The Best American Poetry

Some Musings on the Olympics (by Laura Orem)

The Olympics are fun, but I don't think they are as exciting as when both Summer and Winter Games were held in the same year. Back then, you really had to wait four years, not two, for the next Olympics, and so a huge amount of anticipation built up. Now, some Games or another seems to come around fairly often, so it's hard to get as hyped up about it.

This is not to cast aspersions on the achievements of the athletes, or the excitement of the competitions themselves. In fact, judging by what's going on in Vancouver, the sports are getting more and more challenging and daring. Shaun White flying through the air - I mean, jeez louise. Amazing.

And is it just me, or are the athletes uniformly rock-star glamorous? Even White, with his shock of flaming red hair and baggy snowboarder wardrobe, gives off the kind of good-hearted bad-boy sex appeal that makes young girls swoon. And I have never seen so many sets of perfect teeth in my life. Without exception, the Vancouver Olympians have teeth you could read by. Really, there isn't a bad looker in the lot.

   

left to right, Bode Miller, Shani Davis, Apolo Ohno

 

left to right, Shaun White, Lindsay Vonn, Katherine Reutter

Today's athletes are highly polished, highly technical, highly trained. Physically, they have to be - their sports are more competitive, more daring, more dangerous. They are all also media packages, looking toward a life after competition of endorsements and television appearances. Many of them struggled and sacrificed much to get where they are, so they can't be faulted for this. Everyone has to make a living, and these folks are the best of the best in their fields. They are entitled to some payback and reward.

But I must admit that I miss the old days of scandal and mess, the juicy unrehearsed mess that seemed to accompany the torch wherever it went. What Olympics is complete without some deeply delicious controversy, a la Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding? In Vancouver, everyone, even the former problem child Bode Miller, is decorously well-behaved and poised. What fun is that?

I also miss the non-top tier athletes. There always used to be competitors who were awful but undaunted - think of the Jamaican bobsledders - who inspired not by talent but by grit, but they are few and far between anymore. The level of competition is so high that they are not welcome; in fact, the rules now state that Olympians must have competed at world-class levels in their sport to be eligible to participate in the games. This ensures exciting competitions and world records, but it also eliminates folks like my all-time favorite Olympian, Eddy "the Eagle" Edwards.

John Keats "made an awkward bow" today

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed – see here it is --
I hold it towards you.

-- John Keats, 31 October 1795 - 23 February 1821

Renovation: When Backward is Forward (by Malachi Black)

Just a few weeks ago, I found in my inbox an e-mail from Apple announcing the upcoming release of its iPad.  Intrigued by Apple’s description of the product as a “magical and revolutionary device” (I defy anyone to resist those adjectives in combination), I clicked on the embedded link and found myself in the midst of a relatively tasteful and incredibly well-produced promotional video.  Engrossing as the video was, I couldn’t keep myself from responding to a prediction made by one of the several executives featured in the video:  “[The iPad]’s going to change the way we do the things we do every day.”

 

In our very forward-looking age, it’s easy to forget that, for the greater part of its written history, poetry has been a backward-looking medium. 

Happy birthday, Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer, author of The World as Will and Representation, was born today in Danzig in 1788.

Here are a few remarks the philosopher made in his illustrious career:

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

"A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants."

"Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see."

"Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly."

"You can't win honor. You can only lose it."

Thomas Mann explained Artie's conception of death: "You believe that when you die the rest of the world will go on existing, while you, sad to say, will be no more. But I say to you, this world, which is your idea, will no longer be; whereas you, precisely that in you which, because it is the will to live, fears death and rejects it, you will remain, you will continue to live."

Ah, idealism! Ah, Germany!

"Learning to Write the MFA Poem" [by Nin Andrews]

I’ve heard people argue that there’s an awful kind of poem
called an MFA poem, and usually these people

who hate MFA poems have never earned an MFA,

so the MFA poets argue vehemently in defense

of their craft and their MFAs, and I, an MFA poet

try to agree and say, I’m on the MFA’s team.

We’re right and they’re wrong. Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah.

