The Best American Poetry

Books/Mags/Panels/Readings I Can't Wait to Buy/Read/See/Hear at the AWP

Aimee Nezhukumatathil's Lucky Fish (Tupelo) is definitely at the top of my list. Also at or near the top is Steve Kistulentz's The Luckless Age, just out from Red Hen Press. And the great thing is that I will soon be swooning over poets that I had no idea existed or wrote such lively and funny and musical verse. That's the best part about AWP: discovery! 

And then there's all those beautiful hot-off-the-presses lit mags just waiting for us: Willow Springs, Puerto del Sol, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Bat City Review, just to name a few. Last year I ponied up for 2-year subscriptions of The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Ecotone, all for a fraction of the cover price. I sure didn't regret that. That's another great thing about AWP--screaming deals!

I blogged yesterday about Thursday's line-up, but have a look at Friday. At 9 am there's a panel titled Channeling Voices: The Persona Poem with Julie Sheehan, Linda Bierds, Cornelius Eady, Joan Houlihan, Melissa Stein, Robert Thomas on the curious case of persona poem. I am so excited about this one. And after what I'm sure will be a lively and worthwhile chat,  we can all pay tribute, come late afternoon, to one of our best dramatic monologists: Ai. But before that tribute, there's the Houghton Mifflin celebrating 10 years of Michael Collier at the helm. Andrew Hudgins, Linda Gregerson, Rodney Jones, Maurice Manning, and Leslie Harrison are all reading. Next it's off to Local Poets with National Reputations, where Linda Pastan, Carolyn Forche, Fanny Howe, Jonetta Rose Barras will read. That's some line-up. And, if you're still conscious at that point,Claudia Rankine and Charles Wright will grace the Regency Ballroom.  

Anyway, these are my choices for Friday. Am I missing out on something I somehow overlooked? If so, please post a comment and let us know any enticing options I may have overlooked! 

Hitchcock would be there if he could . . .

You may get the feeling from recent posts that everyone is going to descend on Washington, D.C. this week for the AWP conference.  Alas, I'm not going.  But that hasn't stopped me from looking at the panels on offer and dreaming about which ones I would attend if I could.  Here's one that I would set my alarm for.  I asked Stephanie Brown to tell me little bit more about what I'm going to miss:

"Strangers on a Train: What Poets Can Learn from Hitchcock" with Ralph Angel, David St. John, Michelle Mitchell-Foust, Suzanne Lummis, and Stephanie Brown, on Thursday at 10:30 in the Diplomat Ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel, West Lobby.

What will poets learn if they attend this panel?  David St. John says, “They will learn why the psychological inner narratives of Hitchcock movies are exactly like the enactments of voice we find in contemporary poems. They will learn why Poe set the stage not only for Hitchcock but also for many late 20th Century poems of revelation and epiphany.” Suzanne Lummis will discuss how to use Hitchcock's films in creative writing classes. She’ll illustrate some of Ezra. Pound's and Hitchcock's principles with a discussion of the visuals and narrative from Hitchcock's early film Sabotage along with comparisons to the work of Wislawa Szymborska. Michelle Mitchell-Foust will talk about Hitchcock’s use of vertical perspective (a camera shooting up and under Anthony Perkins’ chin in Psycho, for instance, rather than the use of a horizontal perspective) and how this choice of perspective be used as a method for both teaching and writing. Stephanie Brown will discuss the way Hitchcock layers narrative in Vertigo, using the landscape of California to create a reverse timeline of California history that runs throughout the story. A writer can layer narratives in the same way via the use of symbols and landscape. Ralph Angel will discuss Hitchcock’s women, a subject as large and complex than any of the others. 

If you weren't planning to go, this should change your mind:

-- sdh

Floricanto, AWP book signings, and Dap Gold:The Tropical Roundup [by Emma Trelles]

 

Introducing The Tropical Roundup, in which I, at random times, post points of interest that may be thematically or geographically linked. Or, they could be event driven or contain some kind of vital-to-obscure news peg, Said points will most likely be stolen from other sources, such as blogs and dailies, but will also be gathered by scrawling notes on the back of gas receipts, in a fruitless effort to bring order to our blue and green sphere, which is currently screaming off its invisible tracks.

Also, I like lists.

 

1.   First and foremost in the inaugural round up is FLORICANTO IN WASHINGTON D.C.: A Multicultural Reading in Response to SB 1070.

