The Best American Poetry

Hoop Dreams: Talk to Her Edition [Gabrielle Calvocoressi]

I’ve said it before but I feel like the most appropriate author photo for a writer with a significant other is a picture of said writer doing something like sitting with their head in their hands or staring at the ceiling or lying in the fetal position under the dining room table weeping and behind them their partner staring at them with a look that says, “Really? Isn’t this what we did yesterday?”

Take my partner, Penelope Cruz.* Today in Los Angeles, in between interviews and a photo shoot and doing her doctoral work, she sat down next to me on the couch and said, “If you do not figure out what to write for Sports Desk I don’t want to think what’s going to happen to you.” I might have put a sort of curse on myself earlier in the day and said something like, “If I don’t finish this post today then…” It’s not worth getting into the exact nature of the curse. It does involve my abilities to sit down and also process Thai food. 

 

“Just say it,” she said. In addition to being a very fine actress, Penelope knows that I have a secret.  For the last two weeks she has been urging me to write about it and I’ve done things like sit on the couch and stare at the ceiling and say, “You don’t even like sports. You can’t understand.” I don’t want to brag but some people have told me my theatrical abilities are “really something.” The thing is, she’s right. All these weeks I’ve been holding back. I’ve been getting requests for the next Sports Desk column and everyone seems to want the same thing. Penelope gets off of skype with Pedro and says, “For goodness sakes just tell them.” And then she kisses me. A lot.

Fine.

I do not give a damn about March Madness.

Go ahead. Tell me how great it is. That it’s the only sport you like. That we get to see basketball the way an old white guy from Canada intended it. It’s about the love of the game. It’s about the little guy. It’s about the school you teach for and so who cares that you don’t like sports because OH MY GOD, BAYLOR!!!!!

I told Penelope this was going to be the post where I lost all my readers. It’s not that I don’t like college basketball. I actually love it. I particularly love women’s basketball. I’m from Connecticut.  I grew up during the era of Rebecca Lobo and the first truly great UConn women’s team. Every kid in Connecticut wore a UConn jersey at one point or another. I love the fact that women’s games sell out even more than the men’s and I love the fact that last year, coming home from Columbia, MO I sat on the shuttle to St. Louis with a family member of UConn’s star player, Maya Moore and we talked all about how amazing that program is and all the opportunities she has and what a thing it is to watch a young woman do what she does best in the world, and better than most. I love how excited the crowds get and that it’s not like a Lakers game or Knicks game where very few hard working people can afford a seat and kids from poor backgrounds who love the sport sure can’t see a game live.  I love the spirit of it. I like the idea of it. I love all those people driving across the country and screaming in bars and kids running down the court and cutting the net down when they win. I love that Vermont gets to play in a televised game and get their hats handed to them by Syracuse but who cares because oh my gosh they got there. March Madness!!!!

It’s getting a little warm in here. Maybe I do love March Madness.

Nope. Look, here’s what I don’t love.

I don’t love watching women athletes reach the height of their career at the age of 20. I know, WNBA, Olympics, Europe. Whatever. It’s not the same. The women who play basketball on teams like UConn and Tennessee are having their professional careers right now. And they aren’t getting compensated for it. The WNBA is not a success. The women who play in the Sweet 16 during March Madness will have a bigger and more consistent television audience than they ever will if they play professionally.

The team salary cap within the WNBA for the year 2013 (yes, three years from now) is $913,000.  Let’s just say that figure again. $913,000.

Here are a few other figures from the Altius Directory:

 WNBA Bonuses

    * WNBA Champion - $10,500 per player

    * Championship Runner-up - $5,250 per player

    * Eliminated in semifinals - $2,625 per player

    * Eliminated in quarterfinals - $1,050 per player

    * Most Valuable Player Award - $15,000

    * All-WNBA First Team Award - $10,000 per player

    * All-WNBA Second Team Award - $5,000 per player

    * Defensive Player Award - $5,000

    * Sportsmanship Award - $5,000

    * Rookie of the Year Award - $5,000

    * Most Improved Player Award - $5,000

 WNBA Salary Fast Facts:

    * Rookie minimum salary: $34,500

    * Average rookie salary: $36,500, plus daily allowance

    * Veteran (over 3 years with the WNBA) minimum: $50,000,

    * Maximum salary: $95,000

· Team salary cap: $750,000, which teams may exceed by 4%

There are 34 games in a season. 43 if you make it all the way.  It’s hard on your body and even if you play pro your career is short. You’re going to have surgeries and lots of medical bills and, oh yes, many college stars are still going to have student loans to pay off. Imagine if you were better at what you did than most people in the world and that many of the guys you went to school with were making either insane money professionally or pretty good money in Europe. It’s a hard pill to swallow and when I see all those women in one place, playing so beautifully, and I know that many of them came from situations as economically desperate as their male counterparts, it takes some of the joy out of it for me. And when I read how much money schools make on the backs of these women...  I still cheer for them and I am so happy they get their moment on television but I also think it’s sad.

