The Best American Poetry

Whither Greece? [by DL]

I asked the man in the street, I mean my friend on the Street, about the fate of Greece and the Eurozone, and this is what I heard:
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I don't know about Greece. None of the other countries really cares about Greece, many because their own problems are overwhelming, and in the long run I think Greece would be better off out of the Eurozone and, in fact, the whole EU (haven't The Iliad and The Odyssey been proof a long time that Greece is both the single force most responsible for Europe and not itself European?). But you also have to consider the run on banks that Greece's exit would probably — some would say surely — trigger and which the other Euro countries obviously don't want and are incapable of dealing with, financially or otherwise. So it looks like Greece either gets out on its own, defaulting on its debt, and begins the long road to recovery, or, through no fault of its own, really, but because no one wants the fantasy to evaporate, it takes out the whole Eurozone and possibly, eventually, the EU as well. Good riddance to bad rubbish: The United States of Europe has always seemed ridiculous to me. But, meanwhile, chaos either way.
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What can I say / but oy vay? Meanwhile, if anyone knows anything about a Spanish language Monopoly-like board game about the IMF called" Eternal Debt," please let me know. -- DL

Nin Andrews: How to Write the MFA Poem

Tom Clark, on his estimable blog today, posts Nin Andrews's must-read "Learning to Write the MFA Poem." (Click here.) We printed the poem in its entirety on February 22, 2010, as you'll see if you use this link, but I can't resist offering this excerpt:

there is a certain kind of poem I was taught to write
when I was earning what my husband calls my mail-order degree
from a low-res program in the Northeast.  And I guess
I would call this kind of poem an MFA poem,
though the truth is, I never learned to write one very well
(though this is one of them, or is trying to be),
but I do see them everywhere now, these MFA poems,
which I despise, not because the poems are bad
but because I was taught how to write them
by this asshole professor (he was such a creep)
who was abusive to women, mostly,
fucked with their heads if not their bodies,
you know the type.  Back then
the women took whatever he dished out
because he was famous I guess.
I hated that, and how he would write poems
about being an asshole, which he was and is,
and about everything and anything else
because, he would explain, everything is happening at once,
so everything is happening in his poems, and happening so fast,
that the past, present, and future are all there in the poems
though nothing is ever really happening
because the poems are usually in some static place

The next stanza takes the poem to that particular place and does amazing things with the set-up. It's a tour de force -- the truth, the poetry, and the parody are one. Mega kludos, Nin.

I remember writing a poem called "The Guggenheim Poem," aping the kind of poems people used to write on their fellowship year funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The poems uusally took place in Italy -- in Venice, often, but sometimes Florence or Rome, with side trips to Siena, and maybe Arezzo, and certainly Rapollo, and once in a while Naples. The poet had gone to a museum in a flimsy skirt in the fierce heat and the eyes of the men were upon her as she walked on the hot brick or cobblestone streets and she wore sunglasses and imagined she was Audrey Hepburn but all pretense and fantasy fell away when she came face to face with the Titian of Venus and Adonis or the David of Donatello in Florence or Piero's madonna and child in Urbino or a Giorgione self-portrait in Venice, which she saw as a vision of her father or her husband, she's not sure which, though she has spent many hours analyzing the possibilities, but this she knows this: it was a sudden flash, an epiphany even, like seeing a broken statue and realizing you had to change your life. -- DL

Your Soul is a Landscape Rare: The Monet to Mallarme Poetry Walk at the New York Botanical Garden (through October 21, 2012) by Madge McKeithen

photo (c) Lawrence Schwartzwald

 In the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths . . . Arthur Rimbaud “Sensation.”

The pillars of Nature’s temple are alive/and sometimes yield perplexing messages . . . Charles Baudelaire “Correspondences.”

…one of those magical, closed water lilies which spring up suddenly, enveloping nothingness with their hollow whiteness, formed from untouched dreams . . . Stephane Mallarmé “The White Water Lily.”

The stunningly beautiful convergence of gardens, painting, and poetry now alive along the Monet to Mallarmé Poetry Walk at the New York Botanical Garden defies narration and invites a walk, an afternoon, several.

To walk the gardens, read the words, take in the artist’s palette, and stand before two of Monet’s rarely seen paintings is to get a sense of the rush of creative spirit and intelligence that marked the interactions of the Mardistes, painters, poets, writers and musicians who gathered regularly at Mallarmé’s Paris apartment more than 120 years ago.

This third collaboration between the Poetry Society of America and the New York Botanical Garden, following Emily Dickinson’s Garden in 2010 and the 2011 Gardens of the Alhambra featuring poems by Federico García Lorca, is a must see, with months ahead for repeat visits. The exhibit is open through October 21.