The reading takes place during the AWP Conference this Friday, Feb. 4, from 6-9 p.m., at the True Reformer Building in D.C., and is sponsored by Split This Rock, The Acentos Poetry Foundation, and Poets Responding to SB 1070. Floricanto presents more than 20 poets responding in verse to what organizers call the growing "xenophobia under which the bill was created," which "targets immigrants and legalizes racial profiling."

SB 1070 was signed into state law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer in April 2010 and authorizes police to arrest and charge any immigrant not carrying identifying documents. When asked to comment on how police officers might discern suspects without profiling, Governor Brewer told the New York Times "we simply have to trust in our law enforcement." 

Because blind trust in men with guns always works out well, doesn't it?

According to Rich Villar, executive director of the Acentos Foundation, the word "floricanto" has linguistic origins in both the Meso-American and Spanish languages, re-appearing during the rise of the Chicano arts and poetry movements of th 60s.. "Poets came together for celebration, for political ends, for self-affirmation," says Villar.  "In the Floricanto, the poetic and political are not only compatible, but complimentary, inevitable."

 "This reading is a show of solidarity," Villar adds. "It is also very a specific act. It is the unambiguous use of language, in the form of poetry, to counter the obfuscated legal language of war, death, and exile. The poets in this reading do precisely that, day in and day out."

Floricanto will be hosted by Oscar Bermeo and featured readers include  Francisco X. Alarcon, Tara Betts, Sarah Browning, Regie Cabico, Carmen Calatayud, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Susan Deer Cloud, Martín Espada, Odilia Galvan Rodriguez, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Aracelis Girmay, Randall Horton, Juan Felipe Herrera, Dorianne Laux, Marilyn Nelson, Mark Nowak, Barbara Jane Reyes, Abel Salas, Sonia Sanchez, Craig Santos Perez, Hedy Trevino, Pam Uschuk, Dan Vera, Rich Villar, and Andre Yang.

 2.  AWP Conference,  Author book signings

Here's a sampling of who will sign what at this year's bookfair. Is there an author/book that's been missed? Add it to the comments box.

Neil de la Flor, Almost Dorothy (Marsh Hawk Press). Buy this book and score a free voodoo doll bookmark. Neil will also be taking pre-orders with Maureen Seaton for their collaborative book Sinead O'Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds (Firewheel Editions). A23, Saturday, Feb. 5, 2-2:45 p.m.

Jim Daniels, Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry (Carnegie Mellon University Press). H29, Friday, Feb. 4, 12:30-1:30 p.m.

Susan Briante, Utopia Minus (Ahsahta Press). E27 & E28, Friday, Feb. 4, 10-11 a.m. 

Justin Petropoulos, Eminent Domain (Marsh Hawk Press). Winner of the 2010 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. E10, Saturday, Feb. 5, 11:30 a.m.

Valerie Duff, To The New World (Salmon Poetry). E26.

Dan Albergotti, The Boatloads (BOA Editions). Booth 208, Hall C,Thursday, Feb.3, noon.  

All from Rose Metal Press. A4. Friday, February 4: Adam Golaski, Color Plates. 10:30 a.m.; Mary Hamilton, We Know What We Are. 2 p.m. Carol Guess, Tinderbox Lawn. 3 p.m.

Packing (and unpacking) for AWP 2011 [by Martha Silano]

Martha Silano here. For the next six days I will be blogging to you live from the 2011 Associated Writing Programs Conference in Washington DC.

However, right now I am in the other Washington, where I am trying to figure out how many pairs of boots and long johns to take with me.

I have lived in the land of moss and ferns for too long. I've become what my East coast friends refer to as "a cold wimp." Jack Frost has not nipped my nose since I visited Santa Fe in 1986 and came down with a terrible flu after jogging when it was 2 degrees outside.  

I've been emailing back and forth with Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, just out from White Pine Press, because she arrived in DC two days ago after a similar dilemma regarding which boots to bring with her: the very waterproof/warm but less stylish, or the less waterproof/warm but quite hip. She is telling me in today’s missives that she went with the hip pair and definitely made the right choice, that in fact as of 4 pm today it was 49 degrees in our nation's capitol, and then added that I needed to bring my sunglasses.

Sunglasses. What a novel concept.

 Meanwhile, Weatherbug.com shows, next to Tuesday, Feb 1, the day I fly to DC, a white cloud with a bunch of snowflakes falling from it. Oh, and also mention of freezing rain. (Perhaps I should also be packing a plant mister filled with de-icer?)

