The Best American Poetry

Best American Poetry 2015 West Coast Launch Party

October 9 at 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Hugo House

1634 11th Avenue
Seattle, WA 98122

Phone: 206.322.7030

We're pleased to announce the exclusive Seattle book launch for the premier anthology of contemporary American poetry. The 2015 edition marks an exceptional volume guest edited by award-winning novelist and poet Sherman Alexie, who will also host the event. Readers include poets Natalie Diaz, Joan Kane, Ed Skoog, Cody Walker, and Jane Wong. Alexie picked seventy-five poems for the anthology, which highlight the depth and breadth of the American experience.

Find more information here.

sdh

On the lookout for aphorisms thanks to Yahia Lababidi [by Stacey Harwood]

After reading Yahia's first post, I've tried to become more alert to aphorisms in my reading. Today, while reading W. H. Auden's introduction to The Portable Elizabethan And Jacobean Poets: Marlowe to Marvell, I came across this. What do you think Yahia? 

"Only stupid people are without affection and only dishonest ones think of themselves as rational."

sdh

Virtual World: Life-Enhancing versus Soul-Destroying - by Yahia Lababidi

"Monkey With Mask" by Albert Watson

I held out as long as I could before signing up for an email account.  At the time, I viewed the idea of electronic mail as invasive, and unnecessary; far preferring the romance and torture of letter-writing which took days or weeks to compose and send. But at the repeated entreaties of a dear friend (and early adopter of new technologies), I caved in. I remember pressing the “send” button on that first email felt like diving off a cliff —as terrifying, as exhilarating. My threatened, and admittedly precious, terms of agreement in those heady days were that I would not report on my outer life, or any daily activities, but rather share glimpses of my mental diary. 

For more or less the same reasons (perhaps, out of a writerly fear of being consumed?) I never owned a mobile phone, until I moved to the US nearly ten years ago. Why willingly carry a tracer, I thought, shrilly interrupting my inner dialogue at any moment? If someone needed to contact me, urgently, they could reach me at home or work. But, the rest of the time was mine: to dream, to escape, to slip between the gaps. Now, I confess, my Iphone serves as a kind of life-support machine, and I suspect I am not alone. I’m still not overly fond of speaking on it, but think of texting as a kind of telepathy and do share, through the pores, on Facebook and Twitter (after, you guessed it, also fighting them off for as long as I could, in hopes social media would go away).

(Unofficial) Banksy

Instead, what does seem to be going away to my dismay, and those of my ilk, is the so-called real world, specifically the print world. As a writer, it fills me with dread to see independent publishers endangered, actual bookstores going out of business, book review sections in esteemed newspapers folding and, subsequently, the newspapers and magazines themselves struggling to maintain a physical presence.

As I put it in a short poem “Shuttered Windows”:

“To speak of the smell and feel / of books, the erotics of the text, / has begun to sound perverse. / One by one, the old places of worship/ become quaint and are vacated/ In their stead a gleaming, ambitious screen”.

Yet, I am beginning to see the error of my ways, and realize the patent folly in being a self-defeating Luddite. I don’t read on Kindle, but four of my books are available, electronically, and I hope that others do! I do read, rabidly, articles, essays, reviews, you name it, on my smart phone and computer, and even wrote my first i-phone poem not too long ago – when forced to check in my bag at New York’s MET museum, and left only with “a gleaming, ambitious screen” to record my impressions.

Which is to say that, as I gingerly enter my fifth (!) decade, I am making a kind of peace with the virtual world. It’s all just wrapping paper, I tell myself, whether paperback or electronic. What matters is the gift inside, the words themselves – that they are read and people connect.

So, it seems that the world itself is now migrating online. Fine, I’ll work with it. Not just for survival’s sake must we stoop to engage with this brave new world, but also because it’s spiritually foolish to condescend. I have friends, writer friends only slightly older than myself, who regard things like Twitter and Facebook as infra dig, insisting that they “mean us harm”. I get it, or a part of me does. But, the other part, doesn’t. It might be virtual, but it’s still real people in real time. Managed judiciously, that is to say with intelligence and care, it’s simply too great a learning experience to pass up.

"The seduction of social media: a taste of omniscience." - Yahia Lababidi

 

Wherever people congregate, en masse, for sustenance – such as the great communal wells of social media – we must pay attention. Real friendships are forged in these virtual communities, vital news shared, and that most elusive thing of all, inspiration, sparked from so many souls colliding in wonder and thirst for human contact. And, yes, I remain aware of the many serious dangers: the regrettable narcissism networking engenders, the cluttering of our inner spaces, the real and paradoxical isolation that results from so much online “socializing” as well as the attendant erosion of social skills and, no less importantly, the damage to our attention spans.

