The Best American Poetry

Available Surfaces III: Mrs. Quack and Miss Cuckoo [T.R. Hummer]

Lay on, Macduff,/ And damn'd be him that first cries, "Hold, enough!" --William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5 scene 8

Mrs. Quack sat at her desk in front of the class, striking a classic Quack pose of cynical boredom. From a perspective of many decades on, I realize that she was a relatively unusual specimen: a country cynic. Real cynicism is rare among country people, who generally can’t afford the luxury of denial.

But Mrs. Quack had, so to say, come in from the cold. She still lived in the country, but she did not work on the farm where she lived; every day she got in her old Ford and drove to town to teach sixth graders. How she came to such a pass I haven’t a clue, but the situation was unfortunate for everyone involved.

Any sixth grader in her class could have quickly told you one thing about Mrs. Quack: she did not care, at all, for sixth graders. Sixth graders, to her, were ridiculous creatures, too close to childhood to be taken seriously, but too close to puberty to be idealized and adored.

To be fair, we were, like all captive groups of eleven year olds, a tough room. Adolescence has its horrors, and those are well known; in the coming years we would all turn into monsters of one kind or another. Preadolescence is less obvious, but it has its profound discomforts. At eleven, one is an adolescent of adolescence. An adolescent ignorantly desires to die and be reborn as an adult; a preadolescent abysmally wants to die and be reborn as an adolescent. O to be thirteen! To attend a prom! To have real pimples!

Mitch Sisskind presents a poem by Erika Moya

A Trail Leading Back  

an old sage once told me that when you find someone you like, you take them by the ankles and you shake them. all their good qualities, the things you fell in love with them for, will come out of their pockets and fall onto the floor. you grab these things, he said spreading his arms wide, grab them and you take them to the bank. you get yourself one of those fancy safety deposit boxes they have way in the back, and you take these good qualities of theirs, lock them up, and hide the key. hide the key, he whispered, because there will be dark times. times when you don't exactly recall why you are with this person, this stranger. you will wake in the middle of the night, confused because you don't remember the person you are sleeping next to. days will pass when neither of you have uttered one word to the other. when this happens you are going to have to find the key to the safety deposit box. once you find the key, you are going to have to get to the bank, and unlock that box. look inside it and remember. it won't make sense at first, because remember you two are strangers. but once it does it will be like a baby’s song, a string of vowels, devoid of all consonants, like bubbles rising up into the sky and leaving a trail. a trail leading back.

###

Erika Moya is a painter and writer. Her work has appeared in Qaartsiluni, the Smoking Poet, the Holly Rose Review, SN Review, the Toronto Quarterly, and Mosaic: Art and Literary journal of the University of California, Riverside. She attends the MFA program of the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Poem: "In the Brevoort Hotel..." (by Mitch Sisskind)

I have always loved hotels and my time as night desk clerk at the Belden-Stratford Hotel in Chicago was a wonderful gift.

In the Brevoort Hotel
He met Helene Shrubbie.
In the Dorchester Arms,
Orly Samelius was his girl.
In the Webster Hotel,
He entered the fur business
With Burt and Eli Aptaker.

What were the names of
His stomping grounds?
The Tiffany Room,
Don the Beachcomber,
The Camellia House,
The Imperial House,
And the Chez Paree.

Flo Doyle was ever in his memory
Linked to the Wellington Arms;
Ruth Diehl and Mary Clemco
To the Carlos Hotel on
North Pulaski where Abe Blinder
(Rhymes with cinder)
Used to roam.

Once with girls on both arms,
He entered the Imperial House.
To Charlotte Hauser he said,
“Let’s get the show on the road.”
To Muriel Demet: “Hey doll,
“You’re looking good tonight.
“What would you like to drink?”

In his heyday he joined
Bryn Mawr Country Club,
The Standard Club and the
Covenant Club but never passed
Up a tryst with Louise Gabiner.
The Liberty Hotel was their
Venue, on the fourth floor.

