The Best American Poetry

Happy new year, every buddy!

 

Three Moon Travel on New Year’s Eve [Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three Moon Travel   

 

We were driving through New Jersey

when the snow began to fall

the Turnpike looked so beautiful

when your memory I recalled

 

Then I saw your face in my mind's eye

I saw your lovely smile

I tried so hard to remember you

gone forever and a while

 

bridge

Whispers from afar:

`I never knew who you are'

The last free fall when we tried to part as friends

and keep the end from breaking us    still haunts me

so I sadly ...

 

Stood beside the Christmas tree

and waited for a sign

that you and me would make it through

one step at a time

 

But the plans we made were not to be

our luck ran out too soon

On New Year's Eve I watched you leave

by a cold December moon

 

Now I talk to you when I'm alone

as though you're by my side

and I think I see you all the time

in the corner of my eye

 

Will I never hear your voice again

Will you never hold me tight

Will your laughter never break my heart

the way it did that night?

© 1994  Terence Winch & Regan Wick/ Celtic Thunder Music

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This song, written almost 20 years ago by me (lyrics) and Regan Wick (music), appeared on our (i.e., the original Celtic Thunder's) 1995 album, Hard New York Days, with Laura Murphy on vocals, Regan Wick on piano, and guest musician Ralph Gordon on cello.  TO LISTEN:

Three Moon Travel

Be It Resolved, Part 2: With This Love -- by Amy Glynn

I’d waited a long time, thought about it a long time. I knew there were complications, but there were always complications, with anything, with anyone, and I wasn’t a kid anymore. Okay, legally I was still a kid for the next few months. I was seventeen. I think you were twenty. Not the point. I’d resolved myself to the idea and that was that. It was too hard to wait any more. I’d lost track of what the waiting was about. I guess I’d thought I’d be the sort of throwback who waited for marriage, who only ever had one lover, and, look, I knew from the first second I laid eyes on you that there was no chance of that. The idea still honestly really appealed to me – the high school sweetheart model, the One True Love Soulmate Missing Piece It’s So Sappy Walt Disney Wouldn’t Touch It model.

I didn’t get a high school sweetheart: I got you.

I got you, you chimera, you kaleidoscope, you liar, you weirdo, you gorgeous enigmatic irresolvable equation; you, part James Dean part feral cat; you Houdini, you genius, you specialist in the unsaid and unsayable, you cognitive dissonance, you unhealable, no-closure, no sutures for it slice down the midline.

And nearly a quarter-century later, I still don’t know what that means because everyone who had you, whether for a moment or most of your life, got something slightly different. And I don’t mean it in the normal sense, the way in every relationship there is a fusion of my you and your you; my me and your me. I mean you had a mask collection to rival Venice at Carnaval. I doubt any two people who knew you remember the same person.

I headed east for college, and counted days until I’d see you again. You were infuriating, sent strange love letters, often made a point of saying you’d call at such and such time on such and such day and then very specifically not being around when the time came. You screened your calls and I often got the sense that you enjoyed listening to my increasingly frantic messages. Sometimes I’d get upset – I knew you were there – and call several times in an hour. In between, your outgoing answering machine message would change to things like “Don’t hang up, darling – just leave me a message.” People told me you were sadistic, even abusive, and I understood why they said it but I never saw it that way. I knew you couldn't help it. Why I put up with it is still a mystery but I guess we can just say I couldn't help it either, and sometimes love is like that.

You made a point of offering to pick me up at the airport when I came home for Christmas. Then you made a point of not doing it.

Now what? I’d made up my mind to, you know, take the “relationship” to the “next level” and you were pulling one of your little games at the worst possible time. A different girl might have blown you off at that point and moved on. Not I, friend. I refused to make social plans in case you called. I skulked around the house, wondering if you’d had one of your little breakdowns (or one of the not little ones) or if this was about that girl with the curly black hair and the big butt who dressed like it was 1890. I was tough, tougher than you realized and tougher than you were and I was going to stick this out. I was resolve incarnate.

Resolved: resoluto. in pieces, broken.

When the vase of gladioli showed up on the porch with no note in the middle of the night, I didn’t call you. There was something really weird about that. It was like putting flowers on a grave and I did not appreciate the implications. Besides, if I was dead to you, why did you bother driving all the way out to my house?

But then you called and wanted to know if I’d spend New Year’s Eve with you. I was young. Old enough to understand I wasn’t being treated well, but too young to say no. Oh, let's be honest, I was floating. Finally, I'd have you for real. Finally the games were over.

We drove up into the hills, to one of the overlooks – you know which one – where you could see the cold glitter of the city and the obsidian black of the bay reflecting the lights. Absent the summer fog, the view was pristine, sharp – well it was high-resolution. I turned to you with every nerve ending on fire. The piece-by-piece inch-by-inch absolute ravishment of you, the one I’d charted out in my head like some kind of erotic cartographer night after night as I fell asleep: never mind the shenanigans, it would be now.

As I leaned in to kiss you, you said, abruptly, “I think this is over, don’t you?”

It was New Year's Eve, 1989. It was nine o'clock. I was seventeen. Over?

Resolution, in fiction and drama, means something like closure. Loose ends tied, narrative brought to a satisfying conclusion. The solving of the essential problem. Hero isn't dead after all, the wedding goes on as planned and Beatrice and Benedick admit they love each other and tie the knot too. Resolution literally means untying, but we've been over that. It's an untangling, a locating of the truth.

You taught me, at seventeen, a lesson that I, as a child reared on fiction and poetry and plays and music, still haven't fully embraced at 41: resolution is not ever guaranteed in real life, and you have surprisingly little control over whether it happens. Some wounds don't heal. Some things stay broken, never cohere. I drove home in a panic, reeling at the sheer number of things I'd never be able to stand the smell of (your cologne, on a stranger in an elevator, still makes my knees buckle), the music I'd never be able to separate from the thought of you (that whole summer of Passion, Peter Gabriel's soundtrack for The Last Temptation of Christ -- the imprint seemed so indelible I'd never get over it), the chains of association sparked simply by the view from the Lawrence Hall of Science or a cluster of red grapes or a pomegranate. You dissolved me. Whoever I was going to be after you, it would be someone else. (Indeed the person I think I was before you went dormant that night and it took me twenty years to realize it was still there at all.) I knew for certain, in all my over-passionate adolescent silliness -- because you were never going to be the worst thing that happened to me -- that I would never eat, never sleep, ever again, knowing you were out there and not with me.

I didn't know it then but it wouldn't be long. There were to be only nine months and three weeks more in which you were out there, and not with me. After that, half of that would stop being true. I had just said goodbye to you for the second to last time.

Resolution? Not an option you ever gave me. Not in the sense of closure, or clarity, not in the sense of law, which is agreement to enact something, or the sense of math, which is to make an equation more elegant. Not in the sense of music, where dissonance returns to consonance. The medical sense of resolution, in which inflammation disappears without infection, Time gave me, not you. 