But the truth is, well,

there is a certain kind of poem I was taught to write

when I was earning what my husband calls my mail-order degree

from a low-res program in the Northeast.  And I guess

I would call this kind of poem an MFA poem,

though the truth is, I never learned to write one very well

(though this is one of them, or is trying to be),

but I do see them everywhere now, these MFA poems,

which I despise, not because the poems are bad

but because I was taught how to write them

by this asshole professor (he was such a creep)

who was abusive to women, mostly,

fucked with their heads if not their bodies,

you know the type.  Back then

the women took whatever he dished out

because he was famous I guess.

I hated that, and how he would write poems

about being an asshole, which he was and is,

and about everything and anything else

because, he would explain, everything is happening at once,

so everything is happening in his poems, and happening so fast,

that the past, present, and future are all there in the poems

though nothing is ever really happening

because the poems are usually in some static place

like an airplane seat, where he is safely buckled in,

or a dream, or a therapist's office or a hospital room . . .

He was so often in hospital rooms

because he had just had an appendectomy

or a case of gout or a kidney stone

or gangrene or hemorrhoids or who knows what else,

hypochondria maybe, and usually there was a TV on

(this is America, after all, and everything

is always happening on TV, he said),

and so the I of the poem is always watching

scenes of violence and destruction from far away

while obsessing about himself

and thinking of what the I really wants

which is usually pretty predictable:

a shower, a cup of Starbucks,

a few martinis, a really good fuck.

Yes, he smirked, a good fuck is always nice,

and it’s nice to fuck or use the word, fuck,

in a poem as often as possible

Salutations (by Malachi Black)

I’d like to begin by extending my sincere thanks both to Stacey and to David for inviting me to serve as a BAP guest blogger.  I hardly need to remark on the rarity of forums of this sort, and I’m truly delighted to have the opportunity to engage with the wide and devoted community of readers and writers that this site represents. 

 

For those of you who happen to know me, it won’t come as a great surprise to learn that this is my first attempt at blogging, and I beg your pardon in advance for any missteps as I endeavor to get my hands on the medium.  I intend to use my time here simply to consider a few things that I've been batting around lately, and, while my musings are unlikely to coalesce into any sustained arguments, I’m hopeful that they will at least add up to a worthwhile week.

 

In collecting my thoughts for this series, I rather inevitably found myself contemplating the status and condition of American poetry today.  Is the patient healthy?  As I regarded its charts and vital signs, puzzling over possible diagnoses, I came upon this aptly-titled item in Richard Kenney’s One-Strand River:

 

POETRY

 

Nobody at any rate reads it much.  Your

lay

citizenry have other forms of fun.

 

Still, who would wish to live in a culture

of which future anthropologists would say

Oddly, they had none?

 

One of a Thousand Reasons by Jerry Williams

My mother and I were poised on the fake leather sofa in our living room watching The Exorcist on television when my father sneaked up behind us and yelled "WAAHHHHHH!" as loud as he could without pulling a neck muscle.  I nearly jumped out of my dermis, and I imagine my mother did, too, because she promptly grabbed a thick, vanilla-scented candle off the coffee table and chucked it at him, missing wide to the left.  The candle landed dully in the corner, and she emerged from her afghan and griped across the blue shag carpet to retrieve it.  "Asshole," she hissed, not quite under her breath.  My father orangutan-laughed and moseyed off to the bathroom with the sports section and a pack of Winstons.  Startling people when they were lost in thought or folding laundry or reading an issue of Mad Magazine remained one of his few hobbies.  No daydreaming or concentrating in the Williams household.

 I don't remember much about The Exorcist because I could not sit through the entire movie—far too scary for a ten year old with the jitters—and I've never seen it since.  Poor Linda Blair's face had that gnawed-on-by-a-horde-of-rats veneer, and she sounded like a gargoyled Louis Armstrong.  When you're a kid and your parents, teachers, and every other hapless adult have trained you to believe that god and the devil exist, then the raw gutterality of Linda Blair's voice becomes the most frightening expression imaginable—more frightening than the crack of a belt against flesh.

 Though we had school the next morning, my older sisters had gone out for the evening: Susan with the gear-heads and Quaalude-munchers and Patty with the cheerleaders and jocks.  I holed up in their bedroom until the movie ended, listening to Robin Trower's "Bridge of Sighs" on the record player and trying on their adjustable mood rings.  By the time I resurfaced, my father had been exiled to the ragged gold beanbag in the family room and, still shaken, I convinced my mother to let me sleep in their king-size bed with her.

