The Best American Poetry

Literary Sites (by Larry Epstein)

When I was a teenager I convinced my family to go on a literary tour of New England. We went to all the usual spots such as Walden Pond, Author's Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Hawthorne's house, and Emily Dickinson's house. I was also interested in utopian movements, so we stopped at Harvard, Massachusetts to see Fruitlands, the doomed community started by Bronson Alcott who was not only Louisa May Alcott's father but also the man who loaned Henry David Thoreau an ax to chop down trees for his cabin in the woods.

A couple of years later, a friend and I drove around the country, and we made sure to stop in such places as Hannibal, Missouri and Hartford, Connecticut to join Mark Twain's youth to his old age.

All these places are well-known. But there are lesser-known literary sites.

For example, Edna St. Vincent Millay lived in the narrowest house in New York City, at 75 1/2 Bedford Street. The house is nine and a half feet wide. It is a three story brick building constructed on what was once a carriage alley. Millay lived there in 1923 and 1924. Cary Grant and John Barrymore also later lived in the house. In the fifties, William Burroughs lived a few doors down at 69 Bedford.

Then there is the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. Many famous guests have stayed at the Willard, including writers and presidents who were also writers. Abraham Lincoln and his family lived there for several weeks before his inauguration. Indeed, Lincoln's first presidential paycheck was used to settle his bill. It was for $773.75. And one morning in 1861 a woman from Boston was awakened by the harsh sound of soldiers marching beneath her window. They were singing "John Brown's Body." She liked the tune but not the words. So she climbed out of bed, sat at her desk in her room at the Willard, and there Julia Ward Howe wrote the words to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." President Ulysses S. Grant fled the White House to find some peace and quiet in the Willard's lobby. Sadly, many people followed him there begging for political favors. He called these people "lobbyists," and the word stuck.

I'm not sure why I've always enjoyed literary sites. Maybe it's a mystical hope that some of the talent that resided there will find its way into my mind. Maybe it's a way to understand the writers better by seeing where they wrote. I'm aware, of course, that such visits are no substitute for reading the words of writers, but I often find I enjoy the reading more after I've seen an author's home. The visits offer an author-reader connection across time. Visiting sites where the authors lived or stayed helps both the authors and me cheat their deaths. I like to think they're glad about that.

Autumnal Oration [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

My dearest Bleaders,

Today is the kind of day the word susurration was born to serve.  The trees out my window are full of dry leaves and seed pods and the wind is blowing around the bower.  A visiting longhaired cat is glowering at big leaves bumping around with the breeze, and a lone last pepper dipping on its branch like a grounded fledgling flitting around. Riveting programing.

It is reasonable to be seasonably sensible to Keats, at least so much as to respond to the need for an inner struggle to take place in a physical space and that space to be a stubbled field after harvest.

But  are we bird, or leaf, or cat?  Real or imaginary?  I'm the pepper, you're the cat.  Sadly, there is no bird.  There is a mansion in Asia Minor in which each room is a poem with women who come and go talking of Michelangelo, and a room with a girl sitting in the curve of a colossal marble ear, and out front there is a beak in a heart and a form on a door.   Out back is the newly shorn staffs of wheat and corn.  And there we are, on a picnic blanket, not forlorn but arguing with our actual demons who are plump and angry and we are grotesque but they are getting tired, even of us.  Let's just try to hold on and see what happens after dark.

love,

Jennifer

Letter to Cummins from the Island of Idyllwild [by David Lehman and David St. John]

Letter to Cummins from the Island of Idyllwild

Dear Jim, forgive the long delay in writing
But the feasts go on from dawn to dawn
And the natives insist on feeding us by hand, slices
        of papaya
And mango with orange beer. Last night
We stood beneath a sky of white and green silk sea
Anemones pulsing like parachutes above an amphitheater
         as wide
As a valley, and a single child walked out to sing to
        the crows
Rasping above us in nearby pines. You may not remember
        this, but
That child, circumcised and blond, outshouted the sea
That summer when amnesia invaded our sleeping bags
Like bugs transmitting the intimacy of an illness.
You had sex with a friendly neighbor and woke up without
A hangover or any memory of how she seduced you.
The island was full of enchantments, and still is.
There are lotus flowers, young goddesses with liquid bodies
In loose summer frocks, craters of quicksand and
       rushing rapids.
On this island no news is fair weather, and the women
      write poems.
And so whatever you might have feared for us, don’t
      worry now.
The six points of the pirate’s compass will guide us
As the six breezes from the seven continents return like
A sestina’s consolation and the envoy’s delight. Here, on our
Perpetually new isle, we can imagine you imagining us, idle
      as the natives
Of Idyllwild, yearning to be as wise, and as wild. David
      & David.

