The Best American Poetry

An Interview with Major Jackson [by Aspen Matis]

January 19, 2021

AM: What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course?

MJ: Fascinating catalogue, all of which I have experienced over the years in reading and teaching poems, that in fact, are not mutually exclusive. Political poetry that I love, for example, pushes me toward a greater consciousness of complicated issues that point to imbalance of power and injustice, and many of them I’ve also found to be exact and beautiful in their lyricism. Yet almost always, with the best poems, I am awakened to language (its palpable presence in the body and mouth) and thus, too, sensory experience. I’ll add to that a growing sense of wonder that marks us as human beings. The best poems are multidimensional and multimodal in that way.

Your most recent book of poems, The Absurd Man, confronts the struggle for meaning in a technological world and ponders the value and nature of creation in the face of meaninglessness. What, in your view, is the meaning of your life?

Of course, on any given day I could answer this differently. You’ll have to forgive the lack of clarity as I truly believe the answer is far more complex than what will land here. In the past and today, I have talked about challenging the precincts of meaning, which takes a great dosage of critical intelligence and, believe it or not, love. I find meaning in the passionate pursuit of the “real” as Milosz phrases it. In writing poems, I am strongly committed to the possibility of uttering something that cracks and breaks through the veneer of my insecurities and fears, that pierces the armor I’ve built up that disconnects and alienates me from humanity. 

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

We are bound, regrettably, by the strictures of language; meaning is its own prison, and thus, our lives become faint replicas of outdated ideas and what was previously discovered. No matter how beautiful the garden evoked in language, if it merely alludes to some biblical origin story then it is valueless, and quite possibly redundant. We rarely discuss the ethical imperative of “making it new.” Understandably, it is a weighty responsibility to put on poetry, a tall order as we say. Yet still, out of relevancy and quite possibly a spiritual urgency, a poet has to discover radical ways of picturing and sounding out this moment. That’s pretty far-reaching to me. In this way, poetry speaks to the living fact of being alive today. For example, some in our country believe it is 1776; I have been saying lately that we need a new image of patriotism so that we do not fall victim to a vision of the past that constrains us.

What, in your view, should that new image of patriotism look like?

My favorite image of patriotism is new Americans taking the oath of allegiance which I had the pleasure of witnessing once during a friend’s naturalization ceremony. There was not a dry eye in the room. It made me hopeful about the future of our country, and the bedrock foundations of freedom and opportunity. Scraggly hordes of men pretending we are in colonial America carrying weapons is the stuff of history books that exploits political divisions and frankly stokes the flames of populism that seem aimed at the worst of our humanity. Every American is a patriot and no one group can claim greater right to that label than another. 

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

Probably the Metaphysical Poets, chiefly Andrew Marvell and John Donne. Donne’s poems “The Ecstasy” and “The Good-Morrow” are favorites. I like poems that are intellectually demanding yet aim for a single argument about love and life, not to mention the transcendent aspects of sex. Also, someone who reads my poems closely knows that I hinge quite a bit on metaphor and its ability to order thought and give it shape.

You edited the 2019 edition of The Best American Poetry. What was that experience like for you? How, if at all, did editing the anthology affect you? Are you proud of the book? How do you feel about the process—and the product of your labor—in retrospect?

As I write in the Introduction, editing the book had me fall in love again with poetry; after many years of teaching and editing, I was becoming cynical and dispassionate. The experience was akin to standing on a beach for a year and deciding to plunge into a series of crashing waves; the richness of life in American poetry is stunningly humbling. Human beings transcribe as much joy and love in poetry with great relish and embodiment as they do their pain. Such inner musings authentically rendered in language deeply impacted my spiritual life. I only wish I could have doubled or even tripled the anthology in size. So many other poems would have found their way into its pages. I read all of the previous Best American Poetry introductions, which was its own education. Also, too, I was reminded of the importance of magazine editors whose curating is so underappreciated. It was a joy to work with series editor David Lehman. One gets a sense of his and others’ huge contributions to literary culture.

Ed note: For Aspen's interview with Mitch Sisskind, which we posted last Thursday (Jan 14, 2021), please click here.

"I Took a Creative Writing Class" [by Molly Arden]

 

Everybody wanted to sleep with
On one side
Each line had to

And embrace

For example a cup
Equals
A pearl necklace means

Where can I go when
Why did you think I didn’t

Toys

If you left on the last

Three straight times
He didn’t love
He loved
Her
Me

 

art by Nelina Trubach-Moshnikova

 

"What Trumps Vain Boasts": The Wizardry of "Ozymandias" [by David Lehman]

 

Impromptu poetry competitions were not uncommon among the English Romantic poets. The poets would be given a quarter of an hour or so to turn out a serviceable sonnet on a chosen theme. In December 1816 John Keats and Leigh Hunt wrote sonnets on “the grasshopper and cricket.” Hunt’s effort holds up pretty well, but you’d have to say that Keats won with the poem that begins “The poetry of earth is never dead” and ends “on a lone winter evening,” when “to one in drowsiness half lost” the cricket “shrills” and wakens an echo of the grasshopper’s summer song “among some grassy hills.”

