The Best American Poetry

Hard Times, part five (by Mitch Sisskind)

Another problem solved!

Eye to ear to eye and back [by John Emil Vincent, with quotations from Gizzi/Killian's new, wonderful, Spicer Collected: "my vocabulary did this to me"]

"(and back and back and back again)"
            --Spicer, "Awkward Bridge," p. 261, and (also) "Coda," p. 270 (Gizzi/Killian, Collected Poems).

Below, I quote what is possibly Jack Spicer's most famous poem (as Graham Foust suggested a bit ago in a lovely essay in "Jacket"), but with one line break that I'm adding:

the penultimate pulled from the final line--

September 21, 2001: Mike Piazza Homers to Defeat Braves, 3-2

It was the first ball game played in New York after 9/ 11. The Mets were down 2-1 in the bottom of the eighth inning. Mike Piazza got up with a man on first base (Desi Relaford, if memory serves) and unloaded a pitch over the wall in center field. If you had been at Shea that evening, as we were, with a full house, you will never forget the feeling through the stands at the moment the ball cleared the fence, as Piazza rounded first and Relaford symmetrically rounded third, and strangers hugged themselves in the aisles.

-- DL

Trevor Winkfield at the New School [Reviewed by Meg McGuire]

Seeing a screen and a slide projector set up in Room 510 is unusual for Poetry Forum gatherings at The New School, but we had artist Trevor Winkfield to visit Tuesday night, and of course, seeing the work is its best introduction. John Ashbery says, paraphrasing Walter Pater, “If all art aspires toward the condition of music as Pater wrote, Trevor Winkfield must be counted among the most successful artists of all time.” (Check out Trevor’s website here. )

       An attitude of precise methodical whimsy pervades his work, and it was especially illuminating to listen to a painter who is also a writer who has collaborated with poets.  In his introduction, New School poetry coordinator David Lehman (above, right, with Winkfield, left) explained that he and colleagues believe in the inter-dependency of the arts, and that if you’re looking for inspiration, “It makes as much sense to expose yourself to painting as to poetry.”
       Trevor Winkfield has collaborated with Ashbery, John Yau and Ron Padgett among others. Exact Change Books recently re-published the Winkfield's translation of Raymond Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Works.  Winkfield has collected his writings in In the Scissors’ Courtyard and his art in Pageant.
       At the beginning of his talk, Trevor tackled exactly that: How to begin. The problem -- “Where to

Pierrot and Harlequin, Winkfield, 2006

place the first mark on a canvas, and what it should represent” – is a problem for poets as well. The speaker also noted the special blessing (which doubles as a challenge) for artists and poets –  unlike ballerinas, they have or can have life-long careers. That’s the blessing. The challenge is how to keep developing and coming up with fresh ideas. He made the comparison to Scheherazade, who, in the Arabian Nights, is constantly in mortal danger if her powers of invention fail her. Winkfield warned against what he called the Marc Chagall effect -- the endless repetition of motifs from the start of one’s career. The room tittered at that -- it’s always fun to poke fun at one of the "big names."       

30 [by John Emil Vincent; poem no comment]

30

He is young.

He could be younger.

His hands shake.

Even propped on the bar.

His nights:

he stands so ready:

his face: a mark:

the close of claws.

And passed:

after a pause.

Postcard from Perugia (and many other places) [by Moira Egan]

["I summon to the winding ancient stair"? no, we went round the long way. Perugia at night]

These days, for me, jet lag in this direction is much worse than jet lag going to the States. Going that way, my clock is just a little off, so I get to pretend that I'm a morning person (ha!) But coming back this way, I zap right up at 3 in the morning and I'm wide awake until 5 or 6. I'm only happy about this now  because it gives me more time to read Words in Air, the letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, as I'm sure you know, and if you haven't gone out and plonked down the 45 dollars (or however many Euro it was; I think we got it through Amazon.France--quelle bonne idee pour nous expatries! and I'm not putting in the diacritics because they mess up everything!), please do.

It's a wonderful book, full of humor and love, intelligence, pathos and literary gossip. Last night, for example, I went from EB saying "I feel awful about Hemingway's suicide" to talking about organizing the gift of a Brazilian dress for little Harriet Lowell: "Or how about a monkey instead of a new dress? He would adore your various typewriters and might learn to pick out Beat poetry." Yes that was EB, not me!

New and iffy [by John Emil Vincent]

--'Though iffy hasn't stopped me thus far.

I do find it odd still that 'blogging absolutely occludes its initial "we." 

When there's an "i"phone, there is a 'blog.

