The Best American Poetry

Monday @ KGB: Craig Morgan Teicher & Geoffrey Nutter

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of Brenda Is In The Room And Other Poems and Cradle Book: Stories & Fables. He is a VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, a senior editor at Publishers Weekly, and teaches creative writing at The New School, among other places. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

Geoffrey Nutter is originally from California, but now lives in New York. He attended the University of Iowa, where he was awarded an Academy of American Poets prize by Mark Strand. His previous books are A Summer Evening, Water's Leaves & Other Poems, and most recently Christopher Sunset, published by Wave Books in April 2010. He currently teaches poetry at NYU and will be a visiting professor at the University of Iowa in spring 2011.

 

The Monday night Poetry reading series at KGB is hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez & Michael Quattrone, and was founded by David Lehman and Star Black. 

Readings begin at 7:30 pm. Admission is FREE

For the complete season line-up, click here.

KGB Bar ● 85 East 4th Street ● New York, NY 10003 ● Phone: 212-505-3360 ● KgbBar.com 

 

The Floating Crowbar & The Rambling Pitchfork: The Poetry of Irish Tune Titles (Terence Winch)

Not long ago, I was contemplating this medley of tunes from an album called Stormy Weather by the excellent traditional band Beginish:

I'm Waiting for You

Touch Me If You Dare

The Gooseberry Bush

And I thought, there's almost a narrative contained in the names of these three reels, an abbreviated sexual story whose climax takes place in a gooseberry bush. And, musically, the tunes seem to belong together.  It must have been intentional­—Beginish (pictured below) seems like a witty collection of people.

The Moving Cloud, The Flowing Tide, Banish Misfortune, Paddy Gone to France, the Girl That Broke My Heart, The Pope's Toe, We Were Drinking and Kissing the Ladies, I Have No Money, Money in Both Pockets, The Cat's Rambles to the Child's Saucepan—just a random list off the CDs closest to my keyboard.  But there is often a high degree of wit, metaphor, and color in tune titles (and here I am distinguishing between songs, which are sung, and tunes, which are instrumental pieces), along with the suggestion of a story. 

Of course, many tune names are more descriptive than evocative—George Whyte's Favourite,  The Green Fields of America, the Longford Collector, Sligo Maid, and thousands more.  But as you enter into a tune, going though the process of learning it so that you eventually know it by heart, so that each note and each line of music has an inevitability to it, it starts to seem that the notes are almost like words with their own story to tell.  There are shifting moods, funny turns of phrase, surprising developments in the melody line, satisfying resolutions, all found right there in the music.  And often the names of tunes seem exactly right for the music they call forth.  The Bucks of Oranmore, a big five-part,  get-the-hell-out-my-way reel that everyone knows and that is often the grand finale for any number of group-playing situations, seems  to summon up a football-team of Galway linebackers ready to roll right over you. [the video features John Whelan's version of Bucks]

The Rainy Day, on the other hand, has a moody, overcast feel, while the Boogie Reel rocks the house and practically goes airborne in the B part.  For me, and I think for many other musicians, tunes speak in their own language, and I increasingly see tunes and poems as very closely related experiences.

It must be said, however, that many musicians, while they may know a thousand tunes, wouldn't be able to tell you the names of a dozen of them.  And tune nomenclature can be very inconsistent, confusing, or mistaken.   The previously cited Boogie Reel, e.g., is a composition by John Nolan, the first Irish-American to win the All-Ireland button accordion championship, yet I have at least four versions of the same tune by Irish-born players, all of whom call it The Durrow.  Tellingly, these misnamed versions of the Boogie Reel seem a bit lackluster to me, deficient  in the dynamism you get with Nolan's (or Billy McComiskey's) recording of it.    Maybe if those players had the name right, the tune would have taken off the way it was intended to.

(Here's Billy's version of Boogie, followed by his composition, The Controversial.)

Boogie Reel - The Controversial

      

 

