The Best American Poetry

This Monday at KGB: Patricia Spears Jones + Shanna Compton

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

Patricia Spears Jones + Shanna Compton

Monday, December 1, 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

 

PATRICIA SPEARS JONES was named by Essence.com as one of its “40 Poets They Love” in 2010. She is author of the poetry collections: Painkiller and Femme du Monde from Tia Chucha Press and The Weather That Kills from Coffee House Press and four chapbooks, the most recent Living in the Love Economy. Her work is widely anthologized....Spears Jones has been a culture maven for four decades. She was the first African American programmer as Program Coordinator at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. She served as Mentor for Emerge, Surface, Be, a new fellowship program at The Poetry Project. She ran the esteemed New Works Program for the Massachusetts Council of Arts and Humanities (1989-1991) and was Director of Planning and Development at The New Museum of Contemporary Art (1994-96). She is also actively involved in a variety of formal and informal organizations involved with progressive politics, social justice, feminism, the environment, and multi-culturalism, best seen in her appointment as Senior Fellow for The Black Earth Institute. She teaches for CUNY. Her art, theater, poetry and music essays, reviews and interviews can be found in print and online at www.tribes.org, Bomb, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Black Issues Book Review, The Boston Globe, and Essence and www.Essence.com.

SHANNA COMPTON is the author of the poetry collections Brink, For Girls & Others, Down Spooky, and several chapbooks. The Seam, a book-length speculative poem, is forthcoming from Bloof Books in 2014. She is also the editor of a collection of essays on the topic of video games, Gamers. Her work has been widely published, including in the Best American Poetry series and other anthologies.

Upcoming, Fall 2014

Dec 8    Mark Doty + Vijay Seshadri + Season Finale Party!   

Rachel Fayne Gruskin, Guest Author December 1-5

This week we welcome Rachel Fayne Gruskin as our guest author. Rachel was born in Miami, Florida and obtained her English degree from The University of Central Florida in Orlando and her MFA in Poetry from The New School, with additinal post-graduate work in poetry at Columbia University. Rachel lives in South Florida and splits her time between hosting duties, teaching, and freelance writing. For the past two years, she has hosted and written for Beyond the Book, a television program based on visiting places written about in popular books and interviews with visiting authors.  Rachel also teaches a variety of English classes at Broward College and Digital Media Arts College. Her publications are primarily poetry and lifestyle pieces, and her latest article for The Travel Channel can be found on its website. Her poetry honors and publications include work in Shampoo, The Furnace Review, Westview Newspaper, The Smoking Poet, Caffeine Destiny, and Calliope. If you don’t live in South Florida, you can catch Beyond the Book anytime under ‘Regular Programming’ here or gently encourage Rachel to be more active on Twitter here.

Welcome, Rachel. 

In other news . . . 

Remembering Mark Strand (1934-2014). Please post your memories of Mark in the comment field to this post. 

-- sdh

 

Remembering Mark Strand [by Brenda Shaughnessy]

(Ed note: Brenda Shaughnessy wrote about Mark Strand on her facebook page. She kindly agreed to let me share her moving tribute here.Thank you, Brenda. sdh) 

Like many others, I was very young when I first encountered Mark Strand's poems--and they seemed like they issued from some faraway, magical, impossible world where some exalted humans were deigned poets. These pieces of art were otherworldly. It made sense that the person who made them was this tall drink-of-water silver fox with an excess of charm (or so I saw in photos and heard in anecdote.) The chance to get to know him a little--enough to call him a friend, to love his wit, admire his generosity, and to appreciate his joyful embrace of younger generations of poets--made me feel like I was really part of poetry, past and present. He wasn't just his poems, of course. He was kind, full of vim, was devoted to poetry and cared about those who wrote it. I'm so sad that Mark Strand, the person, is now elsewhere forever. Here's one of my favorites:

The Tunnel

A man has been standing
in front of my house
for days. I peek at him
from the living room
window and at night,
unable to sleep,
I shine my flashlight
down on the lawn.
He is always there.

After a while
I open the front door
just a crack and order
him out of my yard.
He narrows his eyes
and moans. I slam
the door and dash back
to the kitchen, then up
to the bedroom, then down.

