The Best American Poetry

Santa Session [by Alan Ziegler and Forsyth Harmon]

Occasionally Forsyth Harmon (forsythharmon.com) and I make cartoons. I do the easy part--a few words--and she does the artwork. 

Philip Brady, Guest Author December 8-12

This week we welcome Philip Brady as our guest author. Philip is Executive Director of Etruscan Press and author of four books of poems, a memoir, and a collection of essays.  His most recent book is To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet (Broadstone Books). His work has been awarded the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, a Gold Medal from ForeWord Magazine,  an Ohioana Poetry Award, five Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Awards, Thayer and Newhouse Fellowships from New York State, and residencies at Yaddo, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Ragdale, Hambidge,the Virginia Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, and the Soros Centre for the Arts in the Czech Republic. Brady has taught at the University of Lubumbashi in the Congo; University College Cork, Ireland; and on Semester at Sea. Currently, he teaches at Youngstown State University and in the low-residency MFA Program at Wilkes University. He plays bodhran in the New-Celtic band, Brady’s Leap. For more information please visit www.philipbrady.com

Welcome, Philip. 

-- sdh

Hell (O, Young Lovers) [by DL]

As one who maintains that the multiple-choice exam retains its potency for the poet who favors unusual or ad hoc forms, I have created the Freud Quiz, a series that continues and now numbers some thirty entries. But as a sort of aphoristic aphrodisiac, this versatile form begs to be applied to other subjects. Let's start with hell. Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and make our visit.

Hell is

(1) "Other people" (Sartre)
(2) The title of the first section of Dante's Divine Comedy
(3) Cowering in a trench in Flanders beside the dead bodies of two fallen comrades
(4) Faculty meetings
(5) "Myself" (Milton)
(6) A book of poetry consisting entirely of unedited traffic reports
(7) A substantive formed from the Anglo-Saxon helan or behelian, cognate to "hole" (cavern) and "hollow."
(8) The edifice at the end of the road paved with good intentions
(9) An empty place populated by devils (Shakespeare)
(10) "What You Make It" (Breathe Carolina, 2011)

So what does Van Gogh's "Kartoffelessers" ("Potato Eaters"), the image above, have to do with it? Well. . .

"A Woman of Worth" [by Joy Katz]

A Woman of Worth
                                                  Proverbs 31

A woman of worth who can find?
For her province is far above rubric.

A woman of wood, hooks, and rind.
The forks have gone suddenly ruthless.

The hearth of her husband,
husk of her --

She does him good, she evolves.
Dislodges God the last days of her life.

A woman of words: who could mind?
So what if her rupees surprise us.

She is fond of her housefly,
her housefly is cloned with garnet.

She consoles a friend yet bests him.
The fruit of her hands is vincible.

A woman of wound who can find?
She gilds her lawn in streaks, makes song her law.

Her hands hoist the splendor, the spilt.
She strews her hands toward the pool.

“A woman at war with her mind.”
“Her parlance is totally useless.”

She counts singers in fields, and bison.
Steak and doubloons in her cloud chamber.

She opens her mouth: hysteria.
Its likeness on her tongue.

A woman reorders, combines.
Chills rise up into her breast, blessing the husk also, singing:

Favor is false and beauty is vain,
flavor is pulse and bedding is vale.

This woman yet fears the Lord, praise her.
Praise the wood, praise the intimate grain.

-- Joy Katz

Boys, Beware of the Bad Girl! [by Mitch Sisskind]

How ironic that, as intellectuals and aesthetes, those of us who live by words may underestimate the power of the words we speak or write. Just the other day I was in pleasant conversation with a talented versifier when he happened to mention the name "Lilith." Although he was referring to the radical feminist magazine that may or may not still exist, there is no doubt that the real Lilith still exists just as she has since the time of Adam. And to utter her name without quickly pretending to spit twice over one's right shoulder is asking for serious trouble.

Lilith (spit, spit!) as some of you may know, was Adam's first wife. When she affronted the Creator by insisting on "unorthodox" relations with her husband, she was banished from Eden and spent the next 500 years at the bottom of the ocean. Finally she surfaced, determined to wreak as much havoc as possible in human domestic affairs.

When Lilith hears a man mention her name, she surmises (quite correctly!) that a secret wish for her appearance exists in the speaker. Of course, as with any repressed wish, the poor fool may not be aware of his own desire. That's why Lilith always appears in disguise. The new temp at the office, the Fedex delivery girl, the grad student in need of help with her thesis -- any or all of these may be Lilith. But those potential incarnations are relatively easy to resist. Lilith is much more dangerous when she manifests as a man's own wife!

If a woman appears and sounds like his wife, a man -- and especially a poet, naive by nature -- may assume the woman is his wife indeed: "If it looks like a duck..." etc.  He may also forget that he spoke the forbidden name that morning in Starbucks. Well, he's in for a surprise -- and the worst part is, Lilith is dangerously addictive. Not only is she erotically exciting but she's also an excellent conversationalist.

There are two solutions for this problem, both recommended by the ancient sages of the Talmud. First, don't speak the name in the first place! Just refer to the Bad Girl and any educated person will know who you're talking about. Second, create a secret code with your wife that only the two of you know -- an arbitrary phrase like "plate of shrimp"  from the film Repo Man. If you sense anything unusual in your conjugal affairs, demand the password. If it's not forthcoming, fill a bucket with water and pour it on the demon woman. Lilith has hated water ever since her five hundred years in the ocean.