Particularly, in regards to how the Internet can detrimentally affect our concentration, meaning our capacity for immersive reading and/or critical thinking, I remember being set alight a few years ago by an Atlantic magazine article (which the author, Nicholas Carr, developed into a fine book). The title of the piece encapsulated all my misgivings, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the internet is doing to our brains”. Shortly after this seminal, but somewhat alarmist, piece, a slew of articles, backed by scientific studies, made a counter argument: Google and the Internet might be making us smarter. True, multi-tasking stands to make memory worse, they suggested, but certain types of memory are improving as search engines reroute our brains. 

“Abundance of books makes men less studious” stated a critic of the printing press, Hieronimo Squarciafico, as early as the 15th century. This might well be the case today, too, with the wealth of unsorted, uneven information available at our fingertips. Yet, perhaps this truth also speaks to our innate laziness as a species, rather than the evils of abundance. For those with discipline and curiosity to sift through the buried treasures (as well as the sanity not to entirely live online), the Internet need not be a soul-destroying monster but can be, potentially, a life-enhancing tool.

Sentenced to Silence, Liberated by Aphorisms - by Yahia Lababidi

I first began experimenting with silence in university.  I would go on silent fasts for days at a time, rationing words, and speaking only when I must – perhaps a mouthful in class, or even less if someone were in my face and absolutely needed to hear from me. Otherwise, friends understood that I’d ‘gone under’ and only the very committed continued leaving voice messages on my answering machine (or, braver still, tagging along, noiselessly - as was the case with my wife-to-be).

The idea at the time –more inner imperative, really, than any sort of formulated thought- was to sound my depths and think things through. This was my first taste of freedom as an adult, and that was how I chose to exercise it. It was as though, suddenly and without explanation, I was taken in for questioning, and I had to play both parts:  officer and suspect. Who was I, What did I know, Why am I here, and Do I have an alibi?

Typically, I’d walk around all day in a semi-trance talking back to the books I’d read, lost in the echo chamber of my head.  I read a great deal more those days, again out of an inner imperative, but hardly the assigned material.  My self-imposed reading list was a volatile cocktail, unequal parts literature / philosophy, and the discovery of those great contrarians, Wilde and Nietzsche, made my world spin faster.  Unaware of it then, this obsessive reading was in fact teaching me how to write.  The rhythms and cadences of my Masters insinuated themselves into my style, just as their stances and daring were persuading me to distrust ready-made ideas and try to formulate better questions.

It was out of these silences and attendant solitude that I began writing what would become a book of aphorisms – by transcribing the heady conversations that I was having with myself at the time.   My ‘method’ in writing these aphorisms was simply to jot down on a scrap of paper (the back of a napkin, receipt, or whatever else was handy) what I thought was worth quoting from my soul’s dialogue with itself.

If ever I tried keeping a notebook, the thoughts would hesitate leaving their cave – sensing ambush.  So, by night I kept bits of paper and a pencil by my side, just in case.  When something did occur to me, I feverishly scribbled it down in the dark, without my glasses, out of the same superstitious cautiousness of scaring ideas off.

These aphorisms were to reveal me to myself and served as a biography of my mental, spiritual and emotional life.   I read as I wrote, helplessly, in a state of emergency; and, in my youthful fanaticism, I was convinced I was squeezing existence for answers, no less.  I felt that one should only read on a need-to-know basis, and write discriminatingly, with the sole purpose of intensifying consciousness.

Strangely, during these years of white-hot inspiration, I discovered that when I returned home to Egypt (for the summer, Christmas, and eventually following graduation) I was unable to write aphorisms.  No longer the master of my environment, and forced to accommodate the myriad interruptions that make a life I gradually realized that, because I had lost my silences, I had lost my voice… Which is to say, as remarkable as it is for me to consider, now, I managed to compose the bulk of the aphorisms in my first book, Signposts to Elsewhere , before turning 22 years old!

It would take me several years to begin writing again after that great surge and, out of this unsettling and involuntary silence, would be born two new forms:  poetry and eventually essays. Now, after a decade or so of aphoristic silence, I'm secreting them through the pores once more and I find myself with a new collection of over 800 of these brief arts, in search of an intrepid publisher to set them free.

Since last I aphorized, I observe that something is taking place within me, a shift as decisive and imperceptible as a continental drift. I, who once identified with my mind, nay, worshiped at its altar, have come to feel I'm standing at the edge of it, and find that it’s thin and flat. The time came to leap. My way into the life of the spirit began, unwittingly, when I first began experimenting with silence, in university.  Yet, after decades of intellectual exploration I am humbled to discover that, spiritually, I still stand on the shore of a vast and limitless sea…

Meanwhile, I see I’m not the only one that’s changing. Times are changing, too, and aphorisms are no longer regarded as an archaic form.  On the contrary, in the age of Twitter quips and Facebook status updates, it seems everyone now thinks that they are an aphorist!

