The Best American Poetry

Poems by People I Like [by Anna Maria Hong]

Today I’d like to feature writing by nine contemporary American poets whom I like. I’ve known most of them for a while, although I’ve made the acquaintance of some recently through their work.

I asked each of them to send me one piece of new writing from a work-in-progress, recently published collection, or forthcoming book. All are wonderful poets, so naturally, most sent poems. One sent an excerpt from his new (poetic) novel. All are persons whom I esteem for their thoughtfulness and resolve, in addition to their incisive insight and verbal verve. All are poets who give generously to other poets and to their communities inside and outside of writing.

I feel lucky to know them and their work.

The first poem is by poet and translator Rosa Alcalá from her forthcoming collection M(y)OtherTongue (Futurepoem, 2016), her third poetry collection. Rosa’s book Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013) was short-listed for the PEN Translation Award.

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Visitor’s Log

As if the memory of burning hairs from hooves or soaking tripe in vinegar might an enclosure make, traction from the present leads us back and not to the other side of the curtain where a woman wails to pry open a lid.  We casually break off pieces of crackers and wipe on cheap napkins oil and anisette, until the middle child crosses the threshold, unafraid. We have failed in the most basic rule, to never turn from offal in favor of quiet or self-care or need, as if the ugliness and flavor of it would make unpronounceable our names. When we knew the secrets of transformation, of the long simmer, the cure, the careful pluck. Still, we fail every moment we turn our slippery grammars against us and let our children be adopted into perfect homes.  We stood there, my brothers and I, ladling the honeycombed stomach into your dish, the last holders of something funny, yet never told again, as a cowlick fixed moments before the bulb flashes. We laughed that we knew the joke and were the joke, but would fail the test of translation. For which our children groan, and push away a dish, and throw open the curtains, their sunshine so big and so original. What do you call it, when in a mind and in a language the sun goes down? When you float from floor to floor or let your sister braid your hair an afternoon before the war? “I leave and they don’t know. To find a bed that is my own.”

*

David Groff is a poet, writer, independent book editor, literary scout, and teacher. His most recent poetry collection, Clay, was chosen by Michael Waters as winner of the Louise Bogan Award for Artistic Merit and Excellence (Trio House, 2013). The following poem is from his collection Bloodwood, a work-in-progress.

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A Boy’s Own Jesus

The older brother I never had,
the one who knew the way
to the bathroom in the dark.
Okay with rushed prayers
He who witnessed the fists
gut me to breathlessness.
Able to sleep during storms.
Trustworthy, though with
erratic tempests,
like a father after a few drinks.
Never a father.
Keeping distance
from his own hard father.
Suffering little children
who suffered, yet suffering
when I lay my weight on him
and made his thighs tingle.
Shaking his head at my penis
pronging, this pollution,
this boy-distraction.
Looking good in a loincloth,
his pained man muscles
turning me truant.
Desire and dying,
made one body.
In my fevers
rising with robe-wings
over my wild boat,
feeling fevered too,
keen to each degree.
Making me his special boy.
His arms held and wrestled me.
A cradle or a cage,
devil or deliverer.

*

Rachel Levitsky’s poem is from her work-in-progress invoking the couplet, Warren Beatty films, and other relevant forces. Her most recent collection is the verse novel The Story of My Accident Is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013).

*

imminence.

 

hedging bets. against loving a mother
sexy mom horrified she had a fat ass 

resist telling this ongoing mother ruth’s chest
now dead dad herb speaks. he and i tussle 

whether i can write or not. not ‘hemingway’ or a genius.
can't find out later how he did that.

abandon the stories of the past. not something special.
the refugee is me / not me. [peter: jew / not jew]

a memoir because my life is interesting enough to me to remember the bits and
pieces and to tell. i liked this beginning. this manner of just telling.

nothing overly fancy and overreaching like those sentences in the last book.
sentences just the same…in this weird couplet form…holding to the position of

poet more than poem. my problem holding on, believing in the effects of accretion. i
think i need to tell my lover wait i need the ongoing story wait i need

our conversation to accrue i will lose a sense of myself i will forget what i have
written i have been trying to collect this life over and over again no one ever

stays the witness. no. i won’t make you. let slow cactus grow. menopausal
and continuously wet. corita’s painting of nin.

going in to come out.

*

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s poem is from her debut collection Built with Safe Spaces, forthcoming from Sundress Publications. Xochitl-Julisa notes this about her collection:

“Built with Safe Spaces is a collection of poetry inspired by Los Angeles, my grandmother, and the Arizona-Mexico border where I volunteered as a desert aid worker in the summers of 2011 and 2013. By traveling from the green hills of Los Angeles to the jagged canyons of the Sonoran desert, it is my hope these poems illustrate a speaker driven to activism by a need to honor her family's journey as Mexican immigrants.”

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Our Lady of the Water Gallon             

            Un mensaje a mis compañer@s
            Arivaca, AZ

I etch black line Sharpie Virgenes
on plastic water gallons: one arc,
Ichthys in the sand at travelers’ feet;
one post carving, hobo’s mark
on the road. The Virgen speaks to faceless
shadows traveling when the land is dark.
I etch black line Sharpie Virgenes

on plastic water gallons. One arc
is the bridge between L.A. and Arivaca,
liquor store murals and water drawings,
dogs on lawns and dogs trained to attack a
man and woman darting up Hippie Mountain.
They’ve hiked this far from Guatemala
on one plastic water gallon, one arc.

Ichthys in the sand at traveler’s feet
is the tale of a man left shirtless and shoeless
beside thorny mesquite. Como un pez sin agua,
he is fished off the road limp and nearly witless.
In the arms of compañeros he asks,
“¿Es esto sentir la muerte?” Barely conscious
he is Ichthys in the sand at traveler’s feet.

One post carving, hobo’s mark,
would mark our “angel food” with a cross,
but cross signs feel wrong to fingers  
wanting a symbol with less power, more loss,
like desert flower blooms, or a growing belly
beneath blue robes of water and gloss.
I need one post carving, hobo’s mark.

On the road, the Virgen speaks to faceless
suffering. A woman seven months pregnant
hikes with garlic-lashed calves (snake safe-guard).
Bleeding and cramping, body bent
to ground, she makes mud salves and prayers 
to Our Mother: keep my unborn daughter radiant.
On the road, the Virgen speaks. To faceless

shadows traveling when the land is dark
I say, I see the fresh footprint in the riverbed,
the torn blanket ditched on the hillside.
At a rest stop shaded by oak, I tread
slow, count empty gallons, read what remains.
I promise you are not invisible, nor discarded,
people traveling when the land is dark.

