The Best American Poetry

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Raina J. León

Art by Raffaele

suspect

by Raina J. León

in the isolation room, there are dirt spots on the floor.  in laboring, as the contraction waves rise to peak pain and then taper, i focus on dirt.  i am riding a wave above the soiling.  the child washes me over in hot spray.  my body sheens over in glow.  a nurse says, you are so strong and you are doing so well.  her affirmations are dumb; i do not trust them.  how can i when i cannot see her lips, her face, beneath the blue mask.  i, too, am masked.  it’s a dirty exchange.  i think in expletives.  i try to return to the wave.  i ask for a heating pad.  they will never bring it.  my touch is contagion, suspected contagion.  i am guilty until proven innocent.  a fever is pandemic. a black body is pandemic.  a fever is not a possible sign of labor, though i am laboring.  the child pushes blood through the gate, announces herself.  the body takes over.  the doctor says, “do whatever your body tells you.” as if i could stop her entrance on this human water, the fertile spark of me a path into an isolation filled with people.  i focus on the spots and their erasure.  mine.

 

photo credit: Matteo Monchiero

Raina J. León, PhD, is a Black, Afro-Boricua, native Philadelphian, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She is a fellow of Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006), the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Macondo, and CantoMundo and has been published in over 100 publications in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and academic scholarship. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the practice of humanizing education.

She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn and sombra: dis(locate) and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto and The Ruby in San Francisco. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, a journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She is a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

"Late November Afternoon, Hazman’s Field" [by Karl Elder]

                “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”-- TS Eliot, "What the Thunder Said"

A man in gray overalls
steps out of the gray matter of the horizon.
Snow whirs above the stalks
like angels of locusts
Discerning his face
is like trying to make substance
of atoms that won’t adhere—
these flakes,
one of which, wafer-like
lights at your parted lips
like a hint of a name
partially quenching
the dry question of identity.
You freeze,
almost remembering;
something about another season,
person, and place.

-- 1977

Squibs 423-444: My Activism Lustrum [by Alan Ziegler]

 

423: In the early 60s, protesters march to “ban the bomb”; the bomb is banned (partially) with the 1963 Test Ban Treaty. Protesters march, sit-in, and are beaten in pursuit of equal rights; discrimination is banned (partially) with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These are baby steps, but we're two-for-two. The antiwar (Vietnam) movement is taking shape as I enter college in 1965; the (partial) winning streak is about to end. 

 

424: My freshman year at Union College, I attend an International Relations Club conference in Washington. I meet campus liberals and campus conservatives; the liberals are more fun. In the hotel lobby a long-haired kid sits at an unattended piano and improvises melodically; I ask if he's with the conference and he says no he's in a rock group called The Left Banke. I hang out with a kid from Afghanistan; he is proud that his country’s flag hangs first outside the State Department. We get a background-only briefing from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who says we have no plans to stay in Vietnam after we win. I ask him, “What’s to stop the Viet Cong from restarting the war as soon as you declare victory and leave?” The Secretary replies, “We can get back there faster than they can.” 

 

425: Rich Balagur and I start an anti-war coalition at school, beginning with the lowest common belief: end the bombing of North Vietnam; 10% of the college community signs our petition.


President Johnson increases the bombing in response to the "Nervous Nellies"; escalation enters the antiwar argot. People may be dying because of the movement. I search for a silver lining in this cloud of horror, and find it when a local television station tapes an interview with me, which I watch in a dorm lounge. The me on the couch listens to the me on the screen say that even if the Vietnam War has too much momentum for us to end it, the antiwar movement will succeed in the long run: "If it starts happening again, people will say no before it is too late." The student sitting next to the me on the couch says to the me on the screen, “Good point.” I will turn out to be utterly wrong.

 

426: Our movement grows as we march, cajole, educate, and organize. The Committee Against Bombing becomes the Campus Action Committee, with an expanded portfolio including racism and economic oppression. And always I am doing the two-finger typewriter dance (Dylan may have gone electric, but we are still in the era of acoustic typewriters) for the college newspaper. (For more about my piece that was called "a slander of the whole College community," see: dangerous words.) My outlet is doubled when Rich Balagur and I concoct the Paper Highway, along with poet Carl Rosenstock and music critic Cliff Safane.

427: I receive hate mail in the form of marked-up newspaper clippings addressed to Allen Viegler. The first one (not available) is from the Daily News with the headline “Send me Protesters for Christmas,” a quote from a soldier in Vietnam who says he will “feed them to the Viet Cong.” The word protester is crossed out throughout the article, replaced by Viegler.

 

 

428:  Time again for a name-change and paradigm shift. The Campus Action Committee will now be The Community, with even broader concerns: sexism, educational reform, expansion of the arts. We need a participatory spectacle to kick it off, and the freshman beanie is the ideal prop. Beanies are issued to incoming freshmen, who are instructed to wear them outdoors until the football team wins its first game; very few in my class lasted more than two weeks, and succeeding classes even less. But the beanies still exist as a way to identify the underclass (who must eat and live together), and we call for a Beanie Burn to smoke out the class system and shed light on The Community. 

429: A group of high school students are suspended for publishing an underground newspaper called the Free Student. Balagur and I create a leaflet in support: “You have the power of numbers and the moral justification on this…You can’t discuss the issues raised by the Free Student if it isn’t published.” We show up before school starts and hand out the leaflets along with copies of Paper Highway, on the public (we thought) sidewalk. The assistant principal and the principal call in the police. Student journalist Scott Simons is on the scene and writes a piece called The Big Bust: "You with them? [the assistant principal says to me]. Well, I’ll warn you like I warned them. Get off school grounds or get arrested." Alan Ziegler starts asking what law says we have to get off school property. Cop says "The law is go!" The principal doesn’t want us to go. He points his finger at Ziegler and Balagur and says, "I want to proffer charges against these two." Ziegler replies that he wants to proffer charges of assault and battery against the assistant principal. The principal starts yelling, "I want them arrested." And indeed Balagur and I are arrested, driven downtown in a police car, and placed in adjoining cells, where we chant “Om” until we are bailed out with our rent money. Simons' account: Alan comes out first. Cop pulls out paper bag, hands Alan his belt, shoelaces, wallets, and an autographed copy of Alice’s Restaurant.