 Okay, so I am a cold wimp, but I also like glittery tank tops and very much not waterproof sleek black boots, though admittedly I also adore my Joan of Arctic Sorel boot with “vulcanized rubber shell” and “felt frost plug,” rated at -25 degree F.

But will I need them?

I also have a bunch of books and magazines I want to read on the plane, but I dimly recall my final hours in Denver at last year’s conference being spent alternately jumping on my suitcase to get it to close, and woefully removing several coveted literary magazines purchased at the Book Fair and flinging them into the trash.

I should not pack a single piece of reading material for the East bound flight, and I should only fill my suitcase half way, but everyone who knows me knows that this is not going to happen, for I must be reading or writing from take off till landing in order to prevent myself from contemplating the fact that at any moment the plane I am on could suddenly fall off the radar and God knows which city we’d all come showering down on. Or that we might actually have to figure out how to don our life vests and blow into those hideous tubes before we hit the emergency slides a la Steven Slater (yes, you can be sure I will take time to grab an icy cold one from a beverage cart in anticipation of my swan dive into the gelid waters of Lake Erie.)

But getting back to my destination: the AWP conference! Several weeks ago I printed out my own personal schedule, the must-sees during my 3-day panelizing and reading marathon. Here’s what I am hoping to attend on the first official day of the Literary Big Top, Thursday, February 3:

10:30-11:45 am If You Can’t Dance You Can Keep Your Revolution (Sean Thomas Dougherty(below L), Crystal Williams (below R), and four other Writers of Political Engagement)
 

3-4:15 pm: This Human Longing, with Bob Hicok(below L), Marie Howe, Gregory Orr (below R), Kevin Young, and Alison Granucci.

 4:30-5:45 pm: 40^th Anniverary Ploughshares Reading with Terrance Hayes and others, but from this I cut out early for the Saturnalia/Painted Bride Quarterly reading at Bardeo, which I hear is very close by and has a wonderful array of finger foods.

 Note that I am not even attempting to attend anything during the 9-10:15 am panel slot. This is because (1) jet lag and (2) not having to be up at 7 am PST to make buttermilk pancakes in the shapes of hearts or soccer balls or dinosaurs or butterflies for my two school-aged kids. Either that or I will be doing the other thing I never have time to do in Seattle: exercising at a gym.

 Wish me a safe journey in which I do not hear “this is your captain. I have just received word from Air Traffic Control that Reagan National Airport has closed due to [insert one of the following: heavy snow, freezing rain, hail, graupel, earth quake, avalanche, meteor strike, space alien invasion].”

"Wow!" he said . . . AWP Comics, by Nin Andrews

 

Not Just Another Highlight Reel (David Lehman and The Boston Musical Theater)

We just do what we have to do . . .

"If I insist that my work be rewarding, that it mustn't be tedious or monotonous, I'm in trouble. . . . Time after time it fails to become so.  So I get more agitated about it, I fight with people about it, I make more demands about it. . . . It's ridiculous to demand that work always be pleasurable, because work is not necessarily pleasing; sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.  If we're detached and simply pick up the job we have to do and go ahead and do it, it's usually fairly satisfying.  Even jobs that are repugnant or dull or tedious tend to be quite satisfying, once we get right down to doing them. . . . One of the routine jobs I get every once in a while comes from putting out a little magazine.  You to sort the pages.  It's a simple, routine, mechanical sort of job. . . . I never realized that this would be one of the most satisfying parts of the whole thing, just standing there sorting pages.  This happens when we just do what we have to do."

-- Thomas Merton "The Springs of Contemplation:  A Retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani"

-- sdh

Green Grow the Mountains, O!

