The Best American Poetry

Ron Padgett's Collected Poems [reviewed by David Lehman]

I had the happy chance to review Ron Padgett's Collected Poems (Coffee House Press) for Publishers Weekly. Here are my first two grafs and a link to the rest.  -- DL

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Long a mainstay of the New York School’s second generation, Ron Padgett—the self-styled “Tulsa Kid,” as the title of one of his books has it—left Oklahoma to attend Columbia University and become a big city poet. He studied with Kenneth Koch, met Frank O’Hara, made the pilgrimage to Paris, read and translated Reverdy, Apollinaire, Cendrars. From the start his poems had a joyous nonchalance about them—the Renaissance term for it is sprezzatura. Five decades fuel his Collected Poems, a tome teeming with Padgett’s trademark traits: comic energy, good humor, alert intelligence, constant curiosity, and the determination to put it all into poems.

Padgett is prolific, buoyant, confident that the day will yield its poem, nothing forced. He has written affecting memoirs of Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard, two close friends from Tulsa days. His Collected highlights an array of New York School strategies. But though he mentions his wife and friends in poems, even ending a poem with the phone number of one of them (Larry Fagin), Padgett’s poems are not crowded with people and events in the O’Hara manner. If there is a consistency of purpose it is Padgett’s devotion to an esthetic path, his trust in the imagination and the associative logic that powers it. In “My Room” the logic leads quite naturally (and hilariously) from a lamp that Ted Berrigan once took from a hotel room to the value of studying Latin.
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The Dream Dictates- [by Alexandra Zelman-Doring]

photo (c) Katya Arnold

In an interview about his school, Stanley Bosworth speaks of the god in all of us, the god in which we do not even have to believe, “because simply the fact of Bach, the fact of music…the fact of discovery, the fact of Degas, the fact of one thousand other artists and writers and Yeats above all is what sacredness is about…” All of this, he concludes, is the fundamental “mobile” of Saint Ann’s School. 

His interviews bring back the memory of hearing him speak live.  To me it always felt like watching a masterful musician improvise- thrilling, risky, profound.  “We are near god as ever we can be…”

The school, he tells, is about communication.  How appropriate that a literary journal was born here. 

photo (c) Lynn Saville

About her collection of short stories, “A Burden of Earth,” E.L. Doctorow wrote: "Beth Bosworth sets her stories in the labyrinth of family life, bravely exploring its dark turns and heartstopping entanglements. The minds of her characters are self haunted with their memories, and what is imagined as the past is as crucially immediate as the present.”  In 2000, she founded The Saint Ann’s Review: A Journal of Contemporary Arts and Letters. Teaching at Saint Ann’s since 1985, Bosworth regards the review as a natural outgrowth of our community- a juggling act and a privilege, with one foot in the community, and the other foot out. The SAR publishes work by writers around the globe. “We’ve juxtapose pieces by experienced writers such as Peter Carey, Mary Gordon, Mary Beth Hughs, John Hollander, Mervyn Taylor, and Diane Greco, with works by writers coming right now into their own,” she explains.  The SAR hosts a reading series running January-June, and has featured interviews with Edwidge Danticat, Daniel Bergner, Amitav Ghosh, Philip Levine, and others.  The magazine also features memoir, reviews, art, plays, criticism and translation. 

I recently started work as assistant editor.  Going through past issues, I found myself wading through wonders:

Traveling Song

By Mervyn Taylor 

For Sekou 

Last night in the park Odetta sang Alabama Bound,
And I thought I saw your hat
Moving through the crowd, and I thought
I heard you call for a second microphone and
Everything just got so still.
And Odetta sang
That traveling song, and the glare
From her white dress made me close my eyes.
And the white boy made that stride piano
Sound like a train moving through the dark,
And Odetta did like she was waving from
A window, and you were coming down the aisle.
Last stop, you whispered, without slowing down. 

 One day in the office, I caught Beth frozen over a poem.  “I used to love this poem,” she said.  “Do you still?” I asked.  “Yes”

Childish Things

By Alberta Turner

I have put childish things away,
have scrubbed and rinsed and put
on shoes and grown discrete.
My morals loosen, my breasts
sag, my nose lengthens. 

My vote is uncertain.
Dinosaurs in plastic coats
greet me in the Child’s
Museum.  I drink milk.  I wear
diapers.  My future is
inscribed on granite
and deciphered by tourists
with pointy heads, who
drive up in saucers.  My god floats
in space, hunting for stars
that have swallowed their
light.

Somewhere is written
That lives are round.
We worry, but we’ll be OK.
Come, Little Ones, curl
around me, and wait.

In an interview with Edwidge Danticat, Beth Bosworth asks what guides the shape of a story or a novel.  

"ED: The characters guide that. The characters guide how the story is told.  The stories that I've written in third person always come that way, where you see a scene and you're watching something, as opposed to the stories that I tell in the first person, where I feel that I hear the person telling me the story.  The stories and characters often dictate the form and the structure.  And some stories are faster than others because you feel that's how the person would tell it.  There's an attempt at copying a voice.

BB: You use the word "patience." What you're describing seems to require time and a degree of peace, to be able to hear the characters.  

ED: Well, as far as the time goes, I'm learning more and more to wait for something to come.  To wait for the stories.  Because I've had such great coincidences, where I'm writing a story and I just see something on the street that is the answer to where the story should go next.  Or I go to bed and have a dream which dictates the next move for the character.  I'm just now learning more and more to trust that, that if it comes, it's ok, and if it doesn't, it's ok too. We live in a society where everything works so quickly that it's much harder to wait for a catalyst or a solution.  However, I am learning more and more if a story's not working, to just leave it alone and give it time to resolve itself.  

BB: You enjoy writing?

ED: I enjoy writing but sometimes I find it extremely difficult.  Sometimes it feels like somebody really sadistic is playing with you, because some days it’s great and then other days it’s so hard and you feel like you’ll never do it again.  That’s why I say I’m learning to be patient and to trust that it will happen again, that a line, or a word will come when it wants to."

The god that is everywhere may strike; if she does, good, and if not, also good.  Stanley loves it. 

The upcoming issue features poetry by Justin Boening (including a review of his chapbook “Self-Portrait as Missing Person,”) and Marina Kaganova, translations of Arseny Tarkovsky by Jeff Landman, a translation of Efrain Bartolome’s “Ocosingo War Diary: Voices from Chiapas” by Kevin Brown, and prose by Ingrid Norton, Diane Greco, and Curt Saltzman. It also features an interview and poems by Saar Yachin, as well as essays by Lori Horvitz, Sue Allison, and art by writers who make art such as Mark Strand and Bianca Stone.  We read submissions September-July.

