The Best American Poetry

"You can't outrun the holy ghost..." (by Mitch Sisskind)

Oral presentation is so important and so few poets in our day have mastered it. Why, for example, are there poetry readings instead of poetry recitations? I'm as guilty as anyone -- i don't know any of my meager oeuvre by heart, not have i ever tried to study the classical techniques of rhetoric offered by Quintilian and others. Perhaps for that very reason I so admire people who can present with power, and some of my favorites are gospel preachers. For example:

Jimmy Swaggart:

The late comedian Sam Kinison connects with his roots:

The great Aimee Semple McPherson looked pretty hot in the 1930s:

And just for all you kitten fans, join the 650,000 who have viewed this one:

A Little Night Music [by Laura Orem]

For the past few nights, very early in the morning before the other birds stir, we've been hearing two owls talking with each other in the treetops outside our bedroom window. They have lengthy but quiet conversations, their hooting conducted in sotto voce. We know they are Great Horned owls by their calls; also, once or twice we've been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of one of them flying overhead in the dark. On an amazing night last summer, one sat quietly perched on the streetlight pole for ten minutes or so while we watched from a respectful distance. Mostly, though, we know of their presence only from their disembodied voices and the occasional pile of feathers in the middle of talon marks in the ground.

Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus)

Trochaic Theory Meets Rodgers & Hammerstein

Just got off the phone with John Hollander, who points out that all double trochees -- Harry Truman, Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, Woodrow Wilson, et al. -- are "musically inevitable" and can be sung to the tune of the title song of Oklahoma!

Thank you, John.

It's hard to get a perfect fit for the combination of trochee, iamb, and partial pyrrhic that constitutes "Barack Obama," but Hello, Young Lovers (from The King and I) works -- and Younger Than Springtime (from South Pacific) almost does.

-- DL

Putting chaos into fourteen lines [by Moira Egan]

Yes, I confess: I'm obsessed with sonnets. I love reading them, writing them, teaching them. What is it about this little form that's allowed it to stick around, despite its detractors, and falling in and out of fashion, for lo these many centuries? Not long ago a poet/professor friend of mine asked another good question: why do so many poets seem to go through "a sonnet stage" as they are working to find their voices? Hmm. I wrote back, thinking about how the sonnet epitomizes (and dare I say, in a formal way) most of the things that we look for in poetry: compression, flights of figurative language that take us along for the ride, careful attention to the actual craft of the writing, and the payoff at the end: the volta, that turn that steers us toward epiphany or surprise. And oh!, the shapely sonnet: it embodies these in a way that feels right, proportional, measured: it's like walking into a villa designed by Palladio and thinking, “Oh yeah. This is just right. I want to live here."

But then I started to wonder about my own little love affair with sonnets. When did it start? And a funny thing happened (coincidence? I think not). For another reason altogether, I decided to track down David Trinidad, a beloved former teacher who had, over the years in those workshops, given us several poems by Tim Dlugos. Weird enough, David had suddenly appeared in a dream one night (I've already told him about it; it was a nice dream, and not at all alarming!) just as I was trying unsuccessfully to find a poem by Tim that had, metaphorically anyway, saved my life back in those days. Bad bad break-up, you know how that goes, and I had actually taped this poem up on the wall so that I could read it every day before I left my teeny-weeny Upper West Side studio. I didn't remember the title, but I did remember that, just-post-break-up, the speaker "finds a shiny dime from Canada" and eats "the same beef stew he always eats" at a particular restaurant. I wrote to David, who, as it turns out, was two or three pages away from this poem in his typing-up of Tim's manuscript, which David is assembling for publication. He kindly sent it to me:

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

In the June 1849 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay titled "Song-Writing" in which he asserted, "For my own part, I would much rather have written the best song of a nation than its noblest epic."

Pulitzer Boards took a long time to see Poe's point. On April 7th, Bob Dylan won a Special Citation "for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." This award is not comparable to an honorary doctorate. It's a genuine Pulitzer Prize.

Dylan unquestionably is one of America's greatest songwriters. He was able, at one time at least, to take young people on a guided tour of the national subconscious. He could conjure arresting images that were projections of hidden but recognizable feelings. He invented new language for members of a generation, providing aphorisms and maxims that seasoned their conversations and affected their lives. He decoded the spirit of the time with a unique clarity and later re-encoded it into cryptic but resonant songs that sounded like dispatches from the front lines in the war between reason and madness.

