The Best American Poetry

From “The hounding of author Kate Clanchy. . ." [by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian, Jan. 23, 2022]

From “The hounding of author Kate Clanchy has been a witch-hunt without mercy” by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian (January 23, 2022)

A few years ago, when I was still getting to grips with the vagaries of Twitter, I inadvertently took part in a social media pile-on. Someone well known said something stupid and I enjoyed tweeting to that effect. But when she shared how upsetting she found the onslaught, I was forced to confront my unwitting bit-part in a collective act of bullying. There was nothing wrong with my tweet by itself, but hundreds of people shouting at you feels like abuse in a way that a single critique does not and the virtual nature of social media makes it harder to know when you are complicit in a form of mob justice.

Things have got worse since then and I find myself returning to this idea of proportionality often, most recently in the case of the author Kate Clanchy. Last week, it was announced that she and her publisher, Pan Macmillan, had parted company “by mutual consent” and that it will “revert the rights” and cease distribution of all her work.

The book that prompted this is Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, her memoir of a 30-year teaching career. Rave reviews and an Orwell prize gave way to mixed reactions from readers: some adored it, others thought she used racial and ableist stereotypes to describe her diverse students. Among the readers of colour I know, reactions were just as mixed: some found her descriptors offensive, others thought they were OK, especially in the context of her honesty about her own naivety and prejudices.

After apologies and safeguarding investigations had been demanded on their behalf, a group of Clanchy’s students wrote of her “unequivocal care and support for us… as poets and as people”, noting the book’s “flaws and imperfections”, but drawing attention to her “empowering methods of supporting and championing youth poetry... from disadvantaged backgrounds”. Supporting Clanchy, a former student railed against criticism of the author’s description of her “almond-shaped eyes” as offensive; another has written of the “unimaginable” positive impact Clanchy has had on her life.

It is true that Clanchy reacted badly to the criticism, denying the phrases in question were in her book. Defensiveness is a flawed but common response when being charged with something you abhor. But both she and Pan Macmillan issued apologies for the offence the book caused and her publisher announced she would rewrite it to address concerns. One might think that that would have drawn a line, enabling the industry to move on to issues about its lack of diversity, which Clanchy has done more than many of her critics to address.

It did not. Pan Macmillan was further berated for giving her the opportunity to make amends by rewriting. After her publisher, Picador imprint’s Philip Gwyn Jones, rightly reflected that he wished he had been clearer about its support for Clanchy and her rights, alongside condemning the online abuse and trolling by her critics, he issued an apology for causing further hurt that read like a hostage note: “I now understand I must use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness.”

Clanchy appears to have been cast beyond the pale, where there is no room for nuance. But it is evident from the testimony of those who know her that she has done a huge amount of good, championing young people whom society too often ignores. Her students have gone on to address the UN, been commissioned to write poetry for the BBC and had their poetry set to music by acclaimed composers.

Clanchy appears to have been cast beyond the pale, where there is no room for nuance. But it is evident from the testimony of those who know her that she has done a huge amount of good, championing young people whom society too often ignores. Her students have gone on to address the UN, been commissioned to write poetry for the BBC and had their poetry set to music by acclaimed composers.

How to make sense of her ostracism? Some people are desperate to see the world cast in black and white. Clanchy’s worst crime is not to fit this mould. Of course she doesn’t: none of us can rise above the imperfectly human. Look at her in the round and it’s obvious she’s done more good than most. This is why the strand of anti-racist thinking that is obsessed with the blame and shame all white people should bear for structural discrimination is so corrosive to common cause and understanding. White people who do nothing to challenge racism are terrible, but white people who trip up when trying to do something about it are even worse. The societal misogyny that infects this movement means it sees older white women as the very worst of all. Any expression of distress is the weaponisation of “white women’s tears”. The witch is not permitted to have feelings; they distract from her role as lightning rod for anger at all of society’s ills.

Publishing’s lack of diversity makes it vulnerable to witch-hunts. It is notoriously posh and white; when someone unfamiliar comes along saying that something is so offensive it should be expunged from the record, publishers assume they speak for all people of colour, as if we constitute a blob of uniform thought.

Pan Macmillan’s overreaction has caused huge collateral damage – it will no longer publish a new anthology of poems by Clanchy’s students – and is no substitute for working at becoming more diverse. “Sensitivity readers”, people who comb manuscripts looking for the potentially offensive, are a crass development: it outsources responsibility and plays on the idea that if a book has the potential to offend, it shouldn’t be published.

What has happened to Clanchy is a sad tale for our ages. No individual is to blame: it is the product of brittle and cowardly institutions, and the collective social media frenzy that prizes heads on a platter over change. But what I cannot understand is the lack of humanity at Pan Macmillan. One of its authors writes about feeling suicidal, as Clanchy has done recently, and, rather than offering her support, it walks away.

For all our differences of opinion, our eagerness to call out right and wrong, the one thing we must never let the digital age allow us to forget is the duty of care we owe each other as human beings.

See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/23/the-hounding-of-kate-clanchy-has-been-a-witch-hunt-without-mercy
Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist

Talking Pictures: On "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) [by David Lehman]

On The Manchurian Candidate (1962): " John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece remains supreme in the field of conspiracy-theory celluloid."

<<< 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.
>>>

for the rest of this "Talking Pictures" column written for The American Scholar and posted January 22, 2022 please click here.