Listen to Beth Bosworth read from her work on “The Next Hour” WBAI 99.5 FM this Sunday from 11-12  www.wbai.org.  Also featuring playwright Halley Feiffer and poet D. Nurkse

Watch “First Meetings” by Arseny Tarkovsky in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “The Mirror" 

 Translation by Jeff Landman

 Each moment of our every meeting
we celebrated in revelation,
one in the whole world. You
bolder and lighter than a bird on wing,
down the stairs like vertigo
took me running through the dew-
damp lilac to your sanctuary
on the other side of the silvered glass.

When night began grace
was granted me, the chancel gates
opened, and our nakedness slowly
stretched out sparks in the darkness,
and awakened, “Be Blessed”
I cried and knew my benediction
bold: you slept
and the lilacs hung heaven’s whole blue
above your eyelids, and touched
you were calm and your hand was warm.

And in the crystal rivers pulsed,
mountains billowed, oceans dawned glinting,
and you palmed the sphere,
a crystal globe, and you slept on the throne,
and - Good God! - you were mine.
Everything in the bright world was transfigured,
even simple things - a basin, a pitcher - when
standing between us, as if on guard,
solid and stratified, was water.

We were carried God knows where.
Miraculously built cities parted
like mirages before us, mint
laid itself beneath our feet, and
there were birds with us along the way,
and fish writhed out of the river,
and the sky unfurled before our eyes…

While fate trailed our steps
like a madman, blade in hand.

Wednesday, November 6, 6:00 PM: Launch Reading to Celebrate David Lehman's New and Selected Poems

New York University Bookstore (Broadway and Waverly Place, NYC)

Reading followed by conversation with NPR's Ken Tucker

FREE

“Very few writers can actually shape how you see the world. David Lehman is such a writer.” —Robert Olen Butler

“Inventive and often winningly sincere…Lehman is candid as well as ironic—sometimes, both at once. He generates a maniacal, irreverent, fast-thinking range of references to movies, poems, history.” —Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World

“Lehman uses many conveyances—including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes—to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity.” —Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

E.A.P. Meets Fozzy Bear

Things You Should Know About Ravens

1. They are found virtually all over the world.

2. They look like crows, but are much bigger.

3. They are extremely intelligent. They use tools, learn from each other, and engage in play.

4. They are great imitators.

5. According to the Animal Spirits Guide, Raven medicine includes rebirth and renewal, the ability to find light in darkness, introspection, and eloquence. Poets, take heed. If you see a Raven, say hello and thank you. He may answer back.

 

The Elliston Poetry Audio Archive Has Been Digitized. Oh My! [by Michelle Burke]

1.  I have been reading Mary Ruefle’s collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey. In “Poetry and the Moon,” Ruefle shares this: When man first walked on the moon, the New York Times interviewed various prominent people, asking them to respond. Pablo Picasso said: “It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.”

Picasso’s dismissal of the moon landing came to mind recently when I received an email from my graduate program. The email invited me to a workshop on “mapping the conceptual significance and possibilities of the Elliston Project and of digital audio archives more generally.”

The Elliston Project is a digital archive of readings and lectures given by poets at the University of Cincinnati since 1951 and includes such luminaries as Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, and Seamus Heaney. I’m all for these analog recordings being digitized, preserved, and made accessible to as many people as might like to hear them, but the language of the email—“mapping the conceptual significance”—irked me.

2. The English Department at the University of Cincinnati, like many others, has become obsessed with all things digital. I assume that this obsession, like most obsessions, is rooted in fear.

Fear of irrelevancy. Fear of becoming obsolete. Fear of death. These are reasonable fears.

What is unreasonable is to think that if we adopt the right stance or map the correct concept, we can do an end run around irrelevancy, obsoleteness, and death.

3. I read an article by the visiting theorist who has been chosen by the university to map the conceptual significance of the digital audio archive, and I find that I am less struck by the content of his argument than by his tone. It is both prophetic and chiding. He asserts that scholars must integrate digital technology into their scholarship “on as broad a scale as possible.” He writes: “Circumstances are such that this work can no longer be safely postponed.” “Information technology is even now transforming the fundamental character of the library.” “The shifting plates are already registering on the seismographs."

Why the alarmist tone? Is the earth actually shaking? Is the sky falling?

Hasn’t the sky been falling for thousands of years?

4. Most of the poets I know, myself included, dismiss the hysteria surrounding digital technology that is so pervasive in the academy. I consider this as I chop an onion for dinner. Then I look at my fingers. My digits. This is where the word “digital” comes from—this living hand, now warm and capable.

To make something digital is to literally transform it into digits, numbers. The way you learned to count as a child on your fingers: One, two, three.

I want to discuss this with someone who understands the concept of “digital” better than I do, so I G-chat with my brother David.

“The word ‘digital’ comes from ‘digit,’ right?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “To make something digital is to convert it into numbers. Ones and zeroes.”

“So what’s the difference between a digital recording and an analog recording?”

“In the digital world,” he says, “one is always one. One doesn’t really exist in the analog world. Or in the real world. Nothing is ever exactly one meter long.”

“So when you digitize a recording, you make an abstract representation of it using ones and zeroes? These are then arranged into a pattern that can be interpreted by anyone who knows how?”

“Yes. And that information doesn’t change over time. Analog changes. Your memories are analog. They degrade. Just accessing them changes them. A record changes every time you play it. Maybe analog is more like something that is alive in that it’s always dying.”

Maybe analog is more like something that is alive in that it’s always dying? I think of Keats’s fragment, perhaps the last thing he wrote:

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.

5. When I was in college, I worked at a bakery. One day, the owner of the bakery taught me how to make apple turnovers. He said, “Don’t worry about making them perfect. People like to buy pastries that look a little messy because that way they know they’re homemade.”

A degree of imperfection is part of the aesthetic appeal of many handmade things. In hand-thrown pottery, you can see where the sculptor’s fingertips moved through the wet clay. In a hand-knitted blanket, you can see where the knitter held the knitting needles more tightly, where more loosely. The work of creation is embedded in the thing created. 

6. Audiophiles fetishize records. Writers fetishize books. Ultimately, of course, what the audiophile loves is music. What the writer loves is language. In other words, they love the content, not merely the form.

Form, however, has power. Slide a record from its sleeve, fit it onto a phonograph, and slip the needle into the groove. Hold a well-worn book in your palm. Feel the heft of it. Didn’t you once feel very serious carrying a stack of imposing books around your college campus?

I don’t really believe that the medium is the message, but I do believe that physical objects become repositories of nostalgia and that this is no small thing. I experience music differently when I listen to a record. I experience words differently when I read them on a printed page. This is, in part, the power of ritual. I remember playing records and reading books as a child.

Maybe this is why so many religions invest symbolic trinkets with sacred power. Maybe this is why so many people report feeling better when they are given placebos.

Audiophiles insist that a record produces a warmer sound than a digital recording because it records the sound wave directly, whereas a digital recording samples the wave. Whether or not this assertion can be backed up by science, I believe that audiophiles experience analog sound differently because they believe they do.

7. Later, I G-chat with my brother again.

“Should we worry about digital information being lost because digital platforms are always changing?”