 

430: We become a big local story. “Principal Supported in Arrest of 2 Men” headlines The Schenectady Gazette, which identifies us by saying, “They told authorities they were students.” In subsequent articles, we learn that authorities say they will consult with the District Attorney to see whether “there is any involvement with pornography per se.” We are said to glorify “the use of language and thoughts reserved for amoral, indecent and morally corrupt individuals…” which would “easily shock the senses of all decent people.” We “contribute nothing of value” and law enforcement will “oppose this evil by all means available to us” to avoid “terrible consequences of the continued exposure…on the minds of our students.” I love the idea that we can be both amoral and morally corrupt.

431: Represented by an ACLU lawyer, we make our first court appearance before Judge Stroebel, who has a preceding proceeding: “George, you are charged with public drunkenness and falling down. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?” “Guilty, judge.” “Now George, I haven’t seen you here in a while. I thought you had a job. What happened? Now back to the same old thing?” “Judge, my wife left me again. She’s gone. But I want to get my life back again.” “Well, thirty days in the County Farm might at least get you cleaned up again.” County Farm? I imagine Rich and I goaded into violence by a mean warden (think David Landau in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang) and growing old breaking rocks and feeding chickens.

432: I am interviewed, live, on the local T.V. news. After the show, the weather girl says she can’t wait to go home and tell her teenage daughter that she met me. Police cars frequently park across the street from our apartment. As I am crossing a street, I am almost nicked by a car turning the corner; it’s the assistant principal. I ask a professor if he thinks our phone is tapped and he replies, "No need. They've probably bugged your apartment." I get involved in a fender-bender; the cop who arrives at the scene looks at my license and says, "Aren't you in enough trouble?"

433: At the trial, the assistant principal lies and says he never touched me, but the ACLU lawyer won’t let us testify because she wants to keep the case pure for appeal. We are convicted (by the judge), and the Albany Times Union describes me as sitting “poker faced” at the verdict. Our sentence is fifty dollars or five days. I’m tempted to take the five days but I feel a cold coming on. I am doing an independent study on Revolutionary Change in America, and my paper is egregiously late, but the professor says I won’t be penalized because I have been doing "field work."

 

 

434: I read Rollo May in my Humanistic Psychology class and am nervously excited at the reception following his campus lecture. I am trying to get up the courage to approach him with my many questions, when he walks straight to me and says, “So, you’re the radical around here,” and proceeds to pick my brain.

 

435: The snowy New Hampshire backroads of the McCarthy movement lead to the Memphis-motel and Los Angeles-hotel eradications of King and Kennedy, and the system-gone-berserk in Chicago. That long and winding road of hope, despair, and anger ends with Richard Nixon at the White House doorstep. I am asked to cover the antiwar Counter Inauguration for a makeshift network of small radio stations. I record each segment several times, inserting a local angle by attributing the same quote to a student from, say, Trinity College, Cornell, and Dartmouth. (Twenty years later, my broadcasting teammate, Richard Roth, will cover Tiananmen Square for CBS while I am writing and teaching poetry.)

 

436: I take notes as protesters chant “Up the ass of the ruling class” while some fling mud on the fur coats of guests arriving at a reception for Spiro Agnew at the Smithsonian; flee from a club-wielding cop on a horse after the cop decides I am among the mud-throwers; help a well-dressed elderly woman find her companions, and am pleased when they turn out to be on our team; and dance myself dizzy to a deafening rock band under strobe lights in a tent. I crash on a church floor among dozens of visiting dissidents, the air filled with incense and peace lullabies.

 

437: I wake up shuddering. We disarmed Johnson only to see Nixon loaded in his place. I have to talk to someone who can actually do something, and I remember Al Lowenstein. He was a leader of the Dump Johnson movement, and I met him a couple of times when he was running for Congress in my home district. Now he is my representative. I bee-line to his office, where he is hobnobbing with well-dressed constituents. I am wearing blue jeans and a cowboy hat. “Al,” I say, “I'm really bummed out about Nixon; I mean, it  just hit me that he's the fucking president.” Lowenstein takes me aside and assures me that the movement is still alive, now with people like him in Congress. He will be gerrymandered out of office in two years.

 

438: Along the Inauguration parade route—Nixon is not due for a half hour—I spot a figure in a tree. He looks about 16, wearing a baseball cap and T-shirt in the chill. And he has a rifle. I approach carefully, in case it isn't Nixon he is after. “Hey, whatcha doing up there?” I shout, counting on my long hair to entitle me to an answer. “Waiting for Nixon.” “Gonna shoot him?” “Nah, it’s plastic, see?” He taps the rifle against a branch and tosses it easily into the air. “They’ll arrest you. If they don’t shoot you first.” “For what? Playing with a toy? It’s political theater." “The Secret Service can’t tell actor from assassin.” The kid climbs down and takes a bow as I applaud. 

 

439: After Kent State, with classes shut down by a nationwide strike, Union students and faculty coalesce to form an alternative college. A philosophy professor and I teach a course on educational innovation, and I form the 
Committee for Educational Research and Experimentation (I love naming things.) One of my proposals is for an educational commune: the College would provide housing for a group of students next year, and the participants would get a course credit for group living and curricular experimentation. The unit would be a hub for faculty talks, arts projects, and whatever else students can devise given the time and space. The proposal is accepted, but I am  graduating and pass the torch to the next generation. 

 

440: As in high school, bells signal the start and end of classes, and they continue to toll during the strike. We tell the Dean the bells are paternalistic, Pavlovian, and unnecessary. The Dean promises there will be no more bells. Small victory. 

 

441: A friend is kicked out of the campus bookstore for being barefoot, and we decide to take ironic action, a mock cause to break the confrontational tension. Several of us return to the book store and ceremoniously remove our shoes and socks. We unfurl makeshift placards: Up With Freedom, Down With Socks; Free the Toes Ten; Don’t Tread On Me When I Tread Bare. The manager comes over and sprays the area with Right Guard: "more appropriate than tear gas." We all laugh. We’ve had our fun and leave, saying "We'll take this up with the Dean." I don't make the connection when the Dean asks to see me the next day. “We’d like to avoid confrontation and polarization, so we are prepared to offer a compromise: Students will be allowed to enter the bookstore with bare feet on hot days, except on weekends, when alumni visit.” I wait for him to burst out laughing, but he is serious, and a tad nervous. “Deal," I say, and we shake hands. Absurd Victory.

 

 

442: The night before graduation, I sit in one of the folding chairs laid out for the ceremony. A rent-a-cop approaches me warily and asks to see my student I.D. When I show it to him, he apologizes and says he’s been instructed to be on the lookout for subversives. I almost explain to him that if there were to be disruptions they would come from students like me, but I just assure him that no one is going to mess with graduation, and I walk to my off-campus apartment for the last time.