The principal claim supporting Dylan as poet is that Dylan is on the most intimate terms with the English language, that his use of rhyme, assonance, alliteration, imager, simile, metaphor, meter, and other poetic devices reveals someone who uses words and sounds as well as poets.

Dylan prompts the thought that instead of maintaining a sharp demarcation between poetry and lyrics, we might expand the definition of poetry to include songs that provide the same pleasures as poetry.

Still, printing songs as though they were reducible to lyrics and meant to be read as poets is sometimes adequate, but the songs are never accurately represented on the the page even though all of us who are writers continue to present them that way. Dylan's musical achievements are those of a performance artist. Separated from the music and the nasal twang and the startling cadences of Dylan's voice, the written lyrics can seem desiccated.

Maybe if readers decide that a sufficient number of songs do provide the pleasures of poetry, the books we write in the future will have both pages with poems meant to be read privately and an accompanying CD with poems meant to be heard and those meant to be sung.

Such books would have pleased Poe.

"The Most Boring Man" (by Jim Cummins)

The Most Boring Man

At last I am more
boring than the most
boring man at work.
I see panic in his eyes
as he’s washing up.
I enter the restroom
with a friendly smile
and the charming start
to a garrulous tale:
he’s gone like a shot.
I chuckle and piss.
Oh, the years of listening,
caught in the beam
of another’s high regard
for his riveting life!
Handholding, counsel—
die, miserable dogs!
No more the talking cure
driving me insane,
no more the delightful
tar pits of the cute.
I am the most boring
now and it only took
learning how to share.

– Jim Cummins

True Dodger Blue [by Benjamin Weissman and Amy Gerstler]

Tuesday, August 19, 2008: Dodger Stadium,  Los Angeles CA
Los Angeles Dodgers versus Colorado Rockies

Our lovely seventy-five-year-old mother-in-law / mother (respectively) Mimi, a RABID Dodger fan for seventy years, was recently our guest at Dodger Stadium. Her Dodger obsession dates back to early childhood. As a tot of five living in Brooklyn, she ran away from home to neighboring Ebbets Field, because it was her favorite place on earth. Her parents found her happily sitting on the grass, singing to herself, and with some effort coaxed her home, probably with the promise that they’d bring her back to a game, real soon.

Ebbets Field: Paradise Lost.

Mimi has old wounds dating back to when the Giants’ Juan Marichal cracked the Dodgers’ Johnny Roseboro on the head in the heat of an argument in 1965. 

Juan Marichal

Roseboro needed fourteen stitches. You can still make Mimi livid just by mentioning Marichal’s name. [Ed. note: I remember that game. Koufax pitched for the Dodgers.]

Sartorial commentary

Actor Chazz Palmenteri tossed out the first pitch. He was looking elegant and gaunt and Count Dracula-like, attired in black, with his black hair combed back, his cheekbones as dramatic and prominent as Bela Lugosi’s.

Dodger uniforms are way cuter than the Colorado Rockies' uniforms. The Rockies' uniforms look Star Trekky. The Dodgers' simple white and blue uniforms are elegant, dignified, classic, and show dirt right away from honest on-field activity like sliding into bases……while the Rockies’ strangely shaped black shirts and laundry-water gray striped pants look mismatched, like badly designed children’s pajamas. 

Happily, rumors that recently acquired Dodgers slugger Manny Ramirez had cut off or substantially trimmed his trademark flowing rasta braids are untrue. Were Manny to cut his locks, it would be a hair crime on the scale of Samson’s unfortunate barbering in the Old Testament. Fans were sighted at Dodger Stadium sporting at least three different styles of Manny hats. One: batting helmets with fake Manny braids attached. Two: regular baseball caps with fake Manny braids attached. Three: Manny style blue babushka kerchiefs/doo rags (he wears one under his baseball hat) with the aforementioned ropy faux dreads dangling down. Take your pick. All look great.

Cuisine notes

Mimi consumed a super Dodger dog with relish, mustard, catsup, and a triple helping of minced onions -- the full compliment of condiments available for dog eaters at Dodger stadium. She enjoyed the dog so much she kept closing her eyes while she ate as though she were listening to Mozart. Upon finishing the dog she requested a fork so she could eat the leftover onion bits out of its paper wrapper. She also shared a bag of famously salty Dodger peanuts (salted in shell! how do they accomplish this? are they soaked in brine before roasting?) and a diet Coke.