Ben, I've had a lot of crappy New Year's Eves. A lot. But you, my dear, set the bar so high I doubt anyone will ever be able to top it. I know you couldn't help it and I don't hold it against you; never did. But I still miss you. Whoever you were to the rest of the world, you were my first totally consuming experience of love. You left me with a hell of a lot to learn about boundaries, about need, and about the aspect of passion that means suffering. And I suppose it is in the nature of grand passion that it be, as you were, a study in the unresolved and unresolvable. What was I supposed to do with all that energy that had nowhere to go? With this love?

 

 

 

 

"And I brought some corn for popping" (circa 1950)

 

The "No Hemlock Rock" came before Stay; and a poem by Lisa Marie Basile [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

 

Hope you holiweeked nicely, fattened up for the frost. I never really took down my garden from this summer, I’ll wait for a warm day and try to turn it all over. It's looking a like a tomato’s idea of a haunted house. I was getting gorgeous tomatoes as late as October but then what Keats said happened, Autumn set budding more and still more, later flowers for the bees, until they thought warm days would never cease, for summer as o’erbrimmed their clammy cells. So there are a lot of green tomatoes out there in various forms of shock (they dreamed warm days would never cease).

Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot, I’ll tell you more about it later.

Right now I want to tell you a quick story and then introduce a great new poet, Lisa Marie Basile.

Story first.

Sometimes for no reason to do with when they were written, two books come out at once. Happened to me in 2003, with Doubt: A History, and The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France. One was with Harper and one with Columbia Univ Press, so pretty different audiences, and it was very tricky to try to get word out about them at the same time.

Now it is happening again, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It has come out at the same time, late October, as my new poetry book, Who Said, 7 years in the making. Of course prose is going to get more attention, but it’s been hard not seeing reviews or responses to Who Said. 

I wake up this morning and Garrison Keillor has put up one of the poems from Who Said, and reads it, on his Writer’s Almanac podcast/website. Of course I’m super happy about this.

But it made me want to say that this poem and maybe two others in the book deal with suicide. (One or two say goodbye in somewhat cryptic ways; one that imagines Socrates not killing himself, then stepping back from the public stage -- becoming locally known for his figs.)

It just happened that GK picked this one, just at the moment Stay, the argument against suicide, was getting some attention.

Last time I posted I showed a bit of what Who Said is about. [Click this link or on the side of this website “Jennifer Michael Hecht: The Lion and the Honeycomb” to see this, and all my posts.]

I guess I also want to say that the poem GK chose is the very first thing I wrote on the subject.

I wrote the book because I wrote a blog post (here on BAP) after two poet friends (they were friends too) took their own lives, less than two years apart, and that blog post went a little viral and was published in the Boston Globe. I got a lot of emails about it which made me feel I had to pursue thinking this through, so I wrote a book proposal. But I wrote the poem after only one of them had killed herself.

I first published it here, on this site. Its ideas really are at the heart of what I say in the blog post (even for all its historical take on suicide), and also at the heart of what I say in the book (even for all its research and further thought).

True, It doesn't mention the second big idea against suicide: that you owe it to your future self to stay alive. (I have good stats that most people [one large study showed 94 percent 25 years later] who are thwarted in very serious suicide attempts [like they jumped from a killing height and somehow survived], are glad they survived and don't do it again. and other suggestions that you shouldn't let one of your moods murder all the others]. Still, it shakes me up to read the poem now.

Hearing Garrison Keillor read it is, for me, a stunner.

So that's my story.

Now I present to you the wonderful Lisa Marie Basile. She’s got a new book soon, her first poetry book, apocryphal – out in 2014 with Noctuary Press. Here’s a poem from that book.

  

today my father came to pray

black denim & brown suede

    a little tattoo of something holy

    only he isn’t holy

he was raised at church     & in fields of flora

in the back seat of the family Ambassador sedan

    his eyes the color of that caballero tan

pinching his sister     those pretty curls

setting fire to stacks of Playboy magazines.

 

when he prayed he did so in Italian. & i know this

because i’ve dressed as the Madonna before:

 

head down,

hands clasped

polyester veil

a little pushup bra,

with some bubble gum & beach spray.

 

when you hear a man’s apologies

you are embarrassed by his honesty,

 

    makes you feel petty, small

    and dishonorable.

--

I love the deft depiction of a situation and an inner life, both strange and secret and yet exceedingly well observed.

Look her up, she's had some interesting press lately.

Oh and if you're interested from my last post, it all worked out, I was on Hardball on Friday, with Ron Reagan.

Here comes 2014 friends! Don't kill yourself and I will return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Be It Resolved, Part 1: Dharma Confusion -- by Amy Glynn

Confession: New Year’s Eve is just about my least favorite day of the year. It tends to come over me with the kind of pressure that turns shale to slate. The pressure to revel, to kick up your heels; the ominous old wives’ tale that whatever you’re doing when the clock strikes midnight is what you’ll be doing the whole next year, the whole “Am I happy now?” thing. And of course, the eternal grind of those things we think will make us better people but that we can’t quite seem to attain, which we call “resolutions.” So, this week I am going to offer you a few meditations on the subject of Resolution. Feel free to chime in with your own.

 

Here higher mind, so resolute,

Is undivided, Arjuna,

Though minds of the irresolute

Branch out in many endless ways.

(The Bhagavad Gita – this translation by Charles Martin with Gavin Flood)

 

Dharma -- wich means virtue, but also natural order and law -- is one of the main concerns of the Bhagavad Gita, one of the great classics of Hindu literature and a text that has perplexed and inspired artists and philosophers for centuries. The Gita is a verse dialogue between a warrior named Arjuna and his charioteer, who conveniently happens to be Krishna. Just before a battle, Arjuna suffers a crisis of conscience about slaughtering his own kinsmen, and questions whether it is right to engage in battle. Krishna proceeds to chide him for several pages, sneering at his misguided arrogance. After all, if Arjuna dies, he will ascend in reincarnation. If he lives, he will prevail on earth. Same for his so-called enemies in the next village. Arjuna is a warrior and the dharma of a warrior is… war. Of course it's the right thing to do, dummy. Now shut up and fight. 

Okay: this bothers me. I mean, yes to dharma. To things acting in accordance with natural order, with their quintessence, their truth. And in a cosmology rooted in the idea of kalachakra or samsara or whatever you like to call the endless recycling of the soul into eternally repeating dramas of pain and pleasure, longing and loss, striving and confusion – and in which the ultimate goal is to Get Out of Dodge – sure, I guess I can even understand that at a certain level, even killing should not be questioned. .   

Here's what bugs me. How can you tell if you’ve got your dharma mixed up with your imagination, or wishful thinking, or some misguided need to prove something or some Brooklyn Bridge you’ve sold yourself as a distraction from confronting something you’re afraid of? What if you’ve lost sight of your truth in the tangle of wishes and worries and dreams and projections and inventions and the myriad illusions even very wise humans cast between themselves and the reality of who and what they are and what they are here to do? Dude, it happens! If it didn’t, do you realize how many therapists would be out of work? And people even get righteous and prideful about the bill of goods they’ve sold themselves. I’ve seen it. I’m pretty sure I’ve done it.