 

443: After the ceremony, my father points to the college president greeting parents and saying goodbye to students. "Does he know who you are? Is he aware that there's an Alan Ziegler here?" "Oh yes," I say, "he knows I've been here."

 

444: The following autumn, I return to campus to see how the experimental house is doing. A friend from last year's committee welcomes me, but most of the other faces are new. After a couple of days, I am thinking about staying for a while, but my friend takes me aside and says, "This is kind of awkward, but at yesterday's meeting they voted that only students should stay here, so you'll have to leave." 

"Don't Come In" [by Angela Ball]

Don’t Come In

         I prefer the sign “No Entry” to the one that says “No Exit.” - Stanislaus Lec

If for you, women are toy cars
whose wheels you strike
on the ground to make
them go; if for you, women
are tea towels at the feast; if you stand by
as women are swept from the path,
don’t approach. In our inviolate
land we fly ruddy gliders;
press oil from impossible fruit; derive power
from waves. At any moment
our silk turbans may become
volcanoes; our slippers,
submarines.

-- Angela Ball

Don Berger: Pick of the Week (Terence Winch)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Peter Berger

Leaving the Tavern

How long should my morning

be?  They've never known

who I am but

I don't feel time's gone too fast

slow enough to fit the spirit in.

Sun brings gold to the right side

of all the people's faces,

half of the muscles used to smile.

Travelled through, based on a

true story, cliff surface or the cave wall,

how quickly does bamboo grow?

Two inches per hour.

Then after sixty days never grows 

in height or diameter again.

A truckload of walnuts

tells the tale of flirtations,

immune from the hazard of rebirth.

Heaven told me/us,

the sky told me

the arch is the dragon's mouth,

Thursday is orange, Friday is blue,

brick tea, silver and silk.

The heart doesn't have to fight

gravity to get blood back.

Take height

under the floating hip.

Mind your head.

The deer is loose.

Veal ribs in

Coca Cola.

Deep-fried tench.

We have these ingredients.

The head cleared, and then all of a sudden,

the king was an infant,

the peace feelers that were

already being extended,

strong enough to blow the tiles

off the roof of the church.

_________________________________________________

Donald Berger is the author of The Long Time, a bilingual edition in English and German (Wallstein Publishers); Quality Hill (Lost Roads Publishers), and The Cream-Filled Muse (Fledermaus Press).  His work has appeared in The New Republic, Slate, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Fence, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review and other magazines including some from Berlin, Leipzig, Budapest, Hong Kong, and mainland China. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University. 

"Leaving the Tavern" includes the word "floating," which is the very word I would use to describe many of Berger's poems. His poems glide over wondrous landscapes of language and place, offering mysterious information at every turn. To hear him read several other poems, check out these videos:

 

 

 

 

"You, Reader" [by Major Jackson]

So often I dream of the secrets of satellites
and so often I want the moose to step
from the shadows and reveal his transgressions,
and so often I come to her body
as though she were Lookout Mountain,
but give me a farmer’s market to park my martyred masks
and I will name all the dirt roads that dead-end
at the cubist sculpture called My Infinity,
for I no longer light bonfires in the city of adulterers
and no longer smudge the cheeks of debutantes
hurriedly floating across the high fruit of night,
and yes, I know there is only one notable death in any small town
and that is the pig-farmer, but listen, at all times
the proud rivers mourn my absence, especially
when, like a full moon, you, reader, hidden behind a spray
of night-blooming, drift in and out of scattered clouds
above lighthouses producing their artificial calm,
just to sweep a chalk of light over distant waters.

from The Absurd Man by Major Jackson. NY: Norton, 2020. Major Jackson chose the poems for The Best American Poetry 2019.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Roberto Carlos Garcia

Down these mean streets, 2017, Roberto Carlos Garcia

 from Mixtape for City Kids from Dysfunctional but Happy Families, Kids Like Me
                                        (a new form )
by Roberto Carlos Garcia 

When the light from that moon spilled
out of your mother’s belly, I tell you,
you were smiling then. We need a name:
but we can’t call this Menace to the Hood
or Boys in Society or no shit like that. You
have been born into a world. Look around.
See that black boy over there running scared,
his old man got a problem & it’s a bad one. Mami?
Even though she don’t have a job, Mami still
works hard. The last 23 years of her life have been
spent teaching a poet & killing generations
of cockroaches with sky-blue plastic slippers.
But these are the people who will love you
with the same love they received, or hopefully
better.  You will have enemies too. My enemies
ride jets to parties. They use words like casualties
to speak of murder. Yes, you’ll survive. Look at me.
I’m shocked too, I’m supposed to be locked up too,
you escape what I escaped you’d be in Paris
getting fucked up too. My father said…surviving
one thing means another comes & kills you.
He’s dead, & so, I trust him. I know this isn’t much.
But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did
about the future. Forget the future. I’d worship someone
who could do that. Then, slowly, Lo is fo e ri bari
Lo is fo e ri bari  love is for everybody Love is for
every every body love  love love everybody love.


Poet, storyteller, and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia is a self-described “sancocho […] of provisions from the Harlem Renaissance, the Spanish Poets of 1929, the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican School, and the Modernists.” A native New Yorker, Garcia is rigorously interrogative of himself and the world around him, conveying “nakedness of emotion, intent, and experience,” and he writes extensively about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. Roberto’s third poetry collection, [Elegies], is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. His second poetry collection, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, is available from Willow Books.  Roberto’s first collection, Melancolía, is available from Červená Barva Press. His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, The BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNEXT, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The Root, Those People, Rigorous, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Gawker, Barrelhouse, The Acentos Review, Lunch Ticket, and many others. He is founder of the cooperative press Get Fresh Books Publishing, A NonProfit Corp. Roberto holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation and is the creator of the “mixtape” poem, which resembles a cento in that it is composed of lines borrowed from other poets but also includes lines from fiction, non-fiction, rap lyrics, and other forms of literature. A “mixtape” is between 50 to 100 lines long and should have at least ten original lines written by the poet. The above poem excerpt borrows lines from Reginald Dwaye Betts, Gil Scott Heron, Willie Perdomo, Aracelis Girmay, Jay-Z, John Murillo, Larry Levis, and Rumi.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

Jim Cummins Takes a Noir Detour

We date the “classic” noir period from 1941's The Maltese Falcon (or even Orson Welles' 1940 Citizen Kane, itself a mystery about Fate) to the 1959 Welles tour-de-force Touch of Evil.  But noir wasn't noir until the French got hold of America's backlog of films after 1945.  Hollywood had to flush its war film stockpile through the pipeline before it could release its noirs on the Continent; and when it did the French, the beautiful French, went crazy.  Partly as a result, Detour is often regarded as the Ur-noir though it was made in 1945 on a very un-Hollywoodian shoestring. 

