The Best American Poetry

Adam Bellow on his dad's "Mr. Sammler's Planet"

Adam Bellow [in SAPIR]
His Barbed Behind:  Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Its Critics
What my father’s 1970 novel tells us about today

“I am not a revolutionary. I have little respect for American revolutionaries as I know them, and I have known them quite well.”
                                                                             — Saul Bellow: Letters, p. 290

In 1970 my father, Saul Bellow [left], published Mr. Sammler’s Planet. His seventh novel, it came on the heels of major works that had long since established him as the preeminent American writer of his generation.

The book was immediately hailed as a triumph, reviewed and praised in every significant outlet. Here again, readers were told, were the signature marks of his method — gritty urban realism, a flawed and introspective intellectual protagonist, a gallery of eccentric characters based on real people in his life, a no-holds-barred exposure of Jewish family comedy, and (for the first time) direct engagement with the Holocaust, a theme he had previously treated only glancingly.

But it was also controversial — intensely so, and clearly by design. A direct intervention in the social and political debates of the time, it was seen as taking up conservative themes, particularly the bad effects of the sexual revolution and “black power” protest on American society and culture. Consequently, it was called “the first neoconservative novel” and lamented in liberal circles as a sign of the author’s deplorable “turn to the right.”

“Nowadays we tend to forget what a bombshell it was,” wrote the neoconservative art critic Hilton Kramer 25 years later. “In its refusal to conform to the left-wing pieties that had already swamped the academy, the media, and the whole cultural scene, it mocked what had swiftly become the conventional wisdom. Which, of course, was why the Left decried it.”

And decry it they did. Consider some of the adjectives applied to it: “harsh,” “aloof,” “judgmental,” “cold,” “contemptuous,” “didactic to a fault,” “rank and embittered,” “an austere, dismissive jeremiad,” “a howl of rage.” Saul’s ex-friend Alfred Kazin, once a major booster of his work, panned it as an expression of “punitive moral outrage.”

In short, the reaction was seismic, challenging readers on a deep level — especially members of the New York cultural elite who saw themselves reflected in its scathing critique of liberal hypocrisy. The critic Joseph Epstein was on to something when he remarked that the book seemed calculated “to offend whole categories of the reading public as well as most of the people who write about books.”

Why would the author’s son enter this literary minefield more than 50 years after the fact? Certainly it is daunting for one who is neither a writer or a critic, but a publisher, which is a very different animal. That said, I have a distinct advantage in being intimately acquainted with my father’s private thoughts. As much as anyone alive, I knew his mind. I have also in my career as an editor published many polarizing books — books that liberals considered “bad” and “dangerous.”

You can tell a lot about the state of ideological flux in this country from how people react to such a book, and Sammler, while not a political treatise, does make a political argument. To reappraise it today is therefore necessarily to ask, in a way we do not ask of other novels, not just whether it holds up as a work of fiction (which it obviously does), but whether its argument was right.

*

[Saul Bellow] remained a mainstream liberal, appalled by McCarthy, firmly committed to civil rights, and publicly opposed to the Vietnam War — even as he accepted an invitation from LBJ to attend a dinner at the White House for “leaders in the arts,” a choice for which he was severely criticized by literary friends such as Robert Lowell. At the same time he was uncomfortable with the more extreme antinomian aspects of the student revolt against the so-called white power structure and bourgeois morality.

Critics who prefer not to address the substantive reasons for this movement away from the Left tend to fall back on psychoanalysis. The argument here is that Saul became more “patriarchal” as he aged, shifting from the archetype of the son to that of the father who seeks, as his virility declines, to assert his authority in the face of a noisy, disrespectful challenge from the young. In this connection, much is made of an episode that occurred in May 1968 at San Francisco State, where Saul’s speech on the place of writers in the university was disrupted by an angry young man who called him an “effete old shit” with “dried up balls.” This incident, incorporated practically verbatim into Sammler, is cited in various biographies and memoirs to suggest that Sammler is “an old man’s book” and that Saul and his hero are one and the same. The scene takes up less than a page:

“Hey!” . . . A man in Levi’s, thick-bearded but possibly young, a figure of compact distortion, was standing shouting at him.

“Hey! Old Man!”

There is a brief exchange about something George Orwell had said:

“Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counterrevolutionary. It’s good that he died when he did. And what you are saying is shit.”

A commotion breaks out and Sammler is helped to withdraw by a sympathetic female student. Out on the street, the narration resumes:

[But] he was not so much personally offended by the event as struck by the will to offend. What a passion to be real. But real was also brutal. And the acceptance of excrement as a standard? How extraordinary! Youth? Together with the idea of sexual potency? All this confused sex-excrement-militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing, Barbary-ape howling.

Saul was undoubtedly upset by this experience. But he had already voiced his jaundiced view of the student movement in the New York Times, writing that he was “wholly opposed to civil disobedience” and disliked “unreasonable rebelliousness and pointless defiance of authority.” Jews of his generation remembered how German universities in the ’30s had collapsed into fascism and plausibly feared it could happen again, here in the tolerant USA, amid the violent rejection of all civilized tradition and restraint. So there was clearly more involved for him than personal affront.

for the rest of this article, click here
from SAPIR
https://sapirjournal.org/university/2024/11/his-barbed-behind-mr-sammlers-planet-and-its-critics/?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=newsletter

ADAM BELLOW is the publisher of Wicked Son Books and the executive editor at Bombardier Books, imprints of Post Hill Press. He is the co-founder of the Jewish Literary Fund.

“Chroniques d’une exploratrice”: Web experience on stage (and about time, too) [By Tracy Danison]

“Chroniques d’une exploratrice” by Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent. “@RabbitHowl: Go see Osaka, there’s a box full of straw”. Photo Courtesy L’Etoile du nord © Alice Gozlan

Until Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent’s theater performance Chroniques d’une exploratrice (“An Explorer’s Chronicle”), I’d never seen Web experience on stage, theatricalized. I don’t mean I hadn't read depictions of a fantasy “cyber-world” such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer or seen such fantastic allegories of real life as the Wachowski bros. film The Matrix made into stage plays. I mean I hadn't seen a stage portrayal of actual human Web experience: sitting typing on a keyboard, scrolling, watching video and hearing audio clips, making acquaintance via pseudonymous written-language chat boxes, emoting, usually alone, in a personal space.

More than any other form of art, except pure dance, of course, theater performance of a thing can help a body understand it as an actual phenomenon. Think of all the plays based on conversations – think the B-52 crew in Dr. Strangelove. With the United States soon to be run by Web trolls, cranks and personas, it’s about time somebody did.

Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent build the plot of Chroniques d’une exploratrice around Alice Gozlan’s discovery of the Web’s thriving white-supremacist, or what I think of as a “Nazi”, world. That is harrowing and entertaining but I am inclined to pretty much ignore it here in order to talk about its theatrical framework.