I weep like a schoolgirl
and make obscene gestures
through the window. I
write large suicide notes
and place them so he
can read them easily.
I destroy the living
room furniture to prove
I own nothing of value.
When he seems unmoved
I decide to dig a tunnel
to a neighboring yard.
I seal the basement off
from the upstairs with
a brick wall. I dig hard
and in no time the tunnel
is done. Leaving my pick
and shovel below,

I come out in front of a house
and stand there too tired to
move or even speak, hoping
someone will help me.
I feel I’m being watched
and sometimes I hear
a man’s voice,
but nothing is done
and I have been waiting for days.

Mark Strand

"Monroeville, PA" (by Ed Ochester)

Monroeville, PA

One day a kid yelled
"Hey Asshole!"
and everybody on the street
turned around

-- Ed Ochester

The poem appeared in Poetry in 2000 and in Ed Ochester's book WHITE HORSES: SELECTED POEMS (Autumn House Press). Originally in Poetry.

From the Archive: On Movies and Beauties (by Mark Strand)

When I was very young, say, around seven or eight, I went in for cowboy flicks.I usually went with a pack of boys my own age; we paid our dime and watched a double feature. The National Anthem was played and sometimes there’d be a yo-yo contest.There were usually one or two cartoons, a serial of Superman or Captain Marvel and always Movietone Newsreels.I had no use for Tom Mix or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers.I liked Randolph Scott, I guess because I admired his perfectly chiseled features and the fact that he didn’t sing.But I’ll talk about the male stars of my past at another time.

Now I want to discuss the females that I had begun to want to watch, the many on whom I developed a crush.I was nine or ten when I thought Esther Williams [left] was hot. It was her swimming, naturally, that did it for me. In those days I liked women who evinced some athleticism. I never really thought of them as women, but as grown up girls.  Esther Williams could swim. That was it for me. I thought her face a little broad, especially when she wore a swimming cap. The crush was short lived. I moved on. Athleticism ceased to be a necessity, since almost none of the female stars was athletic, at least not on screen. That is, with the exception of Ginger Rogers, whose dancing I considered a kind of athletic event. (As I grew older I ceased to think of it as merely that.) I should also mention Betty Grable [below right: the GIs' favorite pin-up girl in WW II], who does a terrific solo in “The Gay Divorcee.” But this and other Rogers/Astaire movies I saw sometimes as many as ten years after they first appeared.  It wasn’t simply Rogers's athleticism that got to me, it was her energy, her perkiness. That’s it: she was perky, despite those eyes that could be a shade soulful, a little hurt.

Other Perky cuties I had a crush on were Janet Blair, Joan Leslie. I have not seen Janet Blair since I was ten years old, so I can’t say what effect she would have on me now, but I recently watched “Flying Down to Rio” and took a good hard look at the young Ginger Rogers [left] but was not overwhelmed. More overwhelming was the seemingly endless Carioca dance numbers with Fred and an ensemble of hundreds (it seemed). And most overwhelming was Dolores Del Rio [below] to whom I had paid no attention when I was a boy. 

Ah Dolores! I ran into her once in an elevator in Mexico City back in 1953. I was with my father and he noticed her right away and practically fainted on the spot. She was then 48 and I was 19.She was still beautiful, but not the way she was in “Flying Down to Rio.” She was darkly glamorous, which is about all that I could be certain of in the few seconds we were on the elevator. In “Flying Down to Rio” you noticed the playful intensity of her eyes and her perfect features. But more about the true beauties next time.

-- Mark Strand

Mark Strand is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently New and Selected (Knopf, 2009) and Man and Camel (Knopf, 2008).  Read more about Mark Strand here.

(This post originally appeared on August 31, 2009)

Mark Strand 1934-2014

(Ed note: Please post your memories of Mark in the comment field below. I'll publish them in a single post later this week. Thank you. sdh )

In memory of Mark Strand [by Lera Auerbach]

While a student at Juilliard I read the poem "The Dead" by Mark Strand, which instantly inspired me to write my very first song setting of English language poetry.
In memory of a poet - Mark Strand (Apr. 11, 1934 - Nov. 29, 2014)

 

 Lina Tetriani, soprano; Lera Auerbach, piano .

 

What Would Kafka Do? [by Stacey Harwood]

On October 21, 1985, The New Yorker published this poem by Raymond Carver:
 
Kafka’s Watch

I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns, and
an infinite eight to nine hours of work.
I devour the time outside of the office like a wild beast.
Someday I hope to sit in a chair in another
country, looking out the window at fields of sugarcane
or Mohammedan cemeteries.
I don’t complain about the work so much as abou
the sluggishness of swampy time.  The office hours
cannot be divided up!  I feel the pressure
of the full eight or nine hours even in the last
half hour of the day.  It’s like a train ride
lasting night and day.  In the end you’re totally
crushed.  You no longer thing about the straining
of the engine, or about the hills or
flat country, but ascribe all that’s happening
to your watch alone.  The watch which you continually hold
in the palm of your hand.  Then shake.  And bring slowly
to your ear in disbelief. 