Kudos to editor Neil Shepard and poetry editor Elizabeth Powell on the splendid new issue of GREEN MOUNTAINS REVIEW with its special 100-page section on poetic influence in addition to another 130 pages of poety and fiction. Among those represented are Olena Kalytiak Davis, Stephen Dunn, Martin Espada, Dorianne Laux, Adrienne Su, and Natasha Trethewey, and there are tributes to influential masters -- an interview with Dunn, an essay on Maxine Kumin, poems in honor of Ruth Stone. Most wonderful of all, to this reader, are the discoveries, works by persons previously unknown to me. Anna Maria Hong, for example, has two compelling sonnets. And Stephen Dunn quotes a poem by the Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst, whose writing (Dunn explains) "suggests that it takes everything you have to get simplicity right." Here's the Bringhurst poem Dunn cites. -- DL

These Poems, She Said

These poems, these poems,

these poems, she said, are poems

with no love in them. These are the poems of a man   

who would leave his wife and child because   

they made noise in his study. These are the poems   

of a man who would murder his mother to claim   

the inheritance. These are the poems of a man   

like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not   

comprehend but which nevertheless

offended me. These are the poems of a man

who would rather sleep with himself than with women,   

she said. These are the poems of a man

with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s   

hands, woven of water and logic

and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These   

poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant   

as elm leaves, which if they love love only   

the wide blue sky and the air and the idea

of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,   

and not a beginning. Love means love

of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.   

These poems, she said....

                                       You are, he said,

beautiful.

                That is not love, she said rightly.

-- Robert Bringhurst (Green Mountains Review, vol. 33, no. 2)

Martha Silano, Guest Blogger January 30 - February 5

 This week we welcome back Martha Silano as our guest blogger.  Martha is the author of The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, chosen by Campbell McGrath as the winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her other collections are Blue Positive and What the Truth Tastes Like. Her poems have appeared in many places, including American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, TriQuarterly, and Best American Poetry 2009. Martha teaches at Bellevue College. Welcome, Martha.

In other news . . . 

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was one of the deadliest industrial disasters in history.  It marked a turning point in the history of the labor movement in the US.  Now the Jewish Daily Forward is accepting original, unpublished English and Yiddish poems that reflect upon the tragic fire’s meaning and legacy. A distinguished panel of judges will select a winning poem in each language to receive a $500 cash prize and to be published in the Forward. Details here. 

Nin Andrews interviews Richard Mathews for Meet the Press.

-- sdh

How to Approach Potential Employers at AWP

Things you might need to know.

 

Are You Going to AWP? (by Nin Andrews)

  

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews interviews Richard Mathews, editor of the Tampa Review and director of the University of Tampa Press

NA. I'd love it if you would start by telling me a little bit about yourself:  how you became a writer, editor, publisher, and how these worlds are interwoven.

RM. The worlds have always been interwoven for me, I guess.  That’s a good word to use. From writing and printing little stories using a toy printing set with rubber type as a kid, to editing my high school newspaper, working as a writer and layout staff person for weekly and daily newspapers while putting myself through school at the University of Florida, to being a letterpress printer and university editor/publisher today. As an undergrad I switched from a journalism major to an English major, and I got more serious about writing poetry and fiction. I was founding editor of the literary journal Florida Quarterly at the University of Florida and went on to earn my PhD at the University of Virginia, not only because I knew I could study with a great literature faculty there, but also because I could take creative writing workshops with Peter Taylor, who was their writer-in-residence.  Some of his longtime friends from college days, Robert Lowell most frequently, would visit from time to time and come into our workshop. During my time there I shifted away from fiction toward poetry. I won an Academy of American Poets prize and began to publish my poetry in little magazines, but I also continued to write fiction, with Peter’s encouragement.  I have to say, though, he was especially supportive of my poetry, even though what he saw of it was incidental really, since he was teaching fiction workshops.

Of course, it makes sense that he’d encourage poetry, given his long friendship with Lowell and his marriage to the wonderful poet Eleanor Ross Taylor.  In fact there’s a continuation of these good memories made tangible in a collection of short stories we published about a year ago.  Through a surprising series of events, we had the chance to publish the first collection of short stories by Jean Ross Justice, a wonderful writer whose work I hadn’t really known until the manuscript was passed along to us by a mutual friend, Robert Dana. Jean’s work had appeared in Esquire, Antioch Review, Yale Review, Shenandoah, The Oxford American, and elsewhere, but these and other stories had never been collected until we brought out her book, The End of a Good Party .  It turns out that Jean is the widow of poet Donald Justice.  And she is also the sister of Peter Taylor’s wife, the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor.  As things unfolded, Peter and Eleanor wound up living in Florida (in Gainesville, at my old alma mater, the University of Florida), as did Donald Justice and Jean, before they moved to Iowa. These interesting, layered connections only slowly dawned on me, after we had already decided to publish the book of Jean’s stories, without any of us having realizing the links . . . 