The images above are just two of Lilith's infintely various disguises. On top, of course, is Veronica from Archie Comics; below is a seemingly innocous dental hygenist. Poets! Choose Betty, not Veronica -- and floss daily!

Frank McCourt and Me [By Rachel Fayne Gruskin]

With every book I read, a veritable film is created within. Pupils retract and widen; my fingers can’t move rapidly enough through pages as I see these words and somewhere inside me, images of this reality are created and the film reel of the book progresses. The most internal movie is being made as I imagine what these words really mean. Everything is there. I can see each character; I try to sense idiosyncrasies within them; I conjure up the places they live; there’s an attempt to see everything, and often, I’m imagining it. That’s ok. But what if I didn’t have to? A thirst for reading combined with a primal love for adventure and travel sparked a passion for going to those places I’ve read about in books and experiencing a tangible film reel--something I can touch and don’t have to dream up within my imagination.

 

Brazenly colored buildings line the streets 

 

 

Pretty psyched to be in Ireland

 The best place I’ve ever seen is Ireland. But I knew that before I visited. My father trekked through the country years ago; he brought back a bodhran, a necklace he’d been given by someone who picked him up while hitchhiking, and a map of the country. I’d traced the lines of the map hanging on my father’s wall so many times, but I’d also read Angela’s Ashes. Frank McCourt’s brutal accounts of poverty and hardship in 1930’s/1940’s Limerick didn’t necessarily stir in me a desire to glorify or relish in the grit of the city. It did, however, have me wondering what it might be like to retrace McCourt’s steps. For those not familiar with the book, Frank McCourt recounts his impoverished childhood as he moves from Brooklyn to Limerick and details all the trials that came with it.                      

 

The Location of Leamy’s National School, Now Called Leamy House

I came to Limerick not needing to see McCourt’s Limerick necessarily, but to create my own, and to assimilate it into a more personal Angela’s Ashes. McCourt describes Leamy’s National School, for example, as a seemingly gray place where teachers doled out corporate punishment and students were warned not to cry. Today, the mid-sized brick building still stands, and it seems implausible that this--this spot where you lean and rest your back on the cool iron gates and finger the short stone columns that stand before the building--this is where Frank McCourt saw the things that made him who he was and subsequently earned him a Pulitzer. I stand where he stood.

The Current Storefront of South’s Bar

Much of McCourt’s Limerick has been glorified so, and what was once poverty stricken have subsequently become museums, luxury hotels, and other signs of booming industry. There’s even an Angela’s Ashes walking tour. Not everything still stands, but some things do. South’s Pub does. It’s the pub that serves as a vehicle for McCourt’s father to drink up the family’s savings in the book. It’s also the place where McCourt’s uncle bought him his first pint. The brightly colored bar glass of the Tiffany lamps and lavishly upholstered furniture may not reflect the more bleakly narrated description of the bar in the novel, but that’s not the point. It’s there. I was there. And you can go there. We can all be somehow a part of rewriting our favorite novels in our own mind’s eye by seeing and touching and smelling what our authors did when those words were written. We can make our own reel, and then our favorite novels become something else. They become ours. 

Remembering Strand [By Rachel Fayne Gruskin]

The entirety of the literary community and fans of his work are all grieving the loss of Mark Strand this week. The faulty area at school was abuzz with memories and stories of the iconic poet. Professor Deborah DeNicola, my colleague at Broward College, celebrates Strand in a poem she had published in Nimrod a few years ago.

 

Loving Mark Strand

It’s as if he knows how close he’s always been to Spirit.

As if your hand might pass through the numen of his voice

and a little shadow shiver on the auditorium wall.

If you asked I bet he’d glance away with a half smile and husky

whisper . . . Everything ages . . . We get old . . . Everyone disappears . . .

and this with a hissing sigh: . . . Love fades . . . But his eyes

would twinkle like wild dice and you’d know underneath

that haunting still lives a romantic, why else would he

strike us so humble, so droll? One could do worse

than scribble ethereal sighs while years slip by

 

as pages lifted by wind. Maybe he sees something

we can’t imagine beyond this earthly timeline. Always

his quavery moans purr like a couple of mongrels,

wounded but playful. Oh Strand! Oh handsome Strand!

Your towering gaze taught us tricks that held out mystery,

ships made of words, lifelines we almost grasp

as we read poems built of vowels, poems mocking

themselves, poems so pleased to be poems, bemused

at the range of their pain, consumed with their own toiling

well into twilight— elusive, mewing poems whose feet

 

never touch ground. And here in the pin-drop quiet,

ten deep in the standing-room-only of his vapory breath,

we’re almost splay-legged in rapture while there

at the podium, he’s merely mouthing the syllables

of light and air and glass in the perfectly stitched font

of The New Yorker. We could sail the rictus of cryptic

grin, its crescent aisle, while we cling to his piper’s cape

and flow from the building up a Bread Loaf embankment

where wind blows color out of the gloaming and the smoky

 

poems dissolve, deliquescent as rain beclouding

the synchronous rise of birds. And Strand,

with the bittersweet smile, glad to have touched our lives,

never giving a hoot who mimicked him . . . he just keeps moving,

 

holy over the fields, an Aquarian Orpheus, one with his head

intact, toes dangling over the edge of our good green planet

into the mythic skies of poetry history, taking his place beside

Homer, Virgil . . . Demosthenes’ stones under his tongue,

back to the first bicameral tribe, the blue mother cave where

he first dreamed in the silence the tender language of the born.