            To a devoted Carver fan, the poem seemed uncharacteristic: more lush than the spare style that tagged Carver as “minimalist.”  I loved the poem, clipped it, and committed it to memory.

            Ten years later while reading Kafka’s letters, I came across this passage, written in October 1907, when Kafka was 24 and had begun work for the Italian insurance company Assicuraziono Generali:

 

             My life is completely chaotic now.  At any rate, I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns and an immense eight to nine hours of work; but I devour the hours outside the office like a wild beast.  Since I was not previously accustomed to limiting my private life to six hours, and since I am also studying Italian and want to spend the evenings of these lovely days out of doors, I emerge from the crowdedness of my leisure hours scarcely rested . . .

            I am in the Assicurazioni Generali and have some hopes of someday sitting in chairs in faraway countries, looking out of the office windows at fields of sugar cane or Mohammedan cemeteries; and the whole world of insurance itself interests me greatly, but my present work is dreary.

            I don’t complain about the work so much as about the sluggishness of swampy time.The office hours, you see, cannot be divided up; even in the last half hour I feel the pressure of the eight hours just as much as in the first.Often it is like a train ride lasting night and day, until in the end you’re totally crushed; you no longer think about the straining of the engine, or about the hilly or flat countryside but ascribe all that’s happening to your watch alone, which you continually hold in your palm . . .

My immediate reaction was dismay. Although I know all about collage and "sampling"  I wondered about the propriety of what RC had done. Did he take too many liberties? Does the title indicate that this is a “found” poem? When Carver later published Kafka’s Watch in a collection, he added the epigraph “from a letter.” Does that addition make it right? Or is it plagiarism pure and simple?

Would Kafka approve?  Do you?

-- sdh

AMERICAN FOOTBALL AS AN AMERICAN WAR GAME, &c: PART IV [by Matthew Yeager]

THE GLADIATOR FALLACY

Hi Friends, it's a pleasure to be typing again on this spontaneous essay.  I've posted about 11,000 words so far, and I haven't managed to get quite to where I hoped.  It isn't that I've stumbled into topics more important than the ones I hoped to shed light on.  If you're in the woods on a deer-hunting trip and you discover a dead body, obviously you should abandon your original purpose.  In my case, it's as if I went on a deer-hunting trip, got coughed on, got sick, lost my party, wandered around, discovered a creek with a little falls, and just sat down next to it, and eventually put my feet in it....  

That's a terrible analogy.  Oh well....But earlier this year, I did sit down at the kitchen table with my mother on a trip back to Ohio.  I had a pencil and a piece of paper, and with a few crude diagrams and about twenty minutes of talking, I managed to explain to her how American football was a symbolic re-enactment of the forceful, strategic, violent, and successful acquisition of the American continent from its native inhabitants by English speakers.  And she understood it!  Because, by grace, the ideas rolled succinctly and swiftly off the tongue.  I will cling to that, and hopefully I can approximate it before I'm done here on BAP.  

Trying to take that trip, though, or rather give that trip, in a more scenic, prosaic, and reputable way has proven a different and difficult undertaking.  If anyone out there has found anything I've typed enjoyable or interesting at all to this point, I'm thankful, because in some ways I don't know if I've even found my way into the starting gate.  Regardless, I'm going to pick up where I left off in the last post, which was in the late Roman empire.  We're going to look at an idea that I call "The Gladiator Fallacy" and examine the similarities and differences between the Roman games and American football.        

THE GLADIATOR FALLACY:  When the fans, owners, players, and marketers of the NFL acknowledge their game as having an historical precedent, they point to the sporting tradtion of one place and time: the Ancient Republic of Rome.  I don't know about you, but it makes me shiver a little as an American citizen, because the last thing we like thinking of ourselves as is the next Ancient Rome.  But that's another topic altogether....