Dan Gutstein: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Fox Who Loves Me + Other Developments in the Faunal and Floral Kingdoms

 

1. Deep, deep in the shrubberies: behold the beaver. Being human and smart-alecky, one ponders the paddle. We’re told that the paddle is for dam building, but that can’t be all. The beaver, for example, knows love. What doeth the paddle during the love-making of the beaver? People paddle each other, although the paddle is not—organically—attached to them. You might think “furry, cute little critter” but I think not. I see a varmint that can chew through a tree. Knowing not what might aggravate the beaver, I keep moving along.

2. This massive heron floats down to earth. It is equal parts dinosaur, goose, and 747. A comedian. Slender and plump. Where are the myths about this fine specimen? How come no Leda and the Great Blue? It is a stoic. Perhaps it thinks me a stoic, as well. The two of us, trudging along in the miserable murk that defines our lives. Me ‘n’ the heron, we complaineth not.

3. Thank you for inquiring about the Early Girl tomato plant. Given the absence of bees on the balcony, Dear Reader, I hand-pollinated every single flower. Lo, the plant begat many dozen tomatoes! We had a terrific affair. As for the fruits themselves, well, they were quite tasty, as it works out. This bit of gardening provided me with an essential activity as my skeleton reeled from an injury.

4. During my convalescence from said injury (which continues at present) I watched some reruns of Law & Order. I would like to say that Claire Kincaid, played by Jill Hennessey, is my favorite character. Dunno how the show continued on without her.

5. I got bitten! Not only that, but the venom (of whatever bit me) tried to slay me. But I endured.

6. Given the seriousness of the injury, I hadn’t seen my BFF from the faunal kingdom in several months. But one day, as part of my rehabilitation walk, I thought I saw the little ears sticking up, out of the sand trap. So I says, “Hey mate,” in my silly Australian accent. “Hey mate, you’re a good-looking fox.” This is how all the animals in my orbit know it’s me. The silly accent. She sits bolt upright, curling the big brush of the tail behind her. I think she even whined a little bit. That really broke me up!

7. The fox, stirring.

8. The fox, running. She looks hale and hearty. She’s a good-looking fox, mate.

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   Dan Gutstein’s most recent collection of writing is Metacarpalism (poetry, Unsolicited Press, 2022). His poems and stories have appeared in more than a hundred journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, American Scholar, The Iowa Review, Best American Poetry, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. He is also co-director of documentary project Li’l Liza Jane: The Story of America Through the History of a Song and vocalist for NPR-featured punk band Joy on Fire

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                                                    Winslow Homer, The Fox Hunt.

On Balanchine's Birthday (January 22,1904)

George Balanchine (1904-1983) is tremendously quotable – if only because so many of his bon mots are adapted from others. When he declared himself to be “not a man but a cloud in trousers,” for example, he lifted the line directly from one of Mayakovsky’s greatest poems. Usually, however, the matchless choreographer offered not a straight quotation but an unacknowledged paraphrase. Here’s a basket of Mr. B’s observations.

“God made men to sing the praises of women.”

“When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, ‘What do you mean?  What is your significance?’ Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful.  We're like flowers.  A flower doesn't tell you a story. It’s in itself a beautiful thing.”

In Balanchine’s view, Fred Astaire [pictured right with Cyd Charisse] was “the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times.”

“The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.”

“In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts. God made men to sing the praises of women. They are not equal to men: They are better.”

“Dance is music made visible.” (Also, “See the music, hear the dance.”)

“There are no mothers-in-law in ballet” (also known as Balanchine’s Law).

“We all live in the same time forever. There is no future and there is no past.”

“Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policemen don't have to look beautiful at the same time.”

“In fact I disagree with everybody and I don't want to argue about it.”

“The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.”

And when he received the Handel medallion, he said, “I can't Handel it. . .so I'll Haydn it.”

See Arlene Croce's “Balanchine Said” in The New Yorker (January 26, 2009): “In later years, [Balanchine] waged a personal campaign against the twentieth-century fetish of originality. . . . He saw no harm in appropriating; and he stole and was stolen from – that was the way of art.”

Above: George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell rehearsing Don Quixote in 1968.

"Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters" [new poems by Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung]

"At the start of the pandemic, I wrote nine lines (three tercets) and asked Laren to write a response in three tercets. This back and forth correspondence has continued as an improvisation throughout this strange time and perhaps the poetic dialogue has been led by the sway of language, the movement of two minds at play, and the nature of this unfolding moment. The excerpt here begins with my nine lines, and then Laren's, and so forth."   —Yusef Komunyakaa 

from Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters

I met Greg from north Louisiana, both of us
graduate students in Colorado, & one night
he said, I got something weird to show you.

We went to his small, spic & span apartment,
& he pulled from the closet iron shackles,
& said, This ugly thing’s from back home

at my plantation I’m turning into a tree farm.
He handed the shackles to me & said, Please
hold ‘em. It took me a night to get out of ‘em.

There’s irony in a man who drags shackles
around to remind him of sins of the past—
the ghost of Jacob Marley hauling chains,

condemned to eternally roam as penance.
Maybe shackles are a form of redemption
for one with a conscience who might think

a way to undo karma is to keep going back
in time, unearth a grave, & lock yourself
in the box, then strike ‘til the shackle drops.