As a framework, Chroniques is as savvy and pertinent as could be. Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent create a place and atmosphere appropriate to the physical and psychic action involved in Web exploration that Alice Gozlan can then meaningfully perform.

A conversation play needs a table and a hidden subject, a war play, a commander and belabored guesswork, a murder play, a weapon and secret motive. A Web play needs a screen (with keyboard or access-equivalent) a thirst to know.

The set of Chroniques has three different screens, one large screen set center and two smaller ones set back, stage right, to create a “screen environment” where Gozlan can watch others and herself, and be watched, by herself and others. With the “red-pill-blue-pill” scene from The Matrix running on one, the two smaller screens visually betray a larger Web reality or context.

The screen environment brings out the particularity that of Web interface requires a systematic self-othering of the person-exploring it. The person who decides to sit at the keyboard is the person who observes and authorizes but does not directly operate the Web persona (handle, pseudo or identifier), the authorized Other, as it were, that does on-screen/on-line interaction.

How the person and the Othered Web persona are tethered seems to me the heart of any effective portrayal of Web experience.

To theatricalize the Othering link of person and Web persona, Gozlan and Lorent use the three available theatrical spaces: stage-line, set and seats. Performer Alice Gozlan first sits on the edge of the stage as informant, then takes a seat in the audience as observer, then enters the set space as both Web Explorer persona and stage performer of the Web Experience. A telephone/voice relationship with a self-involved partner whose life seems to move parallel to rather than with her own highlights the Web Explorer Alice Gozlan’s alone-ness in an environment that is otherwise home.

The whole effect of this is to show an Alice Gozlan person and a Web Explorer persona living as a unit in an ordinary living space, a “home” that is also a sort of Wonderland, full of unsettling encounters, relations and adventures. This sense of home certainly undercuts the traditional image of safety and comfort; the place of “outside” is also the place of “inside”; the intruder is within the home and outside it.

Chroniques depicts a Web that is only as dark as its explorer, or maybe as dark as their itch of curiosity, wants it to be; if snuff films or Russian state propaganda are slithering into an Explorer’s YouTube feed, the Web Explorer has in some way brought them on. Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer relates how she came to explore the internet outside her established yoga, cooking, and how-to algorithms – by trying a little, pressing against the rabbit hole of her ordinary algorithmic world.

 

“Chroniques d’une exploratrice” by Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent. Photo Courtesy L’Etoile du nord © Alice Gozlan

 

This is important verisimilitude: the tether that links the person and persona is thick and also guilt-inspiring.

Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona finally tumbles into the parallel rabbit-hole of misogynists and Nazis through a single link. The links’ logics send her much further along, working pretty much in the same way that my curiosity about the UFO hearings has generated videos claiming that the human reptiles I all too often run into are, in fact, reptile-like alien invaders masquerading as human beings.

As an “othered self” and operating on what is perceived as “the other side of the screen”, the Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona has a “web object” to structure a psyche appropriate to the conditions of its environment – analogous to, if not surely an, “emotional object”. Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona finds her object in un-localized, livesurveillance-camera image of a woman alone on a mattress on a floor.

The woman on the mattress has a bruise on her arm.   

In real life and Web experience, an object, even an emotional object, is seen: there is some association between seeing it and the emotions raised by the sight. In a rainstorm, for instance, from my kitchen window, a half mile of so up the hillside, I see a mother neighbor smoking on her terrace. Her predicament moves me just as the predicament of the solitary woman on the mattress moves Alice Gozlan.

Both objects are seen, both are out of reach, but only Alice Gozlan’s woman on the mattress is unreachable, forcing the sort of dissociation of emotion and experience that characterizes a range of common psychic disorders.   

Alice Gozlan’s Web persona doesn’t just leave its Alice Gozlan person dissociated. It adumbrates helplessness: it can’t communicate with its emotional object, nor locate it, nor come to its aid, nor even hope to come to its aid, nor, since she controls neither the access machinery nor the algorithms that shape her journey, even find it, or find it again. Completing this awful tableau of dissociation and helplessness inflicted on the person through the Web persona is the uncertainty surrounding the object itself. I know as best as a body here-below can know it, that the smoking mother through my window exists – if I felt any uncertainty, I would take it as a sign that I should adjust my anti-psychotic medicine. Not so for the woman on the mattress. The persona delivers an image of an object that may or may not be fake. If image-object is fake, the feelings it arouses in Alice Gozlan, as deeply felt as they may be, are, insofar as the image may be a manipulation, fake, too.

And, finally, all the while, there is a possibility that the Web object is a real woman and that the person Alice Gozlan is a nasty voyeur, and a nasty fascinated voyeur, too. It’s her responsibility: who forced Alice Gozlan to go Nazi-hunting?

The dramatic thread of Chroniques d’une exploratrice mixes the Web Exploration into the world. In its denouement, Real and Web worlds touch as Alice Gozlan, first through betrayal, when she is doxed, and then when other Web personas take real form in her physical world. As I watched the plot roll out, I couldn’t help but make out a structure that parallels with those incomprehensible Gnostic tracts I ploughed through so long ago for my thesis … Indeed, I just call Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona, “Seeker Alice” and say that her goal is getting knowledge of mysteries (otherwise closed to her) rather than “looking into white supremacy-nazis”. I then think of the “chapters” that mark the dramatic timeline are “rungs” on the ladder to enlightenment, I could very well be reading Hermes Trismegistus.

 

“Chroniques d’une exploratrice” by Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent. Photo Courtesy L’Etoile du nord © Alice Gozlan

 

Of course, the “red-pill, blue-pill, ignorance-or-knowledge” narrative, as well as the routine of psychic dissociation certainly lend themselves to the notion that Web exploration is experienced as a “spiritual journey”. But what convinces me of a connection to mystic/spirit cult tradition is the way Web personas relate to one another, especially as “guide-and-seeker”, a relationship often found in spiritual journey narratives other than Gnostic ones.  

There has grown up on the Web just such a culture of semi-conflictual relationships between “seekers”, “adepts”, “guides” and “masters”. Guides, adepts and masters are often very ambiguous personas, with obscure motives and little patience for seekers and adepts and who possess “special” knowledge of one sort or another – I’m thinking here of Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural character. In the real world we have an example of Donald Trump pronouncing, very much in the rhetorical vein of @RabbitHowl, from his very own platform.

I evoked Gnosticism.  With oracular language, “Q”, the cryptic, apocalyptic Web persona, said to be an anonymous state “insider”, guides many a “queer thinker” across the wide world to broader truths about what is really going on. The “Q” handle references a theoretical source – “true” – gospel [Word of God]”. Web Explorer Alice Gozlan’s guide, “@RabbitHowl”, who attaches himself to her because of her curiosity (and shows her, among other things, the woman-Web object on the mattress) also doxes her, undoing her Web Explorer persona and returning her to her reality as a solitary woman at home. Her guide thus makes her vulnerable in reality to all the Nazi creepiness she’s become acquainted with on the Web.

Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona also has an equally ambiguous “protector” with the handle/persona “LaCréature”. This noun has the same semantic field as the English cognate and, I think, off the top of my head, probably references Kreacher, in the very popular Harry Potter series, the conflicted house elf left to Harry Potter by the divided House of Black. LaCréature is backed up by a Web real world gang called “Animals of the Night”: totems, ids, sprites.

As from all voyages, Alice Gozlan, the person and performer, returns transformed. As Chroniques has it, the transformation involves both recognition of the person’s real vulnerability and solitariness and the existence of a – formerly – unacknowledged and ugly world.

Be wary, friends, theatrical form often mirrors real-world content.

Good job, Alice Gozlan, for a quality performance and with co-creator Zacharie Lorent, a really intelligent and original staging.

______

I saw “Chroniques d’une exploratrice” created by Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent, performance by Alice Gozlan, at L’Etoile du nord on 7 November 2024, with sound by Nicolas Hadot, lighting installation and video with Simon Anquetil and Clément Chebli, and costumes and set design by Marjolaine Mansot.

 

Drive-by Animals (by Nin Andrews)

Drive-by animals, we called them when I was a girl—the dogs and cats dumped off on our farm by passing cars. The cats took up residence in the barns. One year our farm had over fifty barn cats. The number changed all the time—a lot of strays didn’t survive. They crouched in the alfalfa field when the mower swept by. Or they caught distemper or were killed by the dogs.

The animal-dumping practice is ongoing. I currently live on a dirt road in Virginia, and just this fall, my neighbors and I have adopted three black roosters, two barn cats, and a puppy, all left on the road. The chickens were hard to catch, but several of my neighbors were well-versed in the art of rooster-catching. “Dive for their feet or tail feathers!” they yelled as they grabbed for their claws and landed in the tall grass. Turns out a rooster can turn into a rocket and fly straight up in the air, thus avoiding capture. The cats didn’t need help finding shelter—they simply moved in to the closet barns. The puppy, a six-pound poodle-mix, flung from a BMW on a freezing Saturday afternoon (a hunter witnessed the event) was clueless. Looking bewildered, she shivered in the middle of the road. The puppy has now taken over our home.

What causes people to see the countryside as a dump? It’s not just unwanted animals you can find here. Old mattresses, toilets, air conditioners, and sofas land in the creeks, fields, and woods. There’s a rusted-out school bus deep in one of the valleys. An armchair used to sit on a hillside, as if someone dragged it there to watch the sunrise. One summer day I thought of sitting on it before bees and mice came buzzing and squealing out of it, and a rat snake slid across my path, pursuing its next meal.

I’m not one to be overly romantic, but I am a fan of poets like William Wordsworth, Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, Sydney Lea, John Lane and Nickole Brown, among others, who celebrate the natural world. I recently enjoyed this essay on Robert Frost by Sydney Lea. The poem, “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry speaks of how I find solace in times like this.  

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

That said, I’m not one to find the natural world a purely peaceful place, not when I lie awake at night, listening to the coyotes howl and hope they aren't dining on a newborn calf. Crossing the fields this morning with the pup, I watched buzzards circle overhead before I came across the carcass of a fawn.  And then there are the horrors of farm life. Whenever a cow becomes sick or injured or otherwise undesirable (like the little bull who jumped every fence), for example, the farmer who owns the herd sends them to the feedlot or the slaughterhouse. I am reminded of this poem by David Keplinger.  

The Head Gate Injury
by David Keplinger

The head gate didn’t tear the shoulder from the neck, it tore the neck from the shoulder, and the neck was displaced in a far-flung angle. They carried him toward the feedlot. And all the way he was quiet. He held his hand against the neck. He did it to keep it from falling off the world, which is to say, he did it to keep it from falling off his body. To the feedlot he floated as toward a drawbridge. I’ll pay for the gate, he managed at last. In careful English. I’ll pay for everything I did and I am very sorry.

Eighty years on, V-discs "for our servicemen overseas"

There's a thin young man named Frankie hanging around the theater.
who is glad to be making more V-discs for the men overseas.
Now he'd like to sing
"If You are but a Dream."
"Sunday, Monday, and Always" -- "Dick Haymes, Dick Todd, and Como."
"There'll be a Hot Time in the Town of Berlim"

Come out, come out, wherever you are. . .

 

The Birth of the Blues (1958 duet, Sinatra and Keely Smith)

On Frank's birthday (12/12).  .a rarity. . . with Louis Prima's trumpet as fanfare

 

"On Sinatra's Birthday"

On Sinatra’s Birthday

Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.
But why try to change me now?
An Englishman is happy when he's fighting for his queen
and the dawn comes up like thunder.

What a guy. What a fool am I.
It’s a quarter to three. Fools rush in.
Why do I do just as you say?
You broke my heart, you took it apart.

That’s life.  I'm just a mess without you.
A lady doesn’t blow on some other guy’s dice,
those fingers in my hair, a whole gang of love,
and I laughed to think it might turn out that way.

When I bit off more than I could chew,
why should I cry over you?
My kind of people, too.
What a world, what a life, I’m in love.

-- David Lehman 12/12/12

"Tea for Two" times six

"Tea for Two"
music by Vincent Youmans
lyrics by Irving Caesar

"Tahiti Trot": Shostakovich's take on"Tea for Two"
John McGlinn and the Ambrosia Chorus ("Broadway Showstoppers")
Art Tatum (1933, 1939, 1953)
Nat King Cole (1957)
Doris Day (1950)
Frank Sinatra and Dinah Shore (1958)
Yuja Wang (2023) pictured above 

On Angela Ball's "Hares" [by Jim Cummins]

photo © Steffi Wacker

To talk about Angela Ball's brilliant poem, "Hares," which appeared in the Paris Review last winter, I really have to begin with a look at the voice of the speaker in the first six lines. It's a very cunning sleight-of-hand that sets up the poem top to bottom. The very first words "Not mine—" imagine a world the speaker is outside of, a world the speaker approaches almost apologetically, reassuring the gatekeeper of that world—whoever he is or they are—that although she's going to take "some" of it, she promises she won't take much, just a "part."  And "not the best part," she claims.  Those words end line three.  

But then, in line four she completely upends this "hat in hand" assurance: "it could be the best, though."  There is "no way of knowing," the implication being that the assessment of value in that world might be askew.  She might bargain for a smaller part, but what's made available to her might include the best part because the ones who've got it might not know what they've got.  By mildly speculating on the ultimate value of what's at stake, she's undermines the authority of those who guard that world.  There's social humility at work here ("knowing one's place"), and social humility is an agreed-upon mask; but true humility recognizes the worth of the self.  The custodian of the world the speaker will take "a part" of is, finally, a gatekeeper to the wider philosophical world the lyric is going to traverse.  