 

-Deborah DeNicola, published in Nimrod

"Who Wrote It?" (A Multiple-Choice Quiz)

I am not of those miserable males
Who sniff at vice, and, daring not to snap,
Do therefore hope for heaven. I take the hap
Of all my deeds. The wind that fills my sails,
Propels; but I am helmsman. Am I wrecked,
I know the devil has sufficient weight
To bear: I lay it not on him, or fate.
Besides, he's damned. That man I do suspect
A coward, who would burden the poor deuce
With what ensues from his own slipperiness.
I have just found a wanton-scented tress
In an old desk, dusty for lack of use.
Of days and nights it is demonstrative,
That, like some aged star, gleam luridly.
If for those times I must ask charity,
Have I not any charity to give?

This poem was written by
1) Robert Lowell on the subject of Bill Clinton
2) George Meredith in Modern Love
3) Meredith Wilson in The Music Man
4) Anonymous blogger under heading "The End of a Love Affair"
5) Wilfred Owen, World War I

TALES OF THE SIXTIES: THE ETHNIC DORM, THE ERECTION IN THE GYM SHOWER, AND TWO SIDES OF INFIDELITY—WORDS AS TROUBLEMAKERS [by Alan Ziegler]

    The first time my writing in the college newspaper got me in hot water, I wasn’t prepared for the heat. Early in my freshman year (1965) at Union College, on deadline at the Concordiensis, the editor discovered we were short of copy and asked me to write a letter to the editor “about anything, but try to make it funny.” I wrote a sarcastic tribute to my overcrowded, no-frills dorm, North College, where the “lounge, located on the front steps, provides a superb meeting place,” “three are placed in a room meant for two with only one closet to provide a workshop for cooperation,” and “there are no screens on the windows so moths and other creatures may be observed at close hand.”

    In case someone didn’t get the joke, I closed the letter with “But don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. After all, it’s ethnic.” On the folk music scene, ethnic meant authentic. Mississippi John Hurt and Doc Boggs were ethnic; The Kingston Trio and The Brothers Four were not. Mere effort could not make someone ethnic (except perhaps for Pete Seeger). The Smothers Brothers recognized this by naming an album Think Ethnic! We all got the joke.

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

    The next day on the cafeteria line I overheard students quoting my letter and laughing. I had arrived. Back in North College, I received a message to see the Dean of Students. When I entered his office, the newspaper was opened to my letter.

    “I hope you appreciate the humor,” I said nervously.

    “No, I do not, and neither does the president.”

    The president? “I wasn’t really complaining about the dorm; see, it says that at the end.”

     “That’s exactly why you’re here. The last sentence. We take charges of anti-Semitism very seriously.”

    Anti-Semitism?

    The Dean went on to show me a chart of students in my dorm, pointing out all the non-Jewish sounding names. “We resent very much that you would accuse us of using an old, rundown building as an ethnic dorm.”

    I tried to explain the folk connotation of ethnic, but he went on to tell me that I might not have been accepted had they not kept North College open. I almost asked why they would award a full scholarship to someone near the bottom of the list, but I didn’t want to further alienate the two most powerful administrators in my first semester.

    (Incidentally, when fraternity rushing started, one of the houses focused on my section of North College. Everyone got at least one dinner invitation, except for me and the other Jews.)

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

    By my junior year I had established myself as a campus activist, and was no longer worried about alienating administrators. Still, I had no idea I would enrage almost the entire college community with a heartfelt, moralistic piece of writing, which appeared Tuesday, April 30, 1968 on page three of the Concordiensis under the headline “Dutchman, Rape, Point to Needed Change.” The invitation to trouble began with the first sentence:

                Union’s insensitivity stood out at the showing of Dutchman like an erection in the gym shower.

    About that lead: After I had typed “insensitivity stood out last night…”, my inner editor said, “Tell insensitivity to sit down, because it doesn’t have a leg to stand on.” Then the simile offered itself, and I took it. I chuckled, figuring I’d remove it later, but I wound up leaving it in to lighten the tone of what had become a heavy piece. (Clearly, I hadn’t learned the ethnic lesson.) In the first section, I discussed a showing of the movie Dutchman:

                “At every flash of thigh or suggestion of carnal activities, the ejaculations of laughter drowned out the next ten lines of dialogue….Behind the movie’s sexual façade was apparent the rotten core of the American illness…. but most of the Union men didn’t look this far for they were satisfied with the sexual façade.”

I segued to the aftermath of a rape that had been reported on campus:

                The Scene: A dorm after the news has gotten around that a girl has just been raped on campus. Three students sit upset and bewildered that such a thing could have happened. They talk of the brutality and the inhumanity of it….Then the fragmented sounds from outside, that had only been half listened to before, solidify and permeate the consciousness of the three. And they realize that the guys are chanting: “Rape, rape, rape…” Over and over in a savage litany to the night….

                “A girl, raped? All right! All right!”

                “Hope a Union man did it.”

                “Hey, did you do it? All right! All right!”

                “Finally some action here.”

