The Best American Poetry

What Are the Poets in New Zealand Up To These Days?

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The Best New Zealand Poems is published annually by the International Institute of Modern Letters, and aims to introduce readers—especially internationally—to leading contemporary New Zealand poets. The poems are chosen to show the vitality and range of current writing. We have shamelessly modelled this online project on the successful US paperback anthology, The Best American Poetry. Each year we publish 25 poems from recent literary magazines and poetry collections, where possible including notes about and by the poet, as well as links to related publishing and literary websites. In this way we hope that readers will be able to follow up fresh discoveries. There are plenty to be made.

The editorship of Best New Zealand Poems changes annually. This year’s editor is the poet James Brown. Earlier editors were Paula Green (2007), Anne Kennedy and Robert Sullivan (2006), Andrew Johnston (2005), Emma Neale (2004), Robin Dudding (2003), Elizabeth Smither (2002) and Iain Sharp (2001). The 2009 editor will be Robyn Marsack, director of the Scottish Poetry Library and co-editor of the newly published anthology Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets (Carcanet, March 2009).

Bill Manhire
International Institute of Modern Letters
Wellington, New Zealand
March, 2009
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Read more here. -- DL

Lorca is Green [by Emma Trelles]

 
 
 Federico Garcia Lorca was a poet with deep set eyes and a hood of thick eyebrows. When pressed together, his lips resembled two curved shells. He was a diminutive man who walked with a limp. His hands were delicate and resembled a child's.

Since I read recently that the Spanish government will soon try to exhume his remains, I have thought much about Lorca, his words but also his body, what must now only be his disassembled bones, his prettiness and his flaws dissolved to minerals. He is perhaps buried near Granada, where hundreds of men and women were executed by gunshot in 1936, during the Civil War, beside a cemetery wall  and its surrounding hillsides and olive trees.

Lorca died in summer, four months before the olive harvest and when the trees' silvered branches were likely heavy with petals and fruit. Some of them are very old, their leaves long threaded by a wind that arrives through a vacant archway, as Lorca wrote, "...blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby's spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things."

Lorca is green as the sky at the hour of the crepúsculo, when the moon begins its bright ascent and the sidewalks fall to darkness. Lorca is the shadow-green of mangroves and pines, the slash of green beneath the egret's eye. He is the green that enters in silence; he is the green that returns.

Lorca was a poet whose work I read out loud and in Spanish to my mother and stepfather. She made Cuban coffee and served it in tiny china cups. He sat at the kitchen counter and noted, kindly, that my pronunciation was better than he had expected, quite good, in fact. 

That summer when my mother's hair had finally grown back after her chemo, her head now dark and budding with curls, I could read espadas and adelfa but did not know they meant swords and oleander. It is easier to speak than to understand. Spanish, with its velvet-clad consonants and hopeful vowels, each letter sounding exactly as it appears. Nothing is left behind. Nothing is buried.

When my mother says my name, her voice rings like a little gold bell, and I think of yellow, a color that, like her, is filled with resolve. Yellow is a window, a locket, a poison that can heal. Yellow is Pinar del Rio -- heat and flat valleys and where my mother's people are from. When I was a girl, yellow was the braid she wore long and down the middle of her back; yellow was the garden of succulents she grew, their branches circuitous, and each leaf's shape a surprise: a paddle, a button, a dagger, a heart.

William Waltz presents. . .a poem by Mary Ruefle

As much as I try to stay in the moment, it seems all my attention, as an editor, goes to the forthcoming issue as soon as the current issue is shipped across the country and over the seas. So, writing these posts has given me the excuse to read through our catalogue, which, despite commonsense and the laws of economics, is now twenty issues deep. It’s been a thrill to re-discover poems, not that I had forgotten them, not at all, but, like re-connecting with old friends, I had forgotten how satisfying it was to be in their company.

We tend to think of forgetting as a malfunction of some sort, yet much of what we forget is evidence of a functioning memory. The world would be too much if our brains didn’t slough off the vast majority of it. But I can’t help thinking that how we remember by forgetting resembles how we write poetry. Memory selects but a handful of sensations and their corresponding people, actions, things, etc., to archive in the brain’s wet network. Those selected inevitably accrue added significance, which is to say they become concentrated. The poet makes similar selections and cuts with hopes of yielding similar results.