The garlic fries at Dodger stadium are top notch: prodigiously greasy yet marvelous visibly garlicky, flecked with parsley, creating a personal garlic cloud for eater and seatmates. One of the best Dodger Stadium foodstuffs. Eat them and you won’t get a cold for weeks.

Beer glasses with a little ring of flashing strobe lights around the base of the glass (like a sunken UFO at the bottom of your beer) are now sold at Dodger stadium and were a popular, if slightly distracting item.

Snacks from home: We brought carrot slices and hummus, tortilla chips and red seedless grapes. One twenty-four ounce beer, $12.

Literary criticism

“DodgerVision” is an enormous video screen on field. It’s the largest Standard Definition video screen in Major League Baseball (tied for that distinction with the Cincinnati Reds).

When players come up to bat, their huge, usually nervously grinning or grimacing  image appears on screen along with some of their recent stats and allegedly amusing text about them. Two substandard Dodgervision puns from said texts may benefit from editing:

For Nomar Garciaparra: “NO MAR MESSING AROUND!”

For Manny Ramirez: ‘SHOW ME THE MANNY.”

Actual game-related remarks

The Dodgers had just acquired forty-two-year old legend Greg Maddux from the Padres that afternoon, and although he did not pitch, there he was suited up in his new blue and white uniform that evening. The following conversation ensued:

B: having Maddux on our team is like having Confucius in the dugout. He has wowed teammates and coaches by accurately predicting where every hitter in the lineup will hit the ball.

A: Uh oh, our pitching coach is walking to the mound.

B: I always thought Honeycutt was an odd choice for pitching coach as during his days on the mound he was once thrown out of a game for having an emery board hidden in his glove.

A: So he could do his nails during the game?

B: No, so he could scuff the ball for enhanced gripping, which affects the movement of the pitched ball and makes it do freaky, subtle things.

Postscript: The Dodgers have long held the terrible ability of acquiring superstars after their prime. Pittsburgh Pirate batting god Bill Madlock wa a Dodger before retiring. The list of almost pensioners they’ve acquired in the eleventh hour is endless, embarrassing.

The Rockies scored two runs on three hits in the first inning. When you play the Rockies. you have to survive the dangerous Holliday/Hawpe duo and we did not.  Holliday lined a comebacker off Kuroda’s left foot and one pitch later Hawpe homered. Kuroda said about the homerun pitch, “I wasn’t able to transfer my will to the ball.” Then we had a string of sketchy middle relievers -- Jason Johnson, Hong-Chih Kuo, Tanyon Sturtze and Ramon Troncoso -- who gave up several more runs. The bullpen has been a Dodger strong suit, but not if the starting pitchers falter every game, with minimal run production adding to the pain

Manny being Manny

Manny can’t do everything, as the L.A. sports page announces three times a week, but he has been able to boost Jeff Kent’s batting average by twenty points by simply being there; Kent is getting tasty strikes to hit, because Manny's on deck. Mr. Kent had two hits in the game, briefly raising his batting average to 280 from the 250 zone it has been in for half a decade. Mr.  Kent, National League MVP in 2000, was once the possessor of outrageous numbers: 33 HR, 125 RBI, and 334 BA. (His lifetime BA is a more modest but still impressive.289.) He is one of the slowest second baseman in the history of baseball, and when he dives for a grounder, take note of the vain effort, which resembles a lethargic dinner guest volunteering to do the dishes after three quarters are already drying on the rack. He, Kent, was at his best when he played for the San Francisco Giants, frequently giving teammate Barry Bonds a piece of his mind.

Manny is beautiful, like a bouncy lumbering bear. He plays loose and free, and most of his new teammates appear to love him. He’s kid-like. And never hits a ball gently. His pop ups scrape the sky; his foul balls are lethal weapons. One foul curved in our direction (field box, first base side), whipped away at the last minute like a muscular dragon’s tail, and bruised a sequence of human palms before slamming into an abandoned seat.

The other Dodger delights include Matt Kemp, who combines power and speed, and has become a more disciplined hitter; James Loney, an elegant, reliable first baseman with a Ted Williams swing; and Russell Martin, the Canadian, who, earlier in the season, had “Play that Funky Music White Boy” played before his at-bats. (Dodgers get a snatch of their “favorite song” played when they’re batting at a home game.) Most joyous: brooding Nomar Garciaparra wisely selected “Low Rider” by War as the song to play before his at-bats. Nothing could be more nearly perfect for Dodger fans.