I can think of at least two reasons why this is so.  One is that films like Falcon and Murder My Sweet, the latter from 1943, were still “Hollywood” movies.  Despite the noir fixtures such as the private detective, the hard-boiled language, the femme fatale, and the sleazy subject matter (all elements that poets love!), Falcon still has elements of the filmed play, especially the last third, as well as “comic” moments such as Spade's anger ploy in Gutman's suite, followed by Sam laughing at himself in the hallway, looking at his hand shaking with adrenaline.  And Murder has the unlikely romance between Philip Marlowe and Ann. 

Detour has the requisite noir elements: good girl/bad girl contrast, downward spiral of events, an emotionally vicious femme fatale. It also has a voiceover narrator, a la Murder My Sweet, but in this movie the narrator is hugely unreliable; we don't identify with Al as we do with Phil. We aren't sure he didn't kill the guy, steal his money, clothes and car, and go whistling down the road.  And the “accidental” strangulation behind a locked door strains credulity. We don't even know whether Al is in fact a talented musician, or that Vera might just have wanted to get away from this loser. After Vera emotionally eviscerates him, it turns out she's dying of TB and wants him to have sex with her? The whole story might be a pack of lies, and Al merely a self-pitying narcissist.

The second reason Detour is often thought of as the first noir is its great noir subject: Fate.  Now if you believe, as I do, that “character is fate,” then you have a shortcut into understanding noir.  I wonder if poets secretly appreciate this even if, to be politically correct, they must blame social and cultural processes as the reason for everyone's unhappiness. And if you believe in great cosmic manipulations of a supernatural sort, then good luck to you.  Detour is about “fate” only in the sense that in 1945 the word still held a factor of fear and malevolence shrouded in thousands of years of human superstition.  As a word, it still had, even has, poetic resonance. In Detour Al is merely a sniveling, whiney, wretch-in-denial loser who blames his shortcomings on others.  He's the personification of self-pity. And at least in one case, probably two, a murderer.

No one could deny, of course, that social and cultural processes carry great weight and power in influencing one's external “destiny.”  But noir is about the inner life, and this is one of the main reasons any writer loves these movies.  “Fate” informs all noir because human beings are weak, yet they must act against the background of social norms which we the audience provide.  We're the Greek chorus, except that we deliciously slip the bonds of “normal” behavior and partake with gusto of noir's shady deals, viciousness, pathological sex, and black-and-white photography.  What's not to like?

"Lost" [by David Wagoner]

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

The esteemed poet and teacher David Wagoner was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2009.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

The esteemed poet and teacher David Wagoner was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2009.

Richard Deming on "A Touch of Evil" as BFI Film Classics Return

BFI Film Classics – books commissioned by the British Film Institute, published by Bloomsbury in the United States -- make a welcome return with Richard Deming’s excellent study of A Touch of Evil. Orson Welles’s 1958 noir is justly celebrated by film aficionados, though its meandering plot has puzzled many viewers. Deming's book is a fine guide for the perplexed.

Set in a town near the US-Mexican border, the movie fuses sex and violence in a boiling cauldron. It begins with an explosion that interrupts an embrace and ends with two shooting deaths in an oilfield.

As Deming points out, one remarkable thing about the film is the extent to which the plot is subordinate to the technique. Welles uses cinematic means to explore questions of justice, motivation and “a complex, perpetually equivocating moral world,” in the author's phrase. If the causality and chronology of events are enshrouded in a swamp-like fog, it’s because Welles achieves his effects by cinematic rather than literary means. Deming’s analysis of the famous tracking shot that opens the movie is right on the money. 

Deming strikes a personal note in his preface by way of ushering us into the darkness of Welles’s vision. In chapter one he presents a valuable summary of noir, its meaning, its history. He argues that A Touch of Evil “is more than the apotheosis or apex of a genre or a style” – to his mind, it is the ultimate noir, and then some. The movie’s central thesis, he argues, is spoken by Charlton Heston, playing the Mexican policeman Vargas, to Welles, playing the corrupt police chief Hank Quinlan, an obese bully, a bigot, and a slob: “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”

Janet Leigh, the blond Yankee spouse of the Mexican Vargas, is as beautiful and vulnerable as in Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate, and Marlene Dietrich as a fortune teller may have the best line in the movie. When Welles asks her to read his future, she has, “You haven't got any.” “Huh?'” “Your future's all used up.”

A Touch of Evil takes the romance out of noir, and leaves only the criminality, the hostility, the spite, and the evil that men do that lives after them. It is a deliberately ugly movie, refusing to treat sin and crime, the stuff of noir, with the romantic sheen and sensual promise that usually comes with the turf. (Think of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past.) Welles, possessor of a “distinctive smoothly textured baritone with its ability to slide across tonalities with both insolence and nobility,” is willing to sacrifice even this most valuable of assets; he slurs his words, mumbles, steps on other characters’ lines.

“Who’s the boss – the cop or the law?” Vargas asks. That’s the thematic crux of A Touch of Evil. the movie. But the experience of the movie is far more unsettling than any such formulation, and Richard Deming's discussion of the film makes it an object lesson in understanding the meaning of a narrative in cinematic images rather than in literary terms.

The BFI has seized the opportunity to reissue of other books on the backlist. I enjoyed Greil Marcus’s take on The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer), for example. Marcus, who writes with swagger and is never less than interesting, regards the picture as the “most exciting movie” from Citizen Kane to The Godfather, an overstatement but an arresting one.

The Manchurian Candidate is Frankheimer's best movie To make his point about the originality and brilliance of the brainwashing sequence that opens the movie, Marcus argues that by comparison the Hitchcock / Dali dream collaboration in Spellbound is “visually florid and intellectually dead.” I maintain that Spellbound, Hitch’s most Freudian effort, is underrated, but perhaps the larger point is that Gregory Peck's dream in Spellbound has a very different function from the collective hypnosis of the American POWs in The Manchurian Candidate. To exalt the latter it is not necessary to deprecate the former. Criticism is not a zero sum game.

Again, to substantiate his feeling that Sinatra’s performance in The Manchurian Candidate is the best in his Hollywood career, with which I would concur, Marcus says that Sinatra in From Here to Eternity gave "a one-note performance" and that Ernest Borgnine's in the same film was "better." Come on. 