I closed this true vignette with a zinger:

                Maybe a Union man didn’t rape that girl, but, man, most of them are probably only sorry that they didn’t get a chance to watch.

Unfair? Probably. But I was pissed, and I hoped it would cause readers to imagine the humanity behind these inhumane chants. I shifted to pontificating mode, referring to the ongoing debate about whether the all-male Union should become coeducational.

                So, why is it like this and what do we do? For one thing....get girls here quick. Only when girls become part of the everyday environment will they be accepted and treated as people to whom you must relate fully, and not just as things.

                Maybe then Union men will learn that the breasts are on the girl, and not that incidentally there is a girl attached to the breasts. And maybe they’ll learn that sex is much better when it is part of a full relationship.

    The final section concerned the recent liberalization of Union’s “social rules.” For the first time, female visitors would be permitted in the dorms—but with a 2 a.m. curfew. To many students, this was liberating; I thought it would exacerbate bad attitudes:

                “Screw ‘em and leave ‘em” [is] not only condoned by the social rules, [it is] legislated by them.

                The time: 1:45 a.m. It is your third date with a girl. You are in your room. You have just had intercourse. She feels ambivalent and insecure and wants to hold on to you, talk to you. The alarm rings. You tell her to get dressed, it’s curfew time. You take her back to Skidmore and you both spend the night alone.

    I thought perhaps the piece would cause a few ripples, but I was not prepared for the tsunami that followed. I took the bus down to the City on Wednesday to go to a concert, not knowing that the All College Council (a new governing body comprising administrators, faculty, and students) would take up the issue that evening. When I returned to Schenectady on Friday, Concordiensis’s banner headline revealed that the Council had voted to censure the editor for “editorial poor taste,” labeling my article “a slander of the whole College community.” The English Department professor who taught the only course in creative writing warned that “never again will indiscretions of this nature be tolerated.” The Dean of Faculty “expressed the concern that the college community outside the confines of the campus, the alumni and trustees, would be heartily distressed,” and, if no action were taken, pressure “would be severe.”

    The editor was asked to apologize, and “if the situation repeats itself, further steps, such as the editor’s resignation, would be in order.” The student body president voted for the censure, though he stated he was “neither a Puritan nor an ultramoralist.” There was only one vote again the censure, from the editor of the school yearbook, who said, “The article’s defense need not sink to the level of defending freedom of speech, for….no matter how crude and obscene it appears to some, it cannot be accused of lying.” There was no comment from me because “Ziegler had departed for home earlier Wednesday afternoon.”

    (Incidentally, at the same meeting, the All College Council voted not to recognize the Black Alliance but “emphasized the commitment of the white community to blacks.”)

Things got even more beguiling with the letters to the editor. Here are three, in their entirety.

                 Ziegler—just who do you think you are?

                 With less imagery and rhetoric Alan Ziegler might be able to write an article worthy of printing.

                 In the annals of journalism, Mr. Ziegler’s article stands out “like an erection in the gym shower." 

Not all the letters were negative. An English professor, Sam Ullmann, pointed out that the Puritan was me. Some excerpts:

                Mrs. Grundy has resurrected and is alive and well at Union College….For the first time in memory, a campus publication has printed an article in bad taste, not only likely to offend the fair sex but to make a manly man bite his mustachios in anger….Mr. Ziegler’s allegedly pornographic polemic was, in fact, merely a pungent piece of Puritanism….[The ACC objects] not to the bad taste of the students but to the bad taste of the editor for allowing his paper to call such behavior to the attention to its members….What made the offence still worse was that instead of using the usual embalming fluid of conventional journalism, Ziegler chose to vent his spleen in the style of a Norman Mailer. Inept abuse is tolerable, but metaphor menaces and must be shunned. Fie!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(I have carried the phrase inept abuse is tolerable, but metaphor menaces and must be shunned with me ever since, quoting it in discussions about “voice” in writing.)

    The editor didn’t apologize, and he was not asked to resign. I heard that some psychology students took my article to a senior citizens center to test the premise that it would “offend the little old ladies” of Schenectady (I don’t know if they used height and weight as criteria for selecting their sample). The ladies’ response—as reported to me—was a collective “right on!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of weeks later, the Concordiensis included a comic strip of me as a tiny Don Quixote, visiting the College president to demand that the school’s slogan be changed from Sous les lois de Minerve nous devenons tous frères (Under the laws of Minerva we all become brothers) to Entre les jambes de Minerve nous devenons tous frères (“Between the legs of Minerva we all become brothers”). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

    The following year, my words (and action) would get me into more trouble—including an arrest (with Sam Ullmann showing support by attending the trial)—but that’s for another story (upcoming in this space). For now, I will fast forward a few years, to one of my first published poems:

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

    Now, I was one of the two people hurt because two other people (one of whom was my girlfriend) had sex, but I gave equal time to the unfaithful and placed it in The Village Voice. I got a phone call from a friend of my girlfriend’s, who said the words I’d always longed to hear: “I read your poem in The Voice.”

    I expected her to praise my open-mindedness, but she went on: “And so did my boyfriend, who used it as the opportunity to tell me he was screwing someone else and, after reading your poem, he no longer feels guilty about it. Thanks a lot, troublemaker.”