The Botanical Garden and the Poetry Walk were the setting for the Poetry Society of America’s Spring Benefit on May 23^rd, which brought together poets, musicians, and friends of poetry for a tour of the exhibit and the Poetry Walk, followed by an evening of music and dinner at the newly renovated Stone Mill. Soprano Jennifer Zetlan and pianist David Shimoni performed three beautiful selections that set the words of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé to music by Britten, Gretchaninov, and Debussy. Actress Maria Tucci’s reading of a selection of poems from the French Symbolists gave resonant, memorable voice to verse more familiar on the page than aloud.

The impressively wide-ranging offerings as a result of this  collaboration between the Poetry Society of America and the Botanical Garden include, over the course of the next five months, films, concerts, poetry readings, and children’s art activities. A new NYBG in Bloom APP allows visitors to the exhibit to toggle between the plants in Monet’s Garden and Monet’s paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A Saturday afternoon Salon Series, will feature poets reading from their favorite French poets and speaking about their influences.

A visit to Monet’s Garden offers the possibility if not certainty of an enlivening appreciation of visual and poetic beauty. Of Monet’s time, Alice Quinn writes in her essay in the exhibit catalog, “This was a moment of true apotheosis in Parisian cultural life, when so many geniuses were – as scholar Mary Ann Caws noted – ‘in a lookabout mode’.” An experience analogous to a ‘lookabout mode’ accompanies a walk down the Poetry Walk to Monet’s Garden. Poems and paintings and the impulses that sparked and inspired them are nestled within a landscape of intense beauty – colors and light play across a magnificent horticultural tableau.

A central theme of the exhibit runs through much of the wall text and is stated succinctly: for Monet, gardens were “part refuge, part motivator, part work of art”. Monet’s Garden and the Monet to Mallarmé Poetry Walk offer all three.

“Monet’s Garden” runs from Saturday through Oct. 21 at the New York Botanical Garden, Bronx River Parkway (Exit 7W) and Fordham Road, Bedford Park, the Bronx; (718) 817-8700, nybg.org.

Madge McKeithen has written about poems in several essays including those collected in her book, Blue Peninsula (FSG, 2006). She initiated the One Page Poetry Circle at the NYPL and at the Darien Library. Her work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies and newspapers, The New York Times Book Review, and Best American Essays 2011. She teaches nonfiction in the Writing Program at the New School University and writes online at www.madgemckeithen.com.

The "Soupe au Pistou" Challenge [by DL]

Can you come up with a better recipe for soupe au pistou than this one or that one?

Which do you favor, the Epicurious recipe or Mark Bittman's in The New York Times?

A friend is going to the south of France, and our conversation prompted my recollection of this wonderful soup as served in Vence and other such places in the alpes maritimes just north of Nice. -- DL

James Diamond, Private Eye [by DL]

I asked a friend who works on the Street to comment on the news of the colossal mishaps at JP Morgan Chase under golden boy Jamie Dimon's watch.

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One of the more bizarre signs of Jamie Dimon's fall from grace is the way he is now often referred to in the media as "James Dimon." (You feel like saying, "Private eye?") The real money loser, though, unless the initial $2 billion, which has already widened to $5 billion, turns out to be only the beginning of a chasm, is his loss of the ability to argue down regulation in Washington. That regulation, whatever its virtues, and there's no doubt in my mind that the regulation is needed, just as there's no doubt it won't prevent future stealing, mismanagement, recessions, and depressions, is going to cost JPM and the other banks a fortune. And do you remember the way they howled when Spitzer forced them to cough up $1.4 billion for the privilege of not admitting guilt to collusion between research and investment banking? In the real world it's called a plea bargain; on Wall Street it's known as the "settlement" (sometimes inital capped) or, occasionally and longwindedly, the "settlement agreement." Of course enforcing the separation between IB and research cost, and costs, the companies a lot more than the one-time fine. Volcker will be expensive, too.
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In other financial goings on. . .  in the last twenty-four hours I have heard from pros that the best place to put your money at the present time is

a) A thirty-year mortgage at the lowest rate you can get from a reputable bank. "Cash is going to be a lot more expensive when prices and costs start to rise, and inflation comes back big."

b) Cash in US dollars as the last stable currency in a worldwide flight to safety. "The chances of a global recession beginning in the fourth-quarter approach 100%, not so much because of the mess in the Eurzone but because China and India are slowing."

c) Dividend paying blue chip stocks with healthy balance sheets and free cash flow -- Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Microsoft, Intel, Coke, Pepsi, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb, Caterpillar, Disney, IBM, Procter and Gamble, GE, American Express. "The size of the dividend is less important than the company's record of growing the dividend."

d) Gold (always the default position for 5 to 10% of the investment public).

e) Kenneth Koch's poem in which the crazed poet gives away "the money you had been saving to live on for the next ten years. / The man who asked for it was shabby / and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold."

