The Best American Poetry

Sally Wen Mao Guest Author May 19-23

This week we welcome Sally Wen Mao as our guest author. Sally is the author of a poetry collection, Mad Honey Symposium, which is out this month from Alice James Books. The recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, she holds an M.F.A. from Cornell University.

Welcome, Sally.

In other news . . .

Next Line, Please: Help the American Scholar Write a Sonnet

On Tuesday, May 6, The American Scholar  launched a website experiment in writing crowd-sourced poetry—in this case, a  sonnet. David Lehman wrote the first line and selects subsequent lines from among those submitted by you. Here's the sonnet to date:

How like a prison is my cubicle
And yet how far my mind can freely roam
From gaol to Jerusalem, Hell to home

For details on how to submit your line for consideration, go here.

-- sdh

Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by Melissa Green

Ann Kjellberg, founding editor of Little Star, an annual journal of poetry and prose, and Little Star Weekly, its mobile app version, will be offering a poem every Sunday this spring. This is her fourth post.

In 2011 the poet Melissa Green wrote a series of poems in the voice of Mad Maud, from the pair of anonymous early seventeenth-century songs, “Tom A Bedlam” and “Mad Maud’s Search.”  Tom O’Bedlam, and with him his paramour Maud, became a stock character in English literature and folklore—an “Abram Man,” a vagrant-beggar-con man ostensibly sprung from the Abraham Ward at Bedlam (the Bethlehem Royal Hospital for the insane in London). Although Bedlam denied releasing its patients to itineracy, and there seems to have been a certain amount of theater to the Tom O’Bedlam vocation (part of the songs’ color), the joke of the songs overlay a terrible reality about the long ostracism of the mad.

Green’s Maud reflects on the cruelties, not so different from our own, then suffered by the insane, her “ancestress[es]” who “carried the gene for mental illness. I was haunted by generations of women who would have been burned as witches or would sit in the urine and shitsoaked straw of Bedlam, chained to the wall.” But this note of sympathy and reconstruction is only the beginning.  Maud’s language, the language of Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals and King Lear’s Edgar, who took on the persona of Tom O’Bedlam in order, like the Fool, to disguise the truth in nonsense, participates both in English literature’s notably earthy origins and its most exalted lyric flights. Maud’s home, like Blake’s, is Albion; the spaces in her lines reflect both her broken thinking and the strong caesuras of English verse’s alliterative origins.  In Maud’s day wild boar were caught and trussed by the river, but people were also a hair’s breadth from, on the one hand, magic, and, on the other, revelation, as they stretched their laundry out on rocks.

And indeed Maud’s “broken mind” is a torment, but it also admits wonder.  Her language is its expression and cannot pass beyond it; for Maud her madness is as elemental as the sky, and yet it is kin to the sensitivity of her perception and her capacity for love. Green writes, one wonders whether Tom and Maud could be “figments of one another’s imagination.”

In “Mad Maud’s Four Dreams,” below, as in several of the poems, in the vanishing point is a place of final blankness and extinction (a few last lines: “that place where no light ever comes”; “I fell out of the world without a sound”; “there’s mist between us now—or murk—or vanishing”; “he trod upon the stars     and put the morning out”) and yet the encompassing world—the cathedral of nature and the soaring language in which the poem contains it—seems to offer a compensatory exaltation and consolation. And a complicity with those inducted, across time, in the language’s underground fraternity.

The diction of Green’s poems is often archaic and not demotic and colloquial as is the modern temper. Her radical isolation from contemporary life is, in part, its engine. But it is this very estrangement, perhaps, that gives her poems their intense lyricism and vatic force.

Read more of Green’s Mad Maud poems in Little Star #3 (2012). Her books The Squanicook Eclogues and Fifty-Two are out of print but well worth searching for. Read her memoir of her friendships with Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky in the current issue of Parnassus.

 

Mad Maud's Four Dreams
Once seized by sleep I dreamt I was at captived at Bridewell where all trulls
and gillots go     I knew the place for I’d picked hessian and oakum there

and taken flogging by a scourge of holly leaves      Roped at the wrists
to one who walked ahead and one behind we came in from the fields and lay

upon the grave-cold ground under iron grates     And in my dream I dreamt
another In high summer I saw momently a sparrow flit above a golden lea

and fly into the brumous wood where there was only rustling and silence
‘Tis Maud      as swiftly gone as those wings crossing a yellow meadow

I dreamt thrice     By a mizzling shore St. Cuthbert knelt on stones to pray
Ice in his beard    frost silvering his steepled hands     Two otters bounded

from the water and breathed upon his feet to warm them    rolling back
and forth upon him they tried with their fur to dry his blue besobled skin

He had for solace   sorrow   longing   winter   want   cold   darkness   death
Wind whistling across heath and moorlands    saturating marshlands

and fens in their flux    I dreamt a fourth    The wide blackening sky of Albion
roared overhead    and I wept that neither sun nor youth nor hope nor love

would come again    I crawled into an hollow oak     pulled lichen over me
Maud shall have no church or coffin    song or blessing    priest or cross

In the mews of the dream in a bark-beetled sepulchre    Maud shall have
a glimmergowk to hoot her elegy    shall nither there until the mawks

liquefy her skin    boil at her heart with their white roilings    her body
unhouselled    her soul left to the earth and night    extinguishing

—Melissa Green 

Kate Middleton on "The Future of Poetry"

The Australian poet Kate Middleton, who was recommended to us by our friend Alan Wearne, has written a brief for poetry -- and for the physical book. Although the very existence of these things is widely thought to be under threat, they will survive, she writes, because of their "brilliant design." Here is an excerpt from "The Future of Poery."