 After donning my customary slumbering attire, sweatpants and a Miami Dolphins jersey, I lay under the covers while she loaded her blond hair with curlers.  She was a heavily freckled woman, not very tall, not yet overweight, and when she smiled the split between her front teeth unveiled an earthy pragmatism.  She did whatever she had to do to survive.  If her husband grew angry with her for breaking one of his million niggling rules and confiscated her checkbook and car keys, she waited patiently at home until he needed her to make a purchase or run an errand.  Quote life unquote always snapped back into place.

Eliot's "Ass-Wednesday" (by Mitch Sisskind)

As we move into Lent, Eliot's "Ass-Wednesday" is a work to which we naturally return. Is it surprising to discover the poet's inscription to Scott Fitzgerald "with the author's homage"? At first thought the two writers hardly seem like a match -- but there are actually several points of affinity. Both men were Midwesterners who went East to Harvard (Eliot) and Princeton (Fitzgerald.) Both men had "difficult" marriages to Vivienne (Eliot) and Zelda (Fitzgerald.) Both men liked to drink, though Tom seems to have been able to handle it better.

Those of us who admire both writers no doubt have favorite poems/stories/novels, and even favorite lines. I recall reading Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" as a high school student and being moved (almost) to tears. That story, said to be an early version of The Great Gatsby, still seems to me one of Fitzgerald's best. And rarely does a week go by in which I don't recite to myself my favorite line from "The Waste Land" (actually, from the notes): "I have associated it quite arbitrarily with the Fisher King himself." But my favorite Eliot is "Four Quartets."

Good day!

Sports Desk: Letter to Tiger [Gabrielle Calvocoressi]

Dear Tiger,

 Good morning from Los Angeles. All week long I’ve been watching the Olympics and thinking what to write about for my Sports Desk column. Truth be told I’m a little late. I’m falling into all of the old clichés about poet sports columnists: by the time we’re done revising it’s next season. But it’s hard. There’s so much amazing stuff to write about. 

  Like Torah Bright. First of all, I had never watched women’s snowboard half-pipe before. Let me tell you, if I had one ounce of physical ability that would totally be my event. The speed, the tricks, the fact that you seem to get to wear your iPod when you compete. Man. Totally. And I just love the fact that the commentators are young enough that they have no problem saying someone like Torah is better than a vast majority of the men. You don’t really hear that talk among the older sportscasters. But it’s true. Anybody who watches sports can tell. She’s just so good. You know, she had a ton of concussions in the past year and it didn’t always seem like she would be able to compete. But there she was, just ripping it up. And the crowd was going crazy for her. That’s something else I love about snow boarding at the Olympics. Everyone just seems to be having so much fun. Even when they lose, the boarders tend to be smiling. I mean, you can tell it kills them and nobody could ever think that they don’t care.  At the same time it seems to me like they know they’re also part of a culture born from skate boarding and surfing and the punk scene in Southern California. So there’s this sense of being glad to be on such a big stage and also knowing it isn’t necessarily where they’re from. I love that. How the Olympics has room for all kinds of different values and world views.  Like Torah. She’s a Mormon. She doesn’t make a big deal of it but she doesn’t hide it either. She also says there’s a ghost in her house. She can also fly or at least that’s how it looks.

The other person I love is Bode Miller. I know. I know. Why do I have to love all the famous American athletes? Well, I did get really excited by Simon Amman, the Swiss ski jumper who just won his fourth Olympic gold (a record in the sport).  I love the way it looks when those guys come off the jump and just shoot through the air. Here he is in 2002:

Also, he looks like a superhero. Which is very cool. I tried to rock a spandex suit like that once and I was told in no uncertain terms never to do that again. Which is why I became a poet. Because I can wear my spandex outfit and helmet at home and nobody will ever know.