The only thing they all agree on is to avoid bonds, especially long-term bonds, and Treasury notes. -- DL

This Just In . . . T.P. Winch and Elinor Nauen read at St. Marks

Wednesday, May 30, 8:00 pm
131 E. 10th Street, New York, NY 10003

Terence Winch is the author of five poetry collections: Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor, Boy Drinkers, The Drift of  Things, The Great Indoors, and Irish Musicians/American Friends, which won an American Book Award. He has also written two story collections, Contenders and That Special Place: New World Irish Stories, which draws on his experiences as a founding member of the original Celtic Thunder, the acclaimed Irish band. His work is included in numerous anthologies, among them the Oxford Book of American Poetry and four Best American Poetry collections, and has been featured on “The Writers Almanac” and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Winch is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in poetry, a Fund for Poetry grant, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing., among other honors.  As a musician, he is a song-writer and button-accordion player.  In 2007, he released a compilation of his best-known compositions called When New York Was Irish: Songs & Tunes by Terence Winch.

Elinor Nauen has written or edited Cars and Other Poems; American Guys; Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women writers on baseball; Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women writers on cars and the road, and several chapbooks. Her most recent books are So Late into the Night and My Marriage A to Z: A big-city romance. She makes her living as a freelance magazine and book writer and editor, recently earned a black belt in karate, and is a member of the Poetry Project Board of Directors. She lives in New York City with her husband Johnny Stanton. Visit ElinorNauen.com for more.

Find more information here.

WE HAVE LEFT THE WORLD TO BE SAVED BY PERSONS UNFIT TO LIVE IN IT (By Anthony Madrid)

 

MY brothers, we have left the world to be saved by persons unfit
      to live in it.
The depressed will never save the world, for they | unconsciously
      long to be rid of it.

The constitutionally depressed are in the grip of an ax-grinding
      saturnine arrogance.
They can only detect intelligence in that which conduces to the
      zero sum.

No wonder they love their Sunzi, that much-translated Daoist war
      manual.
The world’s only instruction book | on how to be passive
      aggressive.

O ye of little tact. How you long to hear confessions. You want to
      go on national
Television and dish out the advice . . .

My brothers, we are different. We respect our materials. When
      issuing
A travelers’ advisory the last thing we want to see is tears.

We must wrest the world from the depressed, from those who
      put stock in repentance.
For they cannot see how repentance is merely a piece of sacred theater.

Trembling, pedantic, they step up to the plate and solemnly take
      a vow.
They think, Dreamland starts now. For I have a piece of paper.

Mama didn’t love me don’t matter no more—for I have a piece of paper.
And hand in hand, out of Eden they take | their slow and solitary
      way . . .

Wake up, Homer. C’mon, Homer: rise and shine. For the human
      botch
Cannot grow a new head, nor should this be asked of him.

The cracked ego cannot be patched. It is too late for the
      individual.
In China we say “Three Buddhas and two sticks of incense.” It
      means none for you.

 

Originally appeared in Fence, Fall 2011.

Anthony Madrid's book of poems is I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (Canarium, 2012).  You can order it here.

"Mad Men": Last Night in Manhattan [by Connie Aitcheson]

           Wow. By the end of Mad Men last night, I wasn’t thinking of The Kinks' Girl, You Really Got Me (1964) but a line from Maurice Chevalier’s Thank Heaven for Little Girls – “for little girls get bigger every day.” Joan and Peggy have certainly grown up. 

           The exchange or sale for sex is certainly not new in the Mad world. Just last week Harry got slapped after an impromptu sexual encounter when he told the woman she just gave it away for free.  But for Joan to be so blatantly presented with the proposition for sex in order to land the Jaguar account was certainly shocking.

            The philosophical question of price came up several times last night. “What price would we pay?” “What do you want to get paid?” The show reasoned that better finances might allow Joan not to have to worry about repairing appliances or might even allow her to be free of her miserable mother, but I wonder whether any price is worth paying in order to land a partner position at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. The terms of the deal weren’t Joan’s but Pete's, though Lane (for his own ends, partially) helped her improve the offer. Can Joan ever be free? Or has she just bought a noose around her neck?

            Peggy’s leaving was even more shocking to me. I always thought Peggy was the one character with integrity. She was there to remind the viewers of a person with flaws who is honestly trying to overcome them without hurting others in the process. But I guess after Don threw the money in her face, as might be expected towards a derelict or prostitute on the street, there was no recovery for her. When Michael Ginsberg’s character was introduced she was warned by another character not to bring him into the firm because he would be her supervisor one day, but she didn’t listen and brought him in because of his talents. Now she fully comprehends that talent would always be half the battle. As a female she would always be excluded from the big boys' table and spend her career enviously watching them from outside the glass office. Leaving was the only way to keep her integrity. Others (Freddy, for example) helped her to come up with the terms of departure. Will she too be able to stand on her own? Will she be able to trust the men who encouraged her to leave?

