The Best American Poetry

Doug Lang in America (Terence Winch)

In 1973, the last American ground troops left Vietnam, the World Trade Center opened for business, the Watergate scandal rolled downhill, the IRA bombing campaign was in full swing.  Agnew resigned. Allende was overthrown.  And Doug Lang arrived in the U.S.

His arrival was historic—it changed my life, as it did the lives of his many friends, colleagues, and students over the past three decades. Doug came here from England, by way of Wales, where he is from. Specifically, the town of Swansea (also Dylan Thomas’s hometown).

[left to right: Michael Lally, Terence Winch, Doug Lang, Lynne Dreyer, at Folio Books in DC, ca. 1976]

I used to write Clerihews about my friends in the 1970s. Doug’s was:

Doug Lang
likes to be one of the gang.
That’s why he talks funny and always wears a hat.
In Wales, everyone does that.

Doug has taught writing at the Corcoran School of Art since 1976. He is revered there, and elsewhere. His work is hard to characterize because he has succeeded at many kinds of writing on many different levels. Just before coming to this country, he published two novels, one pseudonymously. I think he told me that each took about six weeks to write. Today, they are extremely rare (though I seem to remember Ray DiPalma telling me he once came upon a stack of Freaks in a Manhattan bookstore).

We used to collaborate a lot in the old days. We wrote a sonnet sequence in the mid-1970s, which was never published, but to which we gave one of my all-time favorite titles: Take the Qua Train.
[photo below by Tom Orange]

Doug has written a great deal during his years in America, but has not published all that much. A big new collection of his writing is in the works, to be brought out by Edge Books, Rod Smith’s press here in DC. Meanwhile, Titanic Books published a collection of his poems called Magic Fire Chevrolet in 1980. I re-read MFC on the Metro today, and was knocked out anew at the intense energy and sheer force of the poems:

THE DEPRESSION

Charlie Green was a member of Fletcher Henderson’s
Orchestra, played trombone, cut 38 sides with Bessie
Smith, froze to death on the doorstep of a Harlem
Tenement during the depression. The snow keeps coming
Down. Well, let it come down. The city gets
Kind of white. Your body is cool.
I forget when I look in your face how far back.
Details, standing around. Everything goes out.
Face back. Heat eases
Up. Suspended. You bring wine, you talk. I like
To hear you talk, the way you talk.
I get nervous, anyway. Follow me up, through
The clocks, Mister B.
B for boss.  The book I toss.
She who longs for the red hot songs of Robert Johnson.
And so the bread is baked by you now, maybe draw
Some beer & sit for hours, you had it spaced wrong.
Saturn a bromide & Irish cream & footsteps on Sullivan
Street & Burgundy from the mountains, the mountains
Of romance, talk to me. Fat chance.
Tight wire risk.
The onion & onion.
Umbrellas from you, all broken.
Drunk & stoned & crazy 3 in the morning phone ringing.
The most difficult a relationship
Of air & what is wrong.
Trying to remember where the wall is.
Margaret Johnson came in from Kansas City &
Played piano on one record date with Billie Holiday,
Buck Clayton, Dickie Wells, Lester Young,
Freddy Greene, Walter Page & Jo Jones.
& Lester Young said, “I have eyes & I can see.”

Magic Fire Chevrolet also includes one of Doug’s most popular poems, “The Americans,” which has always been a personal favorite of mine. I believe you will have a hard time finding MFC, but if you can lay your hands on it, it’s a brilliant book. In the meantime, check out two more recent poems of Doug’s on the McSweeney’s sestina site (read one of them; read the other one). And the new issue of Smartish Pace, the excellent Baltimore journal, includes a poem of Doug’s. Don't forget Doug Lang's own blog, but don't expect daily installments (click here).  [photo below by Sandra Rottman]

“…The door held ajar by a 2-by-4, our
Bodies calm as rocks on a coastline at low tide, rhumba
Drums & another cup of coffee, a perfect blend
Of mass & rotation or distance & everybody’s asleep
As the earth and the other earth direct our attention
To an as-if experience”

              [from “McDonald, PA”] 

"Northwest Passage" (by James Richardson)

Northwest Passage

That faint line in the dark

might be the shore

of some heretofore unknown

small hour.

This fir-scent on the wind

must be the forests

of the unheard of month

between July and August.