-- Benjamin Weissman and Amy Gerstler

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

Oh, in case you were wondering what I'm doing here in Rome, it's kind of a funny story. I married my translator. We met in Baltimore at a party that was very much populated by many good poets. At some point, I was introduced to Damiano Abeni (research doctor by day, poetry translator by night, I was told). Damiano started telling us about the edition of Elizabeth Bishop that he and two other translators, Riccardo Duranti and Ottavio Fatica, had just published with Biblioteca Adelphi (a very fine house by the way). But the really amazing thing was that the first printing of 5000 sold out within a couple of weeks, and it immediately went into a second printing. It's still unbelievable to look at the publication page of the second edition: First printing, January 2006. Second printing, February 2006. How often does that happen with a book of poetry?

Meantime, yes, we started dating, or I wouldn't be telling this story. After about a week, we were to meet up at the Cat's Eye in Fells Point, Baltimore, a pub into which I'd been crawling for many more years than it was legal for me to do so. Damiano was already there, and pulled out of his backpack a translation of one of my poems, carefully lettered onto heavy ivory stock. Yes, this is one direct path to a poet girl's heart.

I'm still trying to describe the very weird sensation of reading one of your own poems in a language you don't know so well. At that point, I had a little bit of Italian still resident in my brain from when I lived here as a child, and I'd studied other languages along the way. But to be able to read fluently, because you've written the thing, in a language that you CAN'T actually read: it's very visceral, like you're reading through your bones and gut instead of through your eyes and brain or something. No, that's still not quite right. I'll get it someday.

Since then, I've learned a lot more Italian, and he's still translating. In fact, poor guy, I've given him a translation interview questionnaire, which he's been working on these past few days, and in a later post or two, I/we will talk about poets he's translated, not to mention work we've done together (like the John Ashbery book, link to which Stacey was kind to put up a few weeks ago). But for now, I'll give you an example close to home. AND it's a sonnet, a form near and dear to my heart that can, as you know, be less than a picnic to translate.

This is a naughty little thing by the way; I excuse myself in advance. Thanks to Innisfree.com for putting it up the first time, and to Lo Straniero for publishing the Italian version.

At 3 a.m.

And when my cell phone vibrates in the dark,
its alien green eye blinking me awake,
I hardly start. My past, both near and far,
at these hours never lets me get away.

He’s drunk and lonely, wants to hear my voice,
although I’m guessing he could wake his wife
and do to her in person what he enjoys
explaining he would like to do to me. Night

can come on heavy, I’m first to admit,
the sheets twisted around you like a noose.
But I’m getting too old for this late-night shit
and being his 1-900 number muse.

I tell him I can’t talk; I’m not alone.
Truth is, these nights I’m sleeping with my poems.

* * *

ALLE 3 DI NOTTE

E quando il mio cellulare vibra al buio,
l’occhio verde, alieno, che sbatte e mi sveglia
mi sommuove appena. Il mio passato, prossimo, remoto,
a quest’ora non mi lascia sfuggire.

E’ sbronzo, solo, vuole sentire la mia voce,
anche se penso potrebbe svegliare la moglie
e con lei in persona soddisfare quelle voglie
che gli piace dire gli piacerebbe soddisfare con me.

La notte può scendere pesante, credo lo si sappia,
lenzuola attorte addosso come un cappio.
Non ho più l’età per queste stronzate, di notte o di giorno,
né per essere la sua musa da telefono porno.

Gli dico che non posso parlare, sono in compagnia.
Davvero, queste notti vado a letto con la mia poesia.

* * *
Though there's no shortage of porn opportunities in Italy, the phrase "1-900 number" doesn't mean anything here. I like what he did with those lines, bending it a little to get the "di notte o di giorno," which of course sets up the rhyme for "musa da telefono porno."

He'll tell you more about such things later this week, but I wanted to point out the nice way he keeps the rhyme and the integrity of the final couplet. Instead of saying exactly "I'm not alone," it's flipped to say something more like "I have company," "sono in compagnia," which clicks home nicely with "con la mia poesia."

And yes, the rhyme scheme shimmies around in the quatrains in the Italian, but I don't mind; I think the "sonnetness" of the poem is held very much intact. (But Amy! Denise! if he translates any of your ABBA poems, we'll be sure that that doesn't happen;)

Can This Marriage Be Saved? A Collaboration

Amy Lemmon (who will be a guest blogger in September) and I have been at work on a series of collaborate poems with two restraints: the stanzas are written in abba rhyme, with a mandatory mention of Abba, the singing group, in each poem.  Here's one for those of you who can't get out to see Mamma Mia! -- Denise Duhamel

CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?