I etch black line Sharpie Virgenes
to cloak rocky paths in stars
and hope one will guide you home.
When muscles spasm and farm lights appear too far,
know that I built this poem with safe spaces.
But because no words can erase your scars,
I etch black line Sharpie Virgenes.

*

Our fiction exception is from David Micah Greenberg’s recently completed novel Concourse, the first in his five-volume cycle of novels about New York City. Also the author of the poetry collection Planned Solstice (University of Iowa Press, 2003), David notes:

“Concourse is a novel set in the Bronx, in which the lives of an emergency room physician and a public servant become entangled during a corruption investigation. The book weaves together narrative, verse and essay, as in this excerpt about the history of food in the experimental novel." 

*

The history of the novel is food, crowds, and charity.

The history of nations is different from a history of human nature, because with nations time must be spent, but with human nature it must be observed. Nations are as an eleemosynary repast against which human nature rebels, to reveal that which is worth telling. In the 18th century charitable action becomes a subject of the novel; Tom Jones, is taken up by Squire Allworthy. The squab was served with a charred bread pudding, glazed in a truck of smoke.

Balanced against the feast are characters who mingle unconstrained by station, though limited by context — as the infinite variety of typesetting, and its narrow combinatory rules. The martini was blended with scotch so as to smoke the concoction. Charity intrudes to make the better man not attend; it is the ability to choose this attendance which sets the novel apart, and provides neither duty nor relief.

And crowds come and grow, bringing with them famine and Thomas Malthus, the patron saint of the novel.  Why is it that with increased communication — moveable type, the internet —  art becomes more hermetic? Is it a rivalry between charity and nature? The terrine had a glaze that smelled like sex from a certain angle. A calm superiority buffets it. Because the conscious author rests over the crowds like a simile over a hawk, or a hawk over unsuspecting crowds, the reader maintains the predator’s view.  The beef carpaccio had seaweed and sliced hazelnuts with a lemon vinaigrette, but there was also mutton.

The one-sidedness of simile is a joy and lament on human nature. It is a charity that does not crucify distinction upon a cross of ever-proliferating, voice. An enormous caesar salad was made from kale and hazelnuts, with the egg white thickly drizzled. It does not expect patronage; it does not believe it should live without work, but strives to entertain. Do the ravenous masses enjoy hunger? The nature of hunger is to warn, to circumvent, to sort in the pleasured brain — guests who disappear before pain sets. The fruits were forward and the wine was a mess.

And if our lives and opinions matter then these thoughts driven into the body already decay, like a hull on its side in the Irish Sea. The pork belly, smoky and crisp, lay in a smoked tomato reduction with stringy scallions. The wine’s metallic and floral notes were almost salty, against the seared and puckered fluke in yuzu. The moment is indelibly orphaned. Madness is real and will always cling to us; it has a better ability to describe and predict, even the tide against shoals. From the birth of chance, a sidelong glance. The unseen sands have become us.

*

The following poem is from fellow Philadelphian Jason Zuzga’s forthcoming first poetry collection Heat Wake, which will be published by Saturnalia Books next March. Saturnalia’s catalogue describes the book thus:

“Heat Wake the phrase could designate the heat of the just-deceased animal, the warmed seat, the legacy of the anthropocene, the Fata Morgana that swirls and ripples sightlines. Heat Wake the book swirls with tactility, biology, evolution, and desire: hands reach, grab, feel, and are held as the poems percolate with quick sonic link and variation.  The poems unfold amid the presence of stubborn rocks, ocean, suburban New Jersey, all approached at a queer angle . . . .”

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        Connected

A long sugar stick—translucence
and transparence—twirled
molecular ribbon—held dark inside
this mouth against this tongue.

Scissor this word from printed fiber.
Let this persuasive stain dissolve
under tongue like a pink snowball
held by mammal hand inside
an aluminum house or
standing in this sunlit creek.

Burn this on a pyre of
scrapped macaques,
research-jangled and car-blown.

Delete “this” with a clap
from air, from the file of words;
scratch this from the sand
with pointed stick. 

This through-line will connect
you—to me, whether you be of tar,
of electric, of pheromone
spat through tube.

*

Amy Uyematsu is the author of four esteemed poetry collections including The Yellow Door (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Stone Bow Prayer (Copper Canyon, 2005). This poem is from her new collection Basic Vocabulary.

 

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A Handful of Knowing 

1

Even as a child she prefers their company. Each day the girl goes to Stone
Mountain and chooses one of the ten thousand stones which lie at its base.
Sometimes she picks a jagged rock, studies it from different angles to see
it brighten and darken in the shifting light. Or she might spread a handful of
pebbles on her outstretched palms and marvel that no two are exactly the same
size or shape. If she finds a boulder big enough for her to recline on her back, she
can take in the sky. Before long the girl is able to touch each granite gem with
the deft fingers of a sculptor, delighted when a once grainy surface turns glassy
and smooth. Sitting among the rocks and pebbles, she listens with them to a world
that stirs, grateful when something new flurries in and glad when mountain quiet
returns. As time passes, the girl grows so intimate with the stones that no one
notices she's become old and weathered and silent like them. Song birds and lizards
rest on her.  Small fingers trace the lines on her face.

 

2

(after watching a video on Michael Grab, a Boulder artist who stacks boulders)
Pay close attention to the feel of each rock. 
Remember that balance requires a minimum of three contact points.
Let fingers go light.
Notice even the smallest clicks, some smaller than millimeters.
Continue to meditate.
Use the tiny to large indentations as a tripod so the stone can stand upright.
Connect with the rock's vibrations.
Wait for it to become nearly weightless.
Listen to it become still.Expect the impossible.
Arrange one rock so it barely touches the next rock then one more.
Splash some water on the slowly rising sculpture.
Welcome the wind rushing through.
Believe in the steadiness of these stones.
Be as patient.
Know that simple gravity and devotion form a limitless glue.
Count on the zero point of silence within.

 

*

Michael Snediker is the author of the poetry collection The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (Punctum Books, 2013). His poem is from a recently completed collection New York Editions, which he describes as:

“A ‘translation’ of Henry James’s fiction into poems, and an experiment in ‘close reading’ brought so close it sometimes blurs. Both poem and manuscript are interested in how something like desire (or hope or lonesomeness) is and isn’t translatable across genre and time, between persons and characters: the relation between feeling and form as they both wear down and into each other, and carry each other along.”