Maybe another way of saying it is that the successful poet possesses the facility for intense focus on the page, extracting from her experience, imagination, or both, a rich distillate to share with her readers. This power of focus is one of the things that I love and admire about Mary Ruefle’s poem “Cardamom Buds,” which first appeared in “Past Imperfect: The Trouble with Remembering and Forgetting,” Conduit #11. Mary’s voice, strong and firm, strides, despite her speaker’s somewhat agitated and fragile emotional state, through this poem, from 30,000 feet to the kitchen counter. The world is there and the world falls away leaving speaker and reader there, alone.

I almost forgot to write that this is my last dispatch for The Best American Poetry blog. Thanks for reading.

-- William Waltz

Cardamom Buds

High in the sky someone ate a peanut and accepted
a complimentary beverage, Mr. Rabbit’s corduroy robe
was taken off and put on nine times in the next seat,
a spatula was made in a factory far below
and one who had lost the habit of marveling took it home
and turned things over. Undoubtedly I still loved you
and man remained an inexpressible island of grief.
It began to rain, and I don’t know if I was alone or
by myself (was I washing my hands or the bar of soap?)
but the growing season was over. The rain came nonetheless
and I saw with intense thankfulness a few cardamom buds
lying on the counter. Nothing else mattered!
I was no longer a zebra lost among birches,
and the great beauty of my upward striving
was received with intense thankfulness
by no one in particular. Tea was in order.
I sat at the counter and let life sketch me.
I blushed at first, believing I took up too much space.
I crossed and uncrossed my legs. I folded and unfolded\
my hands. I couldn’t move much more than that,
for on the other side of the room your ghost stood,
waving a palette. Come over here! it cried,
I’ll make you as small as you like!
But I stayed where I was, and dropped the cardamom buds
in my tea, certain the summons couldn’t possibly apply to me.

-- Mary Ruefle

Craig Morgan Teicher, Guest Blogger, October 25-31

This week we welcome Craig Morgan Teicher as our guest blogger.  Craig is a Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle.  He is the author of Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (CLP, 2007). Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA) will be published in 2010.  Find out more about Craig here.

We also welcome back Emma Trelles as our tropical correspondent. Emma is the author of Little Spells, (GOSS183). Her work has appeared in publications such as Verse Daily, 3 AM Magazine, Oranges and Sardines, Gulf Stream, Newsday, the Miami Herald, Latina magazine, and the Sun- Sentinel, where she was the art critic for three years. She is the editor of MiPOesias Magazine's American Cuban Issue, the recipient of a Green Eyeshade Award for art writing, and a Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry. Emma sometimes teaches creative writing at the Florida Center for the Literary Arts and at the Art Center/South Florida.

This Just In . . . Live blogging from Bill Hayward's Intimacy Project

Bill Hayward sends along this link and photos from The Port Authority, where poets Jeff Johnson and Claire Donato are live blogging poetry every day during the performance's 10-day run.  Check it out!

Three Poems by Loren Goodman

RICHARD 111

            by George

I was fascinated by Richard 111
But I wondered about the first
Hundred and ten plays—
Could they have been so good?

WCW

The cat stepped
Over the enjamb-
Ment one
Forefoot first
Then the second
Then the other

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

After 120 years of
Reaction and explication
There is still no basic core
Of agreement on how
Wuthering Heights is
Structured or what
It is about

               -- Loren Goodman

Poets and Writers - WTF???

I've been involved in conducting and evaluating survey research for more than twenty years, ever since completing graduate work in regulatory economics with an emphasis on survey research design.  I was dismayed that Poets and Writers, in its November/December on-line magazine, published rankings of MFA programs that are based on bogus research methods. The author of the rankings has no credentials as a pollster.  Why would Poets and Writers entrust such an important assignment -- one with a lot at stake for many individuals and writing programs  -- to a blogger?   Here's the letter I sent to the Editor: 

Dear Mr. Larimer:

 

It is astonishing that Poets & Writers would publish Seth Abramson’s MFA program rankings (www.pw.org Nov/Dec 2009) without scrutinizing his research methods, which are utterly bogus. Unlike a valid poll, which would survey a randomly selected representative sample of the total pool of current and potential MFA applicants, Abramson's poll reflects only the responses of self-selected readers of his blog, and there is nothing to prevent individuals from responding more than once from multiple locations.  The people drawn to a single point-of-view blog are already inclined to agree with the blogger's biases, and even a cursory look at Abramson's blog reveals just how many extreme biases he has. Any responsible social science researcher knows that findings based on self-selected survey responses are not just worthless -- they can be harmful and misleading.