And it’s not just the women.  It’s great watching the guys play but I don’t feel the argument about it being pure basketball. I think the joy is pure and I think it wouldn’t be hard to make the men’s side of things feel equal for everyone in terms of what the college’s and the NCAA get out of it and what the players get. Because it’s true that part of the joy (and there is tremendous joy) of watching March Madness is seeing kids who are never going to be pro play on a national stage and just kill it. The Sports Illustrated I got last week shows Vermont’s, Maurice Joseph looking thunderstruck as Syracuse’s Scoop Jardine goes in for the layup.  At the same time, a lot of money gets made off of March Madness. CBS made over $600 million in television advertising last year.  The deal the NCAA signed with CBS is worth $6 billion dollars over 11 years.  The NCAA can use the image of any player for any purpose and they make a lot of money doing it. And the players don’t see a penny except for tuition scholarships. It may be “pure” to say that an education is all a college player should hope for but this is big business for a lot of people. And many college players are not going to go pro and many have been allowed to slide by academically, leaving them unprepared for post-collegiate, post-basketball life. There’s a case weaving its way through the courts that would require that college athletes be compensated for the use their image and their name.  Right now, you can buy a copy of March Madness: The Greatest Moments Of The NCAA Tournament (DVD) for $19.95. The narrator is a CBS commentator. No students will see royalties from that.

 “See,” I just told Penelope. “I’m a total downer.” She says she’s just glad I got the post finished. “You just want to write about baseball.” True. I’ve been listening to spring training on the radio and picking out which Orioles shirt to buy this year. I do want to talk about baseball. But sometimes you just have to get the tough stuff off your chest before you can say anything else.

* My partner’s name is actually Angeline. She won’t let me use her last name. She’s the one standing there in the photo of me lying beneath my desk with my head in the trash basket.

However Measured [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 Darlink Bleaders,

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?  Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove.
 If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer, an ever-fixèd mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken.
Why?

Should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
within his bending sickle's compass come,
love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
but bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.  Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured and far away. 

Let me not, to the marriage of true minds. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises. Let me not admit impediments.  Love is a product that follows from devotion.  Love is not love -- you’ve got the wrong word there -- if what you call love alters when it alteration finds.


If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer, an ever-fixèd mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.  By definition it is the outcome of devotion.  That’s why it is an ever-fixed mark.

 Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
within his bending sickle's compass come;
love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
but bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises.

Bear it out even to the edge of doom.  Let us step to the music which we hear, however measured and far away.  If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.  

But he did writ and so did I and they (bard and Walden's warden) did love and so do I.

Love,

Jennifer

ps more soon xoxjmh

From the KGB Files . . .

Meghan O'Rourke and 

Ada Limón read from forthcoming books at KGB on Monday.  Here are some highlights:

Join us on Monday, April 5th to hear Michael Gizzi and Keith Waldrop!

So That's How it Should Sound!

Hearing trained actors read poetry is a great pleasure.  Actors approach the poems as scripts, and understand how to deliver the lines so that even if they don't make logical sense, they sound beautiful.  Listening to an actor read a beloved poem can be like encountering it for the first time.  Hearing an unfamiliar poem read beautifully can make one want to find the poem on the page. For the CD Poetic License, Glen Roven enlisted 100 performers to read 100 poems. You'll find some glorious old chestnuts on the disc, and there are surprises, too. See if you can match the actor with his or her poem:

1.  Michael Cerveris      1.   New Yorkers, by Edward Field
2.  Kathleen Turner       2.   Love looks not with the eyes by Shakespeare
3.  JoBeth Williams      3.  Correspondence, by Ariel Dorfman
4.  Christine Baranski   4.  Tommy by Rudyard Kipling
5.  Michael York           5.  When I have fears that I may cease to be by Keats
6.  Paige Davis             6.  The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje

You can hear the correct pairings and more on Poetic License.  Buy it here. Now.

-- sdh

Other Flowers by James Schuyler (Review by Adam Fitzgerald)

Few poets of the last half of the 20th century were so unembarrassedly Keatsian as the flower-doting, texture-interrogating, word-tasting James Schuyler. Compared with Barbara Guest, Schuyler’s flora and fauna feel less hypothetical and cerebral. And while his work shared in the cubist aftermath of the painters he wrote about and loved (Schuyler’s best poems often splice and collage together sensuous impressions in a diaristic guise of simply recording them), his delicate splashes of color tended to stain the body more than the mind’s eye. In his smaller lyrics, the effect was tender and subdued: love, like other natural appetites and cycles, is deeply felt yet fleeting. In the longer, more ambitious poems, “The Morning of the Poem” for example, impressions, phrases, sayings, memories are aggregated and piled up into a new whole, remaking the poet’s inner life into a gorgeous miscellany of vital reflexes.