 

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

I thought of this comic when I was reading The Paris Review article by David Orr on "The Road Not Taken," that suggests this often quoted poem is one of the most misread poems in the country. NA

 

Growing up in Egypt, surrounded by Wit [by Yahia Lababidi]

Superman bares his chest to show the Egyptian Revolution

Growing up in Cairo, Egypt I was surrounded by a love of language.  So, it came as no surprise to me, for example, when our Revolution erupted in 2011 that masses of peaceful protesters chose to express their dissent and dreams in poetry, chanted jubilantly from Tahrir Square. Wit and verse were always sport, and a kind of national pastime, during the three decades I lived in Egypt. Never mind that around 50 percent of the population were actually illiterate; it wasn’t about being book-smart. “Knowledge is what’s in your head, not in your notebooks” an Egyptian saying shrewdly justified (in Arabic, it rhymes, too: el 3elm fil rass mish fil korras). 

Which is to say, proverbs were always our street poetry as well as philosophy. They were our oral tradition and inherited wisdom, rescuing keen psychological insights from the past, and passing it onto future generations, as shortcuts to hard-won experience or observations. Proverbs can be like coral reef, that way, fossils of ancient philosophies merging with living truths. Good aphorisms aspire to this type of wisdom literature, as well.

Collage of the author in the White Dessert, Egypt

Only recently, am I beginning to fully realize what it means to have been raised in this culture where aphorisms were viewed as both common utterance and a sort of magical invocation. I grew up with grandmothers, both maternal and paternal who, at times, spoke almost exclusively in such sayings - a string of proverbs, sing-songy, witty-wise remarks, for every occasion. Also, being half-Lebanese myself, meant that Gibran Khalil Gibran, popular poet and philosopher, was an early and inescapable influence. I even suspect such matters of stylistic heritage might have been written in blood, since I was named after my paternal grandfather  (Yahia Lababidi), a musician and poet, who passed away long before I was born, yet passed onto me a love of song, intravenously. When, in my late teens, I found that I could unburden myself in verse and aphorism I felt that, for the first time, I was beginning to earn my name.

Lately, in the United States at least, there seems to be an Aphoristic Renaissance - something I would never have imagined when I first started writing them (anachronistically, I felt) over 20 years ago. The practitioners of the contemporary American aphorism tend to be poets, and bring to them a poetic sensibility.  This November, I’m pleased to be part of an anthology, Short Flights (Schaffner Press), which draws together the work and musings of 32 leading pioneers of short-form writing.  I’m especially proud to be in the company of writers I respect and admire, many of whom have become friends and helped me take my first literary steps, such as: James Richardson, James Geary, Alfred Corn, H.L. Hix  - as well as the editors of this exciting project, Alex Stein  (with whom I’ve also collaborated on a book of ecstatic conversations, The Artist as Mystic) and James Lough, both fine aphorists in their own right.

"The Radical Pessimism of Dashiell Hammett" [by David Lehman]

The Radical Pessimism of Dashiell Hammett

The stories of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler once wrote, “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”

Photo via Make it Old, Flickr

 

Click here for the full essay, which appears in the current issue of The American Scholar and is now available via Longreads.

Yahia Lababidi, Guest Author September 28-October 2

photo (c) Diana Restrepo

This week we welcome Yahia Lababidi, Egyptian-American, as our guest author. Yahia is the author of five books in four genres. His sixth book, Balancing Acts: New & Selected Poems (1993-2015) is forthcoming from Press 53, Silver Concho Poetry Series, Spring of 2016. In November of 2015, Lababidi will be featured in a new aphorism anthology, Short Flights: Thirty-Two Modern Writers, available for pre-order, here. You can follow him on Twitter @YahiaLababidi and visit his SoundCloud page to hear him read favorite poems:  https://soundcloud.com/yahia-lababidi

Welcome, Yahia.

sdh

"The Bad Glazier": Lehman translates Baudelaire for "Antioch Review"