After the initial obeisance is paid—almost like a fare or an admission charge—the speaker lists a catalogue of "specific abstractions" (my term) of what she will "take" a part of, the whole of which amounts to what I'll call life itself, or on the individual's part, the reclaiming of a life.  Synecdoche is an age-old rhetorical device loved by poets.  Here, Angela's magic has turned it into another effective tool that makes our footing a little bit shakier than when we started.  Synecdoche, of course, substitutes part for whole, or vice versa.  Angela doubles its effect in the following way.  Take the first example.  The "blue part" is a "whole" that is itself broken into blue things (and the blue thing selected to be "taken" by the speaker from this category is a cantilever bridge).  But this blue "whole" is "part" of a larger whole that I'm calling "life" or "world."  So the cantilever bridge is part to the larger blue whole; but the blue whole is part to the whole of life, the smorgasbord, carnival, boxing match, of life.  The longest part of "Hares" is a catalogue of these synecdoches.

Synecdoches that are parts of greater wholes include colors (of experience--subdued colors, I might add, which speaks to personality type and character), roughness of life (teeth marks, halter), deliquescence and dis-integration (failure, death), unflinching art, attempt at prophylaxis (vaccination), people who understand things, people who don't, ecstasy (endorphins—if swimming, it might be 'endolphins'), rebirth, reincarnation, Nature, Beauty—and much else.  Then the last six lines envelope the poem and focus in on the particulars of the part she takes that IS the larger whole: life, lived with another "part," who "rests close against me" and watches the boxing hares with her. These last six lines come back to the micro, zero in on particulars ("parts") that make up a whole personality, being, who watches with her the spectacular presentation of dawn. I would say the boxing hares are the last part-to-whole, but they're not.  The image of the mysterious presence resting close to the speaker is the last synecdoche of the poem.

Whitman's catalogues, often part of an ecstatic whole, can't be ignored here. Angela is an American poet working in an American vein: you can't produce a new catalogue without calling to mind the Cataloguer of catalogues--not if you're "part" of a tradition. Whitman moves from the micro to the macro and back in 'Song of Myself'—in a more modest way, Angela does the same.  We return to "Not mine—" --the words that begin the poem. Why isn't "it" hers?  Why does Whitman proclaim "Myself" while Angela says "Not mine"?  I'm not going to make an argument about "male ego" vs. a woman's "place" (especially since that place is usually defined by men); or about the idea that no one of sensibility would want to identify with America these days; but the puns surrounding that Manifest Destiny century--the 19th--are a lot of (dark) fun.  Originally, "manifest" meant "caught by hand," or even "seized."  The sense of entitlement that Whitman took for granted is not just shied away from in Angela's "Not mine"--but is in fact debunked. Whitman, Emerson, the whole 19^th Century, was about power, American 'exceptionalism,' identity through strength; and it produced great work. Angela's poem is a much more modest 21st Century acceptance, even quiet celebration, of a more human-sized part-for-whole.  "Hares," I would offer, is a sturdy, tough-minded expression of what affirmation we're capable of these days: an acceptance of our "part" in the scheme of things, and the resting close to our "part"-ners as we watch the amazing spectacle of it all.  

 

Angela Ball is professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she directs the Center for Writers. She is the author of five previous poetry collections: Kneeling Between Parked Cars, The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits, Possession, Quartet, and Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds. Angela curates the "New York School Diaspora" for this blog. Find her selections here. 

 

James Cummins is the author of Still Some Cake (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2012); Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2005), with David Lehman; Portrain in a Spoon:Poems (The James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series) and Then & Now (Swallow Press, 2004), among others. His honors include an Ingram Merrill grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. 

Ashbery's "The Skaters" -- Great Poems of the World, episode 16, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

Here's Part One of "The Skaters," John Ashbery's 
700 line poem that appeared in his book titled 
Rivers and Mountains (1966.) The complete poem 
is available at this link:

John Ashbery, "The Skaters"

The Skaters

I

These decibels
Are a kind of flagellation, an entity of sound
Into which being enters, and is apart.
Their colors on a warm February day
Make for masses of inertia, and hips
Prod out of the violet-seeming into a new kind
Of demand that stumps the absolute because not new
In the sense of the next one in an infinite series
But, as it were, pre-existing or pre-seeming in
Such a way as to contrast funnily with the unexpectedness
And somehow push us all into perdition.

Here a scarf flies, there an excited call is heard.

The answer is that it is novelty
That guides these swift blades o'er the ice,
Projects into a finer expression (but at the expense
Of energy) the profile I cannot remember.
Colors slip away from and chide us. The human mind
Cannot retain anything except perhaps the dismal two-note theme
Of some sodden "dump" or lament.

But the water surface ripples, the whole light changes.

We children are ashamed of our bodies
But we laugh and, demanded, talk of sex again
And all is well. The waves of morning harshness
Float away like coal-gas into the sky.
But how much survives? How much of any one of us survives?
The articles we'd collect-stamps of the colonies
With greasy cancellation marks, mauve, magenta and chocolate,
Or funny-looking dogs we'd see in the street, or bright remarks.
One collects bullets. An Indianapolis, Indiana man collects slingshots of all epochs, and so on.

Subtracted from our collections, though, these go on a little while, collecting aimlessly. We still support them.
But so little energy they have! And up the swollen sands
Staggers the darkness fiend, with the storm fiend close behind him!
True, melodious tolling does go on in that awful pandemonium,
Certain resonances are not utterly displeasing to the terrified eardrum.
Some paroxysms are dinning of tambourine, others suggest piano room or organ loft
For the most dissonant night charms us, even after death. This, after all, may be happiness: tuba notes awash on the great flood, ruptures of xylophone, violins, limpets, grace-notes, the musical instrument called serpent, viola da gambas, aeolian harps, clavicles, pinball machines, electric drills, que sais-je encore!
The performance has rapidly reached your ear; silent and tear-stained, in the post-mortem shock, you stand listening, awash
With memories of hair in particular, part of the welling that is you,
The gurgling of harp, cymbal, glockenspiel, triangle, temple block, English horn and metronome! And still no presentiment, no feeling of pain before or after.
The passage sustains, does not give. And you have come far indeed.

Yet to go from "not interesting" to "old and uninteresting,"
To be surrounded by friends, though late in life,
To hear the wings of the spirit, though far....
Why do I hurriedly undrown myself to cut you down?
"I am yesterday," and my fault is eternal.
I do not expect constant attendance, knowing myself insufficient for your present demands
And I have a dim intuition that I am that other "I" with which we began.
My cheeks as blank walls to your tears and eagerness
Fondling that other, as though you had let him get away forever.

The evidence of the visual henceforth replaced
By the great shadow of trees falling over life.

A child's devotion
To this normal, shapeless entity....