Book Review Classics: Garrison Keillor on Bernard-Henri Levy's America

from Garrison Keillor's review of American Vertigo (NYTBR, Jan. 29, 2006)
<<<
Any American with a big urge to write a book explaining France to the French should read this book first, to get a sense of the hazards involved. Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair ("a festival of American kitsch"); Sun City ("gilded apartheid for the old");a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz - you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World's Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.
***
And good Lord, the childlike love of paradox - America is magnificent but mad, greedy and modest, drunk with materialism and religiosity, puritan and outrageous, facing toward the future and yet obsessed with its memories. Americans' party loyalty is "very strong and very pliable, extremely tenacious and in the end somewhat empty." Existential and yet devoid of all content and direction. The partner-swapping club is both "libertine" and "conventional," "depraved" and "proper." And so the reader is fascinated and exhausted by Lévy's tedious and original thinking: "A strong bond holds America together, but a minimal one. An attachment of great force, but not fiercely resolute. A place of high - extremely high - symbolic tension, but a neutral one, a nearly empty one." And what's with the flurries of rhetorical questions? Is this how the French talk or is it something they save for books about America? "What is a Republican? What distinguishes a Republican in the America of today from a Democrat?" Lévy writes, like a student padding out a term paper. "What does this experience tell us?" he writes about the Mall of America. "What do we learn about American civilization from this mausoleum of merchandise, this funeral accumulation of false goods and nondesires in this end-of-the-world setting? What is the effect on the Americans of today of this confined space, this aquarium, where only a semblance of life seems to subsist?" And what is one to make of the series of questions - 20 in a row - about Hillary Clinton, in which Lévy implies she is seeking the White House to erase the shame of the Lewinsky affair? Was Lévy aware of the game 20 Questions, commonly played on long car trips in America? Are we to read this passage as a metaphor of American restlessness? Does he understand how irritating this is? Does he? Do you? May I stop now?
>>>>
For more of Mr. Keillor's review, click here. [Note: The links in the paragraphs above were put in by the blog editor and are not part of the piece as pubkished in the Times or posted on its web site. -- DL]

Darks arts for dark days: Poetry on All Hallows' Eve [Katy Evans-Bush]

The old church in Heptonstall, Yorkshire

Rather than leave on such a public footing, I see I'm still live - so I'll consider the day a bit before signing off. I've always felt October 31st to be a highly charged day, not like other days - even nowadays: there is a feeling of things being afoot. In the UK this year this is even the day the clocks have gone back: suddenly the trees are seriously yellow, and more bald than yesterday; the light has flattened out overnight to something hard-edged and intent on - well, on what? The ground, maybe. Or something not quite visible.

Tomorrow is All Saints' Day, when the dead - our dead - roam the earth. So somehow this point is a pivot, on which the year seems to turn. We're dead opposite Easter, with its cheery daffodils and new hats. In Mexico they'll be celebrating the Day of the Dead; and then we all start getting ready for Christmas and the other festivals of light. For now, though, we're in the thick of it, the thickened atmosphere that goes with the annual thinning of the membrane.

It's a day for poetry: verbal gateway to the other side of consciousness. In his famously contentious "Dark Arts" lecture a few years ago, Don Paterson wrote of poetry as incantatory, invocatory, magical, even dangerousl: "poetry, from the earliest so deeply connected to the world and our own survival in it, was quickly invested with magical properties, and soon took the form of the spell, the riddle, the curse, the blessing, the prayer."

Real arcana is interesting only in prospect. These formulae must be very dull, if we are to do our job of alienating the amateur. Arcana are things as small, specific, useful and horrible as the Horseman's Word. Actually the horseman's word - which gives the apprentice ploughman power over horses and women when it's whispered in their ears - is also the secret formula for all poems. It was unwisely published in F. Marian MacNeill's The Silver Bough, so now it's in the public domain you might as well know it. In Scots it's twa-in-yin; two in one.

The object of a poem is to place a new unity in the language...

A blue butterfly to go home with [Katy Evans-Bush]

Poetry International 2010: Imagining Peace

ALAS! No picture of Waterloo Bridge with which to round off this week. But take it from me: earth has not anything to show more fair, not even Westminster Bridge. I can see the London Eye, distantly and when the trees have no leaves, from my kitchen window - and everyone agrees that that is a valuable perk of my flat.

In the end, my friend and I were whisked up to the green room to mingle with the poets and drink free literary wine, and when the Southbank Centre finally kicked us all out we had barely time to run for the bus.

Wonderful, though. I love listening to people read poetry in languages I don't understand. You almost get to understand a language in a different way that way, through sound and rhythm alone. (And rest assured that translations in english were projected onto a big screen behind the readers!) Arabic, of which we heard a lot tonight, is really, really beautiful. There's a particular elongated dying fall of a vowel that is incredibly musical and expressive. Nouri al-Jarrah - a practitioner of this vowel - began the evening with a poem called Letter From Odysseus (pronouned Odysséus, as if in French), which describes the homecomings the king doesn't have, among suitors, and ends:

I am Odysséus,
Dead in a ship.

Alas: that's all I had time to copy down.