<<<

 There are people who live entirely in their minds and are 
totally impractical, utterly abstract, who can nevertheless, under the 
sway of some mysterious force, act so decisively even they cannot 
believe it.
    	   One fellow comes home, fearful of bad news, so he paces for 
a full hour in front of the concierge’s door, too nervous to knock but 
too irresolute to leave; another one holds onto a letter for a fortnight 
before he opens it; a third is still wondering, after six months have 
gone by, whether to do something he should have done a year ago. 
There are times when even such characters spring into action, rudely 
propelled by an irresistible force, like an arrow shot from a bow. 
The moralist and the physician, with their air of infallibility, 
cannot explain where this energy comes from or how a good-for-nothing 
idler or voluptuary, ordinarily incapable of running the simplest 
errand, can somehow tap into that surfeit of bravery that emboldens 
a man to perform the craziest and most reckless stunts.
	   A friend of mine, as innocuous a daydreamer as has ever 
lived, once  set a forest on fire just to see, he said, whether fire 
spreads as speedily as people think. Ten times the experiment failed. 
On the eleventh it succeeded all too well. 
           Somebody else will light a cigar near a powder keg just 
to see, to know, to tempt destiny,  to test his mettle, to gamble, 
to enjoy the pleasures of anxiety, or for no reason at all, on a whim, 
a piece of mischief born of idleness.  
           For the twin cause of this energy is ennui and fantasy; 
and those in whom it manifests itself tend to be, as I have said, 
the laziest of day-dreaming louts. 

>>>

For the rest of this extraordinary prose poem, click here for the Antioch Review's poem of the day feature for last Wednesday.

http://antiochreviewblog.com/2015/09/23/poem-wednesday-the-bad-glazier-a-translation-by-david-lehman/

Lyrics [ Amy Lingafelter ]

I like when he says With no lovin’ in our souls and no money in our coats.

I like when they say Out with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels.

I like when she says I know you’ve heard it all before so I don’t say it anymore. I just stand by and let you fight your secret war.

I like when he says I still owe money to the money to the money I owe. I never thought about love when I thought about home.

I like when he says Started from the bottom, now we here.

I like when he says If you feel like mud, you’ll end up gold. If you feel like lost, you’ll end up found, so amigos lay them raises down.

I like when he says Ain’t you had enough of this stuff? Ashtray floors, dirty clothes and filthy jokes.

I like when she says When I walk in, sit up straight.  I don’t give a  f**k if I was late.

I like when he says Well if you want a friend, feed any animal.

I like when he says You think you’re gonna take her away with your money and your cocaine.

I like when he says Brooklyn, New York City where they paint murals of Biggie.

And I really really really like when he says I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost for wanting things that can only be found in the darkness on the edge of town.

 

"Tears Dry On Their Own" by Amy Winehouse [ Amy Lingafelter ]

I worried that confessing to still having an in-my-head version of my teenaged notebooks of song lyrics would seem less than adult or academic.  Even worse, I worried that it would seem girlish.

Girlish.  And some of the attendant adjectives that might accompany that word in your head: emotional, messy, sensitive, vulnerable, too much, just too much.

Then I saw Amy (2015) the excellent documentary by Asif Kapadia.  It’s been written about much more eloquently and in depth around the internet this summer, including here and here.  I liked it more than Anthony Lane, but it left me troubled for some of the same reasons.  My favorite part of the movie ended up being something I hated initially.  You see Amy Winehouse scribbling out her lyrics in her own notebooks.  She writes and rewrites, crosses out and erases, even records “Back to Black” reading from her notebook. But Kapadia chose to float the lyrics over the screen while songs are being performed or played, and as I sat in the theater, my initial reaction was negative- it seemed so girlish. 

As if girlishness somehow diminished the bright and beautiful art that Amy Winehouse made.

Then I went home and actually read the lyrics to ”Wake Up Alone”. And “Me & Mr. Jones”.  And “Tears Dry on Their Own”.

 

So we are history, the shadow covers me, the sky above a blaze that only lovers see...

There is nothing wrong with the girlish notebook of song lyrics that produced those lines.   

In fact, thank goodness she had the notebook with her to begin with (the documentary produced so much obsessive revisiting for me, “Back to Black” is now firmly on my Top Ten albums list).

And thank goodness for emotions, messiness, sensitivity, and vulnerability.  They are not traits one needs to apologize for.  They have produced much greatness in this world.  And girls and women don’t need to do any more apologizing than they already do.

And thank goodness for my own notebooks of song lyrics and poem fragments and the happiness they brought me. The sky above a blaze that only lovers see...

 

"Tom Ames' Prayer" by Steve Earle [ Amy Lingafelter ]

Sometimes it’s the whole story of song that gets me.  See “Tom Ames’ Prayer” by Steve Earle on Train a Comin’ (1995).

 

It's a supreme argument for the existence of God, or not.

If you like Rio Bravo or Deadwood or Lonesome Dove (book or miniseries), you will love the lyrics and delivery of it.