 

Sincerely,

Stacey Harwood

Doenjang Jjigae [by Loren Goodman]

SEOUL, Korea -- October 21, 2009

 

Seoul. Homophonic city of dreams. And everything in Seoul ain't always what it seems. Too much, too much, too many people, too much!

At least that's how I felt when I got here, two years and two months ago. Coming from Japan, it took a long time to adjust. Perhaps differences stand out most when things are similar.

And then there is change... near the end of summer, I start to feel more comfortable. I believe this is the result of many factors: finding a pool, getting off the couch, and perhaps most of all, this:

"Bibliomorphic" [by Jim Dolot]

Bibliomorphic

Things that are shaped like books but are not books
Abound.  One leaf opens over another.
The folding-chairs are books manqués, no doubt,
Though only when unfolded for the booths,
And only such in this folding, defeated poem,
Which will not be, even by a reader, repeated.
Bebe Rebozo is a name shaped like a book,
Book him, you serifs, before he gets away,
Though who he wasn’t we otherwise don’t remember
(Our synapses are fading now and yellowing like books.)
A box of candies open, a laptop, a sandwich,
All of these are (sort of) like books, at least for now.
The body is bibliomorphic, symmetrical,
Libriform, and lasts about as long as a paperback.
So is the butterfly in this novel and that.
The universe, book-formed, has a central seam
For two great wings, star-marginalia visible
Only to those who have the right strength
Reading-glasses, and the minuscule g
Turned on its side is a bicycle, ant, or book.
Books are Kabbalahform, cubic, Kaabaesque.
They take part in the night-closing of the shops.

-- Jim Dolot

Much Depends on Dinner: Cooking with Grace Cavalieri

With this post we inaugurate a new series to showcase poets who cook.  We're delighted that Grace Cavalieri agreed to be our first contributor. Grace founded and  produces "The Poet and the Poem," now recorded at the Library of Congress for public radio. Her series celebrates its 32nd consecutive year on-air.  Grace and co-author Sabine Pascarelli have just published The Poet's Cookbook, with photographs by Dan Murano (A Solitary Moment).  The Poet's Cookbook includes full menus with more than 75 recipes for Antipasti, Minestre, Primi Piatti , Secondi Piatti, Verdure, Insalate, and Dolci.

Here's what Grace has to say about today's recipe:

Pomodori Ripieni is something my mother used to make. She even made this for my lunch when I came home from school. In the first part of the 20th century, there were no lunch rooms and cafeterias, no "Subway" or sandwich shops. Children walked home from school and back in one short hour. Nettie made Pomodori for me on toast. I guess that was our version of an open-face sandwich. 　Nettie's family　came from Sicily and my father, Angelo, who was truly a great chef, came from near Venice. If there were a class war between regions of Italy, it was never in the kitchen. This is the place that always smelled wonderful.

Dan Murano arranged these tomatoes beautifully in the pan. Mine are not always as symmetrical.

Stewed Tomatoes – Pomodori Ripieni

• 8 Fresh tomatoes
• 2 Cloves Garlic
• ½ cup of mixed herbs (parsley, basil and garlic ground together)
• 1/8 lb butter
• Salt and pepper
• 1 T olive oil

Cut tomatoes across in half. Scoop out seeds. Lay first layer in large pan. In place of seeds add the herb mixture and a dot of butter in each pocket. Place another layer of tomatoes on top. Drizzle with olive oil. Put ¼ cup water in bottom of pan, cover and cook on low for 45 minutes. Serves 4-6.

All photos by Dan Murano

Gerry Spence, poet and lawyer: "Is there anyone I wouldn't take as a client? Well, I'd never represent a banker."

Wyoming attorney Gerry Spence (b. 1929) never lost a criminal case in more than fifty years. Though he's no Hoss Cartwright John Ashbery, you can read some of his poems and other work on his blog: http://gerryspence.wordpress.com.