Similarly, in the Kenard Beach
Apartment Hotel on North Kenmore
He shared a love nest with
May Engberg -- the same one
Who later married Eli Aptaker;
The three of them used to
Get together and laugh about it.

After a number of years, of course,
The fur business collapsed. Farewell!

Nicholson Baker writes a novel about a poet compiling an anthology

It won't be published for another week or so, but may I enthusiastically recommend Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, a new novel about a poet who has writer's block composing the introduction to a poetry anthology.

There are marvelous Bakerite meditations on W.H. Auden, the state of poetry reviewing, and the flaw of iambic pentameter in English. I think it may be his best novel since The Mezzanine, which is really saying something.

Order yours, as they say, today.

--Ken Tucker

The Limits of Palmistry [from a conversation with David Shapiro]

David Shapiro (pictured left with son Daniel): "Leonardo believed in reading palms until he saw the long life-lines on the palms of young soldiers dead on the field."
David Lehman: "That's a great line."
DS: "I used it in a poem."
DL: "Which one?"
DS: "It's in one of my last ten books."
DL: "Which one?"
DS: "Can't remember but here it is."

The only palm presentation I will make
will be reading your palms one day
for long life-lines on the field of battle
and intricate lovelines and laughlines
on the field of your face.

DS: "Circa 2000. In the book the poem is called 'Little Low Tech'."
DL: "I think you should change the title."
DS: "I can't. It's already in a book."
DL: "That doesn't prevent you from changing the title. Then it becomes a different poem and eligible for inclusion in a new book."
DS: "OK. How about 'Reading in the Dark'"?
DL: "Much better."

                                                          David Lehman

Available Surfaces II: The Gravitas of Paper [T.R. Hummer]

"Another damned, thick, square book.  Always scribble, scribble, scribble!  Eh!  Mr Gibbon?" --William Henry, First Duke of Gloucester

 

In the late spring of 2001, the boxes began arriving. Buoyant gentlemen in brown uniforms brought them four afternoons in a row, stacking them on the old wooden porch in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia, where I then lived, though I would not be living there for long. Inside the house, other boxes were accruing, because we were preparing to move.

In particular, I had just finished packing up all my books. In the dining room, there was a virtual levee of boxes identical to the ones that were arriving on the porch: one hundred (more or less) cartons bought at the U-Haul store full of the tools of my vocation. It would have been easy, if I’d had the corpse of an author on hand, to make a funeral cairn of books, to contain the body of a poet entirely within a tomb of boxes marked Poetry in appropriately black Sharpie to prevent confusion; likely I had enough Fiction boxes to encompass a trio of novelists; and the Criticism could have stashed the cremains of a panel of deconstructionists in a tidy mausoleum.

I was, in short, myself entombed inside my own collection of books. And yet, on the front porch, more boxes were arriving. And, perverse as it may appear, as I packed box after box with household goods, the incoming boxes were unpacked, their contents scrutinized.

 

*

 

Writers are apt to be all too well acquainted with the weight of paper. Those sheets that flutter so lightly in the wind when we don’t want them to, that crumble so easily into balls under the force of our writerly frustration, have a way of accruing into groupings—packets, bundles, parcels, walls, mountains—of enormous density. I was told a story once that the library at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale got around a cut in their book acquisition budget by claiming—and in fact proving—that books are an efficient insulating material. That slim volume of poems that almost levitates off your desk can, when joined with sufficient others of its ilk, crush the child who tries to climb a freestanding bookshelf. The cousins of those buoyant gentlemen and -women of UPS--I mean professional movers—quickly lose their cheerfulness when confronted by a personal library, especially one packed in cartons deemed by the movers “too big,” i.e. too heavy. Weight has consequences. Mass accrues. A spine, not to say a heart, can only bear so much. I could, as easily as that clambering monkey-child alluded to above, be killed by my books. So could a mover. So could a moving van.