<<<
The `Future of Poetry´ is something I often hear discussed – usually in hushed tones, suitably sombre for the doom and gloom being posited. I understand the reasons for the doom and gloom that fuels the opinion that poetry is dying: it´s not a lucrative product. As the first `Sydney City Poet´ I have recently been given one of the few jobs in Australia that contains the word `poet´ in the job title, and even with its designation as `part-time,´ it´s still not a large allowance. People don´t buy a lot of poetry, and, if Marianne Moore is to be believed, a few poets even claim to dislike it. I think about the numbers sometimes, and I too despair: especially when I realise that in Australia we´ve really got a pretty good deal. I just spent four years in the United States where there is so little funding available and really so very many writers. In America there is a glut of literary journals and small presses, and yet people still find it difficult to get work published, let alone read. The most common way a first book gets picked up is through winning a competition: poets will often enter many competitions, paying $25 or $30 to get their manuscript in front of an editor´s eyes, before the book is finally picked up. In Australia it´s still difficult for the poems and manuscripts to settle into the right places, but when I look at the struggles other friends have, I am exhausted.

In addressing the topic of this forum, first, I´m going to admit that I envisage our future readers as a relatively small group. I´m not bewailing this, but I am coming to realise that I don´t just read an unusual amount of poetry, but I read an unusual amount in general. I gain delight from books that other people may find elsewhere: film, good television, cooking, walking. I can understand that people might get home and want to watch something or listen to music instead of curling up with a book. In fact, I do these things too, far too often.
>>>

Kate Middleton's Fire Season (Giramondo, 2009) won the Western Australian Premier´s Award for poetry in 2009. In September 2011 she became the inaugural Sydney City Poet. She was educated at the University of Melbourne and has done graduate work in the United States: she holds an MA from Georgetown University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, where she won Hopwood Awards in poetry and drama. For more of her essay, click here.

Translation of Charles Baudelaire's "Un Voyage A Cythere" [by Sandra Simonds]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voyage to Cythera 

My heart is like a bird going on a sea voyage to find utter joy,
the way a well-intentioned yet anemic adolescent
pins a corsage through the paper nipple of his warped drawing
of a young, freckled nude. And just like this,
I, myself, radiate that sun-filled madness.

So I must ask you, Felix, as we approach
the island Cythera together on our funky canoe,
why it is that if I feel so light and airy, Cythera is so dismal?

As we paddle closer to the shore, the salt-
encrusted crows, sonic warnings, caw and caw,
and as I dip my bare feet into the weepy waters,
and pull our boat to shore I hear, from the distant
center of the island, the mud-caked
yodeling of ancient men and women.

Walking toward the center of Cythera,
down its one path, whose dust chokes me,
I see a sad procession of headless lovers,
a few of them beating on tattered tambourines.

As the music grows more intense,
I find a scraggly pine tree to hide behind…and just in time!
For behold these ghosts and their queen, Aphrodite,
that terrible beauty with her obsessed face,
who leads the procession towards the town square.
Behold the ghosts who circle before her.
If you have never seen a procession
of ghosts kneeling before their queen,
then you have lived a life without trouble.

In a sudden state of horror, I turned back
and, Felix, brother, guide, companion, father,
mother, sister, Virgil, everything— you were gone!

Alone here? Could this be true? To suffer
the terror of abandonment? How shall I return
to any green place, lush with tropical plants?
How shall I return to Oberlin, Ohio,
to my basement where I keep the drawings
of Claire Madonna Smith, that innocent high school girl I love?
For this is not an island of dreams
but rather an island of suffocating nectars that
drip from overgrown, deranged flowers.  

God, not this island, this weapon of illusions!
Never did I think I could be its singular, living,
object, the center of its circle of nothingness.

I was holding onto a branch of the pine
and it broke and the noise of the crack
caught the queen’s attention. She looked at
me and I could now see that her eyes were
two endless black holes full of other black
holes full of decimals full of numerals
full of crystals full of dominos and land.

She began to walk toward me and the blood
in my body spilled into the holes
that were her eyes and the holes that were
not her eyes and the holes that were society
and the holes that were not society and in that moment
I realized that I was Cythera’s one luscious corpse,
Aphrodite’s vibrant victim hanging
upside down from a half-dead tree.

I couldn’t even taste the vomit in my mouth
as the ghosts surrounded me but Felix,
I forced myself to look
at the dirt of the earth which was now beyond
the sky whose soft scent of carnations and salt
grew tighter around my neck while Aphrodite, like a bird,
whispered into my dead ear, “The only thing
I ever wanted was to share my island with you.” 