Anyway. Bode. I just love him. His family actually runs the tennis camp that my cousins all went to.  My great-aunt Gertrude always talks about him with a lot of love. Like the media, she calls him a “bad boy.” The difference is the pride in her voice.   Gertrude is in her 80’s and has been working in the prison system, teaching men to read and get their GED, since she moved to New Hampshire 40+ years ago.  When she and I drove to see the assisted living facility she was moving into we passed a prison and she said, “Only ten minutes from the house, dear.” Pretty much my hero. So Bode has been in my ear for most of his career. He’s amazing. You probably know him. The press is really hard on him because during the 2006 Olympics he made a number of statements about loving to party and being wasted and generally being young and not particularly disciplined in his personal life. He talked about skiing and driving while drunk.  He looked foolish. And then he lost each race.  Which taught him something, it seems. Now he’s back and he’s already won two medals. He has two more events.  He’s older and more in control of himself. It’s a good lesson. How you can be so talented and still make a mess of things and then you can come back and rock it. But the press won’t let it go. How he disappointed all of us.

Yeah. All week I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about in my column. I don’t really know if there’s a ton of room for a poet to be writing about sports but I just get so much out of it. When I taught at Stanford (it was about 4 years after you left to turn pro) I had a number of students who were on track to become Olympians or professional athletes. I remember I was Ta’ing a Renaissance Lit class and this student Greg came in from football practice.  We were getting ready to talk about Spencer and he stood there in the doorway. I asked what was up and he said “one sec” and put his shoulder against the doorframe and pushed as hard and fast as he could. He got super pale, breathed deep and said, “Okay, let’s talk about The Faerie Queene.” Last time I checked, he played for the 49ers. He got an A in my class and wrote a tremendous final essay. I also had a student named Isaac who was in my workshop. He’d taken a year off to go on mission like most young Mormon men do and now he was back. He needed to decide if he was going to try and qualify for the Olympic Cross Country team or go to law school. In the end he decided on law school. Those athletes in my classes taught me a ton about focus and hope and being super rigorous. I try and do that in my poems. Be the best I can be, then push farther (risk failure) and have a good time while doing it.

I’ve been thinking about you. You were on the front page of the New York Times yesterday. Well, the picture was actually a bar full of people watching you apologize on television. Hm. I don’t even like golf. But I kept thinking about 2008 when you played the US Open with a broken leg. And how the crowd just went crazy every time you came through. You were in so much pain and you kept going. It’s like ski jumping: I don’t know much about the sport but I know when I’m seeing something so extraordinary there’s a lesson in it for me and my artistic life. Most of the golfers on the tour want you to come back because, as one of them said, when you are good at something you want to play against the best. I think that’s true. I wonder what’s going to happen with you.

From Los Angeles.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of Apocalyptic Swing (Persea Books. 2009). She lives in Los Angeles.

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Tony Towle

This poem by Tony Towle first appeared in Hanging Loose 82 (Fall, 2002) and also appears in his latest collection, Winter Journey.

THE DINNER PARTY

Ah, life is a reassuring dream that is vivid but comfortably mundane,
said the shmuck aloud to himself as he sat down next to the shlemiel
and indulged in an expansive gesture of certitude that sent the latter’s soup
into the lap of the adjacent shlimazel.  The shmendrick apologized,
to no one in particular, and the shmegeggy accepted; while the shlep
shuffled off to the kitchen to get another bowl, and at the front door the shnorrer
pushed past the shlumps to talk his way in.  It was the putz, of course,
that had arranged the seating, a decorous mélange of shmoes
crowded in next to the radiator, sweating and uncomfortable
but grateful to have been invited.  I have no idea where I’m supposed to sit,
so I leave and go sit in the park, where I hear an avian voice: “Hey,
you don’t recognize me?  I’m the pigeon that craps on your windowsill.
Why are you down here on a cold bench when you could be upstairs
eating a free meal?  What are you, some kind of shnook?”

Lenny Bruce said that everybody who lives in New York is Jewish and everybody who lives outside of New York is not Jewish.

In support of that thesis, I offer you Tony Towle, a sandy-haired shagetz who long-ago fled his native Queens and established himself as one of those residents of lower Manhattan to whom anywhere north of 14^th Street is the Adirondacks.   Tony has the true New Yorker’s command of the essential Yiddish vocabulary combined with a poet’s ear and sensitivity to nuance.  The fact that he lives with a nice Jewish girl probably doesn’t hurt either.

When Tony reads this poem aloud, he keeps it flat and reportorial, a bit the way a Swedish sociologist might present it, say.  I had the pleasure of reading it at the recent 70th birthday celebration for Tony at The Poetry Project.  I didn’t go into full shtetl mode, but I could feel the spirit of my late Uncle Louis trying to assert itself.