Forgotten as the words fly briskly across, each time
Bringing down meaning as snow from a low sky, or rabbits flushed from a wood.
How strange that the narrow perspective lines
Always seem to meet, although parallel, and that an insane ghost could do this,
Could make the house seem so much farther in the distance, as
It seemed to the horse, dragging the sledge of a perspective line.
Dim banners in the distance, to die.... And nothing put to rights. The pigs in their cages

And so much snow, but it is to be littered with waste and ashes
So that cathedrals may grow. Out of this spring builds a tolerable
Affair of brushwood, the sea is felt behind oak wands, noiselessly pouring.
Spring with its promise of winter, and the black ivy once again
On the porch, its yellow perspective bands in place
And the horse nears them and weeps.

So much has passed through my mind this morning
That I can give you but a dim account of it:
It is already after lunch, the men are returning to their positions around the cement mixer
And I try to sort out what has happened to me. The bundle of Gerard's letters,
And that awful bit of news buried on the back page of yesterday's paper.
Then the news of you this morning, in the snow. Sometimes the interval
Of bad news is so brisk that... And the human brain, with its tray of images
Seems a sorcerer's magic lantern, projecting black and orange cellophane shadows
On the distance of my hand... The very reaction's puny,
And when we seek to move around, wondering what our position is now, what the arm of that chair.

A great wind lifted these cardboard panels
Horizontal in the air. At once the perspective with the horse
Disappeared in a bigarrure of squiggly lines. The image with the crocodile in it became no longer apparent.
Thus a great wind cleanses, as a new ruler
Edits new laws, sweeping the very breath of the streets
Into posterior trash. The films have changed-
The great titles on the scalloped awning have turned dry and blight-colored.
No wind that does not penetrate a man's house, into the very bowels of the furnace,
Scratching in dust a name on the mirror-say, and what about letters,
The dried grasses, fruits of the winter-gosh! Everything is trash!
The wind points to the advantages of decay
At the same time as removing them far from the sight of men.
The regent of the winds, Aeolus, is a symbol for all earthly potentates
Since holding this sickening, festering process by which we are cleansed
Of afterthought.
A girl slowly descended the line of steps.

The wind and treason are partners, turning secrets over to the military police.

Lengthening arches. The intensity of minor acts. As skaters elaborate their distances,
Taking a separate line to its end. Returning to the mass, they join each other
Blotted in an incredible mess of dark colors, and again reappearing to take the theme
Some little distance, like fishing boats developing from the land different parabolas,
Taking the exquisite theme far, into farness, to Land's End, to the ends of the earth!

But the livery of the year, the changing air
Bring each to fulfillment. Leaving phrases unfinished,
Gestures half-sketched against woodsmoke. The abundant sap
Oozes in girls' throats, the sticky words, half-uttered, unwished for,
A blanket disbelief, quickly supplanted by idle questions that fade in turn.
Slowly the mood turns to look at itself as some urchin
Forgotten by the roadside. New schemes are got up, new taxes,
Earthworks. And the hours becomes light again.
Girls wake up in it.

It is best to remain indoors. Because there is error
In so much precision. As flames are fanned, wishful thinking arises
Bearing its own prophets, its pointed ignoring. And just as a desire
Settles down at the end of a long spring day, over heather and watered shoot and dried rush field,
So error is plaited into desires not yet born.

Therefore the post must be resumed (is being falsified
To be forever involved, tragically, with one's own image?).
The studio light suddenly invaded the long casement-values were what
She knows now. But the floor is being slowly pulled apart
Like straw under those limpid feet.
And Helga, in the minuscule apartment in Jersey City
Is reacting violet to the same land of dress, is drawing death
Again in blossoms against the reactionary fire... pulsing
And knowing nothing to superb lambent distances that intercalate
This city. Is the death of the cube repeated. Or in the musical album.

It is time now for a general understanding of
The meaning of all this. The meaning of Helga, importance of the setting, etc.
A description of the blues. Labels on bottles
And all kinds of discarded objects that ought to be described.
But can one ever be sure of which ones?
Isn't this a death-trap, wanting to put too much in
So the floor sags, as under the weight of a piano, or a piano-legged girl
And the whole house of cards comes dinning down around one's ears!
But this is an important aspect of the question
Which I am not ready to discuss, am not at all ready to,
This leaving-out business. On it hinges the very importance of what's novel
Or autocratic, or dense or silly. It is as well to call attention
To it by exaggeration, perhaps. But calling attention
Isn't the same thing as explaining, and as I said I am not ready
To line phrases with the costly stuff of explanation, and shall not,
Will not do so for the moment. Except to say that the carnivorous
Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving
Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves presence, but still.
Nevertheless these are fundamental absences, struggling to get up and be off themselves.

This, thus, is a portion of the subject of this poem
Which is in the form of falling snow:
That is, the individual flakes are not essential to the importance of the whole's becoming so much of a truism
That their importance is again called in question, to be denied further out, and again and again like this.
Hence, neither the importance of the individual flake,
Nor the importance of the whole impression of the storm, if it has any, is what it is,
But the rhythm of the series of repeated jumps, from abstract into positive and back to a slightly less diluted abstract.

Mild effects are the result.

I cannot think any more of going out into all that, will stay here
With my quiet schmerzen. Besides the storm is almost over
Having frozen the face of the bust into a strange style with the lips
And the teeth the most distinct part of the whole business.

It is this madness to explain....

What is the matter with plain old-fashioned cause-and-effect?
Leaving one alone with romantic impressions of the trees, the sky?
Who, actually, is going to be fooled one instant by these phony explanations,
Think them important? So back we go to the old, imprecise feelings, the
Common knowledge, the importance of duly suffering and the occasional glimpses
Of some balmy felicity. The world of Schubert's lieder. I am fascinated
Though by the urge to get out of it all, by going
Further in and correcting the whole mismanaged mess. But am afraid I'll
Be of no help to you. Good-bye.

As balloons are to the poet, so to the ground
Its varied assortment of trees. The more assorted they are, the
Vaster his experience. Sometimes
You catch sight of them on a level with the top story of a house,
Strung up there for publicity purposes. Or like those bubbles
Children make with a kind of ring, not a pipe, and probably using some detergent
Rather than plain everyday soap and water. Where was I? The balloons
Drift thoughtfully over the land, not exactly commenting on it;
These are the range of the poet's experience. He can hide in trees
Like a hamadryad, but wisely prefers not to, letting the balloons
Idle him out of existence, as a car idles. Traveling faster
And more furiously across unknown horizons, belted into the night
Wishing more and more to be unlike someone, getting the whole thing
(So he believes) out of his system. Inventing systems.
We are a part of some system, thinks he, just as the sun is part of
The solar system. Trees brake his approach. And he seems to be wearing but
Half a coat, viewed from one side. A "half-man" look inspiring the disgust of honest folk
Returning from chores, the milk frozen, the pump heaped high with a chapeau of snow,
The "No Skating" sign as well. But it is here that he is best,
Face to face with the unsmiling alternatives of his nerve-wracking existence.
Placed squarely in front of his dilemma, on all fours before the lamentable spectacle of the unknown.
Yet knowing where men are coming from. It is this, to hold the candle up to the album.