Agree or disagree, Marcus is a compelling writer, and he hits the nail on the head when he talks of “the Iron Maiden of repression,” which sums up Laurence Harvey's acting in The Manchurian Candidate -- and explains why Al Pacino’s work in The Godfather movies was the best of his career.

Other books in the BFI series include Camille Paglia’s characteristically provocative and engrossing study of The Birds. Paglia contends that Tippi Hedren is “the ultimate Hitchcock heroine” (not a consensus view) and analyzes her, what she says, what she wears, with the meticulousness of an exceptionally astute apostle of Freud. It is always stimulating to spend a few hours listening to Camille Paglia, though I do wish she would overcome her aversion to Doris Day, among the best of all the big band singers, and Deborah Reynolds, whose contributions to Singing in the Rain and The Tender Trap are not to be underrated.

-- DL

Reading Poetry to Ward off the Covid Blues [by Nin Andrews]

It’s another day and soon it will be another month in this miserable COVID summer. The sunlight is streaming through my window, and outside, the goldfinches are swooping through the meadow that is so thick with black-eyed susans, it looks like an Impressionist painting. In the distance, I can see the cows in the pasture, calves running behind them, a newborn trying to stand up on wobbly legs. Most years I’d feel a sense of joy at all this pastoral beauty. But this year, I wake each day to a strange ache in my heart, almost as if I have lost a loved one. I try to write but usually find myself just staring at the page. Maybe poetry is the loved one I have lost, I think. A friend tells me I am suffering from the COVID blues. She says lots of folks are, including herself. She’s been riding her motorcycle after dark to escape the loneliness. “You need something powerful between your legs,” she jokes. Like me, she says writing poetry usually gives her a thrill, a sense of romance and escape from the humdrum of daily life.  

I am reminded of the Bruce Bond’s first paragraph of the preface for the most recent PLUME anthology, Plume 8:

“All good poems are love poems. They have something to lose. No less so in the aftermath of loss, or the thick of peril, in the crisis of the here and now that summons language as public and private, all at once. Relational, historical, psychological, poems recover, in light and in spite of human difficulty, a sense of their vocation. They ask us, as they ask themselves, why now. Why a poem. And more challenging still, why beauty.”   

Bond goes on to talk about the many beautiful poems in the anthology, and he’s right. Plume Poetry 8 is a stunning collection, featuring  many of my favorite poets including Lynn Emanuel,  Major Jackson, Albert Rios, Lisa Russ Spaar, Jeffrey Friedman, and Elizabeth A.I. Powell. Reading it does alleviate some of the misery of this peculiar time.  While it would be impossible to pick just one poem to admire, there is a poem by Cynthia Cruz that synchronizes with my current mood:  

The Music

Constellations of evening,

Sweet, the smell of fire
and filth of pines.

Racing through the woods
on silver shining

motorcycle.
What is the sound

of driving back
through black

magnetic fields of night.
Play the record back.

Unpack the accident
down to its haunting.

Its smaller rooms,
its trash and crackle.

This morning
the good voice
spoke to me.

A ghost
entering the body.

Then the sound
of a violin playing.

What I was
is gone.

Now just the din
of smaller sounds

of wayward and crawl.

And then, there is this oddly timely poem by Stephanie Burt, with an epigraph in ancient Greek (which I can’t type out on my ancient IBM Thinkpad, alas). Reading the poem I am reminded of the Molly Arden, whose work and translations of Catullus have appeared here as well as in various literary reviews.

After Callimachus (Hecale, 298)

The gods who made us made us such
          that whenever you or anybody laughs,
someone is probably crying; someone got hurt.
          If the foreground is joy, the background is always sad.
I admit it’s not much
          but it’s something to say, on that poor god’s behalf:
look what he had
          to work with. Look what we came from: water and dirt.

Another anthology that I’ve enjoyed reading in this time of COVID blues is Best Microfiction 2020, edited by Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke and Michael Martone. I turn to microfiction when I want to be surprised, and this anthology doesn’t disappoint. While I don’t know many of the names of the authors represented, I am delighted to discover them. And to remember how sometimes a very simple piece of prose delights for reasons I cannot and do not want to explain, though a falling club, as described in the following story by Trent England, might be just what I need these days.  

A Quick Word about My Life

Ever since they opened up a falling club in our town, there’s little else that Theresa will do. After her daily shift at the ball bearing plant, she drives to the large, lime-stained building that used to be a Toys “R” Us, where she falls into foam pits, backwards, as though she’s a concertgoer in a mosh pit or a toppled statue of a despot. Like a gym, it has its members and regulars and Theresa remembers everyone’s names. Over dinner, she tells me about Dan who falls because he has a stressful job as a 911 operator or Janet who has three children to feed and thinks that any day her husband will get fired. I hear about Becki who sleeps with night terrors and Greg who can’t sleep at all. And while she’s telling me that if she falls enough she will one day earn a spot in the platinum level, which is the old stock room, and get to step off backwards from an even greater height, I wonder what she tells Dan and Janet and Becki and Greg about her own life or about me, or why, for example, when she leaves for work to drive to the falling club, she passes our house without stopping, without looking up at the window to see her husband standing there.

And now that I am mentioning examples of prose and poetry that have uplifted me, I’d like to close with a link to Dante di Stefano’s stunning COVID poem from last spring, and to the wonderful essays on becoming a poet on the Marsh Hawk Press Website, including essays by Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, Stephanie Strickland, and Amy Gerstler. The most recent essay, by Julie Marie Wade, begins: Since I first began writing as a child, a small door inside my head has been propped open, perpetually. In the beginning, I didn’t know it was there, but now I’m sure I couldn’t close it, even if I tried—that essential parenthesis—that necessary gap between the frame and the wall where the first light and the last light stream through.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

we the dancing millions
by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

(after Omar Sakr’s Where I am Not)

I ask the driver if he likes New York.

            we have not yet established I speak his mother

tongue. he laments against loneliness, a season

            here depressed, a season back on the island, in revelry. a season

here. a season there. season season season season

            he finds with every return that people here do not speak

with each other, the rushingrushing an anvil on relation.

            so many unspokens. better to be with family, to go where

you are loved. I try to love him for the length of the ride,

            brown bodies we are in the loneliest world      so

I smile, a secret gesture of union. he says through the rearview,

            it is a beautiful day isn’t it? I look out the window, he taps

the steering wheel of his car, the hum of diaspora a child we’ve made

            between us, ready to live the twelve minutes to my destination. hermosa,

pero, hermosa. his whole face beams the sun, the winter in him dies—

            ¿hablas español?! we feast on language

the New York kind of lonesome we know

            our bridge & tunnel lovechild nobody wants

to love. but we learn to love her too. when he isn’t driving

            all of Brooklyn through their silence, he—José—(with the name

of my grandfather) dances home to his country of brothers,

            their stifled exuberance riving imperialism’s calendar. an abundance

of rice unworried for time: there is no word for late in the island’s mouth.