In 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Ozymandias,” perhaps the greatest of his short poems, when he and his banker friend Horace Smith sat down to compose dueling sonnets on a passage from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus. The passage concerned Rameses II, the Egyptian pharaoh who squared off against Moses in Exodus. A massive statue glorifying him proclaimed on its pedestal that he was the “king of kings.” The poets used this phrase and called the ancient pharaoh, whose statue lay in ruins, Ozymandias.

Horace Smith’s “Ozymandias” has some fine lines about a hunter in a future age beholding “some fragment huge” in the wilderness “where London once stood.” But genius went into Shelley’s poem:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

One reason “Ozymandias” is so often anthologized is that it conveys a message dear to poets. Time mocks emperors, particularly boastful ones. The sculptor’s “hand that mocked” is a brilliant pun, for the word “mocked” in 1817 signified not only ridicule but also imitation, as in painting from a model.

Fragments fascinate us, because they bear witness to the devastation of time.

Shakespeare’s sonnet #55 argues in favor of poetry, which shall outlive “the gilded monuments/ Of princes,” because marble and stone are inevitably “besmear’d with sluttish time,” while language, being immaterial, can theoretically live forever. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley, the brash idealist, argues against tyranny itself – “the frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” – in the course of presenting the evidence that time defeats despots with their monumental vanity.

 An unusual rhyme scheme, with three rhymes occurring three times each, contributes to the power of “Ozymandias.” But the magnificence of the poem’s conclusion goes beyond rhetoric.  The disjunction between “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” and the curt sentence that follows, “Nothing beside remains,” is a breathtaking example of how a poet can use the line-break as a meaning-making mechanism.

The phrase “colossal wreck,” a near oxymoron, is as landlocked in the poem’s last three lines as the ruined statue in the endless desert. The alliteration – “boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away” – smoothly conveys a sense of the vast continuous distance covered in that “stretch.”  The image is haunting, as is the framing device that Shelley employs. We are left wondering about the mysterious “traveler from an antique land” who is said to be the author of the poem.

“The New Colossus” (1883), Emma Lazarus’s stirring sonnet about the Statue of Liberty, borrows a rhyme from “Ozymandias” (stand, land, command) and invites us to read it as a rejoinder to Shelley’s sonnet. The statue in Lazarus' poem is a replacement for the Colossus of Rhodes, “the brazen giant of Greek fame.” The great bronze monument to the sun god, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, stood in the harbor of Rhodes. (It crumbled in an earthquake in 226 BC.) Not as a warrior with “conquering limbs” but as a woman with "mild eyes" and "silent lips," the new colossus will stand as tall as the old, honoring not a god but an ideal that will make it a wonder of the modern world. Welcoming immigrants and refugees, the legend in Lazarus' poem could be construed as the opposite of a tyrant's imperial vanity:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she,
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

-- David Lehman

from the archive; first published as a "maste++++rpiece" column in The Wall Street Journal (June 23, 2017 1:04 pm ET).

"The Definition of Gardening" [by James Tate]

Jim just loves to garden, yes he does.

He likes nothing better than to put on

his little overalls and his straw hat.

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

But then doubt begins to set in.

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

And thoughts about a "modernistic" garden

begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve.

He stands in the driveway a long time.

"Horticulture is a groping in the dark

into the obscure and unfamiliar,

kneeling before a disinterested secret,

slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,

birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and

destroy, pull out and apply salt,

hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,

where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,

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

into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,

through the nose, the earsplitting necrology

of it, the withering, shriveling,

the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder

and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,

wireworms are worse than their parents,

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

pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently

at me, the me who so loves to garden

because it prevents the heaving of the ground

and the untimely death of porch furniture,

and dark, murky days in a large city

and the dream home under a permanent storm

is also a factor to keep in mind."

 

James Tate, "The Definition of Gardening" from Shroud of the Gnome (The Ecco Press, 1997)

"Links of Snow" [haiku exchange by David Lehman & Shapiro, Jan 13-19, 2003]

Subj:    Re: A little group to compensate for senior miscounting; more on KK
Date:    1/13/03 9:42:35 AM Eastern Standard Time
From:    DaJoShap
To:    DCLEHMAN

Let the breeze of So What
Blow through you, said the masters:
Now it does: And so?

Kenneth liked the Rules:
But preferred smashing them Smash!
Why count? Huh? Go Fish!

If I could love all
The way I worshiped Her once
I'd be a Saint Paul!

If I loved each Thing
The way I adored that Girl:
Spinoza would sing!

That's my Father---there!
No, just a butterfly re-
turning to its branch!

Op illusions
Are not haiku? What say you?
Everything's haiku

Black holes, flat screens:
Is a new word poetry?
Old snow falls slowly--

Don't tease me, young Dave!
Let's plop like Ken into pond
Make happy sound wave!     