Thanks now to the stewardship of James Meetze and Simon Pettet, we encounter two hundred pages of uncollected poems in Other Flowers (March 2010, FSG) gathered from the poet’s papers at San Diego University. The poems remind us what Schuyler excelled at—lush, moving physical descriptions of nature and the human body in short-lined stichic shapes that trail down the page like a sprawling vine, at times in detached, all-over-the-page phrases like falling, wind-blown foliage. We also recognize Schuyler’s intimate voice, unique as any poetry I've read. It may have plenty of analogues—William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Francis, Elizabeth Bishop, even sometimes Cavafy—but it exists nowhere else.

“Other Flowers” may not go very far in advancing James Schuyler’s reputation as an indispensable poet, except that the necessary occasion of such a book reminds us how indispensable he already is, how eager we are to read him again. While plenty of the fugitive poems collected together in “Other Flowers” could have been worked into what books we already know without regret, few strike me as essential reading. Among the best are “Letter Poem to Kenneth Koch,” “A Blue Shadow Painting,” “Atlantic Snore,” “Catalogue” and “Poem (Between Glacier and Glacier).” Nearly all the poems here demonstrate how easy it was for his work to sound pretty, even merely pretty. Most interestingly, they also show him incorporating the voices of the past poets he modeled himself after, Lawrence and Leopardi, some whom he knew personally, such as John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Schuyler’s verbal genius, half collagist, half vegetable spirit, wasn’t afraid to traffic in tones precious, overly sentimental and lightweight—yet even then he often can charm you. Flanked with the new edition of his selected poems (2007), the selected letters (“Just the Thing," 2005), his diaries and art criticism, as well as a handsome little book of his correspondence with O’Hara, “Other Flowers” contributes to our overall esteem and measure of his achievements, their pleasures and limits. A pleasure that will not fade.

 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.

More Bears (by Laura Orem)

I'm still on the bear kick. I'm even going to teach a class in the fall called "The Literary Bear."  So I share this lovely poem with you today, the others "who make fires and cry tears."

"The Bear's Gift"

by Ursula K. LeGuin

Nobody knows the name of the bear,
not even the bear. Only the ones
who make fires and cry tears know the name
of the bear, that the bear gave to them.
Quail and plumed grass, infant and puma,
all their lives they are wholly alive
and they do not have to say a word.
But those who know the name of the bear
have to go out alone and apart
across hollow places and bridges,
crossing dangerous places;
and they speak. They must speak. They must say
all the words, all the names, having learned
the first name, the bear's name. Inside it
is language. Inside it is music.
We dance to the sound of the bear's name
and it is the hand we take hands with.
We see with the dark eye of that name
what no one else sees: what will happen.
So we fear darkness. So we light fires.
So we cry tears, our rain, the salt rain.
All the deaths, our own and the others,
are not theirs, but our own, the bear's gift,
the dark name that the bear gave away.

"Poetry of the Law" [by Kathleen Heil]

Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present, the first serious anthology of law-related poetry in the United States, has just been published by The University of Iowa Press.  Edited by Michael Stanford, a former literature professor and active public defender, and David Kader, a professor of law at Arizona State University, the collection surveys six centuries of poetry related to the law. Kathleen Heil recently exchanged emails with the editors about the book.

In preparing this collection did you find yourselves drawn to a particular period or style of poem as being particularly suited to illuminating aspects of the law?

David:  No.  I believe we were open to every period, over six centuries, and to any style of poem.  Our focus was on the content and the quality of the poem, whenever it was written and in whatever manner.

Mike:  I agree with David, but would point to the Renaissance as a period in which poets were especially knowledgeable about, and interested in, the law. Shakespeare, who had many connections with London’s law schools the Inns of Court; Donne, who studied law at Lincoln’s Inn; and Sir John Davies, who had a very distinguished legal career and was set to become England’s top judge at his death — all wrote poems thoroughly suffused with legal imagery.

David:  For sure, the Elizabethan period in particular was rich with engagement between writers and the Inns of Court, in no small part due to the growing entertainment demands of the Inns, but also due to the coming and going of the contagious plague, which shut down theaters and other entertainment venues, and led the legal community to host events within the Inns—including the premier, I believe it was, of Twelfth Night, performed with the queen herself in attendance.

You mention in the preface that despite the surfeit of law-related work in drama and fiction, that this is the first time anyone has undertaken to anthologize a serious collection of poetry related to the law.  Do you think that poetry related to the law has been previously overlooked, and is this anthology an attempt to rectify the oversight?