When Robert Johnson went to Hazlehurst
he sought out an old guitarist named Ike
Zimmerman, & they’d go out at midnight

into the graveyard & play for long hours,
singing verses etched on stone by acid rain,
going inside, & coming out the backdoor,

smelling of moonshine. A lusty knot
tied when a hoodoo woman dared him
to clench his guitar with a seventh string.

Sometimes a hellhound on the trail can set
you back, or a woman’s dare dream you
two steps forward when you’re caught up

in syzygy of a great exchange. Sometimes
one occults while the third makes transit.
But, man, think of Johnson’s large hands

gliding on the neck of his Gibson, the devil
in the right fingerpicking with all digits & thumb.
Yeah, he slayed beauty ‘til it sung like two.

Brother John says, Good trouble. I hear you.
Yeah, another black Southerner who stood up,
squared his shoulders, & faced off scalawags,

die-hards, & a den of humbug, today,
we lay you to rest in Trueblood’s Atlanta.
Yes, springtime’s cut an unruly pathway.

Ah, life, I danced you up & down a windy road,
& wore out nine pairs of work boots, almost
there, my heart prodded up high stone steps.

Be cool,’Sef, & take high steps slow. Sarsens
at Stonehenge align with the Sun, like Temple
of Kukulcán. See, even three snowy pyramids

in the polar desert were mistaken for mountains.
We all yearn to build toward heaven or design
worlds that rise from a distance into clouds.

Colossal heads unearthed on Easter Island
reveal torsos, & below tombs. Or in the Sphinx
head, a labyrinth. Alien codes are writ in DNA.

Well, I’m not ready to see a crazy doctor’s jitterbug
behind the podium, talking about alien sperm, hoax,
& black magic. Just come back down slowly

to Earth. We have been in lockdown for over four
months, but you nor I have changed into a starry-eyed
siren, alien, or deadly hag-maiden in the fiery mirror.

Nor are we now Donne, Mary Shelley, & Percy,
creating ghosts & monsters, the sun hidden behind
volcanic ash, each day a candle-flicker all summer.

Flaming ash, & three hours of ground shaking
bones of the dead, sea turned stone in eighteen hundred
& froze to death, or Year of the Beggar

as Germans called it. Here locals lived on rats,
boiled nettles, raccoon & pigeon, or by sucking red clay.
But we’re lucky—skies so clear we study star

for clues, even in the halo of city lights, no smog
blows in this shutdown. We’ve grown fat here,
yet there’s phantom taste of hunger in plumes of ash.

I doubt it, yet there are children fending off hunger
in overfed America, while parents drink & gamble
in high rises & basement hovels with barb-tail devils,

sitting in director chairs, behind their Saks Fifth
skeleton masks. Yes, our phantoms are twelve feet,
& each has mastered the freeway’s chase scene.

But Shelley’s Frankenstein was pieced together
slow as a Gees Bend quilt, saying, Please love me,
or you’re responsible for the bad I think, say, & do.

Seamstresses wove tenderness into fine scraps
of kaleidoscopic praise, freedom quilts
reviving a world from pain, birthed by divine

Shakti in women’s hands, not by obsession
of a doctor who comes tragically aware, saying:
I tortured a living animal to animate lifeless clay.

My first loves were monsters, shadowy figures
hocussing in doorways, vampires stalking halls
of sleep, but before the fateful bite, I’d beg, Wait.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Emperor of Water Clocks, and Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth (FSG). His most recent honors in 2021 include the Griffin Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. His plays, performance art and libretti have been performed internationally and include Saturnalia, Wakonda’s Dream, Testimony, and Gilgamesh. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2003.

 

Laren McClung is the author of a collection of poems, Between Here and Monkey Mountain (Sheep Meadow Press), and editor of the anthology Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (W.W. Norton). Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Poetry, Yale Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She has held fellowships and residencies from Teachers & Writers Collaborative; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. She served as the 40th Poet Laureate of Bucks County and currently teaches at New York University.

The Portable Pussy [by Nin Andrews]

The Portable Pussy

Wherever I go, I carry a pussy with me.  How, you might ask, but I and the pussy are not one and the same being, so carry it I must.   Asleep or awake, depending on who else is in the room, the pussy talks.  Quietly of course, so as not to attract attention or disturb the peace.  And honestly, much too honestly, really.  I am so relieved when those who hear it pretend not to.  Or perhaps they imagine they are only hearing things.  On rare occasions the pussy gets carried away.   Then it sings off key or starts composing poetry.   Of course, most don’t suspect (or so I hope) that it’s the pussy and not I who sings, or how difficult it is to carry a pussy everywhere I go, much less listen to the running commentary when all I wish for is silence.  A little relief.  I’ve even sought medical advice, but the doctors insist the pussy is all in the mind.  I need only stop thinking about it, and the pussy will vanish forever.  So I have been thinking about not thinking about the pussy.  But I have fears.  If the pussy is in my mind, alongside my thoughts, what if the thoughts leave first?  If I have to pick between a pussy and a brain, which will it be? After all, who can choose between the player and his flute?  The sea below and the sky above?  How can I ignore the gullies for the torrents of the rain and the path of the thunderbolt? And who am I to command the waves thus far and no farther shall you come.

--- Nin Andrews

On Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" [by David Lehman]

“Where Ignorance Is Bliss, Tis Folly To Be Wise” 
David Lehman on why Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” is an overlooked poetic masterpiece.
By David Lehman 

from Slate (January 22, 2013)

Portrait of Thomas Gray

Painted by John Giles Eccardt.

