The Best American Poetry

Devil or dupe? (by Mitch Sisskind)

Killer Kowalski was one of the icons of the so-called Golden Age of professional wrestling during the 1950s and 60s. His death on August 30, together with the selection a few days earlier of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate, reminds us of the supreme relevance of pro wrestling as a template for so many other forms of endeavor.
McCain's teaming up with Sarah was straight out of the wrestling bag of tricks. It generated exactly the same kind of shock and awe that used to happen during wrestling's Golden Age when an outrageously unlikely tag team would come into being. (By the way: although they're both on the same side there's also a whiff of Bobby Riggs/Billie Jean King in McCain/Palin. But wrestling is definitely the primary comparison.)
Obama and Biden, of course, are the perfect "good guys." Black wrestlers -- and there were only a few of them in the old days, like Bearcat Wright and Sweet Daddy Siki -- always had to be good. And for his part, Biden is the perfect virtuous old trial horse wrestler who would often pair with a talented but vulnerable rookie.
Then you have the ungeheuer McCain, with his face permanently stretched out of shape. The visual effect is not unlike Yukon Eric's lacking an ear (thanks to Kowalski.) And now McCain cynically teams up with a girl! We don't know whether to feel anger or pity toward her. Is she the captive of the evil troll or a full partner in his monstrous plans?

Look at McCain brazenly putting his arms around Sarah! Oh it's too horrible!

Of course later in the "script" it will be revealed that Sarah has somehow been hypnotized by McCain. Then Barack will snap her out of it at a crucial point in the match and in righteous anger Sarah will furiously turn on McCain like an avenging valkyrie and fling him over the ropes. The crowd will go wild! In a post match interview, Biden will announce his retirement to become the manager of a new Obama/Palin dream team. But wait! Suddenly Michelle Obama leaps into the ring, smashes a chair over Palin, kicks Barack in the head, and teams up with McCain!

Who would have believed it?! As Shakespeare wrote, "Confusion hath made his masterpiece."

Just got off the phone with. . .

Richard Wilbur [photo by Nancy Palmieri]

Just got off the phone with Richard Wilbur, who, industrious as ever, has finished translating two more Corneille plays that Harcourt will soon publish. And for the first time in two decades he will be returning to the classroom when classes resume after Labor Day. Do the students at Amherst (Dick's alma mater) know how lucky they are? Wilbur is co-teaching a course with his tennis doubles partner, Amherst Professor David Sofield. The course is titled simply "Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Milton." Wish I could be there.

-- DL

Movie Moments - Dead Man (1996)

Although lines from William Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" and "Auguries of Innocence" are quoted throughout this Jim Jarmusch film, I've always believed it to be based on Emily Dickinson's #754 (My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun) because of how Depp's character evolves from a timid accountant to an accomplished gun-slinger.  I offer these two scenes as support.  In the second, I have in mind the lines "And now We roam in Sovereign Woods - And now We hunt the Doe - " Note as well that Depp's nemesis (played by Robert Mitchum) is named Dickinson:

-- sdh

E. Ethelbert Miller - Guest Blogger August 31-Sept 6

This week, we welcome E. Ethelbert Miller as our guest blogger.  Miller is the author of, most recently How We Sleep on the Nights We Don't Make Love (Curbstone). You can read more about him, and follow his own blog, E-Notes, here.  Welcome, Ethelbert!