-- DS, 1 / 13 / 03

Haiku Heaven

Date: 1/13/03 7:15:47 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: DCLEHMAN
To: DaJoShap

Even the master
of So What has off days, days
off, days of fire.

O for a muse of
fire on this green lake of
snow in the mountains.

We no can count but
why keep account of our
haiku transgressions?

A bird's eye disturbs
this winter landscape of hills
like white short stories.

On the other hand,
one thing's left to do, to say:
I've forgotten what.

[DL, 1 / 13 / 03]

Links of Snow

from David Shapiro to David Lehman

Snow to me, I say,
Is what bananas are to
Gabriel Marquez!

I thought snow useless
Until I saw a book sez:
Economic Snow.

A physicist cried:
Wake up, David, you never
Thought snow was useful!?

No, no, no., never
Have I ever thought that snow
Was useful! To skis

trees, warming flowers,
giving symbolists white hours--
SNOW IS NOT MONEY!

A snowman blinks, War.
Time of the empire, fat whore!
On the lawn, new snow!

*****
As if pardoned from
death by the Czar of all Rus:
he received her note!

Swifter than haiku,
deeper than Prospero's book,
E-mail like snow...Look!

--DS, 1 / 17 / 03

Music of Poetry, and Ginsberg’s Box Remembered

Violin on floor --
Haven't practiced in months now--
Hear planes in the air!

Mute violin there--
No more sound than Al's squeeze-box--
Practice haiku more-!

-- DS, 1 / 18 / 03

Breakfast at Noon

from David Lehman to David Shapiro

Greetings from my hut
in Manhattan where I slept
late this cold morning.

Breakfast at noon, no
strings but a piano plays
"Shall We Dance" (Rodgers).

Yes, I still live back
in the fifties in Brooklyn
cheering the Dodgers.

-- (DL, 1/ 18 / 03]

Borges: Baseball is a metaphysical game because it need never conclude

And I in NJ
I make the snowy commute
Over the nude bridge!

How I've ended there!
Baseball metaphysical--
It may never end!

I walked Weequahic Park ("wekwak”)
Now my family is gone---
Let's take mental walk! 

-- DS, 1 / 19 / 03

Jane Freilicher, "Parts of a World" at Kasmin (Jan 21-Feb 27, 2021)

 

 

"The Master of the Gamblers": Omnia Vincit Amor

The "Master of the Gamblers" is how art historians, curators, and auctioneers refer to the 17th-century Italian painter (Rome, maybe Naples), otherwise unnamed, who painted, in the main, gamblers playing cards and shooting dice. "Omnia Vincit Amor" ("Love  Conquers All") is unusual among his works. -- DL

John Yau: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Eve Aschheim

__________________________________________________________________________________

Things I Should Tell You Before It’s Too Late

 

Princess Sitting Duck isn’t my real name

I am not one of the ones marred

 

By inexplicable outbursts of an obstreperous nature

Most times I am a curtain of conviviality

 

Don’t make friends with my dog

I used to collect ideas until I realized

 

I don’t have any of my own

Learn to shirk your duties

 

With dignity I always say

I used to dress in a squirrel suit

 

and play in the forest

where it flanks the railroad tracks

 

leading to the haunted mines

I never reached the rank of colonel

 

You can hold my hand

as long as you don’t lose it

 

I serve drinks in tall blue glasses

I am never sure which principles are mine

 

Sometimes I get glassy-eyed

and pee on the neighbor’s porch

 

I no longer throw stones at children

I bow whenever I see a high-ranking dignitary

 

stop to tie his shoes

or zip up his fly

 

Princess Sitting duck isn’t my nickname either

____________________________________________________________________________________________

John Yau has published many books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. He has a book of poems, Genghis Chan on Drums, forthcoming from Omnidawn, and a monograph on the Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong, from Lund Humphries (both fall 2021). He is the publisher of Black Square Editions, and his reviews of art and poetry appear regularly in the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He lives in New York City and teaches at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University). [For more information on, and work by, John Yau, click here.]

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

                  John Yau, 1983. Oil on canvas by Robert Berlind

 

 

 

"Witness to a Murder" [by David Lehman]

Witness to a Murder

                                                                   -- Barbara Stanwyck (1954)

She saw a murder.
She bought all the papers.
She pocketed the murdered woman's earrings.
She called the police.
She smoked a cigarette.
She told her story and was not believed.
She deduced that the door had been tampered with.
She answered the doctor's unreasonable questions reasonably.
She heard the woman say one thing: “Show Mr. Peabody into the library, please.”
She didn't back down.
She insisted she saw the ex-Nazi, author of Age of Violence, kill the girl, “Joyce Stewart.”
She didn't write the threatening letters that were typed on her machine.
She didn't get ticketed, just scolded, for speeding on a scary mountainous road.
She took the elevator down.
She ran in the street.
She hurried up the black and white steps pursued by shadows. 