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Daisy Miller

 

Time isn’t the solution

our alchemy happens in,

 

time is the alchemy,

lost art of the hasp

 

of a Roman fibula

made sharp in the sea

 

of Marsyas.

Like the tomb of Hector

 

where the boy hides,

the air in the wings

 

of our throats is

unimaginable fire

 

doomed to repeat

the spell of a soul

 

lifting out of the body

the body’s threshing.

 

That you know it

by heart

 

doesn’t mean it

belongs there,

 

incurable, each morning,

your fall into the marble

 

baths of Diocletian

which you haunt

 

like something you died

trying.

 

I wish I’d known you

when the silver

 

of your beard

was red,

 

the alarming ease

with which the outside,

 

gentleman caller,

creeps in.

                                       

*

And our last poem for the evening is from Joanna Klink’s luminous new collection Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (Penguin, 2015), her fourth collection.

 

*

Processional 

If there is a world, let me be in it.
Let fires arise and pass. The sky fill with evening air
then sink across the woodlots and porches,
the streams thinning to creeks.
In winter there will be creatures half-locked in ice,
storms blown through iron grates, a drug of whitest ardor.
Let the old hopes be made new.
Let stacks of clouds blacken if they have to
but never let the people in this town go hungry.
Never let them fear cold. If there is a world,
let it not be temporary, like these vague stars.
Let us die when we must. And spinelessness
not overtake us, and privation,
let rain bead across tangled lavender plants.
If there is a world where we feel very little,
let it not be our world. Let worth be worth
and energy action—let blood fly up to the surface skin.
If you are fierce, if you are cynical, halfhearted, pained—
I would sit with you awhile, or walk next to you,
and when we take leave of each other after so many years,
the oaks will toss their branches in wheels of wind
above us—as if it had mattered, all of it,
every second. If there is a world.

*

Rhapsody in Despair and Wonder, and notes on my return - Jennifer Michael Hecht

Dear Bleaders,

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold. Also spent a lot of time in realms of muck, and the town of what the. But I’m back here in my page away from page, The Lion and the Honeycomb, on BAP. Its title refers to the way Yeats used a phrase from the Biblical story of Samson. I’ll tell you more about it next time, or read back, I talked about it here a few years back. 

For now I just want to say that I'm doing pretty well moodwise but how I feel about the world right now is like the visceral feeling of dropping I got when my son fixed a broken-in-pieces mug handle with a few well-placed wraps of blue masking tape. 

I posted an unpublished poem on Facebook, because it spoke to what I was feeling after the Paris attacks, so I'm publishing it here now. I’d worked on it for some time, but it only got finished in the wake of that tragedy. All the bombings and killing is horrific, in general, and each for their own reasons. I lived in Paris for a year doing my PhD research, which later became my first book, The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France. And a great number of us have visited, it hurts more when you've been there so the place really exists as a physical memory.

But also, Paris means things to us. France was losing at industrialism in the late 19th century, so it consciously chose to go with exquisite beauty experiences: fine art, perfume, wine, jewelry, fine food, haute couture, and romance. Paris is the most visited city in the world because of it. Also, the French Revolution invented some political ideals central to our self image as a secular democracy. I just wanted to point out that we are mourning people and also something pretty and idealistic that we have internalized, and that just got slashed.

 The poem is obviously about all the terror and violence, how history changes, and how it boggles the mind.

 

Rhapsody in Despair and Wonder

He was worst until something worse came.

For gum he used girls fed spearmint for days.

Things repeat, but they are not the same.

 

Blood has been bad, here comes boiling rain.

He combed his beard with the ribs of boys.

He was worst until something worse came.

 

Daily he flayed his dogs, yet later in the game

indignity grew more systematic. Worse.

It repeats. It’s the ever in never again.

 

Now old vile terrors look man-sized and tame.

Look away for air. Rest here in line eleven.

They were the worst until new blades came.

 

Howl, howl, howl, said Lear to Cordelia, too late.

Bark a dirge of lost worlds, and loss again.

The first was worst, and then much worse came.

Things repeat and they are not the same.

 

Jennifer Michael Hecht, Nov 2015

 

I'll be posting again, when I can but at least once a month. I've missed you all terribly, but as we know, there is a season for this and a season for that and if you fight it over here, something gets lost over there. More news and rumination soon.

Love,

Jennifer

Surrealist Comforts [by Anna Maria Hong]

Over the last few days, I have been thinking about poetry as a source of consolation in the face of devastating circumstances, thinking again of our friends, loved ones, and fellow poets in France—and of an earlier generation of French poets, the Surrealists, who knew a great deal about mass violence, displacement, and senseless suffering, having lived through the First and Second World Wars in Europe.

I love the Surrealists for many reasons including their emphasis on collaborative processes of making poetry and art, gathering together nightly in Paris to play verbal and visual games of chance that often yielded startling rich results, and for their attempt to achieve states of mind in which “life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions,” as their leonine poet-manifestoist André Breton, declared.

I like that the movement was founded and led by a poet but encompassed many painters and sculptors, and that it was international. Most of all, I like the language of Surrealist works, which fluidly incorporates strangeness into the everyday in a way that makes sense to me. I like the bleak humor and wit and the defiant activation of levity to puncture despair. There is much to loathe as well about the Surrealists with their embracing of violence, casual sexism, Eurocentrism, and misogyny, but when I read the poems, what I like is the working from and toward a place where destruction, sorrow, and fear can become something manageable, with the pain of experience still foregrounded.

Everyone who turns to poetry for consolation has a different idea of what a comforting poem looks like, and naturally what one seeks depends on the situation, but since the oughts, I have often turned to poems in this mode for a little pick-me-up, that feeling of nicely startled recognition as in oh, yes, of course, that’s how it is. Why didn’t I see that before?

My favorite of the French Surrealist poets is Max Jacob, who grew up in Quimper in Celtic Brittany and died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944. His life story is nearly unbearably sad, though his prose poems will always make me smile.

Here are two poems by Jacob, the first translated by Andrei Codrescu and the second translated by Armand Schwerner. 

The Wallpaper of Mr. R.K.

The ceiling of hell was fastened with thick gold nails. Up above was the earth. Hell is all fountains, big, luminous and twisted. For the earth there is a little slope: a field of wheat cut smoothly and a small sky in onion rinds through which passes a cavalcade of mad dwarves. On each side there is a pine forest and an aloe forest. You are now appearing, Miss Suzanne, before a revolutionary court for having found a white hair among your many black ones. 