-- trans. Sandra Simonds

Fun Stuff Friday: Buck Downs' Dang Yall [by Jennifer L. Knox]

The (often but not all the time like a manic clown) Very Funny Poet Buck Downs has been posting comments on Facebook with the phrase DANG YALL in them. "I've been doing it for a few months now. Like a lot of my poetics, it started on a whim, became a habit, and developed a theory." The folks at Flying Object picked their faves and assembled them in their office directory box. Ah, the surprising wells from which poetry springs forth. I can't explain why I think it's so funny (though certainly the hickishness of it dazzles) because, as the saying goes, explaining funny is like dissecting a frog: when you're done, you'll know what makes it tick, but it'll be dead.

Meet the Poet: Xavier Cavazos [by Jennifer L. Knox]

When I moved to Ames, Iowa, in 2013, I was lucky enough to meet Xavier Cavazos, whose chapbook, Barbarian at the Gate, won the 2014 National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. Prize judge Thomas Sayers Ellis wrote in his introduction, "No one 'fucks' with fixed traditional Western forms or controls linear excess, the oral downpour of ideas onto the page, like Xavier Cavazos...Ask anyone who has ever tried to define, in writing, the Blues, and they will tell you that it’s easier to express the ache or recovering ease of what comes right after the Blues. Caught up, Cavazos comes close to a brand of telling that doesn’t have to trade in deep, heartfelt truth for quick, snapshot similes held hostage by 'like' or 'as'—"

Xav's a tireless champion of poetry. When we hung out, it was all we ever talked about. But no bashing, just talking about the writers and poems that shaped us—especially the work of Richard Hugo for whom we shared a common love. When Xav gave me a copy of Barbarian at the Gate, I was flabbergasted. Oh, that experience of meeting a poet, liking a poet, then you find that his/her work is as amazing as your best conversations. What a gift—almost like a magic trick.

Working With Others: George Schneeman at Poets House [by Sharon Preiss]

The East Village of New York City in 1966 was a bohemian paradise. You could rent a decent sized apartment for about $200 a month; Saint Mark’s Church on East 10^th and Second Avenue, one of the oldest churches in the city, was hosting rock bands, experimental theater, and poetry readings; and the 1960’s sense of  “anything goes” was in full swing. Just two blocks down the avenue from the church was the Gem Spa newsstand and its famous Egg Creams, on the corner of Saint Mark’s Place and Second, and within a stone’s throw or two of that lived a good chunk of the second generation New York School Poets: Ted Berrigan, Alice Notely, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Bill Berkson, Dick Gallup. This community of poets, all in their 20s and early 30s, often hung out at each others’ apartments, cooked and ate dinners together, and riffed off each other for inspiration and collaboration.

Enter the artist George Schneeman. Ron Padgett had met Schneeman several years before where he had been living in Italy, and Schneeman – with his affable openness, good humor, and background in poetry – fit right in with the group when he and his wife Katie decided to move into the ‘hood that year. Schneeman had already worked collaboratively with other American writers who had visited in Italy, but here in New York he would find a lifelong home and a cadre of friends for whom and with whom he would create some of the most warm and joyful works of their respective careers.

A Painter and His Poets, on view at Poets House in Battery Park City, New York, until September 20, 2014, collects almost 100 of Schneeman’s works that involve these, and other, poets – book covers, posters for readings, artist/poet collaborations, and portraits of the poets themselves – in the largest retrospective of Schneeman’s collaborative works to date (the artist passed away in 2009). What stands out as the viewer wends her way through the poetry stacks to view the many pieces of the show is the sheer sense of fun these friends had creating art with each other. If there had been a group credo, which of course there wasn’t because this was an anti-credo kind of group, it might have been “Making art is serious work, but the work doesn’t have to look so serious.” If there was no sense of joy in the end creation, or in the process itself, then what was the purpose of making it?

The works are characterized by the happy accidents that happen when collaborators have no plan for the outcome and no real aesthetic agenda. Most of the pieces are on simple poster board or paper, and Schneeman’s contributions are often found-images from old magazines, books, and newspapers. A typical work session might start out with George gluing one of these images – the front grill of an old car, a stylish fedora, a snippet of sheet music – onto the page and passing it off to the poet for the next stage of contribution. Most likely, whatever the poet added would be a non-sequitur, whatever lines or words had been roaming around in his or her head and needed to find a home, or maybe some random association the poet made with the image. Meanwhile, George would be cutting and pasting on another sheet, and the poet and artist would exchange, building up image – maybe another generally non-related image or a swath of paint – and word until someone, usually George, declared the piece done. Surely, in this reductive description, the final outcome must sound like just a jumble of unrelated nothing. But there is clearly some magic that happened in the process of two like-minded people working together without agenda, with love and admiration for each other, with the idea of making something fun and interesting uppermost in their minds as opposed to trying to make “art.” 