            Besides Joan and Peggy I felt sad for Don. His world seemsto be exploding around him. His girls, the women he has defended and loved, were making demands, selling themselves, or leaving. (He was the only partner to be outraged by the Jaguar magnate's demand for Joan's favors.) The rebellion of Megan, the departure of Peggy, woud be enough to shake the strongest man. But now his most central strength has been challenged. Would he and the other partners ever know if they won the Jaguar account because of his pitch (which was Ginsberg’s idea) or because Joan slept with Herb from the car company? It seems a tough situation to reconcile.

            The end of the show made me think of the Charlie Sheen quote, “I don’t pay prostitutes for sex. I pay them to go away afterwards.” Now the one who sold her soul stayed and the one who would never sell herself left.  It’ll be interesting to see how Joan’s presence in the partners' meetings affects the other partners. Will she be a thorn in their side on issues about the business or stand on her own among the mad men?    

-- Connie Aitcheson

John Allan Wyeth: Lost Poet of the Lost Generation by Bradley Omanson

Of all the writers of the Lost Generation, there was perhaps none quite so lost as John Allan Wyeth.  Until his 1928 book of war poems was reprinted by Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli in 2008 (This Man's Army Univ of SC Press), Wyeth’s literary reputation was non-existent.  Not a single scholar of the period had written about him, or even heard of him, and his poems appeared in no anthology of First World War literature from the 1930s to the present.  Yet it might have been otherwise.  Wyeth had all the requisite credentials of the time for literary fame: an Ivy League education, service in the World War, followed by nearly two decades as an itinerant expatriate in London, Liège, Paris, Holland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Provence, Italy and Greece, first as a poet, and then as a painter.  Moreover, he was known to Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, members of the Bloomsbury Group and Ezra Pound.  His cycle of modernist war sonnets, when it appeared a year before A Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front, was perceptively and appreciatively reviewed in a handful of journals, including Poetry.   But Oblivion followed, swift and absolute, for the next eighty-odd years.  Such are the inexplicable vagaries of literary fortune.

            Wyeth’s This Man’s Army is a diary of sorts, an impressionistic yet meticulously factual memoir of fifty-two entries, each identified by place-name, and covering the period May 15 to October 20, 1918, when Wyeth served on the headquarters staff of 33^rd Division, American Expeditionary Force.  Like any good diarist, Wyeth confines himself to the facts as they present themselves, never forsaking the particular to draw out some larger theme.  Any universals suggested by his subject matter are left implicit.

            In the following sonnet, for instance--- which describes the morning of August 16 in the aftermath of the Battle of Amiens, one of the critical turning points of the war--- there is no allusion to the historical significance of immediate events.  There are simply two soldiers, one an officer and the other enlisted, travelling by motorcycle and sidecar through a devastated French village occupied just days before by the Germans.  As they pass through the rubble without stopping, they share a jam sandwich and, in that symbolic act of breaking bread, the hellishness of war and the presence of the dead are experienced, not as an abstract realization or emotion, but as a precisely located sensation: a sickening taste in the back of the throat.

            Harbonnières to Bayonvillers: Picnic

            A house marked Ortskommandantur--- a great

            sign Kaiserplatz on a corner of the church,

            and German street names all around the square.

            Troop columns split to let our sidecar through.

            “Drive like hell and get back on the main road--- it’s getting late.”

            “Yessir.”

                                    The roadway seemed to reel and lurch

            through clay wastes rimmed and pitted everywhere.

            “You hungry?--- Have some of this, there’s enough for two.”

            We drove through Bayonvillers--- and as we ate

            men long since dead reached out and left a smirch

            and taste in our throats like gas and rotten jam.

            “Want any more?”

                                                “Yes sir, if you got enough there.”

            “Those fellows smell pretty strong.”

                                                                        “I’ll say they do,

            but I’m too hungry sir to care a damn.”

Wyeth’s literary record of the war is an accumulation of such small, precisely rendered sketches: low-key, incidental, unrehearsed, without a shred of rhetoric.  Compared to the major poems of  Owen and Sassoon, the sonnets of Wyeth may seem minor pieces, but they withstand close scrutiny, both in their craft and their accuracy of detail, and there is more to them than at first appears. Read more about John Allan Wyeth here.

Good-bye, Carrie Smith

Oh, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off!

Where Does My Body Live? - Kenji C. Liu [Asian Pacific American Heritage Month]

* Previous posts in this series: Kenji C. Liu - Craig Santos Perez - Ching-In Chen - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - Andre Yang - Barbara Jane Reyes

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As someone who was raised as a man, my gender is an incredibly slippery experience to write about. Attempts to explore the making of my gender through poetry is an ongoing and uneven unraveling of layers.

For inspiration, I look to critical race studies and whiteness studies scholars who point out that whiteness is so normalized and taken for granted, white people have a remarkably hard time grasping its deep reach in their own lives. Those who spend the majority of their lives as the norm or ideal have little practice putting it under the microscope. Similarly, for me writing about being a man happens slowly in bits and pieces, with reliance on the work done by feminists and gender outlaws.