 

 

 

L'uomo che cammina un passo avanti al buio (Mark Strand, 1934-2014) [by Moira Egan]

I don’t know how many times the word “dark” appears in Mark Strand’s Collected Poems, which recently appeared at our doorway with a glorious thump. I guess someone at Knopf can tell us. But I can tell you that the word “dark” appears 126 times in L’uomo che cammina un passo avanti al buio, a bi-lingual selection of his poems from 1964-2006, which was published here in Italy in 2011. And yet, when, early on, his poems were criticized as being too dark, he famously replied, “I find them evenly lit.”

Mark and Dark. There have been some dark hours over here, as the phone calls and sympathy messages keep pouring in, from poets, editors, critics, publishers, and admirers of his work. We're functioning as the Italian center for condolences, and it's so sad, yet it's also a great honor. Mark himself referred to Damiano as his “voice in Italian,” even inscribing one book to Damiano “from his American brother, or twin. Or author of twin texts. Or necessary precursor of Damiano’s poems.”

In another book (which one it is will become immediately obvious), he has written: “The man cannot thank you enough—and the camel thanks you too. Seriously, thank you for this second life.” Much has been (and will continue to be) written about Mark’s place in American letters. But this “second life” as a major force in Italian poetry has grown exponentially since 1999, with the publication of L’inizio di una sedia, the first bi-lingual edition of his work here.

Here I sit, surrounded by upwards of a dozen of Mark’s books in translation, “a cura di Damiano Abeni,” and, more latterly, with my name on the cover, too. They were published by various houses, ranging from the small, beautiful, and arty to, well, about as big as they get—and in the series that’s considered by many to be the most prestigious for contemporary poetry in Italy. In Italy, too, Mark won just about every prize that can be awarded to a foreign poet. There’s even a DVD, “Ehi, Mark! Scusa il ritardo, scusa il ritardo...” which features Mark and Damiano reading poems in various locations around Rome, playing, too, on that idea of the “necessary belatedness of the translator.”

But it’s not just the influence of Mark’s own work, nor that “second life” that his poems took on in their beautiful and fated-seeming Italian versions. In 2003, Mark and Damiano co-edited West of your cities: nuova antologia della poesia americana. It was the first time in large circulation that the Italian reading public came to know work by the contemporary American poets, born in the 1930s up through the 50s, whose names are so familiar to us: Bidart, Gluck, Graham, Hass, Koethe, McHugh, Pinsky, Simic, James Tate, C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, and yes, Mark Strand. In his introduction, Strand explains (and I’m back-translating from the Italian here): “for a large number of foreign readers, American poetry seems to have stopped with the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the New York School. This volume is an attempt to update the attentive reader and to show that American poetry is alive and well.”

There’s comfort in knowing that the mind and heart of a poet will remain ever “alive and well” in his or her books. A number of friends have made that observation to us in the past few days. I take that to heart, here among these books that offer darkness and light, wisdom and humor, and some brand of comfort, on an afternoon that can’t decide if it wants to be cloudy or bright, dark or light.

Tucked inside one of these books is an airmail envelope, the old-school kind, postmarked June 5, 2002, 80 cents to wing it over from The University of Chicago to Rome. It’s too perfect. It’s this poem:

 

2002

I am not thinking of Death, but Death is thinking of me.
He leans back in his chair, rubs his hands, strokes
His beard, and says, “I’m thinking of Strand, I’m thinking
That one of these days I’ll be out back, swinging my scythe
Or holding my hourglass up to the moon, and Strand will appear
In a jacket and tie, and together under the boulevards’
Leafless trees we’ll stroll into the city of souls. And when
We get to the Great Piazza with its marble mansions, the crowd
That had been waiting there will welcome us with delirious cries,
And their tears, turned hard and cold as glass from having been
Held back so long, will fall and clatter on the stones below.
                                   O let it be soon. Let it be soon.”

 

This typescript has a different phrase at the end of the ninth line, as well as a penciled-in revision. But the poet has chosen well with his “delirious cries,” which is the way the poem appears in his Collected, that gorgeous, 510-page celebration of “his canonical work.” He’s inscribed our copy: 

                                    For Damiano and Moira

                                    Much love                                   

                                    Many thanks

                                    Mark Strand

 

And we’d like to take this opportunity to say the same, back to him.

 

                                    Dear Mark

                                    Much love

                                    Many thanks

                                    Moira and Damiano

 

2002

Non sto pensando a Morte, ma Morte pensa a me.

Si rilassa in poltrona, si sfrega le mani, s’accarezza

la barba e dice «penso a Strand, penso

che nei prossimi giorni uscirò in cortile, brandendo la falce

o guardando controluna la mia clessidra, e Strand si mostrerà

in giacca e cravatta e insieme sotto gli alberi spogli

dei boulevard passeggeremo fino alla città delle anime. E quando

giungeremo nella Gran Piazza dai palazzi di marmo, le moltitudini

che lì attendevano ci saluteranno con pianti deliranti,

e le loro lacrime, rese dure e fredde come vetro dall’essere state

tanto a lungo trattenute, cadranno e scrosceranno sul selciato.

                        Oh, che sia presto. Che sia presto.»