Till There Was You [by David Shapiro]

<<
Today I was thinking that the only time the Beatles sang a Broadway song was when they recorded "Till There Was You" from Meredith Wilson's "The Music Man," and then a few thoughts occurred to me about poetry readings:

As a violinist I can't imagine reading the score alone, though it gives great pleasure, and I associate poetry as a sister art. Most of us think Homer was a singing bard, Sappho had a lyre she discusses, and the poems of the Bible are sung by those like my grandfather, the chazzan (cantor). The good cantor so moving that Cossacks are said to have stopped and not killed that day.

I learned so much from Stevens' exorbitantly slow grey voice. I ended a love affair with Roethke when he grunted drunk at the Y.
It's true I loved to imitate each poet I loved.
If I loved them, I loved their voice.
When Ashbery read 'The Skaters" whole
[When was that, David?]
In 1964. It was amazing, David. Every word was right.
[Where was it?]
In New York. At the end Allen Ginsberg tried to recruit him for some political action and John said "I'm a political exile."
I knew that any Dylan Thomas saxophone in me had died and was reborn. Horowitz admitted he exaggerated for his audience. Do you mind?
I hate poetry readings, they are the worst thing in nature, but they are not in nature. Lowell sd he changed for Ginsberg--well, it was still RL.
Would you like to hear Trakl read or Rilke?
Those who heard (like Marianne Moore) Meyer Schapiro's lectures were listening to a god's golden sound. When Paul Robeson spoke, when Gielgud read Shakespeare, when Celan reads Todtfugue,we stop breathing. It is bad poems you hate and minor performers, but to hear Shakespeare do the Ghost I would give up the ghost. Forget Allan and what can be comical pathos. Forget the imitators. Get the old Caedmans and listen to that essential science of sound that Keats mentions.
O imagine Donne reading Donne. I would be undone. If a poet bores you, just wake up and look for another voice. Lovers know that the voice is a sexual organ (see Jewish law). If your love's voice doesn't please you, you are already divorced. If an architect's drawings are better than his house, you have made an ontological mistake.
Chekhov on the page, Vanya say, lies inert.
Alive in sound, he is the greatest writer.
My mother said, If you have a good speaking voice, you will have a good singing voice.
Many poems grow from music, the best are already music. Even this topic makes me happy. What is better than Sappho? Catullus? No, Sappho as she once may have been heard.
Pound I can mock, not Anne Porter at 95 reading a poem about her son.
There is a poem that reduces us to tears and wonder without school. Of course, I am one who believes you can speak between poems. Of reading twice, my wife says: Oh no, that poet is horrible enough and now we must hear him twice. But privately, I recite my favorites over and over like a song.
Most poetry readings are bad, but so are most paintings and dances.
>>
-- David Shapiro

T. R. Hummer, Guest blogger August 23-29

 This week we welcome T. R. Hummer as our guest blogger.  Hummer is the author of 11 books of poetry and prose, most recently The Infinity Sessions (poems) and The Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic. He teaches creative writing and literature at Arizona State University. He has served as poetry editor of Cimarron Review, and as editor of Quarterly West, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Georgia Review. Follow his blog here.  Welcome, Terry.

-- sdh

Film Still Series #124 [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. Follow Bill's blog here.

"Conduit" Corner: William Waltz Presents a Poem by Sabrina Orah Mark

Assembling an issue of Conduit sometimes feels like building a giant electron telescope and pointing it toward deep space. We never know what our mad invention will reveal until we peer through the viewfinder. We do know that the efforts and imaginations of many are required to bring our collective dream into focus every six months. In the case of the current issue, “Humans ‘N Nature,” over forty people helped to calibrate its searching eye.

For the majority, it was their first time in Conduit, but for a dozen contributors it was their second or third or fourth time between our covers. Last week I mentioned the joy of finding a wildflower among the weeds. Another great pleasure is to champion, over time, a writer whose work we admire and whom is, presumably, fond of us.

One such poet is Sabrina Orah Mark. Three of our issues have featured her prose poems, including “The 10 Stages of Beatrice,” which can be found below and in her forthcoming book Tsim Tsum (Saturnalia Books). To our enormous satisfaction, “The 10 Stages of Beatrice” was selected by Heather McHugh for the Best American Poetry 2007.