Often the line between visual artist and poet and who contributed what when became blurred. In “My Knee” by Schneeman and Michael Brownstein, it’s likely the first image was that of the man in the scarf in the upper left of the piece. Or was it the collage-within-a-collage on the lower right, a pasture of brown cows superimposed with an upside-down anatomy illustration, a couple of colorful seashells floating above the plain, and a hand-drawn cow leaping over the crest of tree? Of course it’s likely Brownstein contributed “My Knee” and “and no planet” with the indecipherable cross-out next to it. Could it be that Brownstein imagined the man had fallen off the tilted chair and hurt his knee? Or did Brownstein’s knee hurt that day? Does the “planet” refer to the odd landscape? And what of “Sexy Anina”: the cat or the maiden or both? Somehow, the question of narrative and meaning becomes moot in the sheer pleasure of the mash-up and how, beyond all reason, it hangs together, it works. 

Dick Gallup, in his contribution to the excellent 2004 book on Schneeman, Painter Among Poets, from Granary Books, likens the work of collaboration between poets and visual artists to “recess” as opposed to the rigor of the “adult special ed” they engage in when working in isolation on their own. Gallup calls the collaborative session with Schneeman “Equal parts of fun and consternation, which is just how recess should work out.” The metaphor is perfect: the imaginative play of kids – unaware of standards of good play, bad play, right play, wrong play, trying to sell their play for profit or impress anyone with it – fosters a creative freedom that is intense and satisfying, but most importantly fun. Kids play and create as a natural act, and so did Schneeman and his peers. It’s refreshing to smile or even laugh out loud at a work of art in a world where ever more self-important theories of art and writing are espoused and the –isms (conceptualism, formalism, post-genderism, post-millienialism) not only often stand between a work and its viewer but are sometimes even needed to understand and appreciate a work. Schneeman would have none of this. He disliked theory, he even disliked perspective in paintings. In another essay from Painter Among Poets, art critic and poet Carter Ratcliff calls this “modernist ‘difficulty’…the dreariest of academic virtues. In place of ‘difficulty,’” Ratcliff continues, “[Schneeman] puts a clarity so unqualified that one doesn’t know how to account for it.” I propose we don’t even have to “account for it,” we just get to enjoy it.

"I'd say a Mass for his soul." (But first he has to die.) Graham Greene's Wish

from Harpers, December 2007
-- sdh

Who Says? [by Jennifer L. Knox]

Recently during a Q&A session, I was holding forth to a room full of students on the Myth of Feelings—that feelings were the prime mover of a poem, and that every element of a poem took a back seat to them. I declared that a well-placed comma could do as much, or more, for a poem than feelings, because the reader derives his/her feelings from the symbols arranged on the page.

A young woman sporting a futuristic haircut raised her hand. “Who says we have to know how to use a comma?”

“Well…” I scoffed, “being a poet and not knowing how to use punctuation is like being a painter but being, like, ‘Fuck color.’ It’s one of our most important tools. It sets the pace of a poem. It shows the reader what your characters are thinking. It…shows that you know what you’re doing as a writer.”

“Yeah, but who says?”

Point Counterpoint: Amy Gerstler and David Lehman on Mad Men Season 7, Episode 5

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 12:03 AM David Lehman Wrote:

Sword Fighting with Golf Clubs

Dear Joan,

Prior to watching the episode, I had three things on my mind:

-- Everyone hates Lou, the boss from hell, whom most of us know all too well, and how awful will he get?

-- Lots of people are wondering “how Don will die,” as if his death were a foregone conclusion and all that is in question is the means: will he jump from a tall building or turn into a drug-addled beach bum wasting away and finally drowning one summer day in some shabby Florida town?

-- Why did the magnificent Jessica Parre, toothily grinning, pose nude in a swimming pool and panty-clad in the kitchen for an Esquire photo shoot?

As you are not featured in the episode, my dear Joan, it was awfully kind of you to come over and watch it with us, knowing, as you did, that questions one and three would answer themselves. Here, as promised, are the notes I took, the observations you and I and Stacey made, so you can share them with Bob Benson.

I notice that Don spells out “strategy” to open the episode, which closes with his unexpected appearance at a strategy session for a cigarette manufacturer at the Algonquin.

Stacey, also present, gets points for noting the symmetry in wifely party-giving: Betty Draper throws one and so does Megan Draper, on different coasts, with different costs, casts, and results.

Speaking of symmetry, when Lou sadistically keeps Don from taking his flight to Los Angeles, he says he’s going to “tuck you in” for the night – the same locution used by Megan’s friend Amy when she initiates the threesome with Megan and Don after the party in LA, where he flies to comfort his niece – that is, Anna Draper’s niece, Stephanie, seven months pregnant – but whom he never sees, because Megan, jealous of the affection her husband has for the girl, sends her on her way, albeit with a check for a thousand dollars. “I know all his secrets,” Stephanie artlessly says, pushing Megan over the edge.

You were right, Joan: when you consider the sexual shenanigans, it’s hard to get worked up over the Esquire photo shoot. Anyway, even at her meanest, Megan is a lot easier to take than Betty, on whom Henry finally loses his temper. Betty remains in favor of the war in Vietnam when even Nixon goes on record wanting it to end.