-- James Richardson

Re-reading The South Orange Sonnets (Terence Winch)

I do a great deal of my reading on the Washington subway, as a daily commuter to and from my job in DC. (I’m one of the few poets I know who works a 9 to 5 office job; full-time work does take a serious bite out of one’s day, which is why I'm writing this at 9 p.m.) My subway reading this morning was Michael Lally’s South Orange Sonnets, a little book of 20 poems that had a significant influence on me as a young poet more than 35 years ago.

Michael Lally is a singular, original voice in American literature.  I first met him in November of 1971, soon after moving to DC from the Bronx, and we became instant best friends, which we’ve remained ever since. I’ve already mentioned him in previous posts, but I’ll repeat again that he was responsible for starting Mass Transit, a weekly open poetry session in DC that helped launch the writing lives of many poets down here.

In the years since, Michael has published a prodigious amount of work, including two recent, fat books of poetry and prose from Black Sparrow (click here for more) and a long poem called “March 18, 2003,” written at the start of the Iraq war, that is the best piece of political poetry you will read on the context for that terrible misadventure (for more on the poem, click here). He also became a successful actor, with parts in many t.v. shows (Law and Order, JAG, Deadwood, et al.) and movies. Michael even had the lead in a couple of low-budget horror films that scared me, if no one else (but I have never been able to watch horror movies). If you read any substantive sample of his work, you will get a vivid sense of his life story and his obsessions―Michael’s writing is, at its heart, an absolutely convincing and brilliantly rendered enterprise in self-mythologizing. In the last few years, his eclectic interests―rooted in a passionate knowledge of politics, music, poetry, movies, and life―are on almost daily display via his blog, called Lally’s Alley (check it out). [ below: SOS back cover]

The South Orange Sonnets has never lost its impact for me. The language is perfectly in tune, with not a wasted note or an extra space anywhere in the text.  (And, just to tie in with what I wrote about yesterday, this book is also a classic of contemporary Irish-American literature.)

4.
In East Orange Carol Robinson decided I
was her boyfriend. Her father found out
before I did. Told his friends and neigh-
bors how he didn’t want no white boy hang-
ing around his little girl. One asked me
not to pass the time at his house anymore
listening to his son’s Clifford Browns or
talking to his twin daughters. Walking
home that night three teenagers sitting
on a stoop on Halstead Street yelled: Hey
white boy, whatchu doin around here? You
know where you are? Where you from? When
I answered South Orange this fat girl said
Shoot, that muss be Carol Robs turkey.

9.

When my mother died two Irish geat aunts

Came over from New York. The brassy one

wore her hat tilted and always sat with

her legs wide apart. At the wake she told

me loud You look like your grandfather

the cop if you ever get like him shoot

yourself. The other one waited til after

the funeral to pull my ear down to her

level and whisper Youre a good looking

young man but if you don’t shave off them

side boards people will mistake you for

a Puerto Rican. We had so many cousins

in our neighborhood everybody called my

mother Aunt Irene. Even the Italians.

20.

My father lost the store, we all went to

work when I was ten. Then he became a

ward healer. My grandfather was dead before

I knew he spoke Gaelic. My father could

remember when they had mules instead of

automobiles and you had to remove your cap

and step to the curb to let the rich walk

by. My grandfather was glad to die in the

USA. He’d say if you can’t find a job within

thirty miles of New York Citythere aren’t

any jobs to be found. My father would say

You can write all the poetry you want to

when youre a millionaire. Eddie would say

You got to try a shoe on before you buy it.

(Note: The South Orange Sonnets is also included in It's Not Nostalgia; another close friend of mine, Doug Lang, has posted an excellent piece on Michael and his work ---see Doug's post.)

New Yorker article on The Wren! (by Mitch Sisskind)`

This week's New Yorker has an article on the Amherst Belle -- a snoozer as one might expect, a reverent nosegay, soporifically predictable, a term paper for the readership database. However, there is one aspect of the article that I believe is a breakthrough amid everything that's been put out in the world concerning America's all time hottest vampire volcano sex bomb versifier:

I believe this illustration from the article is the first depiction of Emily Dickinson's Newfoundland dog, Carlo. He was given to Emily by her father in 1850 when the poet was 19 and Carlo was with her until 1866. Newfoundlands were popular dogs in the 19th century. The conventional wisdom regarding Carlo's name is that Emily borrowed it from a dog in Jane Eyre, a favorite book. (But he was probably named after Carlo Rizzi, the Amherst hurdy-gurdy man at whom Emily often threw snowballs.)

The illustration takes liberty with the chronology of Emily's life, since her "white election" -- when she began dressing most often in white -- did not occur until shortly after Carlo's death and may have been partly precipitated by it. A lot of things changed for Emily after Carlo's death, such as the start of her self-imposed house arrest. There's no doubt that Carlo was very important to Emily, and he's beginning to get the recognition he deserves. Google him!