As a man whose particular alignment of gender and sex has been generally affirmed since birth, my intersection with race and racism is an important and generative space to write from. I’m inspired by the Asian American feminist work of poet and scholar Margaret Rhee (recently featured in the Poetry Foundation’s blog by Barbara Jane Reyes), who in thinking about how Asian American women’s bodies are objectified, forces me to ask the same of mine:

“We can think of the body (digital or real) as a field, space, a location where oppression names and constrains and where freedom resides—our vulnerable human bodies. How to remap, reclaim, and rewire our bodies?”

The Asian American man’s body is a space shaped by many forces. In the popular US imagination, it invokes many ideas and histories that are traceable to Orientalist manifestations of colonialism, imperialism, and militarism.

To me, however, there is both constraint and production. To grow a properly socialized man, manhood’s rules have to become so ingrained that its creation story is lost. The basic energy of a human being is constrained (Freud might say sublimated) within the requirements of manhood. If I don’t act the way a man should within this view, my behavior gets discouraged in ways that might range from ridicule to death. A man is produced.

At the same time, the Asian American man is often demeaned as an inferior masculinity, as less desirable, as effeminate (mix in a little homophobia), as un-American, etc. While individuals may be able to circumvent or unlearn these, the institutionalization of these constraints produces a cultural, political, and economic reality. Under these circumstances, freedom is an interesting problem. Freedom may not be the typical US understanding of total release from all impingement on the individual, or from responsibility. It might be subversive mimicry, satire, irony, and fragmented theatre.

So how to write poetry in this context? Good poetry can explore the sensations of gender and its enmeshment in social forces without being didactic. Juxtapositions, fertile tensions, the entire palette of human feeling–through rhythm, enjambment, punctuation, erasure–all the tools poets have are useful.

Yet to keep it in the realm of personal experience is only half the process. The other half is to reveal, outline, and implicate the social forces we struggle against. All the multi-syllabic words that lead to didactic and cliche poetry–oppression, injustice, racism, patriarchy–these are placeholders, temporary stand-ins for the real meat of poetry. For me, poetry starts in the minutiae, in skillful showing, not just telling.

Perhaps this is one way to “remap, reclaim, and rewire our bodies”–through a poetics that, by mapping the vessels and capillaries of gender and race, allows a bit of breathing room. To notice a constraint is the first step towards not letting it rule me entirely, much like any other habit. The next task is to write, so that others will hopefully see that they are not alone, that there are other options besides just black or white.

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This past week, we’ve had very striking and provocative posts, many from APA communities whose stories are rarely heard within Asian Pacific American literature, much less the mainstream. If anything should be obvious, it’s that it’s practically impossible to make generalizations about Asian Pacific Americans. This kind of complication is a good thing, because it’s closer to lived reality.

On behalf of all the guest bloggers this week–Craig Santos Perez, Ching-In Chen, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Andre Yang, and myself–thank you for reading and thinking with us. Thank you also to Best American Poetry for providing this valuable space again.

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Kenji Liu is a 1.5-generation immigrant from New Jersey. His writing arises from his work as an activist, educator, artist, and cultural worker. His poetry chapbook You Left Without Your Shoes (Finishing Line Press, 2009) was nominated for a 2009 California Book Award. His writing has appeared in RHINO Poetry, Generations, Kweli Journal, Doveglion Press, Lantern Review, and others. He has received a Pushcart nomination and is working on a multi-genre full-length collection of poetry, prose, and visual art. Kenji is currently the poetry editor at Kartika Review.

Resisting the Narrowing of Community - Barbara Jane Reyes [Asian Pacific American History Month]

* Previous posts in this series: Kenji C. Liu - Craig Santos Perez - Ching-In Chen - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - Andre Yang

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When Kenji Liu invited me here to write about APIA poetry communities, I confess, I wanted to rant about the criticisms I have with APIA poetry communities. Liu wrote in his introductory blog post, “The nationalist framework of Asian Pacific American is at times too parochial,” which is something I needed to read another APIA poet write. Community has always felt like a muddle to me, in which too much compromise, too much silencing and distancing of dissenters occurs.

I posted on Facebook about this desire to rant about the parochialism of community, i.e. Its aesthetic restrictions, its fear of rocking the mainstream boat by producing work that is too confrontational or feminist/womanist/Pinayist or anti-imperialist, or on the community’s grassroots side, its disdain for the “academic,” the “intellectual,” the “experimental” poet. Lately, what I’ve been experiencing is old boys’ club misogyny, in which we women are expected and oftentimes explicitly instructed to withhold our opinions, to assist, to agree, to accommodate, to smile, to execute the unrecognized and uncredited labor for our male counterparts to garner the public praise.

Charles Bukowski: Woodcut by Loren Kantor

Charles Bukowski (c) Loren Kantor

"Woodcuts are by their very nature brusque, harsh & bold," writes woodcut artist Loren Kantor.  "What makes a woodcut portrait come to life are age lines, wrinkles and weathered faces." 