David:  Poetry has definitely been overlooked in the law and literature movement, without question.  And one of our primary ambitions was to cure this blind spot.

Mike:  I agree, and would only add that the tradition of writing about law is indeed less readily visible in poetry than in fiction and drama. So compiling the anthology took time and detective work.  It helped that we had an obsessive love of poetry and access to good research libraries.

Poetry of the Law examines six centuries of legal poetry. Did you observe any major shifts in the content of the poems in terms of their approach to the Law in accordance with changes in the Law qua Law?

Mike:  Well, I think of Whittier’s mid-nineteenth-century poem “The Gallows,” which marks the beginning of a vital anti-death penalty movement in the U.S., arising in tandem with abolitionism. Or Edgar Lee Masters’s “Butch Weldy,” which calls attention to the “fellow servant” doctrine, a Gilded Age legal rule designed to ensure that most workers could never recover for injuries suffered on the job.  Then there’s Brad Leithauser’s “Law Clerk 1979,” which wittily evokes the relatively recent phenomenon of the summer clerkship — the ritual by which corporate law firms wine and dine students from top law schools in order to socialize them into the economic elite. For me, one of the most interesting poetic restatements of a legal idea comes in Robert Hass’s “The Woods in New Jersey.”  Law, says Hass, “is made,/whatever we like to think, more of interests/than of reasons, trees reaching their own way/for the light, to make the sort of order that there is.”

This striking organic metaphor reflects the view called legal realism — the idea that judges’ rulings are driven more by their moral and political views than by reason or respect for precedent. It’s a view more comfortably held by lawyers and legal theorists on the Left. So it’s significant that the poem is dedicated to Justice William Brennan — a liberal hero, and conservative target, for the expansiveness of his opinions on the Supreme Court.

David:  A difficult question, actually, that would require a careful (re)read with the question in mind.  Again time does not permit me to tackle that effort; but it is a splendid question, as a difficult one.  My initial take, without doing any rereading from the book — is that no, no MAJOR shift in content as to approach is readily seen in these poems over time. Sure, the substance of the law has changed in six centuries, but the enduring questions remain — and most of the poems (even those dealing with historical trials) attend to those questions, not really bound by time and space. Maybe that is why these poems appealed to us — they endure, they are for all time, even if born out of particulars.

Hudson house, second floor landing [by Karin Roffman]

For today’s blog on objects from Ashbery’s Hudson house, I thought I’d walk down the attic steps to the second floor landing.  The landing is large.  All the rooms on the second floor have doors off the landing.  There are also two staircases off the landing: the main staircase, leading downstairs to the first floor landing, and a back staircase that leads to the kitchen. The landing is not only large but well-lit.  It looks out onto enormous stained-glass windows (below is a picture).  

The stained glass adds a particular kind of light to the house; it gives the impression of giving off a lot of light without actually being too bright or direct.  And, of course, there’s that connection with churches. 

What these windows do to the objects in the house, in fact, is perhaps best explained by a quotation from William Davies King’s Collections of Nothing (U of Chicago Press, 2008).  (I’m a big fan of this book and was pleased and actually not surprised to discover that King is a big fan of John Ashbery’s poetry.  By the way, I noticed that Professor King will give a talk at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City on April 15, 2010: “Suited for Nothing: Collecting Second-Hand.”) 

King makes a point about the collector, which suits a discussion of what the stained-glass light does to Ashbery’s real objects: “If the tendency of human thinking over the last three millennia has been to deanimate the objective world—to see the divine not in the wind or sun or trees but in abstractions—then the collector is a throwback” (32).  Ashbery's house is a house; it functions as a place for living but it also provides a backdrop for thinking and there is definitely, at certain times of the day, a sense of the divine in the light coming through. And what does that divine light shine on?


One of the things it briefly illuminates is a Popeye wastebasket that sits on the landing under the desk that holds the telephone.  Ashbery recently spoke about about this can: “This wastebasket has all the characters of Popeye.  I bought it new, I think, in 1979…. this [garbage can] has all the characters in it that you don’t normally see.  Well, there’s the Sea Hag.  And there’s Professor O.G. Watasnozzle.  Castor Oyl above Olive Oyl.  Eugene the Jeep.  Actually, the Jeep originated in Popeye this funny animal and in World War II, the army started referring to Jeeps as Jeep after Eugene the Jeep.  Alice the Goon.  There was a tribe of Goons that all had the same heads.  John Sappo had his own strip for a while.  Popeye’s mother who bears a close resemblance.  Swee’pea and Poopdeck Pappy, Popeye’s father…”  (21 July 2009)