Favorite examples of poetic endings include the interrogatives of Shelley (“If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”) and Yeats (“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”), the declarative Milton (“They also serve who only stand and wait”), the ecstatic Coleridge (“For he on honeydew hath fed/ and drunk the milk of paradise”), the reiterated premonitions of Robert Frost (“And miles to go before I sleep”).

In this company belongs Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (written in 1742, published five years later), an overlooked masterpiece from the most underrated century of English verse. Gray’s ode ends, “Where ignorance is bliss,/ Tis folly to be wise,” an assertion that has attained the status of a proverb and can be discussed for many fruitful hours on its own or in relation to the Garden of Eden in Chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis.

In his Short History of English Literature, George Saintsbury says Gray was “probably the best-read man of letters of his time in Europe.” What he lacked in originality and inspiration he made up for in fastidious craftsmanship. His poetic output was small but choice. He subscribed to the idea, popular in the century of Alexander Pope, that excellence of expression trumped originality of concept. Gray felt, too, that true poetry was incompatible with the discourse of the tribe, and it is his artificial diction that earned him an attack from Wordsworth in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth quoted the whole of Gray's sonnet mourning the death of his friend Richard West saying that only five lines were worth keeping. Gray’s best-known poem remains his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” which even Samuel Johnson, no fan of the poet, praised: “The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

The “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” in its general contours, is a romantic poem of return, with some similarities to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”  In both poems the poet returns to a place after an interval of years; he feels the change as a loss; he recollects the past and looks to the future. Wordsworth’s poem travels from melancholy at the passing of youth to the compensations of maturity. But Gray’s poem is more radical, the poet less willing to talk himself out of his gloom.

I have read Gray’s “Ode” many times and it has never failed to astonish me. It begins conventionally enough with a description of Eton seen from afar. “Happy” are the hills, “pleasing” is the shade. We anticipate an idealized evocation of the life of boys on the playing fields of Eton (where, 70 years later, the Duke of Wellington would say that the battle of Waterloo was won). But even as Gray summons up the image of the boys at their games, we get hints that Eton remembered is what Frost called a “momentary stay against confusion.” The boys “snatch a fearful joy,” we learn in the fourth stanza. The fifth stanza states the enviable condition of youth: “the tear forgot as soon as shed.” But nothing prepares us for the change in intensity signaled by the opening of stanza six: “Alas, regardless of their doom,/ The little victims play.” At the sound of the words doom and victim, the reader is in the position of a batter who had expected a fast ball and looks in amazement and dismay as an off-speed pitch curves over the heart of the plate.

There follows an unrelenting list of pains, grievances, ailments, and sufferings—a catalogue without parallel in English lyric poetry. The vision of the life of man is grim, as grim as in Hobbes (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”), but the writing is so controlled and has such authority that one finds it delicious despite the dispiriting content. The balanced clauses reveal a subtlety of distinction—between, for example, the tender-hearted who feels “another’s pain” while “the unfeeling” is mired in his own.

Do we agree with Gray’s conclusion? Do we want to know the doctor’s bad news? Do we cherish our illusions rather than choose what Freud prescribes as “an education in reality”? Would Eve and Adam have been “wise” to reject the fruits of knowledge? These are different questions—not variants of the same question—and their urgency speaks to the epigrammatic power of what Gray wrote.

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear David Lehman read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

"Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College"

By Thomas Gray

Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy Shade;
And ye, that from the stately brow
Of Windsor's heights the expanse below
Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among
Wanders the hoary Thames along
His silver-winding way.

Ah happy hills, ah pleasing shade,
Ah fields beloved in vain,
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales, that from ye blow,
A momentary bliss bestow,
As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.

Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race
Disporting on thy margent green
The paths of pleasure trace,
Who foremost now delight to cleave
With pliant arm thy glassy wave?
The captive linnet which enthrall?
What idle progeny succeed
To chase the rolling circle's speed,
Or urge the flying ball?

While some on earnest business bent
Their murmuring labours ply
'Gainst graver hours, that bring constraint
To sweeten liberty:
Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry:
Still as they run they look behind,
They hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy.

Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed,
Less pleasing when possessed;
The tear forgot as soon as shed,
The sunshine of the breast:
Their buxom health of rosy hue,
Wild wit, invention ever-new,
And lively cheer of vigour born;
The thoughtless day, the easy night,
The spirits pure, the slumbers light,
That fly the approach of morn.

Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond today:
Yet see how all around 'em wait
The ministers of human fate,
And black Misfortune's baleful train!
Ah, show them where in ambush stand
To seize their prey the murtherous band!
Ah, tell them, they are men!

These shall the fury Passions tear,
The vultures of the mind,
Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear,And Shame that skulks behind;
Or pining Love shall waste their youth,
Or Jealousy with rankling tooth,
That inly gnaws the secret heart,
And Envy wan, and faded Care,
Grim-visaged comfortless Despair,
And Sorrow's piercing dart.

Ambition this shall tempt to rise,
Then whirl the wretch from high,
To bitter Scorn a sacrifice,
And grinning Infamy.
The stings of Falsehood those shall try,
And hard Unkindness' altered eye,
That mocks the tear it forced to flow;
And keen Remorse with blood defiled,
And moody Madness laughing wild
Amid severest woe.