Lyrically, it’s part narrative, part actual prayer. The narrative and prayer of a non-believer and thief whose luck has run out, trapped in an alley in Abilene with all but four shells spent.  A non-believer who really doesn’t even know how to pray: You know I ain’t never prayed before but it always seemed to me that if prayin’s the same as beggin’, Lord, I don’t take no charity.

And he calls out God for his own badness:   Well it ain't the first close call I ever had, I'm sure you already know, I had some help from you Lord and the devil himself.

The devil and God only existing in opposition to each other and because of each other.  His temptation towards evil existing only because of a generic temptation towards good.  One he doesn’t possess.

So he prays, like many non-believers do, in his time of need, but he doesn’t ask for anything big: I ain’t asking for a miracle, Lord, just a little bit of luck will do.

And maybe God delivers.  The preacher comes to his prison cell.  And the preacher, by mistake or divine intervention, turns his back for just one second.  And Tom Ames puts a homemade blade to that golden throat.

He doesn’t expect anything from God.  You don’t owe me nothin’ and as far as I know, Lord, I don’t owe nothin’ to you.

All the opportunities possibly afforded by God don’t make up for his solitude at the end, though. Who in the hell am I talkin’ to? There ain’t no one here but me.  Before he cocks both his pistols and spits in the dirt and walks out to certain death. 

A feeling of loneliness even believers must have, praying, sometimes. Even in times of less dire need. Am I just talking to myself?  How do I know?

But still.  He wasn’t asking for a miracle.  And then that preacher came.  Who turned his back at just the right time. Just a little bit of luck.

As the prayer goes, it’s been strictly touch and go.

"Mississippi Goddam" by Nina Simone [Amy Lingafelter]

“It’s a very moving violent song, because that’s how I feel about the whole thing.”

Nina Simone has been with me.  For at least 20 years now.  If she’s been with you, you know what I mean.  Her songs have made you feel all of the things one can possibly feel.  Her “Trouble in Mind” and this live rendition of it might be the saddest song ever.  The drummer is so on point with the ride cymbal, and her piano is, as always, classical.  I like to pretend that that “Oh boy” towards the end isn’t just a signal to the band to wrap up the song; she actually MADE herself sad enough to utter it in that way... her tone going lower and lower on “’Cause the sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday” until it’s just: “Oh boy."

My explanation of my love for her flails in the face of you just listening to this, this, and this, but I’d say it started on the basest level: with me just loving to sing along with her by myself a long time ago.  Singing along with her own songs, jazz standards, protest songs, spirituals, her own songs, Bob Dylan and Bee Gees covers.  No one really knows it but me, but she and I sing very well together.  And loving a singer in that way means loving him or her in a way very few people (except maybe those who ride in your car with you) know about.  My love for her is not just about her piano playing, her voice, her anger, and her dedication.   It’s about how I sound when I sing with her.  It’s a very selfish sort of identification (maybe identity is all selfish).  I am not any of the singers I love singing along with (Tom Petty included), but it is a very personal thing.  I am not Nina Simone, I did not live through what she lived through, but I feel this way too (sad about love, angry about injustice, in love with music).  And she clearly feels this way.  Let us sing together.

So as a less than casual fan, my obsessive reading about her began before one could just do that on one’s phone.  And my excitement when I finally watched the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? earlier this summer knew no bounds.  The movie made me revisit “Mississippi Goddam”, a song I knew and loved and thought I had already felt all the appropriate feelings (disgust and dismay) about... but real disgust and dismay got realer having watched the movie this summer, post-Charleston and post-Sandra-Bland.  And watching Nina Simone talk about her own disgust and dismay over so many things that had built up and are still building up (“When the kids got killed in that church, that did it.  First, you get depressed, and after that you get mad,” she says), felt so sad and prescient.  And then there is the sometimes unfortunate fact that a piece of art can be revisited and the same conclusion can be drawn ad infinitum. See Hamlet. See The Diary of Anne Frank. See The Things They Carried. See Citizen. See man’s inhumanity towards man. Forever. 

But then then also, how thankful I am for the actual art itself, outside of the circumstances of its creation.  How much art can echo.  And how the act of echoing can be a tiny comfort in the face of huge hurt.

If you’re a fan like me, you’ve probably already watched it.  If you’re new to her, your mouth will hang open in amazement the whole time she’s on screen. She is imperfect perfection. She swears excellently (“I was a goddamned good mother”). Her eyes are wild and bright. She is clearly troubled by the extremeness of her emotions. And her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly speaks lovingly and frankly throughout, which must have been incredibly difficult (“If you ask me, they were both nuts,” she says of her parents, a line that might be uttered about all parents everywhere). 