“Not really. There are restrictions, but they are artificial. If you buy a song on iTunes in 2005, you probably won’t be able to play it in 2015, but that’s because there were restrictions placed on the song by Apple. The ones and the zeroes are always the same.”

“So it’s like math will always be there as long as there are mathematicians who understand it?”

“Exactly. Code IS math. All software can be reduced to a mathematical equation. There are no exceptions.”

“When you digitize a sound wave, you turn it into math?”

“Yes. I guess you could say that a sound wave is math, too. You just can’t store a sound wave with perfect accuracy. It’s too complex. It’s like a derivative. You can get infinitely more accurate but never exactly perfect.”

“Is analog recording more accurate because it captures the wave directly rather than representing it with math?”

“No. Once something is digital, it stays the same forever. As soon as you bless a record and call it done, it immediately changes due to entropy.”

“But when you record something digitally, you sample it, right? You record moments from the wave and thus approximate the whole wave, but you don’t actually capture the whole wave.”

“Sure. If you turn a curve into a jagged line, you lose some of it. It’s possible that a record has a higher level of precision than your average digital recording. I don’t know. Of course, you could always make a more precise digital recording. All you have to do is beat the human ear. After that, it’s pointless. To make something twice as accurate, though, you need twice as many ones and zeroes. This makes it cumbersome to store or move around. Real audiophiles will download FLAC files, or lossless files, but those are big and take up space, and most people can’t hear the difference, but audiophiles hear the difference.

“Actually, most of today’s music downloads are of a terrible quality. A tape is probably better. If you want to be super precise, you can make a super precise digital recording. It will hold up better than anything analog, but it won’t be easy to access or move around. That’s the trade-off.”

There’s always a trade-off, right? Do you want quality or convenience? The aficionado will choose quality. The audiophile will download the large FLAC file. The poet will lug around the collected poems of Lowell. The foodie will travel the extra hour in order to go to the better Thai restaurant. In each case, the difficulty is part of the appeal. It’s a way of being in the know. The casual consumer will choose convenience, and the aficionado wants to differentiate him- or herself from the casual consumer.

You can make fun of this as a kind of snobbery, but it’s also a desperate act of love. And, like all obsession, it’s rooted in fear. The audiophile loves music and can’t understand why other people don’t love it in the same way. If you love something deeply that is not valued by society as a whole, you worry that the thing you love will go away. With any intense love comes intense fear.

8. I want to understand why I felt so much hostility in the face of my department’s relatively innocuous email. Why was I so irked by the theorist’s intent to map the conceptual significance of the Elliston Project?

What do I love and what do I fear?

I don’t think that I fear the digital world. In fact, I’m signed up to take a coding class at an art space in Brooklyn next month. This particular art space offers coding classes alongside other classes like sewing, woodworking, blacksmithing, canning, and painting. To them, it’s all the same kind of hands-on pursuit.

And when I talk to my brother, coding sounds really interesting. My brother loves all things digital. When he was fourteen, he built a computer from scratch using spare parts. Now, in his twenties, he owns a software engineering company that creates affordable software for nonprofits and schools.

No, it’s the academy’s hysteria I fear. It’s the prophesying and the chiding and the shrillness of the tone that I fear. Too often, the academy embraces the digital world not out of love but out of fear. Too many academics fear that the thing they actually love—whatever that may be—may go away unless it is digitized. Maybe this fear is founded. Maybe I am naive. But I can’t help but believe that the best thing I can do to serve poetry is to actually write poems.

Michelle Y. Burke has received two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry prizes (2011, 2012) and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry has recently appeared in So to Speak, Georgetown Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Horse Loquela (2007), was published by the Alabama School of Fine Arts. For the 2013–14 academic year, she is a Charles Phelps Taft Dissertation Fellow at the University of Cincinnati. She lives in Brooklyn.

The Muse of Fire on My Neck [by Alexandra Zelman-Doring]

 “O Delmore how I miss you.  You inspired me to write.  You were the greatest man I ever met.  You could capture the deepest emotions in the simplest language.  Your titles were more than good enough to raise the muse of fire on my neck.  You were a genius.  Doomed.” 

Lou Reed met Delmore Schwartz in the 60’s at the University of Syracuse, where Schwartz taught literature.  

“I’d given him a short story.  He gave me a B.  I was so hurt and ashamed.  Why haunt talentless me?  I was the walker for THE HONEY BEAR THAT WALKS WITH ME.  To literary cocktails.  He hated them.  And I was put in charge.  Some drinks later—his shirt undone—one tail from right hanging—tie askew—fly unzipped.  Oh Delmore.  You were so beautiful...”

The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me

BY DELMORE SCHWARTZ

                    “the withness of the body”

A manifold honey to smear his face,   
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,   
The central ton of every place,   
The hungry beating brutish one   
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,   
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,   
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,   
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,   
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,   
A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,   
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope   
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.   
—The strutting show-off is terrified,   
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,   
Trembles to think that his quivering meat   
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,   
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,   
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,   
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,   
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,   
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,   
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,   
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed   
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,   
Amid the hundred million of his kind,   
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

“Reading Yeats and the bell had rung but the poem was not over you hadn’t finished reading—liquid rivulets sprang from your nose but still you would not stop reading.  I was transfixed.  I cried—the love of the word—THE HONEY BEAR.”

Schwartz was in mental institutions.  He never had money.  He was the poetry editor of the Partisan Review.  He was widely anthologized. His first book, “In dreams Begin Responisbilities” was published in 1938, when he was 24 years old. 

“I wanted to write.  One line as good as yours.  My mountain.  My inspiration/You wrote the greatest short story every written/IN DREAMS”

T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell and Vladimir Nabokov praised him. At 52, he died alone, in a hotel room.  His body wasn’t found until two days later.

“A heart attack in the hotel Dixie.  You--one of the greatest writers of our era. No Valise”

The Ballad of the Children of the Czar

  by Delmore Schwartz

          1

The children of the Czar  
Played with a bouncing ball

In the May morning, in the Czar's garden,
Tossing it back and forth.

It fell among the flowerbeds
Or fled to the north gate.

A daylight moon hung up
In the Western sky, bald white.

Like Papa's face, said Sister,  
Hurling the white ball forth.

         2

While I ate a baked potato  
Six thousand miles apart,

In Brooklyn, in 1916,  
Aged two, irrational.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt  
Was an Arrow Collar ad.

O Nicholas! Alas! Alas!
My grandfather coughed in your army,

Hid in a wine-stinking barrel,  
For three days in Bucharest

Then left for America
To become a king himself.

          3

I am my father's father,
You are your children's guilt.

In history's pity and terror  
The child is Aeneas again;

Troy is in the nursery,
The rocking horse is on fire.

Child labor! The child must carry  
His fathers on his back.

But seeing that so much is past  
And that history has no ruth

For the individual,
Who drinks tea, who catches cold,

Let anger be general:
I hate an abstract thing.