How does American football relate to the Roman gladiator tradtion?  Besides the Roman numerals with which the NFL tallies its Super Bowls?  Besides the fact that the NFL's logo is a war implement from a pre-gunpowder world?  That's what I'm trying to figure out.  "Football players are gladiators."  This is something we've all heard said many times, and maybe have even said ourselves.  Google managed to find this exact sentence 1,010 times in .59 seconds.  And it's not only the way the players are understood from the outside by media and fans, it's the way that they understand themselves.  Grappling to make sense of the suicide of retired linebacker Junior Seau, Bengals great Takeo Spikes invoked his Roman antecedents in the following way: “We are so prideful in the way people view us as modern-day gladiators, how tough we are, how we can fight through anything and keep it all inside.”  There is even an AFL team called the Cleveland Gladiators.      

Recently, there was a rather vivid example of the cultivation of the gladiator connection.  If you are a fan of the NFL, it's likely that you saw it, as the image went fairly viral.  September 11, 2014, Baltimore Ravens outside linebacker Terrell Suggs, one of the most ferocious players in the league, without a shred of irony, donned a metal gladiator's helmet and entered M&T stadium in a wild display of smoke and drums.  For this, Suggs was fined over $5,000 - more than what he paid for the mask on a trip to Italy.  As for the fine and fines like it, I find them all ridiculous, but I'll save those opinions for another day.  What deserves our real attention is the way that a contemporary American crowd was effortlessly able to comprehend and contextualize Suggs' gesture.  They got it, and they cheered.  

So what are the similarities?  In both activities, paragons of male physicality are made a spectacle.  Gladiators and football players, watched by the rowdy masses, compete with great intensity at high risk, violent activities that require armor of some sort.  For this high risk competition, they train vigorously - physically, mentally, and spiritually.  As for the tiered, billion dollar, mostly open-air structures in which today's armored, helmeted specimens of manhood collide, they actually still go by the same Latin word they did in Ancient Rome.  Football is played in a stadium.  Fans view the live action from sightlines thousands of years old in their viewing distance and angles, and there is, in that, a deep connection.  There is a mutually altering, energetic, and ancient relationship between the men at the center of the stadium and the men that watch in the tiered seats, and Suggs tapped into it.      

But to me, this is where the connections seem to end.  There is a major difference between the gladiatorial games and a game like American football.  When the action commences in an American football stadium, the men on the field do not participate in the war activities of the contemporary civilization in which the games take place.  And that is actually a GIGANTIC value difference.  Truthfully, I don't even know what it would look like if they did compete in contemporary war activities.  What would they do?  The closest thing that you see to an implement of contemporary war at a football stadium is the occasional pre-game flyover, and perhaps manned bombers aren't even contemporary in this new world of computerized drones....In the Roman games, though, gladiators used the gladius, the standard issue sword of the Roman army.  They protected themselves with shields.  They rode contemporary war chariots around in a loop and threw contemporary Austrian manganese steel-tipped spears at one another.  American football players, however, do no such thing.  Nor do they face off against the wildest beasts that trade might funnel towards the empire's urban center (lions, tigers, and bears); what sort of gladiatorial tradition are we witnessing then we watch it? The participants do not even go galloping towards one another on horse-back, wearing metal armor, carrying jousting poles, in honor of the English language (ha).  But rather, as said before, the players attempt to possess a prolate spheroid leather ball (of which there is only one) forward toward a goal, and they do it all within a strict set of rules which developed here in America.  Yes, they do tackle one another and block one another; very hard, in fact; often tragically, life-alteringly hard.  But was there ever a war that was fought by literal blocking and tackling?   None that I can think of.  So how can football even be referred to as a "war game?"    

----

The answer to that is actually easy.   Football is a war game in the way that chess is a war game.  Both are symbolic war games.  The difference is that in the game of chess, we're abundantly aware that the game is symbolic; this is because chess is entirely symbolic.  To play chess requires little to no physical strain and involves little to no physical coordination.  When you take an opponent's "king," ending the game, all you're literally doing is placing a plastic or wooden figurine onto a square on a checkered board, and taking a different figurine up into your victorious hand.  This is very different than a defensive end slamming a quarterback into the turf, or that deadly accurate specialist, the kicker, booting a ball through the uprights as time expires.     

Now, this isn't to say that American football, as a symbolic war game played out by real men, doesn't play at physical activities and capacities that aren't useful in a real war situation.  Players must have the ability to run; they must have physical strength, stamina, and the ability to focus on a task despite physical pain.  They must have the ability to listen to intelligence, and translate what their ears hear all through their bodies; they must have discipline, and know how their role fits into the larger scheme;  they must have the ability to understand an ever-shifting situation near instantly; they must have the ability to execute specific and specialized tasks toward a common goal; they must have the ability to remain calm and focused despite the distractions of noise and nerves; they must have no small amount of courage; they must enter a different, more intense, more violent head space, heart space, mind space to succeed....However, all this alone wouldn't make football an '"iconic" war-game.  American football, like basketball, ice hockey, and modern lacrosse, the three sports that descend from Native America's great war game - is a symbolic war game played out by real men.  And we'll get into some of the symbolism tomorrow.  