But the framing of that song within the documentary is what got me in my own disgust and dismay this summer.  After it had already gotten me 20 years ago. My favorite part of the song has always been the little small plainspoken part of the chorus: “Tennessee made me lose my rest.”  She’s calling out the news stories that people would have known about Tennessee in the early 1960s, obviously, but just the quiet notion of some thing making one lose one’s rest, and her precisely southern phrasing of it: made me lose my rest. 

A feeling that sounds so tame compared to the historical circumstances that created it.  A sad sad echo

Andrea Beltran on Laurie Ann Guerrero's "A Crown for Gumecindo"

(Ed. note: Laurie Ann Guerrero was a guest author here a few weeks ago. She described her  experience of writing a crown of sonnets as way to cope with her grief over the death of her grandfather. Here is a thoughtful review of her book. Click through the links at the bottom of the review to read Laurie Ann's BAP blog posts.  sdh)

I took to Twitter this weekend after reading Laurie Ann Guerrero’s new book A Crown for Gumecindo (Aztlán Libre Press). I took my time with it, but I read it all in one sitting. When discussing it with a friend earlier this week, I recounted how this book is a work of art from front to back. Tim Z. Hernandez gifts the reader with a devoted study, both technical and artistic, of Guerrero’s writing in this collection:

Continue reading over at Andrea Beltran . . .

Tales of the Fifties (and Beyond): Poker Faces [by Alan Ziegler]

    My parents’ poker game starts in Brooklyn on Friday nights. I fall asleep to poker chatter leaking into the bedroom I share with my sister: Pair of deuces. Possible flush. No help. One poker night, I’m the one who needs help, awakened by excruciating stomach pain. The doctor comes over and examines me in the best light, on the card table, then drives me to the hospital for an appendectomy.

    The game continues after we move to Long Island, now once a month. The players arrive about nine:

    Marvin and Sylvia. Marvin is a shoe salesman with thick glasses whose eyes get progressively worse over the years, until he needs a magnifying glass to read the cards, and then special cards. Sylvia is small, always joking and cracking her gum, saying “denks” for “thanks.”

    Sidney and Phyllis. Phyllis is large with a lusty laugh, and Sidney a rotund, balding door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. Our dog, Duke, greets him effusively as Sidney calls him “Bootchie-Bootch” over and over. Sidney leaves Phyllis and their two teenaged daughters for another woman, and I overhear my father talk about his mean streak. I am disappointed in Duke for falling for the “Bootchie Bootch” routine—he probably tells that to all the dogs.

    Molly and David. They lived across the street from us in Brooklyn. The happiest I ever see David is after he takes his first ride in a jet plane. “You’re strapped in there and the thing takes off and you feel glued to the seat as the ground disappears. I tell you you’ve never felt anything like it.” Their son gets leukemia and is dead in three months. I overhear Marvin tell my father that David came into the shoe store and wept, “My boy, my boy, they took my boy.”

    Stu and Burt—who join the game in later years—are bachelors who go on vacations together and buy new cars every couple of years. My mother says it is because they are single and have no families to support.

    Many years later, my father and I visit my mother’s grave in the vast complex of Jewish cemeteries on Long Island, with an empty plot next to hers, reserved for him. He gestures yonder and beyond, and says, “Out there is our poker game.”

P.G. Wodehouse, the Nazis, and Ozymandias (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

I recently watched the British comedy series Jeeves and Wooster for the third time since its release in the early 1990s. While viewers are never in danger of being exposed to an idea, the series is particularly artful in its use of language, using vocabulary that would stump too many SAT takers and a subtle sarcasm and dry wit that are hilarious. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie offer perfect renditions of P.G. Wodehouse’s inimitable characters.

There was, however, a nagging companion to my enjoyment of the shows. I found myself haunted, even as I laughed, by the burdensome knowledge of P.G. Wodehouse’s radio broadcasts for the Nazis.

As you will recall, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse and his wife moved from Great Britain to Le Touquet, France evidently to avoid taxes on his writing. The Germans entered Le Touquet on May 22, 1940. Two months later all male enemies under 60 were interned. Wodehouse was 58. After being moved several times, the prisoners were sent to Tost in Upper Silesia.

On June 21, 1941, members of the Gestapo visited Wodehouse, gave him ten minutes to pack, and took him to the fancy Hotel Adlon in Berlin. While staying at the hotel, Wodehouse agreed to make five radio broadcasts to the United States (which had not yet then entered the war) for German radio. The broadcasts were Wodehouse’s “humorous” accounts of being an internee. He even, very gently, mocked the German captors. He did not, that is, voice any support for the Nazis, mock or attack the Allies, or talk about much else other than his own existence.