            what a world                where you can linger into the hours of dusk,

live off the horizon by touching its mornings. I wonder

            what it would take to be the bambuco itself, the waltz

of lovers never-quite-touching in want. even my dreams

            of music play the asymptote of solitudes. I am not sure who to blame,

though it is capitalism & poetry often enough to which I turn my back.

            this was never a commercial for anything, but capitalism & poetry

make it possible: José’s hands clapping back at colonialism in the bomba

            rhythm making a lover of the drum; my wrecked body carrying the fevers

of memory down from the mountains. how language spreads us over

            each other, our histories necking in the rain of it all. too many hearts to name,

& we are pulling up, anyway, to my door of seven years pretending to be home.

            our child is over now, the together-ride through a city that maybe ought

to sometimes sleep if only to remember what it is to really dream, to remember

            the grammar of closeness. our twelve minute love affair & its offspring

clinging to the window, heir to the ache of seasons. is that a marvel

            or a mess? can we tell the difference? cuidate, I close the door—parting,

after all, is the first sorrow we know. birth, a distance in the giving of light.

            the harshness of winter returns, a jealous lover at my cheek. but a music trails,

a heat, a season of side by side. how I’ve seen the party linger, every cumbia

            stomping the eye of Columbus. how we sing of home in the argot of the ruined,

the ruck of us, a cortege of seclusions. we leap toward each other, a whole continent of strangers

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, Colombian/Latinx, poet, artist, scholar, and activist. Her poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) was selected by Ada Limón for the 2018 Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. The collection is a meditation on themes of inter-generational and collective inheritances of historical memory and post-colonial trauma, the responses they elicit, the forms of refusal, life, and love, that emerge in their wake. A 2019 CantoMundo Fellow, and 2018 VONA alum, her poetry has been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock’s Quarry, Nat.Brut, Feminist Studies, and Huizache, among other places. 

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

Fashion and Beauty with Poetess Vinny: Non-Binary is the New-Black [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This year’s Pride didn’t have the razzle-dazzle of years past. It didn’t have a parade or concerts or nights in gay and lesbian bars, no access to that one time of year when we’re surrounded by people who get it, who are queer or questioning or different, just like us. Instead, there was fear of illness and protests for change, neither of which are foreign to the queer community. The sparkle and studded leather remained in doors this year, but the message rang true just the same:

People want to exist in the world feeling safe in it, and to be comfortable in their own skin.

Writers have always been a little different.

And it’s no secret that queer people have flocked to the artist’s way in order to truly be themselves. From Lord Byron’s flowing scarves and earth tones to Elizabeth Bishop’s baggy button-downs and boyish slacks, the idea of challenging gender has been in the writer’s fashion lexicon for centuries.

The term "non-binary" is used first and foremost as a gender identity for individuals who do not identify as exclusively male or female. This identity, along with the gender non-conforming fashion choices that surround it, is about breaking down the assumptions we have around femininity and masculinity and providing options for personal expression that were previously inaccessible--and in some cases illegal--both in the fashion world and in real life. It’s about comfort, confidence, and dressing in a way that frees you from other people’s expectations of who you are, how you should dress, or what you are capable of, and it is in that spirit that I offer you the following tips.

 

1. Start with neutral colors.

Our culture has done a good job at telling us which colors are “masculine” and which are “feminine,” which is why wearing mostly neutral colors like beige, brown, black, white, gray, soft earthy tones, and cotton and denim textiles, work so well for a gender non-conforming approach to your outfit.

 

2. Try loose-fitting clothing and cool shoes.

Gender non-conforming fashion is unique in that it’s focus is physical and emotional comfort. One of the ways this is achieved is by taking attention off of the parts of the body that indicate sexuality and gender, such as the chest, waist and hips, and to instead accentuate parts that are more neutral, like the shoulders, neck and feet.

Tops include: t-shirts, button-downs, blazers, vests. Bottoms: relaxed-fit jeans, slacks, knee-length skirts. Shoes: loafers, boots, sneakers, sandals. Accessories: ties, bowties, scarves, suspenders, watches, glasses, backpacks, leather cross-body bags, necklaces and rings.

 

3. Make it pop!

Like Djuna Barnes in her dramatic polka dot turtle neck and dark fedora or Oscar Wilde in his velvet suit and ruffles, gender non-conforming clothing welcomes experimentation, color, and flare. Try a pattern or unconventional color or texture, and definitely expand your shopping trip to check out men’s, women’s, and unisex clothing sections. The only real difference between them is the way the clothing is cut, and sometimes our bodies look and feel better in clothing that was marketed to someone else.

Pro tip: fold your shirt cuffs over twice for a subtle detail on the arms.

 

4. Make it matter.

Gender non-conforming fashion, as well as the trans and non-binary individuals who pioneered it, challenges assumptions about how we each relate to our gender, not only with our clothes, but with our identities. If women’s access to a pair of pants allowed them into the factories to work, it follows that fashion can change the way we exist in the world. What would happen on the day we weren't men, women, trans, queer, or non-binary, but just people?

Furthermore, it is important to think about how fashion has previously been used in order to suppress self-expression, especially when that being expressed deviates from the accepted norm. Both men and women have been given a script to follow and a wardrobe to perform it in, but not once has the individual been asked what part they wanted to play, if any. The beauty of the non-binary gender identity is that it demands the right to not only choose the part, but to write the story and the characters yourself, to look in the dressing-room mirror and see you.

 

 

5. Make a change.

Many a conversation for social change has started with the topic of fashion, not just how you dress, but how you shop and where you place your influence. Spending your money at shops owned and operated by members of the queer community such as Rebirth Garments, Radimo L.A., and The Phluid Project will help them to continue funding programs that support queer and trans communities, to help activists organize and to force change, and most importantly, to provide people (and especially young people) with the tools they need to celebrate inclusion, expression, and diversity.

Writers and activists like Leslie Feinberg (novelist: Stone Butch Blues) and the Wachovski sisters (filmmakers: The Matrix, Cloud Atlas) have given us a deeper understanding of what it is that people who live outside of the gender binary are fighting against in our culture, by using their craft (and their fashion) to express their stories.

One can only marvel at what will be created once we no longer look at the world in black and white, but as a rainbow, whose colors dance fluidly in the spaces between water and air.