Fady Joudah, a doctor and Palestinian-American winner of the Yale Young Poets series, read in English and was subsequently more anecdotal than the others in his introductions. The Lebanese poet Hyam Yared (her first name is pronounced Heeam) read really beautifully in French, a single long poem situating history in the narrative of male and female bodies. There was no book of her work available: if there had been one in French I'd have bought it and quoted it here. As it was, I was too busy listening to copy lines down...

The Cambridge (& fellow Salt Publishing) poet Richard Berengarten was the sole Jewish voice of the evening, which - without wishing to sound partisan - seems a little bit strange, in a festival called "Imagining Peace." In his poem called Nada: Hope or Nothing, he ends with words for hope in many languages, and inserted the Arabic and Hebrew words for the benefit of tonight's performance. (Berengarten also has a small pamphlet, or chapbook, of short poems all about hands.)

His reading opened with the poem The Blue Butterfly (out of his eponymous book), which is satisfyingly built on a rhetorical trope. I'm going to assume I've got his and Salt's permission to quote it here in full (necessary, because otherwise you don't get to the end of the trope) (and I have the book, so it's an unfair advantage, which I admit):

On my Jew's hand, born out of ghettos and shtetls,
raised from unmarked graves of my obliterated people
in Germany, Latvia, lithuania, Poland, Russia,

on my hand mothered by a refugee's daughter,
first opened in Blitzed London, grown big
through post-war years in suburban England,

on my pink, educated, ironical left hand
of a parvenu not quite British psuedo gentleman
which first learned to scrawl its untutored messages

among Latin-reading rugby-playing militarists
in an élite boarding school on Sussex's green downs
and against the cloister walls of puritan Cambridge,

on my hand weakened by anomie, on my
writing hand, now of a sudden willingly
stretched before me in Serbian spring sunlight,

on my unique living hand, trembling and troubled
by this May visitation, like a virginal
leaf new sprung on the oldest oak in Europe,

on my proud firm hand, miraculously blessed
by the two thousand eight hundred martyred
men, women and children fallen at Kragujevac,

a blue butterfly simply fell out of the sky
and settled on the forefinger
oif my bloody international hand.

Thanks to everyone for reading; and many thanks again to Best American Poetry for asking me to spend a week blogging! I've really enjoyed it. Keep reading, if you like, at Baroque in Hackney.

 

"This Living Hand": happy John Keats' birthday, while we're at it:
© David Secombe,  Esoteric London

Why George Soros Votes Yes on Proposition 19

George Soros has a cogent column in the Wall Street Journal on why he favors legalizing marijuana. Here is how the piece opens:
<<<
Our marijuana laws are clearly doing more harm than good. The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.

Law enforcement agencies today spend many billions of taxpayer dollars annually trying to enforce this unenforceable prohibition. The roughly 750,000 arrests they make each year for possession of small amounts of marijuana represent more than 40% of all drug arrests.

Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually. It also would reduce the crime, violence and corruption associated with drug markets, and the violations of civil liberties and human rights that occur when large numbers of otherwise law-abiding citizens are subject to arrest. Police could focus on serious crime instead.

The racial inequities that are part and parcel of marijuana enforcement policies cannot be ignored. African-Americans are no more likely than other Americans to use marijuana but they are three, five or even 10 times more likely—depending on the city—to be arrested for possessing marijuana. I agree with Alice Huffman, president of the California NAACP, when she says that being caught up in the criminal justice system does more harm to young people than marijuana itself. Giving millions of young Americans a permanent drug arrest record that may follow them for life serves no one's interests.
>>>
For more, click here.

Into London [by Katy Evans-Bush]

Old Street, October 2010

Just on my way to the Southbank Centre to the second night of this year's Poetry International Festival there. A lovely, sunny autumn day in London when I mostly slept, and have not been out at all yet. When I come back I'll try and post up a picture from Waterloo Bridge, if I can get a decent one.

In the meantime, here's a rainy picture from a few weeks ago, and - as an antidote to Wordsworth - some William Dunbar:

LONDON thou art of townes A per se.
Soveraign of cities, seemliest in sight,
Of high renoun, riches and royaltie;
Of lordis, barons, and many a goodly knyght;
Of most delectable lusty ladies bright;
Of famous prelatis, in habitis clericall;
Of merchauntis full of substaunce and of myght:
London, thou art the flour of Cities all.

Gladdith anon, thou lusty Troynovaunt,
Citie that some tyme cleped was New Troy;
In all the erth, imperiall as thou stant,
Pryncesse of townes, of pleasure and of joy,
A richer restith under no Christen roy;
For manly power, with craftis naturall,
Fourmeth none fairer sith the flode of Noy:
London, thou art the flour of Cities all.