Alright, I am going to stop here.  My final post will be on Sunday night, though perhaps I might be granted another post or two to try to finish some of these ideas in this forum.

AMERICAN FOOTBALL AS AN AMERICAN WAR GAME, &c: PART III [by Matthew Yeager]

Hello Friends; I'm signing back in for the third installment of my five part spontaneous essay on American Football as an American War Game.  I realize I'm on my last day of blogging, but I'm hopeful that Stacey will keep my account open so I can make the last could of posts. 

REVELATION OF A CAT TOY:  To begin to understand how the game of American football is a war game, and a uniquely American one at that, I think we must back up the wagon.  Back it up out of the enormous frontal portions of the human brain entirely.  Back it into those portions of the brain we share more intimately with our other mammalian friends....  

Friends, do you have a cat?  A dog?  A rat?  A ferret?  If you do, if you have an animal living under your roof, or under the roof of a small, house-like structure in your back yard, chances are that at some point you've looked into the mirror of that animal's activities and seen something familiar.  I don't mean just eating and defecating, those lowest of common denominators.  I mean the loftier parts of our being: how we love, how we obey, how we rebel, even how we dream.  I'll give you an example: recently, my fiance's cat Puck was sleeping on a kitchen chair.  The windows were open; it was about 11 am.  Outside, a neighborhood dog ttook up barking.  Yip!  Ip!  Ip!   Now Puck often hears this dog, and he pays it no mind.  He's no genius; he's not going to invent clothing, or typography, or the wheel, or electricity, but he's smart enough to understand that the dog is outside, and that he is inside.  On this occasion, though, the dog started barking, and Puck, without waking up, started howling that deep spooky frightening howl that cat's howl before a fight.  After about five seconds, he woke himself up, leapt off the chair, and in a raging frightened puffed-up claws-out confusion bristled around for the next minute or so, still howling, looking for a dog that needed a slap.  I just gaped; in the way a ringing alarm clock enters a human dream, and creates a dream where you are pressing every button on your dream alarm clock but still not turning it off, that dog had entered the dreams of a sleeping cat.  The barking had entered Puck's giant ears, and the image of a dog had appeared in his little mind....Amazing.

At play, which is what I'm interested in this five part spontaneous essay, you can likewise observe that an animal's imagination functions a lot like ours do.  I once co-owned an unusually playful grey tabby named Charlie; that cat was a great teacher; Charlie would slap around individually-wrapped life-savers, roll AA batteries across the floor, and run around with all manner of tiny stuffed things in his mouth.  He'd drop them in the corners of the apartment, where they couldn't get away, and then slap them about in a frenzied glee.  What you learn, watching a cat slap around a leaf is the following.  It does not slap the leaf around because it is a leaf.  It isn't thinking, "Leaf, I'm going to get you!"  When a cat interacts with a leaf AS a leaf, it's typically by chewing your plants and then yakking indigestible fronds on your floor.   At play, it's entirely different.  The cat slaps the leaf because the leaf, once in motion, resembles something alive and antic.  When the cat's imagination is added to the leaf, the leaf becomes more than itself.  It becomes what it resembles in motion - a huge edible bug, a mouse with a tail.  In reality, it has become something capable of preparing a cat to get an big edible bug or a mouse: a toy.       

Toys are objects that require imagination.  I think that counts as a true statement.  When the imagination is added to an object, it becomes a toy.  It become something else in the mind, something more than itself, something more real or more serious than itself...A microwave is a microwave to an adult.  It's a serious enough object.  It has its purpose and its place.  You put your frozen dinner in there, and in just five minutes it rotates that lasagna to a creepy perfection.  To a pair of children, though, playing on the floor of a kitchen, that microwave could be a cave, high on a cliff, in which an 8-inch action figure must make the decision to jump, ala Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, to reach safety (a mixing bowl full of water).  The microwave becomes a toy.  Rather, the "play world," which has flowed outwards from the designed toy - the action figure, the object that invites the child's imagination - has grown to include and transform the microwave into something more "serious" than a microwave.  A cave high on a cliff that must be jumped out of is more serious than a microwave waiting to be turned on. 