The recordings were later broadcast in Great Britain. The British were shocked. Some libraries removed Wodehouse’s works. Politicians denounced him as a traitor. He did have his defenders, including Sax Rohmer (creator of the Fu Manchu series) and the famous mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers. The Department of War in the United States saw the interviews as perfect anti-Nazi propaganda. Later, in early 1945, George Orwell wrote an essay titled “In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse” in which he argued that at worst Wodehouse was only guilty of stupidity. Orwell thought Wodehouse’s moral development remained that of child in school. When MI5 representatives later examined the case, they concluded that Wodehouse had not consciously provided assistance to the enemy. There were, therefore, insufficient grounds on which to prosecute him. However, there was a meeting in 1946 in which an MI5 officer met with the director of public prosecutions. The director noted that if Wodehouse ever returned to the country he should be prosecuted. Wodehouse never did return. He spent the remainder of his life in the United States.

Wodehouse himself blamed prison life for sapping his intellect. He claimed never to think politically and that he simply wanted to let all his fans know that he was still alive. He also claimed the broadcasts were to thank other prisoners for their support.

And so, for people like me who find that the broadcasts dilute the pleasure with which Wodehouse may be read or viewed, the question is a simple one. Was P.G. Wodehouse so naïve that he didn’t understand the nature of the Nazi manipulation?

I was thinking of all this as I watched each Jeeves and Wooster episode. Not having the generosity of spirit to forgive people who cooperated in any fashion with the Nazis, I felt I had neither the desire nor the right to forget those broadcasts.

But I did think of another way of looking at the broadcasts, a way I very much wish Wodehouse himself had offered.

I thought of Ozymandias, the great sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poem is mostly thought of as a reproach to those who ruthlessly seek power. But in the context of my Wodehouse problem, I more closely considered the hero of the poem, the sculptor who made those “two vast…legs of stone.” The “traveler from an antique land” describes the scene:

“Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read.”

I thought of that sculptor ordered to make the statue. The sculptor’s heroism lay in being “the hand that mocked” Ozymandias’ cruelty. “Mocked” here has two meanings. The first meaning is the original sense of the word to imitate reality. Indeed, we still use terms like “mock-up”. The sculptor captured the tyrant’s cruelty perfectly. This no doubt pleased Ozymandias. It wouldn’t do to have those who saw the statue think of the ruler as kind or sympathetic and therefore soft. No, the ruler wanted his fierce cruelty, his unforgiving nature, his automatic thirst for revenge if wronged to come through. But the sculptor was more subtle than the ruler. The sculptor also used the statue to mock the ruler in the sense of ridiculing him.

I wish this is what Wodehouse would have understood himself as doing, creating a radio show as the Nazis wanted but in doing so making clear to listeners that he was using the program to mock the very people on whose broadcast he spoke.

As it is, I do think Wodehouse was genuinely naïve and don’t think he was a collaborator. It is this belief that allows me to read his work and watch the shows based on them. But it is Wodehouse’s very naiveté rather than a political wit sufficient to mock the Nazis that prevents me from a full enjoyment of the work. 

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

Song: "Up to Me" [ by Amy Lingafelter ]

I started thinking about this because of “Up to Me”, which I know from the box set Biograph (1985), but was apparently meant for Blood on the Tracks (1975).  It’s not even like my fifth favorite Bob Dylan song, but it has been in heavy rotation for a few years now, leaving me wondering:

A)     about my relationships with artists that I’ve “known” for a long time and how those relationships change as I change, and

B)       how this book, and its Barnes & Noble easiness, came into my life at the exact same time I started to notice song lyrics. (I mean, I really started to notice them.  Like, really.)

It’s just a little Greatest Hits book, published in 1988 by Contemporary Books, Inc.  I was most struck by “Song from Maud” by Tennyson and the Edna St. Vincent Millay poems.  It has Shakespeare, Matthew Arnold, a bunch of Ballads by unknown singers, Christina Rossetti, and the Song of Solomon.  It contains a lot of poems you know, even if you think you don’t know poems, and with a few misses, I’d say it basically lives up to its promise regarding the “classic” quality of the love poems. And I was reading it just as I was reading the lyrics to all the songs on Born to Run. Reading for feelings, not comprehension; feelings both ancient and presently felt.  Come into the garden, Maud. We're out here casing the Promised Land. I filled notebook after notebook with snippets of songs and poems; lines I liked, lines that caught me, lines I noticed.

Obviously, there is empowerment in this kind of adolescent noticing.  I picked the music (and books and movies, for that matter) I listened to, and I liked it all for reasons specific to me, thus continuing the development of a biological “self”, an ego; one that we all know exists but can be hard to scientifically quantify for outside viewers.    Why do you like the stuff you like, and what does it mean about you?