          4

Brother and sister bounced  
The bounding, unbroken ball,

The shattering sun fell down  
Like swords upon their play,

Moving eastward among the stars  
Toward February and October.

But the Maywind brushed their cheeks
Like a mother watching sleep,

And if for a moment they fight  
Over the bouncing ball

And sister pinches brother  
And brother kicks her shins,

Well! The heart of man is known:  
It is a cactus bloom.

          5

The ground on which the ball bounces
Is another bouncing ball.

The wheeling, whirling world
Makes no will glad.

Spinning in its spotlight darkness,
It is too big for their hands.

A pitiless, purposeless Thing,
Arbitrary and unspent,

Made for no play, for no children,
But chasing only itself.

The innocent are overtaken,
They are not innocent.

They are their father's fathers,
The past is inevitable.

          6 

Now, in another October
Of this tragic star,

I see my second year,
I eat my baked potato.

It is my buttered world,
But, poked by my unlearned hand,

It falls from the highchair down
And I begin to howl.

And I see the ball roll under
The iron gate which is locked.

Sister is screaming, brother is howling,
The ball has evaded their will.

Even a bouncing ball
Is uncontrollable,

And is under the garden wall.
I am overtaken by terror

Thinking of my father's fathers,
And of my own will.

This post is a prayer.  A prayer for Lou, for Delmore, and for one other Schwartz. 

My grand aunt lived in Staten Island.  I had been to visit her once or twice as a child.  We had spoken on the phone a number of times after that.  I remember her car. It was full of  crumbled sheets of paper, broken books, pens, jelly doughnuts.…you could hardly breath in the backseat. 

When she died I was summoned to court.  I had been left some money.  I travelled on the ferry to Staten Island, and found myself alone in the courtroom with a bunch of lawyers discussing her estate.  The Public Administrator- a charismatic man who could have jumped right out of the movie “Glen Garry Glen Ross” leaned over and whispered in my ear:

“Did you read her book?”

  “What book?”

 “She wrote a book.  Under a pseudonym.”

 “Where can I find it?”

He slipped me a card. Weeks later, I called and went to his office. I held her 425 page novel in my arms: “The Decision,” by M.T. Sands.  The dedication reads: “This book is dedicated to my parents Abe Schwartz and Sabina Schwartz.”  It was shocking to see my great grandparents’ names there. In that instant, I realized this really was her book.  No one in my family knew about it. 

It starts with a poem:

            WITNESS

A gun shoots fast into the night
Women of shade, shadows of women
Children who cry, who live, who die. 

A gun shot breaks into the night--
Fate failed, I begged deaf ears--
No tears, or eyes. 

A gun shot sings into the night--
The hours die to tell the tale
Of years darker than all days. 

A gun shot cries, the night, the night…

 

And ends with an About the Author: 

Michele Sands was born into the turbulence of the Holocaust years.  One of Belgium’s hidden-children, she survived to eventually migrate to America with her parents and  sister.  An active environmentalist, Ms. Sands is an artist and poet and resides in New York State.

Listen to Lou Reed Read "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (slow to load).

LISTEN TO LOU REED IN HEBREW, BY SHIRA YASUR AND SAAR YACHIN:

A Tale of Love and Squander [by Alexandra Zelman-Doring]

Warm thanks to David and Stacey for inviting me to BLOG this week!  I plan to write about a variety of issues, magazines, people, poems, musicians...but I thought to start on a personal note

I didn’t want to finish my degree at Oxford. It was nearly halfway through the year, and my mother and uncle travelled to Berlin for the Berlinale.  I met them there.

Sitting in a dim restaurant in Mitte, I didn’t touch my sauerkraut until I finished explaining exactly how impossible it would be for me to finish my studies at Oxford.  Consumed by rehearsals, I was spending all my time in the theater, writing, acting, and producing. I wanted to raise money to go to the Edinburgh Fringe that summer.  As if that weren’t enough, I had developed a physical allergy to academic writing.  Each time I mounted the stairs to the Rad Cam, I turned around again like someone performing a ritual dance.  I just couldn’t do it anymore.  I felt like a puppet hanging on divine strings; even if I wanted to finish my studies, I was being guided in another direction. The only valuable part of my engagement with the institution was my long talks, walks, lunches on Fridays with poet and professor Jon Stallworthy.  This was the kind of thing I could learn from.  Reading poems with Jon.  The rest was dross.  I knew I sounded ungrateful.  I knew I sounded childish and stupid.  But I also knew that we only get one chance at living, and that this year would make or break me.  An indestructible fire was burning behind my eyes. I couldn’t let it be put out. Not now.

“Pass the class,” my uncle hissed, coldly, like a clerk. 

Maybe they hadn’t been able to concentrate on what I was saying.  Maybe the food was too good.  I turned to my mother, she surely understood me.

“Pass the class!” She smiled that omnipotent smile that makes her my mother.  That smile that means: I’m paying, you’re obeying. 

I felt as though I’d been taken into a small detention room at an airport; no one spoke my language, no one cared about what happened to me. 

“Eat your kraut,” my uncle suggested, kindly, moving onto desert. 

I couldn’t eat.  Going back to Oxford to continue enrolled as a masters student would be like- like having many abortions at once! All my plays would die inside me! I-

“Pass the class!” They said in unison. I must have given a little shout. People turned from other tables. “Just pass the class.  Then you can do whatever you want.”

That weekend, stressed and depressed, I decided to go to London and try to relax at a tango festival. I had a paper to finish, and a new script to complete for a play we had already started rehearsing. I planned to spend all day writing and all night dancing.  Forget all my troubles.  I had a suitcase with me, packed with pajamas, tango shoes, and my computer.  At nightfall, I made my escape: from the café to the tango hall. 

I was meeting a friend at Finchley before heading over to the dancing.  As soon as I got off the Tube it was obvious I was in the wrong place.  I stood near a large bus station; it was very ill illumined, few people walked the streets. I called my friend and learned I was at the wrong Finchley.  I walked, looking for someone to ask the best way to get to the other Finchley.  Standing on one of those traffic islands where cars circle around in almost four directions, I looked in front of me and saw the blinding pink lights of a strip club. A voice growled in my ear:

“Hey baby, where are you trying to go?”

I’m taking a taxi, I told myself, stepping quickly away from the man and off of the island. 

Glass broke at once, shattering loud and cold against my whole body.  I turned my head, saw the shattered front of a red double decker bus, and realized I was still flying through the air.  Move with it, I told myself.  Yes, I had time to tell myself that.  Yes, it was slow motion.  When I landed, I didn’t move.  I was squatting somehow, oddly balled up on the cement.  I could see my suitcase swallowed under the front of the bus.  My computer! I thought, as the bus driver ran to embrace me, crying. 

“It’s not your fault,” I told him.  “It’s not your fault, just please don’t touch me.”

I was afraid if I moved the wrong way I would dislocate something.  Or break it, if it wasn’t already broken. Maybe it didn’t matter, maybe I was paralyzed anyway.  He couldn’t control his impulse to hug me, he kept reaching out and grabbing me.