-- David Lehman & David St. John

The Gala Launch: A Report [by Liz Howort]

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 featured  prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

              David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

            “Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

            John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprised of movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi

means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

            In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

          It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

        -- Liz Howort

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.   John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

"My Three Sons" [by Angela Ball]

MY THREE SONS

Are tapping wing-tipped feet.
What scrapes
Has today scripted?  Soon.

A building next to a body shop
Without bodies.  A doctor who said,
“I know your doctor, he knows
My work.”

The next building a pea soup
Color.  Bent flowers
On a desk.  A doctor saying,
“You are all legs.”  Would
That were.

Another look at the place:  a leatherette
Lounger, tufts of Kleenex,
An aide asking, “Are you sure
You’re all right?”  I have never
Been.

Fred could have been my dad, now
Could be the sons.  In a way.

-- Angela Ball
(from Field)

Collage and Poetry, Part Deux (by Laura Orem)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a piece on poetry and collage and called for poets who work in the genre to send me JPEGs of one or two pieces, as well as a few words on any connections they see between the two art forms. I've gotten some lovely pieces and very cool insights, but I'd like some more. So, if you haven't sent me anything, please do! I will post something in the next few weeks about the topic (sending me the pictures says you are giving me permission to post them here on Best American Poetry).

Send one or two images and your words of wisdom to me at [email protected].

Thanks!

(Pablo Picasso)

I promised David Lehman ten puns today

Here they are. Plus one to grow on. 

Didya hear about the infamous movie director who tumbled down the snowy mountain?

...He had a roaming pole and ski. 

Didya the good natured Hasid who couldn't bring himself to true hooliganism?  

...He only threw Mazel Tov cocktails through windows. 

Didya hear about the Jewish matron who got an obscene phone call from a famous Mexican guitarist?

...So overcome with the perplexing emotions of both shock and flinching desire, she responded in the only way she could: "Oy vey! Come ovah!"

Now for some Tom Swifties:

"Buy my trout!  Mine alone!" Tom said, selfishly.  

"I'll take another gin," Tom said, slowly. 

Bathroom humor alert:

"Indeed, I poop every twenty four hours!" Tom said, yesterday.  

"Whoops! I farted!" Tom said, astutely.

And a few more because I cannot help myself, really. 

"This I do on behalf of my former spouse," Tom said, exactingly.  

Tom was forthcoming: "I can masturbate ALL NIGHT!"

"It seems this bird is missing something," Tom said, knowingly.

And lastly, leastly:

Tom totally announced: "Yep, there's ten of them!"

 

Thank you, thank you.  You've been great.  

"All the Things You Are": The Greatest Love Song?

The other day, David proclaimed that Jerome Kern's "All the Things You Are" is the greatest of all love songs and Jill Alexander Essbaum asked why. David played a Sinatra cover from 1944 and Stacey searched vainly for the "Broadway Showstoppers" album that John McGlinn put together, which features a full operatic version of the song, verse and all, as it would be presented theatrically. But Jill's question lingered in the air. Jamie Katz talked about how the changes in the song held a great appeal for jazz musicians, something you couldn't say about "Some Enchanted Evening," for example. David talked about the soaring melody, the changes in key and the range that make the song so challenging to a singer. Stacey talked about how the lyrics expressed longing and epitomized the poem in praise of one's sought-for partner. Laura Orem recalled that Oscar Hammerstein wasn't very proud of the inversion toward the end: "Someday I'll know that moment divine / when all the things you are are mine" -- the inversion was forced on him by the rhyme. David remembered reading that Hammerstein fan Stephen Sondheim preferred the same songwriters' "The Song Is You" perhaps for that reason. We sat and we talked and we listened and we hope you will listen to -- two versions below -- and weigh in with your opinion. Leaving superlatives aside, since they are there to emphasize a point and not as statements that can be logically verified, what makes "All the Things You Are" a consummate example of the romantic love song in the great American songbook?

If you listen to Barbara Streisand's interpretation, you will hear the introductory verse Sills and Forrest leave out. 