Lou, sealing his status as a certified asshole, turns out to be a cartoonist (“Scout’s Honor”), who compares himself to Bob Dylan (!), rhetorically asking a room of incredulous associates, “Is he hip enough for you?” And then to clinch the deal: “You’re a bunch of flag-burning snots.” Ugh.

“Hip,” also “out of sight,” “bread,” “solid,” “dealing grass,” are among the week’s linguistic markers, and Amy says she is going  “to split” meaning “to leave” the morning after she and Megan and Don share the connubial bed. As for fashion, there are the hideous plaid sports jackets that even Don dons, and Harry Crane sports an ascot where a tie should go, while a bearded Stan, joint in mouth, wears a bandanna in the same place.

But more on Lou, whom I dislike so much I feel sorry for friends of mine named Lou who spell it that way. Best line of the night comes when Lou, disgusted with his whole staff, asks Don whether he should let them all go (whether for the night or for good). “I’d let you go, Lou,” says our dapper hero (in real life an avid St. Louis Cardinals fan, but we who root for the Dodgers or Mets won’t hold that against him.) The sadistic shithead leaves the office and lets Don know that he can wait until Monday for the work, after all.

Oh, those days of joints everywhere, of Blood, Sweat, and Tears on the radio, of musicians who drop out of Berkeley and get busted for dealing dope, of adult content and sexual situations, of girls wearing hair bands or sword-fighting with golf clubs, and, alas, of guys named Ginsberg who flip out and get carted off to the nut house.  Cutting off one of his nipples and presenting it to Peggy in a gift box takes the cake for sincere craziness.  But in this very satisfying episode, he is also responsible for perhaps the cleverest most ‘69 moment, so to speak. It happens when he spies on Cutler and Lou talking and watches their mouths move, imagining what they are saying – just as Hal the computer reads the astronauts’ lips in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, released in 1968 but on wide screens everywhere a year later.

Joan, I do not think Don is going to jump out of a window, or die on a deserted beach. I think we get a glimpse of his future when he barges into the Algonquin and offers to resign from the firm if it means the Philip Morris account. And then he turns into Don Draper, the man who can sell any concept to any executive, who has worked ten years on tobacco and is the only cigarette man who has conferred with the opposition and arranged a “stay of execution” for the industry in 60, in 62, in 64 and 65. Makes my hand go reflexively to my breast pocket and pluck out an unfiltered Lucky to light up. 

Yours in sincere admiration,

Dapper Dave, author of “The Drape(r)s of Roth”

PS Speaking of nipples, did you see Rihanna’s on Instagram?

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 11:26 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Mad Men “The Runaways.”

I am worried sick about Ginsberg. I fear our resident, wisecracking  Jew is going to be subjected to shock treatment, and perhaps thereby be silenced, leaving an entirely goyishe office. He has been descending into something like paranoid schizophrenia since the season began. (Wonderful acting job by Ben Feldman!! Looks like he’s lost weight, his face intermittently flushed as though he were coming down with scarlet fever, and he seemed persecuted even by his own dark, handlebar mustache, as though by some tarantula.) As you recounted, poor Peggy had to be the one to make the call and have him hospitalized, after he sliced off his nipple and offered it to her in a bracelet box. Peggy being an (ex?) Catholic, there was something straight out of the lives of the martyrs about that self mutilation / lovingly proffered body part (which made Peggy scream.) The later shot of her puffy, pink, tearstained face as she watches Ginsberg being rolled down a hospital hallway, strapped to a gurney, still wildly gesticulating and blabbing, gave us a glimpse of a former, more tender-hearted Peggy I have to admit I miss, though I well understand it’s better for dramatic development, for intensity of character and storylike, etc. etc. if she continues on her path of becoming Don’s Dark Sister. But when was the last time Peggy looked sorry for or fond of anyone? It was high time. (There’s still no silver bullet for treating schizophrenia, if that’s how Ginsberg ends up getting diagnosed, and back in 1969 options were fewer and grimmer. Will he be forcefed Thorazine? (Lit Footnote, just cuz I looked this stuff up: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was published in1975, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar didn’t come out in the US till 1971, after it’d appeared in England at first under a pseudonym.) I was hoping it would to come light that Ginsberg had merely been dropping tons of acid. Alas, it appears to be something more insidious. (All this evokes, as you so rightly note, another family of highly verbal, east coast Ginsberg’s travails.)

Mad magazine (who can resist this confluence of Mad Men and Mad magazine) but felt that the most spot-on reference, to George Baker’s Sad Sack, remained unmentioned. There’s a giddy, cruel, boyish, schoolyard atmosphere that pervades these scenes. The school bully (Lou) is found out to have a vulnerable point (his secret life as a comics artist) and for a while the younger boys of the creative team take merciless, giggling advantage, unable to stop mocking him behind his back (or so they think) even while taking a leak (the revelation of the sketches being an inadvertant “leak” of another sort, I suppose.)  