Ms. Mark’s recurring characters, Beatrice and Walter B., inhabit a world fecund with Old World charm and inanimate objects of mysterious significance, and, in the process of rendering this world, Sabrina Orah Mark has created a timeless fable full of longing, humor, and tendernes

-- William Waltz

THE 10 STAGES OF BEATRICE

Stage 1. — Belonging.

In the first stage Beatrice is precisely labeled and timed. She is able to divise complex graphs, answer questions in the order that they're asked, and construct coherent narratives without nostalgia or actual fear. There is no display of loud sobbing, nor are there visions.

Stage 2.— Happy.

Beatrice, during the second stage, believes she is alive. The possibility that she is not alive, in this stage, never enters her mind. This stage is only possible if the spectacle comes to town.

Stage 3. — Walter B.

This stage is also called "the latch stage." It is Beatrice at her most historical and strange.

Stage 4. — Romance.

Beatrice is hunted, captured, and softly strung to a tree. In this stage words are used to intoxicate, supply, and deceive. These words are rarely interesting. Gifts are exchanged that are of no use.

Stage 5. — Dread.

Beatrice is covered in feathers and twigs. She believes she is a nest. This stage, if it occurs in winter, is also called "The Babies."

Stage 6. — Slice. 

The sixth stage often appears in Beatrice's hand like a long instrument with a blade at the end. She will eat cake, during this stage, until she has visions.

Stage 7. — Cryptozoology.

In the seventh stage Beatrice wears a green dress with large white pockets in which to store the evidence. If this stage is mingled with the second stage, ecstasy is achieved.

Stage 8. — Crowded.

Beatrice is behind glass. In this stage Beatrice is blurred by the humans who observe her without caution. 

Stage 9. — Poland.

Beatrice gathers her grandfather into her arms. She recites him from his memory. The ninth stage sounds like this: tsim tsum, tsim tsum, tsim tsum.

Stage 10. — Return.

In the final stage Beatrice watches Beatrice feed the babies with a spade.

-- Sabrina Orah Mark

Available Surfaces I: Uncle Ernest’s Tattoos [by T. R. Hummer]

My thanks to David Lehman and Best American Poetry for the opportunity to be guest blogger for this week. The invitation is timely, because, as it happens, I have a theme I want to explore, and writing for this blog will provide me the opportunity and the much-needed impetus to get it done. Here, then, begins a series of entries that will progress under the overall title “Available Surfaces."

*

character c.1315, from O.Fr. caractere, from L. character, from Gk. kharakter "engraved mark," from kharassein "to engrave," from kharax "pointed stake." Meaning extended by metaphor to "a defining quality."    

I grew up in a place and time wherein the art of tattooing was virtually unknown—or, to be more accurate, was beyond the pale. A map of local businesses would not have included a tattoo parlor, any more than a list of the local houses of worship (and that would have been a lengthy list) would have included a Church of Elvis, however many Elvis worshipers might actually have lurked among us.  

The only member of my family who had tattoos was my Uncle Ernest, who we rarely saw, because he lived Elsewhere. Furthermore, he came from Elsewhere, as he was “only” an uncle by marriage anyway, having courted and won Aunt Eunice after the Great War; and Aunt Eunice was not “really” an aunt in any case, as she was adopted (though she was in fact Family, being the daughter of another aunt and uncle, both of whom perished in the Great Train Wreck, but that, children, is another story).

As if that weren’t enough, Uncle Ernest obtained his tattoos in an even more distant Elsewhere. During the Great War he had been a marine, serving in the Pacific Theater, where, I gather, he saw a good deal of combat on islands whose names, when I was a child, were utterly strange to me. I remember hearing him tell a story about lying on his belly firing his rifle (from under a jeep? Or have I imagined that detail?) while the bullets of an unseen enemy inscribed furrows in the sand to the left and right of him.  From there, I understood, it was somehow a natural step to the tattoo parlor.