The notion of being “resolute” sounds so virtuous, doesn’t it? Steadfast, firm, determined, committed. Responsible, mature, disciplined. I value those things. So much so that no matter how many times I read this poem I still squirm when Krishna remonstrates with Arjuna over the moment of questioning, and compassion, that the god promptly declares a pathetic and misguided failure of will. And it’s that word “resolute” that does it, that hits me in the solar plexus. As Krishna lectures the young warrior on the attainment of perfection, that word repeatedly leaps off the page at me like an accusation.

Am I resolute? Am I living according to my purpose? If I waver in my belief about what my purpose is, if I change my mind, does that make me unevolved, not acting from my higher mind? Bad soldier?

So many questions, but I can tell you Krishna has never once offered to drive my Toyota, and I'm betting he hasn’t shown up in livery at your house either. So I ask again, how do you RESOLVE the question of whether you are RESOLVED upon the right things?

The word resolute comes from the Latin “resolvere.” Latin scholars, what is the meaning of that verb? To untie or unfasten or loosen. Resolute originally meant loose, dissolved, broken down. Am I the only one who finds that interesting? I find that interesting. It’s almost the opposite of its modern meaning, which has a nose of stoicism and steel and an unwavering determination on the palate, with a long, long, focused finish, if you will. And it is definitely the opposite of the meaning of the Sanskrit word “yoga,” which is “yoking” (onself to the Divine). Is that not odd?

So: this etymological hall of mirrors resolves, so to speak, via the idea of breaking something down in order to arrive at the truth of it – to determine its true nature. Unquestioning? No way. Paying attention? Yeah. In fact not just observing, but living your life as a kind of ongoing hypothesis and understanding that the experiment can yield different answers depending on the conditions. It is the dharma of grass to assimilate sunlight through chloroplasts and grow and be green. If it is too cold or too dry, the grass won’t do that. Is it morally lax grass? Krishna?

And even though the Vedas tend to insist on renouncement of all interest in the material world, that vale of tears; the attachments of mind and body that plague us with lust and greed and shame and fear and grief; the ego that acts on us like blinders on a horse -- and hey, they might have a point -- I’m going to try, this year, to go with this: you’re in a body for a reason. Learn from it. Listen to your gut, because it's probably screaming at you Being irresolute (or the opposite of broken into parts: something whole, or maybe something tied together, tangled) is necessary to the quest to understand your dharma. No one's going to tell you what it is, excpt you If you have the nagging feeling that even though you’re living the life you set out to live, something really deep Just Feels Wrong, if you feel chronically restless or live with a physical or psychic pain you just can’t seem to… resolve, no matter how good your intentions might be – well, you’re probably not aligned with your dharma, but with an illusion. And seeking to throw off that veil, even if it takes breaking something down – even if it takes you yourself breaking down – yes, it can hurt, it can be scary, it can raise awful questions you never wanted to confront. But it doesn’t make you a bad warrior. Between here and our convergence with All That Is, there are a million moments in which we will have to... you know, pick our battles. 

So, my dears: it’s Resolution Season. What illusion are you going to tackle? 

Variation on Arnolfini Wedding Portrait by Jan Van Eyck

(c) Jane Lee & Geronimo DeOcampo Desumala III

A Selection of Contemporary Australian Poetry (Week 13)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bad Habits

                                I take the hap
                           of all my deeds.

                           George Meredith Modern Love XX

         2.50 what? The night's at kickback stage.
And if I'm the man heading to LAX
you must be Madison, monument to your sex,
sweet, groomed, worldly and my daughter's age,
with cute, white slivers of k'thwack k'thwack
for hours of bug-eyed frenzy.
                                          Till the chop.
And 'Ken,' I'm hearing, 'reckon we oughta stop,
or name us a worse place for your heart attack.'
         But bad and badder habits hunt in packs:
if y'urge says Go! so y'splurge y'dough
oh ain't that par for one horny CEO
who craves you as his item-to-the-max
(unless, well hardly, you've turned out a narc).
          I queue at 6 with Trans Pacific rabble.
Till then Mmmadison: you straddle, I babble:
bloodshot, out-staring Fox Sports in the dark.

 

Alan Wearne

 

Alan Wearne (1948-) writes ‘For over a decade I have written 35 poems (mainly sonnets) inspired by popular Australian songs. The jaunty retro-sounding early 80s hit Bad Habits http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eETES1xP-IM is the jumping off point for this monologue fuelled by (let’s call it) innocent sleaze: before flying to the US a businessman has an escort visit his hotel room…oh dear she’s bringing drugs…’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk8N-iMVrNs&feature=youtu.be

 

Amy Glynn, Guest Author December 30-January 1

This week we welcome Amy Glynn as our guest author. Amy's work appears widely in journals and anthologies (including The Best American Poetry 2010 and 2012). Her book A Modern Herbal was released by Measure Press in November 2013. Follow Amy on twitter (@AmyAlysaGlynn) and facebook. 

Welcome, Amy.

-- sdh

Old Friends by Jennifer L. Knox

(Ed note: Laurence Goldstein's posts this week about encounter poems reminded me of this poem by one of my favorite poets. What do you think? Do you have a favorite "encounter" poem? -- sdh)

 

Old Friends

I’m in a coffee shop, remembering a woman I knew
years ago who had drowned eight kittens in a sack.
I listened to her tell the whole story many times, even
begged her to repeat it when we were wasted, and laughed
at the part where the flung sack hit the concrete instead
of the water. I’m thinking how different things are now,
especially me, how my heart can barely stomach the story,
which means I’ve become a better person, certainly better
than the woman I knew, who I would never be friends with
again—she probably hadn’t changed at all. Now that I’m
a better person, I probably shouldn’t forgive her, or
should I? I wonder, and as I’m wondering this, the bodies
of all the people I’d drowned in sacks years ago begin
falling from the sky, heavy like wet sandbags from a crane.
I go out to watch them. God, lots of them. To each, I
wave as it flies past, mouth “I miss you,” wait for “Me
too!” from the back of its smooshed, hairless head.

            -- by Jennifer L. Knox
                from The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway (Bloof, 2010)

Hardball. Not Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Fancy Dog, here for no reason.

 

 

Dear Bleaders,

I find it hard to believe that, down that long road, *nobody* said it would be easy. I think someone’s given me a hard wrong on that account. I was gonna say bum steer, but despite the fun of saying bum, and thinking steer: I don’t know what a bum steer is. Wait, I’ll google. Back. It’s about steering a boat backwards requiring a lookout at one end shouting info to the guy on the other end (who does the actual steering) via a bucket train of informing shouters. It went wrong badly often, because: telephone game.

Anyway, easy’s been a bit of a hard wrong because the heat's been out for days – we’re not part of the national freeze-off, our furnace just said “yo Ima die” on the day before Christmas when people who fix things for a living are off somewhere living.

So we got to light a fire in the fireplace, which beguilingly calms both my son and I. Daughter and husband enjoy it, but me and the lad have a couple of tight spots in our ghost machines and need a little maintenance. Like the fire. Tinker tinker.

Turns out that having a lovely fire for the sake of a cozy evening is totally different from maintaining one so your children don’t become CuteCicles. BrooklynIce. FrozeAfriend. A LOT of work. Wood is maddeningly short lived, you’re not burning some logs, you’re feeding a maw, who has to be tempted to stay gorging because we need the heat of the beast.