Most myghty carbuncle of vertue and valour;
Strong Troy in vigour and in strenuytie;
Of royall cities rose and geraflour;
Empress of townes, exalt in honour;
In beawtie beryng the crone imperiall;
Swete paradise precelling in pleasure;
London, thou art the flour of Cities all...

And here's one from this week:

St James' Park, October 2010

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Irremovable Soul [by Stephanie Paterik]

Jennifer Michael Hecht is “a minor famous atheist,” as she puts it. Her bestselling book Doubt: A History made her a cult figure among skeptics and catapulted her into the public speaking circuit.

At a New School poetry forum last week, the popular philosopher, professor and BAP blogger spoke to the home crowd, musing on her career, poetry and soul (more on that later). In addition to life after Doubt, she discussed her latest nonfiction project, Stay, and her most recent book of poems, Funny. 

Hecht, the rare poet with a Columbia Ph.D. in the History of Science, read from her first book of poems, The Next Ancient World, which serves as a love letter to future anthropologists.

In “Please Answer All Three Of The Following Essay Questions” she asks: “If someone wanted to make you/
slap them, hard, would it be better for him or/
her to say that your father didn’t like to hear you/
sing, or to say that your mother purposefully pricked/ her finger and bled into the coleslaw she brought/
to the physics-department picnics every year.”

Hecht recited “Villanelle If You Want to Be a Bad-Ass” and “Cannibal Villanelle,” prompting moderator David Lehman to ask why she delights in the form.

“I fall in love with lines,” she said, “and the Villanelle repeats the line.”

Bob Dylan, DJ

From Sean Wilentz's new book, Bob Dylan in America, on Bob Dylan's radio show, which ran from May 2006 through April 2009 and is still available in reruns (on satellite radio) and accessible on the net.

<<<
From out of this past, Dylan the DJ — no latter-day Symphony Sid Torin or Alan Freed, his voice sounding as old as the hills — spun his platters (of which, of course, there were none in this digital age), playing a great deal of music that one doesn’t hear on the radio anymore — except on some college stations and the odd listener-supported radio station like WWOZ in New Orleans — telling something about the performers and, often, even listing the label on which the recording appeared, as if we could run out and buy them. And Dylan’s tastes turned out to be even more eclectic than most listeners could have imagined. There was, not surprisingly, plenty of blues and rhythm and blues, beginning with the very first record on the very first show, Muddy Waters performing “Blow, Wind, Blow”; and there was plenty of country (from the Carter Family onward), western swing, gospel, doo-wop, and rock and roll, by performers and groups both famous and long forgotten; and occasionally, Dylan played jazz (including, as the preface to his show “Moon,” Charlie Parker playing “Ornithology,” which the DJ instructor pointed out was based on the chord structure of “How High the Moon”).

But Dylan also played a great deal of Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra (the performer played most often in the first season), Patti Page, and various crooners from the 1930s through the 1950s, including Bing Crosby. He played LL Cool J and spoke knowledgeably about rap. He took time to recite repeatedly fitting lines of serious literature, from Yeats’ “Drinking Song” to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Baseball Canto.” And sometimes, instead of juxtaposing one thing and another, he threw different things into the same pot and stirred, as on the “Devil” show, when he read of Satan from Paradise Lost, while he played the Reverend Gary Davis in the background, performing “Devil’s Dream."
-- Sean Wilentz
>>>
Read more of this excerpt posted on the Daily Beast

October [by Lera Auerbach]

I opened the windows on a dark orchard.

Trees were guarding the movement of branches.

And with the bitterness of October rennet apples

I opened the windows on a dark orchard.

 

The funeral decay of the orchard lingered,

Covering the heart in fallen memories,

With autumnal stilling languor,

The funeral decay of the orchard lingered.

 

October lingered and languored.

Stealthily approached with tiny steps.

And we defoliated mysteriously too,

While October lingered and languored.

 

The last frame has been brought into focus.

Branches draw organ screams in sky.

Who knows what will come, what drama

When the last frame has been brought into focus.

 

Well it is good that we are still alive;

That time ages while years like ink

Run down and smudge shoddily, lazily,

And it's good that we are still alive.

  
 ---  Lera Auerbach

 

 

Krapp's Last Tape at the Duchess: a trinket-free zone [Katy Evans-Bush]

"A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine."