Kantor has been posting images of his woodcuts of actors, writers, artists, family, and friends over at Woodcuttingfool for about a year.  He sent me this likeness of Charles Bukowski last week and I love it, especially because of the way he's captured the weariness in Bukowski's eyes.  Thank you Loren for letting us share this image with our readers.  See more about Bukowski here.  Read Bukowski's The Laughing Heart (a personal favorite), here.

-- sdh

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: You Get What You Order

Bars are not democracies, but in both cases, you get what you order with regularity. Voters pick the guy who’s going to deregulate, reform education and cut taxes, and lo! that’s what he does. Voters pick the guy who’s going to reform health care, cut taxes and get us out of Iraq, and lo! Ditto! There are few surprises. Scott Walker’s bait and switch aside, elected officials are actually kind of predictable.

So what do voters mean when they complain about slippery politicians? It means they ordered up something they don’t want after all, and instead of admitting their own mistake, they find a crack in the glass, a fly in the soup, a crook behind the bar. Obama the candidate was pretty clear about seeking to reform healthcare should he be elected. Guess what? He did just that.

But voters want to send back the Obamacare cocktail, and now he’s ignoring his own biggest legislative achievement. He could say, “Hey, you got what you ordered.” But he won’t. As every bartender knows, you dump the perfectly good drink and make another, to the customer’s specifications, even though it’s the customer who’s at fault.

Having been maneuvered into this defensive posture more than once, here’s what one former bartender used to do: suppress customer turnout. In other words, I took preventative measures, steps to avoid filling the orders of customers likely to return them, by discouraging the customer from staying at my bar. I profiled. Here’s the kind of customer who’s going to send a drink back:

• Asks for, then spends a very long time parsing, a Drinks Menu
• Chooses based on the garnish, hence ordering that which comes with an umbrella, cucumber, or
  specialty ice cubes in the shape of florets
• Giggles
• Consults friends and neighbors before ordering, but does not consult the bartender
• Zeroes in on the flaming drinks

Someone who fit this profile would learn from me, much to my disappointment, that the key ingredient (crème de boullion, a sparkler) was out of stock. If I had to, I’d invent a key ingredient.

This method is highly inexact and therefore thoroughly unfair. No doubt many lovely customers got caught in my dragnet. Tough. Since I’d earn better tips from taking care of fewer, less problematic drinkers, prevention was too winning a strategy to ignore.

Which is why Republicans are very busy suppressing wide swatches of the electorate with “anti-fraud” laws, lest some few of them vote for Obama, and why I here suggest that Democrats try the same, anti-democratic, elitist, un-American, immoral strategy. Here’s how:

• Card the usual suspects: every white person over the age of 50. Make sure each has a valid passport or similar to prove U.S. citizenship.
• Inspect the ID photo—does it really look like its bearer? Or like a younger, more attractive cousin? Since passports are good for 10 years, a number of photos will be out of date. Challenge these.
• Check the address—is it within the polling place’s district? Some of the elderly move into assisted living but don’t change their addresses on their passports or driver’s licenses, since they can no longer travel or drive. Flag these tricksters as potentially fraudulent voters, no doubt pulling a fast one on America from their socialist, Obamacare-subsidized wheelchairs.
• Also target younger white men with cigars, white women who show up during business hours pushing expensive strollers, and anyone wearing a cross.
• Canvass the parking lot, then demand valid proof from white voters with fish or other Christian iconography on the bumpers or rear-view mirrors of their cars.
• Have all of the above cast provisional ballets, so they are in the same boat as the young, black and brown Americans who’ve been harassed by the other side.

There is an easier way. Voters could educate themselves. They want to slash aid for hungry people, schools, NPR and Planned Parenthood, while pouring tax dollars into wasteful defense spending at a rate higher than the next 10 countries’ combined military budgets? They can vote for Romney. They want tax breaks for the rich and squat for the middle-to-poor? They can vote Romney. If people calculated their interests like the rational creatures economists believe them to be, Democrats would win with 99% of the vote. But voters are no more rational than giggling arsonists perusing the drinks menu at Painkiller. Oops, gotta go. Just got a request for Zombie Punch.

"Famous Blue Raincoat" (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Were the haunting, breathtaking, painful lyrics of “Famous Blue Raincoat” written by almost any other songwriter besides Leonard Cohen, there would be no question about the song’s meaning.  It appears to a straightforward confessional letter about a love triangle between “L. Cohen” his woman “Jane” and their mutual friend, a man with a blue raincoat who has gone to the desert and at one time had a brief affair with Jane.

As such, the song is deeply, almost embarrassingly, personal, an epistolary song about a wounded man who cannot help forgiving the friend.

The overpowering emotion of the song inhibits another look at the lyrics, but Cohen’s autobiography immediately suggests problems with this common interpretation.  Specifically, it is Cohen’s life that is being described both as the narrator and the other man.