Lo, in the vale of years beneath
A grisly troop are seen,
The painful family of Death,
More hideous than their Queen:
This racks the joints, this fires the veins,
That every labouring sinew strains,
Those in the deeper vitals rage:
Lo, Poverty, to fill the band,
That numbs the soul with icy hand,
And slow-consuming Age.

To each his sufferings: all are men,
Condemned alike to groan;
The tender for another's pain,
The unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/classic_poems/2013/01/david_lehman_on_why_thomas_gray_s_ode_on_a_distant_prospect_of_eton_college.html

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

Ozymandias:
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

Emily Dickinson
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/06/a-trip-to-tintern-abbey-by-david-lehman.html

To His Coy Mistress
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/08/seizing-the-moment-on-andrew-marvells-to-his-coy-mistress-by-david-lehman.html

Ben Jonson
https://marshhawkpress.org/commentary-by-david-lehman-ben-jonsons-my-picture-left-in-scotland/

or click on our "Great Poems" link here or on the left side of the page.   

Ogden Nash's Advice to Husbands

A Word to Husbands

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.

from Candy is Dandy by Ogden Nash (1962).
Did you know that rhymester Nash wrote the lyrics for Kurt Weill's beautiful love song "Speak Low"? 

Igor Stravinsky: "I surround myself with obstacles. . ."

Albert Gleizes, Portrait of Igor Stravinsky, 1914, Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 114.3 cm. Muséum of Modern Art Collection

"My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit."

—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

-- sdl

Lyn Li Che: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

Sobriqu(i)ets 

 

On the corner of 12^th and Market, a man says

            Nihao, China and I’m in love,  

I just don’t know it yet. One day, I’ll love  

            the slant of my eyes, their slashing stare.

I’ll love the ching-chong clamour of the old country   

            and my grandfather’s names: both the one  

he was given and the one taken away   

            by the registrar’s pen. None of his siblings  

had the same last name but I’ll love them too:  

            the Che’s and Chen’s and Chong’s, all laid out  

like a racist’s naughty nursery rhyme.  

            I’ll be shook by my buck-toothed gook

reflection. I’ll be cool with my coolie shape  

            and my sideways drape, how easily   

my body zipperheads into anything else –  

            a container of chowmein, a coin slot  

cooter choking open. I’ll be someone’s 

            bamboo chink and kimchee kink, though bitch,  

I’m not even Korean. I’ll stan   

            my Jackie Chan doyenne Chinaman  

brand. I’ll idealize this Oriental disguise.

            I hope I just don’t know it yet.  

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lyn Li Che was born in Malaysia. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Michigan Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Waxwing, PANK, Passages North, Tupelo Quarterly, BOAAT, River Styx, and others. A 2021 Kundiman Mentorship Lab Fellow, she currently lives in New York City, where she works in tech strategy.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                Mohd Noor Mahmud, Siri Kala Kota Bharu series: Main Ayun, acrylic on wood, 2006

"As Romance Fails" [by Star Black]

As Romance Fails

Indolence fans the aqua pools
before lovers’ spats prelude dawn’s make-up sex.
A chilling sky ensues, as everyone fears love,
the great mummer of regrets. Yet,

not even trees control their destinies,
half-stilled by burlesque bees, bird-burdened.
Nor can they turn upright one fallen limb, languishing
as if lonesome. You, Richard, have grown,

a green sailor upon a mulched sea, closer
to love, to reality, to the seashells of woodbine,
the seraph’s tunes; and, soon, trust,

regret’s second cousin, will alarm you
with devotion: its rose-lilt fathoms, their glass eye,
enfolding bold écrivains who, far-flung, revive.

from the archive; first posted December 1, 2008. Photo of Star Black and Paul Violi above. Photo credit: David Lehman (1998).

As Romance Fails

Indolence fans the aqua pools
before lovers’ spats prelude dawn’s make-up sex.
A chilling sky ensues, as everyone fears love,
the great mummer of regrets. Yet,

not even trees control their destinies,
half-stilled by burlesque bees, bird-burdened.
Nor can they turn upright one fallen limb, languishing
as if lonesome. You, Richard, have grown,

a green sailor upon a mulched sea, closer
to love, to reality, to the seashells of woodbine,
the seraph’s tunes; and, soon, trust,

regret’s second cousin, will alarm you
with devotion: its rose-lilt fathoms, their glass eye,
enfolding bold écrivains who, far-flung, revive.

from the archive; first posted December 1, 2008. Photo of Star Black and Paul Violi above. Photo credit: David Lehman (1998).

As Romance Fails

Indolence fans the aqua pools
before lovers’ spats prelude dawn’s make-up sex.
A chilling sky ensues, as everyone fears love,
the great mummer of regrets. Yet,

not even trees control their destinies,
half-stilled by burlesque bees, bird-burdened.
Nor can they turn upright one fallen limb, languishing
as if lonesome. You, Richard, have grown,

a green sailor upon a mulched sea, closer
to love, to reality, to the seashells of woodbine,
the seraph’s tunes; and, soon, trust,

regret’s second cousin, will alarm you
with devotion: its rose-lilt fathoms, their glass eye,
enfolding bold écrivains who, far-flung, revive.

from the archive; first posted December 1, 2008. Photo of Star Black and Paul Violi above. Photo credit: David Lehman (1998).