Guess what? Tomorrow, (Fri 27, 7pm) I’m going to be on Hardball with Chris Matthews, (guest host Michael Smerconish, who I really like - can be tough, but  contemplative).

I was supposed to be on on Thurs but they told me if I could do it Friday we could have Ron Reagan with us. I had to reschedule a phone interview to do it but I was like, yes please – I’ve spoken at the same event with him (the Freedom From Religion Foundation awarded me "Freethinker of the Year" in 2009, and they gave an award to Reagan and one to Ursula Leguin, her award was called “The Emperor has no clothes". (TEHNC). Reagan was charming and dishy and great. Leguin silenced the house with a story about how she had always thought the boy who said TEHNC! was a rude, ill-raised child. You’re supposed to go along with the cultures traditions and manners. There were good lies, like royal nudity and the NSA, and that little boy was supposed to lie them along with his betters. Fun way to look at the story but not in this crowd in that moment.

We looked at each other in wonder and went on with things as if she’d given us the opposite speech. Apparently it really is hard to the point of near impossibility to say “Thenk” which is how I am pronouncing TEHNC, the acronym of “The emperor has no clothes.”

So yeah, Hardball on tv. To talk about this Politico article I wrote because Politico emailed me and said, wanna write something for us about atheism and Barney Frank coming out as atheist only after leaving office (though he’d bravely came out as gay in 1987), Politico asked me to talk to him and told his people that it would be nice if he’d call me so we could chat about it, which he did. It was highly wily to have that voice on my phone fighting back at my gentle but persistent questions.

Anyway, I just now (Nov '13) have two books out, a poetry book that took 7 years to write, and a prose book that took 4 years to write, but I’m getting to be on television because of this article I was assigned to and wrote in 5 days. It's got 2028 comments, which is at least a grand an a half more than I've ever gotten before. 

This is a classic tale in the writer’s life, and kind of charming though it feels a little ankles over neck nape.

Stay, my prose book (Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It) is definitely getting some attention too. Like this great brainpickings take on it.

But it’s been a hush on the poetry book, Who Said, (Copper Canyon Nov ’13). I’m a poet before anything and I always have been, so it it’s hard, like having a friend away and in danger, you figure all will be well but there’re some minor cords in the swish of your hair. Here’s what I came up with to tempt you to the book: poetry. (Frost's poem follows this one)

Not Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening

I
“Promises to keep,” was a lie, he had nothing. Through
the woods. Over the river and into the pain. It is an addict’s
talk of quitting as she’s smacking at a vein. He was always
going into the woods. It was he who wrote, “The only way

around is through.” You’d think a shrink, but no, a poet.
He saw the woods and knew. The forest is the one that holds
promises. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, they fill
with a quiet snow. Miles are traveled as we sleep. He steers

his horse off the road. Among the trees now, the blizzard
is a dusting. Holes in the canopy make columns of snowstorm,
lit from above. His little horse thinks it is queer. They go
deeper, sky gets darker. It’s the darkest night of the year.

II
He had no promises to keep, nothing pending. Had no bed
to head to, measurably away in miles. He was a freak like me,
monster of the dawn. Whose woods these are I think I know,
his house is in the village though. In the middle of life

he found himself lost in a dark woods. I discovered myself
in a somber forest. In between my breasts and breaths I got
lost. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I’ve got promises
to keep, smiles to go before I leap. I’m going into the woods.

They’re lovely dark, and deep, which is what I want, deep lovely

darkness. No one has asked, let alone taken, a promise of me, 

no one will notice if I choose bed or rug, couch or forest deep.
It doesn’t matter where I sleep. It doesn’t matter where I sleep.

-----

(for reference see below:) (Oh and I couldnt fix the formating in the above last stanza, should look like the others.)

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
BY ROBERT FROST
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

-

This sort of thing goes on in a lot of the book’s poems. The book opens thusly:

Key

Some half the poems in this book
from an iconic work a way was took
and as when obeying the rules of the dead,
you’re right to ask yourself, “Who said?”

To know which strangers are old friends
There’s a clutch of classics at the end.
Most of you will hardly need them
still our life of nights rereads them.

For those of you at the brick road’s start:
echo’s stolen golden tongue (my heart).
For those who’ve been around before
I’m offering, humbly, a little bit more.

--

Hey, the heat’s fixed! Now we’re on easy street. Oh so that’s who said It would be easy. From now on, “Most people never said it would be easy!” Change approved. Psyched to go on Hardball, it’s not exactly scary but it do focus the mind.

Okay. Here comes the new year. Even February. Even July. Much of it will be horrible, as usual, but there will be some very good days and a few surprises.

Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

The Encounter Poem Part IV by Laurence Goldstein

(Ed. note: This is a continuation of Laurence Goldstein's essay about the encounter poem. Find part one here, part II here, and part III here.)

Nastassja Kinski in Roman Polanski's film Tess (1979)

    In previous posts I speculated on ways that certain rules or conventions inhere in the genre of the encounter poem.  My starting point was my own memory poem “Meeting B. F. Skinner, 1963” and I proceeded to comment on poems of major importance by William Wordsworth, Robert Hayden, and Robert Frost.  I deliberately confined my examples to male poets because I wanted to complicate the genre definition in a follow-up column on poems by women.  This is that column.

   I argued in my first mini-essay that encounter poems originate in the emotion of awe and strangeness that overtakes the speaker—almost always a recognizable portrait of the author—upon coming into contact with a figure who shocks him or her into a new state of being or mind.  In this sense the encounter poem may be said to enact the rhetorical function of all lyric poetry.  As I indicated previously, the stranger must be of higher or lower social status in order for the poet to make the mental adjustments that constitute the exchange of insight between poem and reader.  Occasionally the mysterious figure encountered in a strange place turns out to be a double of the speaker, arguably an exact equivalent, and his or her recognition of that fact engenders the surprise, even the shock, of the poem.  Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” is the purest example I know of that dramatic situation.  In the subterranean graveyards of battle, differences of social status, national citizenship, and ethnic definition are revealed as fundamental illusions.

   History has placed women in the same privileged positions as men for smelling out the false consciousness that follows upon deference to undeserving authority.  I would endorse claims that women have always responded as sensitively as men both to fraudulent oppressors and authentic figures of redemption, whether of high or low position on the social register.  And not just social station.  Those who occupy existential situations as seemingly forlorn as the Leech Gatherer or “Aunt Jemima,” carry what Wordsworth calls “a more than human weight,” as if they had traveled across the furthest border of mortal possibility to confront the merely social station of the speaker.  In Hayden’s poem, I argued, the mysterious stranger usurps the customary male role by speaking almost the entirety of the poem, pronouncing the moral in the final lines, a privilege almost always reserved for the poet or his surrogate.

   I think of “Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves” as a poem that hands off the baton of male authority to a rising generation of women who assert their rights by means of the poetics of correction: “Don’t you take no wooden nickels, hear?”  By contrast, no stranger is going to correct the speaker of “Two Tramps in Mud Time.”  He holds his axe aloft and the needy wood-choppers recede back into the “mud” whence they came.