When Carlo died Emily wrote in her studied enigmatic fashion to her friend Thomas Wentworth Higgenson, the literary fellow whose head she loved to fuck with:

AMHERST.
Carlo died.
E. DICKINSON.
Would you instruct me now?

Accent on the you, non? Because Carlo had been instructing her before: "I talk of all these things with Carlo, and his eyes grow meaning and his shaggy feet keep a slower pace."

A wonderful story about Emily Dickinson as a robot is in Wild Nights, the recent book from the great Joyce Carol Oates.

"Multiform" [by Florence Cassen Mayers]

Multiform

The form
of a poem is part of its meaning. Form's
a way to get the poem written. Formalist
poets rely on form
to get from
beginning to end. Inventive poets alter form,

often they reform
form
or form
new forms.
I format
my iMac to transform

poems into sestinas, an old French form:
six end words repeat seven times each to form
thirty-nine lines. My poems are performances
of formal
and informal
experiment. In my formative

years I wore form-fitting
uniforms
or floriform
formless
dress. I refused to conform.
FYI

Here I've upped the ante, heightened form's
challenge: Are there form
words enough to inform
this peculiar form
of sestina where every line contains form?
Some poets are misinformed.

Some poets are uninformed,
some, formidable,
formulate
and pour formulaic
verse into formaldehyde
vials aligned on Formica

platforms.
Not thirty-nine lines? A mere formality.

-- Florence Cassen Mayers

From McSweeney’s [June 29, 2005]

Ireland Over Here: Inventing Irish-American Poetry (Terence Winch)

Yesterday I wrote about my friend Tim Dlugos, the tremendously gifted poet who died of AIDS in 1990. Thinking of Tim calls to mind a makeshift reading tour Tim, Michael Lally, Ed Cox, and I threw together in 1973. We had many adventures on the road—from car break-downs to one-night stands, but what I remember most was discovering a chapbook entitled A Munster Song of Love and War by James Liddy in a bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. Flipping through the book, published in 1971 by White Rabbit, I was immediately taken with Liddy’s poems:

11

“Irishmen make bad lovers,”
Says Bishop was how
The newspapers had it and we walked
In night’s service of evil to fall in love
     again sure love was not
     a word but a contagion
Of the English. Being in love casts out love.
How else could any of our fuckings be haunted
     as they are and the lips
     heard in any poem
How should we go to bed again

This was a far cry from Yeats and company. It was a revelation to me that an Irish poet could be producing work with this kind of edge. I tracked him down somehow, and we began a correspondence. Liddy has lived and taught in Milwaukee since the ’70s, and, although we’ve met only four or five times over the years, we’ve kept in touch (link to more information on Liddy).

[James Liddy]

James Liddy, like Eamonn Wall, another Irish-born poet who has lived in the States for decades, has re-defined the meaning of “Irish-American” for me (click here for more about Eamonn) . As the child of Irish immigrants to New York, I used to exclude automatically from our hyphenated ranks anyone born in Ireland. But Liddy and Wall, among others, bring a passion for American poetry to their writing that shows up clearly in their own work. In many ways, they are more influenced by writers like Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, and The New York School greats than by the icons of Irish modernism. 

[Eamonn Wall]

Very soon after we became friends, James and I decided that the world urgently needed what was going to be the first anthology of Irish-American literature, which we would co-edit. It would be called Ireland Over Here: An Anthology of 20^th-Century Irish-American Poetry and Prose. For at least three or four years, we mailed suggestions back and forth to each other, with samples of the work we liked by prospective writers. For the introduction, James would expand an essay he had written on “The Double Vision of Irish-American Fiction” and I would re-think a review I wrote on the Irish-American context of William Kennedy’s Albany trilogy. We would include all kinds of expected and unexpected candidates—Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Elizabeth Cullinan, Eileen Myles, Robert Creeley!  The literary world would be awestruck. Once we collided into the reality of permissions and the fees thereof, however, our noble project ran out of steam. I still have my big, fat “Ireland Over Here” file and fond memories of what might have been.