It’s a marvelous literary “full circle” in interesting ways.  Again, it seems thoroughly interwoven. Jean’s book would not have happened without some more tight interweaving, through the friendship of two great colleagues here at Tampa who have been consistently involved with Tampa Review, Don Morrill and Lisa Birnbaum, close friends of Robert Dana, who also knew Jean Justice.  Lisa has been one of our fiction editors, and she offered to work with Jean as our in-house editor to agree on the final selection of stories and see everything through final page edits.  It was a labor of love for all of us—and we’re also proud to have published some of Jean’s stories in Tampa Review. 

NA.  How would you best describe your press? 

Things Ben Mirov Thinks are Rad: Post 4 of ???

Every now and then an essay comes around that captures an inchoate idea in poetry and amplifies and shapes that idea. Take Charles Olson's magisterial "Projective Verse," which not only explicates but embodies the poetic principles it talks about. Dan Hoy's newly minted, THE PIN-UP STAKES, over at Montevidayo, is one such essay. In brief, Hoy talks about the relatively new coupling of poetry and the marketing of poetry, (via social networking, blogging, publicity stunts, etc.) thereby defining an emerging poetic category of "Image Artist". According to Hoy's assessment, image artists fall within a category of poet that uses poetry as a platform to create a "strategic framework" and or brand for themselves. 

(Disclaimer: I am the current poetry editor of LIT Magazine and will become editor-in-chief next issue, so if you hate thinly veiled self-promotion, please skip ahead.)

The current issue of LIT Magazine is days away from being printed. We are going to have a release party at Housing Works in NYC. Get all the details and an author's list by clicking on the image of the cover. I've been super proud to work on LIT with our great team of editors. Our current editors-in-chief, Jackie Clark and Ben Kendrick are stepping down after this issue. It will be difficult to see them go and the magazine will suffer without their insight and hard work. Thanks, bros. 

Also, I'd like to congratulate Jennifer L. Knox (LIT #17: "Kiri Te Kanawa Singing 'O Mio Babbino Caro') and Farrah Field (LIT #18: "You're Really Starting to Suck, Amy" and "Amy Survives Another Apocalypse") for having their poems chosen for the next Best American Poetry.  

Here is a quote by James Tate (right) from an interview in Durak #2 (1979) I've been thinking about:

Interviewer: How do you characterize your sense of humor?

Tate: I've never been able to separate and identify my sense of humor, even or myself. Insights are funny, and perceptions can be funny when they're sharp enough. You could say about humor that in the long run it's more hopeless than tragedy. I'm not apologetic about that part of myself; I learned to live with it a long time ago.

I love WORLD BALL NOTEBOOK by Sesshu Foster from City Lights Books. It's a collection of microcosms, mostly prose poems, that examine minute social interactions, mishaps, conversations, travelogs, and emails. The poems are placed within the context of a ubiquitous game, so that the people in each poem become players, unaware of the game's rules and ultimate goal. What condenses over WORLD BALL NOTEBOOK's 137 pages is a beautiful, pathos filled, picture of humanity that is both entertaining and visionary. 

Gladys Horton, lead singer for The Marvelettes: More than just another fish in the sea

Gladys Horton, one of the lead singers for the Marvelettes, has died. It’s a measure of how little respect this great girl-group has been given that The New York Times obituary of Horton had to resort to many hedges due to a lack of outside scholarship about the group. Horton was either 64 or 65 when she died; she was born either in Inkster, Michigan, or Gainesville, Florida; the Marvelettes broke up either “in the late 1960s or early 1970s.” Sigh. I think we know the exact moment the Beatles broke up, and the precise moment Dylan “went electric,” don’t we?

         The Marvelettes will always be obscured by other acts on the Motown label starting with the Supremes. But they released a string of singles that are exceptional examples of girl-group soul. Their tight harmonies, no-nonsense phrasing, and lack of melodramatic flourishes may actually have worked against them, as did their talent for putting across a novelty song such as (the Marvin Gaye-written) “Beechwood 4-5789” as skillfully as they did more poetic work such as Smokey Robinson’s extraordinary “The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game.”

         Horton didn’t sing lead on that last song, but she did on the group’s biggest hit, “Please Mr. Postman,” and one of the Marvelettes’ trickiest, wittiest performances, “Too Many Fish In The Sea.”