AND: Here’s a toast to Betty’s contribution to the ‘progressive dinner,’ where guests move from house to house to sample various courses (at which she demonstrates her decidedly unprogressive politics! as you noted, situating herself to the right of even 1969 vintage Richard Nixon, not to mention her politically ambitious husband.) Oh! but I drink here to the fussy and disgusting foods of the era: crab louie on toast points (not so bad), rumaki (one of the grossest culinary inventions of all time, in the opinion of this lifelong liver-hater) and “little franks in barbeque sauce” (not recommended by the surgeon general). For the uninitiated, since I’m old enough to remember rumaki and to have been severely traumatized by it (“Just taste it! That’s all you have to do…”) here’s a typical ingredient list for that dreaded hors d’oeuvre (in case you think I’m harshing Betty’s buzz unnecessarily.)

         a 4 oz. can of water chestnuts, drained and sliced
            1  cup teriyaki sauce
             1/2 teaspoon minced fresh ginger root
             12 ounces fresh chicken livers, halved
             a teaspoon of minced garlic
             12 slices bacon
             1 quart oil for frying

There are recipes aplenty online if this appeals to you. ENJOY!

Sally’s broken nose seems a symbolic precursor to loss of virgnity. Was she telling the truth about how it happened? I liked the intimate scene between her and younger brother Bobby if for no other reason than we’ve never really seen them join forces before. Sally’s escaped to boarding school but poor Bobby is stuck watching his beautiful, angry, twisted up mother smolder and fume through the ides of her second marriage and grow restless in the throes of a kind of incipient feminism which is not reacting well with her knee jerk reactionary tendencies. “I have a stomach ache all the time” Bobbie says to his big sister in a small voice, and “the other night they were really screaming at each other.” Poor kid.

I am jonesing for more Joan. Not happy when she’s absent. I am wondering if the appearance of Don’s pregnant hippie “niece” (speaking of plot harbingers) is somehow a teaser for the fact that Megan will find herself pregnant before the series is through. I hope Don doesn’t die at all, and especially that he doesn’t die of lung cancer. I LOVE the way he whistles for a taxi.

Till next week! I am already having withdrawal symptoms! How can there be so few episodes left this season????

LSE versus NYS Debate the Burning Issues of the Day [by David Lehman]

Debate teams representing the London School of Economics [LSE] and the New York School of Poets [NYS] will go into action in neutral Montreal on Friday, May 23 of this year, a spokesperson for the League of Labor Day Mothers announced today.

The potential topics, which captains of the two squads agreed to, are taken from recent issues of high-circulation journals. According to the spokesperson, Alexis Carrington, the topics include

(A) Resolved: the Holocaust did not happen, and if it did, the number of victims has been exaggerated. [See Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2014, p. A8],

(B) Resolved: though a large portion of the West Antarctica ice sheet has begun melting at a pace that appears to be unstoppable, governments around the world would be wise to delay acting to cut greenhouse gas emissions in order to avert sea level rise, species extinction, and food insecurity. [See "I Back Governor Corbett" by Chris Abruzzo, Pennsylvania Cigarette, May 13, 2014]. 

(C) Resolved: the worst corporation in the world, from the point of view of either consumer satsifaction or shareholder relations, is Time Warner Cable or whatever the skunks call themselves today. [See "Enjoy Better" campaign on all major networks.]

[D] Resolved: all drugs, not excluding heroin, should be legalized immediately subject to strict governmental controls regarding user age. [See Newspeak, May 26, 2014].

Among the NYS debate team members are Henry Francis, Michael Ginsberg, Joan Harris, and Stephanie Horton. The LSE team is captained by Mervyn Bunter and includes Amanda Fitton, Arthur Hastings,and Flossie Rubrick. Teams must be prepared to take either the affirmative or negative side of whichever debate topic the judges (Paul Biegler, Emily French, and Hector McQueen) choose based on what they had for breakfast that morning. Hosting the televised proceedings will be Alex Trebek, who has vowed to grow back his old mustache for the occasion. -- DL

Next Line, Please: Help the American Scholar Write a Sonnet

On Tuesday, May 6, The American Scholar launched a website experiment in writing crowd-sourced poetry—in this case, a Shakespearean sonnet. David Lehman supplied the first line and picks subsequent lines from reader submissions.

Click here to read previous lines from the crowd-sourced sonnet, and here for David Lehman’s description of the history and requirements of the form.

---

Here's the sonnet thus far:

How like a prison is my cubicle
And yet how far my mind can freely roam
…

---

Of the winning second line, David Lehman writes: The many impressive second-line candidates left me undecided until the last moment when I opted for Leo Braudy’s elegant “And yet how far my mind can freely roam.” The succession of strong monosyllables broken only by the single crucial adverb won me over. Initially, I wondered at the wisdom of the turn signaled by the conjunction that begins the line; it seemed more appropriate for the pivot after line eight. On reflection, however, I thought it might be interesting to jump quickly to the paradox of freedom within constraints. It places a lot of pressure on the composers of lines three and four, which need to rhyme with “cubicle” and “roam” in any order.