Uncle Ernest had an anchor on his shoulder and a naked woman on his forearm. Both were tattoos of the crudest kind available from a professional--utterly stereotypical hack work executed in one color: mimeograph blue. Uncle Ernest was deeply ashamed of them, and always wore long-sleeved shirts. He would display them only rarely, under a combination of duress and the influence of a drink or three.   My connection to my Uncle (actually Cousin-By-Marriage) Ernest, therefore, was both complicated and distant.

And Another Thing... [by Jim Stubenrauch]

Greetings from hot, muggy, overcast Brooklyn... please pardon your guest blogger’s blog outage of the past two days. Service resumes just in time to wrap up the week with a couple of items…

 When Stacey shared with me a few guidelines for posting on this site, she mentioned that BAP bloggers generally avoid overtly political commentary, but she also said—I’m paraphrasing here—that readers might find it interesting to hear a bit about how AJN covers health care topics that have become politicized.

As anyone who wasn’t already in a coma this summer knows about our most recent coma-inducing national conversation, the timing couldn’t be better for discussing the discussion. I wrote about it, here, last week, where I noted:

At AJN we usually avoid taking sides in partisan political fights. We focus on issues that are important to nurses and their patients, and when we publish articles that concern health care policymaking, we try to present the facts as objectively as possible. When there’s a legitimate debate about the best approach to achieving a particular goal, we try to present all sides with equal objectivity, in the belief that readers can make up their own minds when presented with unbiased information.

 Unfortunately, people who should and probably do know better are not upholding similar standards of objectivity and reason in the current debate. National political and media figures are willfully undermining sensible discussion of desperately needed reform efforts, misinforming the public and stirring up baseless fears for their own political advantage and financial gain. It therefore becomes increasingly difficult to cover health care policymaking without taking some note of the political forces that are distorting the very terms of the debate.

 (Well, I suppose that’s all very sound; much more fun, of course, would be to have Jon Stewart’s job, and do this, not to mention this.)

 Those who are sick of hearing about health care reform may benefit most from reading these posts by AJN senior editor Jacob Molyneux at AJNoffthecharts.

 In any case, I hope you’ll read my post, and the Times article that traces the origins of the heinous phrase “death panel,” and names those responsible for inserting it into the debate.

 Credit where credit is due: let it be noted that on “Cease to Thrill,” the Vdisc song I posted on Wednesday, the music was written by Lin Esser, Ted Mockrish, Stephanie St. John, and Vdisc; the lyrics were written by Ted Mockrish. The track was produced by Lin Esser. The musicians were Paul Bennett, bass; Lin Esser, guitars, guitar synth, violin; Ted Mockrish, drums; Stephanie St. John, voice; and your guest blogger, keyboards.

 That’s all for now. It’s been a real pleasure to be here this past week. Thanks, again, for reading and listening.

The Second Handsomest Man

OK, I'll grant that Cary Grant (ne Archibald Leach) was Hollywood's handsomest leading man -- and for the long span between the early screwball comedies (playing opposite Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, and Rosalind Russell) and the later thrillers (with leading ladies Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, and Audrey Hepburn).

But who is number two? I would nominate the Clark Gable of "It Happened One Night," "GWTW," and "The Hucksters." How about you? Would you choose the young Gregory Peck of "Ten O'Clock High," or maybe Robert Mitchum in "Out of the Past," or William Holden in "The Bridge On the River Kwai"? Or Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Burt Lancaster, Steve McQueen, Dana Andrews in "Laura," and I'm sure I've overlooked an obvious contender on the order of Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Woody Allen, George Clooney, and a whole raft of British actors from Laurence Olivier to Errol Flynn.

Let us know what you think.

Happy Birthday, Dorothy Parker & Your "quondam dreams"

Symptom Recital

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the gentlest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I pond on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men . . .
I'm due to fall in love again.

