting business on the side. This part of Stephanie’s journey felt like a detour, but it ultimately led to the role of editor in chief of Adweek.

Click here for the interview. And she was a mixed doubles champion in tennis (2013).

Amiri Baraka Catching Up With Himself [by Vincent Katz]

One day, a year or so ago, Oliver said to me, in passing, “I need to read some Baraka.” When someone, especially someone close to me, says something like that, I leap into action. I leapt to my keyboard and ordered him The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, edited by William J. Harris with input from the author. Published in 2009 by Basic Books, the Reader does not cover the last fifteen years of Baraka’s production, but, at close to 600 pages, it certainly covers the early years, from the late 1950s through 1999.

To supplement this, I recommend SOS: Poems 1961-2013, published by Grove Press in 2014. This volume, edited by Paul Vangelisti, shows the scope of Baraka’s poetic achievement and is especially surprising in its final section, titled “Fashion This,” which covers the years 1996-2013. Here, we see the poet at his most unguarded. Many of these poems have not been previously collected in book form. They maintain the same senses of urgency and outrage that animate Baraka’s poetry throughout, but they are tempered with a lightness, a delicacy at times, that can be shocking and disarming.

I’ve shied away from Readers as they focus on a consensus of what an author’s best work is, or someone’s assessment of that, leaving out much interesting peripheral work — but the LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka reader feels essential. Partially that has to do with Baraka’s participation in the selection, but mainly it’s because the man was so prolific, something the Reader makes clear. He published poetry, music criticism, fiction, and was a successful playwright from his early days on. He was also a significant editor of literary journals — first of Yugen, with Hettie Jones, and then, with Diane di Prima, of The Floating Bear. Baraka always had a voice.

I’ve often wondered what it is that catapults a poet into a wider consciousness, and I believe much of it has to do with prose writing. While poetry remains a particular province, prose, if it is well-written and timely, can reach a much larger audience. In Baraka’s case, his two books on music, Blues People, published in 1963, and Black Music (1968) did precisely that. The first was composed as a study of the origins of jazz and has the subtitle The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed From It. The second book was composed of articles and reviews previously published in DownBeat, Kulchur, and as liner notes for such artists as John Coltrane and Sonny Murray.

Selections from these seminal studies are included in the Reader, along with a fantastic, often hilarious account of a trip to Cuba in 1960, originally published in Home: Social Essays (1966). There is much more in the Reader, including a selection of at-the-time unpublished works. One of these returns to Malcolm X, a seminal figure in Baraka’s movement from downtown bohemian to uptown Black Nationalist in the late 1960s. In the ‘70s, Baraka adopted an explicitly Marxist ideology, elaborating and expanding his views on race. In the Reader, this is referred to as his Third World Marxist Period. In one of the last pieces in the reader, “Malcolm as Ideology” (1995), Baraka critiques Spike Lee’s interpretation in his 1992 biopic.

I am powering through the Reader, and it has been a supreme education for me about a lot of things, mainly about Baraka himself. His framing of stories and his furious outbursts, the rage and neurosis he lays bare on the page, stem directly from the condition he eloquently describes, in many different genres and styles, throughout his life. He made the decision as an artist to leave all that visible on the page.

He didn’t sugar-coat, and he didn’t try to cover up the nastiness of some of his feelings. Ultimately, though, in his poetry especially, he comes to moments of pure bliss, when he seems to feel at home, to have located himself finally in his culture, and there he has written some of the most tender verse of our time. Much of it can be found in the final 130 pages of Vangelisti’s book, poems mostly unpublished during Baraka’s lifetime.

Here’s one:

“Note to AB”

I became a poet

Because every thing

Beautiful seemed

“poetic” to me.

I thought there were things

I didn’t understand

that wd make the world

poetry. I felt I knew

who I was but had to

Struggle, to catch up

w/ my self.

Now I do see me

sometimes, a few worlds

ahead, & I speed up, then,

put my head down,

Stretch my stride out

& dig

There me go, I scat &

sing, there me go.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fourteen): Jessica Guzman [by Angela Ball]

ODE AT THE HOSPITAL

My father’s moustache aced geometry.
My father’s moustache makes cowboys blush
with its hard line. My father’s moustache
has two spots, one light in one dark,
like a black-eyed pea, or a tube t.v.
shutting off. My father’s moustache talks
like Ricky Ricardo, tells fortunes, chants
Our Fathers in its sleep—it dreams blue seas.
My father’s moustache survived chemotherapy.
My father’s moustache goes by Antonio
if you’re family. If not, try a cup of water
under your bed—it cures everything.

--Jessica Guzman

I had been writing poems about my father’s illness when I read an essay in which Stanley Plumly describes odes as rendering their subjects into art objects. Something similar to but not quite ekphrasis. My father had a commanding moustache, and I imagined it on display in a museum next to a little plaque. ‘Ode at the Hospital’ began with that image before anaphora morphed it into something more intimate and dynamic.

--Jessica Guzman

Jessica Guzman is the author of Adelante (Switchback Books, 2020), selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2019 Gatewood Prize. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, jubilat, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She teaches at Widener University and lives in Philadelphia.