I just got back in from an amazing thing. Through a fluke, I was lucky enough to get two very cheap last-minute tickets to see something I was actually fretting about missing (cheapest seatc £25, in the normal run of things). It was this: Michael Gambon in his limited run of Samuel Beckett's wonderful short play Krapp's Last Tape , transferred from the Gate in Dublin to the plushly intimate Duchess Theatre just off the Strand in London.

I've been thinking a lot about Beckett for the past year or two. I was dying to write it all up into some huge dazzling article, collected all the materials, and never wrote it. How very Beckettian of me. But now this.

There was the publication (by CUP) of Beckett's Letters, 1929-1940 - a doorstop of a book, the first of four volumes, printed on heavy, shiny, old-fashioned paper and the detailed, daily, minutely animated opposite of what we might expect of the man whose art became so spare, so pared down, so "devoured by huge black pauses” – which Beckett wrote in 1936-7 of the "sound surface" of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. (Quoted from Gabriel Josipovici in the TLS).

There was last year's special Beckett issue of Fulcrum magazine - another doorstop of a thing, produced annually by Katia Kapovich and Philiip Nikolaev - in which Nikolaev makes an impassioned case for Beckett as a major twentieth century poet: "To discover Beckett's true lyric worth, we must begin to read the poems with new eyes," he writes.

Hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference - the concluding yawn of poststructuralism. What does it matter who is speaking? Beckett asks his question de profundis, but Foucault answers it ex cathedra, as if it were a question of "theory."

He writes: 

Consider his pennywhistlings (mirlitonnades), late brief poems that are so spare, so extremely minimalist, so bare of ostentation that they themselves appear at first blush to invite the notion of their own slightness. It has been too easy to overlook the fact that these miniature gems are like nothing else in our poetic tradition. They are uniquely, self-effacingly Beckettian, his refined "lessness" in action.

There was the Faber reissue of Beckett's works, in shiny new editions with new introductions and exciting new typographical covers (in beautifully readable print - some of us mind about this!). I was reading Worstward Ho last summer, the work the famous quote comes from: "Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." It has stayed with me since: so interior that it just goes straight in and lodges.

The words too whosesoever. What room for worse! How almost true they sometimes ring! How wanting in inanity! Say the night is young and take heart. Or better worse say still a watch of night alas to come. A rest of last watch to come. And take heart.

There was that massive revival of Waiting for Godot, with Ian McKellan and Simon Callow, which came in for a certain amount of criticism - in fact, split the critics (and my friends) down the middle as if with a knife. Too knockabout - or else just perfect. Depending what you thought. I was gutted to miss it, which is one reason I was virtually in tears of joy at my desk yesterday when I got these tickets.

So, the performance. Michael Gambon was born for this role and is now 69 I think - same age as Krapp. He's amazingly physical, surprisingly so considering Krapp's defining feature is his decrepitude - so instead of the pauses and "broods" of the stage directions on the page, you get lots of nervous action, the sense of a man imprisoned in his animal body.

The whole thing is so spare that everything added or changes shows: the table is centre stage! It's a big old cumbersome Victorian-style desk, with hideous beading around the edges; Gambon, instead of sitting still or pacing, hobbles nervously round the edge, running a fingernail along this beading. The tapes are loose on the table, painfully patted into straight lines along the edge by Gambon's Krapp; in Beckett's performances, apparently he used to use tin boxes instead of the specified cardboard ones, so that when Krapp sweeps them to the floor they land with a resounding crash & clatter. Here, at one stage Krapp weeps. He has wonderful mobile arms and what look like double-jointed shoulders; the hands wrap around his head almost to his face. When he disappears to the back and the cork goes pop, you also hear quite stagey pouring and burbling and guzzling; I didn't feel I needed that. I wanted the silence and suspense... 

The whole beginning section, before there's any speech, lasts about 15 minutes. There's extra business with the banana. Predictable, sadly...! (Ha!) But "Free-ranging" (as Gambon, quoted in London's Evening Standard says) - and surprising, given the rigour with which the Beckett estate famously polices productions of his work. Instead of being an overstatement of the bleakly implicit, or just puerile, the whole thing, including the banana gag, works.

It's hard to describe a performance of this play: the dark around the table is just what you expect to see, a velvety cocoon - and a devouring huge black pause. Krapp sits under his harsh light, with his (antiquarian, for a 21st century audience) reel-to-reel recorder. The voice in the tape is fruity, ponderous, trying hard to be much more posh than Krapp's present self, in a wonderful in-and-out Irish accent, and the incidents described by that voice might indeed come out of Les Grand Meaulnes. (The play premiered in 1958; the voice would have been recording in 1928; hey presto!) Gambon's voice is of course beautiful. Which Krapp is more real? They are the same.