“Please, don’t cry, it’s not your fault! Just please don’t touch me. And can you please help me to get my bag!  My bag is under your bus- please help me get my bag!”

The ambulance came fast.  Someone called and said a fifteen year old girl had been hit by a bus.  The paramedics told me not to move, lay me down, fastened a kind of brace that kept me from moving my neck and jaw. My suitcase was with me in the ambulance.  I asked them to call my boyfriend and tell him where they were taking me.  The paramedic wanted to know where I was a student, what I studied…she wanted to know all about me.  I told her I was sorry but I didn’t want to talk.  She kept asking questions. I told her I wanted to cry.  I thought about dancing, I thought about being on stage- I wondered if I would be paralyzed, brain damaged, or what.  I pictured my computer in many pieces. I saw dark lights on an empty stage.

When she realized I wasn’t interested in talking about my university or academic interests or boyfriend or anything else really, the paramedic started talking to me about herself.  She was from Ireland, had just gotten married, loved her husband dearly, and thought she had a great job.  Things couldn’t be better for her really.  When we got to the hospital, she met a friend of hers that she hadn’t seen in a long time.  He had also just gotten married.  His wife was pregnant, he had a vacation coming up soon. So did she. We were queing to enter the ER, and the que wasn’t moving an inch.

“You guys are really enjoying your lives,” I observed, perking my lips and speaking in a strange accent inspired by the jaw brace. 

They looked down at me and smiled.

Inside the ER, I was stationed a curtain away from someone who really sounded like they were about to die. The cries were so guttural, I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.  I got scared.  Maybe they had placed me in the dying ward.  I started screaming with her (or him), loud.  Together we managed to attract one Brazilian nurse who petted our hands, first his (or hers,) then mine, and assured us that soon someone would come help us.

“Alexandra?!”

“Ress!” (Yes, pronounced with a jaw brace.)

It was my boyfriend.  He stood over me, and started to cry.

“Please! Get my computer! I need to see my computer!”

He tried to hold my hand.

“Please! Can you let go of my hand and open the suitcase and get my computer?”

“You’re crazy,” I heard him say.  “You just got hit by a bus, who cares about your computer?!”

“I want to see it. It’s probably destroyed,” I said, tears oozing out. “Everything is on there. My whole life.  Please can you just take it out of the suitcase?”

Trembling, he went for the bag.  I strained my eyes all the way to the right to be able to behold the computer as soon as it came out.  It had been deep under the bus, I reminded myself.  It must be shattered. 

When I saw it lifted out intact, I couldn’t believe it.  I smiled inside. 

“Open it!” I begged.  “Turn it on!”

He looked at me in disbelief.  I threatened him with my squint.  He gave up and opened the computer; I held my breath as he pressed the button.  Then, like angels singing, I heard the “daaaAAAA” of the Apple coming to life. I closed my eyes and rested. 

Monday Comic [by Nin Andrews]

"Public Speaking" [by Eric Jager]

Earlier this year, I gave an invited talk at a conference sponsored by the University of Caen on the procedures of proof in French medieval law. The conference, held at a medieval château, was open to le grand public  — the general public. An audience of about 100 people showed up to hear a dozen academics talk about judicial duels, animal trials in medieval romances, torture, and other topics. A local official opened the proceedings, and during the coffee and lunch breaks, the speakers mingled with the le grand public.

I spoke with a retired corporate executive, a group of young law students, and a novelist who runs a local crêperie, as well as a doctoral student in history who was researching medieval noble courts in the regional archives. In nearly thirty years, I had never attended a conference attracting such a wide range of people. What, I wondered, are we American academics doing wrong? And could our tendency, at least among literature professors, to avoid the general public have anything to do with the widely discussed “crisis” in the humanities?

A few months before my trip to France, I was chatting with a publicist who works for a university in my state. His job is to publicize faculty research within his university and to the general public by pitching news articles or features to media outlets — online, print, radio and TV.

I asked him what he was working on right now. He told me that he was reading — or trying to read — a new book by a literature professor at his university. "What do you mean, trying to read?" I asked. He explained that the book, about a popular British novelist still widely read today, was impenetrable, and he simply could not make heads nor tails of it. The jacket blurbs from other literature professors praised the book as groundbreaking and worthy of a wide readership. But the publicist would read a chapter, a paragraph, even a single sentence over and over again without being able to understand it. The book had now been on his desk for several weeks, and he had no idea how he was going to finish it, let alone recommend or publicize it to others.

Wow, I thought. This is not a problem just for you, or the author. If a smart, dedicated publicist at a major research university cannot make sense of a newly published book about a major novelist still widely taught in English departments, this represents a problem for the whole profession of literature.

The problem, of course, is not new. For several decades now, literature professors have been retreating into a new ivory tower built from bricks of abstruse theory and mortar of impenetrable jargon. As a profession, we have abandoned the warm campfires of story where people once took comfort in meaningful narrative and each other’s company, and we have ascended the frigid heights of a new tower of Babel.

Moreover, in a strange irony, as the profession of literature has opened up by breaking down barriers to many previously excluded groups — including women and underrepresented minorities — we have managed at the same time to close off our profession to much of the general public.  Who woulda thunk it?

Higher education is now under fire everywhere, as tuition costs climb, legislators slash university budgets, the public views tenure as inexplicable or unjust, and skepticism grows about the value of the humanities or of a liberal arts education in general. It’s easy for academics to blame budget-cutting politicians, pragmatic university administrators, or a supposedly ignorant public, but we may bear some responsibility ourselves, as pointed out in a recent letter to The New York Times by a professor of Japanese studies at Tufts University:

“In recent decades the tendency has grown among academics to produce jargon-laden articles about obscure subjects that only their mothers and a few colleagues might appreciate. This tendency has helped alienate our core constituents —  the intellectually curious public —  who might like to read a stimulating academic work but who are too often befuddled and annoyed by baffling academic prose.”  

Granted, academics in all fields, including literature, frequently write about topics or use terms that are difficult even for “the intellectually curious public” to understand.

No one expects the scientist to put her research on particle physics, dense with mathematical formulas, into everyday language. Or the linguistics scholar to report his findings on Indo-European velar consonants as a readable script for the evening news. But using technical language to share unavoidably abstruse research findings is different from the cultivated obscurity of some professors, whose arcane theory and off-putting jargon often seem intended to drive off all but a tiny cohort of colleagues and acolytes who possess the secret code.

True, not all academics are good rhetoricians. Not every biologist can explain her subject in a layperson’s terms, nor can every sociologist turn his research findings into an immediate take-away. But literature professors? Our subject is very popular. People everywhere read novels, stories, poems, and plays — the things we teach and write about. Reading groups all over the country devour books. And we’re supposed to be good with language. So why do so many of us often keep to our own kind?