-

The Fire This Time [ by Charles Coe]

I don’t think the attitude of a man like Darren Wilson—who insists he has “no regrets” and has offered no apology to Michael Brown’s family—is typical of most law enforcement officers, most of whom take their responsibility to protect the public seriously and try to get to know the people in their community. Many of them are taking night school classes toward college degrees, and don’t get their kicks by abusing and humilitaing ordinary citizens.

Unfortunately, there’s another kind of street cop. The kind who was a “tough guy” in high school, probably played sports and bought into the culture of machismo. The kind of guy who’d hang out on the weekend with his buddies getting wasted on beer somebody’s older brother bought them. He was a bit on the wild side but never got into any serious trouble; he was just smart enough to realize it was better to be on the side of the bars where you got to go home at night.

Now he's carrying a badge and a gun. Telling nigger jokes when no black officers are around. Strutting through our community like a centurion in an army of occupation. He lacks the wisdom and maturity to defuse the situation when a young black man gives him attitude; he takes it as a personal challenge.

The Darren Wilsons of the world wouldn’t act as they do unless they knew their leaders would tolerate it. And their leaders wouldn’t tolerate it unless they knew they wouldn’t be held accountable. But all this is just part of a much bigger issue—society at large has decided that young black men are a disposable, surplus commodity. No one in the power structure would ever admit this aloud, but the decision has been made to contain and control black men by policing them and cramming them into (very profitable) prisons rather than making any real attempt to create meaningful educational and economic opportunities that would help them enter the mainstream. ("Sorry...just no room.")

Sometime soon you’ll pick up your morning paper and read about yet another young black man gunned down in suspicious circumstances. Another white officer will claim he acted in self defense. Another mostly white grand jury will decide there isn’t enough evidence for a trial.

And the will sun rise on the smoking ruins of another inner-city neighborhood.

 

 

Charles Coe is author of two books of poetry:  “All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents” and “Picnic on the Moon,” both published by Leapfrog Press. His poetry has appeared in a number of literary reviews and anthologies, including Poesis, The Mom Egg, Solstice Literary Review, and Urban Nature. He is the winner of a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Charles’s poems have been set by a number of composers, including Beth Denisch, Julia Carey and Robert Moran. A short film based on his poem “Fortress” is currently in production by filmmaker Roberto Mighty. Charles is co-chair of the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union, a labor union for freelance writers. He has been selected by the Associates of the Boston Public Library as a “Boston Literary Light for 2014.” His novella, "Spin Cycles," will be published in September by Gemma Media.

Robert Herrick and "Liquefaction"

A friend from Cambridge, England, writes:

The sexiest word in the language, I think sometimes on lovely days as I walk along tree-lined streets and look at the women in their loose summer frocks, is liquefaction. The word refers to the transformation of a substance from a solid to a liquid state. Robert Herrick (1591-1674), in one of his most beautiful short poems, captures the exact sense of the word that I have in mind.

UPON JULIA'S CLOTHES

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!

-- Robert Herrick

And here is the man himself:

"Jeweat?" Tips from Ethel Cotton's 1960 Course in Conversation [by Stacey Harwood]

A few years ago at the Tompkins County Friends of the Library sale I picked up a complete Ethel Cotton 1960 Course in Conversation comprising twelve lessons that promise to turn a shy wall flower into a master of repartee. Here's a tip for today: 

More on #5:

From Painted Bride Quarterly: "The Best Thanksgiving Ever" by Jennifer L. Knox

THE BEST THANKSGIVING EVER by Jennifer L. Knox

After the meal, Sandy decided we should spice up charades
by slapping the loser’s butt with a ping-pong paddle.
Whenever Ed got slapped, he farted because he was so nervous.
The ladies won, slapped all the men’s butts, but then what to do?
“Take off your clothes!” I told Sean, who didn’t seem like the kind
of guy who’d do such a thing—but he was, and he did. Then Jim
took off his clothes. Then John. And then the other Jim

Continue reading over at Painted Bride Quarterly . . .

AMERICAN FOOTBALL AS AN AMERICAN WAR GAME, &c: PART II

PART II: Master Blasters  

Hello friends, and Happy Thanksgiving!  It's good to be back with my second installment of this spontaneous essay on American Football as an American War Game.  I won't go into the reasons why, but I didn't get my second post up yesterday, so there will be two today.  In any event, here is yesterday's post.  

