The Best American Poetry

Post-Emmy Haiku

Kyra Sedgwick, what

the hell? Connie Britton, you

were robbed, football muse.

The Graham Method: an excerpt [by Dante Micheaux]

Jorie Graham is among the best poets writing in English and her poems have changed, both visually and in aspects of content, in a dramatic way—most evident from one collection of poems to the next. Helen Vendler, in a book that studies the changes in style of three different poets, theorizes that if “a poet puts off an old style (to speak for a moment as if this were a deliberate undertaking), he or she perpetrates an act of violence, so to speak, on the self”, (The Breaking of Style, 1), and goes on to apply this notion to Graham’s ever-expanding work. Vendler states in her lecture Jorie Graham: The Moment of Excess that: “When a poem is deprived, in critical discussion, of its material body—which is constituted by its rhythm, its grammar, its lineation, or other such features—it exists only as a mere cluster of ideas, and loses its physical, and therefore its aesthetic, distinctness” (The Breaking of Style, 71). Her specific interest is in Graham’s individual line, which has metamorphosed from being short in early poems to idiosyncratically long in more recent poems (those written before 1994 when Vendler delivers the aforementioned lecture). “When a poet ceases to write short lines,” she posits, “and starts to write long lines, that change is a breaking of style almost more consequential, in its implications, than any other” (The Breaking of Style, 72). Though Vendler subsequently makes some undeniable observations about excess in Graham’s work, her basic supposition on the importance of style is flawed, if only due to the fact that she does not account for the possibility of Graham, at some point in the future, returning to short lines—or creating a composition that depends on both long lines and short lines, as she has in her most recent collection, Sea Change.

     By recycling the examples that Vendler offers in her study and adding a few others, it is clear that what is significant, or most consequential in Jorie Graham’s work is not lineation—long or short. The strength of her composition lies in a highly-evolved, demanding addressee and the process by which she communicates with it, called, for the sake of argument, vocative sublimity. The rhythm, grammar, lineation or other such features are rendered differently by Graham depending on unknown variables to the reader but what shapes those features into a whole, the communication with the addressee that exists on the plane of poetic thinking, is consistent. Vocative sublimity might better be defined as thus: “to be knitted up, chainmail of vocables—link / by link— / till even the air all round you suddenly seems to / shine—really now—there where it means, / or means to mean, because mostly of course it is just talk…” (The Errancy, 75). No better understanding of this process is to be found than, perhaps, those lines that limn the geography of a poetic mind and attempt to fix a dialogue that is at once clear and completely metaphysical. The philosopher, Martin Buber, describes the effect of this kind of dialogue on thought and perception: “When I confront a human being as my You and speak the basic word I-You to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things…[n]eighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light” (I and Thou, 59). In Graham’s poetry, she is the “I” of Buber’s philosophy and her addressee is the “You”, not as an exercise in egocentrism but in the dynamic of apprentice to omniscient master, always questioning. It would be easy to mistake the object of Graham’s poetry as multiple, as “You” in reality changes, but a prudent position would be to view the object as a singular entity with the ability to be all things at once—much like the relationship between a divinity and the adherents of its cosmology. Her poems seem to state what she has observed and beg notice of what she has observed, the better to question her addressee.

Horse as main course (by Luke Meinzen)

 

(Meat Vendor in Mongolia.  Photo (c)Leigh Wells)

After reading about the photographs of Mongolia on view at  Tibet House last month, Luke Meinzen sent along this piece about an experience he had during his tenure as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mongolia:

As a child, the closest I got to horses was a coin-operated mustang in the grocery store. I was mostly indifferent to them, boyhood cowboy phase excepted, until a history professor described the Mongol armies that dominated Asia. Horsemen with a string of mounts pressed at unprecedented speed across impossible territory. They struck quickly, baiting opposing armies into outrunning their own supply lines and their discipline. When the Mongols moved separate from their own herds, they rotated horses to keep them fresh, opened veins to drink horse blood, and culled the weakest for food.

Continue reading here. 

Thanks, Luke.

-- sdh

David Yezzi on Rachel Wetzsteon

Death is not the end when a poet dies. What we dearly miss is everything they have to tell us about the minutiae of life, about head colds and deadlines, restaurants and articles, embarrassments and triumphs. And gossip, always gossip—about our doings and others’. But the poems keep talking. They talk with even greater clarity and power, in fact, because they are no longer in process. They are finished. Yet like all good art, they continue to unfold, have things to say, even new things to say that we hadn’t heard before.

from Able Muse.  Read the complete essay here.