   So let’s test my rules and regulations on an encounter poem that never fails to stir my students to profitable contention:  Ana Castillo’s “Seduced by Nastassia Kinski,” from her volume of 2001, I Ask the Impossible.  Encounter poems often share conventions with other genres, and this one belongs equally to the genre of the “movie star homage poem,” about which I have written in my book The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History.  This genre is like and unlike the genre in which poets encounter other poets.  That is, they are fan’s notes, often laced with envy and resentment but are almost always fantasies of encounter, not real meetings.  Robert Frost made himself available to poets like Robert Lowell and Donald Hall, and would not have been surprised to hear that they included his conversation in poems; but we know at once that Ana Castillo is not reporting a gaudy night with the famous star that actually happened.  The poem, with its title like a tabloid headline and its lurid narrative of coercion derived from the template of Alec D’Urberville and Tess in Kinski’s most famous role, is all dreamwork in keeping with the agreed-upon conventions of star-fucking poems.

   Castillo presents the nubile Kinski as the embodiment of sexual desire:

            When we dance, I avoid her gaze.
            I am trying every possible way to escape eyes,
            mouth, smile, determination, scarf pulling me
            closer, cheap wine, strobe light, dinner invitation.
            “Come home with me.  It’s all for fun,” she says.

The speaker offers some futile resistance before succumbing:

            . . . she finds me at a table in the dark.
            “What do you want, my money?” I ask.  She reminds, cockily,
            that she has more money than I do.  I am a poet, everybody
            does.  And when we dance, I am a strawberry, ripened and
            bursting, devoured, and she has won.

    They retire to Kinski’s place and consummate their lust; we understand the sex as a one-night-stand, not as the inception of a continuing relationship.  That is the convention of the male encounter poem.  But we would be wrong to do so.  The next day, a Sunday, the couple goes out for dinner and over champagne “Nastassia wants me forever.”  The star-power overwhelms the dazzled speaker, who whispers, “te llevaré conmigo” [I’ll take you with me.].  “As if I ever had a choice,” the speaker laments in the rosy aftermath of their impulsive coupling.  What choice or chance does any fan have when encountering the sex object of his or her dreams?  Glamour of this wattage is irresistible.

   The same-sex character of this seduction, and its ethnic component, provide my students with more grounds for discussion of taboo violations.  Hook-ups between strangers may or may not unsettle the Millennial Generation.  They know, or learn in survey courses, that the erotic “gaze” and ensuing sexual consummation between women has a literary genealogy at least as far back as Coleridge’s “Christabel,” not to mention Sappho.  The formerly masculine-only prerogative of selecting and persuading a bed partner of the opposite sex, and sometimes of differing ethnic identity, was always a cultural myth inviting the potent counter-myth of the openly aggressive female, white or non-white.  This charismatic stranger reveals to the speaker new depths to her personality, not without some regret.  And, as always, readers learn from texts of transgression something new about the allure of the formerly off-limits Other.

   The beginning of a feminist sensibility, we were told decades ago, is marked by an increased fascination with the female body, one’s own and the other’s.  The mutual adoration of speaker and stranger, and their erotic union, is a fulfillment that breaks one form of chains derived from the male tradition.  It is no backhanded compliment to say that Castillo’s poem still shakes us with the strength of an edgy movie, in which forbidden things challenge and change us.

    If I choose to stay on the topic of encounters with movie stars a few paragraphs longer it’s because the ubiquity of references to film actors in contemporary poetry is one of the most noteworthy ekphrastic modes of our time.  Yes, the overwhelming and inescapable impact of visual media in our culture is the chief cause of this new feature in our poetics.  But I hazard the thought that the voluminous surge of significant writings by women poets beginning in the 1960s has something to do with it as well.  One impulse of this new writing was to explore the possibilities largely left open by male poets who seemed not to realize precisely how women understood themselves and the universe around them.  Female poets found it useful to shake up the forms, including the encounter poem, by which male poets coded and dramatized information about human relationships.  From grammar school to graduate school, from Edith Hamilton’s Mythology to M. Esther Harding’s Woman’s Mysteries, Ancient and Modern, I was astonished by the legends women claimed as their inheritance, legends they felt free to subvert or recreate in contemporary idioms with modern, or postmodern, figures of magic and transformation.

    Movie stars make themselves available for such appropriation; indeed, that’s their function in our lives.  Male poets paid homage from a distance, acting as high priests of the new religion of cinema.  Vachel Lindsay wrote a hymn to Mae Marsh, Delmore Schwartz to Marilyn Monroe, Frank O’Hara to James Dean.  But how different their forms of praise are from Anne Carson’s extensive use of stars like Catherine Deneuve and Monica Vitti to help her articulate lyric desire, lyric shame, lyric rapture, lyric degradation.  (See the extended prose poem “Irony Is Not Enough:  Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve” in Men in the Off Hours and the sequence of poems on Vitti in Decreation.)  Carson does not construct a traditional meeting with these stars; she absorbs them into her identity, her imagination of feminine nature and female destiny that bonds her with the European performers.  Dialogue tends to disappear in these poems—certainly dialogue between figures as discrete as her actual self and the Romantic other. 

     In Decreation the encounters are placed in cinematic or theatrical formats.  “Lots of Guns” is my favorite adaptation of movie conventions.  The opening scene of what she calls an “oratorio” is a parody of some strange meeting somewhere between two people unlikely to meet again: 

            Who are you?
            A stranger.
            Why are you here?
            To take your life and stuff it in a box.
            You have no right.
            My gun gives me the right.
            I veto your gun.
            Your veto is unreasonable.
            Your reason is a mystery.
            Your mystery is a way of lying.
            This concept is no longer in use.
            You mean lying?
            The concept of lying, yes, is no longer in use.
            What do you do when you want to avoid telling the truth?
            I use a microwave oven.
            How does that work?
            Has 600 watts and 5 power levels.
            Isn’t it hard on your gun?
            I never put my gun in the microwave—there is no need.  Guns do not lie.

    The Marx Brothers come to mind as a seminal influence here rather than Greek tragedy or Greek comedy.  I read the exchange as between male and female, though I’d be cautious about identifying which voice is which.  As with poems about Nastassia Kinski and Catherine Deneuve, the discourse is hard-edge and resists recognizable gender roles.  The “poem” makes sense whether the one who wields the gun is a femme fatale or the gunsel of noir romance, acting tough but easily brutalized by his/her opposite number.

    As long as I am extending the conventions of the encounter poem I’ll make reference to another intriguing experiment with dramatic structure by a contemporary.  Denise Duhamel’s “How It Will End” appeared in Best American Poetry 2009 and according to the author’s note it derives, like “Resolution and Independence” and “Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves,” from the serendipity of an actual walk in a picturesque location and the resultant encounter with figures worth writing about.  The innovation in this text is that the speaker and her husband do not pass words with the distant objects of their attention, a lifeguard and his girlfriend who are quarreling and generally making a spectacle of themselves.  The two would-be eavesdroppers cannot hear the dialogue being exchanged but they do become involved in what they imagine to be the source of contention.  “It is as good as a movie,” she says, a silent movie, and then she and her husband proceed to undergo a surrogate encounter as they disappear into the roles of “lifeguard” and “waitress” they endow upon the actors they watch from a bench on the boardwalk.