Fortunately, other, more resourceful people came along to take up the challenge. In fact, over the last thirty or so years, there has been a momentous awakening to the idea of Irish America, the very concept of which used to be greeted by everything from puzzlement to scorn by many. I know about the latter—I’ve gotten into my share of arguments with the scornful on this subject. Scholars like Charlie Fanning and Timothy Meagher, however, have brought immense talent and insight to their analyses of Irish American identity and history. My old friend Bob Callahan, who passed away in January of 2008, brought out The Big Book of Irish American Culture and edited a sui generis journal called Callahan’s Irish Quarterly (link to information on Bob) . There’s even a four-color monthly magazine called Irish America. New York alone supports two weekly Irish newspapers—The Irish Echo and The Irish Voice. A song that I wrote in the 1980s, called “When New York Was Irish,” became an instant hit in the Irish-American world, with the title itself getting recycled for use in scholarly books and conferences (Download when_new_york_was_irish.m4a).

[Timothy Meagher]

There have even been a few anthologies over the years. But the most impressive omnium gatherum of all came out in 2007. Published by the University of Notre Dame Press and edited by poet/scholar Daniel Tobin, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18^th Century to the Present (link to information on the book) represents a signal moment in the history of this literary tradition. While I might argue that Tobin’s criteria are sometimes a bit too accommodating, I am delighted to have this book in my life. Some names may surprise some readers—Thoreau, Whitman (him again), Jeffers, Frost, Schuyler, Ammons, et al. Go see for yourself. I had the honor of participating in a reading—along with John Waters, Dan Tobin, Jean Valentine, Greg Delanty, and Joe Lennon—at NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House last fall to mark the publication of this 900-page gorilla. It was a historic evening, and no fights broke out, though we did go out for a drink afterwards. 

Sinatra & Elvis on TV

"Love Me Tender" versus "Witchcraft"

"Social Security" [by Terence Winch]

Social Security

No one is safe. The streets are unsafe.
Even in the safety zones, it's not safe.
Even safe sex is not safe.
Even things you lock in a safe
are not safe. Never deposit anything
in a safety deposit box, because it
won't be safe there. Nobody is safe
at home during baseball games anymore.

At night I go around in the dark
locking everything, returning
a few minutes later
to make sure I locked
everything. It's not safe here.
It's not safe and they know it.
People get hurt using safety pins.

It was not always this way.
Long ago, everyone felt safe. Aristotle
never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger
only when Xerxes was around. Young women
were afraid of wingéd dragons, but felt
relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however,
was terrified of storms until he played
one on the flute. After that, everyone
was more afraid of him than of the violent
west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.
Euclid, full of music himself, believed only
that there was safety in numbers.

-- Terence Winch

[from The Drift of Things, The Figures Press, 2001]
http://www.terencewinch.com

We love you, Jo

Courtesy of Amy Gerstler, here are a couple of more Jo Stafford covers. What a pure voice!

And here, from the BBC news of July 19, 2008, are some more details about her passing:

Band singer Jo Stafford has died at her home in Los Angeles at the age of 90.

The star was a big hit with US servicemen in World War II who nicknamed her GI Jo. Stafford died of heart failure on Wednesday, her son Tim Weston said. He added that her health had been declining since October. The singer had 26 charted singles, nearly a dozen top 10 hits and she also won a Grammy for a comedy album she released with husband Paul Weston.

'Reluctant star'

Born in Coalinga, California, Stafford began her career as a member of the Pied Pipers. The group backed Frank Sinatra on his early recordings with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in the late 1930s. Speaking about Stafford, Sinatra once said: "It was a joy to sit on the bandstand and listen to her."
Despite her shyness, she had her own radio and TV series during the 40s and 50s. Her son said she was a "reluctant star". He added: "She loved making records and really didn't crave the attention of personal appearances."
Stafford voluntarily retired after making her last recording in 1970.
In addition to her son, Stafford is survived by a daughter, Amy Wells, and four grandchildren. Weston died in 1996.

Tim Dlugos [by Terence Winch]

The last time I saw Tim Dlugos was 30 December 1989. We met for dinner at Kramer Books & Afterwords, the first bookstore/café in the land (as far as I know). It’s one of the few independent bookstores still going strong in DC, but probably more because of the food than the books. Tim had been battling AIDS for a while, and I remember being a little apprehensive about seeing him, wondering to what extent the disease might have changed him. So his arrival came as a relief, a cause for optimism—he looked better than ever, and seemed full of energy and purpose.