Miracles Real Miracles

Nice, old priest! After he’d left us we saw him fly over the lake, just like a bat, his thoughts absorbing him, not even understanding that this flight was a miracle. His cassock, the hem of his cassock is wet! That amazes him. 

And here are two poems by contemporary American poets. I’m not sure if they would consider themselves surrealist or not, but I feel the influence of the surreal uncanny in their poems, which I have long admired. The first is by Larissa Szporluk from her collection The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind published by Alice James Books. 

               Hippocampus

A bell is gonged,
the body of a girl
curled up inside it,

a town grown wild,
dogs sniffing skyward—
gong, gong. 

They listen all night
for the girl to fall,
her stomach to growl,

or is it a foot
in a mindless gallop,
snorts of delight 

as the gods take up
the virgin-offer,
or is it a weird 

and beautiful gargle,
the lovemaking sound
of a deep-sea diver

The next poem by the poet and translator Don Mee Choi speaks to the aftermath of the Second World War and the Korean War in Asia, as well as other large forces of history and American poetry, including a phrase from Dickinson (Emily). The poem is from her collection The Morning News Is Exciting published by Action Books.

from Twin Flower, Master, Emily

4 Dear Master,

I do! Autogeography, I do! Deeply lobed, in defiance of pretentious form, I push a petal from my Gown. An orator, born from jets, never met a translator. Orator, map out a wasteland between the front and the Chinese border. Such is—neocoloniality. I do! Autotranslation, I do! History can confront napalm. Sister’s madness is as good as mine. We make the biggest picture in the world. Shallow and spiked, nodding in air, we endure barbed wire. Daisy Cutter can touch us, cut us, demolish our petals. Our gown can stain like a drape. Translator for hire! Hire me. See you at the DMZ!

Yours, Twin Flower

"The Key that Confirms the Lock": The Progress of Our Sonnet [by David Lehman]

We are looking for line seven.

Here is what we have so far:

Our dreams as disparate as our days uniform, Michael C. Rush
We crave a lovely scandal with someone well-known; Angela Ball
Midnight champagne, penthouse lit by thunderstorm, Christine Rhein
In this version of darkness, we are never alone. Elizabeth Solsburg

If marriage is a cage, we can force the lock, but he Christine Rhein
Clutches the key, a jailer too stubborn to learn Patricia Smith

Line seven must end with the word "turn." For more, click here.

Please consider submitting a line! -- DL

Daily Poem in Paris, for Stacey, November 24, 2000 [by David Lehman]

November 24 [2000]

The best thing about Paris
is being here with you
and the best thing about
being here with you
is Paris three letters short
of paradise but I
wouldn't have it any
other way on this November
day of clean blue skies
rather than yesterday's morning
of citizens with umbrellas
three stories below our window
where three streets meet
in the cold gray rain
of a new day in the past
which we're keeping alive

-- DL

Dispatch from Paris [by Tracy Danison]

Bataclan commando: Pure murder in Paris

 

When I started doing these Paris walk essays for you, I had no idea that I’d write of the declensions of murder. That’s life.

 

On Friday night I wasn’t in Paris. I was helping a friend who had had an operation and who lives in a suburb. I had no inkling of the attacks until I fiddled, washed myself, woke Karine and finally got coffee into my cup. I turned on my cell phone. 

 

There an unusual number of text messages and Facebook notifications, friends and relatives asking me if I were OK? My niece, who has a gift for delicate understatement that I had not heretofore remarked, wrote, « Uncle Tracy… Paris is looking a bit chaotic. I hope you are safe and well. »  

 

Chaotic? Safe? Well? Karine put on the radio. 

 

We heard then of a commando raid by religious fanatics in three different spots in Paris: so far 128 dead. 

 

More than 80 of the murders happened at the Bataclan, a music venue and café in the area where we and those we love are raising, have raised, our children. Where many friends & acquaintances live. 

 

We return to Paris Saturday evening. We already knew that the Flamenco show we were going to see is cancelled. We have an apéritif in an empty bar and dinner in an almost-empty restaurant in Menilmontant, as above and away as we can get from the scenes of chaos without leaving our usual stomping grounds.

 

Karine wants to brunch the next morning, Sunday, because she says, the murders are especially an attack on pleasure and joie de vivre. Why else would somebody attack people who are dining together, talking, singing, flirting, dancing, listening to music in their own neighborhood?  

 

Having brunch then a walk under the sweet autumn sunshine, she says, is to laugh into the disapproving scowl of the fanatic murderer, thumb our noses at these bombs and bullets. I’m for that, so we do.

 

We want to see the scene of the crime, too. I want especially to check on my favorite barman and barmaid, Gaël & Miriam. They are young, their living & work places are near the bloody scenes and I want them to see that I am glad they are alive or know they are dead, if they are.

 

As we walk east from République to and then along the avenue Parmentier, I tell Karine that these attenats, as far as I can see, are an attack on the young. 

 

« I can’t look at Facebook, » I tell her, because when I opened it the night before, there was a photo of one the young victims. I couldn’t bear to see it … 

 

There, but for the twitch of a butterfly’s wing, go my  …  Hush, now.

 

« O, it’s much worse than an attack on young people, » Karine replies, taking her hand out of mine. « It’s an attack on the métisses. » 

 

Métisse means anyone or who has a mixed heritage of any sort. It is no insult.

 

Karine explained that the young people at the Bataclan or the Petit Cambodge aren’t a « mixed » or « multicultural » crowd. And Bobo - « Bohemian-Bourgeois » - isn’t adequate either. It is just a label made up by the too-numerous jealous souls around us.

 

« They are a whole new group, » she says, wringing her hands. « They share what is interesting to them, from all sorts of cultures. They are beyond ‘tolerance’ of ‘difference’. They are the babies of tolerance. They can just be themselves in a way we can’t be. » 

 

These young people are the Nouvelle France, devoutly wished for.

 

The fanatics hate Métisses, Karine tells me, scrupulously avoiding my eye, because fanatics are fascinated by « purity ». Religious, cultural, racial or whatever else purity you might imagine. 

 

« They feel compelled to separate the sheep from the goats, » she says, « Rape the maiden, worship the mother, always be judging the good and the bad, living life as if it’s bad to be drunk on bad wine but good to be stinking drunk on good liquor!»

 

As we walk, Karine meshes her fingers and stretches her hands in front of her. At the Bataclan or in the sidewalk cafés, she continues, the murderers came face to face with existential impurity.

 

« What they fear most of all, » she says, « Is the fruit of love and liberté, égalité, solidarité! That’s what they hate.» She stares straight ahead, walking fast now.