Some little bit about this poem--eh, well, Cavafy and Donne in bed? Or Cavafy and Emily Dickinson in bed. Or Cavafy in bed with a fortune cookie. Or Cavafy alone in bed, in rapture, rolling onto a fortune cookie and noticing the fortune amid the crumbly bits. 

One little note about the terribly lovable Cavafy: ok, he's so cool that when he's dying of throat cancer, unable to speak, his final "words" are him writing on a pad of paper: he writes: a circle, then, in the middle of that circle, a very firm dot.

During this poem I was thinking of dots, periods, whatever, but of, particularly, that gesture. And how, if someone isn't him, isn't as Cavafy as him (damn wish I were), isn't even playing him on tv, what would that gesture seem? How would it play? As a non-final gesture: A stuttered dot. But a stutter--as we (former and present) stutterers know, ( I love how that makes what it says happen, erer....) --is in time, not simultaneous. A frustrated futurity. Repetition with compulsion. A block which will be repeated as a block until...there it is. Well, until communication of whatever sort. 

So, what about a stutter out of time, or a being against its own self with only slight visible sign? As glaring (optical) as a stutter (aural). An entirely optical stutter. What would an optical stutter mean? Or what could it mean? Can it mean? 

Today, teaching class, I stuttered horribly, not by most standards, but by my own.[Um, the text I was teaching, first real repeated stutter of the entire year, was talking about J.L. Autsin's How to Do Thing With Words.] Whence this return? Or rather, why feel it AS A RETURN? Even though, of course, a stutter is always a return, but what if the return to a stutter isn't a return to but a re-feeling and re-flection of the pleasure of return. The younger body asserting its aliveness, a non-creepy this living hand. Well, I'm not sure I know what water I've swum into.

30

He is young.

He could be younger.

His hands shake.

Even propped on the bar.

His nights:

he stands so ready:

his face: a mark:

the close of claws.

And passed:

after a pause.

...

C Train, Thursday, February 26, 2009, 12:45 PM

 

--sdh

An MTV VJ and Surgeon General Rolled into One!

Tickle those ivories, Bob.

That's Jbooks, to donate.  Be a mensch.  --sdh

This just overheard [by John Emil Vincent]

"It's lucky that what I like and who I am

are totally related--

cuz the things I like are really awesome."

--anon.

I heart Joe Brainard, always will [by John Emil Vincent]

I remember…

                        after of course Joe Brainard who did it better but always makes me want to try 

  he's so damn good

I remember Jack Lorde on Hawaii 5-0. I remember an episode where the killer had no fingerprints because he worked in a pineapple canning factory.

I remember Winnie-the-Poo shirts.

I remember wanting to be like Michael J. Fox.

I remember the pastel plaid I wore two years too far into junior high.  I remember feeling like a dork, but no one really seemed to notice.

I remember how my head gear smelled in the morning.  I remember how it plugged tightly into two little holes.

I remember driving around feeling disappointed that the world didn’t look radically different the day after I lost my virginity to a girl.

I remember being “disappointing” after the prom.

I remember perms on boys.

I remember being mean to Harry Rezzimeni who was the most effeminate boy in my class.  I remember being relentless.  I heard after dropping out of college, he guided raft tours and had loads of gay sex in Atlanta.  I remember my friend Tony being uncomfortable with all the details Harry gave him.  I remember not being able to get them out of Tony.

If it's Lent then what is it I borrowed?

Today is Ash Wednesday.  This you can deduce from the people walking up and down the avenues all smudged on their foreheads looking Lynette Fromme-ey (it's a mark of contrition, not a show of Manson Family solidarity, Folks).  It is the day that many Western Christians begin the the great fast of Lent.  Lent is a time of abstinence, a period of reflection, a season of meditation on our need for a savior.  It's when we are called to recall that we are all but ash, and it is to the ashes that we shall return.

If the thought of that bums you out, then remember: it's supposed to.

Many practicing Christians make sacrifices during Lent.  The sacrifice is intended to leave a hole, a vacuum that you are then supposed to invite the holy awe of God and all His mercies to enter into.  Some people give up a favorite food-- chocolate, meat, sweets of all kinds, liquor.  Other Christians give up habits.  One Lent I made it a priority to refrain from backbiting.  That was hard to do, and I'm not even all that much of a snarly bitch.  Sometimes, it's not a tangible that is given up, but rather a practice that is taken on-- daily prayer, charity work, eucharistic devotion.

This year, I am giving up something for Lent that I'd be embarrassed to tell you about, if I didn't know that many of you did it already TOO.  

oh and

no one went to the pre-k, just my husband.  the kids are wary of the cold by now.  so I thought I'd write again and tell you to click on the third picture, below, because it is so pretty when a little bigger.

xoxjmh

eviscerating the polis, one end of an orange cat

even the city has surprises in its veins

it's not just me

ape the ape?  cat the cat.