Starting in the early 1970s, Tim and I were part of a group of poets who participated in an open reading every Monday night in a room over the Community Book Shop in Dupont Circle in DC. The readings, called Mass Transit, were started by Michael Lally in 1971.  Mass Transit was a poetry lab, where all experiments were welcome, or at least tolerated. Many poets came up through Mass Transit, and became friends—Ed Cox, Lee Lally, Beth Joselow, Tina Darragh, Pete Inman, Liam Rector, Lynne Dreyer, Phyllis Rosenzweig, and Bernie Welt, to mention a few. We hosted a reading series at the Pyramid Gallery, bringing poets like John Ashbery to town to read with local poets. We also started a publishing venture called Some of Us Press, bringing out chapbooks by everyone from Ed Cox to Bruce Andrews. Michael left for New York in 1975, and I think Tim left town around the same time. Fortunately, Doug Lang appeared on the scene and, in his capacity as manager of Folio Books, also in Dupont Circle, became the same kind of catalyst that Michael Lally had been. Doug’s Folio readings featured Ted Berrigan, Tom Raworth, Ray DiPalma, Barbara Guest, Maureen Owen, Susan Howe, Fielding Dawson, Ted Greenwald, and dozens of others, each usually paired with a DC poet. Doug, who started a small press called Jawbone and was part of another called Titanic Books, also hosted a number of workshops, whose participants included Diane Ward, Joan Retallack, and others.

In fact, Some of Us Press published High There by Tim in 1973, which I believe was his first book, and in 1977, Jawbone brought out Tim’s chapbook For Years. In New York, Tim seemed to flourish. He became editor of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project newsletter for a while, his magnetism and openness as a person always drawing people to him. He also partied hard in the big city. Later, in poems like “Powerless,” he would write with great passion about getting sober.

Tim’s masterpiece is the poem “G-9,” named after the AIDS ward at Roosevelt Hospital in NYC. I’m not an expert in the literature to come out of the AIDS epidemic, but it’s hard to believe there is anything in that body of work more vivid and powerful than this poem (here's the text of "G-9"). In November of 1989, Tim sent me a fat envelope of poems—“Here are the fruits of my hospital stay and my first week out.” I was blown away the contents, which included “Powerless” and “G-9.” He was doing his best work in his final year of life.  “G-9” was accepted by the Paris Review not long before Tim died, of complications from AIDS on December 3, 1990, at age 40. He never lived to see the issue (#115) come out, but he was delighted to know that it would be in the magazine.

The good news is that Tim’s friend, the poet David Trinidad, is working on the first complete poems of Tim Dlugos. I’ve looked at a chunk of this manuscript, and I very much believe its publication will be a landmark literary event, bringing back to public attention an amazing and important writer. Like Whitman, Tim, through his poems, seems to be with us still. (Wikipedia entry on Tim: click here.)

In his research, David came up with a poem by Tim that I had no memory of, but was very grateful to have. I think the poem is from 1973, when I was the poetry book buyer at a shop called Discount Books:

THINGS I MIGHT DO
for Terry Winch

Might write a letter to Jim Carroll
this p.m., I finally found his address.
Might get an answer; probably not.
Might start crying when Joey calls
tonight. Might wonder if he slept
with Michael; probably won’t ask.
Some time might remember the name of
the star that the statue on the fountain
at the Circle resembles: not Leslie Howard,
but that’s pretty close. Might quit
work today, might dream about my job
again tonight, the 4th night in a row.
Might lose something if I keep on
working. Might forget to cash my check
again. Might go out dancing
with Billy whom I might call this afternoon,
and might go to bed with when parents split
for West Coast in just two weeks. Might
look for an apartment. Might make
a tremendous break and move to New York City

Might do the streets. Might get crabs.
Might be missing the world’s most beautiful
boy by writing now. Might get a sunburn.
Might go bald. Might fall asleep on the bench
like some old bum. Might leave the Circle.
Might check the poems out at Discount Books,
find Joe Brainard, find Geraud. Might wave
to Terry as I just walk past, his waving back
a p.m. highlight and distinct possibility.

"John Ashbery: Created Spaces"

The summer 2008 Rain Taxi, just up, has a special portfolio devoted to John Ashbery, his house in Hudson, New York, and the idea of "created spaces" -- how Ashbery, in his dwelling place as in his poems, creates an architecture capable of accommodating many kinds of disparate artistic phenomena. Micaela Morrisette edited the feature, which has an introduction from Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer as well as essays by Roger Gilbert, David Kermani, Rosanne Wasserman, Penelope Creeley, Michael Gizzi, and Robert Kelly.

The timing couldn't be better. Today is Ashbery's birthday and in offices around the country much water-cooler gab is being devoted to Ashbery's close friend, Frank O'Hara, whose poems fascinate the enigmatic hero of the great AMC series Mad Men in last night's season opener.