Bruce Covey presents Peter Davis

In an environment in which so many seem to steer their sculls between appointed lines, Peter Davis’s poems motorboat back and forth across poetry currents – satirically, yes, but also intelligently, self aware, and shrewdly critical. Davis’s brilliantly bizarre 2006 book, Hitler’s Mustache (Barnwood Press [http://www.bsu.edu/classes/koontz/barnwood]), both parodies and plays homage to precursors as varied as Frank O’’Hara, Robert Bly, and Russell Edson; tests the limits of traditional form (haiku, sestinas, and the Blues, for example); and isn’t afraid to act unassumingly goofy, putting, in the words of Amy Gerstler, "the id through a juicer." His new work tackles assumptions not of the canon, but of the writing process itself. The awkwardly plain, self-conscious tone is both startlingly ironic and subtly perceptive. Peter’s poems make me laugh aloud or shake my head, wondering how and where he unearths their chutzpah! The poem below originally appeared in Coconut 11 (http://www.coconutpoetry.org/cover11.htm). Behold its metatextuality! We do reassure you, O poem! The Best American Poetry has stumbled across you after all & reproduces you here lovingly, albeit virtually! We all wish you, O poem, a very happy tenure-line!

-- Bruce Covey

Poem that Begs for Reassurance

My experience with the world around me is that I either feel it's awful, or I feel that it is great. Right now I feel like this poem is awful. I feel like I am awful. I feel like an outcast in the literary world. Nobody reviews my work. As far as I can tell, nobody really talks about me. They do, but it's never enough. I'm not besieged with e-mails soliciting my poetry. I keep waiting for something to happen. I mean, this is a good poem. Other people seem to have so much going on. I read their bio notes and think, "Well, jeez, how do they all do it?" I say to my wife, "Honey, I always feel a few steps behind. How can I do all of that in this poem?" Some of them maintain blogs with numerous links and a lot of daily hits. Others don't even have blogs! All around me poets are winning prizes and being included in anthologies like The Best American Poetry. Some at very young ages. Some of these people, if they don't already have tenure-line teaching positions, are very strong candidates for tenure-line teaching positions.

– Peter Davis

Letter to Harwood and Lehman from Livingston, II

(c) bill hayward 2008

Dear Stacey and David:  This is from [Richard] Hugo's The Real West Marginal Way, "Self-Interview":

<<<
Q: Do you think of the wind as God?

A: I suppose I do, except I don't believe in God.  I believe the wind is like God because we can see and feel its effect but not see it.

Q: But isn't that true about other things, for example electricity?

A: Yes and I hate you for bringing that up. I suppose the fault lies with me. I want to but can never accept theoretical explanations of electricity, and I've never been able to accept electricity as a concept because I don't understand it.  On the other hand I accept wind BECAUSE I don't understand it, and would refuse to listen to a theoretical explanation of it.

Q: Aren't you rather narrow?

A: Hopelessly.

Q: How about another poem about your ex-wife?
>>>

E. Ethelbert Miller and Taters

George Scott , the first baseman who once played for the Boston Red Sox called his homeruns "taters.

I keep thinking that's what I should call the poems by James Tate. I heard Tate read at a book festival in Vermont several years ago. I fell in love with his dark humor. At some of my own readings I would recite "Rapture" and other poems from Tate's Memoir of the Hawk. Yesterday, I sat in a Borders bookstore in Silver Spring, Maryland reading The Ghost Soldiers and shaking my head. Take a look at "The Lost Tribe" or "The Native Americans." I love taters.

In some of my new poems I've been attempting to be as daring and surprising as Tate. It's like being a jazz musician after hearing Charlie Parker play. Soon you discover why you have ears.

I left Borders humming the "Jan's Scary Novel" tater. It had those memorable lines:

"It's all about bunnies?"

I ask incredulously. "Bad bunnies," she says, "Very bad bunnies."

George "the Boomer" Scott

-- E. Ethelbert Miller

Amy Gerstler's Sonnet for Judith Moore

Sonnet
for Judith Moore

The small stone towers pictured on the other side of this postcard
are called Lanterns of the Dead. Lights are displayed at night in those tiny
porthole-like openings at the top to indicate the location of cemeteries,
so penitents hiking through graveyards by torchlight (a popular
activity here, the allure of which is a complete mystery to me)
can find their way. The lace pillow slips in this hotel look as if
they’re crocheted from loops of white icing. This creates the sensation
that one is sleeping with one’s head on a large unbaked, rectangular
pastry. The hotel manager, a man with a drooping mustache, greets his
squirmy young dog each morning by cooing, "Hello, Mr. Wiggling
     Gentleman."
Of course this sounds ever so much better in French. That’s all for now,
     dear.
Kiss the baby for me. I trust his custardy little mind remains sweetly
unencumbered by thought. Determined as I am to return from this mission
in one piece, I see now why your daily prayers are soooo important.