Time's Wardrobe: Visiting the Mimi Ferzt Gallery (by Star Black)

I hadn't planned to go anywhere in New York. It was Sunday, September 27th. Monday was Yom Kippur and the city was quiet. I decided to walk downtown with my new camera and photograph whatever I saw, and since I like to photograph people, I headed for Broadway. I had been in hiding during the summer, swimming every day in a lake near Sag Harbor and reading thick biographies by the lakeside. I decided to replace swimming with walking, and my dog-eared copies of James Atlas' Bellow and Deirdre Bair's Jung with a camera. I got hungry and found a Chinese eatery in SoHo where I photographed a gorgeous couple having coffee at the table behind me, and then was drawn to a nearby art gallery.

The exhibit on view was tiny and consisted of  black and white photos of Russia in the l960s. Much to my surprise, I found myself looking at the work of one of Joseph Brodsky's closest friends, the photographer Lev Poliakov, who had taken the last picture of Joseph in Leningrad on the morning before he went into exile in l972. Joseph had written the introduction to one of Lev's books of photos: Russia, A Portrait. His essay, "In Praise of Grey," contains this beautiful passage: "For grey is the color of time and time's wardrobe here knows very few changes."

Poliakov's photographs were in the old-fashioned 8" by l0" size and depicted, in a 50-millimeter straight-on lens-way, ordinary scenes of people: in an alley in a small town, with farm supplies on roads between farm fields, or gazing out of windows. It was up to the viewer to slowly comprehend what these scenes revealed, a harsh yet dignified survival or maybe, more accurately, a survival without the ability to compare itself to other survivals, a locked-in life, a given. Brodsky's essay continues: "A great mistake for a photographer is to bring his color film here. The net result would be like Turner'd talkies..." I knew Joseph and remember him telling me that his father wanted to join the navy but was prevented from doing so by the state because he was Jewish and that he had worked, upon occasion, as a news photographer. Clearly, judging from the essay, Brodsky knew the craft. Writing on Poliakov, he adds: "A quarter of a century ago this photographer himself was part of the landscape he was depicting, and the material he had at his disposal was manufactured by this country's equally gray extension: Agfa, in the DDR."

 The exhibit included a magnificent 1964 photograph of Anna Akmatova in Kamarovo, printed in 1974 as a silver gelatin print, as well as a wonderful 1981 photograph of Brodsky in Maine.  I wanted to photograph the photographs and post them but Andrew C. Sarewitz, the gallery director whose family is from Russia, said I should ask the photographer first and that Poliakov would probably be stopping by soon. While waiting, Andrew mesmerized me with his knowledge of Russian Noncomformist Art.  He brought out from storage a small drawing by Boris Sveshnikov, made at the Vetlosian camp, near Ukhta, 1,200 kilometers northeast of Moscow in the "Komi Autonomous Region," a place that sounds eerie and very cold. Rather than lines made by a single sweep of the pen, Sveshnikov, who was an art student before he was sent to Stalin’s gulag at 19, broke his lines into tiny feather-marks so that a scene emerged as if it were almost shaking. Andrew gave me a book: Painting for the Grave: The Early Work of Boris Sveshnikov, (image, right) a catalogue from the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Lev Poliakov didn't return to the gallery that afternoon. When I left the Mimi Ferzt gallery I wanted to "see" the streetas Lev Poliakov might had seen what was right before him in 1960s Russia.

Star Black is a poet and visual artist.  She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Ghostwood. Her photographs are in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. Her collages have been exhibited in various galleries in New York City and Long Island. She lives in New York City. 

Finding Your Inner Poetry Hat {Loren Goodman}

SEOUL, Korea -- October 20

(Photo by Maciej Gryzbowski)

If there's one thing I want to do this week, it's find my inner poetry hat. Not that I haven't been searching. For months all I can find is this one:

JA on RAI [by Moira Egan]

This just in!

Tomorrow (Thursday) at 5 p.m. Rome time (11 a.m. East Coast Time), listen to an interview on RAI with John Ashbery on the occasion of Un mondo che non può essere migliore: Poesie scelte 1956-2007 (translated by Damiano Abeni and Moira Egan, with an introduction by Joseph Harrison) having won a Special Prize from the Premio Napoli.

Go to http://www.radio.rai.it/player/player.cfm?Q_CANALE=3

Balloon Boy and the Triumph of the Poetic [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

My Darling Bleaders,

I've decided to continue worrying about balloon boy, even though he never really existed.  I've decided to believe that the balloon is still floating over the heartland and that its fragile compartment really does contain a child.  Are his parents still looking skyward and weeping?  No, their bad behavior in real life banishes them from my revery.  They are in a small cell, watching each other on television.  The child is ours.  The rest of the nation is bending its neck backwards and waiting for word.