 

Sharon Olds and Ferguson [By Rachel Fayne Gruskin]

The happenings in Ferguson have had us all reading articles, thinking a little deeper, and maybe looking for answers. I definitely was. In between feeling articled out and strung out on news sources, I kept coming back to On the Subway by Sharon Olds. Much of the chatter I’ve heard about race relations in that section of Missouri has been about the balance of power. The majority of the police force is white, which doesn’t reflect the bulk of Ferguson’s racial makeup. On the Subway is certainly topical, and it touches on a power we all give each other (earned or not) based solely on things that have nothing do with earning it.

ON THE SUBWAY, BY SHARON OLDS

The young man and I face each other.
His feet are huge, in black sneakers
laced with white in a complex pattern like a
set of intentional scars. We are stuck on
opposite sides of the car, a couple of
molecules stuck in a rod of energy
rapidly moving through darkness. He has
or my white eye imagines he has
the casual cold look of a mugger,
alert under lowered eyelids. He is wearing
red, like the inside of the body
exposed. I am wearing old fur, the
whole skin of an animal taken
and used. I look at his unknown face,
he looks at my grandmother’s coat, and I don’t
know if I am in his power —
he could take my coat so easily, my
briefcase, my life —
or if he is in my power, the way I am
living off his life, eating the steak
he may not be eating, as if I am taking
the food from his mouth. And he is black
and I am white, and without meaning or
trying to I must profit from our history,
the way he absorbs the murderous beams of the
nation’s heart, as black cotton
absorbs the heat of the sun and holds it. There is
no way to know how easy this
white skin makes my life, this
he could break so easily, the way I
think his own back is being broken, the
rod of his soul that at birth was dark and
fluid, rich as the heart of a seedling
ready to thrust up into any available light.

-Sharon Olds from The Gold Cell

A Feast for the Guilt-Ridden Guest [by David Lehman]

George Herbert’s ‘Love (III)’ from 1633 Yao Xiao

Like John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, though not as flamboyant as the first or as metrically inventive as the second, George Herbert proved that devotional poetry can generate high intellectual excitement.

Born in Wales in 1593, Herbert distinguished himself at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was elected to Parliament twice. In 1630, a year after he married, Herbert took holy orders. He served as rector in Bemerton near Salisbury, delivering sermons and writing poems, for the rest of his short life. Before he died in 1633 he entrusted a gathering of his poems, “The Temple,” to a friend. The poems won an immediate audience.

Herbert is one of the so-called metaphysical poets, who rely on cunning wit and use elaborate, sometimes incongruous metaphors to explore complex themes. He has a poem, “The Pulley,” in which God pours all his pleasures on man except “rest.” Anyone who doubts that the lowly pun can perform sublime feats need only consider these two lines in which “rest” meaning “remainder” and “rest” meaning “repose” are entangled to their paradoxical enhancement: “Yet let him keep the rest, / But keep them with repining restlessness.”

Where Herbert is most obviously innovative is in his use of carmen figuratum—shaped or patterned poems. He has one in the shape of an altar and another, “Easter Wings,” that demands to be viewed as a pair of birds in flight. Herbert was also an inveterate compiler of proverbs. To him we owe one that has since become a durable cliché: “His bark is worse than his bite.”

Continue reading here. 

Next Line, Please: Sense of an Ending

For last week's "Next Line, Please" contest, David Lehman invited readers to write the last sentence of a nonexistent story—either a story that we can imagine or one that we would yearn to read strictly on the basis of your sentence. The winning entry may imply a specific narrative—or it may be so suggestive that readers will be inspired to supply the writing that culminates in the sentence.

Click over the The American Scholar to find out whose last is best.

 

Why Lee Wiley? [by David Lehman]

Because. . .she's magnificent. . .the tremble in her throat. . .the fusion of melancholy and joy . . .
Listen to her deliver Cole Porter's "Looking At You" or the Gershwin brothers' "My One and Only" or Rodgers & Hart's "Manhattan" or Harold Arlen's "Let's Fall in Love."
Because I told Amy Gerstler that LW is my favorite female vocalist and AG (who had thought Helen Forrest was my fave) instantly sent me three lovely Lee Wiley images.
And because I do believe that she was the first to record an entire album devoted to one songwriter or one songwriting team.
-- DL

Let's All Love Jenny Zhang Together! [By Rachel Fayne Gruskin]

I discovered Jenny Zhang about a year ago because her book had just been published by one of my favorite small independent presses, Octopus Books. That book, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find is like a fart joke camouflaged as a refreshing example of modern poetry. I’m not the first to say that some modern poetry is praised purely for being subversive. (flarf, anyone?) However, Zhang’s work is truly revolutionary, but not just for the sake of being so.

 Zhang lets everything go in a way that made me feel like I was up to her ear and being fed secrets in the most deliciously impish way. She’s a poet’s poet and touches on everything from the kind of tangible jealousy we can almost taste in our mouths to a virtually comic-book style use of onomatopoeia.

The exaggerated line breaks and seemingly simplistic colloquial tone are without doubt characteristic of many modern poets and can be found here, in I Ate Marigolds.