Dusk (for Barry Lopez) [by John Freeman]

DUSK 

for Barry Lopez [January 6, 1945 - December 25, 2020]

Horizon fades from blue to black
with infinite tenderness in London
tonight. Yet even at full dusk a smear
of cobalt rings the tree line. Maybe
endless love awaits us. I know you believed
so, even as forests and rivers turned to fire,
libraries to ash. Now that you’re not here
to tend them, I see the lamps you lit for us.
Sometimes it’s important to see the darkness,
you would say, to regard one another other,
and our trembling. Or on other nights, like
now: we must look up. How is this same
moon in my sky hanging over Eugene these
small hours? Do you feel its comforts?
As you sleep through this final stretch
how badly I want you to know we have
the torches now, my friend, we’ll protect the flame,
you are free to be the wind again.

-- John Freeman

John Freeman (pictured above) is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and The Tyranny of E-mail, as well as Tales of Two Americas, an anthology of new writing about inequality in the U.S. today. Maps, his debut collection of poems, was published in 2017. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the New York Times. The former editor of Granta and one-time president of the National Book Critics Circle, he is currently Artist-in-Residence at New York University. The poem appears in a special issue of Orion magazine, in which writers and artists salute the late Barry Lopez.

https://orionmagazine.org/article/writers-artists-on-the-influence-of-barry-lopez/#freeman

Sexy Poets Quiz [by Molly Arden]

Match the poet with the quote from his or her poem:

1.  "I groped for him before I knew"

2.  "you slip/ half-a-foot deep into someone you like"

3.  "new memory like a seltzer in my crotch"

4.  "he kissed her Anne Sexton/ and she returned the favor, caressing

            his Ted Berrigan"

5.  "that slippery ingress ... its complicated fragrance"

6.  "Gently, with my lips/ loosen the button./ Have them slip into my hands/

            Like two freshly poured beer mugs"

7.  "she wanted him hung up on her breasts, not on her feet"

8.  "The clam shell opens./ The oyster is eaten."

9.  "At each beat of his heart it threw/ An odd little nod my way.  From the

            slot of the spout/ Extended a drop of transparent viscous goo"

10. "nude ghosts seeking each other out in the silence"

Charles Simic                Marge Piercy                    Albert Goldbarth

Emily Dickinson             David Lehman                  Allen Ginsberg

Elizabeth Alexander       Michael Ryan                    Jim Cummins

                                    W. H. Auden

If you know the right match-ups, please let me know -- in a comment.  I need to know because I lost the sheet on which I wrote the identifyuing names. It's not easy being a mother. Also, if you have a good sexy line thaty belongs in a poem that has not yet been written, go right ahead and let us know. It will enter the public domain of ouir collective consciousness. Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal. --Molly

Figurative Art at the Salmagundi Club

The Salmagundi Club’s Figurative Art Exhibition

Denizens of lower Fifth Avenue in New York City are excited by the figurative art on display at the Salmagundi Club:

47 Fifth Avenue @ Twelfth Street | New York, NY  10003
Tel: (212) 255-7740 | Email: info@salmagundi.org

<<<
The Salmagundi Club is pleased to announce its 2022 open New York Figurative exhibition. This will be an exhibition of figurative work and the human form in all of its permutations: portraiture, clothed, nude; focusing on the human form and/or face

D A T E
January 10, 2021 – January 28, 2021

L O C A T I O N
Skylight gallery

H O U R S
Monday to Friday, 1PM – 6PM
Saturday & Sunday, 1PM – 5PM

Salmagundi welcomes Max Ginsburg and Colleen Barry who will serve as the Jury of Awards. Guest Advisor: Patricia Watwood Among the painters whose work is on display is Ricky Mujica with his portrait of David Lehman.reproduced on the cover of The Morning Line. Click here for more information. Below are paintings from the 2021 show by (left to right, top to bottom) by Susan O’Neill, “Eloquent”, Charcoal and Water-Soluble Graphite, 28″ 36″; Elizabeth Zanzinger, “Foragers”, Oil on Panel, 20″ x 15″; Anton Zhou, “Folklore”, Oil, 24″ x 18″; Anthony Almeida, “Connections in Time and Place”, LE Black and White Photo on Aluminum Substrate, 24″ x 30″; Christopher Zhang, “Mother and Child”, Oil, 28″ x 22″; Jane Manco, “Evening in the Drawing Room”, Oil, 12″ x 12

Of these, which is your favorite? So far we have received votes for "Foragers," "Mother and Child," and "Evening in the Darwing Room."

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-One): Jennifer Grotz [by Angela Ball]

The Crows

There must have been greetings
that rhymed with each of them,

but now she only remembers
the goodbyes, the countless times

they stood together speechless
under a starry meal of snow,

crows congregating above them
in bare winter branches, all through

the desperate sadness at the end,
one of them still madly in love

while the other admitted defeat,
taking turns as if exchanging

a heavy suitcase. And they were after all
always traveling. Somehow never at home.

He loved her in libraries and parking lots,
in cemeteries and cafes. She loved him

in the held breath of elevators, in stairwells
and trains. He loved her in daylight. But also

in the dark. She loved him most at the end
of the day, telling a story at dinner

while waving his fork and knife. He was her
never husband and she his never wife.

There must have been greetings
that rhymed with each of them.