---

Friends, I have to say: I have not written prose outside of emails, catering event reports, and an occasional journal entry in upwards of seven years; I am clumsy in it; I don't know what to put in or take out.  If you observe me hammering at the same nail too many times, or pouring water back and forth over and over between the same two bowls, there is no need to exercise patience; intead, skip ahead.  I have charted a somewhat limited course for today, the day before Thanksgiving, on account of having contracted a small flu; also, it's a hideous day in New York low, gray and drizzly, one of those NY days where the dusk is fourteen hours long, and wakefulness is never fully arrived into; I don't know what bearing that has on anything, but I don't feel as great as I'd like, so will probably write less.   

To give a brief overview of PART I:  I recalled my first memory of watching my beloved Cincinnati Bengals.  I then toddled up into my early childhood with a vague idea of finding my way through some early experiences of the NFL.  The point was to to try to sniff out the consciousness-level I was walking around with at different points as a small American person.  The plan was to reach the VCR, as one reaches a life-raft, then to describe a particular NFL-films VHS tape that meant a great deal to me for a period of time.  I mean to discuss a pair of conflicting messages that I puzzled over as a kid, and lately have been puzzling over as an adult.  

Of course that goal was not reached.  I made my way off the floor and to the VCR, but instead ended up stuck on the experience of rewatching a single Bengals victory as a first-grader.  Portrait of a lunatic fan in his thermal pajamas!  Revisiting that particular Monday Night game from 1986 was illuminating.   An unusual optimism regarding the Bengals has flowed from my disposition for as long as I can remember; it has flowed in the improbable way that water flows from a struck rock; it was confounding to my peers all through the '90s; it was confounding even to me.  Now I've found the fountainhead.  That optimism owes its source to the self-induced brain-washing I performed in the early mornings of 1986-1987.  What separates me from your average mid-30s Bengals fan is that I have seen many many more Bengals victories than there have actually been.  Oh yes!  As a small boy, I once saw the Bengals win upwards of fifty football games in a single year!  That the vast majority of them were all the same game matters less to the subconscious.  Particularly the subconscious in its formative years.  So many Bengals victories!  Bengals victories as inevitabilities!  

In any event, because I've gone down that  Bengals path a few paces, I'll go further, and perhaps talk about that simulatneous zenith and nadir of Bengaldom: the '88-'89 Superbowl.  If you are a fan of the NFL, and you have never heard an overview of the San Francisco 49ers dynasty of the '80s from the perspective of a Cincinnatian, I believe you'll get a kick out of it.  But now I must return to the story of another VHS tape...

---

IN THE EARLY 1990s, around the time I first was able to put on pads and begin slamming into my schoolmates, I had another video cassette. This one was called Master Blasters; it was an NFL Films release, which meant Steve Sabol, balls spiraling beautifully in slow motion, crooning baritone voiceover narration - all the glories of NFL Films!  Master Blasters, as you'd guess,celebrated the legacy of one very specific aspect of the game of football: bone-crushing hits.  In the way the ethos of an older NFL was programmed into that Texas Instruments game, it was rolled up in that tape: Master Blasters was packed with collisions as a junkyard, and the destructive hitters it profiled were held up as heroes.  You were invited to glory in watching a grainy, black-and-white Dick "Night Train" Lane send opponents' helmets somersaulting through the air with his forearms.  Through the doorway of Jack Lambert's missing teeth, you entered into a knowledge of the mighty Steel Curtain.  You learned a colorful langauge, that there existed position called the "wedge buster," and this "wedge buster" had to have the mentality of "a rolling ball of butcher knives" to do his job, which was run down the field on a kickoff and smash into a wall of huge men holding hands.  The violence was shocking; what is now penalized was back then memorialized; there is a zero percent chance the NFL will EVER EVER EVER issue a tape like this ever again; nor should they.    

"I'm a 30 year old mother who manages a masonry business . . . "

Woman Reading by Candlelight by Peter Ilsted

(Ed. note: Just in time for Thanksgiving, David received this note. Ms. Roderberg kindly gave permission for us to post it here. Thank you Mallory! Happy Thanksgiving. sdh)

 

Mr. Lehman,

I bought the 2014 edition of The Best American Poetry a few weeks ago, and having finally found the time to begin reading it, I am struck by a question you pose in the foreword, "Does anyone anywhere buy books of poetry?" I want to tell you that I do. I'm a 30 year old mother who manages a masonry business in Evansville, Indiana, and so far this year I've bought books by Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Mary Szybist, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, J.V. Cunningham, Margaret Atwood, Mark Doty, Anna Swir, Bob Hicok, Tomas Transtromer, Robert Bly, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, and that's just what I can remember offhand. I offer this as a small token of encouragement because I love The Best American series and I'm so grateful it exists. Poetry does matter--and not just to writers in MFA programs, or scholars walled off by dusty tomes in dying English departments--it matters to people like me who still read poems aloud to their children, who carry dog-eared copies of chapbooks in their purses to stave off impatience in inevitable waiting rooms. You probably already know we're out there, but I think it never hurts to hear a little validation.