 

« It is why they are so ferocious and so pitiless with people. It is why they hate women so much.» 

 

I give her a long, considering look. Karine has two adolescent children, Juliette and Hassan, whose father is a high-income professional green-eyed son of poor Algerian immigrants. They have their mother’s nose and their father’s eyes. And she does NOT want to talk of them.

 

We walk a long time without speaking. I dare not put my arm around her, though I would very much like to. I would like to tell her that I love her and her Nouvelles Frances and her hopes and dreams and deceptions too and all together and at the same time.

 

Instead, I touch her shoulder and suggest we take the metro at Voltaire-Léon Blum.

 

Vive un monde métisse. Vive la Nouvelle France.

 

Korean American Feminist Poetry [by Anna Maria Hong]

Hi! I’m very excited to be guest blogging for The Best American Poetry this week, as I’ve been an admirer of the series for a long time and am a fan of the persons editing the series and this blog. I love that writers here have the leeway to talk about anything, and if I do this again I may write about ‘70s divas, the perfect Manhattan, and what my dog would say if he could talk, but for this, my first run, I will keep my posts poetry-centric, writing today about three Korean American feminist poetry panels that I’m participating in or have recently produced.

The first of these panels took place last March at the Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, and Literary Study Conference at the University of Montana, Missoula, an invigorating new forum produced by the poets Prageeta Sharma and Joanna Klink, who founded the conference in 2014 to “examine innovative creative writing and scholarship that re-thinks the complex and inseparable links between literary forms and the racialized thinking, processes, and histories that have shaped this country since its founding.” The conference takes its title from scholar Dorothy Wang’s book Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2013), which in turn takes the phrase "thinking its presence" from Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poem "Chinese Space" from her collection Empathy. As Adrienne Rich said, one never knows what the life of a poem will be.

Featured readers at this year’s conference included the keynote speaker Claudia Rankine who delivered a mind-rousing reading from Citizen, John Keene who read a terrific story from his new fiction collection Counternarratives, William S. YellowRobe who read from his strange play Native American Paranormal Society, and the irrepressible Marilyn Chin. Panel topics encompassed technoshamanism, how translation fractals race, tributes and responses to Amiri Baraka’s work, and the personal essay, among other lively subjects.

I produced and moderated a panel titled Why KA? FP with the poets Youna Kwak, Hannah Sanghee Park, and Franny Choi. (The “F” stands for feminist. I like the idea of Feminist Poetry as the answer to most questions.) I wanted to enact this panel to feature the writing of these talented and forthright writers, to discuss phenomena we address as KAF poets, and to draw attention to these experiences through our very presence. Small though our numbers were, this was one of the largest gatherings of KAF poets we’d known, and certainly so including the audience.

Gathering together in person affords the opportunity to have a fluid conversation, so after reading new work, we discussed a few questions including the following:

• Where did you see yourself in children's stories when you were children or young writers?
• What is an enjoyable racialized poetic moment that you've experienced lately?
• What is the most annoying question that you're frequently asked?
• What is a question that you would like to be asked?
• How do you write good poems?

Then we opened up the discussion to the audience who asked excellent questions, making for an enjoyable, idea-provoking, sustaining experience.

I will mention that these poets’ writing styles vary tremendously, as you may see by reading the poems below, and as I expect they will among the poets on the two Korean American female poet panels I’ll be participating in next April, both produced by the young award-winning writers Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello and EJ Koh. The first panel will take place at the AWP Conference in Los Angeles; the second will happen at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, D.C.

The presenters on the AWP panel will include Marci, EJ, Hannah, and Franny; Arlene Kim will also present on the Split This Rock panel. We’re working out the details of what we’ll be focusing on, but here’s a list of “13 Reasons to Do a Korean American Female Poetry Panel" that we’ve come up with:

1. To feature new writing by exciting poets.
2. To redress underrepresentation of new writing by KAFP.
3. We are tired of hearing, "Your English is great. Where are you from?"
4. To disabuse the notion that we are overrepresented.
5. Korean adoptees coming of age now are seeking someone to speak to their experiences and discovering silence.
6. To do something other than eat Korean BBQ in LA.
7. Korean Americans are more than K-pop, kimchi, and great skincare products.
8. Though we’ve been confused for each other, we are only sometimes confused.
9. To deflate the distrust engendered by misogyny and white hegemony.
10. To speak to Korean American women who are not pretending to be Korean American women.
11. To express solidarity (yep) with other women of color.
12. To respectfully disagree.
13. To disrupt centuries of silence.

Throughout the week, I’ll be featuring new poems by contemporary American poets whose work and persons I like. The first poem is by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello from her collection Hour of the Ox, winner of the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, forthcoming in 2016 from the University of Pittsburgh Press. This poem originally appeared in the November 2014 issue of Thrush Poetry Journal.

 

Brother Returns As Chrysanthemum

Didn’t we think we were more than this—
little suns unfurling above the earth? 

We thought we were constellations
in soil, entire galaxies anchored to dust.

Ravenous, we believed our thousand
arms could hoard the horizon—

eclipsing ourselves even as we waned,
bereft of all but shadow.

Arlene Kim, author of What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? (Milkweed Editions), wrote the following poem, which first appeared on diode:

 

American Gothic: Revival

        . . . these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys . . .


                                                                                                        —from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet 

Dear Rilke, I am not young and I am not a poet. I slink around the city, disaster-footed, sure for danger, face unknown, I pull my hoodie up. I snick around, I slink around the city’s back. Short for danger. My motherless face bagged. I like a girl at Taco Bell but she knows only my voice. I wear my clothes like a blanket around the shipwreck of my body, the et cetera of my body. Like Dracula, I don’t exist. There is no such thing as a moonless night. There are only nights and nights in a blown together indigo accordion. I’m there at 2 a.m. to shut down Leilani’s, pilfer burritos and lumpia. I like to keep zippered all the way. I like the sound my skateboard makes on the asphalt. I think dreadlock is a funny way of putting it. I call my face a jihad. I, the lesser victor. I call my face a tattoo. One my father gave me—someone else’s face Frankensteined to mine. Inside my head, my father’s words,  notations, fatwas. My father stalks me like a footnote. Follows me—   when I see boards pasted with pictures of the missing, I look for my face. That is me, gone. It’s been much more than 24 hours. In society. Among citizens. I never take off my hood, because inside I’m all wolf. My reasons are still unknown.

Dear Rilke, I read your book. I read your book anyway.