Continue reading here  . . .

Meat the Poet: Jennifer Tamayo [by Jennifer L. Knox]

Above: JT's "IM ALL ARMS IM ALL IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS IM ALL ARMS"

I've probably attended about 500 poetry readings in my life. One of the most memorable was given by writer/performer Jennifer Tamayo while wearing a paper glazed donut mask over her entire face. By "glazed," I mean she had poured some super-gross viscous material all over it. She read from her book, Poems Are The Only Real Bodies, which the publisher, Bloof Books, describes as: "A collection of letters to the historical object, Harriet Tubman (aka Araminta Ross/The Conductor/Moses) the sequence considers the pleasures and difficulties of what it means to encounter and experience a radiant historical figure—how do subjectivities collide? How does poetry service the body? Most of the chapbook was written in situ at the Harriet Tubman Memorial Triangle in Harlem, the neighborhood in which Tamayo both lives and works." The magenta and orange colors on the cover "are inspired by a popular fast-food chain located in the same plaza," which is Dunkin Donuts— thus, her donut mask. The combination of her mask, her strong stage presence, and addressing the revered subject of her book—Harriet Tubman—in a mode at once modern, profane, self-indicting, and sincere was like nothing I'd ever seen. Now I am reminded of the Flamenco dance class scene from Happy Go Lucky. It made me feel...not entirely comfortable...but good.

Is That Your Final Answer? [by Charles Coe]

Whenever I start to worry that the human race is becoming too intelligent, I take a day off from work to camp out on the sofa and check out some daytime television. I especially enjoy the “Jerry Springer Show,” and its various clones that make it obvious there are some people who'll do anything for their fifteen minutes.

Who can resist a hairy, three-hundred-pound guy in a tutu shaking his moneymaker? Or a couple of skanky-looking women fighting over some kuckle dragger who looks like he'd have a hard time scoring a dishwashing gig at Denny’s?

One Springer clone recently featured the topic (and I swear I’m not making this up) “My Mom Thinks My Baby’s Too Dark to Be My Fiancée’s.”

Fair enough. But I’m looking forward to the follow-up: “My Baby Thinks My Mom’s too Stupid to Be His Grandmother”...

BABY: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We welcome our studio audience and viewers at home to “Are You too Stupid to Be My Grandmother?” Is our contestant ready to begin?

CONTESTANT: Yes.

BABY: Excellent. Your first question: “What religion is the president of the United States?

CONTESTANT: Muslim!

(Buzzer sounds)

BABY: Sorry, that is incorrect. The president is Christian. Next question: “Please name a planet in our solar system other than Earth.”

CONTESTANT: Umm…the Moon?

(Buzzer sounds)

BABY: Incorrect. The Moon is a satellite, not a planet. Next question: “Is a thespian allowed by law to serve in the Congress of the United States?”

CONTESTANT: Absolutely not!

(Buzzer sounds)

BABY: That is incorrect. Appearing in a dinner theater production of “Cats” does not preclude holding national public office, although some might argue it should. Are you ready for your final question?

CONTESTANT: I guess…

BABY: Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?

CONTESTANT: …Uhhhh…

(Buzzer sounds)

BABY: Sorry, your time is up. We have now ascertained that you are, indeed, “Too Stupid to Be My Grandmother.” But thank you for playing. We hope you enjoy your parting gifts: a case of Bacon Ranch Pringles and the complete boxed set of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” Please exit through the door on your right…no…the other right...

Daytime television reassures the aliens who’ve been monitoring our transmissions for the last hundred and fifty years that Earthlings pose no threat to the Galactic Federation. At some point soon, after checking out the show with the guy whose ex-girlfriend won’t give back his prosthetic leg, or the man who married his horse, the aliens will breathe a collective sigh of relief, grab some Chinese takeout, and head for home.

 

Monday Comics by Nin Andrews

A Portrait in Ellipses: Russell Edson, 1935–2014 [by Jennifer L. Knox]

A little pink rabbit’s munching on grass. Everything seems nearly normal, except for the fact that the rabbit’s pink. But it’s a pink you can live with—almost a coral if you want to get technical and who wants to do that? The rabbit’s pink, and that’s that. It raises its head to sniff the air. Suddenly it stands on its back legs and flashes a bright white set of shark teeth directly at you. You read somewhere that sharks have multiple sets of teeth, a secret set nesting behind the outside set, the teeth you can see, another secret set of teeth behind those…

Russell Edson has been called the Godfather of the American Prose Poem, but I don’t think that title fits. He did not create the form, nor was he the first to innoculate it with parables from the subconscious’ darkest regions. In his introduction to Great American Prose Poems, From Poe to the Present, David Lehman wrote, “It is a form that sets store by its use of the demotic, its willingness to locate the sources of poetry defiantly far from the spring on Mount Helicon sacred to the muses. It is an insistently modern form. Some would argue that it is, or was, an inherently subversive one”—hence, a form ideal in which to get your freak on, which Edson did in thirteen (stupidly difficult to find) books written from 1951-2009.

