The Best American Poetry

John Updike 1932-2009

 We have just learned that John Updike has died at the age of 76. 
Of John Updike, David Lehman has this to say:  "He excelled at every genre. He exemplified a true man of letters in the classic sense.  Though greatly admired and recognized the world over, he was sometimes taken for granted, as monuments are.  He may have been the best book reviewer in America; he was undoubtedly one of the two supreme novelists of our day; his poetry, essays, art criticism, and occasional writings reveal a solid professionalism and are always a delight to read.  Even his detractors will acknowledge that he wrote like an angel and that at his best -- in the Rabbit novels, the Bech stories, and other fictions -- he made a magnificent and lasting contribution to American literature. I can think of no one I would recommend more heartily for aspiring writers to read in order to learn the nuts and bolts of the craft. He was a sweet man, with a modest demeanor. At the PEN Congress in New York City in January 1986, which I covered for Newsweek, lots of writers were grandstanding about American foreign policy and the like. Updike was asked to make a comment about his native land.  He paused for a beat then said that he wanted to single out the humble blue postal box that one used to find on almost every street-corner, because it symbolized, in a very practical way, our freedom to communicate and exchange our thoughts and ideas -- and also because he associated it with the arrival of good news." 

We invite you to post your favorite encounters with John Updike, whether on the page or in person.  We are deeply saddened by the news of his death.

Nice Weather We're Having - Kenneth Koch at Columbia University

-- sdh

American Pool or Canadian Lake: Molly Peacock on Poets' Approaches

Can I put my finger on the difference between the Canadian and the American approach to writing a poem?   Let's try a water analogy.  Think of poetry as a swimming pool.  The Canadian poet has no trouble getting in at the shallow end and taking a reader with her, has no trouble assuming the reader will wade into this unknown pool with him.  Poet and reader go in together.  They take their time.  Finally they hit the place where their feet leave the bottom, and then they will swim, experiencing something they both know is over their heads.  (That is what poetry feels like to me, trying to stay afloat in an element in which you might sink, and which is surely over your head.)

   As a result the Canadian poem tends to be longer than the American poem (there are two poems over ten pages each in The Best Canadian Poems in English 2008);  it tends to wind along to more places, to be more interested in the side track, be more familiar with its reader, to assume its reader might be a cousin, or even a friend, swimming along together.  It is possible these qualities are a result of the Canadian poet feeling supported, both by grants and by the government as well as by a populace who actually looks to its poets to define what it is to be Canadian. Or simply the result of a generalized feeling on the part of poets who sense that their culture is responsive to them, or that they are necessary to how the country defines itself.  Small-audience art that it is, poetry is necessary to Canada.

        But the American poet, who generally feels much more extraneous to American culture (except for last Inauguration week) is strictly a deep end diver.  She mounts the diving board.  He walks to the end.  She flips upwards into the air.  He soars, curving, and splashes down into the depths.  All of this happens in the first five lines.  Forget the shallow end.  Forget the journey.  Forget the feeling of writer and reader in an exploration together. Sign up for being an audience, because the American poet requires being watched.  The poet has practiced that amazing dive, and it is thrilling.  You know from the first line that the poem is about to explode with experience, perception, language.  But the companionship of the adventure together can be missing.

        The American poem is compact and immediately surprising.  The Canadian poem is lankier and discovers its surprise.  Perhaps that swimming pool analogy needs adjustment.  Let the American stay with the swimming pool, because there's a sense with an American poem that the poet is leaping off a high board.  But let the Canadian get in at the shallow end of a lake, and take the reader along, feet cut by a few stones, goose-bumped, sea-weedy, out to the middle that requires some strong side-by-side swimming.

        Here's a poem by A.F. Moritz from the anthology that requires this tandem writer-reader companionship.  A reader simply must have the faith and time to follow the writer through his associative journal and its consequent emotional connections.  (I'll post Moritz's clarifying note tomorrow. Meanwhile, enjoy the swim.)

Odds and Ends

An evil swamp meadow, burnt and sawed.
Invisibly small lives hum and rummage in fearful humidity.  Among the stumps
lean six pine saplings, the bare slender trunks
tipped with cone-shaped tufts of needled twigs:
greenery arrowheads.  What made these arrow-trees
fall here notch first and sink their feathers
under the lava flow of golden weed --
what, beyond some whim and power of nature
and ideal of the painter, inexpressible in words?