Given that my vision is but a vision in a dream, we are free to scan the skies from Brooklyn to Maine, Hawaii to Seattle, Hoboken to Fort Lee, Baldwin to LA.  Look up.  I can't see the balloon, but I can see something falling out of the sky.  Was Icharus just looking for a reality show?  No.  And perhaps not even just looking for attention.  There is also the pleasure of flying to consider.  There is also the pleasant smell of frying sausages, though, which is to say, there are other things to do, other things in the cupboard.  Poetry for example.

I have not wasted my life, but I wasted it.  Sweet as a kiss by hopeless fancy feigned on lips that are for others.  There are other things to do, you know.  "There are," my voice insists.  I can't think of any.  In the subway these days, on signs, Shopenhauer says "Every man takes the limits of his own world as the limits of the world."   So how can I be expected to think of something else to do?  The world doesn't go on forever, but try falling off it.

Boy oh balloon boy, once you're allowing your imaginary baby to hover and swerve in the skies above us, you have already thrown yourself out with the bathwater.  Still, I'm still having trouble thinking of anything else to do.  I have so many ideas, but time sped up so fast that by the time I write the next line my underwood has rusted to an orange ash heap.  Sped up so fast by the time I write the next word, my computer needs upgraded.

So what can I do?  Learn to write slower?  At this age?  Report to a new master?  Master my own faster? I'm up here and I'm fine, but I can't seem to come down.  Will this thing eventually land?  These are only a few of the questions I am not asking.  

Can a trout blow kisses backwards, from its gils?  

Okay, that's enough.  Stay safe my balloon children, hover in the internetted sky.  I will find you.  Be assured that I am scanning clouds for any thing unusual.

love,

Jennifer

ps I'm off to East Kentucky tomorrow to chautauqua.  I'll be doing a poetry reading and giving a talk on the history of Doubt, about which I wrote a big book and do a good deal of talking.

The Amazing Amelia (by Laura Orem)

Seventy-two years ago, Amelia Earhart flew into the wild blue yonder and never returned.  What happened to her has remained a topic of conjecture and much argument over the past seven decades. A new movie, "Amelia," starring Hillary Swank and Richard Gere, is out on Friday, and myriad books, articles, and documentaries have been produced to examine her story.

Most aviation experts agree, however, that what happened to her was simply the result of a miscalculation. Earhart was on the second-to-last leg of her round-the-world flight, from Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island, in her shiny silver Lockheed Electra. Without radar and with primitive (by our standards) radio equipment, the 2500-mile journey over open water between Lae and Howland was extremely risky (her route is traced above left). On top of this, Howland is little more than an uninhabited speck in the ocean - only 6,500 feet long and 2,000 feet at its widest point, and almost invisible from the air (right). Earhart was to land on Howland and get resupplied in fuel and food by the Itasca, a US Coast Guard cutter waiting off the island. But Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, operating by dead-reckoning and a compass, miscalculated the location of tiny Howland Island. After a series of weakening and ever more desperate radio signals picked up by the Itasca (Earhart had replaced the plane's original radio with a state-of-the-art model but was apparently unfamiliar with how to operate it correctly, so she did not hear the Itasca's repeated attempts to contact her), she either ditched or crashed the Electra into the water when it ran out of gas. In this area, the ocean reaches depths of over 17,000 feet (that's about three miles), so it is not surprising that no wreckage was ever found.

Some have called Earhart a publicity-hound or the pawn of her fame-hungry husband, George Putnam, and claim that she does not deserve the accolades she has received, both during her lifetime and posthumously. But a careful look at her life shows that she was no charlatan - she was an important figure in aviation history: brave, accomplished, and trailblazing. She was only the 16th woman in the world to receive a professional pilot's license. She broke the woman's world altitude record in 1922, reaching a height of 14,000 feet. She was the first woman to fly an autogyro (the precursor to a helicopter) and was the first person, male or female, to fly one across the United States. She was the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo -in 1928, one year after Lindbergh. She was the first person to fly the Atlantic twice. And on and on.