    Duhamel now must complicate the cliché of life as a movie in which we are all bit players and/or eager voyeurs.  There is plenty of exposition in the long line free verse, in which most of the syntactical units are fitted to the full line so that the story element is not unduly interrupted by line breaks calling attention to the poem’s status as artifact.  Gradually the observing couple begin to bicker among themselves as each takes the part of the corresponding gender figure down by the lifeguard station:

            “You never even give the guy a chance and you’re always nagging,
            so how can he tell the real issues from the nitpicking?”
            and I say, “She doesn’t nitpick!” and he says, “Oh really?
            Maybe he should start recording her tirades,” and I say
            “Maybe he should help out more,” and he says
            “Maybe she should be more supportive,” and I say
            “Do you mean supportive or do you mean support him?”

The misunderstanding between these two is so profound, and so banal, that we sense that they are encountering each other for the first time, struggling to articulate the nature of their own relationship in the guise of perplexed viewers making sense of a movie.

    In the more familiar kind of encounter poem the boardwalk couple would continue their walk and speak with the beach couple, or, more daring, the beach couple would spot the spectators and walk up to confront them.  But the poem ends like the romantic idyll it is.  [Spoiler alert]  Suddenly the beach couple is making up:

            She has her arms around his neck and is crying into his shoulder.
            He whisks her up into his hut.  We look around, but no one is watching us.

    Well, not quite.  The reader is watching them, and listening to them, and finally that is the encounter that matters.  The poem acts on us like cinema, first involving us in a lovers quarrel and then releasing us with a happy ending.  Or is it happy?  “No one is watching us.”  The boardwalk couple is left with hurt feelings of which the poem is the guilty witness.  One rises from reading the poem needing an embrace and looks around for one’s beloved.

    Is “How It Will End” a gendered or genderless poem?  Alicia Ostriker argued in her groundbreaking study of feminist poetics, Stealing the Language, that all poetry is gendered, and especially those poems that chronicle “expressions of rage at entrapment in gender-polarized relationships” by offering “retaliatory poems which dismantle the myth of the male as lover, hero, father, and God.”  The speaker’s immediate suspicion of the lifeguard, whose profession is the very embodiment of the heroic, and her first statement in the poem, “He deserves whatever’s coming to him,” are clear expressions of sexual politics.  The encounter on the beach is the occasion for an upsurge of discovery, and self-discovery.  Though “How It Will End” is in certain ways a “woman’s poem” it adds to all poets’ repertory of strange meetings another timely model worthy of close study.

(Laurence Goldstein is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and Editor Emeritus of Michigan Quarterly Review (1977-2009).  His most recent book is a volume of poems, A Room in California (Northwestern University Press, 2005).  A book of literary criticism, Poetry Los Angeles:  Reading the City’s Essential Poems, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. )

Steve & Eydie Believe in "You"

 

Merry Christmas!!

The Encounter Poem Part III by Laurence Goldstein

(Ed. note: This is a continuation of Laurence Goldstein's essay about the encounter poem. Find part one here and part II here.)

from "Tramping with Tramps" Josiah Flynt, 1907

 I want to call attention to two masterpieces of the genre.  The first is the encounter of William Wordsworth, or “William Wordsworth,” and the Leech Gatherer in the poem “Resolution and Independence.”  I put the author’s name in quotation marks because the poem is not a fully accurate account of their meeting on the moors; we have Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry of 3 October 1800 to remind us that this most sincere of all poets did not hesitate to recast his experience into a more perfect artistic form for his readers’ benefit.  He was an artificer and sought a truth-to-life beyond the constraints of exact transcription.

   Manipulation of details can be expected from a poem with such an overt therapeutic purpose.  We know from biographical materials that this poem of 1802 is Wordsworth’s response to his friend Coleridge’s professions in person and in writing of his suffocating experiences of dejection.  Wordsworth, also a prey to melancholy even in the happiest times of his life, harked back to an encounter two years previous and impersonated the malady he shared with his fellow poet.  The first-person plural in the poem’s most famous couplet is no accident:  “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness, / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.”  In no way does this biographical context impair the poem; quite the contrary.  The formal question and answer structure, rendered in rhyme royal, sustains the dignity of a colloquy that might have become maudlin in the hands of a lesser poet.

   The Leech Gatherer (the poem’s original title) seems at first to be the subordinate figure of the duo:  “His body was bent double, feet and head / Coming together in life’s pilgrimage.”  Add to his physical debility the fact that the leeches upon whose sale his survival depends have diminished in number over the years.  Poor and exhausted, he is obviously close to death by natural causes.  And yet this pathetic creature is full of good cheer, fortitude, and trust in his Creator.  The speaker elicits the facts of the matter by repeated questions and remarks, during which time we as readers stand in awe of how the Leech Gatherer’s “discourse . . . // Cheerfully uttered, with demeanor kind” rebukes the poet’s anxiety and self-pity.  That transmission of spiritual power complicates the narrative by means of a confusion of understanding as to just who is more or less fortunate, more glad and grateful to be alive.  This confusion nourishes the paradox of the poem’s presence in our lives.  The Leech Gatherer continues to be a consolatory figure for readers who may enjoy comfortable circumstances outwardly but suffer bouts of melancholy within.  Paul Goodman wrote that he could not read the poem without weeping.  (Lewis Carroll, who skewered it in a parody, apparently could not read it without laughing.)  It remains an encounter poem we read throughout our life with mixed and deep feelings.

   Compared to all the hundreds (thousands?) of commentaries Wordsworth’s poem has garnered, it is astonishing to me that a poem close to it in quality has received no lengthy readings at all (I hope to be corrected on this point).  I refer to Robert Hayden’s “Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves” from his volume of 1970, Words in the Mourning Time, and reprinted in his Collected Poems.  In Part I of this dramatic lyric the speaker wanders by a seaside minstrel/freak show featuring performers doing various sketches of a humiliating kind.  “Poor devils have to live somehow,” he remarks to himself in a one-line stanza.  Obviously dejected, he sits by the shore, and then in Part II he is joined by the woman who performs the role of Aunt Jemima, “fake mammy to God’s mistakes,” as she wisecracks.  But like the Leech Gatherer she is full of good spirit and fills the rest of the poem with vivid autobiographical musings.