Thanks, David.

-- sdh

Mad Men Haiku [by Stacey Harwood]

for Ken Tucker

The Mad Men women
are the grownups while the men
are the big babies.

"Scenes from a Voyage" [by John Tranter]

The passengers are delirious, staring at the sea.
The slide presentation featured the Deutsche Bahn AG
then the attendees took off their clothes… the news
spread like wildfire through the luxury liner –
Ronald, stop them! Don’t shout! Or give orders!
We told the passenger what the passenger wants.
We’ve only potted palms, and one wolf a year.
Then all the comedians disembark in San Diego.

That’s a tour plan with a real future, though
the Torture Room is daunting, I agree,
and I should say that the ticket sale failed
because of that. They even want to set up
cameras in the bedrooms. We’ll all need visas,
for this is the land where hope turns to fear.

-- John Tranter

"My Life Is a Test" [by Mitch Sisskind]

Here's another question from my autobiography in the form of an SAT test. After you've had a look at it, you can watch the explanatory video featuring the kind participation of my friend Alexandra.

Which of the following has Mitchell NEVER used as an alias?

a: Blatchford Sarnemington
b: Al Farber
c: Lou Belmont
d: Donald Bruce
e: The Kalashnikover Rebbe

Special Bonus! Do you ever have trouble waking your children up in the morning so they can get to school on time? The following video is a rock version of the Romanian national anthem sung by an aggregation of Romanian television personalities. Just play it at high volume and watch your kids come flying out of bed like pigeons escaping from a coop. And for you, the video can also be great for overcoming a case of the afternoon "blahs."

BANK HOLIDAY WITH MY BAROQUE PAPA [by Dante Micheaux]

In a 1999 essay published in The Southern Review, literary critic Laurence Goldstein implies Robert Hayden’s “Perseus” to be the greatest poem in the world. Though it may not reach such titular extravagance for me, it is my favorite Hayden poem and the reason why I continue to return to him again and again.  

            Her sleeping head with its great gelid mass

of serpents torpidly astir

            burned into the mirroring shield—

                        a scathing image dire

            as hated truth the mind accepts at last

                        and festers on.

            I struck. The shield flashed bare.

 

            Yet even as I lifted up the head

                        and started from that place

            of gazing silences and terrored stone,

                        I thirsted to destroy.

            None could have passed me then—

                        no garland-bearing girl, no priest

            or staring boy—and lived.

 Hayden is an important American poet and should be read more widely than he is. Reasons for his marginalization arise from the racial divide that plagued (continues to plague) American literary politics. Hayden was such an adept poet that he could not be denied by the “white literary establishment” of mid-twentieth century America and that acceptance made him an outcast among the rising Black Nationalist literati of the same era. One had thought him rescued with the posthumous publication of his Collected Poemsin 1985 and its reintroduction by the venerable Arnold Rampersad in 1996. His prominence, however, is still lacking—though for my generation of Black American poets he is the undisputed heavyweight. Like they love posters of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in February, white readers of Hayden love “Those Winter Sundays”; and they love the one about Bessie Smith because, well, who does “the blues” better than Black folk? But there is so much more to Hayden! As Goldstein points out: “For a great-souled author like Hayden there can be no question of choosing one realm, one racial history, rather than another. The Perseus myth belongs exclusively neither to whites nor to blacks, but to all races, because it illuminates the tragic experience of all races.” Hayden knew the path through the desolation of human action and his true contribution to the world was a poetics of peace. Reading him is to show him gratitude.

The time is right

There's no time

like the present

for a martini

with a twist.

avec les sept

voleurs de Chicago

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Joanna Ruocco

When I Worked for Madonna

The bodyguards wear white 
The bullets fly towards them 
The bodyguards are clouds 
The bullets do not penetrate 
Kaddafi. The bullets are precipitation 
After we drink coffee, we check 
the bird feeders. Kaddafi has purple 
martins on his shoulders. The bodyguards 
are snowy egrets. Forget 
in both directions from this moment 
I am right in front of you 
I have a rifle 
I am sexually wonderful 
like a horse

* * *

Joanna Ruocco is the author of Man's Companions (Tarpaulin Sky). No Tell Motel first published this poem in January 2009. Joanna wrote, "One time, my friend, Brian Conn, was waiting to cross the street and he saw a big squirrel standing next to him on the sidewalk. The big squirrel was standing quite still, holding a smaller squirrel in its mouth. Brian Conn watched the big squirrel and the big squirrel watched the traffic. Suddenly, the big squirrel ran into the street and threw the smaller squirrel under the wheels of a car. 
I didn't write these poems thinking about that story. However, I am very interested in animals, sudden death, and misapprehensions of all kinds. 