Ashbery also wrote about Popeye in “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” the (only ever) Popeye sestina from The Double Dream of Spring (1970).  Here is stanza four:

"Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched
Her long thigh. “I have news!” she gasped. “Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country
One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment
And all that it contains, myself and spinach
In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder
At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant

Arpeggio of our years. . . "

The wastebasket did not precede the poem, but it comments on (and lists) some of the names that Ashbery’s poem initially revived.  As King’s book smartly explains, collecting provides “the superior vocabulary needed to name the full strangeness of our world” (124).  For Ashbery, collecting first occurs in the poem, which finds in Popeye’s vocabulary an available and underused source “to name the full strangeness of our world.”  It seems fitting, then, that pieces of that vocabulary adorn a garbage can now used to collect scraps of paper with jotted notes from phone conversations that he later discarded.

Monday @ KGB: Ada Limón & Meghan O'Rourke

The KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series
Hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez & Michael Quattrone
Presents . . .

Ada Limón & Meghan O'Rourke
Monday, March 29 @ 7:30 PM
Admission is FREE

Ada Limón’s first book, Lucky Wreck, was the winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize and her second book, This Big Fake World, was the winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize. Her third book of poems, Sharks in the Rivers, will be published by Milkweed Editions in September, 2010.

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of Halflife, a collection of poems. A recipient of the 2008 May Sarton Award for Poetry, she is co-poetry editor of The Paris Review and a culture critic for Slate. She is at work on a nonfiction book about grief.

KGB Bar
85 E. 4th St.
(Between Bowery & 2nd Ave.)
New York, NY 10003

For the complete KGB spring lineup, click here.

Ada Limón & Meghan O'Rourke
Monday, March 29 @ 7:30 PM
Admission is FREE

Ada Limón’s first book, Lucky Wreck, was the winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize and her second book, This Big Fake World, was the winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize. Her third book of poems, Sharks in the Rivers, will be published by Milkweed Editions in September, 2010.

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of Halflife, a collection of poems. A recipient of the 2008 May Sarton Award for Poetry, she is co-poetry editor of The Paris Review and a culture critic for Slate. She is at work on a nonfiction book about grief.

For the complete KGB spring lineup, click here.

Hudson house, Attic [by Karin Roffman]

Doorway to John Ashbery's Hudson, NY home.  Photo(c)Ahndraya Parlato

I want to thank David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for inviting me to blog about John Ashbery’s Hudson, New York home, and I want to particularly thank John Ashbery and David Kermani for letting me share a piece of the Hudson house with readers.

I am in the midst of a study on John Ashbery as a poet and collector, a project that considers his house (and the collections of objects in it, of which the house itself might be considered the first major piece of the collection) as a space just as important to understanding his poetry.  The house is autobiographical (whose house isn’t?), but since Ashbery is a writer who has repeatedly deflected autobiographical inquiries in interviews, the house, as one might expect, rarely, if ever, offers up evidence of direct autobiography.  Robert Harbison’s classic Eccentric Spaces (1977), a book Ashbery very much liked when he read it in the late 1970s, provides a nice articulation of this idea of architecture as modern narrator of a life: ““If one takes architecture as the expression of an individual life, one starts at the center rather than at the face, asking what space is created rather than what plot is filled” (22).

 Over the next few blog entries, I will introduce readers to a modest and hopefully intriguing sample of things from Ashbery’s house, which was built in 1894 and which he purchased in October 1978 (the house was featured once in the 1987 book American Victorian).  The items I have chosen to highlight are what I might call a selection of amuse bouches and are meant to, in Harbison’s metaphor, highlight the center(s) of the house rather than reveal its face. 

 If you are curious about the house and would like to learn more, please let me direct you also to two sites: the Ashbery Resource Center, a project of the Flow Chart Foundation  and Micaela Morisette’s wonderful 2008 Rain Taxi special online edition of essays on John Ashbery’s Created Spaces.

For this first entry today, I thought I would start in the attic and pull out one piece that is both quirky and representative in some ways.  My choice is Ashbery’s first French textbook, le Francais et la France, which I found lying on a shelf there last summer.

He used the book while taking French class during his sophomore and junior years at Sodus High School (a small town about thirty miles from Rochester).  Having skipped a grade, he began high school in the fall of 1940 at the age of thirteen. 

 The heavily annotated book contains a kind of Ashbery in miniature: on an empty page at the beginning of the book, he copied down the lyrics (in French) to “Deep Purple,” which his French teacher used to sing a lot in class: “When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls…”  Inside, there are many sketches; he added drawings (signposts, people, captions) to illustrate some of the goofier French phrases in the book (Ashbery was concurrently taking drawing classes every Friday at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester).  He also added sketches of “Great Moments in Opera” to improve Lesson 26, with exaggerated pictures of Carmen, Escamillo, and others (he listened to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast every Sunday).  There are some inserts too: a quiz, a handwritten copy of W.W.Gibson’s poem, “Plato’s Cave” (with the note Harpers—April, 1943), and a large sketch Ashbery created of a woman (see below). 