It is the friend in the song not “L. Cohen,” the narrator, who has a “famous blue raincoat.” But as the real Cohen noted in liner notes to the 1975 collection The Best of Leonard Cohen, the blue raincoat was his. “I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959….It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather.”

In the song, the narrator asks the friend, “Did you ever go clear?” This is a reference to Scientology and its state of “Clear.” Cohen himself for a brief time at least was a Church of Scientology member.

In the song, “L. Cohen” sings to the friend:

“You'd been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene “

But in his concert introduction to Chelsea Hotel #2, Cohen said, “Once upon a time, there was a hotel in New York City. There was an elevator in that hotel. One evening, about three in the morning, I met a young woman in that hotel… I wasn’t looking for her., I was looking for Lili Marlene.” The song “Lili Marlene” (there are variants in the spelling of her name) was a popular love song from World War II although it had been written in Germany in 1915 during the First World War. The song is about a soldier who stands waiting by a lamppost for his love, Lili Marlene. That is, Lili is a symbol of perfect love that has gone away.

But if it is Leonard Cohen who has experienced all that is attributed to the friend, then to whom is “L. Cohen” singing? To ask the question is to answer it. “L. Cohen” is one part of Leonard Cohen singing to another part of Leonard Cohen. Call that other part, the friend in the song, “Leonard Cohen.” “L. Cohen” is faithful to women. “Leonard Cohen” is not. Leonard Cohen, the real songwriter, is writing about a romantic triangle, but he is both men in that triangle. “Jane” is any woman Leonard Cohen has been involved with.

Using this premise, it is possible to work through the song.

It opens with this line: “It's four in the morning, the end of December.” Clearly, given the time of day and year, the setting is cold and dark. It is a line reminiscent of Robert Frost’s famous line in “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” an evening the speaker calls

“the darkest evening of the year.” In both cases, the setting represents the speaker’s profound sense of loneliness, of sorrow, of a depression like no other. In this despair “L. Cohen” writes to himself, seeking understanding perhaps even a reconciliation.

And so, in a step toward that reconciliation, “L. Cohen” sings: “I'm writing you now just to see if you're better.” “L. Cohen” wants the two sides to be friends.

“New York is cold, but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening.”

Clinton Street is on the Lower East Side in New York. Leonard Cohen really lived there. Clinton Street is named after the Revolutionary War hero General George Clinton who went on to become the first Governor of New York after independence and, in 1804, the Vice-President of the United States. The area, that is, is drenched in both Jewish and American history and has its own ongoing soundtrack. Unlike “Leonard Cohen,” “L. Cohen seems content, pleased about where he is in life.”

“I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert.”

“Leonard Cohen” is not like “L. Cohen.” He is emotionally apart from other people, far away from them in his mind. A desert is so dry that it can support only very sparse vegetation if any at all. The desert is a perfect metaphor for “Leonard Cohen’s” mind: it is so dry no fertile ideas can grow there. The desert also has multiple religious meanings. In Judaism the Israelites escaping slavery in Egypt stayed in the desert wandering for forty years, but they also received the Torah at Mount Sinai and did eventually get to the land of Israel. In Christianity, Jesus was tempted by the Devil in the Judean desert. The desert is a place of testing and “Leonard Cohen” was just in such a place in his mind.

”You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record.”

This line, of course, has a double meaning. “Living for nothing” can mean living without cost, but it more likely especially means living without a purpose, desperately searching. “L. Cohen,” ever the optimist wants “Leonard Cohen” to mine the despair for material, to keep a record.  

“Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?”

“Jane” is the woman in both their lives. The romantic “Leonard” has given her a memento to remember him by as he left to go on a spiritual exploration.

 “Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder.”

“Leonard’s” depression is aging him. The blue raincoat is a central symbol in the poem. A raincoat is a protection against wet weather, against the storms of life. “Leonard’s” raincoat was famous, because it had always protected him. He was lucky, blessed by life. All had gone well for him as he walked through life. Others got drenched, but he had his coat, his ability to conjure up the right language in the right order and put that language to music. Now, though, the raincoat is torn. It is no longer working as it once did. “Leonard” is getting a bit wet because the raincoat has torn.

 “You'd been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene.”

Poor “Leonard” has been looking for the perfect woman, but he cannot meet her.  

”And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back she was nobody's wife.”

 “Leonard,” the great romantic has bothered to give a discarded piece of himself, a flake, to Jane, but, given that it was “Leonard,” they broke up and she returned to the faithful “L. Cohen” but she had been permanently changed. She had discovered that she wasn’t anyone’s attachment. She wasn’t defined just by her relationship to a man.

“Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief.”

“L. Cohen is angry in these lines, mocking “Leonard’s” romantic pose, his Gypsy-like nomadic attitude, but in his case being a nomad meant traveling not from place to place but from woman to woman. “L. Cohen” believes in devotion to one woman for life. “Leonard” does not seem capable of that.