"I've had enough!" he said. "I'm moving out
tonight!"  He left the toilet seat up,
the toothpaste uncapped. I logged on to Meetup
dot com to scout for a guy who would scrub tile grout,

take out the recycling, not leave whiskers in the sink.
My first message was from a guy who played the ukulele
inviting me to the Ukulele Cabaret at Jimmy's. A melee
of goatees, hula skirts, and sweet umbrella drinks

shimmied through my mind. I pressed Delete,
and opened a jar of Skippy, my husband's toast crumbs evidence
of his abominable manners. Meanwhile, my Prince
of Lysol must have been hiding under a dust sheen

in the parlor of some Victorian house. "I'm yours, m'lady,"
his email began.  I went to his website, "Mr. Clean
At Your Service Dot Com." A gilt-framed scene
of a man in a French maid's outfit, a masquerade he

conjured, accompanied by an MP3 of Duran Duran
singing "Is There Something I should Know?"
Trembling, I clicked "Reply" and typed "Hello,
Ever since opening my first box of Spic and Span,

I've found housecleaning incredibly erotic."
My keyboard was sticky from my husband's
Twix bar fetish. I jumped up to wipe my hands
with Purell and take an antibiotic

before checking my email again. "Methinks I can help--
Have you ever seen a hunk vacuum in only an apron?"
I took a breath. Did I dare become the patron
of a Dirt Devilish escort? When Björn and Agnetha split up, I yelped

that true love was a sham. In those good old Clearasil days,
I rooted for Benny and Anni-Frid, Carly Simon and James Taylor,
Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. Now, outside, winter sun shone on a trailer,
my husband loading his lumpy boxes labeled "RAGE" and "MALAISE."

-- Denise Duhamel and Amy Lemmon

Last Amsterdam Blog [by Rachel Shukert]

This is my last Amsterdam blog, so I hope you'll forgive me if I wax slightly philosophical about the nature of the internet and poetry.  I'm extremely interested in what the internet gives us and what it takes away, in regards to art, writing, etc.  On the one hand, it makes it that we never have to remember anything anymore.  Facts no longer imprint themselves on their brain the way they once did...I feel like I've hardly learned anything in a permanent way since 1999.  This is probably very bad for the imagination. 

However, Computer World can give back in unexpected ways.  The internet generates its own poetry, and is open to many poetical experiments.  For example, I had a phase where I would type random words together into Google--bicycle, unicorn, penis--like some kind of oracle and then contruct poems out of the mangled, ephemeral phrases that came back to me.  A couple of examples:

Allow me to explain;
I don’t mind being used for sex
In Thailand with five eleven year old girls
And I understand that if my
Son is to be rich and successful, he
Must become Jewish
But Kiefer Sutherland is one goddamned fucked up
Piece of dick-sucking shit
Because he doesn’t represent me or my
Writing style anymore.

Or

It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter for
That doll was meant to serve the
Sexual needs of the German Fighting Man.
That’s why I wouldn’t let that kid
Invade a vampire’s anus or an
Ultra black Christian single personalized
Beer mug. 
Try the Gay Man’s Ass Burgers—oh no--
It wasn’t a question. It’s no longer just a choice
Whether to have a light beer or a beer in the butt chicken
But the good news is you have your mother’s eyes.

Or

Moira Egan, Guest Blogger August 24-30

This week, we welcome Moira Egan as our guest blogger.  Moira will be sending dispatches from Rome. Welcome, Moira!

When in Rome [by Moira Egan]

Rome in August is a lot like New York in August: everyone leaves. You get that lovely, quiet feeling of having the city to yourself—and a slightly smaller handful of out-of-town visitors. In New York, you can be seated much more quickly—or at all—in your favorite restaurant, or one you’ve always wanted to try.