Kid Bids Hub Fans Adieu

At Fenway Park on September 28, 1960, Ted Williams hit a home run in his last at bat, an event memorialized by John Updike in "Kid Bids Hub Fans Adieu," a superb article in The New Yorker. Read the full piece here or whet your appetite with this brief excerpt:
<<
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.
>>
Did you know that Williams lost the MVP in 1941, the year he hit .400, and in 1947, when he won the triple crown?

Why typing John Ashbery's "The Instruction Manual" is a good thing [by Dara Wier]

These, I suppose, two Candadians, have been watching me for many years.  They're in a painting James Tate and I found on a trans-Canadian road trip.  We don't know who they are, or why they're sitting in a field in their business outfits or what the painting might commemorate or what the hat's are about; nor do we know who painted the picture. But these two men have served many purposes over the years.

At first they constituted an exciting discovery, up on a barn's interior wall that served as a repository for an antique dealer's stash.  When we learned we could have these men, and their mysterious, unknown, unknowable company, we were very happy.  So, we took them with us back home to Amherst, Massachusetts.  Over the years they've watched me work, write, read, think, talk and live.  I've often thought I should please them.  I've often been amused by their situation.  I've sometimes made up somethings about who they are.  I've sometimes let them stare at me.  I grew to love these two strangers in a strange situation, a strange feeling that feels very familiar.  

This particular Cry Room is in Missoula, Montana.  For some reason, I'd never seen a Cry Room before or known that they are fairly commonly found in churches across the country.  My friend and I had been talking about how various people handle or have sudden bouts of crying, and we were about to head into a wedding where one expects a little bit of a certain kind of crying to go on, when I saw the door marked CRY ROOM.  I pointed toward it in such a way as to say without saying it, look, there's where crying gets done, it has its own room.

Recently I typed into a document John Ashbery's early poem, "The Instruction Manual."  This gave me no need of any kind of CRY ROOM of any kind.  This rewarded me with considerable layers of pleasures.  I was typing it so that it could be shown via computer to an honor's poetry seminar I'm meeting at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  I typed from The Library of America's gorgeously produced, well-edited (by Mark Ford) 2008 volume Ashbery/Collected Poems 1956-1987.

Word by word the poem is such an amazing tribute to poetry, to imagination's desire, imagination's ability to save us or save something of us, or for us or in us. The poem treats invention's and sight's methodical rendering as a creative force equal in significance to that of the Big Bang's. The poem enacts how invention advances by careful degrees and attention, how taking time to build something (make up something) gives us such a time of potential beauty. Formally we get to experience an imagination within an imagination, a view of Guadalajara within the poem, Guadalajara's people in their town, in Guadalajara's square, in and around its bandstand, the neighborhoods around the square, a patio within a house, and love appears in most all of its phases and stages, ah, the poem does it all perfectly......and color, how the poem says: you're seeing by means of words what isn't exactly here, believe this with me now, here it is, such a generous gesture, here is this and this leads to that and that leads to there and over here we have, ah the precisely imagined and managed colors and then finally how the poem glides away from itself so perfectly...I love this poem (of course I love many other  Ashbery poems as well)......and so cool that Shahrazad (the one in the book) is in Scheherazade (the music mentioned in the poem) and is one of our ultimately successful model tellers of all time (......these are the tales that saved the life of Shahrazad....) (The Modern Library Classic of THE ARABIAN NIGHTS has commentary or blurbs from:  Robert Louis Stevenson, John Addington Symonds, Agernon Charles Swinburne, and Lady Isabel Bishop, it's translated by Sir Richard F. Burton.  What a crew!

I was talking with a friend yesterday about collaborations, not how we do them, but how what we know about them causes us to feel as we receive them.  And how when one is told that something is a collaboration, suddenly, everything about how one receives it is different from how we receive something from a single author or artist.  Maybe almost everything about collaboration has to do with how we receive it almost as much as how it gets made.  Fictional collaborative efforts seem exceptionally aware of this.

I love the little Russian dolls hiding inside one another for their persistence, the Morton Salt Girl on her box for her flair (I haven't seen her for a while), anything almost that is something within something within something.  I like a frame on a picture.  I like a picture in a picture. I like a geode. I like time lapse photography. I like stop action action.  I used to not like poems about poems, these made me very nervous for a while, and then one day, in an antique store in Deerfield, Massachusetts, I came upon something that dropped that particular veil from my eyes.........walking in the door, my eyes directly were directed to a piece of calligraphy.........I walked closer........I looked more.........(never had calligraphy been anything I'd have thought too much about, all due respect to calligraphers, of course)......I saw there....something I'd never seen before........layers and layers of something written, graphed, laid on a page, words that were drawing me in by their design (like a vortex this is) (like a real reverie) and when I got close enough to see what finally (or perhaps firstly) (who knows which way this was made, at least in its illusion, one can't (and shouldn't) be able to tell which came first) I was caught up short, under a spell, ready to see what I could finally read: executed with a pen.  Way down deep in the almost perspectively vanished end of its existence.