Balanchine Quiz [by Mindy Aloff]

Question: In the Igor Stravinsky score for the 1928 Balanchine ballet Apollon Musagète, today known as Apollo, which 17^th-century French poet’s treatise, L’Art poétique—as the dance scholar Lynn Garafola has written—“sparked Stravinsky’s conception” and called for poets to practice which poetic meter, built by Stravinsky into the variation for Calliope?

Answer: Nicolas Boileau, Alexandrines.

Question: Name three ballets or ballets within other musical works in which Balanchine included the figure of a poet, immortal or mortal, anonymous or named.

Answer (choose any three): Apollo (or Apollon Musagète, 1928, Stravinsky score, Ballets Russes), Orphée aux Enfers (Comic opera in three acts and nine scenes, 1931, Jacques Offenbach, Les Ballets Russes de Georges Balanchine), Les Amours du Poète (Comedy with music in five acts: Act III song “Le Pauvre Pierre,” 1932, Robert Schumann, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo), Waltzes of Beethoven (1933, Les Ballets 1933), The Bat (1936, Jacques Offenbach, American Ballet Ensemble), Orpheus and Eurydice (Opera in two acts and four scenes, 1936, Christoph Willibald Gluck, American Ballet Ensemble), The Song of Norway (Operetta in two acts and seven scenes, 1944, Edvard Grieg, dancers from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo), The Night Shadow (later retitled La Somnambula; 1946; Vittorio Rieti, based on themes in operas by Vincenzo Bellini; Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo), Orpheus (Ballet in three scenes, 1948, Stravinsky, Ballet Society), Orpheus und Eurydike (Opera in three acts and five scenes, 1963, C.W. Gluck, Ballett der Hamburgischen Staatsoper. N.B.: The “Chaconne” of this production served as the basis for the 1976 ballet Chaconne at the New York City Ballet), Don Quixote (Ballet in three acts, 1965, Nicholas Nabokov, New York City Ballet). (From George Balanchine’s catalog raisonné, www.balanchine.org )

Question: Who answered as follows off the top of his head in response to a question during a 1983 interview with Richard Philp for Dance Magazine?

“Recently I was reading a collection of poems and felt a sudden shift, which at first I couldn’t identify. In a very modest, unemphatic way a simple “it” had been slipped in which had the effect of changing the whole sense of the four lines before and the three or four lines which followed. In just one sentence everything had been changed as a result of the placement of one two-letter word. You enjoyed the feel of that, sensed the correctness. The same is true of the shifts in Balanchine’s dances. As subtle as they may be, they are essential to the life and meaning of his work. Few choreographers have known how to do that.”

Answer: Edwin Denby (from “Balanchine’s Poetics,” Dance Writings, ed. Robert Cornfield and William MacKay, first pub. 1986 by Alfred A. Knopf, reprinted by The University Press of Florida.

from the archive; first posted June 2, 2014.

Rudy Burckhardt's Photos at Tibor de Nagy (part two) [by Vincent Katz]

How Rudy Burckhardt photographed on the move is something of mystery. He did it, so we know it’s possible, but try to put yourself in his position. He must have moved with a dancer’s speed and precision, or, cat-like, lain in wait before pouncing on his unsuspecting prey. He regularly captures head-on in close proximity the precise moment at which or just before someone looks at him and says, “Hey!”

In addition to tableaux frozen from the city’s gyre, Burckhardt could compose images that seem snatched from a Renaissance picture-making textbook. Such a one is V-Back, from about 1985. There are two versions of this moment. In the first, Rudy has come up close behind a beautiful woman, her hair carefully styled and held back by a clip, a slender chain around her neck, a purse hanging from her left shoulder, her sweater turned backward, so that its V reveals her upper back. We can see the spinal cleft as it travels down, widening to a darkness in between her delicately flaring shoulder blades. We see a man in a suit in front of her, waiting to cross the street. We catch a glimpse of the traffic as it rushes past.

In the second photo of this moment, Burckhardt has quickly and adroitly turned his camera from a vertical to a horizontal format. He takes advantage of a moment of urban serendipity. A large white delivery truck is passing. In Burckhardt’s horizontal frame, we now see, in addition to the man in the suit on the left, a man in a long-sleeved striped shirt on the right. These two men frame this remarkable woman, each one turned slightly toward her, without actually looking at her, in two different gestures, diffidence and deference. And in that split-second, the woman has suddenly become aware of something behind her, some heat of energy, some thinking, something stretching back to the galleries of European museums, kindled on the stages of New York’s ballet. She turns, looking at Burckhardt, and now at us in the photograph, her beautiful face caught in that glance, the whole picture given a timeless quality by the pure background of the white truck passing, such that, for a split-second, Burckhardt has taken the city completely away, and we are enveloped in this moment of observation, two people seeing each other for the first time.