-– Amy Gerstler

from No Tell Motel

About the poem Gerstler comments: << "Sonnet" is one in what I hope will be a series of poems written using a 1911 set of the Encyclopedia Britannica that I was given as a gift, a present I am still reeling from the generosity of. I'm trying to write one poem for every volume of the encyclopedia, using an encyclopedia entry from each volume (or multiple entries) as a jumping off point for the poem. In this case, I opened the "L-Lor" encyclopedia to the entry: "Lanterns of the Dead" and began there. >>

Editor's note: Born in Oklahoma, Judith Moore (1940-2006) grew up in New York and Tallahasee and lived for many years in the state of Washington before moving to California and commencing a career as a writer and editor. Based in Berkeley, she worked as a senior editor at the San Diego Reader in which capacity she befriended numerous American poets, getting them to write prose articles on subjects other than poetry. (When she found out that I collect stamps, for example, she had me come to San Diego to check out the philately scene there.) Moore's own books include Fat Girl (2005) and The Left Coast of Paradise: California and the American Heart (1987). She won a Guggenheim Fellowship and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. The poets and writers whose work she ceaselessly promoted miss her and mourn her parting.

-- David Lehman

Judith Moore (photo credit Rosa Jurjevics)

Found in Translation (part iii) [by Moira Egan]

[big round building in the neighborhood. I confess to endless fascination with how its appearance changes in various lights]

Before I say anything else today, I want to thank David and Stacey for inviting me to spend some time here this week. It's been a lot of fun, and I hope it's been as enjoyable for you to read as it has been for me to write. Grazie mille!

So, it seems that my constant reflection on "translation" this week has begun to influence all of my thinking. Isn't it funny the way life imitates art when you have an idea like that buzzing around in your brain? We've just had our pranzo, which was a simple frittata made with potatoes, onions, and red peppers. But as I was cooking, and thinking about what I was going to write today, I realized that our lunch was really just a translation into Italian of many of the egg dishes I've learned to cook along the way. To wash it down, we had a pretty decent Hungarian wine (a tokaji), which Damiano bought as part of his ongoing but temporary quest to find good, reasonable wines at one nearby supermarket that's actually OPEN during these last days of August. He uncorked it, we sniffed, a nice light flowery thing going on, so far so good. After the first sip, I said, "ah, an immodest little white wine," yet another sign that our work on translating John Ashbery will likely continue to influence our synaptic activity for quite some time. But that, as they say, couldn't be better!

Fun storming the castle [by Moira Egan]

[Civitella Ranieri: "the front lawn"]

"It's the place where they set you back down after you've been taken up in the Rapture," Sarah the English novelist said when I asked her how she was enjoying her stay at Civitella Ranieri. Then she quickly apologized, worried she might have offended me; I said, "Hell no, heavenly imagery is about all you can use to describe this place!"

"Synergy" is one of those poor words rendered nearly useless now by having been hijacked by the business world, but I think that synergy is one of the things that makes this place so magical. (Oh, "magical" is another word that doesn't mean much anymore either, but hey, I'm talking about a castle here.) The experience really is greater than the sum of its elements, and each element, taken on its own, is pretty wonderful.