--Dorothy Parker

"The Hucksters"

As part of its all-Deborah Kerr day, TCM showed "The Hucksters" at midnight last Sunday, the day of the ballyhooed opening of the new (third) season of "Mad Men."  About the Madison Avenue geniuses of soap jingles, the 1947 movie is underrated on its own terms and contrasts usefully with "Mad Men." 

Like Don Draper in "Mad Men," but even more so, army veteran Vic Norman is the movie's informing personality and Gable is great in the role. Maybe that's because he is playing a version of himself. With his dashing looks and charm, and his ultra-male confidence, Vic can talk his way from being, say, a nobody who can drive a truck to being Hollywood's acknowledged "king," the very embodiment of Rhett Butler. The script does nice things with the notion that sincerity is something you can imitate or simulate. Looking for work as the movie begins, Gable buys a new necktie, because it makes him look sincere. I wondered whether Lionel Trilling saw the movie, which anticipates an argument he makes in "Sincerity and Authenticity."

Gable can sell nearly anything to almost anyone. and when he walks into an ad agency and demands to see the top man, he naturally walks out with the firm's biggest account. Don Draper has epiphanies that guide him unerringly; Gable has his swagger and charm and uses shrewd psychological ploys to get people to do his bidding. He can make a veiled threat sound like a pep talk to get a guy to do the right thing, can bet a nothing hand as if he were holding a straight flush, can con an agent into a rock-bottom contract for the agent's client -- in this case a second-rate comedian named Buddy Hare (played by Keenan Wynn). The stand-up comic in "Mad Men" is nasty. Buddy Hare is just juvenile.

The movie has Sydney Greenstreet, always fun to watch, as an entertainingly boorish villain, on whose oversized white hat Gable pours a pitcher of water. The hero as a good guy with a conscience who turns his back on Mad Ave: Gable makes impressive speeches ("your foreman is fear") after deciding that he'd rather have a defeated opponent's "forgiveness" than his "respect" and be sincere instead of playing at it. The movie -- which exists on the edge between comedy and drama -- was adapted from a novel that was undoubtedly angrier and more biting.

As befits Hollywood's "king," Gable is regaled with a double dose of frabjous femininity. He has Deborah Kerr, a general's widow, on one arm, and Ava Gardner as night club singer Jean Ogilvie on the other. In the terms proposed by "Mad Men," he gets to woo the high-slung proper Jackie ("I like being on a pedestal, but don't overdo it") and to revisit a romance with soulful, low-slung, big breasted Marilyn ("the cocktails are in the icebox"). The plot obliges Gable to be honorable, Gardner to be understanding, a model drinking buddy, and demure Kerr in her stud earrings and short hair to win the man. Kerr is a wonderful actress, easy to embrace in her convertible under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Her best moment: "Stop being a breadwinner and kiss me." But Ava is a rare enchantress. She is 24 and this is her breakout film. Her best moment: when she-- the former Mrs. Artie Shaw and the future Mrs. Frank Sinatra -- explains that singing on the beat (as in George M. Cohan's "Over There") is square. "Modern singing is soft and off the beat," she says. But of course Gable, hep from the start, knew that all along.

-- DL

A Marriage of Love and Independence [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

ws tj, jmh conducting

A Marriage of Love and Independence

 

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

When in the course of human events it becomes

I alone beweep my outcast state

necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands

and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries

which have connected them with another and to assume

and look upon myself and curse my fate

among the powers of the earth,

wishing me like to one more rich in hope

the separate and equal station to which the Laws

featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,

 

with what I most enjoy contented least

We, therefore, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, 
   

for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name,

Haply I think on thee,--and then my state 


and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising 
   

solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies

from sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate; 


are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings 
   

That then I scorn to change my state with kings. 

It's Too Darn Hot!

What’s the Difference?—Blame It on the Weather [by Jim Stubenrauch]

 

Something a bit different tonight: I’d like to offer some music by Vdisc (not V-Disc), an obscure band that released one record, entitled Vee Khan Nez Pha, in the late 90s. Little is known about them—the liner notes are cryptic, even failing to list the names of the musicians—but a recent audit of our archives unearthed several previously unreleased tracks by the mystery collective. Here’s one, called “Cease to Thrill.”