If a crisis should never be wasted, now would seem to be an especially good time for us to be reaching out to the general public, giving talks to alumni or civic groups, participating in programs at the local library, or just talking to people outside of academe about our teaching and our research and why it’s important. Not that it should take a crisis to pry us out of our offices and classrooms.

There are plenty of excuses for avoiding the public and staying in our own comfort zone with our fellow academics: People won’t understand my work. I don’t want to dumb it down. It’s a waste of time. I’m too busy. But how long can we remain in our protective tower before the growing pressures around its base — budgets, politics, anger, ignorance — cause it to crack apart and come crashing down?

                                                                    * * *

A couple of years ago, while I was having a cavity filled, my dentist startled me by asking if I would give a talk to his Rotary Club. He’s a dedicated reader, and we always have a good talk about books, at least when my mouth isn’t full of dental equipment. But now he was asking me if I would give a talk.

I said yes.

The Rotary Club meets quite early in the morning — 7:30, to be exact. The meeting was held at a restaurant, and about two dozen local businesspeople and other club members were there, including my dentist. Over breakfast, I chatted with the people sitting near me, and then, as the dishes were cleared, I was shown to a little lectern set up on one side of the room, as everyone settled down to listen.

The talk was on my recent book about a celebrated duel in medieval France. By now, I had given quite a few talks on this topic — a series of lectures for a literary society, some talks at local bookstores, and several more at historical societies or book fairs. I had also done some interviews and even appeared in a television documentary, so I not only knew the subject but also had had some practice talking about it outside the academy.

Still, I prepared carefully, trimming down an originally much longer talk to just 15 minutes. I used short, punchy sentences written for a listening audience, and I avoided confusing academic buzzwords, such as “hegemonic” and or “subaltern.” I provided some history and analysis of the medieval judicial duel, even describing the specific legal conditions required for a duel in late 14th-century France. But mainly I told a story — about characters, and places, and remarkable events — since that’s what seizes people’s attention and helps them follow what you’re saying.

The talk went well. I got some good questions, and then had a chance to talk with a few more people, some of whom had children or grandchildren at my university and seemed to enjoy hearing from a member of the faculty.

As I was getting ready to leave, one of the Rotarians came over and asked if I would do the same talk for the local Optimist Club, to which he also belonged. Sure, I said, a little surprised to be asked again so quickly.

Two weeks later I was back in the same part of town, giving the same talk, to another early-morning and equally enthusiastic group. And once again, I found myself enjoying it.  After talking to the Rotary Club, and the Optimist Club, I’d gladly talk to the Pessimist Club, too, if there were one.

                                                                     * * *

One of my friends is a commercial pilot, a lawyer, and an M.B.A. Very smart and accomplished, he also claims to be “very unliterary.” But he can explain with great clarity the most arcane technical, legal, and financial matters.

Whether we’re talking about the global financial crisis, or a legal case in the news, or a recent airline mishap, I’m always amazed by how well he can explain a concept, a problem, or a situation so that I can understand it, and how he can do so in such an interesting and memorable way. Above all, he tells a good story.

Not all experts are good explainers. But every profession needs people who can describe a complicated thing in clear, everyday language to others — to members of the general public. And right now, when the profession of literature has some explaining to do, we could use some more people like this.

If we in literature departments, and in the humanities generally, are as smart and accomplished as we think we are, and iif our work is as important as we claim it is, and the public appreciates us as little as we often say, why don’t we get out there more and talk to people about what we know and what we do?

What are we afraid of?

-- Eric Jager is a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles. His next book, Blood Royal: A True Tale of Crime and Detection in Medieval Paris, will appear from Little, Brown and Company, in 2014. This essay is reposted from Inside Higher Education, July 30, 2013.  

Monday Night at KGB: Estha Weiner + D. Nurkse

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

Estha Weiner + D. Nurkse

Monday, Oct 28, 2013

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Series founded in 1997 by Star Black and David Lehman

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY

 

D. Nurkse is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently A Night in Brooklyn, The Border Kingdom, Burnt Island, andThe Fall, from Alfred Knopf. He is the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Whiting Writers Award, and prizes from The Poetry Foundation and the Tanne Foundation. He served as poet laureate of Brooklyn from 1996 to 2001. His work has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Estonian, and other languages

Estha Weiner is the author of In the Weather of the World (Salmon Poetry, 2013), The Mistress Manuscript (Book Works, 2009) and Transfiguration Begins At Home (Tiger Bark Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including The New Republic and Barrow Street.  Estha Weiner is co-editor and contributor to Blues For Bill: A Tribute To William Matthews (Akron Poetry Series, 2005).  She was a 2005 winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and a 2008 Visiting Scholar at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford, England. Estha is a professor in the English Dept. at City College of NY, and in her previous life, she was an actor and worked for BBC radio.

Alexandra Zelman-Doring, Guest Author October 28-November 1

This week we welcome Alexandra Zelman-Doring as our guest author. Alexandra is co-founder of Throes Theater (www.throestheater.com). She is the 2008 first-prize winner of the Glascock Poetry Prize.  She studied at Brown University, Wadham College, Oxford, and holds a MFA from Columbia University’s Program in Poetry. Her poems have been set to music by composers such as Andile Khumalo, Jiří Kadeřábek, and David Adamcyk.  She is the author of numerous plays including “Light in the Dust," “To Hold an Apple,” and “Act Before You Speak.”

Welcome, Alexandra.

In other news . . .

Wednesday, November 6, 6:00 PM: Launch reading to celebrate David Lehman's New and Selected Poems:
NYU Bookstore
726 Broadway (near Waverly)
New York, NY 10003
(212) 998-4678

The reading will be followed by a conversation between David Lehman and cultural critic Ken Tucker.

FREE

A Selection of Contemporary Australian Poems (Week4)

Hit Parade

Fairy lights on the cover of my latest, what
could I have been thinking of? – that
forty-seven poems about a wrestling match
in foul weather would bring about

a fundamental change
in my star status – from number forty-seven
on the East Anglican hit parade to number one
in one lifetime; how absurd, this poem

a perfect example of my perennial inability
to articulate some universal truth, a sad fact
that’s guaranteed to keep me in the ranks

of the also-ran until the day I die or decide
to find some sensible occupation that might take me
to the top; wrestling, with one throw, why not?

 

Philip Hammial

Detroit born Phillip Hammial (1937-)is one of a number of North Americans who has made a career in Australian poetry. With Hammial creating order out of anarchy and anarchy out of order, a reader might well arrive at the end of a poem acknowledging ‘So, that’s where you’ve taken us!’ With 24 published titles so far a New and Selected Poems is in line for 2014.

"Happy Birthday, Michelle Taransky!" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

MICHELLE TARANSKY  (10/26)

Birthday bar 
Of marzipanski
Love to you
Michelle Taransky

Folding Fan 
And on demandski
Love to you
Michelle Taransky

Rubber Band 
And Master Planski
Love to you
Michelle Taransky

Black and Tan 
And Supermanski
Love to you
Michelle Taransky

❂

Love to you
Michelle Taransky!!
Once it’s in 
You’ll understandski

Park the van 
And grease the panski
Love to you
Michelle Taransky

❂

Meeting Flossie Williams on the Empire Line [by Daniel Nester]

There’s always the anxiety that the line to Albany is not the line to Albany.