It's a good thing when one is stripped of a prejudice of any kind.

That piece of calligraphy freed me from a prejudice I'd been longing to drop.  I wish I could show it to you here.

Dara Wier, Guest Blogger September 13- October 17

For the next several weeks, Dara Wier will be our guest blogger.  Dara's posts will appear every few days.  Wier is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently Selected Poems (Wave, 2009).  Other titles include  Remnants of Hannah (2006), Reverse Rapture (2005), Hat on a Pond (2002), Voyages in English (2001), and Our Master Plan (1998), a Phi Beta Kappa award finalist.  She directs the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and along with Noy Holland and Lisa Olstein co-directs the University of Massachusetts' Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. You can listen to Dara on the Joe Milford radio show here.  Welcome, Dara.

In Other News:

"A testament to the wonders and contradictions of each day." Cindy Sostchen-Hochman reviews The Best America Poetry 2009 in Coldfront.  Read her review here.

Garrison Keillor reads Denise Duhamel's "How it Will End" on Writer's Almanac. Denise's poem was chosen by David Wagoner for The Best American Poetry 2009.  Listen here. 

-- sdh

Photos from the Gala Launch Reading (II) -- by Bill Hayward

Mark Doty reading at the gala launch reading
for The Best American Poetry 2009
at the New School's Tishman Auditorium in NYC
September 24, 2009

photo credit: Bill Hayward

"Four Quartets" Revisited [by Belle Randall]

Ed. note: T. S. Eliot was born today 121 years ago. He remains the modernist poet par excellence, reliably moving readers -- sometimes to deep thought, sometimes to sly parody. Each period in his career is marked by a consummate example ("Prufrock," "The Waste land," "Four Quartets"). Here is  Belle Randall's confrontation with the supreme instance of the master's late style. -- DL

“Four Quartets” Revisited

On opening a long unopened book,
what odor rises from the parting pages,
what genie is released, what dark spell broken,
as if some spirit trapped inside for ages,

By this hinge swung open were set free?
My father’s hand has jotted in the margins
its own blunt text of what must be
lecture notes, and planted his place marker

Like a flag among “The Dry Salvages”—
a UC “schedule card,” a blank
grid for weekly classes, and on the back,
O fees and late fees time alone assuages—

We know the longhand’s labored look
was mine, but why that child should scrawl
a phrase so apt for now’s beyond recall:
on opening a long unopened book.

-- Belle Randall

Source: Poetry magazine (September 2009).
With thanks to Don Share, who posted Ms. Randall's poem as a comment on a day when we featured Wendy Cope's translation of "The Waste Land" into five limericks.

William Waltz presents. . .a Poem by Dean Young

My friend and colleague the recently departed John Parker once told me a student of his believed that poems were written in code, which, once broken, would reveal the poem’s true meaning. This young man also believed there was a Rosetta stone of a book hidden somewhere in the library that decoded most of the canonical works. I would have enjoyed hearing John’s reply to such assertions.

This week’s poem is by the magnificent Dean Young. Mr. Young’s poems have appeared numerous times in the pages of Conduit, for which we are honored, thankful and, at times, downright giddy. “Original Monkey” first appeared in our “Neighborhood Gods” (#12) issue and later in his book Elegy on Toy Piano.

Dean uses a typewriter and white-out. His poems come with smudges. I like this. I can’t help wondering how his poems might be different if he used a word processor as 90% of the poets who submit do (or how the poems of the other 90% might be different if they didn’t). I like how Dean keeps sending us poems, how he feels at home between our covers. And, of course I love that he selected Zoo Music as the winner of the Slope Editions Book Prize, not just because he made me a winner but because he was a judge with whom I truly felt an affinity. I was glad to tell him just that when we finally met.

People often point out the humor in Dean Young’s poems, yet anyone who has ever laughed at him knows that behind every chuckle there is either agony or anger. Dean’s poems are long-legged animals running through the tall grass, following his instincts. His path is neither frantic nor methodical, but he always catches his prey. Sometimes it’s a monkey. Meaning, meaning in good poems can’t be seen straight on. One must look askance.