But in Rome, when I say everyone leaves, I pretty much mean it. EVERYONE leaves. Just about every Roman escapes to his/her requisite and hard-earned two-to-four weeks by the sea. The businesses they run are left behind, metal gates pulled down and padlocked, and, peeling in the summer heat, hastily scribbled signs informing of reopening dates. Our favorite restaurant, Ditirambo (yep, that’s Italian for Dithyramb) is, at the moment, closed. The butcher shop downstairs, where we buy not only meat, but also wine, eggs, bread, and cheese, is closed. The pet shop where we can find Iris’s mature-indoor cat food and clumpy kitty litter: closed. (Happily, they will open again on Monday.) The neighborhood “bar” where you get your mid-morning shot of caffè macchiato: also closed. Even the smaller supermarkets close. The other day we needed to buy matches, and managed to find a tabaccaio that stays open during this period. These are the small shops where you can buy not only cigarettes, but bus tickets, Kleenex, gum, and sometimes small Catholic knick-knacks for your home as well. All of the above were available in abundance, but the store was out of matches. The tabaccaio shopgirl joked that the driver of the match truck must also be on vacation.

So, though it’s slightly harder to find what you need (or want) in Rome in August, it’s oh-so much quieter. We live right on the ambulance path of two major hospitals, so we still get the scary loud Mweh-MWEH Mweh_MWEH of the sirens, though, for now, less frequently. But the politicians who careen through town, speeding through traffic lights guided by their escorts of six carabinieri cars with sirens on full-blare: they’re on vacation. Fewer buses are running, many many fewer cars: ah, it feels like a month in the country. Well, almost. And for deeper quiet, the churches of course are still open, maintaining their regular-season hours of approximately 8-12 in the morning, and then again 4-7 p.m., or so. It’s always nice to sit in the cool and visit with the likes of Michelangelo, Bernini, Caravaggio, Mattia Preti, et al.

You might well think that another way to stay cool and enjoy yourself in August, and maybe even learn something, would be to go the movies. And during the rest of the year, there are at least two or three

Letter to Harwood and Lehman from Livingston

Bill Hayward writes to us from big sky country.  He adds that the text accompanying the photo is from "the big timber police report in the big timber paper...that is  in  big timber, montana. "  Thanks, Bill.

--sdh

Bruce Covey presents Anne Boyer

This week’s BAP poem from Coconut marks the fourth appearance for Anne Boyer’s “You Will Want Like Cowboys”:  1. In Coconut 4; 2. In Best of the Net 2006; and 3. In her 2008 Coffee House collection Romance of the Happy Workers.  Anne is so incredibly everywhere & all at once: A way-cool blogger with a frenetic following; guitarist in her own band; brilliant painter/collagist; co-editor (with Kasey Mohammad) of the journal Abraham Lincoln; teacher at the Kansas City Art Institute; author of chapbooks; single mother to her daughter Hazel & cat Ulysses.  Anne’s Issue 4 poems have received more hits than any other poems in the history of Coconut, and for good reason:  “Cowboys” begins with a repetitive riff on wanting, moving from a focus on the rhetoric of desire through the intangible (“ecstatic”) before landing in local, bodily, everyday Kansas.  Along the way there are references both to Goya and to Browning, a restlessness organized by association and fever.  I’d intended to solicit work from Anne — she’s one of my very favorite poets — but she beat me to it.  Everyone likes Anne’s poems!  You will too!

-- Bruce Covey

You Will Want Like Cowboys

I will want like splinters,

astonished spit, also like alphabets and minnows.

You will want at smallness,

also squirreling across the wire.

Wantings in the wilderness!

What did you think,

words?

You've seen it all before.

That's my last duchess—

all I want I've learned from her.

I want all I've learned from her.

Like Goya and church

you will fever like derangement.

You will lick no less

the ecstatic, and you will grow no more

accustomed to this dirty purse

than I to breathlessness

or pavement.

There is Kansas in the wilderness.

There is not cloudy.

All day the fingering, there your gaze,

there I will saddle up

the pillow, buckle, bobbin, tongue

I wanted from.

-- Anne Boyer

Also...[by Rachel Shukert]

Yesterday I had the opportunity to screen the film You Don't Mess With the Zohan in a theater full of Dutch and Germans.  The experience was every bit as discomfiting as it sounds.  I won't go into to too much detail, as I have to save it for a column, but let's just say this: I'm not sure a lot of people here are quite ready to laugh at Jews yet, although they certainly have no trouble using them for football mascots. 

Is this how the Indians feel?