It's just very, very beautiful - and funny, and bleak, and true. Every word is an event. It operates on the very deep symbolic or archetypal, collective-unconscious level, of course - but there's also the quotidian level, where Krapp reminds us of people we've known. It's simply one way life can turn out, painfully.

You'd never get that put on nowadays, they'd be too scared. Life can't turn out like that with so many self-help books and relationship counsellors around! We aren't surrounded by darkness, we're surrounded by chain stores, pop music and mobile phone waves! In political or economic terms, Krapp has no identity. And this is precisely why we NEED Beckett now. Because he goes past, through, around the trinkets and straight to the heart of us. The central word in Krapp, the one word that sits at the top of a page, before which there is hesitation, the Word that was in the beginning, is - What did he say? "The only thing that matters is the tears and the laughter." Someyhing like that. It IS his moment, because  we've forgotten how to do it for ourselves.

Krapp's Last Tape premiered at the Royal Court, the same theatre where two years earlier John Osborne's Look Back in Anger had also debuted. But where it might be said that we may have followed Osborne's road down to our current cul de sac of topicality, "issue plays" and "relevance" (yes, it might), Beckett's is the universal, unchanging Sphinx stare of the human. It's a trinket-free zone.

The Ring-Ring Cycle: Art, Telepathy, Telephone, and Poetry

Rebecca Campbell and Nicole Walker had the smart idea of posting -- on Huffington Post -- a work of visual art one day, a poet's response on day two, a painter's response to the poet's gambit on day three, and so forth, in a collaborative game designed to promote and benefit from an interplay between art and poetry. They call it "Ring Ring: A Game of Artists' Telephone." Each work (or "ring")  exists as both a response and a new work, rather like the stanzas in the Japanese linked-verse that Basho did with select contemporaries in Japan. The project pushes immediacy; you are given only 24 hours to create your ring. Here you'll see the digital drawing Adam Bateman made in response to a David Lehman poem occasioned by exposure to art from Patrick Abbey that arose from his encounter with an Emma Ramey prose poem that she wrote in response to this painting by Anna Fidler:

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender

Yes, it’s Oktoberfest, which means beer selections in a faux Gothic type so ornate you can’t read it, as if Germany had a corner on the Middle Ages. Okay, printing press and all that, but hello, Ariel Narrow, anyone?

That said, there’s some fine beers out there in Oktoberfest land—I just can’t get past the font to tell  you what they are. I had something that began with an H as I sat with my Libertarian friend (!!!) who works for a right-leaning think tank. My “H” beer (Haufbrauhaus? Hefeweizen? Hichbineinberliner?), according to the waiter, was “on the dark side,” and so was my date, but as it happens, he regaled me with stories of how open minded and curious Al Franken is. He’d spent some time at the Washington Press corps dinner with the guy and discovered that Al Franken is someone you’d enjoy having a Hefeweizen with, a non-ideologue who willingly explores the issues of the day with a wide range of people, including Libertarian People®, while still retaining a sense of humor. Would that my beer was with Al Franken, you’re thinking, except that my friend also turned out to be enjoyable to hausgab with, liked exploring the issues of the day without freezing into Tea Party rigidity, and had a sense of humor. The older he gets, he says, the less riled he becomes about the ideas that got him into politics.

He’d never, never win a primary in his own party, the ® GOP ® ®.

Meanwhile, back at a German joint in “Middle Long Island,” I’m wondering what a beer drinker is to do about that font and that 9.2% unemployment rate, as my waiter “Ryan” goes beyond solicitousness to outright ass-kissing and my Think Tank® friend moves on to discussing how he likes Obama, too, not the policies but the man himself, an intellectually curious guy not unlike Al Franken, a fellow Democrat—why is it the Democrats are so much more likeable?—and how no President could possibly be popular when unemployment is so high. This guy votes Republican®, though, and come Tuesday, he will negate my vote for progressive candidates at the local, state and national level with his vote for slash-and-burn candidates at the local, state and national level. Unlike  him, I’ve never met Al Franken, nor have I shaken hands with Barack Obama. I’ve never even chatted with my local congressman, Tim Bishop, and yet I’ve attended call parties for him and dragged my 9-year-old around the neighborhood with door knob hangers, explaining that this is how changes happen.

It’s not how change happens. My Right-Leaning® friend is the perfect swing voter, he ought to cross over from the dark side to support people he actually likes, and yet he won’t. My 9 year old can’t tip the balance, being ineligible to vote for the next decade. How do open, curious Republicans with senses of humor stand by their party?