Thank you!

 

Awaiting the 2015 edition,

Mallory Rodenberg  

Poets on Thanksgiving: A Roundup

Thanksgiving
 

Later, after dinner, we examine your uncle’s photos

of trees, flowers, waterfalls, birds

until I just can’t stand it another second.

I am not at one with nature.  Never was.

Some of the people can be fooled all of the time,

even when you yawn right in their faces.

 

Guests, or ghosts, have taken over the house,

lounging in the living room, watching t.v.

Ugly images of war and politics are all I see.

Cancel the rest of the holidays, please, until this

knot can be untied and our hearts released.

 

-- Terence Winch

 

Happy Thanksgivukkah from Over Here [by Moira Egan, 2013]

Boxed in, Blue Humorous and Bleary Eyed (Bildungsroman Holiday by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

How to Chop a Fuckton of Onions (more Bildungsroman Holiday, by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

Bildungsroman Holiday (by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

Thanksgiving, 1977, Albany NY (by Stacey Harwood, 2010)

A Poem for Thanksgiving (by Martha Silano, 2009)

Happy Thanksgiving (by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2009)

A Poem for Thanksgiving Week (by Laura Orem, 2009)

Venerdi Nero (?) by Moira Egan (2009)

Happy Thanksgiving (2009 - photograph)

"We Gather Together" (2009 - video)

A Thanksgiving Post (by Laura Orem, 2008)

Thanksgiving and Black Friday (by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2008)

Your Brain on Turkey and Fixings (by Martha Silano, 2008)

Live Poetry Blogging on Thanksgiving (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

(Not so) Live Blogging, 10:54 pm [(by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Live Thanksgiving Blogging 12:26 pm (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Happy Spanksgiving, from the flarflist [by Sharon Mesmer, 2008]

Pre-Thanksgiving Emergency Narrowly Averted (by Martha Silano, 2008)

Joel Oppenheimer's Grace [via Alan Ziegler]

When I was in Joel Oppenheimer's workshop in the City College graduate writing program, Joel assigned us to write a grace for Thanksgiving. This is one of his, from his collection of occasional poems, On Occasion.

                                       bless this house

                                       and all who dwell

                                       safe within its

                                       living hell

Poets do Thanksgiving: Karen Resta

I'm already sick of turkey. I'm sick of the idea of it, disgusted by the thought of it, huge, pale and looming on the kitchen counter, threatening and nasty, unconciliatory like the approach to a war. Those goosebump pimples on its hide, the nasty neck looking like someone's severed penis captured and wrapped in tight plastic with dangling gizzards, bloody liver, little gobs of excess fat, it all adds up to sheer terrorism, and I won't have it. Not for the rising aroma from the oven that serves as the fireplace-replacement of our times, steely and meaningful; not for the drumstick which screams like a Medieval painting when wrenched free from its tendons, hungering peasants and small children alike.

-- Karen Resta

One Perfect Ending [by Lee Upton]

It’s a wonderful and rare event to come across a perfect ending.  Recently I discovered one: the six words that conclude “The Faber Book of Adultery,” the opening story by Jonathan Gibbs in The Best British Short Stories 2014.  I admire the story’s ending not only because it closes the narrative in a wonderfully gasp-worthy way, but because it’s a perfect little story in itself: 

This can’t be what it’s like.

What precedes those words is a sex scene.  The story’s protagonist, an academic as well as a writer, views adultery as the overriding subject compelling the achievements of a previous generation of writers: Roth, Cheever, Updike, Yates.  Half stunned by a flirtation that’s turning into action, Mark edits in his mind each sensation as it occurs, as if he’s writing a story.  His actual participation in adultery unfolds not out of lust so much as out of curiosity, his desire to cannibalize experience for his own writing, and his naïve conviction that an earlier generation led lives infused with more sexual daring—and wrote better fiction as a consequence. 

Continue reading over at the Quivering Pen . . .