    The speaker does not address her at all, making this poem a notable variation on the customary dialogue structure.  (Forché directs no quoted speech to the Colonel either.)  But we do hear his silent response, his meditation, or rather overhear it in the mode famously described by John Stuart Mill.  Compared to Aunt Jemima’s fluent, idiomatic wit, his reactions, seemingly addressed as an aside to the reader, remain elevated in diction, professorial in allusion, and complex in syntax.  What seems a mental withdrawal from interaction with his companion can also be read as an effort to translate the picaresque narrative of her life into high-culture literary language: 

Scream of children in the surf,
adagios of sun and flashing foam,
the sexual glitter, oppressive fun. . .
an antique etching comes to mind:

“The Sable Venus” naked on
a baroque Cellini shell—voluptuous
imago floating in the wake
of slave-ships on fantastic seas.*

I’ve never been quite sure how to read this silent rejoinder to her discourse.  He has acknowledged in Part I that he is a “confederate” of the minstrel show figures like Aunt Jemima and “Kokimo the Dixie Dancing Fool.”  He too is black-skinned with a talent for self-invention.  Is he evading the embarrassing implications of her demeaning self-portrait, as if turning away in shame from what she confesses is a degrading life of role-playing and deception?  (She could be making it all up.)  Or does he honor her by interpreting her adventurous life history as a high Romantic life-journey?  In either case he has clearly retreated to the honorable role of Poet, master of language, inviting the reader’s admiration for his elevated rhetoric but covertly yielding the stage to her superior verbal skills.  The last stanza is her unwitting rebuke of his quality reverie:

            Jemima sighs.  Reckon I’d best
            be getting back. I help her up.
            Don't take no wooden nickels, hear?
            Tin dimes neither. So long, pal.

It’s too late for this advice, we think.  His somewhat strained language—a deliberate risk on Hayden’s part—is precisely the stuff of legend and tradition that separates her low raffish idioms from his high eloquence and keeps her fixed in her lowly role as Aunt Jemima.

   The poem is more complex than my few comments can begin to describe.  By bringing these two figures into conjunction--alike in race, unlike in education and life experience--it challenges our good intentions of reading the plot in a straightforward, politically correct manner.  The nervous speaker is too erudite to carry on a companionable conversation, and how strange that seems, to us as to him.  The encounter is a dramatic and linguistic impasse, a stand-off of verbal styles.  What gets transmitted to us is the same failure of class solidarity we glimpse in Wordsworth’s poem, but made more unsettling and ambiguous by the modernist manner of its clashing frames.  This dissonant duet—she speaking to him, he speaking in monologue form to the reader—enlarges the genre of the encounter poem as befits a major poet.

   If the alien figure of the Leech Gatherer looks forward in obvious ways to Aunt Jemima, he anticipates even more obviously Robert Frost’s haunting narrative, “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” the quintessential Great Depression poem, in which an encounter occurs between the backwoods speaker (one has to grit one’s teeth not to type the words “Robert Frost”) who is chopping wood and two lumberjacks, though only one of them approaches the wary speaker and yells “Hit them hard!”  (He is given no further speech.)  By approaching closer to the chopping block, he makes clear his desire to usurp for pay the speaker’s satisfying task of preparing firewood for the cold season.  Like the single utterance of La Belle Dame in Keats’s poem, these three words fix the “hulking” stranger as an archetype, in this case of the dangerous woods from which he emerges.  Giving him no further speech is a mistake, I think.  Frost’s long monologue in response can’t help but reduce the tramp to a prop, a poor occasion for the poet’s self-congratulating sermon about the proper way to behave “For Heaven and the future’s sakes.”

   One final note.  When we consider the figures of the Leech Gatherer and Aunt Jemima—neither is granted a personal name in the poems—we face the inescapable problem of whether to identify them as “doubles” for the poet in the manner Freud defines this elusive concept in his essay on “The Uncanny.”  Encounter poems often do introduce a dyad in which one figure seems to represent the daimon of the other.  Their dialogue enacts the psychic tensions felt by the speaker, who may or may not be trying to exorcise the mysterious personality spun off as a sibling or parent from his unconscious.  When I wrote my poem on B. F. Skinner I intended it as an homage.  Skinner first took shape as a patriarchal voice of rectitude in the music of time.  But in reviewing the manuscript drafts I see how inevitably Skinner emerges as a venerable icon that the speaker treats irreverently.  He and his utopian book are an affront to the twenty-year-old, fated to be an academic scholar as well, who confronts the master and uses the poem as a way to undermine him, if not to slay him in the Oedipal paradigm.  Is there a more forgiving poem about B. F. Skinner out there?  I sincerely hope so.

- The painting Hayden’s speaker has in mind can be seen by searching “The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies.”

(Laurence Goldstein is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and Editor Emeritus of Michigan Quarterly Review (1977-2009).  His most recent book is a volume of poems, A Room in California (Northwestern University Press, 2005).  A book of literary criticism, Poetry Los Angeles:  Reading the City’s Essential Poems, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. )

Bing and the Boys Give Good Advice to Would-be Mules

 

Charles Trenet, Troubador [by Roger Gilbert]

(Ed note: We've been watching episodes of Spiral a French police procedural that's streaming on Netflix. It's wonderful, if a bit gruesome (I've had to leave the room more than once). The show has made me want to listen to more French so I have Pandora tuned to Charles Trenet radio and now I'm reminded of Roger Gilbert's post from June, 2008, reproduced below.-- sdh)

 

What if Irving Berlin and Frank Sinatra had been the same person?  In France they were, and his name was Charles Trenet.

I’m taking a break from my posts on Ammons to share my newly revived passion for Trenet.  While I’ve always enjoyed his lighthearted songs and his buoyant singing, I’ve only recently begun to appreciate his range and versatility.  Trenet (1913-2001) wrote and performed hundreds of songs over the course of his more than sixty-year career; best-known in the US are “La Mer,” memorably recorded by Bobby Darin in an English version called “Beyond the Sea,” and “Que Reste-t-il de Nos Amours,” recorded by Sinatra among others as “I Wish You Love.”  But there are many other superb songs by Trenet that never crossed over to English.  And while Trenet himself spent time in Hollywood, he didn’t achieve the level of transatlantic stardom accorded to fellow performers like Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, and Charles Aznavour.  Yet in my opinion he was the greatest of all the French chanteurs, offering an incomparable blend of nostalgia, humor and joie de vivre, shot through with unexpected streaks of melancholy.

 
It may in part be a measure of how close-knit the French cultural world was in the 30s and 40s that Trenet associated with the likes of Saint-Exupery, Artaud, Cocteau, Colette, and Max Jacob.  He harbored serious literary and artistic aspirations of his own, publishing novels and verse along with his copious chansons. A gay man compelled to keep his sexuality hidden for most of his career, he often called attention to the line between the performer’s mask and the poet’s soul.  One of his most beautiful songs, “L’Ame des Poetes,” imagines a crowd of people singing the poet’s words after his death, “not knowing for whom his heart beat.”  Here’s a video of Trenet singing it sometime in the 1970s:

His performance here is unusually muted; Trenet was generally known for his energetic, google-eyed manner.  Here’s a clip from his first film, in which he calls to mind a singing Harpo Marx (he was known in this period as “le fou chantant” or “the singing clown”):

Finally, here is one of Trenet’s most famous songs, “Je Chante,” originally written in the 30s during the Depression.  Trenet brings an irrepressible glee to his performance, but if one listens carefully to the lyrics they tell a surprisingly grim story of a wandering singer who begins to faint from hunger, is dragged off to jail, then praises the rope or “ficelle” with which he hangs himself for freeing his soul from his body:

Like the proprietor of this blog, I’m a diehard Sinatraphile, as well as a lover of the great American standards.  But there is no one quite like Trenet in American popular music before the 1960s.  While a few songwriters met with success as performers—Hoagie Carmichael, Johnny Mercer—none of them achieved Trenet’s dual standing as one of his country’s most beloved singers and songwriters.  His songs are touching, hilarious, sweet, silly, and sad.  Ecoutez-les!  