My father used to smoke cigars with a squirrel. This was in New York City. My father would lean out the window and the squirrel would balance on a branch of the sycamore tree and they would share Garcia Y Vegas. 

I don't know how to reconcile these two encounters with squirrels. Maybe a gap in the universe opens between irreconcilable encounters with squirrels, and this gap has something to do with poetry? 

All animals should wear orange in the woods and sing loudly."

Postcard from Hampstead [by Dante Micheaux]

(home of John Keats)

 
Everything you have heard about the English is true. They are disingenuous and dull except when they are drunk, which is almost all the time, on the cheapest, warmest swill one can imagine; and then they reach a level of unspeakable vulgarity. If I never stepped inside an English pub again, it would be too soon. Beating the streets of London in search of a good cocktail, I might as well have been training to climb Kilimanjaro! Contrarily, the English have great dental hygiene but simply have a different definition of the color white. The country is very deluded about its quotidian racism. Politics here are a mess and murder on the rise. Unlike Americans, however, they do not shoot each other (save the occasional Cumbrian madman) but prefer the knife for bodily assault. And the English loathe Americans despite their constant effort to recreate our popular culture and poetry. The English female’s penchant for vertigo-inducing short skirts, black tights and bedraggled hair leaves much to be desired. Fun and intimacy are utterly foreign concepts. The only remnants I have of my libertine lifestyle, when I am here and away from my beloved island of Manhattan, are: reruns of Dynasty (left) ; a fabulous newspaper column, called “Out in the City”, by Richard Dennen; and, wandering the halls of academia, Bessie Smith’s voice—seeping from a door left ajar by an eminent Henry James scholar.

Nonetheless, all is forgiven due to fact that I live in the splendor (vastly apart, mind you, from luxury) of Hampstead. It is an unparalleled quarter of London. From the window of my study, I watch a neighboring couple of squirrels plan their day in the trees and chat with an ornery magpie that is only interested in my leftover baguette. My street is lined with Magnolia stellata, purple-leaf plum, Rhododendron ponticum, Choisya ternata and hedges that are ever green. Whenever there is need to go to the post office, I always make my way past Anna Freud’s garden. How can I help but sing “of summer in full-throated ease”¹, living just a short walk from John Keats’ house—where any guest of mine is sure to be taken? If I need a reward at the weekend, I trek the heath to Kenwood House for breakfast. Several weeks ago, I was coming home from Fenton House and decided to walk down Frognal, passing number 97, where the contralto Kathleen Ferrier lived. Immediately, her 1947 recording of Brahams’ Alto-Rhapsodie (a favorite) filled my head. I continued my walk, rounding the corner to catch the sunset on University College School and a small valley of buildings that spanned three centuries. “Turning from these with awe, once more I raised / My eyes to fathom the space every way”². If only my friend and Virgil scholar, the poet James Byrne, who told me of all this before I had ever seen it, was there to share it with me. Alas, it was only me to say, “This is evidence, real as a gold piece”³ and the spirit of Keats to witness the love affair.

(Kenwood House)

1. from "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats.
2. from “The Fall of Hyperion”, by John Keats
3. from “Testimony”, by James Byrne

1 TV Haiku

MAD MEN II

Peggy peeks into

Don's office sees his despair

No schadenfreude, kid

Dante Micheaux, Guest Blogger August 29-September 4

Dante Micheaux is the author of Amorous Shepherd (Sheep Meadow Press, 2010). His poems and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bloom, Callaloo, Gathering Ground and Rattapallax—among other journals and anthologies. He has been a guest of the Poetry Project and the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. His honors include a prize in poetry from the Vera List Center for Art & Politics, the Oscar Wilde Award and fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation and The New York Times Foundation. He resides in London and New York City.  

photo(c)Jay Jamnadas

Welcome Dante

In other news . . .

Don't miss the Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading, September 23, 7:00 PM.  Details here.