The end of the song is the attempt at reconciliation. “L. Cohen” misses his “brother” despite the fact that this double has killed part of him. “L. Cohen” will not put up a fight if “Leonard” returns.

And so the two sides of Leonard Cohen, the responsible side who gives voice to the song, and the depressed romantic side that is scolded and reprimanded, reach a truce. The songwriter has come, for the moment, to accept a self he’s not entirely comfortable with but recognizes as irreversible.  

As if Cohen’s lyrical achievement weren’t enough in this song, there is a technical poetic point that should be mentioned. A good deal of the song is written in amphibrachs. An amphibrach consists of a stressed syllable which has an unstressed syllable on either side of it. Consider, for example, these two lines. I have underlined the stressed syllables:

It’s four in the morning, the end of December.

I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better.

What better way to write a poem about a love triangle than to have a syllabic triangle with a stressed syllable surrounded by two unstressed syllables.

I’m aware of the 1994 BBC interview in which Cohen expressed ambiguity about the nature of the song, and it’s certainly open to a wide variety of interpretations. That’s what makes Leonard Cohen so mysterious and worthwhile.

Other ‘Others’ on Otherness - Andre Yang [Asian Pacific American Heritage Month]

* Previous posts in this series: Kenji C. Liu - Craig Santos Perez - Ching-In Chen - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

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A funny thing happened to me today. I walked into a nearly empty café and stood in line behind a woman who’d just finished giving her order to the barista. The two, both of whom were white, continued to have a conversation after the customer’s order was taken. Not wanting to be rude, I waited for them to finish what I thought to be a brief exchange.

Shortly after, a young African American man entered the café and the barista immediately looked over to him and smiled (this man was obviously a regular) and began trying to guess his order. At that point I stepped forward and said, “Excuse me, I was here first.” I repeated myself three times before she heard me and looked over with a wide-eyed expression of shock, as if I were a ghost that appeared out of nowhere, and apologized profusely for not having noticed me sooner.

There were no other customers in line and I was wearing a bright red T-shirt. How could I not have been noticed? How do I interpret this kind of invisibility? It’s because of situations like this that, when I am introducing myself to anyone, anywhere, I feel I have to introduce myself as being a Hmong American writer.

Some of Us Did Not Die: Sri Lankan Poetic Trauma Stewardship - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha [Asian Pacific American Heritage Month]

* Previous posts in this series: Kenji C. Liu - Craig Santos Perez - Ching-In Chen

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Friday, May 18 marked three years since the official end of Sri Lanka's civil war. I didn't realize this til today–I was in rural Northern California at a writer's residency with no phone or internet service. Once I came home to South Berkeley and recovered from my solo 7-hour drive home from the redwoods, I turned on Facebook and Al Jazeera. I was confronted with both the reality of the anniversary, and the question of what my options are–as a Sri Lankan writer and poet born in the United States, and in the face of the legacy of war, genocide, and forced exile that every Sri Lankan has to figure out what to do with.

African American/Caribbean queer poet-warrior June Jordan entitled her last collection of essays, "Some of Us Did Not Die." Her words are an acknowledgment and a challenge to all of us fierce brown queer poets, who are alive when many of our people are not. Some of us did not die, June wrote, and followed it by asking, so what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do with that precious and not-guaranteed life?

Milwaukee's Pacific Heritage - Ching-In Chen [Asian Pacific American Heritage Month]

* Previous posts in this series: Kenji C. Liu - Craig Santos Perez

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I write to you from Milwaukee, Midwest city, most segregated city in the United States.  What it means to write and be in conversation with Asian Pacific Islander American poetry here (a mutated broken-city text, a choral rendering of the many iterations of bodies within this space) feels very different from the Southern California desert where I lived right before moving here or in Massachusetts where I grew up.

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[Notes to self, locations to map:
Grand Avenue: Lee Chung's where Wah Lee had complained of theft in fall of 1885, police detectives found little white girl hiding underneath bed]

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These last few months in Milwaukee, I have been making poems about the 1889 anti-Chinese riots in Milwaukee.   Admittedly, I was looking for traces of this community beyond the Pacific Produce Market or the American Chinese restaurants scattered throughout the city.   There is a correlation between this singular event and x's on the map all along the West coast.

Reading Across the Acronym - Craig Santos Perez [Asian Pacific American Heritage Month]

* Previous posts in this series: Kenji C. Liu

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The first time I read "To 'P' or Not to 'P'? Marking the Territory Between Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies", by Vicente M. Diaz, I really had to "P." Badly.

And by "P," I mean I had to "Pacific." I had recently completed an MFA in Poetry (the other stream of "P" in my life), and I was thirsty for Pacific literature.

So I applied to a Ph.D. program in Ethnic Studies. I didn't get in. So I applied again the next year and they must have pitied me. As I walked the halls of my department, I realized there was nowhere I could "P." No Pacific faculty, no Pacific courses. I had no choice but to hold my "P" and take other courses.