The exhibition of these and other chance encounters of New York City residents immortalized by Burckhardt’s eye and body is punctuated by a sequence of three films shown on a wall-mounted monitor. In these three films — Default Averted  (1975), Cerveza Bud (1981), and Ostensibly (1989) — Burckhardt takes three different approaches, all showing his complex approach to cinema. Default Averted refers to the moment when New York City almost went bankrupt; Burckhardt takes a typically wry approach to the topic, choosing to show a building being demolished over time. This is a favorite motif of his in his films; he loved the way New York was built, and also knocked down, sporadically, without municipal oversight. Cerveza Bud focuses on one of New York’s great pleasures — public joy, in this case in the form of outdoor dancing, music playing, and roller skating. As usual, Burckhardt is drawn to the city’s black and Latinx populations. Ostensibly uses a poem by that title by John Ashbery, and in fact Ashbery appears in the film, in red suspenders, recording the poem. So many events and images fly by in these films, balanced by moments of calm, that I like to try to document them as they pass. I’ll end with my notes from the films.

Default Averted (1975, 20 minutes, black and white, music by Thelonious Monk and Edgar Varèse)

Architectural emblems, details, demolition, smoke and fire
Fireman grins
Boards dropped from roof
T Monk big band sound to sped up b/w city traffic
Shakespeare-like head all that remains: preserved relic in antic sweep of wreckage-remake (the New York mantra)
Earl Hines reflections in wet pavement
Walls fall, classic Burckhardtism

Cerveza Bud (1981, 30 minutes, color)

Endless bodies of color, dancing, roller skating
Public displays of love: bodies, gay couples dance Hustle to Kool & The Gang
Reclining in summer grass à la La Grand Jatte but more relaxed, more openly sexual
Open embrace of Twin Towers, part of that cityscape with street light suspended in front
Seagull soars against dirtied blue

Ostensibly (1989, 16 minutes, color, poem by John Ashbery,)

piano music by Alvin Curran)
JA reading poem
Kia Heath nude poses in front of Rudy’s De Kooning then dresses, walks in snow
Nice family hops backward up steps
Maine log-throwing competition
A woman (Rochelle Kraut?) reads same poem
Shots of pond details of trees
Man jogs shirtless on Maine road
NY intersection (23rd & Broadway?) in rain reflection
Dancers at party (Skowhegan?)
RB pushing garbage to gutter (NY) and trees to ground (Maine)
Lichen details
NY walkers, skylines, water towers, sped up clouds

Ed. Note:  for part one of Vincent Katz's piece on the new Rudy Burckhardt show, click here. 

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 11 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side
Tel: 212 262 5050. | Web: www.tibordenagy.com | Email: info@tibordenagy.com
The show is up from December 21, 2020 until January 23, 2021.
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday to Saturday 10-6pm

"The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered" [by Clive James, 1939-2019]

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

A Culture in Crisis: Jason Shinder on "Howl" [film by Bill Hayward]

"A culture in crisis..." from bill hayward on Vimeo.

"Miss, Missed, Missing" [by Beth Gylys]

A shame you blew me off.  I shaved my legs,
the sheets are clean, the dust poodles all gone.
I’ve spent the day lounging in my new dress

or standing at the mirror (it does attest
I’m looking pretty hot) and drinking wine.
A shame you didn’t make it. I shaved my legs

and finished that novel about a family mess:
an affair, a murdered child, a mother stricken.
I’ve whiled the hours lounging in my new dress.

I even wore lipstick. I try to want you less.
Night and not even a message on my phone.
Too bad that you aren’t here. I shaved my legs,

cooked veal cutlets. I serve the cat the dregs,
shimmy out of Spanx, my black-lace thong.
I wash my face, slip off the wrinkled dress,

put on sweats and think how I would press
against you. I touch myself. I’m so alone.
Again you blew me off. I shaved my legs,
another wasted day, waiting in some new dress.   

Ed. Note: The villanelle is a notoriously difficult form to master. I, a great believer in the value of constrictive verse forms, regard it as far more challenging than the others I have tried -- the sestina, the sonnet, the pantoum, the canzone, the tanka, you name it. For many years now, Beth Gylys has made the villanelle serve her narrative and lyrical purposes reliably, with good nature, candor, and humor: an achievement it gives me pleasure to salute. 

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly Fly TWA

The great Mad Ave mad men could not have created a better ad for TWA. --  DL

"Not exactly easy and it shouldn’t be": Aspen Matis in Conversation with Mitch Sisskind

Photo © Alex Pieros.

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Often when people have some ability or inclination, they become aware of that or others might point it out to them. Then they’re well-advised to develop that ability. If you’re seven feet tall, try playing basketball. Unfortunately, there can be blocks against it. You might refuse to play basketball for the very reason that you’re seven feet tall. But if you’re a certain kind of person—let’s call it a creative person—and you don’t act upon that fact, there can be problems. In “Madmen” someone says of the main character, “This is what happens to an artistic personality who isn’t an artist.” So I have to give it a shot.
 
Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his/her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation? 

When I was in middle school the girls learned to speak Pig Latin. They liked speaking it fast to each other, both for its own sake and because the boys couldn’t do that or understand it. As I remain a “boy” after all these years, much of academic criticism is like Pig Latin to me. Meanwhile, Auden wrote that negative criticism always turns into showing off, so it's best to skip it as a writer or as a reader. Sometimes wonderful critical insights appear spontaneously. My professor Angus Fletcher once casually remarked, “Freud is such a great writer. He can make you believe anything.” Negative and positive at the same time!

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

I have a few inspiring alter egos that can help me write. One of them is the “peckerwood”—a sort of backwoods man in the modern world who breeds dogs. But he's not a Trump person. He’s deeply apolitical and anti-materialist. He likes it when his car breaks down. He would see Trump as soft, materialistic, and frightened of dogs. Perhaps surprisingly, V.S. Naipaul shows real understanding of peckerwoods in his book on the American South. Other alter egos are the Torah scholar, the sorority girl of the 1950s, and the Chicago policeman. Maybe a common theme would be people who have passionate, unconventional interests that they desperately want to communicate, and they assume that the reader shares their interests. I identify with these people. I don't have to “get inside” them. They’re inside me.

Your new book of poems, Collected Poems, is rich with moments of delightful surprise, sudden twists beyond the mundane moment and into themes that feel vast and universal. How do you achieve this element of freshness? Was this volume’s unifying quality of surprise a conscious choice?

I like characters and voices that are hard to identify as either mundane or transcendent. If I can create that indeterminacy, whether in a short poem or in a whole book, I hope it brings the surprise and freshness you refer to. On the other hand, some readers find this unpleasantly confusing. I’ve gotten both of those responses to my writing and also in other areas of my life.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?

Kenneth Koch said that a poet is interested in the word “ashtray” while a prose writer is interested in all the people who have used the ashtray. Poets young and old should to be sensitive to words or phrases that catch their interest, that strike a spark, however slight. See what you can make of that. I recently came across the phrase “make cow eyes,” meaning to flirt, and I was able to write a poem from that starting point. Stuff like this can happen in wondrous ways. You may know that Lewis Carroll thought of the last line of his long poem “The Hunting of the Snark”—“For the snark was a boojum, you see”—before he wrote anything else.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?
I’ve done lots of ghostwriting with publishers large and small. After that experience, in my own work I’m much more comfortable with self-publishing. I don’t like soliciting people to take an interest in my writing and the snail’s pace of the whole thing can also be demoralizing. I’m getting ready to do a new book of poems that I want to call “Bringing in the Sheaves.” I like not having to consult with a publisher about the title or about the cover. I hope people like my work, but I want to have full responsibility, whether it succeeds or not. I find writing easier now than at earlier points in my life. That is certainly exciting, although it’s still not exactly easy and it shouldn’t be. As Emily Dickinson stated, it’s “all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.” Surf and turf. Nothing better than that.

Click here to listen to Mitch Sisskind on WKCR's "Bookworm" with Michael Silverblatt, click here to read Mitch's blog posts. Order Sisskind's Collected Poems here. 

Aspen Matis is the author of Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir (Little A, June 2020). Called “fearless…A beautifully written story of inspiration, courage, and ultimate transformation” by Booklist, the book was a #1 Amazon bestseller in memoirs. Author Deepak Chopra said the memoir “will open the door to empathy, compassion, and healing.” Novelist Aimee Bender called Your Blue Is Not My Blue “gorgeous…a gripping read that wrestles honestly and sensitively with the ways we connect and the ways we miss one another.”

Matis's short-form writing has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tin House, Psychology Today, Salon, Bloomberg, and Marie Claire. Her first book, the critically acclaimed memoir Girl in the Woods, was published by HarperCollins in 2015. Called “a powerful read” by O, The Oprah Magazine, the book made The Guardian's annual top 50 list. The New York Times named Matis “a hero.”

Rudy Burckhardt’s “New York Hello!” (part one) [by Vincent Katz]

Rudy Burckhardt : “New York Hello!” Photographs and Films from the 1970s and ‘80s

At Tibor de Nagy Gallery, December 11, 2020 through January 23, 2021

https://www.tibordenagy.com

https://www.tibordenagy.com/exhibitions/rudy-burckhardt4

Through January 23, run over to Tibor de Nagy Gallery at 11 Rivington Street to see a glorious selection of the later New York City street photographs of famed downtown denizen Rudy Burckhardt. You can also see the images online, but Burckhardt’s prints, small and unassuming as they are, repay close observation in person.

I guess the only art form that survives intact online is poetry. Poetry was something Burckhardt had a lot of, and I often find myself making the Freudian slip of referring to a photo of his as a “poem.” Partially, that has to do with the wide spaciousness Burckhardt was able to include in his photographs. They have a space in them that reminds one of the space in the city poems of his friends Edwin Denby, James Schuyler, and Frank O’Hara.