My favorite reading of the poem took place a couple of years ago.  CLMP had invited Hanging Loose to present some recently published poems in a reading at the main New York Public Library.  We sent Marie Carter, our associate editor and one-time editor of the University of Edinburgh’s literary magazine.  One of the poems Marie chose was The Dinner Party and her Scottish accent revealed whole new layers of universality in the poem.  The bonny lass did need a little coaching on the pronunciation of “shlamazel.”

-- Robert Hershon

Malachi Black, Guest Blogger February 21 - 27

 This week we welcome Malachi Black as our guest blogger.  Malachi is literary editor of The New York Quarterly and a James A. Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers.  His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Southwest Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI Online, Pleiades, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.  His poem “Traveling by Train” was selected by Mark Strand for inclusion in the Best New Poets 2008.  In 2009, Black was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship.  Read Malachi Black's PoemsOutLoud interview here.

Welcome, Malachi.

Read Jerry William's guest posts from last week here, here, and here.

In other news . . .

Congratulations to poets (and bloggers) Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Tom Healy, and Amy Gerstler on being named finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.  Read all about it here.
 
We're making changes here - it's all good!  Bear with us  . . .
-- sdh

Why Auden is an Aquarius (by Jill Baron)

Wystan Hugh Auden, born February 21, 1905

When I read Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times (the Phi Beta Kappa Poem he read at Harvard in 1946) for the first time, my astrological radar detected an Aquarius. Who but the Water Bearer -- also known (according to astrologer Steven Forrest’s list of Aquarian archetypes) as the Genius, the Truth Sayer, the Scientist, the Exile, the Revolutionary -- would write these lines: “Thou shalt not be on friendly terms / With guys in advertising firms, / Nor speak with such / As read the Bible for its prose, / Nor, above all, make love to those / Who wash too much. // Thou shalt not live within thy means / Nor on plain water and raw greens. / If thou must choose / Between the chances, choose the odd: / Read The New Yorker, trust in God; / And take short views.”

Only an Aquarius would have the chutzpah, or, in Auden’s case, the gall, to reveal opinions so conclusive they sound like truth. For an Aquarius is above all a person of strong individuality. An Aquarius speaks his mind without fear of recrimination. Despite pressure to conform, socialize, and be accepted, an Aquarius will choose his own path, remaining loyal to his personal truths. An Aquarius is a maverick. Auden is a maverick. Therefore, Auden is an Aquarius.

You may be thinking: but all poets are mavericks. Well, wasn’t Auden especially so? Doesn’t Auden represent the Truth-Sayer, the Exile, and the Revolutionary? Liberty and freedom of choice are paramount to him. As he wrote in his essay “The American Scene": "liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one.” Auden’s biographer Edward Mendelson wrote, “[Auden] hoped that art could serve persuasion as well as freedom by guiding its readers into making the right free choice instead of the wrong one.” And Marianne Moore has commented, “the thought of choice as compulsory is central to everything [Auden] writes.” So yes, fellow poets and devotees of Auden – what we have here is an Aquarius through and through.

"Casting Call" [by Patricia Carlin]

                after Jon Woodward

There were glass blowers, and backbiters,
and glass-growers; and there were back-
boners; and waste-makers; and the usual
woman in the back room, whose
old bones tolled, whose soul
had dimly and back been homing.
Testers; and twisters; and every third day
skull-warpers
waiting for a call back.

-- Patricia Carlin

The Imaginary Burning Car by Jerry Williams

Since we are still huddled together in the toxic shadow of Valentine's Day, I suppose it's appropriate to write about breaking up.  Surely, thousands of VD survivors waited until after the holiday to move all their stuff out of apartments and disappear in U-Hauls; get caught cheating on purpose; send goodbye e-mails (or texts); or, hell, just break up face to face like people did before Nikola Tesla kindled the world's ruin with electricity.  Thus?  In honor of the colors red and gray, let me begin at the end of the middle.