All along, though they couldn’t hear it,
before they had stopped being lovers,

before they had even started,
back when they were two people leaving

a restaurant in summer’s dusk,
the crows were growing busy, numerous,

there was one coming to land
on every branch of every tree, once

the thumbless black hands of their wings
had finished stroking the malleable sky,

all along, though they couldn’t hear it,
the birds had been winging

their silent applause
for the love that was going to be, then was.

--Jennifer Grotz

Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open, and translator of three books from the French and Polish, most recently Everything I Don’t Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, co-translated with Piotr Sommer. She teaches at the University of Rochester and directs the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. Still Falling, her fourth book of poems, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2023.

Photo by Marion Ettlinger

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-One): Jennifer Grotz

Jennifer’s Grotz’s mysterious, generous poem, “The Crows,” is parable—but more; the crows, its totems, but more. Reading it, we are pulled in two directions. There is much to say, there is nothing to say—the direction of the ordinary, the direction of the holy. The poem’s almost-refrain, “There must have been greetings / that rhymed with each of them” suggests a Blakean song of innocence in which the world is right, is true; but also suggests the calls of crows announcing something dead and ready to eat; and Ted Hughes’s landmark book, Crow, the dark parable he made of marriage.

The poem dramatizes Robert Frost’s useful dictum, which applies so well to the New York School of Poets and their diaspora: poetry must possess either outer humor and inner seriousness or outer seriousness and inner humor. Dead seriousness is powerless to move us. That’s why the late Stephen Sondheim, in his wrenching (though often over-acted: Judi Dench sings it best) song of lost love, calls for clowns.

The poem’s two characters are isolated, as in parables and fairy tales:

     they stood together speechless

     under a starry meal of snow,

     crows congregating above them

     in bare winter branches, all through

     the desperate sadness at the end,

     one of them still madly in love

     while the other admitted defeat,

     taking turns as if exchanging

     a heavy suitcase.

Dark humor informs the mechanical exchanging of roles, the absurd simile of the suitcase.

The poem partakes, also, of Wallace Stevens’ “mind of winter,” in which silence has the most say.

Yet at its heart there’s a beautiful fairy tale in which each lover’s action is answered variously but exactly by the other’s:

     He loved her in libraries and parking lots,

     in cemeteries and cafes.  She loved him

     in the held breath of elevators, in stairwells

     and trains. He loved her in daylight. But also

     in the dark. She loved him most at the end

     of the day, telling a story at dinner

     while waving his fork and knife. He was her

     never husband and she his never wife.

How exact, that “held breath of elevators.” The last sentence of the interlude, with its nursery-style clinching rhyme, pronounces both the perfection of the moment and the disaster hovering over the couple from and, indeed, before their beginning. Arrive it does, with a suggestion of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds:

     the crows were growing busy, numerous,

     there was one coming to land

     on every branch of every tree

     that introduces the poem’s final trajectory with this most lovely, most chilling couplet: “once / / the thumbless black hands of their wings / had finished stroking the malleable sky,” finally declaring the ascendency of fate, the force that ever and always operates in silence:

     all along, though they couldn’t hear it,

     the birds had been winging

     their silent applause

     for the love that was going to be, then was.

It is the last small phrase of Jennifer Grotz’s The Crows that pronounces victory not just for fate, but for love. Love “was”—existed, held sway. The small word, a weak verb’s past tense, declares both loss and possession, two forces that equally hold us—until, at last, they fade.

--Angela Ball

Quote of the Day: The one point of unity . . . [by Mark Twain]

Mark Twain, on the Viennese Parliament in 1897:  "As to the make-up of the House itself, it is this: the deputies come from all the walks of life and from all the grades of society. There are princes, counts, barons, priests, mechanics, laborers, physicians, professors, merchants, bankers,shopkeepers. They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere, devoted, and they hate the Jews." Lionel Trilling, who quoted this, added that "This hatred of the Jews was the one point of unity in a Parliament which was torn asunder by the fiercest nationalistic and cultural jealousies." Still true.

-- DL

Mark Twain, on the Viennese Parliament in 1897:  "As to the make-up of the House itself, it is this: the deputies come from all the walks of life and from all the grades of society. There are princes, counts, barons, priests, mechanics, laborers, physicians, professors, merchants, bankers,shopkeepers. They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere, devoted, and they hate the Jews." Lionel Trilling, who quoted this, added that "This hatred of the Jews was the one point of unity in a Parliament which was torn asunder by the fiercest nationalistic and cultural jealousies." Still true.

-- DL

Eddie Muller Interviewed by Mark Yost for "Stay Thirsty"

In the summer 2015 issue of Stay Thirsty there's a great interview with Eddie Muller (shown here with Kathleen Maria Milne). Eddie is host of TCM's Noir Alley and head of the foundation that has rescued from oblivion such film noir classics as Cry Danger (1951), Try and Get Me! (1951), Repeat Performance (1948), Too Late for Tears (1949), and Woman on the Run (1950). Watch his showings -- midnight Saturdays and 120 AM Sundays -- and you'll marvel not only at his erudition and charm but also at his period-authentic ties and stylish decor. Click here to read the interview. It was a particular thrill for me when Eddie genrously provided a blurb for my new book, coming in May 2022, The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir. -- DL

https://www.staythirstymedia.com/201507-089/html/201507-yost-muller.html
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501763625/the-mysterious-romance-of-murder/#bookTabs=1

Geoffrey Himes: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________

The Swimming Pool

 

The diver was a knife that slit the surface

with the merest sliver of a splash.