Maureen Owen: Talisman and magic [by Ken Tucker]

Yesterday I bought a copy of Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics—the Fall 2007 issue, is it the latest one? Who knows with poetry mags and who cares, really, when good journals like Talisman bring timeless pleasure? Anyway, I snapped it up because among its many inviting pieces was an interview with Maureen Owen conducted by Barbara Henning.
    Now, I have an ancient vested interest in following Owen's work and statements; she published two poems of mine in her Telephone Magazine in the 1970s—indeed, the only two poems of mine that have ever seen print. (Not that I have submitted a helluva many anywhere since those college days. Ah, youth!) So, you know, even though I don't know her, I have fond feelings toward Owen and admire her taste.
    And her poetry. The occasion for this interview was the publication of Erosion's Pull (2006, Coffee House Press). At one point Owen discusses this poem:

Whenever I Snow

I think of Black
Beauty
when he was
pulling a cab

standing
streetside
under a lamppost
his dark harness gathering flakes
a jet horse becoming white powder

a dark horse disappearing

In the Talisman interview, Owen refers to this poem as "mysterious": "this simple image of an illustration I remember from my childhood book on Black Beauty that stuck in my head forever… I'm kind of overwhelmed by that image. Here is this beautiful animal and he's pulling a cab and it's night and the streetlights are coming on and it is snowing [and] the snow is covering him and he is gone in a way. It's not exactly sad, but it's more like he has flown away. He's disappeared from that path, that job of pulling the cab. It's almost like magic. There are certain things you can do in poetry that are truly magic, and I don't mean in terms of an illusion. You cannot devise this method of magic. It just has to happen. To me in this poem I have succeeded in doing this."
    It seems that way to me, too. Hello, Maureen Owen, magician.
--Ken Tucker

Two Versions of a Marianne Moore Poem

Here are two versions of "The Past is the Present" by baseball fan Marianne Moore.

The first version is the one that I used for The Oxford Book of American Poetry. The second version is one that I found circulating in the web.

What makes the second version corrupt is that it regularizes the spacing. Easy to understand why: idiosyncasies of spacing, unusual typographical arrangements, and even simple indentation are often casualties of electronic transmission. But the spacing here is crucial. I maintain that Moore's poem if printed with conventional spacing is not the same poem – and it is certainly not as good a poem.

The second version differs from the Oxford text for a legitimate reason as well: it is an alternative draft of the same poem. The difference is between "as on a recent occasion I was goaded into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse" and "as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse."

The alternative version is more compact, and usually this is a good thing, but in this case I believe that the original is superior because 1) it is more specific to Moore's personality and 2) it fruitfully complicates the situation and the poem. The phrase "I was goaded into doing by XY" implies that the great assertive sentence that rounds off the poem is not only a comment on what "This man" (or "the teacher") said but also a criticism of it as insufficient. The sentence by XY is vastly more interesting in this light: it exemplifies prose that lacks "a sort of heightened consciousness." The discrepancy between the sentence’s broad truth and its own inadequacy as a vehicle for that truth thus irritates the poet into uttering her epigram. Notice, too, that the Oxford version has the word "occasion" in line four, obliging us to understand how the closing epigram applies to the making of this particular poem.

From the poem’s conclusion I drew the title of the anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms.

The Past is the Present

If external action is effete
    and rhyme is outmoded,
       I shall revert to you,
    Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded
       into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse.
This man said – I think that I repeat
   his identical words:
      "Hebrew poetry is
   prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
   the occasion and expediency determines the form.

– Marianne Moore

corrupt / alternative version found on on the web:

The Past is the Present

If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said - and I think I repeat his exact words -
"Hebrew poetry is prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.

– Marianne Moore

Rare Stamps in Black Movies

Everyone who has seen Charade, the Cary Grant & Audrey Hepburn thriller directed by Stanley Donen, knows the vital role that rare and valuable stamps play in that mystery.

Can you name another crime-centered movie in which stamps function as a means of transferring large sums of ill-gotten gains?

Hint: a stamp album has a merely incidental role in this movie set primarily in Paris (as is Charade) but with parts in Menton, Rome, and New York.