I was glad as always to leave the museum
and regain the town and again be living
in a picture, restored to our nature as pilgrims
for the ideal law.  But when the walk did not turn
and open on the sea, as map misreading had told me,
my eyes settled on a fallen rhododendron flower.
Its petals, intact and perfect, were in fact
not petals but five rays of a single disc,
shadowy rose, with a circular hole at center.
It was a skirt for a dead Romantic waist:
the upturned, golden, hammer-headed pistil
had fit there, with its garden of ten stamens waving
ovular flecks, and these remained above
on their bush withering, while the shed pink dirndl
was put away in the grass.

                                            O clothes she wore
and we put them away for her to wear again
someday, and today they lie there still.

A. F. Moritz

from The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2008
published by Tightrope Books

(Illustration:  David Hockney, Day Pool with Three Blues)

"Fortunate Ones" [by Ernest Hilbert]

Fortunate Ones

You will inherit large sums of money
(But someone dear to you will have to die first).
You will travel far and see the wide world
(And load yourself with debt; these things aren’t free).
You can relax now. You’ve been through the worst
(But it consumed your youth, and now you’re old).
You will enjoy many warm times with friends
(But they will sneak your booze and filch your smokes).
Your fortune is in some other cookie
(Hard to argue the message that one sends).
You are very important to your folks
(They will never let your life be easy).
A fortune is only worth what it covers
(Believe what you like, discard the others).

Originally in The New York Sun

– Ernest Hilbert

Best American Meets the Best Canadian - Picks by Molly Peacock

 As a dual citizen of both the United States and Canada, and as a poet who publishes in both, I play a constant compare and contrast game as I navigate between the two literary cultures.  Americans often think of Canada as just another state north of the border, though Canada has its own entirely  complicated culture.  Canadians look down to their southern neighbors with mystification marbled with hauteur and jealousy, the way someone who lives happily in a small house on beautiful acres looks at a neighbor who's built a McMansion right up against the property line.  Yet occasionally there's an American literary idea that intrigues Canadians, if uneasily.

     The idea of collecting the best poetry of the past year is one of those distinctly American ideas that has been adopted, but adapted in the great North, where people are nervous about ideas of THE BEST.  Yet Tightrope Books, a small press (yes, in Canada a small press can have a very large reach) under the valiant leadership of Halli Villegas, has undertaken to launch a Best Canadian series.  2008 was our first year.  As an admiring copycat of David Lehman, I am the General Series Editor.  Our first judge was the young, super well respected Stephanie Bolster, a poet all Canadian literature followers know, but who is not known in the US, where the few Canadian poets known are two better recognized as prose writers (Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood), one better recognized as a lyricist (Leonard Cohen), and of course, the inimitable Anne Carson.

    Our first volume of The Best Canadian Poetry in English is as different from its US counterpart as Canadian poetry itself is different from what is written to the south.  Same language.  Contrasting ways with it.  The poets of both my countries look inward for their communities;  very few poets trespass across either border.  Canadian poets, accustomed to looking to the south, know the names of American poets;  but American poets don’t know about their Canadian counterparts. They wonder, Who are these people?

    All this week I'll be trying to tell you by introducing Canadian poets from The Best Canadian Poetry in English, with heaps of thanks to Stacey Harwood.  Here's the first, by Margaret Avison, one of my faves.  It has a Marianne Moore-ish prickliness, and it unfolds as a metaphysical conceit.  It doesn't completely hit you at first, and I'll have more to say about this unwillingness to hit a reader on the head tomorrow.  I've kept the Canadian spelling -- yes, we keep the "u" in armour (and in glamour, too). 

Molly Peacock

Hag-Ridden

A plague of locusts is
a reminder that the
focus on knees and thighs
in stringy and gangling
insects can inspire in-
vidious
comparisons.
Nimble in
chain-armour (below) with an
upside-down carapace (shellacked),
these tiny
obstreperousnesses model
adoptable fashion trends.