When he first came to New York from his native Basel, in 1935, at the age of 21, excited though he was by the city’s gigantic scale, he was unable to photograph it, focusing instead on a prescient series of fragments — pedestrians rushing past him in midtown against slivers of storefronts and sidewalks. The effect was almost hermetic, as though Rudy was a consciousness that the urban swirl buffeted but never disturbed.

That still consciousness was something he brought to his well-known photographs of the 1940s, iconic views of Times Square and the Flatiron Building. After a few years in New York, Burckhardt had figured out a way to bring the tallest buildings and pedestrians into the same frame. He worked quickly, never wasting film, preferring to wait for the right season and light, rather than to force an unwilling moment into a picture.

Concomitant to his photographic practice, Burckhardt made over one hundred 16-millimeter films, some in collaboration with other artists, musicians and poets, others on his own as a form of diary or collage film he would assemble over time from footage shot in New York, Maine, and other locations. The collaborative films were one way Burckhardt kept up to date, choosing to invite into them succeeding generations of New York’s brightest stars, from Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles and Aaron Copland, through Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara, to Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Rackstraw Downes, Taylor Mead and Yoshiko Chuma, Douglas Dunn, Grazia Della Terza, Dana Reitz, David Shapiro, Christopher Sweet, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Jacob Burckhardt and Tom Burckhardt, among others.

Like his lifelong friend and collaborator, poet and critic Edwin Denby, Burckhardt made it a habit to keep up on the latest developments in poetry, music, theater, dance, and visual art. Denby and Burckhardt were inveterate culture vultures, inspiring generations of New Yorkers after them. Part of that urbane desire involved being attuned to the look of people and things, as they changed through New York’s mid-century.

Burckhardt photographed on New York’s streets from the late 1930s through the 1990s. His later work shows him experimenting, evolving, using familiar themes in different ways, with subtly different emphases. The photographs currently on view at Tibor de Nagy are striking in their immediacy, their sophisticated informality, and their ability to project certain types or looks of people. Burckhardt was remarkable in his ability to find the beauty in many kinds of people.

Three photos of couples walking are emblematic of the power of youth, of animated promenade. In one from the mid 1980s, a black couple presents ultimate contemporary style — he in t-shirt, athletic shorts, and Pumas without socks, she elegantly coiffed, in designed low-V t-shirt, carefully ironed and cuffed jeans, white sandals. They fit together in style perfectly. But to make a great photograph, he needed more than the main subject. Intimately steeped in classic European painting, he had no trouble forging balanced photographic figure-and-ground compositions on the fly. He also was immersed in modern Abstract painting, learning from it never to leave any area without interest. Here, Burckhardt catches memorable figures between and around the two mythic beauties who dominate the scene.

Ed. note: Part two of Vincent Katz's review will appear tomorrow or the day after.

"On Bedtime and Books" [by Victoria Kelly]

For three years, before I had my own children, I was a Court Appointed Special Advocate to two little girls living in the foster care system. As a CASA, I visited these girls weekly—at home, at school, and at daycare—and attended all court hearings relevant to their placement. My goal was to make sure they were safe and thriving—both in their foster home and when they visited their mother, who was overcoming a series of difficulties in her life. The role as a volunteer CASA is not unlike that of a social worker—get to know the children, learn their routines and habits, and hope that they come to see you as someone they can trust. If many cases, they will confide in you things they might not confide to a foster parent or a social worker, situations that could become harmful or life-threatening.

I loved these little girls. We played paper dolls and “running away to Hollywood.” I watched them enter kindergarten and learn to read, sounding out each word with furrowed brows, and then graduate to chapter books. These girls were fortunate to have a caring foster family. But in their guardianship situation they were not so lucky. They still linger in the foster system after many years, caught in a court battle that remains unresolved.

It was heartbreaking to watch these girls struggle to feel safe, to understand where they belonged, to wonder if they were wanted. Now that I am a mother to two little girls of my own, I look back on those years I spent as a CASA with new eyes. It was what drew me to support the Pajama Program, an organization that provides new pajamas and new books to children like the ones I knew. The children they help are in foster care, or living in shelters, or living in poverty, or have been abandoned. These are kids who do not get tucked into bed. Sometimes these pajamas and books are the only new things they have ever received. Pajamas, and books, help them feel warm and secure at a time when they are most vulnerable.

I can’t imagine what it would have felt like to have never owned a book as a child, to have never had those long Sunday mornings in bed reading, dreaming up new worlds. If you would like to get involved, visit the Pajama Program site to donate, sponsor a book drive, or volunteer at their NYC reading center. Or go here to learn about volunteering as a CASA. 

from the archive; first posted October 7, 2015

"General Strike" [by Jim Dolot]

And balagan and Milosz on jstor.
Certainly Danny Kaye was The Court Jester.

“This day” (Darwin wrote) “I shot me a condor.”
Who manages to say no to being quaestor?