Second hint: Jean Gabin, who as a young man was most marvelous in Grand Illusion and Le Jour se leve and Pepe le Moko, here is sixty-five years old and the head of a crime family.

-- DL

Political Applause Lines [by Bob Kerrey]

Bob Kerrey, president of the New School, has analyzed the structure of effective political applause lines: Reagan in a "debate" saying that he wouldn't hold Mondale's youth against him; Lloyd Bentsen telling Dan Quayle that he bears no resemblance to John Kennedy; Ann Richards's observation that George Bush #41 was born with a silver foot in his mouth. We tend to remember the line itself but forget the set-up. Here is Bob's analysis of how it gets done. And Bob knows: remember, he represented Nebraska in the US Senate for two terms and before that he was the state's governor. And yesterday was his birthday!
Take it away, Bob.-- DL

<<<
First and foremost, an applause line must sound good. The cadence is crucial. When Al Gore said, "it's time for them to go," he relied on an iambic trimeter line to galvanize the crowd.

The ideal applause line measures 24 to 26 seconds and can, as a result, be converted into a 30 second television or internet ad. The structure has three parts:

   Part One: An observation, eg  Most rooms in America have four sides.

   Part Two: An assertion that the thing observed is good or bad, eg Square rooms are turning our children into walled-in squares

   Part Three:  A promise to end the negative or implement the positive, eg When I am elected I will see to it that kids burst out of the walls of inhibition into the open air of freedom.

If the observed phenomenon is obvious and the speaker is pretty confident that the audience is hip, then Part Three may be all that is needed:  "And I shall not cease from mental fight until we build a university without walls" or "With your help I will make sure that the city of the future depends not on the squares of the past but the circles of perfection." 

My favorite example from Tuesday night's DNC convention was Brian Sweitzer's: "The petro dictators will never own American wind and sunshine!" He had a set up line, but he didn't need it.

Challenge to readers: Make a three-part applause line in favor of free sunglasses for everyone, because the August sun can be blinding.

-- Bob Kerrey
>>>

Joan Murray, "One Morganatic Leer"

One Morganatic Leer

You think you complain of the ugliness of people.
Meet your own bed.
Smell what you said.
Your words, unmitigated, dead,
Sink like a noon sun in the crass tomb beneath the steeple.

Two feet above the sand, look down
A tartan shore,
A clan, a clack, a whore,
A mobile open door,
To the dog against the tree, the brittle mugging clown.

Claws like tumbled fingers here
Stand for hands,
Elastic bands,
Minds and trends.
Thighs sprout here enough to breed the honor of your morganatic leer.

from Poems (1947) by Joan Murray (1917-1942).

Variation and quick change [by Moira Egan]

[Garden Gnomes, Italian Variation: Villa Valmarana, Vicenza]

I like what Heather said in her very nice comment about my previous post. It reminds me of one of the first conversations about translation that I had with Damiano. He was talking about his idea that the original text is like sheet music, and that a particular translation of that text can be seen as a "performance." That evening, we sat and listened to each of Glenn Gould's two very different versions of Bach's "Goldberg Variations," one recorded in 1955, the other in 1981, not long before his death. (Go and listen now! I can wait.)