 

 

Got a fashion question? Comment below! And for more from Poetess Vinny, you can follow her blog, Vinny the Snail.

From Portugal: Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho's new anthology

Afagando a Face de Lorca. Uma Antologia
Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho
Selecção e tradução de Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho
Prefácio de Manuel Portela

Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho antologia 22 poetas contemporâneos (da Ucrânia à China). É um exercício que nos dá a ver em português as diferentes vozes dos poetas antologiados mas igualmente a própria voz do poeta-tradutor: Craveiro de Carvalho tem-se dedicado nos últimos anos, a par da sua produção poética, a oferecer-nos versões de grande parte dos poetas agora reunidos sob o título Afagando a Face de Lorca (paráfrase de um verso do neozelandês Mark Young).

Os poetas antologiados: Adam Zagajewski (1945, Lviv, Ucrânia), Amalia Bautista (1962, Madrid, Espanha), Aram Saroyan (1943, Nova Iorque, EUA), Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (1947, Lahore, Paquistão), Billy Collins (1941, Nova Iorque, EUA), Charles Simic (1938, Belgrado, Jugoslávia), David Lehman (1948, Nova Iorque, EUA), Eunice de Souza (1940, Pune, Índia. Faleceu em 2017), Howie Good (1951, Nova Iorque, EUA), J. R. Solonche (1946, Nova Iorque, EUA), Jane Hirshfield (1953, Nova Iorque. EUA), Jennifer Clement (1960, Greenwich, Connecticut, EUA), José Luis García Martín (1950, Aldeanueva del Camino, Cáceres, Espanha), Luis Alberto de Cuenca (1950, Madrid, Espanha), Mark Young (1941, Hokitika, Nova Zelândia), Michael Dylan Welch (1962, Watford, Inglaterra), Nathalie Handal (1969, Haiti), Neil Curry (1937, Newcastle on Tyne, Inglaterra), Owen Bullock (1967, Cornualha, Inglaterra), Pat Boran (1963, Portlaoise, Irlanda), Roger Wolfe (1962, Westerham, Kent, Inglaterra), Steve Klepetar (1949, Xangai, China).

Poemas originais (em inglês e castelhano) e em português.

Nas Livrarias: primeira semana de Julho de 2020.

Oferta especial de PRÉ-VENDA (de 1 a 30 de Junho): 13,60 € (desconto de 20% sobre o preço de livraria: 17 €). Portes gratuitos

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"Decompose and" [by Bruce Kawin]

Decompose and
you might get to
be a peach

then be part of the shit
of the living thing
that eats you

plop back to earth
to feed
some tree

become part of
some flower

be honey

When I walked on the earth
before I was under it
I had a few fertile parts

Now it’s the whole show

"Monroeville, PA" [by Ed Ochester]

One day a kid yelled

"Hey Asshole!"

and everybody on the street

turned around

 

from Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New by Ed Ochester (Autumn House, 2007).

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Grisel Y. Acosta

 

Ways of Seeing My Brothers
by Grisel Y. Acosta

1. You are precise artisans, designing aircrafts meant to soar above the altocumulus, or pumping air 
pulsating through twists of brass trumpet, pressing fingers down on valves to scream higher than a jet.

2. Smirking boys in a 70s photograph, unaware of the holes in your socks.

3. Fearless little men, walking into classrooms filled with children who will only think to ask,
“Are you a spic?”

4.        I do not see you in jail the night you totaled Mami’s car
           I do not see you stoned or geeked out, lonely and alienated in the college dorm
           I do not see you terrified when you see no options in the want ads
           I do not see you when you cry alone when your best friend fell in a rain of bullets
           I only see the miraculous feat of survival, how you managed the impossible:
           staying alive when the world told you every day you did not exist

5. I remember the day your daughter was born, dear brother, and you had to fill out a form, choose
Black or White. Your oblivious white wife saw the X by the word Black and asked you why and you said,
“Well I sure as hell ain’t white,” and all of a sudden you gave your own kind of birth.

6. I wore your clothes, walked like what we call a boy, talked knucklehead talk, became what you were.

7. The only time I met Tio Segundo en Cuba, who built his home with black market wood, his dirty
workman jeans the same as the ones I saw on you, brother, after a day of roofing, and my heart hurt
because I knew the two of you needed each other, drank yourselves into oblivion because you longed 
for each other, yet you would never meet.

8.                   I listened at your doors                            Devo              bang bang bang

                                                           Santana                      Black magic

                             sat for hours          

                                                                       wondered in AC/DC electric

            curiosity fizzling like

                                                                                   guitar feedback

                                                                                                                        waited for you

                             to open the passageway

9.

                                                are you safe, dear brothers?
                                                I cannot protect you from this
                                                obsession with your demise
                                                all I can offer is what I have seen
                                                remember, what I see is beauty

 

Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta is an associate professor at the City University of New York-Bronx Community College. Her first book of poetry, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, is an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist and it is forthcoming from Get Fresh Books in 2021. Recent work can be found in The Baffler, Acentos Journal, Kweli Journal, Red Fez, Short Plays on Reproductive Freedom, and Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood: The Lauryn Hill Reader. She is a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet, a Macondo Fellow, and the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity, an anthology that features over Latinx 30 contributors and subjects. Her work focuses on her Afro-Latinx and indigenous ancestry, queer identity, the punk and house music subcultures, her birthplace of Chicago, and the destruction of post-colonial neoliberalism.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

"On Nature" [by Lawrence Joseph]

        And the puzzles surrounding the cosmological constant,
        spacetime imploded into existence. Ten to fifty years
        between asbestos breathed and mesothelioma
        discovered, a rare form of cancer in the lungs
        or heart, or, if in the stomach, spreading
        quickly to the liver or spleen. Uploaded
        onto one of a half-a-billion or so blogs: “The human
        imagination? A relatively paltry thing, a subproduct,
        merely, of the neural activity of a species
        of terrestrial primate”; and in another, that other
        dimension, the Hudson River, black and still,
        the day about to open at the Narrows’ edge.
        Light on a mountain ash bough, a fresh chill’s
        blue sensation in the eyes. One week buds, then
        the temperature’s up and the landscape turns yellow,
        in a few days the wind scratches the blossoms,
        in a few weeks the sun scorches the leaves.

       I, too, see God adumbrations, I, too, write
       a book on love. Who, here, appears, to touch the skin.
       Hundreds of thousands of square miles of lost
       Arctic sea ice, bits of bone on killing grounds,
       electromagnetic air. Atrocious and bottomless
       states of mind, natural as air.

from So Where Are We? by Lawrence Joseph (2017). Reprinted in A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems  by Lawrence Joseph (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020).