Another Day, Another 5000 meters [by Rachel Shukert]

Another day, another marathon Olympics watching session (I guess we won't be able to say that much longer.)  The Dutch press are making a very big deal about Tia Hellebaut, the 6 foot tall Belgian high jumper who unexpectedly won gold in the high jump, beating out the heavily favored Croatian (and as I kept pretending, pickle heiress) Blanka Vlasic.  (By the way, I have a friend who is an actual pickle heiress, which might be the best kind of heiress to be.  Have you ever thought about that?  I mean, if you were an heiress, what kind would you like to be?  You'd want it to be something distinctive by not embarrassing.  Nobody wants to be constantly referred to in the press as "the Catheter Heiress" or "The Anal Suppository Heiress."  Pickle heiress is perfect.  Anyway.)

I've noticed something else in the European coverage of the games--there's no human interest stories, and I actually miss them.  How can I care about this person if I don't see slow motion footage of the bleak Ukranian orphanage where they first learned to pole vault?  Or hear about how their blind father drove them seven hours each way to Tashkent's only diving complex, until they became an American citizen just three hours before the Games officially began?  (I take that back.  Apparently it's Bahrain and Qatar that were giving citizenships out like candy just before the games.)

But the Europeans do something else.  Just before the start of a long race, they pan over the faces of each competitor.  More than pan--they hold a close-up of each of their faces for several seconds. And what you see there really tells you all you need to know.  Faces are amazing, and theirs are no exception; every hue from everywhere in the world.  And contained therein: fear, pride, fatalism, disbelief, or some combination of all three.  They all look so different, yet so utterly alike.  A moment like that is bigger than everyone.  And I think that's what the Olympics are really about, n'est-ce pas?

Also, China really should have invested in a better wind machine.  Everyone's flag looks like shit when they turn it on.  Hell, they could have borrowed one from Beyonce.  She's got plenty. 

Ricks on Dylan

I've been reading Christopher Ricks's book on Bob Dylan's lyrics, and I wonder how Dylan aficionados feel about it and especially about the discrepancy between style of critic and style of songwriter.

Ricks is probably the most talented practitioner of old-fashioned "close reading" that we have. His books on Milton, Keats, Eliot offer brilliant line-by-line analysis of great poems. "Dylan's Visions of Sin" shares much with his previous books: passionate advocacy of the writer, clever puns and allusions in every sentence, a controlling concept to organize and unify the book (T. S. Eliot and "prejudice," Dylan and "sin"). Thus, for example, "Positively 4th Street" becomes a condemnation of a former friend guilty of the sin of envy. It is exciting that Ricks has the same ardor for Dylan as for Eliot and Samuel Beckett.

The style of analysis and expression is so characteristic of Ricks -- logical, linear despite pirouettes, "English" -- and so seemingly antithetical to Dylan's non-analytical, non-linear, "American" manner that you can't help noting the incongruity.

Opinions, anyone?

-- DL

Robert Byrd: our most (or only) poetic Senator

Few contemporary politicians have any real feeling for poetry. There are some exceptions. Clinton gave Monica a copy of Leaves of Grass. And here the Senator from West Virgina recites:

The following could have been scripted by S. Beckett --

The Fallacy of Irreversible Trends

Even experienced stock investors fall for the fallacy of irreversible trends: the assumption that a trend will continue indefinitely.  When the market is going up (as in the late 1990s), people assume it will continue to go up, and that's when speculators enter the scene and even cabdrivers have a hot tip for you. That's the moment to get out.

Right now, because of the glut of overvalued homes, the credit crunch, the mess in Iraq, and the downturn in the economy, most of us assume -- extrapolating from current trends --that oil and gold will keep going up and the dollar will sink to new depths.

But trends are reversible. Change happens, not only because of the implementation of structural improvements but because the stock market reflects not today's conditions but a best-guess estimate of what things will be like in six months.

A correction in the commodity market this past week resulted in oil dropping to $113 a barrel. Nevertheless, Goldman Sachs has forecast a price of $149 by the end of the year. They're the smart guys and what they say will probably happen. So don't see your Exxon or your Chevron just yet.

But keep in mind that the incentive to create a non-petroleum-based energy source has never been greater, and consider this prediction: the liquid natural resource that will prove most scarce in the ninety two years left in this century is likely to be not oil but fresh water.

Water utilities are worth a look, especially those with decent balance sheets offering dividends a point or more above money market rates.

"Room Temperature" (by James Richardson)

Room Temperature

That coffee I forgot to drink,

this light, eight minutes from the sun,

words that seemed for a second

the hottest ever written.

(from Gulf Coast)

-- James Richardson