Original Monkey

I'm working on my vanishing point.
I'm practicing my zenith.
I used to rely on a piece of glass
to plunge into my heart but that's nothing
compared to my monkey. Usually
we meet on a bench by the whortleberries
to weep and watch the lambs disappear
into the chasm. Hey, it's a rotten world
for a monkey too. Just because
you've got opposable thumbs
doesn't mean you can untrip the trap.
My monkey though is very self-involved
so when the glass doesn't work
and the invisible girders are groaning
and I can't get back to the old country
of the great works of Western art
restored to the luminosity of Looney Tunes,
I call my friend who's drunk again\
like me like me and my moonbeam.
Wrong answer. Wrong ballistics report.
Wrong club membership. Wrong draconian
countermeasure. Wrong emergency room
where the client in the party hat
blinking blood says, It's nothing,
it's nothing. I'll be the judge of that.
We can see that once the work of interpretation
is done, the dream is the fulfillment of a wish
just as the injury is the fulfillment of a wish
and vibrating at the speed of E flat
and unloading heads into the furnace
and realism which is a form of surrealism
on a time-delayed fuse so what I'd like to know
is who's making all these helpful wishes?
My agony is no sillier than yours
even if it's riding a tiny unicycle.
All I'm asking for is a fellow monkey
to accompany my original monkey
in his bridal sadness. Once he was one
among many in tree. Once my piece of glass
was part of a larger piece of glass
which was part of a larger piece glass
which was…okay, you get the point.
As if back there somewhere
was something immense and intact.

-- Dean Young

Photos from the Gala Launch Reading (I)

Richard Howard reading at the gala launch reading
for The Best American Poetry 2009
at the New School's Tishman Auditorium in NYC
September 24, 2009

photo credit: Bill Hayward.

"Pop Cento: Theory and Praxis" [by David Shapiro]

On George Gershwin's birthday, a poem by David Shapiro:

Pop Cento: Theory and Praxis

In theory, it was a foggy day.  In practice, spring is here.
In theory, blues in the night. In practice, that's America to me.
In theory, I was twenty-one. In practice, I let my golden chances pass me by.
In theory, lullaby of Birdland. In practice, they can't take that away from me.
In theory, it was a very good year. In practice, all of me.
In theory, a woman's a two-face, a worrisome thing.  In practice, the sun was shining
            shining shining shining everywhere.
In theory, Kol Nidre. In practice, mammy, my dear mammy.
In theory, I’d walk a million miles for one of her smiles. In practice, let's call the whole
           thing off. Come rain or come shine.

-- David Shapiro (7/ 18 / 09)

"The Friday Night Fights" [by Ronald Wallace]

David Wagoner selected a sonnet by Ronald Wallace for the 2009 edition of The Best American Poetry. Wallace, who once wrote a sonnet a day for 365 days, wrote "No Pegasus" on the back of a boarding pass to escape from conversation with a garrulous salesman.

Ed Ochester has written,

“Whenever I hear people lament the loss of traditional forms, I try to give them a brief lecture on organic form AND I try to point them to the poetry of Ron Wallace, who is a master of the sonnet, the sestina, etc. And does them so gracefully in contemporary diction that a reader may not be aware that Wallace is writing in a conventional form. And, more important that mere formality, it’s all done from the heart."

Here is Wallace's poem "The Friday Night Fights" from Ochester's anthology American Poety Now (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). Note Wallace's characterization of Howard Cosell, the loquacious sportscaster with the melodramatic voice, who sparred verbally with Ali, covered boxing, and was a fixture on "Monday Night Football."

The Friday Night Fights

Every Friday night we watched the fights.
Me, ten years old and stretched out on the couch;
my father, in his wheelchair, looking on
as Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson
fought and won the battles we could not.
Him, twenty-nine, and beat up with disease;
me, counting God among my enemies
for what he’d done to us. We never touched.

But in between the rounds we’d sing how we’d
Look sharp! Feel sharp! & Be sharp! with Gillette
and Howard Cosell, the Bela Lugosi of boxing.
Out in the kitchen, my mother never understood
our need for blood, how this was as close as we’d get
to love—bobbing and weaving, feinting and sparring.