 

The next poem is by EJ Koh, a Kundiman and MacDowell fellow and visiting scholar at the University of Washington, from her collection A Lesser Love:

To My Mother Kneeling in the Cactus Garden

For a month I tried to think of what to say.
How many times you’ve swept a kitchen knife
across your neckline and said, This is how
you end a marriage. How many more wicks you light
for god. I could tell by your eyes you’ve never 

seen him. What would you call the feeling
of abandon and caution and relief that keeps me
tethered to you? Let me be the husband
you prayed for, the son you wanted, or mother
who held you. I’ll build your new patio swing

and fold your coffee linens, wash your hardened
feet in warm water. To me you have become a prison
of its own light. I’ll grow greens and the parsley
you love and wrap them into cold sandwiches.
I will place them where you can reach with ease.

 

Here’s a fablesque poem by Franny Choi, the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing):

http://thejournalmag.org/archives/9907

There’s fancy footwork in this poem from Hannah Sanghee Park’s collection The Same-Different, which won the 2014 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/246710

And I’ll conclude today’s post with a verse/essay by Youna Kwak that appeared this summer in The Offing. Among other accomplishments, Youna recently earned her Ph.D. in the Department of French at NYU. I think of our fellow poets and friends in France in posting her verse essay “You”:

http://theoffingmag.com/essay/you/

Hello, Monday! Brought to you by Mo Gaffney

-- sdh

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

David Lehman and Frank Sinatra's Songs Fill the Airways

David Lehman in Hoboken, NJ, Sinatra's birthplace. Photo by Stacey Harwood-Lehman 

Last week David Lehman and Geoffrey Riley had a grand time talking about Sinatra's Century , David's new book, just out from HarperCollins. They listened to songs (such as "All of Me" and "My Favorite Valentine") and talked about the Rat Pack, Sinatra's wives and lovers, and volatility of Sinatra's personality, which was mirrored perfectly by the ups and downs of his career. Follow this link to hear the full interview.

-- sdh

Anna Maria Hong, Guest Author November 15-19

photo (c) Stephanie Mitchell

This week we welcome Anna Maria Hong as our guest author.  Anna Maria is the winner of the 2014 Clarissa Dalloway Prize from the A Room of Her Own Foundation for her novella H & G. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the recipient of Poetry magazine’s 2013 Frederick Bock Prize, she has fiction and poetry recently appearing in The Iowa Review, The Nation, Green Mountains Review, Fence, Bone Bouquet, The Volta, Verse Daily, Drunken Boat, Unsplendid, Harvard Review, Conduit, Great River Review, China Grove, Boston Review, Southwest Review, 250 Poems, Best New Poets, and The Best American Poetry. A Contributing Editor at The Offing, she teaches creative writing at Ursinus College, where she is the Visiting Creative Writer, and at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. Her chapbook Hello, virtuoso! was published by the Belladonna* Collaborative.

Welcome, Anna Maria. 

-- sdh

On Marianne Moore's Birthday [by David Lehman]

Here are two versions of "The Past is the Present" by Marianne Moore.

The first version is the one that I used for The Oxford Book of American Poetry. The second version is one that I found circulating in the web. What makes the second version corrupt is that it regularizes the spacing. Easy to understand why: idiosyncrasies of spacing, unusual typographical arrangements, and even simple indentation are often casualties of electronic transmission. But the spacing here is crucial. I maintain that Moore's poem if printed with conventional spacing is not the same poem –– and it is certainly not as good a poem.

The second version differs from the Oxford text for a legitimate reason as well: it is an alternative draft of the same poem. The difference is between "as on a recent occasion I was goaded into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse" and "as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse."

The alternative version is more compact, and usually this is a good thing, but in this case I believe that the original is superior because 1) it is more specific to Moore's personality and 2) it fruitfully complicates the situation and the poem. The phrase “I was goaded into doing by XY” implies that the great assertive sentence that rounds off the poem is not only a comment on what  “This man” (or “the teacher”) said but also a criticism of it as insufficient. The sentence by XY is vastly more interesting in this light: it exemplifies prose that lacks “a sort of heightened consciousness.” The discrepancy between the sentence’s broad truth and its own inadequacy as a vehicle for that truth thus irritates the poet into uttering her epigram. Notice, too, that the Oxford version has the word “occasion” in line four, obliging us to understand how the epigram applies to the making of this particular poem.

From the poem’s conclusion I drew the title of the anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms.

The Past is the Present

 If external action is effete
   and rhyme is outmoded,
        I shall revert to you,
   Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded
       into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed
                      Verse.
This man said – I think that I repeat
    his identical words:
       “Hebrew poetry is
    prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy
                    affords
       the occasion and expediency determines the form." 

– Marianne Moore

corrupt / alternative version found on the web:

The Past is the Present

If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said - and I think I repeat his exact words -
"Hebrew poetry is prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.

– Marianne Moore

Moby Dick [poem and commentary by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton]

Woodcut (c) Rockwell Kent

Moby-Dick In those days priests preached of whales—devils
they called them—their tiny eyes and pitchfork fins.
Ahab talked to the whale’s severed head, sphinx-
like and dumb as sand, said, “Tell me the secrets
of underwater breathing and small-boned fish.”
Moby-Dick’s ear was a mere pinprick, his heart
unreachable under all that flesh. Shark-

riddled waters and mermaid-lush islands

dotted Ahab’s maps, inspiring lust
and lunar dreaming. The crew liked to sing rounds
that sounded lovely when the whales joined.

 Even the harpooners swooned, teary-eyed,
their hands trembling like fish before they died.
When they hit the high notes—chords of angels.

MS: I read recently that when Hermann Melville’s writing began to lineate into poetry, his wife Elizabeth feared they would all starve. Since I myself have had this fear from time to time, both rationally and irrationally, I can understand how Hermann might have had insomnia over his ambiguous reputation. I love that one of us started this sonnet with devils and ended with angels. It seems very Melvillian to me (actually, I just wanted to use the word Melvillian). And even though I myself am not a Melvillian, and I don’t believe you are either, Denise), I thought if anyone would appreciate a sonnet about a novel, it would be Melville. (If not his wife.)

DD: Agreed! Poor Melville. Moby-Dick sold poorly during his lifetime. One reviewer accused the book of “degenerating….too often into rhapsody and purposeless extravagance." Maybe that’s when Melville realized he was a poet at heart, ready to embrace that “purposeless extravagance." To support himself and his wife, he became a customs inspector in New York City. But I guess we can take some comfort in that fact that at least he, like us, got to live in New York. Maybe he goofed off during work hours like his character in “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Surely his whaling days and the sea still haunted him, and in his poem “The ribs and terrors in the whale” he was still counting on God to come to the rescue. Remember when the man in the Q&A asked why we didn’t write about mermaids? I forgot that we already had in our “Moby-Dick”—“mermaid-lush islands.”