I’m standing in Penn Station near Gate 6, waiting, I hope, for the Empire Service to board. A woman with mid-length blonde hair and a cotton Nehru-style jacket stands ahead of me. I ask if the line is the line for Albany and she says yes.

We talk about trains, then why we’re here. She’s a singer, she tells me. Opera and theatre. Teaches part-time at one of the colleges in Albany, not mine. I tell her I’m a writer, professor. Almost in passing, the singer mentions her current project: an opera about a poet.

Oh, I say. Which one?

William Carlos Williams?

She answers in the form of a question, as if I might not know who the name.

William Carlos Williams! I say back. He’s my favorite all-time poet!

It feels odd saying that; I mean, normally one would say “all-time favorite” when referring to a baseball player or movie. But a poet?

Anyway, hearing more about the Williams opera has to wait. It is confirmed that the line for Albany is in fact the line for Albany, and the crowd is moved uniformly toward the escalator.

We sit across the aisle, the train half-empty. The singer’s name is Kara Cornell (pictured above), and she lives upstate, a few towns over from me. In the Williams opera, she plays Flossie, the doctor's wife. A baritone-co-star plays Dr. Williams, two girls play the Williams sons as boys. Another couple plays art patrons whose name escapes me. And Ezra Pound. A singing Ez!

 

As way make our way past Yonkers, Cornell lets me look at the score. It’s a full-on opera, The News from Poems, written and composed by Susan Kander. I’d written a libretto once years ago, and I want to say Kander’s name sorta rings a bell. Initially a six-song cycle (“The Red Wheelbarrow,” “This is Just to Say” among them), Kander has expanded the work into a full-fledged opera.

Cornell loves her character. “It’s fun because she gets more drunk as the opera goes on,” she says. One scene takes place in Paris, where the Williams family lived from 1928 to 1929. She sings a Flossie snippet in clear mezzo-soprano.

“I love Paree, I love Paree!”

Even whisper-sung, Cornell’s voice fills our part of the train. No one seems to mind.

We have one Facebook friend in common, WAMC’s Joe Donahue, host of The Roundtable. I tell her about The Summer King, an opera composed by my old friend Daniel Sonenberg, about Negro League home run king Josh Gibson, for which I co-wrote the libretto.

Cornell’s repertoire is varied: solo, theatre, opera. Lately, there’s been a pattern, if two roles make a pattern. In another, recent performance, the opera Shining Brow, Cornell plays Catherine Wright, another, shall we say, less-than-happy wife of a prominent artist, architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

There will be a world-premiere atelier (workshop) performance of The News from Poems at The Center for Contemporary Opera’s Cell Theatre in New York on Saturday, November 2nd, 2013 at 8pm.

I mark my calendar. Amtrak's Empire line just got more business. 

I am always moved uniformly by a spirit of my uselessness on the train. Flossie-Kara and I check email on our devices. I’d cancelled classes today because I’d be travelling; students have been emailing me all day, anxious about the rather simple directions I gave them for their take-home assignments. I resolve to ignore them until I get home.

I drink the rest of my coffee, now cold, I bought in the train station, and read about Meg Ryan’s new private life in New York on the cover of People magazine. The leaves outside turn a deeper and deeper orange as we head further north.

 

"Happy 41, Arielle Greenberg!" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

ARIELLE GREENBERG  (10/24)

Lasso and lariat, cap and gown,
And everything in betweenberg.
With a very happy birthday to
The poet Arielle Greenberg.

Curly and Larry’ll pay for the burial:
Moe is becoming obsceneberg.
With a very happy birthday to
The poet Arielle Greenberg.

Au contrairielle, brink of despairielle,
Girly/gurlesque magazineberg.
With a very happy birthday to
The poet Arielle Greenberg.

•

2.0

This badge’ll be fragile and clean.
The Sheriff has married the Queen.

Baudelairielle almanac.
The more the merrier, Mack.

The Terrier Barrier Reef
And the scream door underneaff . . .

Malarial gasolimeberg
For nary an Arielle Greenberg.

•

“Birthday Poem for Ariana Reines, Beginning with Two Lines Written by Jonathan Swift in His Sleep” [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

ARIANA REINES  (10/24)

I follow no man, a hawk in my fist:
Nor am I brilliant whenever I list.

The saints on their mats | said prayers to the goddess
Not too effective, if we’re being honest

The goddess is gone | she’s off on an errand
Judging each case with regard to its merit

But thirty-two years | of knocking about,
Irony, chaos, defiance and doubt

Have tended to lift | the saints from their mats
Hundred percent if you look at the stats

I wanted to sparkle! I wanted to learn!
Nobody told me it wasn’t my turn

The Reines in our spines | fall meinly in signs
With anapest anapest anapest lines

She follows no man | the goddess it’s true
My friend Ariana has turned thirty-two

•

ASS Ball at OLPH, Maple Shade, NJ, c. 1981 [by Daniel Nester]

At Our Lady of Perpetual Help elementary, the game we played for years was Wall Ball. All you needed was a wall and a ball. Actually, that’s the generic term we used, when one of the sisters or teachers asked us. Wall Ball meant we were throwing a rubber or tennis ball against the two-story tall brick wall and catching it, throwing it again. But then it got boring.  So we started keeping score, like how people play Horse in basketball.  If you tried to catch the ball off the wall and missed it, you got a letter: A, then an S, then another S.That spells ASS. When you spelled out ASS you assumed the position against the wall, bent over with your arms tucked in, cupping over your crotch, and the rest of us got in line to throw as hard as we could at the ASS target. I still remember the hiss from the tennis balls when one of the boys threw it, the sting as it hit my ass cheek or, worse, the tip of my tailbone. Some people took it easy, but most flung away as hard as they could. There was one day in maybe sixth grade, because we were playing in the back yard near the rectory, where we decided to play DICK ball, and got so far as to have one poor guy stand facing the firing squad, everyone aiming at his crotch. I think he put his social studies text in his pants. Sister Katherine, our principal, got wind of that and put the kibosh on it. Rarely did Sister Katherine come out herself to stop some ruckus.  In the Facebook page for our old school, everyone said they hated Sister Katherine with a passion, but I liked her a lot. I was scared of her something serious, but my mom worked for her, and I’d see her after school. She’d be calm, laughing at some joke my mom made. She had a deep voice, which she would make even deeper when she would be serious. When she hollered, she spoke in only spondees; nothing was unaccented when she would cry out, slapping the back of her left hand onto the palm of her right with each syllable, “GIVE THE BALL TO ME HONEY BUNNY.” It sounds hilarious now—who calls anyone honey bunny when they’re angry?—but trying to hear her voice when she says that in my head still sends a tingle up my neck.  Sometimes Sister Katherine would do that to me, and I think she did it to show there was no favoritism toward her secretary’s son.  But the other boys and girls, especially the delinquents, had no doubt I was a big brownnoser.  As much as I still care about what people think of me, I didn’t really care what they thought about that. Maybe it’s because it involved my mom, and my mom didn’t take any shit from anyone.  She was nice to everyone at school.  She’s six foot one, and I remember her coming up to the taller girls in seventh and eighth grade who slouched over so as to not look too much taller than the boys.