Earhart loomed large in my family - because, at the age of 15, my father met her. He was a member of an aviation-enthusiasts club, and in 1932, they heard that Earhart was going to be at Floyd Bennet Air Field on Long Island. So they made the trek from Brooklyn out to meet her. My father said she was gracious and kind, and he treasured the picture she posed for until the day he died. He carefully colorized it, then wrote out her accomplishments on the back, adding, in July 1937, the details of her final flight.

Your Desk is Your Head: The Inner Sanctum {Loren Goodman}

SEOUL, Korea, October 19 --

From time to time these words from Sonny Mishra come to mind.

“The nature of prose is to perish…”

Looking for these words of Paul Valery, I find others:

“Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to”  

and others:  

“At times I think and at times I am.”

Pirooz says something that strikes home: strike out and there’s no home run. Then he says this: “Your desk is your head.” Or “Your room is your mind.” I forget. We spend the majority of baseball practice stealing home.

Which suits you best?

A desk of one’s own. 

A desk with a view.

This desk enwraps me; love requited, passion attained. But I am conscious of a desk more mysterious than this.

When you ask me to speak about women and poetry I sit down on the banks of a river and begin to wonder what words mean. If my desk is my head, what are my feet? This room has a mind of its own.

This Just In . . . The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets

Congratulations to David Yezzi, for The Swallow Anthology of New America Poets.  To celebrate, Yezzi is hosting a reading this Wednesday night, 7:00 PM,  at Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn (718) 789-1534.  Yezzi will be joined by Pricilla Becker, Joshua Mehigan, and Mark Wunderlich.

-- sdh

Dylan's Christmas Album (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

No one ever made a living betting on what Bob Dylan will do next. But a Christmas album? The balladeer of anthemic protest, the poet master of surreal imagery has recorded Christmas In The Heart, a collection of familiar Christmas tunes filtered, as an ad appropriate to the pre-rock feel of the album might put it, through Bob Dylan's unique vocal stylings.

I'm with those who applaud him for his giving all his profits in perpetuity to a variety of hunger charities. (Some places couldn't resist this. The Brisbane Times headlined their review: "Yule be surprised what Dylan has done for a good Claus.)

But I don't know how to review the album. Instead, let me made a few observations. First of all, this whole project is sincere. This is not some sort of in-joke or ironic post-modern creation. Dylan's not wearing a Santa Claus mask. I'm not sure what to make of a contented Bob Dylan. He seems to have found his direction home. I'm glad for him. but it was the little boy lost who fashioned so many rhyming guideposts for our journey through life. It was in moments of contentment that Dylan's songwriting suffered. Dylan's voice, even as its cheerful, still strikes me as more appropriate for melancholy than joy. His voice was built for a blues sound wailing despair or unleashing sarcastic anger. But it is cruel to wish someone sadness so there will be more songs, and doing so would certainly not be in the spirit of the album. I therefore limit this comment to an observation that doesn't cross the border into a hope.

There is no clear way to provide an analysis of the material, pondering its reverberating layers, dissecting its sources and allusions, locating its place in the ongoing Dylan narrative. The sole possible exception is the to consider the album's title. At first glance, Christmas In The Heart seems innocuous, sentimental, and familiar. but, and maybe only because this is Bob Dylan, it is tempting to unpack its meaning. For example, if Christmas is in the heart, it's inside us, a feeling more than a holy day. In that case, this is a spiritual Christmas rather than a religious one. On this reading, Dylan sees in Christmas a time for charity, for joy, for a celebration of life. This is Christmas in the Heartland.

And if that is so, then this is an American album more than a Christian album. For those alert to every twist and turn in the ongoing saga "Is He a Jew or a Christian?" this album provides less data than its subject matter might suggest. The album is about a good-hearted singer content to be a loyal citizen in the Land of the Great American Songbook and singing his heart out with some seasonal standards to help those in need.

Of course, don't get used to this Bob Dylan because who knows where he'll go next? It's okay to anticipate, but I wouldn't place any bets.

The Intimacies Project - Live and Up Close October 20-29

We've been following Bill Hayward's Intimacies Project since the day we started this blog so we are thrilled that he's taking it to the streets, with live performances daily  at The Port Authority of NY/NJ, just about the most central location in NYC.  Time your lunch hour or evening commute so you can catch this exciting event.  The space will be open for viewing daily between noon and 7:00 PM with live performances at 1:00 and 6:00.  Find more information here.

-- sdh