This Monday at KGB: Mark Bibbins + Lucie Brock-Broido + Season Finale Party

Mark Bibbins + Lucie Brock-Broido + Season Finale Party

Monday, May 12, 2014

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

 

Mark Bibbins is the author of The Dance of No Hard Feelings, Sky Lounge, which received a Lambda Literary Award, and They Don't Kill You Because You're Hungry, They Kill You Because They're Full, which was released this spring by Copper Canyon Press. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and The New School, where he co-founded LIT magazine. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Boston Review, Tin House, The Best American Poetry, and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. He was a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow.

Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of Stay,Illusion, which was released in 2013 and name a finalist for both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the author of three previous collections of poetry, A Hunger, The Master Letters, and Trouble in Mind, as well as the editor of the poems of Thomas James, Letters to a Stranger. A volume of Brock-Broido’s selected poems, Soul Keeping Company was published in the U.K. She is Director of Poetry in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and lives in New York City and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

Thanks everyone for a great season! Fall 2014 Season to be announced soon!

Happy Mothers Day!

Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by Abby Rosebrock

Ann Kjellberg, founding editor of Little Star, an annual journal of poetry and prose, and Little Star Weekly, its mobile app version, will be offering a poem every Sunday this spring. This is her fourth post.

A batch of poems by a young poet named Abby Rosebrock was sent to me by a scholar-friend in 2011.  I was astounded by them.  Each one was as bold and confident as a banner, and said something I have never read in a poem before. It should perhaps not surprise that Rosebrock is an actor and a playwright (her web page is a welter of performances, under klieg lights and in cellars, as it is this weekend, with new work at The Rule of 7X7 at The Tank and New York Madness at Playwrights Horizons). Her poems are monologues and in them an utterly singular being comes fully to life and vanishes within the poem’s single act. The speaker is both nakedly there and ingeniously crafted.

“Future Baby,” in its courageous bid for absolute tenderness, was the triumph of the bunch. The boggling truth that a baby in its final vulnerability becomes a locus of total love, an expression of even the possibility of total love, and that this consuming totality comes to rest in a being so tenderly specific, is at once intimate to the experience of being a mother and capacious in its scale. The reciprocity with which love reaches through the generations in the poem becomes an affirmation of the unity of experience and the illusoriness of time. Love clings to us as we crawl away from the disaster of death. Love makes a future baby as real as a living one. The baby is “the whole point,” a vanishing point, that organizes everything and gives it value in the infinite distance; and then, in the poem’s closing lines, as the baby opens its mouth, as babies do, its “glass-clear spittle” becomes lens or a crystal ball, both revealing truth and magnifying love. Where the dragon’s teeth sowed warriors, the spaces where a baby’s teeth will be within baby who does not (yet) exist, beatitude.  Within the homeliness of the poem’s dirty snow, its elbow, its bottle cap, its spittle—like an image in a glass bead in a baroque painting—resides the image of mother and child that haunts our art and poetry, a nesting place for eternity. The poem’s long lines yearn toward its absent object; its alternating couplets and single lines express the poem’s paradox: in love, we are two in one, one in two.

Read more of Abby Rosebrock’s poems in Little Star #3. Her monologue in the voice of spring (“What does your heart encompass, how do its contents compare / to my foliage, my Hellenic arsenal of metaphor?”) is in our mobile app Little Star Weekly this week.

 

Future Baby

The way you will reach for me. The supernatural luckiness of being reached for

by the one I reach for. That you should cry for me—when I wore size-two shoes I cried 

 

for you. At nine I broke my ankle on a trampoline and wept for you. At thirteen

when I cried for my dead mother how I cried for you. I knew then I would love 

 

you as she loved me. At her bedside I felt you clinging to my chest in your white cotton.

 

The secret is for most of us you are the whole point. Look around here

with your small weak gentle eyes. See that corner and that. The doorway 

 

and the snowy muck. The woman tripping. Outer space, illuminated manuscripts,

fried butternut squash. Raw yellow squash, the sport of squash, the verb to squash: 

 

you are the whole point. The other things are waiting room. Ephemera. They need

 

batteries. Now I am twenty-one and poor and lonely and  there is no other joy than pillowing 

your tender imaginary head on my elbow.  You. You make an elbow a sweet thing. 

 

You sweeten the weight of each word here. You open your pink mouth into the shape

of a bottle cap. And that’s where my epiphanies will be. In the glass-clear spittle, 

 

a true love for my enemies. In the spaces where your teeth will grow, beatitude.

—Abby Rosebrock

Jennifer L. Knox Guest Author May 12-16

Jennifer L. Knox's new book of poems, Days of Shame and Failure, will be published by Bloof Books in 2015. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New York Times and four times in The Best American Poetry series. She lives near Ames, Iowa.

Welcome, Jennifer

In other news . . .

Next Line, Please: Help the American Scholar Write a Sonnet

On Tuesday, May 6, The American Scholar  launched a website experiment in writing crowd-sourced poetry—in this case, a Shakespearean sonnet. David Lehman wrote the first line; you supply the remaining thirteen.  Details here.

-- sdh