 

         “I don’t want nobody that don’t want me,” sang Horton on that song. The firm decisiveness is in the lyric written by Norman Whitfield and Eddie Holland, to be sure. But it wouldn’t be half as effective had Horton not sung the sentiment with such a whiplash sting, flicking each consonant at the listener as though she wanted to commingle pain with your pleasure. She was a fine, fine vocalist, and you’d do well to track down a copy of The Marvelettes: Anthology, the best showcase for the group’s work, a short history of soul music across 28 tracks, concluding with the superbly punctuated song title, “A Breath Taking Guy.” Every breath Horton took on these hit singles was a strong one

Things Ben Mirov Thinks are Rad: Post 3 of ???

Dean Young's heart is rad. Even through it may not be working as well as it should, it's produced tons of poems that have helped me live my life. Dean needs a new heart. You can help by making a donation in his honor to the National Foundation for Transplants. I donated for the purely self-serving reason, that helping get Dean get a new heart will be as close as I ever come to writing a Dean Young poem, but I'm sure you will find a better reason. Also the folks over at Coldfront have a rad rundown and video of a benefit for Dean at the National Arts Club in NYC that is worth checking out. Here is a one of many poems by Dean that have helped me make my way through the ossuary:

The Invention of Heaven

The mind becomes a field of snow

but then the snow melts and the dandelions 

blink on and you can walk through them,

your trousers plastered with dew.

They're all waiting for you but first

here's a booth where you can win

 

a peacock feather for bursting a balloon,

a man in huge stripes shouting about 

a boy who is half swan, the biggest 

pig in the world. Then you will pass 

tractors pulling other tractors,

trees snagged with bright wrappers

 

and then you will come to a river

and then you will wash your face.

Birds LLC is rad. They just released two new titles: EITHER WAY I'M CELEBRATING by Sommer Browning and KINGS OF THE F**CKING SEA by Dan Bohel. Birds is shaping up to be a press that represents all the best parts of small publishing enterprises from the 60s and 70s with a dash of professional design and promotion thrown in for good measure. They are a publishing family hell-bent on supporting their own, while bringing hot hot poems to the masses. Also, Birds is having a book release party for the aforementioned titles in Brooklyn this Friday, details HERE.

 

The Wilhelm Scream by James Blake is rad. Can't stop listening to it and staring out the window into the snow while basking in existential melancholy. This isn't the official video, but I think the song goes way better with the kitten riding the magic carpet, anyway.

 

FOOD I CORP is rad. It seems like an insidious, Illuminati-type organization. They have a publishing branch that puts out a stream of truly weird poems and various other oddities. The also have a bunch of interlinked Tumblrs that spit out photos sent via the cell phones of an unknown number of constituents (CORPse, SMASH MAGAZINE, BLACK & GOLD, EAT CORP, CORPTAILS). Seems like it will only become more and more powerful as it spreads like a virus throughout the internet. 

A Little More about Jerry Kern (by Laura Orem)

In response to the previous post, and in continuing honor of Jerome Kern's birthday, here are four versions (three video, one audio) of the remarkable song, "Ol' Man River," written with Oscar Hammerstein for the 1927 Broadway production of "Show Boat."  It is a seminal song in American music for many reasons. For one thing, it was meant to be sung as a bass solo by the character Joe. For another, the song expresses - without caricature and with deep sympathy - the interior lives of the black characters in the play. It acts as a leitfmotif throughout "Show Boat," which, despite its "happy" ending, is perhaps one of the most melancholy pieces in 20th century American musical theater: the two major characters are a woman abandoned for five years by her gambler husband and a woman ruined by the exposure of her true racial identity, drawn against a backdrop of the racism of the deep South in the late 19th century.

Kern and Hammerstein knew what they were doing with the song, and they were very nervous about how it would go over. There is a story of both of them sneaking out of the theater during the premier, lurking in the lobby because they were too jumpy about the audience's response. (It was originally sung by Jules Bledsoe [right], although the song is most associated with Paul Robeson's performance in the 1936 movie version.) As the song ended, there was a deep, unnerving quiet. Kern and Hammerstein looked at each other in alarm and finally worked up enough courage to take a peek. The audience was sitting in stunned silence, many of them quietly weeping, too moved to applaud, too moved to move.

Paul Robeson (left) is actually known for two versions of the song - the version sung in the 1936 James Whale movie, and a later version which is in a way a defiant response to the song's sentiment of resignation. In earlier productions, the character of Joe is a comic figure, resonant of minstrelsy and typical stereotypes of the time. Robeson changed the lyric - slightly but in important ways - in later perfomances to reflect his commitment to civil rights and his own sense of personal dignity.