Katarina stood six feet tall in heels, and she always wore heels (flats made her calves hurt).  She had dark brown hair and eyes.  Her broad features were finely sculpted; her skin was the color of cinnamon.  She looked like a statue standing outside the doorway to Desire.  I know that sounds mawkish, but she was Russian.  When we started seeing each other she had just turned thirty-six—exactly twice my age.  The relationship lasted about nine months and remained rocky, twitchy, and sticky pretty much the whole time given that she was married, had two kids, and worked as my direct supervisor at Bank One, where I answered credit card application phone calls for ten hours every Saturday.  Mid-1980s.  Dayton, Ohio.  Again.

At the time, I was ready for anything, mainly because I was lonely.  Most people don't want to know anything about loneliness.  Real discourse on the subject is more taboo than alluding to the specter of nuclear war: Ignore it, and it might go away.  Yet loneliness makes most of our decisions for us.  Bodies collide because of it.  Cable channels propagate because of it.  Pharmaceuticals slide down esophagi when we can't endure another day of it.  Alcohol.  X-Box oblivion.  Gambling.  A rusty knife hacks away at us from the inside, and we surrender to our most meager ambitions.  Anything to deaden the pain.  I'm probably speaking for myself here—because I want to feel better.  And that sole aspiration, in all its casts and configurations, has been, despite what I say or do, the story of my life.

Katarina was up front about everything: I should avoid calling her at home during the evening; no one must know, not even my closest friends; we would see each other on Thursdays at a pre-designated location; my performance at work must not suffer; she didn't want to catch any diseases, so I wouldn't be permitted to have a girlfriend.  It crossed my mind that she'd had affairs before, but I didn't care.  Or at least I thought I didn't care.  I marveled at my becoming as dark and disastrous as all the poets I admired.  And maybe Katarina felt shipwrecked in adulthood or her husband neglected her.  Maybe she wanted to simulate a courtship and recreate the onset of love, something she feared she might never again experience.  Whatever the reason, it was apparent that we'd risen (or sunk) to the same level of incautious need.

But who knows where or when?

These two gentlemen are
(1) drinking a cocktail concocted by Matthew Yeager
(2) toasting the Civitella Ranieri in Umbria
(3) plotting a trade that will clear salary room so the Knicks can pursue free agent LeBron James next summer
(4) congratulating themselves on buying shares of American Express last April when it was 15. (It is now nearly 40).
(5) considering the best way to get past the dark harbor and resume the continuous life.
The best (wisest, wittiest, most neatly correct) answer will win.
-- T. McGrady
 

Good-bye, Kathryn Grayson, 1922-2010

Kathryn Grayson died today at the age 88. Miss Grayson was one of the last survivors of Hollywood's Golden Age, perhaps best remembered for her performance as Magnolia Hawks in Show Boat (1951), in which she sang the sentimental duet, "Make Believe," with Howard Keel.  Pertly pretty, she was a classically trained coloratura soprano who was equally comfortable with popular music, holding her own against Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh (1945); Mario Lanza in That Midnight Kiss (1949); and Howard Keel again in Kiss Me, Kate (1953). Her first movie appearance was in 1941's Andy Hardy's Private Secretary; her last acting role was a recurring part in the 1980s series, Murder, She Wrote.

This clip is from the 1947 movie, It Happened in Brooklyn. Miss Grayson, young and beautiful, accompanied by the young and handsome Frank Sinatra, sings "Time After Time" to the equally young and handsome Peter Lawford.

This Just In . . . National Grammar Day Writing Contest

March 4 is National Grammar Day and Grammar Girl is going to celebrate with a parts-of-speech creative writing contest. Enter a poem, essay, or short story about your favorite (or least favorite) part of speech.  The maximum word count is 1500, though Grammar Girl prefers much shorter entries. Send your entry here.
The deadline for submission is midnight on February 26. Winners will be notified by e-mail and winning entries will be published in the Grammar Girl newsletter, on the Grammar Girl website, in the Grammar Girl podcast, or in the Grammar Girl iPhone app.

-- sdh

A Pitch of Sonic Ecstasy: Stuart Krimko's "The Sweetness of Herbert" [Review by Adam Fitzgerald]

I first encountered Stuart Krimko’s work at the 11th Street Bar Reading Series, one of the most distinguished in New York City. That night, Krimko, 32, read with Jeff Clark and John Ashbery. Formidable company. Upon hearing his longer poem If It’s May It Won’t Be May I knew I was in the presence of brilliantly original work. I purchased The Sweetness of Herbert (Sand Paper Press) at the back of the bar. Good title, I thought, then thumbed through the handsome, flamingo-pink volume.