 

I Ate Marigolds

I ate Marigolds      for attention            no one noticed

I was forced         to go public               people watching            themselves as long-

er limbed creatures        they have          um       no beauty

 

-By Jenny Zhang, from Dear Jenny, We Are All Find

 

Here’s another favorite:

Anything

your tinny hands are inside tins

I grow as I finish fourth

each de grade action is a great thing

I feel like a great thing

great things are called things and this thing is not inside time which is as tinny as

sorry mom

I wasted dishwater again

I feel feelings

 

this is touchable

Some kids died rollerblading

It’s very touchable

my mother spoons me and in kissing my lips she says she wants to stay

like this forever

me too and I also want to be my own mom

and kiss myself

 

-By Jenny Zhang, from Dear Jenny, We Are All Find

 

I Am What Is Missing: Mark Strand, Forgive me; I Get It Now -- by Amy Glynn

"These socks?" he said to me, leaning in with a big conspiratorial grin, and lifting the leg of his absurdly high-end-looking jeans. 

When Mark Strand smiled, you could almost see the little 1960s Tony Curtis special effects "pling!" of light glinting off his teeth. 

"They're cashmere." And he sat back in the porch rocking chair with a distinctly canary-eating look. 

They were. They were, really, splendidly nice socks. 

Mark Strand died Saturday from liposarcoma. He was 80. Many have, and will, write about Mark with far greater perspicacity and depth than I ever could, so I'm not going to pretend this is at all scholarly or profound. But Mark was one of those writ-large personalities who just seemed to generate legend everywhere he went -- minimalist on the page, Strand's personal presence was massive. In fact the majority of poets over the age of about 26 probably have a Mark Story. So... this is mine.

First of all, poets are supposed to have the decency to be dumpy, or homely, or slobs, or jerks, or mildly autistic and incapable of normal social interaction; or hacks. I mean -- aren't we? Awkward and weird, at the least?

But no. Mark was cool. He was bright, witty, talented, debonair to the nth, highly charismatic, and, it mist be said, head-turningly handsome even decades after AARP must've started haunting his mailbox. He talked like Clint Eastwood and that smile of his could just about blind you -- and he smiled a lot. Because that guy was always in on the joke.  

But what annoyed me was  that sort of Majestically World-Weary schtick that he sometimes had. I think it bugged me because everything about him seemed so effortless and I would have given anything I had to have one twentieth of his CV or body of work and he just semed so utterly Over It I wanted to scream "Pay attention!" When we first met, at Sewanee in 2008, we bonded over a shared admiration for James Merrill and Constantin Cavafy. Then we bonded over my alma mater -- Mark had briefly taught at Mount Holyoke in the 60s, discussion of which put him in a sort of grin-trance during which he seemed to be seeing a potentially scandalous movie on the ceiling. I tried to imagine a guy like Mark presiding over a literature class at Holyoke and immediately came up with an image sort of like this: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmkJ0lrCpLQ

Then he promptly forgot who I was. Anyway, I didn't know what to make of him. At one point I was sitting behind Mark in the reading room at Sewanee when the announcement came that that later that evening there'd be the annual book signing party at the cute college bookstore. Mark moaned loudly enough to be heard at the podium: "Awwwwww... I don't wanna sign BOOKS."

Well, this gal, who'd have given her teeth to have a book on which people actually wanted my autograph, unfortunately lacks the Shy and Retiring gene that runs through the Swiss side of the family, so naturally I leaned forward and whispered into the ear of one of the most famous poets writing in English: "Yeah, well, god forbid you burn a calorie, Mark."

The much, much more polite poet sitting next to Mark turned turned a distressing shade of purple around the ears, and for half a second I wondered what amount of therapy it would take for me to learn not to say stuff just because I was thinking it. Why in God's name would I be impolite to Mark Strand? So I had a bone to pick with his Magnificent Ennui thing and he looked at a point somewhere over my head when he spoke to me. So what? The man had enough laurels on his head I'm surprised he could turn around. 

But his did. With alacrity. And grinning as if I had just said the funniest thing ever.

"You don't get it," he said in his Eastwood growl. "There are more signed Strands than unsigned Strands. It's a devalued currency!" 

And we laughed, and the reading started. However, at the book signing, I couldn't leave it alone. I gathered copies of every Strand volume in the bookstore and whomped them down onto the table in front of him. 

"Mr. Strand," I said, pompously as I could. "Would you do me the immense honor of NOT signing these for me?"

The grin again; bigger than ever. "Why, yes, I would be delighted not to sign those books!"  

"Fabulous! I'll just go put them back on the shelves then," I said. And did.

Mark and I developed a ribbing, slightly snarky, bantering style much colored by the fact that it was a continuum for me and apparently a totally new conversation for him every single time, because he never, ever, ever remembered who I was. Not that year, not the next, not the time I ran into him downtown, not the time we met through a mutual friend and not the time we shared the podium at the Best American Poetry launch reading in 2012 -- a peak experience for me, during which I am pretty sure he checked his watch twice while I read. 

In New York, after forgetting for the 93'd time that we'd met 92 other times, he tried to get around the "should I know you?" thing by saying, "And... where do you go home to?" When I said San Francisco he literally recoiled, saying with disbelief, "You came all the way here? For this?"

"This" was a killer reading that included Mark, and a chance to visit a number of good friends in one of my favorite cities in the world. "Strand," I said, "It's Manhattan. Yeah, I came here for this."

"I live in Chelsea," he said airily, and walked away as I said "I know..." to his retreating back.