“Shoulders out, hon,” she would say, “You’re tall. Get used to it.”

The Inquisitive Eater: "Comment String to a Recipe for Soy-Braised Korean Short Ribs" [by Stacey Harwood]

kitchen vixen: These were delicious. I made them over the weekend for my husband’s game night. I made them the day before, then skimmed the fat before reheating.  Then I served them with a big bowl of white rice and some spicy greens.  For dessert, I made chocolate chip cookies.  Everything was yummy and my husband was really happy.  Plus, his team won.  Can I take credit for that?

Alison: Awesome recipe!  Can’t wait to try it.

Lusty_locavore I made this too and it turned out great although I had to hit three stores before I could find the chestnuts. (Thank you Trader Joes!) Plus after I served it I realized I had forgotten the garnish but nobody noticed.  Deeeeelish!

MessyKitchen I followed the recipe exactly but for some reason the sauce was disappointingly thin even after letting it reduce for an hour so I mixed some arrowroot with water and added it and that seemed to help a lot but there were lumps so I put it in the blender.  It was OK but I don’t think I’ll make it again.

Grill king  That’s too bad MessyKitchen. I wonder what you did wrong. Maybe you added too much water at the beginning or didn’t have enough bones for collagen to thicken it up.  I’m just sayin’.  Mine were great.

LuvinSpoonful I went to that restaurant on my honeymoon!!!

LuvinSpoonful I went to that restaurant on my honeymoon!!!

LuvinSpoonful I went to that restaurant on my honeymoon!!!

CreativeCookie My ribs are braising as I write this and my hole house is fragrant with the smell of all of the lovely . . . Continue reading here.

Frank Lima (1939-2013)

Painting by Wynn Chamberlain—featuring Joe Brainard, Frank O’Hara, Joe LeSueur, and Frank Lima (standing) (1964)

SEPTEMBER 18
by David Lehman

Everything means something
as the “countdown to the unknown”
(Alan Greenspans’ phrase) continues
for example tonight’s the fight
between Felix Trinidad and Oscar de la Hoya
and we’re driving to the republic of Flushing
with Stacey up front and a black star in the back seat
to watch it with our host the poet Frank Lima
who was an assistant chef at the Kennedy White House
and will serve longevity noodles on paper plates
you make a left at Dunkin’ Donuts on 137th Street
then a right on 35 Avenue and you’re there
I hear Bob Holman is coming will he bring Elizabeth Murray
I wonder so why don’t I phone him and find out
it’s ringing he answers “poetry” I say “this is prose”
and we resolve to duke it out on pay-per-view tonight
yes she is coming I just saw her cover for a book of poems
by Lee Ann Brown called Polyverse and want to see more
and I will bring this poem and ask everyone if it’s true

-- from The Evening Sun (Scribner, 2002)

The New Salon: Lucie Brock-Broido, in conversation with Charif Shanahan [by Rachel Lieff Axelbank]

photo (c) Timothy Liu

There is no logical reason to believe that Lucie Brock-Broido’s first [public] reading in ten years was conceived and choreographed and carried out for the specific fulfillment of my own private writerly needs, and yet I cannot shake a feeling that still, somehow, it was.

Brock-Broido appeared at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House on October 17 to read from her book Stay, Illusion (released two days prior, on October 15) and to engage in conversation with Poetry Society of America Programs Director and MFA candidate Charif Shanahan. Beside many other titans des artes et des lettres, Brock-Broido publishes with exquisite infrequency (“a new Lucie Brock-Broido book,” Shanahan noted in their dialogue, “is an event”), and the readerly ravenousness that sometimes attends this was palpable in the crowd that packed the place to hear her read and then lined up at apparently inordinate length to have her to kiss their books with her pen.

If you are, as I am, a person who writes but declines identity as a writer, perhaps because writing is merely the least ineffective way you have come up with yet to deal with the discomfort of consciousness in a universe that contains as much beauty and pain as this one so far seems to, what do you do when confronted with a poem entitled “You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to this World”?

And when the carnelian voice of the poet, whom you cannot see because the only open seat left was the one behind a bookshelf, tells you therein,

Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship           Or a child

Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer

In the 1930s                              Toward the iron lung of polio

and then, in a subsequent selection,

Arguably, still squabbling about the word inarguably …

Whatever suffering is insufferable is punishable by perishable.

In Vienne, the rabbit Maurice is at home in the family cage.

I ache for him, his boredom and his solitude.

On suffering and animals, inarguably, they do.

 

and then,

 

Tread very gingerly; you’ve used up almost all the words

? You take notice, I suppose; anyway, I did.

When she had finished reading, Brock-Broido talked with Shanahan about her poetic identity, process, philosophies, and the making of Stay, Illusion (which, by the way, is a National Book Award finalist). She laid out her binary theory of poetics, in which “there are two kinds of poets: There’s Seamus Heaney, who … says, ‘C’mere – this is what it was like,’ and Frank Bidart says, ‘C’mere – you have never felt like this,’” and I thought, Even though I now have to go home and look those guys up, I get exactly what that means.

photo (c) Timothy Liu

And when she said that, to her, most plainly, “a poem is an egg with horses in it” and that her subject matter as stated to strangers on airplanes is “pets,” I wanted to ask her, Did Charif put you up to this? Preposterous, of course, but the scale of my psychic inversion was by then bordering on hallucinatory. It all seemed too perfect to be incidental.

To Ms. Brock-Broido: thank you. I understand, or almost, that you didn’t do all that for me, but no knowing effort could have had greater effect, I think.

You can find the NYU podcast of Lucie Brock-Broido reading from Stay, Illusion and in discourse with Charif Shanahan here.

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The Poetry Society of America has two upcoming events, both of which will take place in the Great Hall at Cooper Union at 7pm: Yet Do I Marvel: Black Iconic Poets of the 20th Century, on November 7 and a Memorial Reading for Seamus Heaney on November 11. For more details and for a full schedule of events please visit the PSA website here.

Rachel Lieff Axelbank holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in Anthropology from Princeton University. She is working on a book, entitled Nonnative, an examination of Hawaiian environmental and social history via the story of one particular plant. Previously, she was a staff writer and editor for The Jewish Advocate of Boston, and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic online, Boston magazi ne, Hadassah magazine, Princeton Alumni Weekly, PresenTense magazine,The Jewish News of London, and elsewhere.