In short, this book is a microcosm of not only some of his interests as a fourteen and fifteen-year-old boy—drawing, music, poetry, French—but of what he is already doing with what he knows: combining it in unexpected ways, making fun of it, enjoying.

 I was in Paris a few weeks ago for the International Ashbery Conference (greatly organized by Antoine Cazé, Olivier Brossard, Abigail Lang, and Vincent Broqua) and one of the topics under discussion was why did Ashbery go to France in the 1950s and then stay so long?  How did speaking, living, and reading in French transform his poetry?  Did it?  Ashbery’s attic, that repository of the past, provides a glimpse of that future, even at the very beginning of it.

 A few more words about the attic (which, when I am up there, I often find myself humming the phrase “a gavotte of dust-motes” from "Wakefulness").  Like many attics, this one is full of old stuff that mingles: clothes, furniture, magazines from the 1930s and early 1940s, books from Ashbery’s grandparents’ and parents’ houses sit beside recent publications (by Ashbery and others).  In the corner are boxes of school notebooks and framed pictures left there by the previous owner of the house.  This attic also has steps that lead to a door to the roof.  I’ve only been out there once, but it is lovely.  Roofs are an unexpectedly comforting surface to look out on and there are many of them since Hudson is more city than country, even with those lush mountain views in the background.

Karin Roffman, Guest Blogger March 28 - April 3

This week we welcome Karin Roffman as our guest blogger. Karin Roffman's first book, From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries, won the Elizabeth Agee Manuscript Award from the University of Alabama Press and will be published in May, 2010.  An essay on John Ashbery is forthcoming in Raritan.  She is an assistant professor of English at West Point.

Welcome, Karin.

-- sdh

ed note:  The opinions expressed on this blog are Roffman's own and not necessarily those of the U.S. Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Jack Anderson

This poem by Jack Anderson appeared in Hanging Loose 88 and was the title poem of his 2009 collection from HL.

GETTING LOST IN A CITY LIKE THIS

Getting lost is the first thing you find yourself doing here
You stand getting lost right in front of your front door
You wander another way and wonder of wonder
You bump into yourself getting lost there once more

You discover no street parallels anything else here
restaurants sink lost into stews of addresses
Facades circle squares and disappear lost
While strollers walk lost through rainstorms of architecture

Tram cars get lost but slither past carefree
You ask “Is this Prague?  Or Paris?  I’m lost.”
If you found your way yesterday you didn’t you’re still lost
For though you stare at the map the map stares back lost

From now on you can never abandon being lost
So wherever you find yourself you must love yourself lost

-- Jack Anderson

The hangingloosepress.com website includes a complete index to the 95 issues of the magazine we’ve published so far (#96 will be out in April, grab your checkbook!) and I frequently find myself wandering around in it, usually to check the spelling of a name or the accuracy of a title, but often just roaming aimlessly.

Hmmm, did we really publish her? Did we publish him that early? I’m always intrigued by people we published in one issue who we never heard from again. (When I find editors who like my poems, I build a hut on their front step and stay there until they burn me out.)

In contrast to those who come our way but once, there are the HL lifers, the people whose work we have printed year after year, sometimes decade after decade, whose writings are inextricably bound up with our history and the perception of who we are.  Of these, no one has had a longer HL life than Jack Anderson.

Jack had three poems in the first issue, which came rolling out of the mimeograph machine in 1966, and four poems in #93, with frequent visits along the way. He is very civilized company, a witty and sharp-eyed New Yorker and a knowledgeable world-traveler. At the same time, his work often touches on his memories of church suppers and the like in the Milwaukee of his boyhood. (Oddly, his poems almost never reflect his other long career, as a dance critic, for The New York Times and other publications.) I love this poem, Getting Lost, because it combines bad-dream menace with playful language and an ultimate sweetness. It evokes my favorite travel moment: Arrive in a new city, stick a map in your pocket and start walking, getting lost, getting found, getting lost again, until the city begins to yield its essential shape. What’s better than that!

-- Robert Hershon

Flashback: Simic and Lehman, 1992

Charles Simic, guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1992, with series editor David Lehman in October 1992. The Academy of American Poets hosted a launch reading for the anthology featuring Simic, Lehman, Lynda Hull, Rosanna Warren, and did Agha Shahid Ali read that evening?

Click here to fast forward 15 years.