-- DL

Frank O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency" [by DL]

Since the season premiere of Mad Men on AMC last night, people have been scrambling and googling to find out more about the poet Frank O'Hara and his book Meditations in an Emergency. In the show, the man reading it (with horn rimmed glasses and curly hair: code for highbrow) is sitting next to Don Draper at the bar of a midtown cafe -- like perhaps Larre's, where O'Hara, professionally a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, lunched often. Draper asks the man about the book. "You probably wouldn't like it," he is told. But Don buys it, we see him reading it in his office, and the episode concludes with Don's voiceover reading the fourth and final part of O'Hara's poem "Mayakovsky" in Meditations in an Emergency.

The title of the book began as a very sophisticated literary joke, an allusion to John Donne's "Meditations on Emergent Occasions." But as sometimes happened in O'Hara's poetry, the joke turned out to have a surplus of meaning. His poems are meditations -- but not the kind that comes after hours of quiet thought; they proceed from the heart of noise; they are written on the run, in a hurry, on a lunch break, in a perennial emergency. O'Hara's poems perfectly capture the pace of a New York day in 1962. He is a master of the art of gentle self-laceration: "Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern."

For more on Frank O'Hara's life and work, and his central importance in the whole New York art scene in the early 1960s, I hope readers will look at my book The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets.  You may read an excerpt here or there. The introduction appears in an issue of the online magazine, Jacket. 

The title poem of O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency appears in Great American Prose Poems.

See also "A Poet in the Heart of Noise" in the New York Times Book Review, June 20, 1993. -- DL

Guest Blogger - Terence Winch

Our guest blogger this week is writer and musician Terence Winch, who will be posting from Washington, D.C., where he lives.  His most recent book is Boy Drinkers (Hanging Loose Press, 2007). You can learn more about Winch here. Welcome Terence Winch.

Now I am quietly waiting . . .

We watched the season opener of AMC's Mad Men last night and have lots to say about it but for now we want to thank the writers for putting  Frank O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency" front and center more than once.   

Can you name the poem Don Draper recited in voice-over during the closing scene?

Happy Birthday, JA

Heartfelt happy birthday wishes to John Ashbery born on this day (as was Gerard Manley Hopkins, by the way).

The new Library of America edition of JOHN ASHBERY: COLLECTED POEMS 1956-1987, edited deftly by Mark Ford, is scheduled for release this October, and it's a must-have volume. Not only does it contain all the books from Some Trees through April Galleons (including The Vermont Notebook), but it also features more than one hundred pages of previously uncollected works. You'll find the poems he wrote at Deerfield that a "friend" pirated and published under a pseudonym; poems from Harvard days; the cento "To a Waterfowl" from Locus Solus; and such other noteworthy poems as "Evening Quatrains" and "Dangling Modifiers." The extensive chronology in the back of the book is invaluable.

You may order it here.

From Ashbery's merry "One Hundred Multiple-Choice Questions":

1. Thinking can help to solve problems because
a) problems exist only in the mind
b) problems must be taken seriously
c) mind triumphs over matter
d) not to think would be to avoid the problem
e) no problem can be completely solved anyway
f) it is our duty to think our way out of problems

Can't argue with that. Or this:

6. Religious freedom means
a) that God does not exist
b) that God is dead
c) that the individual is free to worship God as he chooses
d) that we need attend church only on Sundays
e) that we can do as we please
f) that there is no life after death

Finally,

68. "E=mc squared" alludes to
a) the personality quotient
b) the battle between the sexes
c) the generation gap
d) Heidi
f) The Little Foxes
g) all of the preceding

Give up? The correct answers are below.

-- DL

Correct answers: 1) g, 6) simon says, 68) A mazurka is a Polish dance.

Jack Kerouac quits the team (by Mitch Sisskind)

I have enjoyed reading on this site about Jack's outstanding work in Mark Van Doren's class at Columbia. However, while it may be true that Jack quit the football team after receiving an 'A' in the class, this is not actually why he quit the team. In 'Vanity of Dulouz,' one of his last books -- it may even have been posthumous -- Jack makes it very clear that he left the team out of frustration at the Columbia Coach. The Coach's real name was Lou Little, and I believe in the book Jack refers to him as Lou Libble. Here he is...

As the book describes it, Little (or Libble) had a tremendous fixation on a reverse play called KF-79. He had won a game with it thousands of years ago, when he was so happy he fell off his dinosaur. Now he kept insisting that Kerouac practice this play over and over, which pissed Jack off. Plus, Jack had broken his leg sometime earlier and Lou had moved him down in the depth chart, very unfairly in Jack's opinion. So Jack left the team. In fact, not long afterward he left Columbia altogether.