 

Her zaftig mother was a pudding oozing

through the poolside plastic webbing.

 

The diver's boyfriend was a mannequin

in bronze tan and vermillion trunks.

 

He ran past the mother, leapt, grabbed his knees,

and landed with a cannonball tsunami.

 

I was a chimera, dog's head and walrus body,

swimming laps through the chlorine blue.

 

I knew the mother and the boyfriend would tire of the sun

and leave the pool to me, the diver and the indigo dusk.

 

The diver bounced on the board, lifted off, hinged at the hips,

straightened like a blade and sliced into the bubbles.

 

I stayed in my lane, scooping with my hands,

swimming toward her, away, toward her, away.

 

Water was our world. Water was our language.

Water was our worship. Water was our embrace.

 

I could be the spoon to her knife.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Geoffrey Himes’s poetry has been published by December, Gianthology, the Loch Raven Review, Survision, January Review, Salt Lick, the Baltimore City Paper, and other publications. His poems are included in the anthologies Singing in the Dark and Poet Trees: Poetry Hiding in Plain Sight. His song lyrics have been set to music by Si Kahn, Walter Egan, Billy Kemp, Fred Koller, and others.  His book on Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A., was published by Continuum Books in 2005. He has written about popular music and theater for the Washington Post, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian Magazine, Paste, Downbeat, Sing Out, and the Nashville Scene since 1977.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                      Paul Cézanne, Woman Diving into Water, 1870. Pencil, watercolor, and gouache on paper. National Museum of Wales, Wales, UK

 

"The Adlai Stevenson of the Art World" [Jane Freilicher]

A 1956 letter written by Ms. Freilicher to Frank O’Hara, who celebrated her in his acclaimed “Jane” poems, initiated various plans to get together, beginning: “Dear Frankie, I was utterly delighted to get your cuddlesome letter. Perhaps you don’t know how much I’m missing you but it is quite a tel’ble lot. It is a terrible thing being the Adlai Stevenson of the art world without a Young Democrat like you by my side.”

<<<
This relationship [with John Ashbery], and the others that grew from it, are the subject of “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets,” an exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Midtown, a show that places Ms. Freilicher’s work in the context of her exalted status among the poets of the New York School — Mr. Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler — to whom she was muse, confidante, beloved brain. “One doesn’t stay friends with somebody for 40 years unless they have a lot of nice qualities, such as brilliance,” Mr. Ashbery wrote two decades ago. “Jane Freilicher is also the wittiest person I have ever known.”
By implication, the show is an exercise in anthropology as well, an exploration of an ever-receding way of social life among successful creative people in the city, one in which the friendships built and circles configured seemed more firmly rooted in genuine affection, in affinity, in shared notions of whimsy, than in the prospect of mutual professional advantage.
>>>

From Gina Bellafante in "Jane Freilicher: A Painter amid Friends," a review of Freilicher's 2013 show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, The New York Times, May 25, 2013. 

A 1956 letter written by Ms. Freilicher to Frank O’Hara, who celebrated her in his acclaimed “Jane” poems, initiated various plans to get together, beginning: “Dear Frankie, I was utterly delighted to get your cuddlesome letter. Perhaps you don’t know how much I’m missing you but it is quite a tel’ble lot. It is a terrible thing being the Adlai Stevenson of the art world without a Young Democrat like you by my side.”

<<<
This relationship [with John Ashbery], and the others that grew from it, are the subject of “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets,” an exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Midtown, a show that places Ms. Freilicher’s work in the context of her exalted status among the poets of the New York School — Mr. Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler — to whom she was muse, confidante, beloved brain. “One doesn’t stay friends with somebody for 40 years unless they have a lot of nice qualities, such as brilliance,” Mr. Ashbery wrote two decades ago. “Jane Freilicher is also the wittiest person I have ever known.”
By implication, the show is an exercise in anthropology as well, an exploration of an ever-receding way of social life among successful creative people in the city, one in which the friendships built and circles configured seemed more firmly rooted in genuine affection, in affinity, in shared notions of whimsy, than in the prospect of mutual professional advantage.
>>>

From Gina Bellafante in "Jane Freilicher: A Painter amid Friends," a review of Freilicher's 2013 show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, The New York Times, May 25, 2013. 

A is for Oboe [by Lera Auerbach]

The virtual book launch of Lera Auerbach's A is for Oboe - The Orchestra's Alphabet, a book of poems for children about music, will take place Sundasy, January 9, 2022. Felicitations! Lera writes :

 

<< I had excellent collaborators: Marilyn Nelson, my dear friend and one of the most brilliant people I know, the fantastic illustrator Paul Hoppe, and a great team at Penguin-Random House and Serendipity Literary Agency. For the audio version of this book, we have the one and only Thomas Quasthoff as the narrator and numerous musical excerpts to illustrate the poetry. I want to thank RSO Vienna, Raschèr Saxophone Quartet, Leonidas Kavakos, Marin Alsop, and Luke Haaksma for lending their artistry to this project. Also, I wish to thank Sikorski, Boosey & Hawkes, BIS Records, and ORF – The Austrian Broadcasting Corporation for their blessings and support.A is for Oboe is my first publication with Penguin Random House, and I am very excited. >>