"Letter to Eve" [by Ruth Homberg]

I wanted to make you a
Thesaurus. Feed you words
He defined, and make synonyms
fall from your mouth.

and be options. Remember,
Queen Anne’s Lace was royalty
but now are weeds. On walks
through Eden you would grasp
handfuls and place them in your hair;
as though already you knew
what it was like to be dethroned.

-- Ruth Homberg

Happy Birthday, Al Jolson (b. 26 March 1886)

(SPOKEN)
Mammy...
My little Mammy.
The sun shines east-- the sun shines west--
I know where-- the sun shines best!
It's on my Mammy I'm talkin' about, nobody else's!

(SUNG)
My little Mammy,
My heartstrings are tangled around Alabammy.

(SPOKEN)
Mammy-- Mammy, I'm comin'--
I'm so sorry that I made you wait!
Mammy-- Mammy, I'm comin'!
Oh God, I hope I'm not late!
Look at me, Mammy! Don't you know me?
I'm your little baby!

(SUNG)
I'd walk a million miles
For one of your smiles,
My Mammy!

John Koethe at the New School [by Liz Howort]

Proust was in the air Tuesday night (3/ 23/ 10) as the distinguished philosopher and poet John Koethe read from his new collection, Ninety-Fifth Street.  The book is defined by “memory poems,” which explore the visceral recollection of people and places, and the overlapping language of such moments, ranging from Plato to Peggy Lee.  The book begins with “Chester,” perhaps the only poem ever written that nods to Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and a late cat: “Mere being/ Is supposed to be enough, without the intricate/ Evasions of a mystery or offstage tragedy.” 

Koethe read “On Happiness,” and noted that while the poem mentions many philosophers, “it doesn’t really matter if you know the references.”  Koethe enters the poem to ask his own question after the philosophers take leave, “Why do we feel the need to create ourselves/ Through what we choose, instead of simply sinking without a trace/ Into the slow stream of time?”  In “Ninety-Fifth Street,” a long, narrative poem, Koethe ponders his own “stream of time,” including a dinner party in 1966 with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara.  As “the narrative of the night dissolved,” the play they intended to finish remained unfinished, and the progression through time is marked by “new epicenters, with new casts of characters.”  As Koethe considers himself in the present, he also contextualizes his mentor:  “…now John’s practically become/ A national treasure, and whenever I look up I think I see him/ Floating in the sky like the Cheshire Cat.”  Koethe seals his youth and the present with the evanescent sky: “the noise of the rain and memories of rain.”   

During the Q&A the moderator, David Lehman, asked Koethe how long it took him to write this poem.  Koethe said he worked on it every day for six weeks. He discovered the memory form, a variant of “Proustian recall,” six or seven years ago.  “Sally’s Hair,” the title poem of his previous book, was his first memory poem; Koethe considers these poems more concrete than his other more discursive works.  Lehman ventured that “On Happiness” is an expository poem, almost like an essay in verse.  Lehman and Koethe also discussed the connections between poetry and philosophy, and Koethe commented, “In poetry you have a great freedom to inhabit these [philosophical] ideas.  You enter into them and they seize you.”  And at times, an idea or memory seizes you without warning: “A delicious pleasure had invaded me…filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not merely inside me, it was me.”

Liz Howort

---

[1] Proust, Marcel.  Swann’s Way.  Trans. Lydia Davis.  New York: Penguin, 2004: 45

Poetry Hi-Jinx in West Chester PA (by Laura Orem)

Here's a cool way to spend a Wednesday evening: attend a poetry reading by our own Jill Alexander Essbaum! Last night, I drove out to West Chester to hear Jill and poet Ernest Hilbert give a reading at the West Chester University Poetry Center's Poetry House. They read to a standing-room only audience from their latest work, and a gala time was had by all.

    

JAE has the audience in the palm of her hand.

   

Ernie Hilbert reading from Sixty Sonnets and his upcoming (2012) book.

Buy these books!

Brilliant AND beautiful - poets who multitask!

Why everything is going to be OK. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 Dear Bleaders,

I’m supposed to be cleaning!  I was given a specific task: straighten up the kid’s bookshelves for Jessie’s birthday party this weekend.  But then my husband, who suggested this task, took the kids and went to Goodwill to get rid of some of the heaps of stuff of which we’re getting rid, leaving me alone to sneak like a thief back to my computer to write you guys a quick post.

I figure as long as I finish by the time he’s back, I’m good.  So.  What I want to tell you is pretty important.  I spent the weekend in Omaha and now have another Homaha in these United States.  What great people I met.  Ridiculously cool people.  Ridunkulous.  And they gave me roast beast, and took me to hear Yo Yo Ma, and made jokes about Exit 420.   If you don’t get it, don’t pay it no mind, but if you do get it, you get that it is good to know.  I gave 6 talks in four days!  One to a synagogue full of clergy, mostly Catholic priests, collared and mostly grey-haired.  Some rabbis, some ministers, some visitors, a lovely woman who said she’d driven six hours to see me.