Jack was a good player in high school in Massachusetts, and I believe he did a postgraduate year at Horace Mann School where he also played. He was probably the best football playing writer ever, certainly the best since U. of Penn All-American T. Truxton Hare in the early years of the 20th century. 'Vanity of Dulouz' is one of the best books ever about football, although only the opening section actually deals with the game. Jack had the ability (like Homer) to magnify a small incident like a football game into something on the scale of the Normandy invasion. 'Dulouz' is really good, and you feel like you're right next to Jack on the field, or on your barstool.

However, the all time best book on football -- in fact, it's in a completely different league than any other football book -- is Don Delilo's End Zone. Which is wonderful, because unless I am mistaken Delilo did not play the game past the high school level and I'm not sure he even played high school ball. In this sense he's a kind of Stephen Crane, who wrote convincingly about combat without having taken part in it. Well, Tolstoy said if you've seen a street fight you can write about a war. If you've seen Mr. Smee, you can write about Captain Hook. If you've seen a dachshund, you can write about a Shar Pei. Trust me!

Adam on Mark (Van Doren)

<<
I had found a roster of my grandfather’s students over the more than 40 years he had taught at Columbia University, each name with a grade meticulously recorded next to it. At the top of each page was the year and course title — “The Narrative Art,” “The Poetry of Thomas Hardy,” “Literature Humanities,” “Shakespeare.”

There were hundreds of names. I recognized many: Allen Ginsberg, Jack (or as my grandfather wrote, John) Kerouac, Lionel Trilling, Thomas Merton, Herman Wouk, Clifton Fadiman, Arthur Sulzberger, Louis Simpson, Whittaker Chambers, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Robert Giroux, Robert A. M. Stern, Jacques Barzun, Robert Lax. The list went on and on, and what a list!

What I had in my hands was a singular piece of history, a collection of men (Columbia didn’t admit women at that time) who had helped shape the American literary canon for a better part of the 20th century. They had all studied under Mark Van Doren, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, literary editor of The Nation and legendary professor (though he would never have approved of that adjective).
>>>

Read the rest of "Kerouac Got an A," the painter Adam Van Doren's piece on his grandfather Mark in the Sunday Times.

Film Still Series - #92

From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman.

Whitman in Washington (Terence Winch)

For six years I worked in the old Patent Office Building in Washington, where the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery are located. The building began its service to the people in 1840, making it one of Washington’s landmarks. I worked there as an editor from 1986 to 1992, before the recent renovations, completed in 2006. In my time, the building still had the feel of the 19th century. I entered every morning through the basement, which always made me think of the catacombs—bulging, thick walls, narrows corridors, stairs that might have met the building code a hundred-plus years ago.  Here's a daguerreotype from 1846, showing the building in its early days (and the early days of photography):

What really made this a special place for me was that Walt Whitman had trod these very same corridors during the Civil War, when the building became a makeshift hospital: "Overflow casualties were housed in the Capitol, in churches, taverns, and schools, in the Georgetown prison and General Lee’s Alexandria mansion. Whitman found them lying between rows of glass display cases in the Patent Office, ‘noblest of Washington’s buildings.’ The Greek Revival shrine to American ingenuity was normally an exhibition hall for models representing ‘every kind of utensil, machine, or invention, it ever enter’d the mind of man to conceive.’ …Now it was a hospital, ‘a curious scene, especially at night when lit up. The glass cases, the beds, the forms lying there, the gallery above, and the marble pavement under foot—the suffering and fortitude to bear it in various degrees—occasionally, from some, the groan that could not be repress’d.’” (from Justin Kaplan’s life of Whitman). I would often imagine Whitman making his rounds in the same building where I worked, sometimes even sensing his presence.

“Whitmanesque” has come to mean that big-hearted, empathetic embrace of whatever life places in one’s path, that exuberant appetite for experience. Whitman’s invention of American poetry has a lot to do with that expansive spirit, and with his frankness, whether about war or sex. He did not back down, or look away. He did not write like anyone who came before. His use of language—open, plainspoken, direct—is the antithesis of poetic. He remains alive in his work because the work itself is so immediate. It is language with a pulse.

There’s a remarkable 1875 chalk on paper drawing of Whitman by Thomas Dewing in the American Art Museum’s collection. Reproductions of it fail to capture its depth and power. When you look at the original, you almost feel like you’re face to face with Walt himself. Because of conservation concerns, the work is very rarely displayed, but I used to ask one of the curators to take it out of storage and show it to me every once in a while.