 

Song lyrics have been poems for me ever since.  I like a poem in the way I like a song, and I like a song in the way I like a poem.  I explain them to myself in the same way. So. Again. “Up to Me” by Bob Dylan.

1. It’s rueful, cynical, hopeful, funny, boastful, and epically sad.
2. I probably won’t need to repeat the above adjectives for the remainder of this project.  They are the mathematical givens in my art equation.
3. The plot (?) still remains unclear to me, heavy rotation aside.  There’s a Three Musketeers meets the Old West meets a Navy ship meets a working at the post office vibe going on.  Is he referencing a “Wanted” poster that he hauled down off the wall?  And who is Estelle?  I get that she’s the one I’ve been wondering about but there’s really nothing much to tell.  But what does she have to do with the old rounder in the iron mask?  And for god’s sake, what is a rounder, and why is he wearing an iron mask?
4. The path he takes to get to whatever it is that is up to him is both musically and lyrically predictable, which is comforting.  You know what’s coming every time he starts a verse.
5. Sometimes, something is up to him because he’s the only one who can do it.  Sometimes, he’s mad that someone has left something up to him (Why does it have to be up to me?  Why can’t it be up to someone else?).  Sometimes, whatever has been left up to him is one of the horrible facts of grown-up life- not everything works, not all problems get solved, not all loves end or begin.  Sometimes, he seems like he’s doing us a favor; other times, he doesn’t care.  Somebody’s got to cry some tears, I guess it must be up to me.
6. My friend Eric, an even bigger Dylan fan with equally migratory favorites, noted that it’s kind of a poor man’s “Tangled Up in Blue” i.e. why listen to it when you can listen to TUIB, the two songs obviously made around the same time.  I tend to agree; if you’re looking for beautiful mid-tempo Bob Dylan songs that are slightly too long, you should probably go with TUIB.  Still, try letting “Up to Me” come up on shuffle for years without forming a personal connection to it.
7. The down-homey reflexive Dylan-y phrasing of everything:

I've only got me one good shirt left and it smells of stale perfume.

You looked a little burned out, my friend, I thought it might be up to me.

And the harmonica around my neck, I blew it for 'ya free.  No one else could play that tune.  You knew it was up to me.

He's right.  The harmonica that follows is pretty much perfect.  A few more lyrics for your consideration to follow this week.  And for the record, (if you're a keeper of lists of your own, you'll understand the compulsion to get this on the record), my first favorite Bob Dylan song is the Them cover of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” followed very closely by this one.

 

Publishers Weekly on David Lehman's "Lively and affectionate" Sinatra's Century

Sinatra’s Century by David Lehman

In this set of affectionate and vibrant fan’s notes, poet and critic Lehman (A Fine Romance) celebrates Ol’ Blue Eyes’s 100th birthday (December 12) with 100 impressionistic reflections on the singer’s successes and shortcomings. He includes mentions of Sinatra’s tempestuous marriage to Ava Gardner and his relationships with Mia Farrow, Lauren Bacall, and Marilyn Monroe, among others. Lehman colorfully points out that Sinatra remains a part of the American cultural scene, with his songs playing in commercials, as background music in restaurants, and in opening and closing credits of movies and television shows such as Wall Street and The Sopranos. He also as a signature brand of bourbon named after him. Sinatra stays in the public eye, Lehman observes, not only because of his work as a movie actor and a singer but also because of his nonconformity and his fondness for being a maverick. Sinatra’s vocal range and phrasing were so pure and powerful that he had teenage girls swooning from the moment he stepped on the stage. Lehman describes Sinatra’s friendly rivalry with Bing Crosby, his lifelong friendship with Dean Martin despite their widely disparate personalities (Martin liked to get up early, Sinatra partied late into the night), his perfectionism, and his famous clashes with gossip columnist Rona Barrett. In the end, Lehman’s lively reflections wonderfully celebrate Sinatra’s enduring impact on his own life and on American culture.(Oct.)

Amy Lingafelter, Guest Author September 21-25

This week we welcome Amy Lingafelter as our guest author. Amy's short collection Return of the Fist came out in the Lost Horse Press Series New Poets / Short Books edited by Marvin Bell in 2009.  Her poems have appeared in Verse, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Quarterly West, and Crab Orchard Review.  She is a school librarian in the Chicago area.

Welcome, Amy.

In other news . . . 

David Lehman and Sherman Alexie to host The Best American Poetry 2015 Launch Reading at The New School

Thursday, September 24, 2015 at 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm 
The Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street, 
Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall
66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011

Books will be for sale. The New School will provide a sign language interpreter. 

-- sdh