When I saw him nine months later, again at Sewanee, I instantly knew it would be the last time. He'd lost half his body mass -- people were discreet and professional about it but he was obviously dying. Now, Mark has written so hauntingly on the subject of death and particularly of his own erasure from this life that I don't stand a chance of saying anything about it that he didn't already say better. I had a lot of questions, big questions, as I looked at him -- things I couldn't ever ask. Like was he scared or had all those poems somehow exorcised the existential dread of nonexistence from his psyche? Was he in pain? He didn't seem to be -- a little more easily tired than I'd seen him in the past, but also a lot more lively. Did talking about it make it feel better or worse? Had different things become important to him? Or unimportant? 

But even I am not quite that impertinent as it turns out. Or, even if I were, I'd have choked on the words because it was just so shocking to see Mark Strand look so... mortal. 

He gave a wonderful craft lecture and the best reading I had ever seen from him that week, footage of which is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJylQzQBxKQ

If you listen carefully there is some ambient noise in the room which is probably me sobbing. It starts around "Almost Invisible," which is where I started to realize I had never given Mark Strand his propers as an artist. Not that I didn't admire his work; I did. But I'd dismissed him too, in a way -- something about his work seemed so effortless that I mistook it for easy. No: not easy. I heard things I'd never heard before; a longing to be understood, an awe at the immensity of death; a self-deprecating charm made the more poingnant because it was just so clear he was becoming one of those poems, cell by cell. He was funny. Gracious. Stirring. It was one of those hours you just feel privileged to have been a witness to. And the immensity of knowing I would never see him again was all the more overwhelming because he held that understanding, that the clock was ticking, so incredibly lightly. 

 

A few hours before this reading, I'd been sitting with a friend having a glass of wine on the porch of the Have a Glass of Something building. Suddenly Mark appeared, and sat in the chair next to me, holding a bottle of beer.

"You changed your hair color," he said.

I almost choked. "You... remember me?" I said, stupidly. But... seriously. After all that?

"Of course," Mark said. "You like James Merrill."

I laughed. "I wanted to be James Merrill when I grew up," I said.

"You know, I kind of did too," said Mark. 

And we chatted for a while, and then I pulled my copy of one of his books out of my bag and asked him if he'd sign it. "Of course!" he said. And I started laughing and couldn't stop. Mark handed me back my book, leaned in close and said, "You know what? These socks -- they're cashmere."

I'll sign off with this poem, which he read delightfully that night. Mark, you will be deeply missed, and I hope there are Ferragamo bedroom slippers and $25,000 cases of Bordeaux in the afterworld.

Harmony In the Boudoir.

After years of marriage, he stands at the foot of the bed and
tells his wife that she will never know him, that for everything
he says there is more that he does not say, that behind each
word he utters there is another word, and hundreds more be-
hind that one. All those unsaid words, he says, contain his true
self, which has been betrayed by the superficial self before her.
"So you see," he says, kicking off his slippers, "I am more than
what I have led you to believe I am." "Oh, you silly man," says
his wife, "of course you are. I find that just thinking of you
having so many selves receding into nothingness is very excit-
ing. That you barely exist as you are couldn't please me more."

  

 

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

Why Would a Graphic Designer Ever be on Letterman? [By Rachel Fayne Gruskin]

I work in an industry where everyone wants to be famous. Not only do they want to be famous, but success is measured by what degree of notoriety you have. I do two things. I host a show on local TV about books called Beyond the Book. For the show, I interview touring authors, talk about what’s happening in the local libraries, and (my favorite) visit and discuss local places that have been mentioned in books. More than almost anything, I’d really like the show to grow and be successful. I also teach College English, something I get equally enthusiastic and zealously passionate about. I have opportunities to read the beginnings of a could-be novel and at the same time, make sure students know their way around a comma splice. Geeky, right? It’s pretty awesome.

Working on Beyond the Book for the last few years has absolutely had me thinking about a next step. Could I bring the show to a larger network? Do I think it could ever be national? What would happen then? What would it be like to be famous? Fame. Walking down the street and someone recognizing your face. What would that be like?

Walking into school every day feels like someone just gave me a license to have meaningful input in what our next generation is learning. I can’t believe I get to be here, giving these people what was given to me in school and telling them things I wish I would have known a few years ago. In the classes I teach, I often require a paper, a script, a poem, or a short story, among other things. There have been a few times that a first draft has been so good-so inspiring and hopeful, that I read it and it’s hard to breathe. Teaching itself is beautiful, but anyone who teaches knows the politics that come with it. Working under a Dean, dealing with HR, and trying to work within or teetering between often pointless politics can suck the life out of you. Reading such a paper can jolt you back to life. It can make you want to reach through the lines of the page and hug the person who filled them with such untainted literary bricks of gold. It happened recently. A student handed me a poem that wasn’t perfect, but it had some perfect pieces, and it had heart. We sat down and I began to tell him how taken I was with what he wrote. Maybe the next step could be working towards publication. This student is in school studying graphic design, but my interest in his work sparked some excitement.

Ms. G, do you think I could get all my poems together and write a book of poetry? I also have some short stories. Maybe I could get them all published. I could do comical essays like David Sedaris. Did you know he was on Letterman? I could definitely imagine myself being famous. Why would a graphic designer ever be on Letterman?

Fame and celebrity have a pull that affects all of us, and I don’t pretend to understand why. I just have observations, and things that I make sure I tell myself when identifying why something is important to me. Success in the grandest of senses doesn’t always mean fame. What is celebrity anyway?

-- Rachel Fayne Gruskin