-- Ronald Wallace

Why I'm Going to see Vermeer at the Met

In a recent New Yorker Peter Schjeldahl writes in "Dutch Touch" this sentence:

An artist has contrived to lure me out of myself into an illusion of reality more fulfilling than any lived reality can be.  (p. 90,  Sept. 21, 2009)

Wow, I think, I like it when an artist does this for me.  I like to be lured out of myself.  I think illusions of reality are reality.  I think lived realities can be damn fulfilling. And it seems to be human nature to be as often as possible on the look-out for occasions which are potentially awe-inspiring.

I like to lose a little self-consciousness when I can.   I don't really fight with that loss all that often.  I love to be confronted with what appears to be perfection.

I like to be lost in someone else's art.  I want to be.  It's a thrill to allow one's brain to be taken over by an artist who's doing something that I'm sure I could not be doing. 

To allow my brain to think (or my eyes to see, or ears to hear) through the delicious complexities another brain has supplied is something I'm grateful to have available for me to humbly accept. It makes life less lonely.

A few years ago I visited a Vuillard retrospective at the National Gallery in D.C., when I left it, my eyes had undergone a revitalization which re-stocked my awe for (& wonderment over & graititude toward) everything I saw.  It also caused me to appreciate my eyes a little more.  Which must be a good thing.

If I could have had anything other than what this show did for me, it would have been to, just for a second, have my fingers, my hands, my wrists, my arms slip seamlessly into Vuillard's so I might feel just a little what it must have felt like to paint as he painted.  

Transformations enacted by choice in art keep art as necessary to us as air or water.  All art has to do is fuel our desire to use our brains and it fulfills one of its deepest, most essential qualities.  By use I mean use well, by use well I mean with agility, in versatile situations, with one's imagination working, perhaps, working hard. 

And I do like as well a difficult to please critic for whom it's second or perhaps first nature to question and examine art with more suspicions or let's just say, from more skeptical angles of approach.  (What's in that soup?) (What's under that hood?)  (What's keeping this plane aloft?) (What is chilled water for?)  And so I'm glad for Peter Scheljdahl's directing me to that little bit of broken pane in the upper left hand corner of "The Milkmaid."  That broken pane is brilliance.

And  this is why I'll head to New York to visit Vermeer next Friday.

For a look at more about what a critic can do for art see a post by Matthew Zapruder not so long ago:

www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=186047

"The Junior High School Band Concert" [by David Wagoner]

The Junior High School Band Concert

When our semi-conductor
Raised his baton, we sat there
Gaping at Marche Militaire,
Our mouth-opening number.
It seemed faintly familiar
(We'd rehearsed it all that winter),
But we attacked in such a blur,
No army anywhere
On its stomach or all fours
Could have squeezed through our crossfire.

I played cornet, seventh chair,
Out of seven, my embouchure
A glorified Bronx cheer
Through that three-keyed keyhole stopper
And neighborhood window-slammer
Where mildew fought for air
At every exhausted corner,
My fingering still unsure
After scaling it for a year
Except on the spit-valve lever.

Each straight-faced mother and father
Retested his moral fiber
Against our traps and slurs
And the inadvertent whickers
Paradiddled by our snares,
And when the brass bulled forth
A blare fit to horn over
Jericho two bars sooner
Than Joshua's harsh measures,
They still had the nerve to stare.

By the last lost chord, our director
Looked older and soberer.
No doubt, in his mind's ear
Some band somewhere
In some music of some Sphere
Was striking a note as pure
As the wishes of Franz Schubert,
But meanwhile here we were:
A lesson in everything minor,
Decomposing our first composer.

-- David Wagoner

David Wagoner is the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2009.

"Free Fall" [by David Wagoner]

Free Fall

At first he's making better and better time
in his descent toward an unavoidable
necessarily inevitable
conclusion against a remarkable-looking surface
no longer keeping its distance or its place
in the scheme of things and then the worldly limit
of acceleration thirty-two feet per second
per second in free fall will slow his body down
to a rough four hundred while he enjoys
the interval to notice the steadily
increasing size of the earth the inexorable
enlargement of its horizon the revelation
of all its topographical details
its clarifying and intensifying colors
and shades of meaning if he were a mouse
or any smaller creature and had the luck
to land where he wouldn't immediately be drowned
impaled or run over he'd go bouncing away
as good as new but as a heavyweight
contender and thinker he comes down now
to earth with entirely too much emphasis.

-- David Wagoner
(from Southwest Review and Verse Daily: 2007)

David Wagoner is the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2009.