The Guessing Game (VI)

So you think
you know art.

Who painted this
picture in 1927?

It was painted
to illustrate or

complement
a work by

another artist
in a different

medium,
and if you

can name it
you will have

taken your
daily step

on the stairway
of surprise. -- DL

2 TV Haiku

MAD MEN

Betty slaps Sally

Children are playing outside

Don drinks in the pain

EMMY AWARDS THIS WEEKEND

Jane Lynch will win prize

Great glee splurge through cameras

If Conan wins, too

Delacroix Quiz: We Have a Winner!

Deanna Dorangrichia has won the Delacroix Quiz constructed by David Shapiro. Click here for the questions. Dorangrichia's answers follow:

1. Nicolò Paganini

2. Frédéric Chopin

3. Rumored to be the illegitimate son of Talleyrand.  At the time of Delacroix’s birth, his father had undergone an extensive operation leaving him impotent.  Would he have been able to impregnate is wife a couple of weeks after having a 28lb tumor from his body?  Charles was also absent from Paris at the time of his son’s birth.  The resemblance Delacroix and Talleyrand had to one another further sparked such rumors.

4. Baudelaire – after a trip to Morocco, Delacroix’s technique changed with his painting Women of Algeirs

5. Ingres?

6. Lightening\

7. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.  Watercolour, 240 x 320 mm

8. How can one choose another’s thoughts and experiences over another?  Both Van Gogh’s letters and Delacroix’s journal provide a personal account of the lives of each artist.  Delacroix put to the page his personal accounts regarding his life, sorrows, his hopes and of course his paintings.  Van Gogh’s letters are intimately written providing a first hand account of his thoughts, beliefs, and frustrations.  Most of these letters are to his brother Theo, whom he was close with and dependent upon.  Vincent’s trust and faith in his brother provide pure honesty within his letters.  Both Delacroix and Van Gogh’s written form provide further insight into their work, their thoughts and their experiences.  I cannot weigh one over the other.

9. Saint Sulpice, Saint Denis du Saint Sacrement, Saint Paul-Saint Louis.

10. Death of Sardanapalus is based on the tale of Byron’s Sardanapalus.  The drastic diagonal claims dominance upon first glance, but Delacroix took artistic freedom with Byron’s story and further elaborating the story visually.  Delacroix depicts the king as having burned his worldly possessions and all that provided him with pleasure including horses and women.  They are both shocking; the diagonal is visually shocking while the imagery is emotionally shocking.

11 .Jewish wedding in Morocco.

12. Delacroix classified himself as a Romanticist. He visited the Orient and his journal details his first impressions, his awes, his fears, his excitement during this trip.  Aren’t we always marveled at the unknown, the new?  Delacroix took in what he saw and experienced.  His journal passages are written with a respectful tone. Was Delacroix’s depiction of the Orient to show it in a light of backwardness?   Was his intention to exploit?  Delacroix painted from his personal experience during travels. When Delacroix arrived in Tangier, he marveled at what he saw and experienced.  He immediately was inspired to paint.  Aren’t we all inspired by new places, sights, colours, smells, and tastes?  Did Delacroix have false assumptions of the Orient? Perhaps.  But, Delacroix was able to experience the Orient first hand, rather than only paint from assumption and fantasy about far-away lands.  In the catalogue for Delacroix’s exhibition, Arlette Sérullaz, wrote that Delacroix was “the first painter to penetrate the heart of Moroccan culture.”  Delacroix had an open soul – he took in literature, music, conversation, travel.  If one is truly ignorant, does one not form beliefs based on what one is told?  Delacroix engaged in first-handed experience of  life and culture.

13  Horse, lion, tiger, lobster, alligator, rabbit.

14. Picasso made studies of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers

15. Frédéric Chopin

16. Delacroix was greatly influenced by the techniques of painters such as John Constable. Delacroix visited England in 1825, but there was no evidence of a meeting with Constable.  Constable never traveled abroad and lived in Suffolk and Hamstead from 1821 until his death.

17. Christ on the Sea of Galilee.  The Sea of Galilee located in northern Israel is mentioned many times in the bible as the place where Jesus performed his preaching and miracles. Mark 1:16 As He was going along by the Sea of Galilee, He saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen.

18. Malerisch was introduced by the American critic Clement Greenberg who defined it as the blurred, broken, loose definition of colour and contour.’  Malerisch is painterly…I’d classify this definition to DeKooning.  