 

Voice from below [by John Emil Vincent]

 A little sad, relying

in perpetuity on witnesses--

a community adorned with jewels

not yet entered into evidence.

 

Delicacy’s preferable to priority

with its hoeing, bringing up to date.

 

Yes,

there is  a communal eyeball,

a rafter of fact

the thickness of spider web.

 

But the heart of the matter

belongs to the passer-by.

 

If sin, crime

and confusion are rungs

down to blindness, then

strength, force and boldness

hide with the osprey

amid hawthorns,

swathed, even decorated,

by hostility. The young,

our young, perpetrate

the world to come--

only dimmed by pleasure’s poverty.

Calligraphic [by John Emil Vincent]

Huge lurid tulips

Painted on cream basement walls

Meant to be cheery but done

Such that each flower looks

As if beneath glass and yet so loud:

The memory of a dead child’s laugh,

A burble in the garden, a pain

You learn to want, a way you walk

Through the trellis these days

Misty eyed and full of religion,

You went to see the elder

For comfort and disappointingly

It was exactly what he gave,

When there is still that laughter

Floating higher and higher

Having broken its string

And the downy clouds framing it

As the dot of color seems to sink

Into their eiderdown and horses clop

The avenue with bells and caps

And there is loud clapping,

You turn away from the sky

And everything’s as lost as you’d wanted

but can’t stand having wanted

And you’ll never sit in the garden

With bright juice pushing your memory

To winters when you dreamed of just this juice,

To a vista with crows above snow

Like in a bad painting: calligraphic

And far enough away to make beauty

A trick of distance.

Susan M. Schultz on "reader's block" from A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry [quoted and commented on by John Emil Vincent]

This quotation is from Susan Schultz's extraordinarily compelling book, note that it begins lineated (Alabama, 2005):

...If being

"Absorbed" into a text is the reader's version of free-writing,

Where the reader in some sense becomes the text as it appears 

On the page (as the writer extends herself into text while

Being absorbed in the process of writing), then "reader's block"

Prevents that identification between reader and language from

Occurring.  That this block is necessary to the process of 

Recovering, uncovering, creating meaning, is something argued

By most recent defenders of the avant-garde,

But its relationship to a prior block, experienced by the writer

Him- or herself, is a subject not as well considered.  If reading

And writing are to be aligned as part of the same process...

...then consider the

Writer as reader, the writer as a blocked reader, the reader

As someone whose texts become opaque to her even as she

Produces them. The fruit of this block is silence...

...

... But if we assume 

Holzer Ontario Projection [by John Emil Vincent]

Loss has verbs in its pockets.

X was 

and now isn’t.

Y notices 

that X was and now isn’t.

X was here, now X is gone.

Loss is sly ownership.

Absence rings, tapped crystal.

Loss sings the rim.

X lost Y, X feels lost.

Loss has no appetite.

The Genius of Bert Williams (by Laura Orem)

People sometimes ask me if I would not give anything to be white. I answer...most emphatically, "No." How do I know what I might be if I were a white man? I might be a sandhog, burrowing away and losing my health for $8 a day. I might be a streetcar conductor at $12 or $15 a week. There is many a white man less fortunate and less well-equipped than I am. In fact, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient...in America.
Bert Williams

As a performer, [Bert Williams] was close to genius...Whatever sense of timing I have, I learned from him.
Eddie Cantor

The funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.
W.C. Fields

Bert Williams (1874-1922)

The vibrant contributions of African-Americans to the  history of our popular culture is a given in any discussion of American performing arts. The influence of people like Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters,  Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, "Fats" Waller, and Jelly-Roll Morton is widely documented and is acknowledged by anyone who has even a passing interest in American music and theater. It is important to note, however, that all of these performers came to prominence in the 1920s, a decade that saw the first public attempts by black artists to break away from traditional white perceptions of what black people should be and do on stage. This could be dangerous for black performers, both professionally and physically, and the great courage of these artists cannot be over-emphasized.