When I sip a dark beer, I think of weight. Dark beers have a weight to them, a burden on their shoulders that says, “Batten down. Storm’s a-coming. Find people you like and hunker down with them in the nearest available cellar.” Unfortunately for my Libertarian® friend, the good company’s incorporated by Registered Democrats. Unfortunately for me, what Republicans want to do with their power will unleash a storm that’s non-partisan in its fury. When the dark side wins, it pours on everyone.

-- Julie Sheehan

Autumn in New York (Binghamton, NY, that is).

Sun

Sun, I'm happy to see you. 
I'm a small child who has had pain and fear.
Now it's over for awhile and I'm grateful
for your company.

Come up.  Cover my day with your glory,
and I will play at immortality.

               -- Milton Kessler

We just returned from an overnight in Binghamton, New York, where David appeared as the Distinguished Milton Kessler Poetry Reader.  This was a great honor for David, and it was an honor for me to be there with him. Kessler appeared on this blog when Jeff Oaks sent this moving post about his former teacher. And Heather McHugh picked Milt Kessler's poem "Comma of God" for The Best American Poetry 2007. Milton Kessler's reputation as a dedicated teacher endures, and we heard many testimonials while we we mingled among his family, friends, and colleagues. "Each day is still full of of amazement, aloneness, danger, and gratitude," he wrote. Of her beloved instructor, Camille Paglia said,, "Milton Kessler embodies for me an ideal of the arts in dynamic synthesis . . . Everything you were, everything that you had ever seen or experienced pressed upon the text in front of you. The class hour seemed to melt and expand." 

 David Lehman, Nicole Santaluccia, Deanna Dorangrichia, Jennie Case, and Christine Gelineau after David's reading.
Photo by Deanna Dorangrichia

We left our Binghamton hotel around noon today, and thanks to the out-of-date GPS that came with our rental car (a gray Buick Regal), we stumbled upon Turkish Restaurant/Sultan's Table (258 Main Street, Johnson City. 607.644.9030 ). We had come looking for a place called Curly's Coffee but luck was on our side. Today was the restaurant's second day in business (having survived a robbery on the eve of its opening!). Binghamton residents take note: the food is delicious, the prices reasonable, and the service friendly. We shared Turkish style red lentil soup (thick and spicy-hot), and an assortment of appetizers (stuffed grape leaves, baba ganoush, eggplant salad, white bean salad, warm flat bread). I can't resist baklavah; the Turkish variety is straightforward -- just philo, nuts, honey -- and satisfying with the last sips of the sweet-strong Turkish coffee. Our hostess indulged my request that she "read" our coffee grounds. [I need to stop worrying and I have travel in my future; David is in love (;-), and has happily embarked on three projects but is undecided about a fourth.] On XM-Satellite radio we heard a May 1943 broadcast of the old radio show "Suspense." Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester starred in a dramatization of Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders. And we decided that Elvis Presley sounds like Dean Martin singing "Memories Are Made of This."

--sdh

Poetry class: Our Lady of Pain (and a cat) [Katy Evans-Bush]

Many apologies; I feel like the guest who comes to dinner and then falls asleep in the chair! Someone commented the other day on my posting a post that positioned poetry firmly in the quotidian world. And alas, that is all too firmly where it is. It's fighting for attention at the moment like the smallest jackal at the dried-up old watering hole, and there have been some other consuming matters at hand even aside from work. My day job is all but overwhelming, it's so busy, and last night I taught a class on anapests (left work late; bus stop out of service; walked miles in the rain, got caught on some kind of crazy roundabout at the end of Westminster Bridge where you can't cross the road, and then had to trudge to Waterloo to get some cash, and got a cab; left my scarf in the cab, but the cabbie fortunately brought it inside to me). The anapests were great: we had Lewis Carroll, Ogden Nash, part of Swimburne's Dolores, The Streets of Laredo, and (of course), as a finale, Byron's wonderful Destruction of Sennacherib:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,
and the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
where the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,

Autumn Evening by David Lehman

(after Holderlin)

The yellow pears hang in the lake. 
Life sinks, grace reigns, sins ripen, and
in the north dies an almond tree. 
>>>

Read the complete poem (and note the Academy's superb "Text Flow" feature) 
at The Academy of American Poets. 

-- sdh

Brian Adams Shoots Marian Call!

at the Anchorage Public Library in 2010
the photographer: Brian Adams
the subject: singer and songwriter Marian Call

Heroic Basketball (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

Last week I noticed the post on this site announcing a poetry contest on the occasion of LeBron James' joining the Miami Heat basketball team.