The elderly, too,
are scant in under-
pinnings, and
angular.  But,
unlike locusts, these
swarm very seldom.  Each may
go with a stick; a plague, perhaps first to
themselves, Yet, their
undemanding pleasure in the
world out under such a
mysterious (some days dazzling) sky
may be a to-be-
desired infection.

by Margaret Avison

from The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008
Tightrope Books

Molly Peacock, Guest Blogger January 25-31

 This week we welcome Molly Peacock as our guest blogger.  She is the author of several volumes of poetry, including  The Second Blush (Norton, 2008) and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems (Norton, 2004).  She recently introduced the first volume of The Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope Books, 2008). You can read more about Molly Peacock here. Welcome, Molly.

In Other News :

Cool Poets, Hot Poems, and English Tea:  David Lehman, Laura Cronk, and our own Moira Egan touching down from Rome, celebrate erotic poetry.  Saturday, February 7, 3:00 PM.  Duane Park Cafe, 157 Duane Street, New York City.  $25 includes a full English tea-service accompanied by sexy poems in a romantic setting. Reservations required: 212-732-5555. More information here.

"Dusk in a Crowded Train Compartment, Regretting My Life" [by Ernest Hilbert]

Dusk in a Crowded Train Compartment, Regretting My Life

I stayed up two days straight with some old friends
In New York, and was charred, gut sick, still wired
Stuck on the Northeast Corridor Express,
Suffering quietly as night descended.
I was pressed to the window, far too tired
To read, cramped by a pimpled giantess
Who nodded to a thump in her headphones.
The wrecked landscape of north Jersey swung past:
Telephone poles tilted to cold shimmer
Of swamp, rusted scaffolds, graffitied stones,
Great piers rotted down into slow, tall grass.
I focused on breathing, like a swimmer.
Late rays shocked an oil tank’s silver to white,
A dying flash, pulled fast out of my sight.

-- Ernest Hilbert

Originally in American Poetry Review

Editor's Note: Each day this week we will be posting a sonnet by Ernest Hilbert.

Ed Ochester Presents a Poem by Russell Edson

“Russell Edson is the dean of American prose poets, the irrepressible and irresistible author of surreal fables, an American Aesop.”
—Ed Ochester

The Alfresco Moment

            A butler asks, will Madam be having her morning coffee alfresco?
            If you would be so kind as to lift me out of my bed to the veranda would be more than willing to imbibe coffee alfresco.
            Shall I ask the Master to join the Madam for coffee alfresco?
            But my nightgown’s so sheer he might see my pubic delta alfresco. And being a woman of wealth I have the loins of a goddess. While you, being but a lowly servant, have the loins of a child’s teddy bear. Yes, have the Master join the alfresco moment. He might just as well be informed of my pubic delta,it’s not a state secret. Besides, he carries an organ worthy of a bull. While you,being but a lowly servant, have the loins of a caterpillar.

             Very good, Madam . . .

-- Russell Edson

“The Alfresco Moment” from The Tormented Mirror
$12.95 • 96 pp. © 2001 University of Pittsburgh Press

Forthcoming (March 2009) by Russell Edson from the Pitt Poetry Series: See Jack 

American Poetry Now, edited by Ed Ochester, features poems by Russell Edson, and many others from the Pitt Poetry Series.

Film Still Series - Intimacies # 5 [by Bill Hayward]

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.

See more of Bill Hayward's work here.

"Modern Love": XLIX [by George Meredith]

# 49

He found her by the ocean's moaning verge,
Nor any wicked change in her discerned;
And she believed his old love had returned,
Which was her exultation, and her scourge.
She took his hand, and walked with him, and seemed
The wife he sought, though shadow-like and dry.
She had one terror, lest her heart should sigh,
And tell her loudly she no longer dreamed.
She dare not say, "This is my breast: look in."
But there's a strength to help the desperate weak.
That night he learned how silence best can speak
The awful things when Pity pleads for Sin.
About the middle of the night her call
Was heard, and he came wondering to the bed.
"Now kiss me, dear! it may be, now!" she said.
Lethe had passed those lips, and he knew all.

-- George Meredith

At Seventeen by Elizabeth Alexander

I want to do it, want to snort and root
and forage in your skin and apertures.
It happens fast. It hits a frantic pitch.