Would the collection, Krimko’s second, reward my high expectations? Yes, it would. Overwhelmingly. Clocking in with 35 poems throughout seventy plus pages, “The Sweetness of Herbert” offers the surprise of a poet early in his career who has mastered the modulation of form, phrasing, tone, and most surprisingly, rhyme. Considering the Harry Mathews blurb on the back, one might expect Krimko to be like other New York School descendants. Indeed, many talented poets hail from this aesthetic configuration in Contemporary Poetry Land. What distinguishes Krimko’s poems are their quirky yet formal composure, matched with an overt musicality that’s absent from too many of Ashbery, Koch, and O’Hara’s heirs.

In The Competition, the rhymes slide together like a sharp skate in memorable parallel: “None of it means / a thing. // Give me that ring. / None of it looks like life. / I need a wife.” The entire book relishes in play of this caliber: dexterous and understated (think Seidel minus his Francis Bacon disposition). In one of the strongest pieces collected, A Joyous Hammer of Praise, the rhymes are raised to a pitch of sonic ecstasy that’s rare in “experimental” poetry today. Recalling perhaps the Laforguian mode of young Eliot, Krimko enlists his rhymes to set a scene, dismantle it; establish irony, explode it; and finally, to move us (both down the page as well as into the speaker’s psyche). Rambling coyly through sexual escapades and brand name-touting astronauts, the poem concludes with the speaker suddenly imagining a daughter:

    Before I bummed a cigarette.
    Before I
    read my Braille newspaper.

    Before I went out into the world
    and bought as many knickknacks as I could afford.
    Before I offered a prayer 
            to a Lord.

    I would love my daughter
             more than my water, she would always come first,
                      she would be the answer to my thirst.

Stuart Krimko’s “The Sweetness of Herbert” proves he is a poet to watch, and watch closely. His poetry, “ineffably light, intensely serious," is a total delight. Interested readers can find more of Stuart Krimko’s work online here.   Watch a video of Krimko reading here.

Adam Fitzgerald is a poetry MFA student at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. His work has appeared in Rain Taxi. He edits Maggy poetry magazine and contributes regularly to TheThe Poetry Blog. He lives in the East Village.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge & Anne Waldman @ KGB

Readers, wordsmiths, lovers, civilians, mark your calendars! Next Monday is not to be missed.
 
KGB Monday Night poetry is back with the full green force that drives the flower, the water through the rocks.
 
Monday, February 22, brings two poets from the crossroads of Language poetry, the New York School, Beat vision, 1970s activism, the American experimental, inquiries into consciousness and the birth of cool. Zen searching, collage, abstract art, and disembodied poetics may also apply.
 
Both poets are visiting from Out West—it will be a rare chance to see them read together.
 
Anne Waldman is the co-founder, with Allen Ginsberg, of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. She directed the St. Mark’s Poetry project from 1966-1978. She is author of more than 40 books of poetry, most recently Manatee/Humanity.
 
Read poems at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/523
 
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the author of 12 books of poetry, most recently I Love Artists, New and Selected Poems from the University of California Press, and Concordance, a collaboration with artist Kiki Smith from Kelsey Street Press. Fog, another collaboration with Smith was produced as an artist's book in 2009 at the Brodsky Center.  She lives in New York City and northern New Mexico.
 
Read poems at http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/989.
 
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KGB Bar
85 E. 4th St.
(Between Bowery & 2nd Ave.)
New York, NY 10003
7:30pm
 Admission is FREE.

View the complete Spring 2010 KGB Poetry lineup here.

  

"A Serious Man" etc. (by Mitch Sisskind)

Last weekend I watched "A Serious Man," the Coen brothers' film about a Jewish family in the 1960s. I loved that film! It really captured the humorous, puzzling, teasing element of the Zohar. It seemed to genuinely connect with the many questions in Jewish mysticism, as well as the absence of answers. How inspiring! As a result, I was energized to create my ALL TIME most ambitious attempt to share authentic Kabbalistic teachings through the medium of old comic books --->>>