It is more problematic when we move backward to a time before the 1920s, when most African-American performers were trammeled by the long, complicated history of minstrelsy - the over-exaggerated, painfully stereotypical portrayals of black culture on the American stage, first by white performers in blackface, then by black performers. Gary Giddins, in his book Visions of Jazz, has described the strange, contradictory, and still lingering influences of minstrelsy on American popular culture:

Its images abound in contemporary life, from the indelible memory of Tim Moore's Kingfish [from "Amos and Andy"] to the caricatures of National Review. The Aunt Jemima-Uncle Ned darkies, solicitous of massa and scornful of the abolitionists who would wreck their joyful plantation life, were implanted in the American mind to such an extent that even black minstrels of the Reconstruction years were expected to enact the familiar stereotypes memorialized by minstrel composers like Stephen Foster. There was triple-edged irony here: minstrelsy provided unprecedented opportunity for gifted black performers...but only if they could adapt the ludicrous precepts of white "Ethiopian" imitators; the blacks were so good, so "authentic" that white minstrel troupes were soon put out of business; the minstrel show was then replaced by a new kind of entertainment nourished by Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths who had found their initial success by appropriating black styles like ragtime or the cakewalk.

As Americans attempted to break away from these painful, degrading stereotypes, it was natural (if unfair) that they turn their backs on performers in this genre. Watching a minstrel show became and still is embarrassing and distressing, both for black Americans whose ancestors had to suffer the stereotypes and for white Americans whose ancestors perpetrated and encouraged them. Sadly though, what often happened was a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and for a long time, one of the babies who went out the window was the spectacularly talented Bert Williams. In recent years, however, and most fortunately for us, his reputation has made a comeback, and he is now recognized as one of the most important 20th century performers, black or white, in vaudeville, music, and early film. In keeping with the irony Giddins speaks of, Williams did all of this in burnt-cork blackface, because he was "too light-skinned" for audiences. In other words, he was a black man made up like a white man playing a black man.

Bert Williams in costume

Williams is also important in that he was one of the first black performers to exercise some creative and financial control over his career, at least as far as he was able to during the time in which he lived. He was the first black performer to have a major recording career; he was the first black artist to be featured in the Ziegfeld Follies (when white cast members protested his hiring and threatened to quit, Flo Ziegfeld is said to have replied, "I can replace every one of you except him") and was its highest paid star for ten years; he was the first black actor to star in feature-length Hollywood films.

His first success nationally came in 1906, with the recording of "Nobody," the early-20th-century equivalent of a smash hit. There are echoes in this minstrel "coon song" (sorry, that's what they were called and marketed as) of  elements of the blues: that recognition of and wry humor at life's unfairness and misfortune. Pay particular attention to Williams' delivery of the punch lines - his timing, as Eddie Cantor said, is impeccable.

"Nobody" (Columbia Records-1906)

Old School [by Elizabeth Samet]

At first the new French teacher isn’t sure she ought to tell the girls at Miss Haines’s School her story, but then she resolves that they will soon be “old enough to love and suffer.” (The line reminded me of something one of my teachers used to say in response to a surprisingly broad range of questions: “You’ll find that out when you’re married, girls.”) For the next enthralling 141 minutes, as Mademoiselle’s dangerous Parisian past unreeled, I tried to keep some unnerving questions at bay: How could I have missed this one? Had I confused it with something else all these years because of that title that has nothing to do with anything? Had I foolishly allowed my deep ambivalence about Charles Boyer—cured several years ago by a screening of Ophuls’s Madame de at Lincoln Center—to stand in the way of one of cinema’s great pleasures? What were the odds that I had never walked in on the middle or caught the last few minutes? Was I simply repressing? A friend—she has earned her absolute authority in these matters by having watched Now, Voyager more times than I have—insisted that I put it at the top of my Netflix queue. Dutifully, I obeyed. As millions watched the Academy Awards last night, I watched All This, and Heaven Too (1940, dir. Anatole Litvak). The Casey Robinson screenplay—derived from Rachel Field’s novel, itself loosely based on a nineteenth-century Parisian scandal involving a loyal governess (Bette Davis), a long suffering and momentarily lunatic Duke (Boyer), and a neurotic and mighty jealous Duchess (Barbara O’Neil)—combines more stolen plots per square inch than just about any movie I’ve ever seen. I caught whiffs of Jane Eyre, Villette, half a dozen gothic novels, and a few of Freud’s case histories. It also might as well be Rebecca, which was published at the same time as Field’s novel. MGM would have sucked the life out of this one: costumed to the gills, the movie would have collapsed under the weight of its own prestige. But Warner Brothers exploited the lurid, the suggestive, the incongruous. I can think of few films that illustrate more completely the improbable alchemy of Hollywood's Golden Age. There’s something in it for everyone: mysterious Corsicans, history so muddled that 1848 occasionally seems to turn into 1789, bit players who appear to have wandered in from the gangster picture shooting on the neighboring soundstage. In what other universe would the French Charles Boyer, playing the French Duc de Praslin, be coached to pronounce the “t” in “valet”? Hokum, absolutely, and of the most exquisite kind.