For some reason this put me in mind of the Iliad, which I first read around 1950 as "The Golden Book of the Iliad" -- a masterful rendition by the way, which I later learned was also an early inspiration to Joseph (Joe) Heller.

Nestor, the grandfatherly blabbermouth, has always been my favorite Homeric character and I have even written a poem in which Nestor acquires three Viagra tablets from Athena and thereby manages to change the course of the Trojan War.

But that's another story. Regarding the LeBraon James contest, I tried to imagine how Nestor would respond. Surely for instance he would immediately disqualify himself by exceeding the six line length limit. And in comparing LeBron James to basketball players of the past, he would be in his habitual mode of "there simply are no men like that now," as W.H.D. Rouse expresses it in his very useful and forceful prose translation. I believe Nestor would also include at least one line in a foreign language in order to showcase his mastery of many tongues.

The Iliad

He is almost a foot
Taller than Calvin Murphy
Was but can he dribble
Two basketballs the length
Of the court and then
Dunk them both?
Yo pienso que no.

Remember how Bill Russell
Shot underhand free throws?
His percentage stank like poo-poo
But when money was on the table
He was strong black coffee
From the line and this too was
Unlike LeBron.

Pro teams used to practice in
The gym where I taught high school.
Chamberlain, Chet Walker, Jerry West,
I saw them all up close and in truth
The only one who acted like a human
Being was Tom Boerwinkle so let's have
A poem contest for the man from Tennessee!

Lewis Carroll, WN Herbert, and how to use your silver spoon [Katy Evans-Bush]

Yesterday I asked what the shock of this week's spending review would have on UK poetry. Well - I asked something like that. It was a cri de coeur, probably informed by the fact that I have somehow become so over-committed with various work projects that I have given up even trying to write poetry.

Having asked that, I then spent much of the day (probably the last sunny weekend day we'll have all year, and certainly the last one before the clocks go back) reading, and prepping a workshop on anapaests. (You want anapaests?! I got anapaests. I know from an anaepest now, I can tell you.) And then went down to the shop.

But luckily not everyone is in my current situation. And the British temperament, thought abroad to be fuelled by the stiffness of its  upper lip, is in fact driven by something far more eternal. Something that in fact strenthens the upper lip; something that has driven the whole history of England's literature and art; something that enables history, in fact, to be allowed to take place at all. It is, in this culture that goes back over a thousand years (and is thus in some ways as intimate as a family, with shared references and no-go areas), the perennially self-generating force of satire.

So my heart leaped when I discovered today that my question is beginning to be answered. From a doughty corner of Britain - the corner occupied by the Scottish poet WN Herbert - comes the best thing of all: a parody of Lewis Carroll. In anapaests.

The Osborne and the Cameron
    disturbed the oysters’ sleep:
by saving sandgrains from the strand
    they made the oysters weep.

‘Should seven widows give their mites
    to us for seven years,
do you think, dear Ozzie, that our debts
    would somehow all be cleared?’

‘—Call the knackers,’ he replied,
    ‘And let them axe
        all facts!’

The Osborne popped his bully cork
    and struck the wasteful sun -
the oysters barked, so in the dark
    he ate them one by one.

‘Should seven virgins save their oil
    to balm our troubled brains,
do you feel, dear Clammy, we’d have power
    for buses and for trains?’

‘—Control the yackers,’ he opined,
    ‘who knows, once hacks
        relax!’

The Cameron buttered buttered bread,
    cut slices from the moon,
and, as the oysters whined, each oik
    met with his silver spoon.

...and there's more - much more...

Monday @ KGB: Catherine Barnett & David Lehman

Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2004 Whiting Award, the 2004 Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award and was published in spring 2004 by Alice James Books. Her poems have been published in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The Washington Post, Barrow Street, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and The Iowa Review. Barnett also teaches at NYU, where she was recently honored with an Outstanding Service Award.

David Lehman is one of the founders of the Monday Night Poetry Series at KGB Bar.  He is the author of seven books of poems, most recently When a Woman Loves a Man, and seven books of prose, most recently A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs.  He is the series editor of the Best American Poetry Series and teaches poetry at The New School.  

The Monday night Poetry reading series at KGB is hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez & Michael Quattrone, and was founded by David Lehman and Star Black. 

Readings begin at 7:30 pm. Admission is FREE

For the complete season line-up, click here.

KGB Bar ● 85 East 4th Street ● New York, NY 10003 ● Phone: 212-505-3360 ● KgbBar.com