I told them that I’d come to tell them about Poetic Atheism.  There is no God, but as Durkheim said a hundred years ago, what we thought was God, was the community.  What we feel when we are gathered together, that there is something larger than us, that feeling is true.  It’s us. 

We can add to it that what we thought of as faith is love.  We have to try to believe in each other, in our mutual misery and compassion.  

The solace we have to offer one another is sufficient to our wounds.

Our feelings of meaning are sufficient to the definition of meaning.

There is no hidden world of meaning.  The feelings of meaning are the meaning.  It’s all true.

Human beings need community, meditation, and ritual.  We need to come together and pray that we will do the right thing, that we will help each other, and that we are capable of helping one another.  It’s a long shot, but it’s better than trying to believe in some third party and hoping that he will do the right thing. 

Am I telling you that all this time you’ve been alone in the dark?  Yes.  Come sit with us.  We're right here.  Turn on the light.

We must look after one another.  There is no heaven.  We are all going to die, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe two years from now, maybe forty years from now, maybe sixty.  It doesn’t matter all that much.  There is an eternity on either side, an eternity, so who cares?  Life is not theater, you can’t miss the end.  You are here.  It’s wonderful.  We made it into existence together. 

We have to start coming together and singing, celebrating.  Health Care, people!  Gorgeous African-American president and presidential family!  Now is the time to lift our voices up.  We are all there is.  We don’t have it for very long.  We have it right now.  America is a lot of things.  I know.  Tea party.  I know.  Beck, and not the good kind.  But it’s okay.

We are here together.  We can keep each other company.  We can see that if this is the world, if our consciousness is what we have of consciousness, than what we feel and what we make is very important indeed.  You’re sacred because you are, and it’s my job to support your awareness of the true and glorious reality that is.  It’s your job to support this awareness in the rest of us.  We are getting better at this.  We are going to get even better.  That's why everything is going to be okay.

Excellent work staying alive since last week, most of you.  Let’s try to do even better next week.

By the way, on my way home from the airport we got stopped on the Brooklyn Bridge and there we stayed for two and a half hours, my whole little family and me, from around 12:30 am to 3 am, when they finally backed us off the bridge.  Meanwhile we got out of our cars.  We heard someone had jumped and saw boats and helicopters shining lights.  Then we heard there was a woman who had climbed up into the bridge girders and was going to jump.  John encouraged me to walk down to where it was all happening; given what I’d been writing about lately, I should just go down and see.  So I did, there was a woman up there, a cop up there near her, I saw him hand her a cigarette, I saw him light it for her, I saw her talking to him, I saw her move her long, brown hair behind her ear. 

Like I said, she hadn’t come down when we left, they’d turned us around to get out, but I felt sure she’d come down, she was talking calmly for hours, there were tons of people everywhere.  We googled it when we got home but saw nothing of it.  Then yesterday saw a report.  She’d jumped.  After we were home in bed.  She’s in critical condition.  A 41-year-old woman from Long Island.  Like so many of us, or thereabouts.  So forgive me, bleaders, for repeating myself.   Stay, everybody.  No more going off the deep end.  Stay.  Let’s all give up together, right here, right now, and have chocolate cake.  But don’t give any to the dog, because chocolate isn’t good for dogs.

I love you like crazy,

 Jennifer

 

This Week (March 21 -27)

We don't have a guest blogger this week so we'll be using this space for updates and random news.  If there's something you think is worth mentioning, well, that's what the comment field is for.  Fire away.

You can listen to David Lehman's Valentine's Day 2010 lecture on Jewish songwriters at Chicago's Spertus Institute here.

Lera Auerbach’s score richly conjures a dark, roiling ocean, with eerily ascending themes and whale-song theremin.  Read more about the San Francisco ballet premier of the Little Mermaid here.  Congratulations, Lera.

-- sdh

I Love Men by Shanna Compton

My boyfriends are infinitely corruptible
by my attacks of maw.
And my husband loves my big mouth.

My sons lick to the extreme
the curves the frills got.
My sons are practically all tongue.

I love and adore and worship
the hindquarters of my husband.
My husband is the best wife in the world.

My boyfriends and I take turns
voting and driving cars.
My boyfriends also lack lasers.

My husband is so hot and I love it
when my boyfriends snuff my crème pie
between their mandible police hats.

(Check in to the No Tell Motel to read more poems by Shanna Compton.) 

©copyright 2004-2010, No Tell Motel. All poems ©copyright the authors.©copyright 2004-2010, No Tell Motel. All poems ©copyright the authors.