Happy Birthday, Emily Dickinson

I am alive -- I guess --
The Branches on my Hand
Are full of Morning Glory --
And at my finger's end --

The Carmine -- tingles warm --
And if I hold a Glass
Across my Mouth -- it blurs it --
Physician's -- proof of Breath --

I am alive -- because
I am not in a Room --
The Parlor -- Commonly -- it is --
So Visitors may come --

And lean -- and view it sidewise --
And add "How cold -- it grew" --
And "Was it conscious -- when it stepped
In Immortality?"

I am alive -- because
I do not own a House --
Entitled to myself -- precise --
And fitting no one else --

And marked my Girlhood's name --
So Visitors may know
Which Door is mine -- and not

-- Emily Dickinson
(December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)

Emma Bolden: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

  _____________________________________________________________________________

My Mother Says There’s Beauty Even in the Midst of Loss

 

but I am no longer listening, I am no longer looking

out of the car window & into the outside & all

its flowers, cheap party favors stacked up at the funeral

 

that the world is. As if a violet were God’s sign

that pain will be worth it someday. As if

on that someday God will make it all worthwhile,

 

living in a world where worth is based on pain.

If I could make the trees listen. If I could make them

understand, make them throw down their leaves & raise

 

arms bare as any human agony to the sky where

my mother says God is, where God stuffs his pockets

with our prayers like he’s hoarding candy, where sometimes

 

he unwraps a wish & decides that his answer is no.

It hurts me more than it makes me angry, the trees’

insistence on green. And after all beauty is nothing

 

like reason, nothing like a reason to believe the things we cannot

change are the things we have to accept. My mother drives,

the car moves over the asphalt some city put down to pave a way,

 

to roll its people forward despite what the ground had to say,

& above the sky gathers its blues like the face of a boy

refusing to breathe until he gets his way.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage (Soft Skull Press), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and such journals as Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, the Bennington Review, and Shenandoah. She currently serves as an editor of Screen Door Review.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                         The Wizard tree, Cathedral Woods, Intervale, N.H. 1900.

"An Alley in Avignon" [by Mary Jo Salter]

November tourist, muscling my way through
the mistral, guidebook in hand, I turned into
a wind-tunnel alley, looking for 22
rue du Roi René, which as I knew

no longer marked the cloister of St Clare.
Fitting, I thought, they’d built a theater
in its place, pleasing us arty types who’d care
Petrarch recorded he first saw Laura there.

And recorded and recorded.  So many rhymes
and plays on her name, lauded so many times
as the sun and sum of all being, here she seems
solid as the church bell that now chimes

thrillingly on cue, only a block
or two away.  I’m standing before the plaque
on the theater’s stone façade; it says that back
in 1327, when he took

one look at her that Good Friday, he was gone.
What does it really mean to love someone?
Am I serious, asking this? I’m sixty-nine,
the age he died, I understand convention,

crave it in fact. This one’s courtly love,
the beautiful bow to beauty set above
all others, the de rigeur frustration of
desire, his pining even for her glove

which of course she denies, and despite the birth
of eleven children and a ghastly death
(at thirty-eight, of the plague), her perfect youth
surviving, the least mortal thing on earth.

She’d married, or some scholars say she had,
an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade,
or maybe hadn’t. Old archives are so bad
when it comes to women, sometimes you’re just glad

there’s a tale to tell, however apocryphal.
And Petrarch’s children’s mother—whom no legal
tie ever bound, whose name’s illegible
to time, of whom no fact is known at all?—

I see her bring him candles he will light
one on another, staying up late to write
what she couldn’t read but heard about, and might
well star the peerless Laura, who tonight
again he’ll fall for, here, and at first sight.

from the current issue of Commonweal.(November 2024)

Photo: Mary Jo Salter flanked by David Lehman and Mark Strand, September 2012. Photo copyright Gabirel Don (c) 2012 

Magic movements, body and space: “Aux Lointains” by Aurélien Dougé [By Tracy Danison]

“Aux Lointains” by Aurélien Dougé. Photo © Olivier Miche

When we were kids, we believed in magic movements – I don’t know where we got that from but we got it; I myself remember using one to see off a troublesome priest. As adults we haven’t lost the belief, though we stay discrete about it and sometimes, thanks to academic psychology, even think such movements mere brain flubbery.

Aurélien Dougé’s wonderful solo dance performance, Aux Lointains, that is to say, Dougé’s body and will in the low hum of an organ continuo and the shifting dark and light over the about 100 square meters of stage, shows that we kids were right to believe and adults are, too.

Magic movements do exist, there are people skilled in them and they work just fine in the real world, stimulating pleasure, understanding and Imagination – things we can’t really get enough of.

Aux Lointains (“In the distance” or “Remembrance”), is intended as a choreography of remembrances and its 45 minutes or so of precise and deliberate movement reveals to the spectator how to find a body’s place not just in past-time, but, strikingly, in space. “Reveals” because it uses movement magic and “find”, because the movement proves (as it must) that space is a thing as well as a property, like gravity or light. So, as with light or gravity, a body has to negotiate it, find its place within it.

 

“Aux Lointains” by Aurélien Dougé. Photo © Margaux Vandassi

For this spectator, the movement magic goes something like this:

Dougé establishes “space” by nonchalantly appearing suddenly in the stage area, from left, as I recall, from behind the seating. He then moves a hand, then both, then both hands along with his feet, then his legs and arms. Seemingly simultaneously, he shows all this mobile body in light of his torso and head. This movement defines the form and shape of Dougé as a body and, at the same time, through the defining movement, points the form of himself as a will. As he defines his body and will, he is also moving into the stage, which I am perceiving from his body and will. It is making room for him. I see that it defines and shapes itself around Dougé, in and over his wake.

At some point along the 45 minutes of Dougé’s performance, I am convinced that space is not occupied but fit into; that a body finds a place, a body does not take it. Remembrance, but also identity and culture and so much else, is exactly this: making into, finding and fitting into a thing that appears so vast as to be void. And with this sense of things, I recall the experience of elegance and poise, feel here and alive, remember the Zen notion of presence.

____________

I saw "Aux Lointains" by Aurélien Dougé, cie Inkörper, at Atelier de Paris CDCN, 29 November 2024. The performance was produced for the Atelier de Paris CDCN and part of Swiss Dance Week 2024, sponsored by the Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris. Creation, set and performance by Aurélien Dougé with assistance on choreography by Cindy Van Acker and assistance in lighting by Luc Gendroz and live sound by Rudy Decelière.