19.  Delacroix! ‘Still Life with Lobsters’

20.A) To pick a favorite amongst Delacroix, Matisse, and Picasso….I would pick Matisse.  Art to me will always be based upon subjective preference.  While I greatly appreciate all three of these artists, aesthetically and emotionally I’m drawn to Matisse more than the works of Delacroix and Picasso.

      Matisse’s work pulls me in, whether it is through a simple line drawing, or with his bold use of colour.  I’m drawn not to, but rather into his work, into his compositions, lines, and subject matter.  His work Woman Reading has a sober tone.  The monochromatic use of colours and subject matter provides a calm and quiet scene.  The viewer is allowed a glimpse into a private moment in this women’s life.  She is not exploited in this painting, but cradled lovingly. The viewer is given a moment of reflection and solitude while the subject matter, the woman reading, does the same.  Somehow Matisse manages to capture this without it feeling voyeuristic.  It feels intimate.  The quiet moment that Matisse has captured with this woman reading is returned to the viewer.  It personally provides me with serenity and calmness as if I’ve taken a moment to myself to sit in a still room and read a favorite book.

      In Matisse’s Dance (I), we are given a different palette and different scene.  There is a bold circular composition. Again, a limited palette of colour, but this time the palette is simpler and bolder having only four main colours that could be described as crayola cadet blue and jungle green.  While Woman Reading was tranquil, Dance (I) provides such fluidity and movement.  The dancers’ movement is graceful and elegant just as the woman’s mannerism is in Woman Reading.  A common thread of Matisse’s work perhaps?  There is beauty in life.  There is beauty in things that appear mundane.  Matisse is beauty.

      Both Woman Reading and Dance (I) appear quite different at first glance.  Their compositions, subject choice, and palette vary, yet both leave me with a wonderful meditative exhale.  Matisse’s work allows me to look within a scene and walk away with more than when I arrived.  Matisse paints emotion in his work, but his work also evokes emotions.  It’s a give and take. I walk away with a sense of fulfillment.  Art will always leave the viewer with an opinion, a feeling or emotion.  I suppose that we have a preference of artist due in part to what feeling is most safe for us.  It doesn’t mean that we can’t appreciate all types of art, but I find it natural that we will be partial to one over the other.  I find comfort, beauty, serenity, and honesty in Matisse’s work and this is the scene in which I prefer.

20B)

Ben Shahn’s painting The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti.  

Why? Perhaps due in part to its underlying theme of Xenophobia. Is that not still feverishly relevant today? 

-------

Congratulations, Deanna. You win a David Shapiro collage. -- DL

"To a Muse" [by David Shapiro]

To a Muse

Give me a first line, you who are far away.
The second line will almost write itself.
In times of pain, I open the dictionary.

Like a girl in the last row who will not say
The theoretical part of the dream was herself
Give me a first lie, you who are far away.

A student laughs. I died once. Red is gray.
Cheat me like a quote, deceiving Elf.
In times of pain I open the dictionary.

You who tried to carve this family in clay
Skeptical and frivolous as a filthy shelf,
Give me another line, you who are far away.

It's a small freedom on a revisionary day
As a jay imitates the human on an elm.
In times of pain, I open the dictionary.

And in ordinary happiness, I open the dictionary.
The words remain, but the guards are gone for help.
Give me a last line, you who are far away.
In times of pain, I open the dictionary.

-- David Shapiro

"Idylls (West Tropicana)" [by Alison Elizabeth Taylor]

How do you like this 2007 screenprint by Alison Elizabeth Taylor? It's called "Idylls (West Tropicana)."

-- DL

Paris in the summer, when it sizzles

From the Hotel Montalembert on the rue du Bac you can see the Tour Eiffel. But what is the domed building in the left background? It looks like the Pantheon, but it can't be, can it?

What's Happening to Poetry at "The Paris Review"?

There's been an editorial change at The Paris Review -- and a good deal of controversy attending the new editors' decision to reject previously accepted poems that had not yet appeared in print. The same thing happened in 2003 but on a lesser scale and with much less of a hue and cry. Here's Daniel Nester on the subject.

On the left you'll find the cover of the Spring 1968 issue of The Paris Review (# 42),  It means a lot to me, because it was my first appearance in George Plimpton's legendary magazine. -- DL