Anita O'Day at the Film Forum

If you're within the sound of my voice (as New York disc jockeys used to say), hurry to the Cinema Village (12th Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place) to catch "Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer."  O'Day was one of the all-time best, whether singing the melody (as when she swings Rodgers & Hart with Billy May's arrangements) or veering off to the farthest imaginable extent (as in her amazing rendition of "Tea for Two" at Mr. Kelly's restaurant in Chicago, April 1958). Born Anita Colton in Chicago in 1919 she named herself O'Day because it was "dough" in Pig Latin, and dough is what she wanted to make. She sang with big bands (Gene Krupa, Stan Kenton) in the 40s and did duets with trumpeter Roy Eldridge. She then reinvented herself as a solo artist recording on the Verve label. She electrified the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with her treatment of "Sweet Georgia Brown." Her outfit on that sunny afternoon -- chic hat, white gloves, black dress -- was nearly as magnificent as her performance, and when her picture appeared in newsmagazines the public began to catch on to what other musicians knew all along. She was a self-made original: independent in a love-me-or-leave-me way, opinionated, candid. Her style was unique and she refused to compromise. O'Day used her voice as if it were an instrument; her bop scatting is the jazz equivalent of action painting. She lived high and went through dough more quickly than she could make it. Arrested for marijuana use in a frame-up, she figured she might as well try what she was accused of doing, and became, for the better part of two decades, a big-time heroin addict. It didn't hurt her singing. She managed to kick the habit and kept on ticking, unrepentantly, into her eighties. (Her obituary and Betty Comden's appeared on the same page of the New York Times one sad day late in 2006.) See the movie while you can. She'll show you half a dozen ways of approaching the Harold Arlen -- Ted Koehler standard, "Let's Fall in Love." And (in the words of a different song), when you fall you fall, and you might not mind it at all.

-- DL

Found in Translation (part ii) [by Moira Egan]

Let's just say it's fun to collaborate closely with your translator. Today, for example, Damiano sent me an email asking about the use of the word "finish" in a particular poem: did it lean more toward "the end" or "the surface, the decoration" in the poem? It seemed to me to be more at "the surface" on the literal level, but there's no getting around the echo in English of that other kind of finish (and it is a poem about death). So how do you translate that?

When we were working on John Ashbery's poems, the running joke was that Damiano would point out a sentence to me. "Do you think this means this, or that, or this?" he would ask, and of course, the answer was, invariably, "Yes." Then how do you render that multiplicity into Italian? Oy. Or should I say, "mamma mia." Puns and jokes and double entendres, not to mention cultural references, are such a challenge. Then of course, with poetry, there's also the form.

So today I thought I'd talk about two poems and their translations. One is by me (so I feel reasonably well qualified to talk about it), and the other is that famous villanelle by the late, great Elizabeth Bishop.

Sneak Peak - The Best American Poetry 2008

Men

     There are also men in the world.  Sometimes we forget, and think thare are only women -- endless hills and plains of unresisting women.  We make little jokes and comfort each other and our lives pass quickly.  But every now and then, it is true, a man rises unexpectedly in our midst like a pine tree, and looks savagely at us, and sends us hobbling away in great floods to hide in the caves and gullies until he is gone.

                                                  -- by Lydia Davis
                                                      from  32 Poems

Pre-order The Best American Poetry 2008, ed. Charles Wright, here.

 

"Everyone's Ex-Girlfriend" [by Sarah Heller]

Everyone's Ex-Girlfriend

Everyone's ex-girlfriend keeps showing up.
She surfaces when I've only just relaxed,
when I let things be
soft. I recognize her because I've been her so well.
You have nothing to worry about,
he says. Why would I want someone
who tried so hard to hurt me?
And then the distracted look.

She used to scream at everyone,
was the first to walk out.
Everyone's ex-girlfriend
had sex with their good friends
during a phase.

Everyone's ex-girlfriend is always
meeting everyone late at night.
Busy girl. He says
Maybe I'll stop by after
and then calls from home.
I say Did you have a good time
and he says We've really grown apart.
But I can picture the tall bar stools.

You look great, they might
say to each other, shiny eyes. You always were
like that. Some things never change.
It's snowing! The snow is in their hair.

When he says It was wild to see someone
after so long, I hear Our skin was so cold.

Everyone says
I don't know who I am right now.
I feel like I haven't felt anything in a long time.

Alright, he says to her,
You're giving me a hard-on.
Really, she murmurs. She is so mean.
Her drink splashes around in her glass.
Touch it, he says.

-- Sarah Heller
from Realpolitik