And in Jerusalem, what is the new measure?
Zechariah 2.   The Duke composes.  The maestros

Generally struck down this whole orchestra.
And the chord, the long interval, is Shakespeare-Castro.

Because of polyptychs, or was it politics, disaster
Struck the General Strikers from the cadastre.

Yestreen, Torahs of authors met in The U Bistro.
Tzaddik, what untold mastery, Cholesterol Pollster?

What violence is done within all the test rows?
What worth, after your Censuses, your lustratios?

(Who, long dead, outpipes the Hasty Paperer?
What Domesday Book is or is not a roster?

On bikes with bamboo shoots, whose happy jousters?)
& is the acrobat is a knot in the air, a typographer?

What freedom in this world but the unrhymed rooster’s?
Carl Friedrich carries dawn’s K down on a poster.)

And Certs and Crest to brush our teeth, the Flosser.
To defy all surfaces, asters and pilasters.

And balagan and Milosz on jstor.
Certes, Danny Kaye was The Court Jester.

from the archive; first posted September 22, 2018. Jim Dolot's poems have appeared in Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms and The Stud Duck.

Reading and Rereading "One Tree" by Philip Metres (by Nin Andrews)

 

In the fall of 2019, I was at a The Lit Youngstown Literary Conference in Youngstown, Ohio (amazing how
long ago that seems now) when I heard Philip Metres read his poem, “One Tree” from his wonderful new book, Shrapnel Maps. And like many poems that are also parables, the poem stuck with me. And stuck with me.  And stuck with me.

When I first heard it, I thought I knew exactly what it meant. I could see it unfolding in my mind. After all, it seems like a simple story, and a true one. I know the neighborhood where the poet lives, and his wife, Amy Breau, a fabulous poet in her own right. I smiled, picturing her, rushing outside with her hair on fire, screaming, “NO!” as the man began chainsawing a limb from her sacred tree, while Philip, the consummate peacemaker, stayed inside, wishing he could hide. But in the end, when the chainsaw was lowered into the tree, I thought, Phil! You let them cut her tree? Because “someone must give”?

I was particularly irked by his apologies to the neighbor, his repeated claim, “it’s not me,” when it was, too, him. After all, “we” said no in the third sentence, not she. What a coward! I thought.

The poem triggered memories of my own family where my mother fought and lost many local, environmental battles. This was back in the 60’s when sexism was even more alive and well than it is today, and my father was so horrified by her activism, he asked that the local newspaper use her maiden name when they wrote about her. He didn’t want the businessmen in town to know that she was his wife. I sometimes wondered—if he had stood by her side, would she have been more successful? After all, people listened to men back then. Not to women.

As I was driving home to Virginia after the conference, a line kept repeating in my head:  “Always the same story: two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love.” I began contemplating the poem as a parable of the one tree—or the sacred tree of life. What will or won’t we do to defend it? I loved how he compared the tree to the baby brought to Solomon. It makes a lovely environmental parable.  Or so I thought.

But then, this winter Philip Metres sent me a video of another tree poem, "Olive Tree" for a project called Lit by the Imaginationthat I am working on for LitYoungstown (we are asking poets to read a poem and offer a prompt based on the poem. These short videos will be posted in April on the LitYoungstown Facebook page). I thought of the olive tree, and the term—offering an olive branch. And of the closing words in the poem, “first brambles, then olives.” Written at his brother-in-law’s home in Palestine, the poem reminded me of Metres’ faith, hope for, and interest in peace and conflict resolution, especially in the Middle East. And suddenly I realized I had misunderstood the first tree poem. Somehow I had fallen so in love with the image of the wife, the glorious, fiery wife with her passion and vision so clear, I had not paid attention to what the poet intended.

The speaker of the poem isn’t championing his wife or the tree. Instead he’s pondering the question of what one should do if he sees both sides of a conflict. “Must I fight for my wife’s desire for yellow blooms when my neighbors’ tomatoes will stunt and blight in shade?” he asks. The tree is not the tree of life, but a tulip poplar, one of the fastest growing native trees of the eastern United States, and a tree that grows so wide, the Native Americans used to make canoes from their trunks. Like the wife in the poem, I had tulip trees in my yard as a child, and they grew to be over 90 feet tall in a relatively short time. In the end the poem, when “they lower the chainsaw again,” I suppose they are putting the chainsaw down on the ground, not raising it to the tree. And the speaker is apologizing, “Dear neighbor it’s not me,” as he places the blame squarely on the shoulders of his hot-headed wife. The poem is not an ecological parable but a political parable about neighborly love, or the lack thereof.

Now, when I reread the poem, I wonder at how often we blame the hot-headed, unappeasable women of the world. Is that a word, unappeasable? I am picturing them now, whole tribes of unappeasable, rising up as one. Needless to say, I still vote for the wife.

Philip Metres has written numerous books, including Shrapnel Maps, Sand Opera, and The Sound of Listening. Awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations, and three Arab American Book Awards, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.