I want to touch touch, suck suck, lick lick
like my kin in the animal kingdom.
Suction noises horrify and thrill me,

forensic evidence of what I'm doing
and doing and doing, pants around
my ankles, twigs in my hair. I am

sweaty and dirty, a little bit bloody,
smell of exactly what I have been
up to, sneak home like the criminal I am,

new memory like a seltzer in my crotch.


from The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008)

Question: Was Moses a Satmar hasid? Answer: YES! (by Mitch Sisskind)

Here's proof--------------->>>>

For your listening pleasure [by Moira Egan]

[another photo of Mark Strand & Damiano Abeni by Mario Ventura]

Just for fun, and/or if you happen to be studying Italian, you now have the opportunity to listen to two interviews with Mark and Damiano on RAI, the Italian national radio and TV network. Links below.

"House Warming" [by Emily Moore]

House Warming

Arrivals. Kisses. Midnight knocks on doors.
Cassy in thick black boots. Her big green eyes,
her coat thrown on my mattress on the floor

when she showed up at ten, her friends in thrift store
slips and ties, the dusty walk up steps alive
with greetings, kisses, midnight knocks on doors,

and trips downstairs for mixers. Back then we wore
our Dickies low, brought six packs, secrets, bags of ice
cradled in coats later discarded on the floor.

The kitchen: candlelit and humming with the lure
of gossip. How we stirred vodka, juice, and lime
for late arrivals, kissed at midnight, propped the door

and climbed the ladder to the roof seconds before
sunrise to lounge on rusty metal chairs, the sky
no longer black, our coats abandoned on the floor

below while up above we hugged and swore
to meet at noon for coffee, breakfast, and advice
on rivals, kisses, midnight knocks on doors,
Cassy asleep on just my mattress on the floor.

-- Emily Moore

Haiku Exchange 1/22/03 [by David Lehman and David Shapiro]

DL to DS

NY Unstuck Exchange (Hi, koo!)

Three drops of blood on
a hill of snow: signal for
rebellion to start.

Two snakes intertwined
around a tree: signal for
couple to have sex.

One touch of Venus
and I will marry the world
with my stiff penis.

I know you knew that
was coming. Of planets I
can’t resist Venus.

How about a new
school of poetics? OK,
but what to call it?

Do you suppose these
haikus will be published and
read on a glad day? [DL, 1 / 20 / 03]

DS to DL

I have one reader
in mind, but probably she
will be glad elsewhere!

this is my haiku
to the addressee slipped way
beyond the world's wake!

Call Poetry Mind
Call all else stupidity
Call squirrel there squirrel!

To pronounce squirrel squirrel
In last stanza change accents
Squirrel is still same squirrel!

Oh nominalist
Oh Zeno halfway there, let
her read us one day!

Here I am at school
In front of blue computer
Fairly serene Fool—         [DS, 1 / 21 / 03]

DL to DS
Monocle, Mon Oncle

Good afternoon, my
friend. Um, how would you define
nominalism?

To define the word
in one haiku seems a task
worthy of your skill.

What did Stevens mean
by writing the “clashed edges
of two words that kill”?

This is my haiku
to the world that never sent
one to Emily:

In January
I always think of David
Shapiro’s first book.   [DL, 1 / 21 / 03]

DS to DL
Haiku no explanation but a vision of Wally and the Liberty Dime (coldsnap)

Only the word lives
for the nominalist -- words
clash: no cold ideas!

Just two words breaking
in Stevens' cave, no fire --
just words -– fireflies -–

Thanks for the memries --
the buried 15 yr old
now lost in old years —

Near Plato's highway
Wallace walks with his wife, but
only words they say!

They go opposite
each other and are happy
Pigeons stay indoors!

That's what the Times sez!
Pigeons indoors! Spouses! Crimes!
Criminals! Ideas!

Well, David, this is
not the complete Clash or edge
just nominal fee --- !

I know that words kill
Because blind History taught
blind Homer they will----

But haikus could be
little consoled birds inside
warm ferries flying--!      [DS, 1 / 22 / 03]

DL to DS
Time for one more haiku

In my sleep I wrote
haiku of wonder but then
the bird flew away.

Nor raven nor crow
yet that blackbird made circles
in the sky and snow.

No nominalist,
That bird was lordly, a sir,
Yes: Sir Realist.

Stevens and wife walked
to end of street and he turned
left and she turned right.