Download Vdisc - Cease to Thrill

Thanks to all who commented on my posts of the past few days. I hope to respond in detail in the next day or two.

Perils of the Poetry Reading [by Katha Pollitt]

    Am I the only person who finds it hard to follow an unfamiliar poem when I hear it read out loud and don’t have the text in front of me? Even when reading to myself at my own pace, I might have to go over a poem several times to really get it,  but  at a reading,  the poems whizz by  unstoppably-- no chance of a second hearing, and all the helpful visual cues of print , like punctuation, italics, quotation marks, and even line breaks,  are absent.  A stray thought enters my head --  I wonder why they painted this room turquoise? -- and in seconds I’ve lost the thread.  (I’m speaking of what you might call “literary poetry” here,  poetry written primarily to be read silently, not spoken word, which is intended for the ear from the outset.)

   I often find that the poems I’ve enjoyed most at a reading  seem oddly flat on the page when I hunt them down in a book.   What made the poem seem striking and fresh was  the poet’s performance: the energy and especially the humor was in the voice and manner and gestures, not the words themselves.  Or it was the story the poem told: the poetry reading as a series of anecdotes, with the poet placing and embellishing each one in his introductions: My uncle ran a chicken farm in Iowa,  and when he ran off with the Methodist minister’s wife my aunt killed all the chickens and  gave them to the nuns, and out of that comes this next poem, “Saint Rooster and the Holy Choir of Hens.”  it’s been suggested, in fact, that the proliferation of poetry readings, and their importance to a poet’s career, has actually changed the way poets --  “literary poets” -- write, encouraging verbal simplicity, talkiness, easy emotions, simple narratives, and punchlines. It’s  the poet as stand-up comedian/tragedian. 

    Still, you can see why poets would try to shape their art to please their audience -- and notice how we now commonly speak of  poetry’s audience rather than poetry’s readers, which tells you something right there.   It can be painful and embarrassing to stand up before a small group of  miscellaneous strangers who expect you to entertain them and instead offer poems they might find bewildering, or remote.  I've given readings  at which I just want to say, oh well, never mind, let’s just go have a beer and talk about health care reform. 

      Wislawa Szymborska’s “Poetry Reading” (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)   may be the definitive account of a reading at its awful,  humiliating worst.  To paraphrase the old Jewish joke about the Catskills hotel (“The food is terrible!” “Yes, and the portions are so small!”), the audience is not only tiny, it’s not even listening.  And yet, Symborska disperses her pity, her warmth and her satirical humor so evenly among poets and audience members and even the muse, poor thing,  that what in lesser hands would be just another complaint about the world’s indifference to art becomes a gesture of understanding, forgiveness, love.

POETRY READING

To be a boxer, or not to be there
at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? 

Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare --

it's time to start this cultural affair.

Half came inside because it started raining, 

the rest are relatives. O Muse.

The women here would love to rant and rave, 

but that's for boxing. Here they must behave. 

Dante's Infemo is ringside nowadays.

Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.

Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet, 

one sentenced to hard shelleying for life, 

for lack of muscles forced to show the world 

the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists 

with luck. O Muse,

O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.

In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore: 

he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more, 

she's making him that tart she used to bake. 

Aflame, but carefully--don't burn his cake!

we start to read. O Muse.

 

        -- by Wislawa Szymborska 
                (from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems Harvest Books, 1996)

Vallejo's Vedic Fiber (as rendered by Tom Clark)

Cesar Vallejo

The conclusion of a Vallejo poem (click here for the rest) makes fortunetelling look easy in the sense that a good center fielder, Carlos Beltran when healthy, say, or the athletic Matt Kemp, makes a difficult catch seem almost but not quite routine:

<<
What hasn't yet come along won't, but
what's already come and gone,
but what's already come and gone.
>>

Cesar Vallejo, translated by Tom Clark, on his blog today