Gulliver's Travels 2 [poem and commentary by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton]

Book Two

Now Gulliver seemed the little man, punk
rocker, baby-faced spider falling through cracks.
He was pelted with boulder-apples, attacked
by a jealous dwarf who prided himself

on baubleness, his keen resemblance to elves.
Mishaps abounded: Peaches, hailstones, puppies’
toys were asteroids crashing, unlovely
bruises turning Gulliver green. History,
according to Gulliver, graphically
supported man’s victory over man,

Gulliver’s repulsion at making chairs

from a queen’s gray hair, thick as a tree trunk,
wiry as a frolicking splacknuck
on an isle of giants, all his hopes kerplunknuck.

MS: So this version of Gulliver didn’t make it into the original chapbook, but we did decide to include it in Caprice. I like the wordplay. Do you ever wish you could remember what lines you wrote, Denise? I appreciate the amnesia of a good collaboration, but once in a while…like “baby-faced spider”…who came up with that? Today I paired up my intro to creative writing students and asked them to merge their freewrites into collaborative pieces and present them to the class. They were terrific, of course—sometimes perfectly in sync, often hilarious and off-the-wall. But it was when they shared about their process that I was really moved—how they worked together for the sake of the poem, deciding which line would most successfully start the piece, which end it, and all those ego-less decisions in between. You and I have been doing that for years now and I’m kind of in awe about it. So: “baubleness”: yours or mine?—who cares?

DD: I remember we were embarrassed by all the “unks” and that’s why we didn’t include this one in our chapbook Little Novels. One of us—who knows which?—used “tree trunk” not knowing the final line would have to rhyme with “punk.” But now I think it’s so funny. I bet if this “mistake” happened to us today we’d exploit it and change all the remaining lines to end in an “unk” sound. The “splacknuck,” basically a weirdo or misfit, is a word right from the novel, then one of us took it on home with the made-up “kerplunknuck.” I did read Gulliver’s Travels in public high school and it was one of my favorites, second only to Catcher in the Rye. Even as a kid I was fascinated by big stuff and small stuff and how weird my chubby toddler hand looked rearranging furniture in a dollhouse. If I were a betting woman, I’d say you wrote “baby-faced spider,” but that would also have you writing “baubleness” which sounds more like it comes from my image wheelhouse. But our wheelhouses often intersect, our dollhouses full of acorns, marbles, grapes and other weird non-furniture furniture.

Start Spreading the News: David Lehman talks Frank Sinatra, Thursday, December 3, 2015, 6:30PM - 8:00PM

Cooper Union 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues, NYC

Sinatra at the Liederkrantz Hall in New York, c.1947. Photo by William P. Gottlieb via the Library of Congress

In a free, public event the poet and critic David Lehman discusses his new book, Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World, a warmly celebratory collection of one hundred short reflections on the man, his music, and his larger-than-life story.

Lehman devotes each of these short pieces to one facet of the Sinatra story—from the singer’s origins on the streets of Hoboken, to his emergence as “The Voice” in the 1940s, to the wild ebb and flow of his career in the decades that followed. Sinatra’s Century includes Lehman’s personally inflected lists of unforgettable performances; accounts of how the competitive performer squared off against everyone from Bing Crosby to Marlon Brando; clear-eyed assessments of the faults and weaknesses that informed his life and work; and a full-throated appreciation of the singer’s art.

Please RSVP here.

Located in the Great Hall Foundation Building, 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues.

Ulysses [poem and commentary by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton]

Bloom used metempsychosis in a sentence
and Molly decided to have an affair
with a man whose orgasms felt like air,
whose mind thought little but: "Look at those tits!"
Bloom preferred masturbation, peeking quick
at the buttocks of naked statues.
If Bloom were really gay, his achoos
would have been quieter, his dates with Dedalus
more planned out. Bloom withheld tenderness
from Molly as his friend went to prostitutes.
Stephen dreaded water, dogs, thunder, mute
drunks who appeared in his nightmares barfing
green bile, thousands of his dead mother laughing,
caught in a prism of wild repentance.

 

DD: I’m glad we saved our “Ulysses 2” which is in the “Little Novels Uncollected” section of Caprice. Remember when we envisioned Little Novels as a full-length book and even had that big editor at that big press almost convinced? We were having so much fun poking fun at the canon, at ourselves. Do high school students even read Ulysses anymore? My students at Florida International University all seem to have read To Kill a Mockingbird, but not many have read or even heard of Catcher in the Rye. Perhaps if we were writing Little Novels now, we’d have to include, for better or worse, Harry Potter. In our notes about the initial chapbook, we have a pretty hilarious exchange about the meanings of peak, pique, and peek.

MS: What? No Catcher in the Rye? The only book on our reading list that I thought the nuns couldn’t possibly have read first? Speaking of Harry Potter (which we do often and happily in my family) one of my favorite little novels would have to be “Gulliver’s Travels.” It might be the only one of all our chosen “canon” selections that I wasn’t assigned in high school or college (both Catholic). I wonder why. Anyway, spoofing a satire, fantasizing a fantasy: now that was a hoot! We did Gulliver completely from Cliffs Notes, right? Originally, Cliff’s Notes. Either way, if the nuns ever caught us using them, it was an automatic F. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed writing about Gulliver so much with you—in pink or peacock blue ink, no less. Oh, yeah. And as far as Ulysses is concerned: it makes me laugh to think that we tried to shrink it. And that we could shrink it a million more times and never reach its essence.

Poem for Veterans Day: "Naming of Parts" (1942) by Henry Reed

Collage of Stacey's Father (c) Star Black

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have naming of parts.

Animal Farm [poem and commentary by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton]

Old Major (Karl Marx) taught swine to read
and organize. Snowball's (Trotsky's) Windmill
flourished under Napoleon's (Stalin's)
two-legged rule, oink rhetoric, the blight
of the porcine underclass. Boars on hind
legs carried placards that read, "Power to
Barnyards!" They buried hams and eggshells, moved
the furniture around for their convenience.
Even donkey skeptics stopped using past tense
and folded themselves into soft couches,
forgetting the first commandment which said:
"Animals are forbidden to sleep in beds."
Pillowcases and sheets kept in the shed
were burned in that final Battle of Greed.