The New York School Diaspora, Part Fourteen: Jessica Guzman [by Angela Ball]

“My Father’s Moustache” is an expression of disdain from 1930’s Brooklyn, a raucous song by Woody Herman & His Herd (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft8X0wXZOhY) , and a likely name for 60’s/70’s soda shops and used-clothing emporiums. It had, by then, an aura of gentle nostalgia—the “my father” referenced a sprightly older gentleman likely a member of a barbershop quartet. In Jessica Guzman’s “Ode At The Hospital,” these associations ground active description, as the moustache “aced geometry” and “makes cowboys blush.” When the ‘stache shows its spots, “one light in one dark, / like a black-eyed pea, or a tube t.v. / shutting off,” it takes on quasi-religious powers, chanting “Our Fathers in its sleep.” With “My father’s moustache survived chemotherapy” it draws us up short with the reality of illness and invokes the protective exclusivity of family, a magic circle. This is, after all “My father’s mustache,” not yours. Like its subject, Guzman’s poem refuses despair, ending with mock advice tinged with mysterious truth: “try a cup of water / under your bed—it cures everything.” In its terse twelve lines, the poem plays life’s essences against one another—virility and age, cultural and personal memory, humor and sadness, exile and belonging, personality and the loss thereof, the body and the loss thereof.  Set in God’s hostel, Jessica Guzman’s “Ode At The Hospital” makes permanent not just its potent moustache, but the particularity of praise.

--Angela Ball

Is Shakespeare Still Readable? [by Vincent Katz]

I am excited to be back at the B.A.P. post desk! This week I plan to riff on things I’m reading and see where that takes me. I usually read a mix of favorites and new work, often going back to things that have affected me powerfully in the past. I like the way books come to litter a place, diving into obscurity for extended periods before resurfacing bold-faced and re-determined to command respect. Alternatively, there are those books that lie there perennially, always available yet untouched for months or years at a time. This summer I picked up such a book and threw it into my overnight bag — the updated Folger Library edition of Hamlet, published in 2012 and edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. I think it belongs to my son Oliver. I say “think” as I found it in the vicinity of his room; there is no handwriting in it I can identify as his, and no evidence he ever looked at it.

 

We used these same editions when I was in high school, probably read the same syllabus. There may be a tendency to look down on these editions as “school” editions, or to think that one should be able to read Shakespeare without notes at this point, that one should be able to get what one gets out of the words alone. I am here to tell you that, unless you are really schooled in sixteenth-century poetry (and I know some of you are), then this is not the case. I understand a lot more of Shakespeare than I did when I was in high school, but there are still usages I want to fine-tune in my reading. And this brings me to the beauty of these editions. They are not at all precious, you can take them anywhere, they are clearly and elegantly designed, they have the benefit of having the notes on pages facing the text, and, for this reader at least, the choices of which usages to include notes for were judicious.

 

For example, in Act 3, Scene 2, when Hamlet is prepping Horatio to observe the King’s reaction during the play Hamlet has prepared for him, here are some of the notes given:

84: comment: observation

85: occulted: deliberately hidden

86: unkennel: a term describing the driving of a fox from its lair

89: Vulcan’s stithy: forge of the Roman god of fire and metalworking

92: censure of: i.e. forming an opinion about; seeming: appearance, behavior

 

Here’s the passage:

I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,

Even with the very comment of thy soul

Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt                      85

Do not itself unkennel in one speech,

It is a damnèd ghost that we have seen,

And my imaginations are as foul

As Vulcan’s stithy. Give him heedful note,

For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,                          90

And, after, we will both our judgements join

In censure of his seeming.

[Maurice Jones as Hamlet in Chicago Shakespeare Theater's 2019 production]

The reading is enhanced, made easier, by this helpful edition. I now want to read all of the plays in these editions. I picked up Hamlet in Oliver’s room, thinking, there is a reason I needs must read this text again (Shakespearean English is quite addictive!). And there was. The embodiment of madness, was it not of love fomented? Was it purely of his father’s motive? And what did that entail? I’ve been reading it to my mother, and we love to repeat to each other, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” It’s an oral art, a text made to be used onstage. It is simultaneously some of the best poetry in our language. I wonder if it is really passing out of use now. I mean, do kids love this language as much I did at their age, and still do?

[Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2, on Shakespeare at Play's iOS app]

Vincent Katz, Guest Author September 13-17

photo © Vivien Bittencourt

This week we welcome back Vincent Katz as our guest author. Vincent is a poet and translator. He is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (Knopf, 2020), Southness (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2016) and Swimming Home (Nightboat Books, 2015), as well as The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton University Press, 2004), which received a National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (MIT Press, 2002; reprinted 2013), and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in publications such as Apollo, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. As curator of the “Readings in Contemporary Poetry” series at Dia:Chelsea from 2010 to 2021, Katz edited the anthology Readings in Contemporary Poetry (Dia Art Foundation, 2017). In 2021, he collaborated with Sarah Sarhandi on the opera While There's Light, based on his translations of Propertius. He lives in New York City.

Find out more about Vincent Katz here. 

Welcome back, Vincent.

-- sdl