Poet Deborah Landau has launched many impressive initiatives since taking over as director of the NYU Creative Writing Program. One of the most community-minded and enjoyable is the Friday Night Happy Hour series to which she invites notable authors to read in the elegant West Village town house that holds the program's offices. The readings commence at 5:00 pm, perfect for those who want a hit of the literary life, along with a glass of wine, before heading into the weekend.
Last Friday, poets Leah Umansky, and our own David Lehman were NYU's featured readers. The warmly lit rooms, fireplace, modest hors d’oeuvres, wines, and books lined across a shelf in front of the window overlooking West 10th Street made the poetry reading seem more like an intimate reception.
Umansky is host and curator of the COUPLET Reading Series and the author of Domestic Uncertainties (BlazeVox, 2013) and the Mad Men-inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014). She was named number seven of twenty-three “People Who Will Make You Care About Poetry in 2013” by Flavorwire.
James Ciano, the NYU graduate student who introduced Umansky, noted that in an interview with Coldfront magazine Umansky had said, “All my life, my poems were about what people would call ‘real’ things, but the fact that my latest poems are centered on television shows like Mad Men and Game of Thrones doesn’t make them any less ‘real.’ What is real about my poems is the emotion and the human experience. I’m a strong believer of admitting that I am inside every poem I write.”
Umansky began with poems from Domestic Uncertainties, her “memoir of my marriage and divorce.”
“Life is a verb,” she read. “And we all just dog-ear the moments that matter…scribbling our truth in the margins.”
“Past the memory, past the dream, always at war, always warring and warred,” it all matters, truthfully, when something threatens to conclude, concedes Umansky in the poem “The Marital Space.” “I’ll take it apart for you,” she continues. “The arms, the cushions, the seatbacks, the framework. I’ll also put it back together. Remember memory’s flexible. How we make ourselves isn’t coincidental; it’s consequential.”
Before reading from Don Dreams and I Dream, Umansky said, “I know there are some Mad Men fans in the house, especially David Lehman, so I’m reading some poems in honor of him." She looked at him and added, " I’m very happy to be reading with you.”
“You’ll like this poem.” Umansky read from her poem “Draper and the Jewess.” “Because we all fight for the underdog…She reminds him ofofof something pure, and of value and charm…She wants to love him, but he grows clingy and pale, recoiling from what she is: jewess…The Jewess does not get what she wants, but neither does the Don.”
Umansky takes the audience inside her poems, so we’re standing next to the narrator and Don, feeling as they do, punishable excitement and loneliness.
“The common cure for breakfast isn’t Life,” Umansky reads from “Don Discovered America. “It’s a serving of good old-fashioned competition…Here’s a fact from Don: forty-five percent of people see the color blue as the same color. I want you to see what I see, my blue.”
The rhythmic swiftness of Umansky’s poems from her latest book captured the alluring nature of Draper, even for those who were not familiar with Mad Men.
To introduce the illustrious and prolific David Lehman, Monica Sok, a second-year graduate student of poetry at NYU, quoted John Hollander: Lehman "reminds us that putting aside childish things can be done only wisely and well by keeping in touch with them, and that American life is best understood and celebrated by those who are [...] both in and out of the game, watching and wondering at it.
Lehman captured the admiration of the audience as soon as he began reading new poems.
“If I were a Fascist / and you were a Republican, / would you marry me anyway?” begins “Blast from the Past,” eliciting spirited laughter from the audience. This take-off on "If I Were a Carpenter," the Tim Hardin song made popular in 1966 by Bobby Darin, continues with "If I were a rocket ship / and you were a galaxy, / would you tickle my underarms? / Could I drive your taxi? Would you give me an erection / if you were an electron / and I were a carpenter / instead of a proton? If I were a son of a bitch / and you were a lady, / would you let me scratch your itch, / would you have my baby?”
Lehman's translation from the French of Guillaume Apollinaire's “Hotel,” a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire, caused the audience to laugh in a way only a dear friend could. “My room’s the shape of a cage,” he said. “The sun crooks his arms through the bars, / but I who smoke to make mirages, / let the flame of day light my cigar. / I don’t want to work. I want to smoke.”
Lehman shared a few poems from a book he has been working on for twelve years called Poems in the Manner Of. “Poem in the Manner of Dorothy Parker” is one of those poems that would break even a tense situation.
“Dorothy Parker/…did not foresee,” Lehman read. “That spectacles would be-/ come fashion accessories./ ‘Men seldom make passes/ At girls who wear glasses.’/…in Washington Square Park/ I thought of…Miss Parker,/ and what she might say/ assessing the spectacles of our day: / ‘Even the nicest lasses/ Have tattoos on their asses.’”
Lehman enlisted the audience’s help to title one of his poems. He was torn between “Poem in the Female Manner” and “I Married a Jerk.” One voice suggested he insert "or" and use both titles. To which Lehman deadpanned: "My next poem is “Poem in the Female Manner or I Married a Jerk.”
“When I lived in Newark and commuted to New York,” read Lehman. “I worked on a magazine called New Work and wrote a poem in the female manner to which I gave the title, ‘I married a jerk,’ because any woman married to me, would be able to make that claim.”
Lehman’s charm continued, even as he sang a few lines of an Irving Berlin song quoted in the poem “On Marilyn Monroe’s Birthday.” He concluded with two poems from his New and Selected Poems. “Cento: The True Romantics” is a sonnet for which Lehman had “lifted each line from a Romantic poet.” Each line fit together seamlessly, though they had previously existed separately in the poems of Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Poe, Yeats, and Clare. Lehman’s sonnet doesn’t only demonstrate his knowledge of poetry from the Romantic era but also his love for it and talent for weaving new fabric from even the darkest lines. Lehman concluded with his translation of “Goethe’s Nightsong,” a poem his father had often recited in German with “a very strange look in his eyes.”
Lehman thanked the spectators for being attentive, though it was easy to be as he had charmed the audience from the start by inviting us into the diverse rooms of each of his poems. The audience laughed, wondered about girls who wore glasses, and tasted a bit of French and German poetry.
In her introduction, Sok recalled what a resident at Coler-Goldwater Hospital named Mr. Reed had said after she read to him Lehman’s poem “When A Woman Loves A Man” (which has been anthologized and translated into other languages, including Chinese). Mr. Reed had thoughtfully said, “Well, when a man loves a woman, it means that she inspires him.”
“So in the same way,” Sok added. “when we love a poet, they inspire us too.”
Lehman and Umansky’s poems, an extension of their talents and of themselves, enticed the audience into the diverse worlds of their narrators. It was as if one by one, each narrator took our hands and danced us into each poem, assuring us that we would never have to do the same routine twice, unless we wanted to.
You can listen to a podcast of this even here (scroll down).