 

The Encounter Poem Part II by Laurence Goldstein

Pip meets Miss Havisham in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946)

(Ed. note: This is a continuation of Laurence Goldstein's essay about the encounter poem. Find part one here.)

Rules of the encounter poem: 

  1)  For maximum effect, the narrative must dramatize a meeting between two people that is clearly a one-off, a nonce occurrence. These two people will never meet again, and that fact is understood by both parties. The unrepeatable quality of their encounter intensifies their emotional and intellectual exchange.  Love poems do not belong in this category, nor poems of family and long friendship. 

   2)  There is an imbalance, a fundamental incongruity, in their status.  The speaker is likely to be the younger person, more a listener and learner taking mental notes.  It is he or she who registers the impact of contact with a person likely to be somewhat exotic, exceptional, troubling, capable of surprising statements. The speaker is almost always impressed by the strangeness of the other’s presence.The best poems in this mode have that Pip-meets-Miss Havisham affect. 

   3)  To say as much is to indicate the closeness of the genre to fiction and drama as models.  The encounter poem treats scenes in ways familiar to all consumers of literature, film scripts, and popular songs.  It is intertextual to a high degree, its practices open to introjection from a variety of familiar and recondite sources.  The encounter poem sounds like a scene in a novel or a condensed short story.  A certain moral weight attaches to the encounter poem because of its deliberate situation in the literary mainstream.  Rules for social conduct are right on the surface.

   4)  There must be some dialogue to fulfill the above-mentioned dialogic structure of the dramatic lyric, though the speaker may prefer to direct his part of the conversation to the reader in the form of a meditative aside.  Meetings with non-human creatures may have some of the same conventions as the encounter poem but their rhetorical strategies differ from this person-with-person mode.  The epiphanies that belong to poems of contact with birds, fish, moose, skunks, groundhogs, bears, deer, dogs and cats (readers can supply some famous examples) differ from the turns and intentions of the interpersonal poem.

   5).  Likewise the allegorical conjunction of one human and one spirit figure do not qualify.  “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is one of the great ballads of the English language, but it does not advance by exchange of dialogue.  The demon lover sings, sighs, and moans; she does not speak beyond her false declaration, “I love thee true.”  (Nor does the “glimmering girl” in Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” who calls her victim’s name but disappears before she can establish herself as anything other than an archetype.)  I would make an exception of some special cases like T. S. Eliot’s encounter with the “familiar compound ghost” in “Little Gidding” and the dialogue of the two dead soldiers in Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting.”  Probably it is Owen’s death in war that makes us subconsciously hear the “I” of the poem as the posthumous voice of the poet.  Dialogues with God do not qualify for this category (sorry, George Herbert!) but because the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are persons, a conversation with, say, Koch Industries, is allowable.

   6).  The fact that the speaker has written a poem to document the encounter becomes an important motif, either explicitly or implicitly.  The artifact brings news about how knowledge and power got transmitted to the talented speaker.  “Something for your poetry, no?” says the Colonel as he pours a sack of human ears onto the table to intimidate the poet-journalist who is dining with him. Precisely. Carolyn Forché’s prose poem enacts the shift of power between them after their encounter, when her world-famous text mortifies his bullying performance.

(Laurence Goldstein is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and Editor Emeritus of Michigan Quarterly Review (1977-2009).  His most recent book is a volume of poems, A Room in California (Northwestern University Press, 2005).  A book of literary criticism, Poetry Los Angeles:  Reading the City’s Essential Poems, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. )

"I'll give you the whole megillah in a one-word speech: / Reach!"

 

The Encounter Poem by Laurence Goldstein

 (ed note: This is the first in a four-part series by Laurence Goldstein. Goldstein is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and Editor Emeritus of Michigan Quarterly Review (1977-2009).  His most recent book is a volume of poems, A Room in California (Northwestern University Press, 2005). A book of literary criticism, Poetry Los Angeles:  Reading the City’s Essential Poems, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press.)

Farley Granger and Robert Walker in Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train" (1951)

MEETING B. F. SKINNER, 1963

“Wear a coat and tie, if you have them,”
my editor advised. “He’s pretty famous.”
I folded my father’s formal jacket
over my sport shirt and peggers, and strolled
across the wide piazza toward Royce Hall.
Humming step by nervous step, in a
cascade of arias from the auditorium,
I mounted many stairs to an airless room.

He wore a coat and tie, of course: Harvard
spiffed-up for UCLA, noblesse oblige.
We both sweated a little. This interview,
we understood, was one building block
in my enlightenment, like the class hour
just past, on Wordsworth or Milton, spirits
most antithetical to L.A. “I hope I don’t
bore you,” I offered. “I’m never bored,” he said,

“Tired sometimes, but never bored.” I tried
to keep it andante, but he had foresuffered
all my queries on free will and social control.
If this were sport fencing, I died in five minutes.
I flourished a final thrust: “You write in Walden Two
that this utopia knows no unhappiness,
thanks to the Planners’ perfect design. Yet
the citizens rehearse a production of Hedda Gabler.

How can that be? How would they understand
so much heartbreak?” He gazed downward;
I felt my education hang in the scales of logic.
Finally, diminuendo, his small defeated voice:
“You’re right. The young wouldn’t understand.
I must change the play in the next edition.”
I felt sorry for him, for my own petty
triumph, my cub mousetrap cunningly sprung.

Skinner didn’t correct the next edition.
So what? Walden Two lost its audience.
The late Sixties made any bossy republic
Seem an affront to the young libido. A discord.
Only the spot of time seems unshakeable,
the invulnerable memory, those few minutes
atop the concert hall, my heart pounding
and the axis of culture shifting, adagio.

“Meeting B. F. Skinner, 1963” was written to mark the semi-centennial of a half hour’s encounter between a UCLA undergraduate, myself, and a distinguished scientist-philosopher visiting the campus to deliver a guest lecture.  In the early 1960s I imagined that my destiny lay in journalism, and as an eager junior reporter for The Daily Bruin I volunteered to interview B. F. Skinner, who generously made himself available for a conversation he probably assumed would be a waste of his valuable time.  The poem preserves the few remarks I can remember and tries to recreate the feel of an event which turned out to be more long-lasting in my memory than my exchanges during those years with other visitors to campus as well as figures residing in Los Angeles:  John F. Kennedy, John Dos Passos, Stan Laurel, Dorothy Parker, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley.

   At the same time I settled into the romance of journalism—I cherished the old saw that this poorly paid profession was highly desirable because “you meet such interesting people”—I became increasingly fascinated by serious literature, especially poetry.  The two worlds meshed for me; both demanded intellectual curiosity, stamina, and high-end verbal skills.  The eight-paragraph news items and book reviews I wrote for the Bruin corresponded to the eight-line stanza poems, often of eight stanzas, I turned out as exercises in verse composition.  Sometimes those poems had the form of a meeting, an interview, a narrative of significant contact between two people.  Sometimes I still write those same kind of poems.  Inevitably I have formulated a few rules governing the encounter poem. 

(Tomorrow: Laurence Goldstein's rules for the "encounter poem.")