Interestingly, the lyric had already been changed in each major production, indicative of what was acceptable language during each era. In the 1927 version, the lyric went: "Niggers all work on de Mississippi/Niggers all work while de white folks play." In the 1936, this was changed to "darkies;" in the 1946 revival (and in the 1951 movie), it became "colored folks."  Finally, in the 1946 movie, "Till the Clouds Roll By," a biopic of Kern's life, it morphed into "Here we all work on the Mississippi," sung by Frank Sinatra (above right) in a white tux against a white background, accompanied by a white orchestra and about a thousand white dancers all dressed in white. Apparently, no one got the irony.

Happy Birthday, Jerry Kern

I hear music when I look at you,
A beautiful theme of every dream I ever knew.
Down deep in my heart
I hear it play,
I feel it start
Then melt away.
I hear music when I touch your hand,
A beautiful melody from some enchanted land.
Down deep in my heart
I hear it say:
Is this the day?
I alone
Have heard this lovely strain.
I alone
Have heard this glad refrain.
Must it be
Forever inside of me?
Why can't I let it go?
Why can't I let you know?
Why can't I let you know
The song my heart would sing --
That beautiful rhapsody
Of love and youth and spring?
The music is sweet,
The words are true.
The song is you.

-- Music by Jerome kern, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein (1932)

Snow [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest darlingest Bleaders,

This is beginning to seem like kind of a lot of snow. Am I wrong? I grew up around these parts and it seems to me when I was a kid there were a lot of winters in which there was this much snow, but that might have been situational as at the time I was very much shorter.

The philosopher tells us to remember to factor in changes in perspective, the meteorologist tells us we've smoke-stacked our planet right out of whack, which is whack; the poet tells us the world in dark and white is something pleasing,but then, it is worth considering that the poet almost never has to shovel. 

I'm enjoying Mirov's posts and am inspired to send you off in my directions, linkily speaking. On music try Jace Clayton. Check out Astra Taylor on unschooling in this video! Listen to Benjamin Walker's Too Much Information. I like everything artist Peggy Nelson does. And, as always, you should so be going to the Poetry Brothel (yes that's me in the photo).

Okay, I love all you arty philosophical freaks and insist that you keep up all your bad behavior. I wish I could say more but have suit up to go pick up the kiddies in the blizzie.  If you need more of me, read the old posts or buy a book! They're cheap! And it cheers me up when they appear to be selling. Yes, like all pets, I'm that petty. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again. OTG* there is a lot of snow on my tree jewelry.

Love,

Jennifer

*Oh Their God. In my house when someone sneezes, we say "einstein". wink.

Video from the Dean Young Benefit [by Amy Lawless]

 

Dude, did you go to the Dean Young Benefit?  I didn't either. So put down your self-flagellation devices and click this link that will transport you over to Coldfront where D.J. Dolack had the wherewhithal to record it and post it and then email me that he posted it. Yay D.J. Also give Dean Young some of your money, otherwise what's the good of SCIENCE?  HAHHAHAHAHAHHA. YAY SCIENCE! WHOOO HOOOOOOO! 

It's important to use science to keep the people we like and love here as long as possible. Oh right the link!  CLICK HERE.

To read about Dean Young and make an online donation, please visit his page at the National Foundation for Transplants.

Sneak Peek: Augury Books is co-curating an evening of poetry at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan. 150 W. 17 St., NYC 10011 @ 7:00 PM

Indiana power plant after flood, 1913. Photograph by DJ Angus.

Poets Kimiko Hahn, Saskia Hamilton, Noelle Kocot, David Lehman, Ben Lerner, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Stacy Szymaszek read poems by themselves and others on the themes of absence, emptiness, and…nothing.

Here's a poem by David Lehman:

The Human Factor

The gambler knows nothing’s
more addictive than deception
with the chance that the betrayed one,
the spouse or the State, is pretending
or consenting to be deceived
for motives of vanity and greed
not different from his own,
leaving him with a choice to make
between his mistress and his self-respect –
which may be why the ideal reader
of Graham Greene’s novels went
to a parochial school, was married
and divorced, has lived abroad
in Europe or Asia, plays in a weekly
small-stakes poker game, works
for a newspaper, lies to make a living.

Find more information about tonight's event here.