Met Percent: Week Twenty-one [by Alec Bernstein]

POV . . . LOP

Enlarged detail and inset painting: Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d'Ognes, Marie Denise Villers, 1801, gallery 629.

In my corporate days, I lived with many a LOP, a list of open points. This fine work, always considered exceptional, has one serious LOP.

1. Artist: First attributed to Jacques-Louis David, it was then assigned to Marie Denise Villers, Constance Marie Charpentier, Marie du Val d’Ognes (self-portrait of the sitter), or even her sister.
2. Scene: Whoever made the portrait depicts a woman in one of the studios available in the Louvre to qualified artists. Professional women . . . with private lives . . . in radical outfits? Much is proposed, little is certain.
3. Details: The broken window pane can be read as a subtle reference to the chaos and violence of the French revolution. The pink of her ribbon was “the color” of 1801.
4. Technique: “Perspective is represented by sight lines that cross through matter. Is this why the pane of glass is broken in the Met portrait? Are perspective rays powerful enough to break glass?” - Anne Higonnet “Through a Louvre Window,” Journal18, 2016.

But Montaigne would say, “The soul which has no established viewpoint gets lost; for, as they say, he who is everywhere, is nowhere.”

 

Three Knaves and a Diversion

Top:The Fortune-Teller, Georges de La Tour, 1630s, gallery 634.
Bottom left: The Cardsharps, Caravaggio, 1595, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.     
Bottom right: The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs, Georges de La Tour, 1630s, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.    

Quatremère de Quincy coined the term petit genre in 1792 . . . and ranked landscape painting at the bottom, because observation from nature supposedly required little imagination. At the top were grande genre (history paintings), because history required a great deal of imagination. Petit genre (ordinary people in common activities) was in the middle, requiring only some imagination. And of course they were priced and sized for the new bourgeois collectors.

The card playing scenes are a mix of diversion and isolation. Modern criticism sees the minimal eye contact of the subjects “as aloneness”. Other readings are possible. 

The Caravaggio could be titled Maesh, Louie and Babe, after my great uncles. Once, after taking my 10-year-old cousins’ allowance money in crazy eights, Uncle Maesh (a Chicago mob lawyer in the 1920s-30s) advised, “don't bet more than you can afford to lose, and never play cards with strangers”. I asked Uncle Babe (day manager at Caesar’s Palace) why they had Evil Knievel jump the casino fountain. “There will be an extra million dollars of private bets - how many bones he will break, will his bike catch on fire . . . and half of those betting will be ‘ahead’ at our door. That money will not leave the property.” Uncle Louie (a bail bondsman and pawn shop owner) had a standard greeting: “You got two tens for a five and I’ll owe you five?”

These petit genre paintings feel like a reunion . . . familial slights of hand. I am retroactively surprised that Aunt Edna, who re-knitted my favorite sweater out of the same yarn each year as I grew, did not take up fortune telling. She would have been great. My favorite detail is the glove, “the fingertips exposed, the better to feel marked cards” (MetText) which I'm sure Edna would have re-sized as needed.

 

Madonna of the Plaga Magna

Top: Madonna and Child with Saints, Giovanni Bellini, c. 1510, not on view.
Bottom left: Madonna della Misericordia, Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, 1308-10, Pinacoteca, Siena.  
Bottom center: Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and Clare, Cima da Conegliano, 1510, not on view.  
Bottom right: Madonna della Misericordia, Piero della Francesca, 1460–1462, Pinacoteca Comunale, Sansepolcro.

Of all the Madonna taxonomies, and there a lot, I only knew a few, like Our Lady of the Flowers and the Madonna of the Rocks. There are many categories, such as religious purpose (humility, misery, childbirth) and place (garden, stairs), but my favorite remains “of the___” (quail, cherries, harpies). 

I found no compositional categories. Both the Bellini and the Cima (and many others) have these wonderful centered stripes. They are found in the purpose category of “sacred conversations” (Mary “interacting” with assorted saints). Why not call it what it is?

The big stripe behind the Madonna is a cloth of honor, derived from the Baldachin (a pattern from Bagdad), resembling the thrones which were common in sacred conversations. The cloth creates a boundary line between the sacred space and the profane landscape. Its Byzantine effect takes a path away from Florentine perspective toward a very abstract spacial plane. 

If I could add a category it would be the Madonna of the Plaga Magna - L. Big Stripe. It would include the Misericordia Madonnas, in which an oversized Mary not only defines the sacred space, but she herself is the big stripe.

Catchlights and Cropped Skulls

Top left: Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. Top right: detail, Albrecht Dürer, 1519, gallery 640.  
Center right: Merle Oberon in Hitchcock’s The Lodger, 1944.  
Bottom right: Carpenter, Vincent van Gogh, 1880, Rijksmuseum KrollerMuller, Otterio.  
Bottom center: Cropped skull drawing lessons, Betty Edwards, The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, 1999.  
Bottom left: Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, A Place in the Sun, 1951.

The catchlight used in film/photography goes way back; we see it as early as Dürer. Those tiny reflections that bring life to the eye. “Saint Anne’s eyes show Dürer’s typical placement of catchlights opposite a minute, crisp reflection along the inner rim of the iris.” - MetText. After Merle Oberon’s car accident, cinematographer Lucian Ballard hid his wife’s scars by slightly washing them out with a small lamp - dubbed an “Obie” after Oberon. The lamp, so close to the axis of the lens, created a catchlight in Oberon’s eyes. 

Betty Edwards found a systematic drawing error in her students; they consistently reduced the size of the forehead. Even when pointed out, they had difficulty “seeing” it. Van Gogh had the same issue in his early drawings. He was self-taught but observant enough to identify and correct the error. The perception that the forehead doesn't have enough information to be valuable somehow suggests the use of skull cropping in the close up. Remove the forehead if it’s a blank slate.

“. . . no one can do what he really wants in the beginning.” (January 1873). “I am trying now to exaggerate the essential, and purposely leave the obvious things vague.” (May 1888). - Vincent van Gogh.

The meaning of standing [by Tracy Danison]

Beach at Jaffa, Israel, during lockdown©Felice Ross 2020

Sacred.

Between earth and sky.

Connected.

Holding hands.

Reaching down.

Stretching up.

Eye and see.

You. In the middle.

A bird on a branch on a leaf on a tree.

A fish in water in a river to a sea.

Life and body.

Me. In the middle.

Breath, air.

Sickness, death.

Us. Between 

Sacred. 

Connected.