Two swords that kill do
so with greater skill than two
words that kill, n'est-ce pas?    [DL, 1 / 22 / 03]

Photos: (1) top left David Lehman with Polish poet Piotr Sommer; (2) David Shapiro beside poem beginning "IO have one reader."

Inaugural poem from the Last Lady [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Change is hi-larlious.  Everyone wants it, no one wants to do it.  Stroll with me into Plato's cave? Rather not?  Well, here we go anyway.  Comfy, right?  Easy for the eyes, nice temp.  Hard to leave.  You see my point.  Change, the only thing and the everything, the "interesting" in the curse "may you live in interesting times" is change, and change is intrusion.  I can almost feel my toes again. Is this being unfroze?  I'm excited about the president.  I'm also a little turned on.  The man is so so so handsome.  And that was no lady, that was the First lady!  Love the matching green shoes and gloves.  Love.  Does anyone want to know what the Last Lady was wearing for the inauguration?  Pajamas.  This is from her, ahem, my first poetry book The Next Ancient World.

Rumination on change?  Notes to myself?  Incantation expiation for a cybernation up from out of hibernation?  Maybe, but not three times fast.  xoxjmh

Villanelle If You Want To Be A Bad-Ass

You will not be rewarded for remaining long the same.

You will, of course, be taunted if you ever try to change.

When trainers wander off, tigers, please do not stay tame.

 

Consistency is worse, it brings the wrong kind of fame.

The orbit of right action has a freakin’ woolly range.

You will not be rewarded for remaining long the same.

 

It, inertia, is a pity.  It, stagnation, is a shame. Yet you

yourself preach caution as you pace your unlocked cage:

“When trainers wander off, tigers, please do not.  Stay tame.”

 

Be a mountain if you want to, be the whole mountain range.

Will you, in turn, be hostage to your hostage on the page?

You will not.  Be rewarded for remaining long the same?

 

You can say what you want when the angel makes you lame.

You can wrestle against water, you can rape your own rage

(when trainers wander off).  Tigers, please do not stay tame.

 

As hard as bleeding a tree to death by cut and squeezing, change

from out of the gut of the rut’s range will be insanely hard.

But you will not be rewarded for remaining long the same,

when trainers wander off, tigers, please do not stay tame.

                        

Best American Poetry 2008 Found Poem (Definitions) by Ming Holden

A canopy of state over a throne,
A duck or a lie,
A string of prayer beads.
A scar,
Bruised,
An error in a book.

From the tar of the beech tree,
Formerly used as an expectorant,
A bizarre decorative object.
With a love of luxury, or an islander,
An inhabitant
With a sense of shared spirituality.

With prickly stems, fragrant leaves,
Pink flowers and red hips,
A shoulder ornament.
Resin used in strong coatings,
Calamitous,
In which a tightened iron collar strangles the condemned.

Wandering scholars devoted to adventure and the good life,
Jugglers,
Marked by slaughter.
A powerful carbon-arc lamp,
One who renders a text into a different form,
A dump for domestic waste.

Fastened securely,
A papal representative,
Apparent displacement due to two sight lines.
Pertaining to fat,
Resembling a feather,
Marked by unwillingness.

A container for the physical remains of saints
To send back to a lower court,
A metamorphic rock.
Named after rich pigment in a fish's ink sac,
A curved writing utensil,
A form of verbal noun.

Ripening and discharging puss
To comply with the time or occasion,
A three-layered net.
The act of anointing
A garment covering neck and chin,
Appearing in the evening.

     -- Ming Holden

Reaction to the Inaugural Poem from (EW) readers [by Ken Tucker]

Please note the largely negative response to Elizabeth Alexander's poem among the readers of the Entertainment Weekly blog. It surprises me primarily because most posts of this sort at EW--that is, non-pop-cult entries--don't usually provoke as many boldly-stated opinions. Not your typical assortment of literary critics, and interesting for just that reason...

Ken Tucker on the Inaugural Poem

Entertainment Weekly's (and our) Ken Tucker weighs in here.

-- sdh

Happy Inaugural Day! (by Laura Orem)

Hello, everyone! I don't think I can add anything eloquent or even cogent to today's events, so I'll just post this, by Robert Hayden.

"Frederick Douglass"

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Robert Hayden