A tip of the fedora to Ira Gershwin, born December 6

There are still two hours left before the sixth
of December gives way to the day of infamy
enough time to mark the birth of Ira,
George's older brother, and what better
way to honor the lad who wrote the words
than to quote some whch should I choose
"Embraceable You" (you irreplaceable you)
or "Someone to Watch over Me" or maybe
"But Not for Me" one of the greatest (for me)
a brainy boy who outlived his genius brother
born the same year as Yip Harburg
and Howard Dietz a very good year for lyricists
was 1896
well, Ira, no use complainin', the odds were
a hundred to one against you,
a stranger in the city,  yet
you're with her who wanted
to add your initial to her monogram

-- DL (frem the archives; December 6, 2009)

"Australian Tourists" by Peter Murphy [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Peter Murphy (1945 - 2024) was a playwright, author, librettist, photographer and poet recognized for his accomplishments in various forms of the genre, including concrete poetry and sound poetry. His visual and written works are notable for their wit and ability to accentuate life’s everyday absurdities. The breadth of his talent was remarkable. A glowing review of his debut short story collection, Black Light, in the February-March I980 issue of Australian Book Review opens with the line, “Peter Murphy is one of the very best poets under forty writing in Australia today.” 

 

 

 

 

"Horrible" by Peter Murphy

 

“Australian Tourists” takes aim at Australians’ uncanny habit of holidaying in places very much like the ones in which they live. Growing up in Sydney, a coastal city with beaches aplenty, I always found it curious that the entire metropolis seemed to resettle just a few hours up the coast each summer, to beaches not too dissimilar from the ones left behind. For me, the most impressive feature of the poem is its economy of language, made possible by Murphy’s deft line breaks. The poem’s idiom, overtly ordinary, evokes the monoculture it describes, and is lubricated by Murphy’s use of one word lines, subtle repetition and some really clever rhyme (“transfigure,” “St Kilda,” “mirror”) that occasion a flow so effortless, the effort required in reading the poem is “to persuade yourself /  you’ve moved.”

 

Australian Tourists

 

travelling in Australia 

 

have to be particularly 

sensitive 

to difference

 

if they're to believe 

they’re somewhere else

 

or that warmer climates 

or denser cities

 

in which they're introduced 

to people like themselves

 

can transfigure

what looks like home 

into the exotic

 

when palms in St Kilda 

mirror

those in Cairns.

 

And though there's no debate 

about distance

or change

 

it's paradoxical

that effort is required 

to persuade yourself 

you've moved.

 

 

Elegy for the Matador

For theToreador . . . this is your reward

The Matador of Metaphor

The grapefruit in the tropical orchard
has ripened into a globe in Hartford
for him to look at, not to eat.
If he had a tin can, he would beat
it as a drummer in a band beats
his drum and steadily with a swish
and sometimes a gong. It’s his wish
to escape from gray walls and sky
into a Denmark of the inner eye
or a bullring south of the border
or a sky espied from the trenches
of a battlefield in Flanders. Wenches
wander into his wonderland. Order
is disorder squared. We are nowhere
else but here, yet live we do in metaphor
like that elegant square-shouldered matador.

-- DL

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-One): Paul Violi [by Angela Ball]

EXTENDED SHORTAGES

I must remind you how serious I’ve become,
Almost grave (though still immensely likeable).

Love threatens to carry me off
Like a dancer in a trash heap storm.

Counterweight! I need a counterweight.
I read history late into the night,
A scavenger, loading up
On high deeds and disillusionment,
Treachery and hope, until I am unable
To hop over a footnote.

An ashtray crowning a stack of Gibbon,
A scotch and soda atop the King James,
Eventually a whiff of pity comes my way,
Not for me but for that sad Titan,
The dim-witted one who has to bear
The weight of heaven and earth*
Gravity and exhilaration, on his back.
Then I can snooze, snicker at my own
Grief and shortcomings and snooze.

When I wake and rise and slowly dress
With dust motes whirling madly around me
In that lovely solemn light, I do not risk
Even thinking about you until I feel
The weight of all I recall sink to my feet
And then in a bow to Philetus,**
I reach for my shoes.

                                   -Paul Violi   (First published in Mississippi Review's Poets of the New York School issue, 2003)

*Thirteen trillion trillion tons.

**Philetus of Cos, poet, teacher, famed for his love lyrics, admired by Ovid and Propertius, tutor to Ptolemy of Philadelphus, so small he had to wear lead shoes lest in the desert wind he be blown away.

 

Paul Violi

1944—2011

Paul Violi was an avant-garde poet. Waterworks, a short selection of his early poems, appeared in 1972, and In Baltic Circles was published the following year. He authored eleven books of poetry, including Harmatan (1977), Splurge (1982), Likewise (1988), The Curious Builder (1993), and Fracas (1999). After receiving his Grants to Artists award in 1999, Violi released Breakers (2000), a selection of his longer poems, and Overnight (2007).

The expanded text of Violi's first collaboration with printmaker Dale Devereux Barker, Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes (2002), is a collection of non-fiction prose. Violi and Barker's art books, including Envoy; Life is Completely Interesting (2006), have been acquired by many libraries and museums.

Subsequent to his 1999 Grants to Artists award, Violi was given The Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001) and a John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award (2004).

Prior to his 1999 FCPA grant, Violi had received grants from the Ingram Merrrill Foundation (1979), The New York Foundation for the Arts (1987), and The Fund for Poetry (1988, 1992). He was also the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowships (1980, 1986).

Violi was managing editor of The Architectural Forum from 1972 to 1974 and worked on freelance projects at Universal Limited Art Editions, researching correspondence of poets and artists and assisting Buckminster Fuller while he wrote the text to Tetrascroll (1982). As chairman of the Associate Council Poetry Committee, Violi organized a series of readings at The Museum of Modern Art from 1974 to 1983. He also co-founded Swollen Magpie Press, which produced poetry chapbooks, a poetry magazine called New York Times, and Broadway: A Poets And Painters Anthology (1979), edited by James Schuyler and Charles North.

Violi graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in English and a minor in Art History. At the time of his death he was teaching in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and in the graduate writing program at The New School. He also taught at New York University, The Dalton School, Sing-Sing, Stevens Institute of Technology, Bloomfield College, State University of New York at Purchase, and Scarsdale Teachers Institute.  (The Foundation for Contemporary Arts)

I am indebted to Ann Violi, the poet’s widow, for the biography above, for this photo, and for permission to republish the poem, which first appeared in Mississippi Review’s Poets of the New York School in 2003.

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-One):  Paul Violi

 

Paul Violi’s gregarious and self-effacing “Extended Shortages,” shares James Schuyler’s poetic domesticity, creating landscapes of the indoor, the close at hand.  He greets us with a humorous disclaimer of humor: “I must remind you how serious I’ve become, / Almost grave (Though still immensely likeable).

But suddenly he warns of impending danger: “Love threatens to carry me off / Like a dancer in a trash heap storm.”  We are reminded of contemporary dance’s fervent moments of extreme buoyancy, when flying costumes seem almost to mate.