DD: Doesn’t Animal Farm resonate even more than when we initially read the book and wrote this poem? The pigs (the One Percenters) more piggy than ever? "All Animals Are Equal / But Some Are More Equal Than Others." I feel such affection for this poem, maybe because it was rejected by more magazines than any of our other “little novels.” My submission notes indicate that we sent it out for over three years to seventeen different magazines before webdelsol accepted it. I even wrote in our notes back and forth to each other that “Animal Farm” would have “good illustration possibilities” for Thalo. And, I have to admit, it’s one of my favorite illustrations in Caprice… (Stacey, can we paste the illustration in?) I wonder what happened to “Animal Farm 2.” We had two or four of each poem—we wrote, exquisite corpse, back and forth, both of us starting a poem at the same time.

MS: Thalo’s illustrations in both Oyl and Little Novels add so much to the text. Not to mention the new ones she drafted for Caprice. Her “Animal Farm” is one of my favorite visuals too, Denise. And what of our “Animal Farm 2”? Well, from the notes, we evidently thought it didn’t have a logical structure. Very funny, Younger Sonnet-writing Selves. I happened to find it in an old file just now, and it kind of sucks. Here are the last two lines, the best two, actually:

Too bad for the hens and sheep, ultra-kind

barnyarders who never did get lucky.

(from “Animal Farm 2”, forever hidden in a virtual drawer)

It's time for a refresher lesson on "OY"

It occurred to me after reading this article in today's New York Times that it might be time for a refresher on the proper uses of "Oy" so I pulled these helpful illustrations by Mitch Sisskind from our archive. Mitch says, and I agree: "'Oy" is one of the greatest words in any language and I've noticed that people of all backgrounds quickly pick it up and start using it. Let's take a look at some situations in which saying "Oy" is appropriate":

 

• 
• 
• 
• 

 

Thank you Mitch! 

-- sdh

A Partial Autobiography of Funny in Ten Takes [by Alan Ziegler]

    1) My first attempt at physical comedy; age 4:

The Set-up. With my family in Manhattan for the first time, I am told that the Empire State Building is a skyscraper. As we get closer, I notice that the pole on top—which I assume is the skyscraper—disappears from view.

The Bit. I lead my family back to where we can see the pole: “Look at the skyscraper!” Then I march us closer, point up, and say, repeatedly, holding my head, “What, no skyscraper?!”

    2) You never know who might be in the audience; age 11:

A bunch of us get interested in pro wrestling, and we construct a backyard ring using rope, trees, and garbage cans. I don’t really like doing the wrestling, so I pick up a fallen branch and turn it into a microphone. I announce the fights, calling for Killer Kowalski’s famous “claw hold” (his deadly match-closer that makes no combative sense), and occasionally throwing in a phrase I saw in a wrestling magazine: “a tangle of arms and legs.” I improvise names and characters for the wrestlers. “The Ape Man wins again. But it’s under protest, here comes the doctor to test whether he has human genes. Oh no! He really is an ape and he’s disqualified. He’s going ape!” Twenty years later, at a literary event I meet a scholar who is from my hometown. “I know you,” she says. “You were friends with my son. I used to watch you calling the wrestling from the window and think, “What a clever boy.”

    3) My first recorded pun, in my journal of a family road trip; age 12:

“We woke up early and hit the road. When our hands hurt, we got into the car and drove off.”

    4) My father shows me how to construct a joke with no words; age 13:

My father takes out a comic strip he keeps folded up in his wallet. As I scan the four captionless panels, he grins with anticipation: In the first panel, a portly schlub wearing a bowler hat catches his dog peeing on the couch. In the second panel, the schlub scolds the dog. In the third panel, the schlub and the dog are outside and the schlub is peeing against a tree while the dog watches. In the fourth panel, the dog is once again peeing against the couch, but now he is standing on his hind legs, holding his penis with his front paws. My father is immensely relieved when I can’t stop laughing.

    5) My first comic in the flesh; age 13:

I’m at a friend’s Bar Mitzvah at Carl Hoppl’s in Baldwin (not the lower-class Carl Hoppl’s in Valley Stream, where I had my Bar Mitzvah). After the reception, we’re moved into the nightclub, where the headliner is Morty Gunty (who, a few years later, would follow the Beatles on Ed Sullivan). Gunty switches accents as he flails about. He becomes a beautiful woman undressing in a hotel room when she notices a window washer perched outside, going about his business. She decides to give him a thrill by taking off her blouse. No reaction. She removes her skirt. Nothing. She starts to dance provocatively. By this time Gunty is really cooking, miming suggestive gestures while making mating sounds. Finally she gives up and glares at the window washer. Gunty becomes the window washer as he peeks in and says, “Vat’s the matter, lady, you never seen a vindow vasher before?” We are hysterical, but the joke falls flat whenever we try to retell it.

    6) Three punchlines to  jokes my friends and I laughed at when we were kids but I now find decidedly unfunny (except for the third one, which is a little funny):

“Why does this pickle have bones in it?” “That’s not rice, that’s lice!” “About six inches.”

    7) Five punchlines to jokes I love that I’ll tell at the drop of a hat (if the hat lands heads):

“Duke! Get away from that guy before he shits all over you!” “What the fuck was that?” "Because the dog is a damn liar.” “My agent was at my house!?” “Do you have any herring?”

    8) Best laugh by an actor in an underrated motion picture:

John Huston in Lovesick after Dudley Moore yanks off a tablecloth at a formal dinner. I use it as my ringtone.

John Huston laugh

    9) The contextuality of garnering laughs:

            For years, Nick Bozanic and I tried to collaborate on a joke, whenever our work and lives crossed: in Tallahassee, New Orleans, DeLand, Grand Rapids, Charlottesville, Traverse City, New York City. Nothing, though we continued to make people laugh with witty remarks. But remarks are not literature, and clever remarks are not jokes. Finally, we came up with one:

            I connected my Cuisinart to my Macintosh and made alphabet soup.

            Nick said he would try it out on one of his classes. Students will laugh at almost any joke from a teacher.

            Nick called the next day to report that he didn’t even get a grin. “Maybe it was the delivery,” I said. “Let me hear how you told it.”

            “Last night I connected my Cuisinart to my Macintosh and made vegetable soup,” Nick said, with a perfect, dry delivery.

            I roared with laughter.

    10) Insert section explaining humor in linguistic and poetic terms, using the construction of a metered poem as a template?

        10a) Nah.

        10b) You’re welcome.