When the museums in the Patent Office building re-opened in 2006, I was delighted to find a little room in the Portrait Gallery solely devoted to Whitman—with paintings and photographs, and rare copies of his work on display. I went back there last Wednesday evening after work to further explore the Whitman room, only to discover it had been replaced. Too bad—they should have made it a permanent exhibition.

For my week of guest blogging on the BAP site, I think I’ll mostly stay on the subject of Washington poets, or at least some of those poets I’ve been fortunate enough to know.

My current attentiveness to Whitman I believe derives from a visit to the Walt Whitman rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike on the way back from Connecticut a few weeks ago:

Namesakes

OK. We get on 95 and drive all day.
We stop at the Walt Whitman rest stop
on the Jersey Turnpike, and the dog and I
both pee in a secret wooded area just beyond
the trash cans and parked cars. We are hurtling
through space and time, through Connecticut,
New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland.
O Walt—and Joyce Kilmer—your poems have earned
you Turnpike rest stops! Horrible places jammed
with anxious travelers in need of a bathroom.
I buy bacon and egg on a croissant and wash it down
with water. But these are not the worst of monuments.
Joyce could praise those leafy arms, while Walt would
love the salt of the earth in their restless wandering.

Tanglewood (continued) [by Lloyd Schwartz]

 

 

(The story of my poems being set to music by the composition fellows at Tanglewood continues with some new wrinkles.)

July 26, 2008: An Interlude

Writing in the first installment of this blog about being both a poet and a critic, I commented that the happy occasion of my poems being set to music also opened a door between these two compartments of my life. But something I hadn’t anticipated came up that makes me think that door should have remained closed. I hadn’t the slightest inkling that being a guest artist working with young composers at the Tanglewood Music Center, the separate educational wing of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, could be regarded as a conflict of interest. But I was wrong. A Boston arts reporter who had evidently seen thisblog (or had it pointed out to him) contacted me and the editors of The Boston Phoenix, for whom I’ve been a free-lance reviewer for thirty years, alerting us that he was writing about this alleged ethical breach in his blog. Peter Kadzis, the Phoenix executive editor, responded that the Phoenix didn’t regard it as such, that the newspaper felt honored by my invitation, and pointed out the long history of artist-critics. All one had to do was read my recent reviews of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and compare them to what I had written before this occasion to see if the slightest change in my attitude had in fact occurred (I’ve always said what I think, sometimes at my own peril; it’s one of my character flaws). I explained the nature of this invitation, repeating in what I regarded as forthright, thorough, and candid detail what I had already quite publicly disclosed on this website.

When the blog appeared, it included so little information about what my role actually was, misguided readers evidently got the impression that I was getting a big payoff (laughable!), that my poems were going to be performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra (rather than by student singers and pianists), and that I even had a recording contract and would be getting residuals! The responses on the website ranged from “What’s the big deal?” to appalling insults and attacks on my character, my poems, and my friends, and offering completely false information as fact. This created something of a firestorm and bloggers are still debating the issue, some with common sense and seriousness and some with astonishing, dismaying, frightening hostility. Every silver lining, I guess, has its dark cloud.

In the meantime, the workshops with the composition fellows have been very exciting and moving. The more I hear of the settings (at this point I’ve heard two almost complete and only parts of the rest), the more impressed I am by the young composers. And their teachers. I started going (with no additional remuneration) to sessions with the composers and performers I was not contracted to attend. Shulamit Ran has been consistently insightful and inspired in her detailed comments and suggestions about the scoring, about clarifying the composers’ intentions, about getting closer to the meaning of the poems. The vocal coaches for this project were two celebrated sopranos, opera star Dawn Upshaw and Lucy Shelton, who is best known for her work in contemporary music (Elliott Carter dedicated a marvelous song cycle to her that she sang with glowing eloquence during the Tanglewood’s Contemporary Music Festival unprecedented five-day all-Carter hundredth birthday celebration). They became so interested in and involved, they both came to all the sessions, not just the ones to which they had each been separately assigned. Their feedback to the singers and pianist was both practical and deeply thoughtful, always making the performers more aware of verbal and emotional nuances and helping them bring these underlying elements to the surface. It was a cooperative venture. The composers were happy to make changes that would help the singers and pianists and get closer to the poems. My “job” was to make sure my intentions were understood, and to clarify phrasing, diction (especially getting these young concert singers to sound more “American”), and the pronunciation of foreign names. The whole process was illuminating.