Then comes a welcome solution: “A counterweight!”  The one that chooses him is history, that weighty discipline, that he reads “late into the night / A scavenger, loading up on high deeds and disillusionment, / Treachery and hope.” The reading lasts until the buzzardized speaker can no longer “hop over a footnote.” How many times have current events made us think ‘Who am I in the face of all this’? How much more so the past.

We next see the items that furnish the poet’s home: “An ashtray crowning a stack of Gibbon, / A scotch and soda atop the King James”—the poem plays with heft as trivial objects top massively important tomes: The Decline and Fall, the King James Bible—their permanence dominated by temporary pleasures.  Our enthralled speaker seems released by the “whiff of pity” that arrives,

 

     Not for me but for that sad Titan,

     The dim-witted one who has to bear

     The weight of heaven and earth

     Gravity and exhilaration, on his back.

     Then I can snooze, snicker at my own

     Grief and shortcomings and snooze.

 

His empathy for a mythical lifter of “thirteen trillion trillion tons” saves the speaker/poet from sinking under history’s heft—in the same way, I think, that savoring the name, “Korean Mums,” saves James Schuyler from anonymous despair.

The rest of Violi’s poem, instead of dispensing with the past, invokes it with serio-comic lightness:

 

     Even thinking about you until I feel

     The weight of all I recall sink to my feet

     And then in a bow to Philetus,

     I reach for my shoes.

 

All at once, we realize that the “you” in the poem is the source of the wilding inflicted by love in the second stanza. We feel poundage countered by the uplift of poetry and love. Paul Violi’s transformative “Extended Shortages” is really a consortium of abundances  ending with a physically slight but mentally immense poet, Philetus—a poet named for love, who must wear “lead shoes” to keep from being blown away, who paradoxically cues the abundance inherent in history and poetry and also the moment of ordinary life when we prepare ourselves for the outside world as love and words and world gloriously take each other’s weight. -Angela Ball

 

On The New York School [by Michael Tyrell]

<<<
O’Hara’s famous poem "Why I Am Not a Painter" begins with the poet yearning to be a painter. O’Hara reports the process of Mike Goldberg applying the word "sardines" to a canvas as O’Hara crafts his poem "Oranges." Eventually, Goldberg’s painting is "just letters" hanging in a gallery, but O’Hara’s poem has not "mentioned orange yet"; twelve poems are the result, but "there should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life." The poem cleverly inverts the materials of the painter and poet (Goldberg works with the word as a physical object, O’Hara with a color), and demonstrates how the final products of both differ from their original, ostensible subjects. Though O’Hara "would rather be / a painter," he honors the close, productive bond between the visual and the verbal, while celebrating himself as that enigmatic, generative figure, the "real poet."

David Lehman proposes that this collaborative, prolific period lasted from 1948 to 1966, when O’Hara died. Of his subjects, O’Hara is often regarded as the undisputed star of the group; commanding and flamboyant, he was as un-self-conscious dashing off a poem during his lunch break from the Museum of Modern Art as he was posing nude for Fairfield Porter and Nell Blaine. . . .

Lehman illustrates the poet’s nearly selfless concern for his peers, pointing out that dozens of people emerged after the poet’s death, each claiming to be his closest friend. Lehman closes his discussion of O’Hara with a provocative reading of "The Day Lady Died," the stunning elegy for Billie Holliday, convincingly placing the poem in the company of the great elegies of the English language:

As the detractors of "Lycidas" were wrong, so the critics of "The Day Lady Died" misjudged the poet’s conversational ease and seemingly self-centered stance…. [It] is a moving elegy not in spite of the poem’s preoccupation with the poet’s self but because of it; the death of the great singer at the age of forty-four occurs as an interruption, a shock that the reader is invited to share…. To the charge that O’Hara is too ironic to be sincere, I would borrow the distinction Lionel Trilling made between sincerity and authenticity: O’Hara’s suspicion of sincerity as a rhetorical mode is paradoxically what makes his work more authentic…. [I]f all that survived of 1959 was "The Day Lady Died," then historians a century hence could piece together the New York of that moment in the same way that archaeologists can reconstruct a whole extinct species of dinosaur from a single fossile bone.

• • •

Each of the remaining three poets receives equally extensive and relevant biographical and critical treatment. Lehman fills us in on Ashbery’s childhood as both a lonely boy growing up on an upstate New York farm and a precocious contestant on a radio program, his friends’ reaction to his early poems ("like falling in love with some thrilling young person from Mars," according to Koch), the impact of his decade in Paris on his life’s work, his contributions as an art critic, and his present position as the most frequently imitated and parodied poet in America. Few seem to remember that his place in the firmament was secured precariously over decades, beginning with Auden’s grudging selection of Some Trees for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

The price of comic ingenuity, Lehman observes, has somewhat affected the literary success of Kenneth Koch. As both an admirer of Koch’s brilliant catalogues and innovative one-line poems, Lehman is perhaps the most enamored of this poet. Koch is a lauded teacher (his antic assignments have become something of a legend in academic circles) yet is presented here as an under-appreciated writer in an era when the lyric was considered alpha and omega. Perhaps more ignored in the poetry world, in spite of a Pulitzer, is James Schuyler, whose life and deceptively transparent, scrupulously particular poems are thoroughly investigated here. In terms of both its form and neglected status, his work stands apart from the others. Often making use of the literal rather than the symbolic, he creates in his "Hymn to Life" a kind of "laundry list" that, as Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan discovers, has the power to make life worthwhile. We learn about his complicated, influential friendship with Auden, as well as why he was the last of the four to publish a book. He was renowned as the best editor of the group, and his poems attracted notable admirers such as Elizabeth Bishop, yet he did not give a public reading until 1988, three years before his death. Dazed at times by heavy dosages of antipsychotic medications, he spent a great deal of his later years in squalid hotel rooms.
>>>

From Michael Tyrell's review of The Last Avant-Garde in Boston Review, December 1, 1999.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/michael-tyrell-review-last-avant-garde/

"Love Me or Leave Me" with Doris Day (1955) plus Jack Sheldon ("How About You?") & special guest Judy Garland

l

 

Ralph Freed's lyric for Burton Lane's tune as sung by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Babes on Broadway

When a girl meets boy
Life can be a joy
But the note they end on
Will depend on
Little pleasures they will share
So let us compare

I like New York in June, how about you?
I like a Gershwin tune, how about you?
I love a fireside when a storm is due.
I like potato chips, moonlight and motor trips,
How about you?
I'm mad about good books, can't get my fill,
And Franklin Roosevelt's looks give me a thrill.
Holding hands at the movie show,
When all the lights are low
May not be new, but I like it,
How about you?

I like Jack Benny's jokes.
To a degree.
I love the common folks.
That includes me.
I like to window shop on 5th Avenue.
I like banana splits, late supper at the Ritz,
How about you?
I love to dream of fame, maybe I'll shine.
I'd love to see your name right beside mine.
I can see we're in harmony,
Looks like we both agree
On what to do,
And I like it, how about you?