The Best American Poetry

On the Past Denied (by Jennifer Michael Hecht)

Dearest Bleaders,

Photographer Reuben Radding and I have again matched a poem of mine, from my most recent book Who Said (Copper Canyon, 2013) to one of his recent photographs. The poem, you'll likely note, is a Dickinsonian adventure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Past Denied

A lot like pushing a rope,
or shove-budging the Earth
it’s tough to ditch a shadow,
by means of bob and jerk.

We are, where we, were.
We’re, one, time-lapsed, blur.
Our past with sweet derision
we, can, not, inter.

The thing we hide returns
just as it turns, to leave
and speaks a hope, that doubts
as, fervently, as it believes.

At last I land, on ground
unfirm, to balance theft and duty
I reckon flesh, and history,
as real as truth and beauty.

photo © Reuben Radding http://www.reubenradding.com
poem © Jennifer Michael Hecht http://tinyurl.com/hofhadt

Happy poetry month, spring will come, experience assures me. Dreary as the coming week may be, the earth will turn towards the sun and we don't have to do anything to help it.

Love,

Jennifer

Goodnight, Sweet Prince [ by Charles Coe ]

It was late night in a gritty little Roxbury convenience store, winter of '83, years before the Boston real estate boom that brought a flood of young professionals, when most blocks had at least a few boarded-up brownstones and you looked over your shoulder when you walked around after dark. The store was a demilitarized zone for hookers and cops and drug dealers and drug addicts and night crawlers of every description, a joint where you could hand over a ten and they'd slip you a “dime bag”—a tiny yellow envelope with four or five joints worth of mediocre pot.

The guy who worked the register looked like an out-of-shape college linebacker, with coal-black shaved head and shiny gold tooth. Suddenly “Little Red Corvette” came on the store’s sound system and he jacked up the volume to sing along. Not lip synching—a full-throated, out-of-tune bleat—going nuts over a song by a skinny androgynous kid from Minneapolis, someone he probably would have beaten up in high school. A kid who wasn’t doing rock or R&B or funk exactly, but some crazy-ass, impossible-to-resist mash up. Genre-blending and gender bending like no one had ever seen.

At the bridge (…“and the ride is so smooth…you must be a limousine”…), cash register guy COMPLETELY LOST HIS MIND. Head back, shoulders bopping, wailing like a wounded moose…while the grinning white cop waited patiently to pay for his Coke and Slim Jims…

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

Red Warren [by Jay Parini]

In my mid-twenties, I moved from Scotland to New Hampshire, taking up a teaching job at Dartmouth.  I recall that I missed Scotland very badly, especially as I had established a close relationship with several poets there – Alastair Reid, Norman MacCaig,  and Anne Stevenson.  Each of these had exercised a very strong influence on me, shaping my understanding of what poetry was and why it mattered. 

I didn’t have a terribly well-developed awareness of contemporary poetry in the U.S. at this time, although I had some favorites:  Philip Levine, Adrienne Rich, and Richard Wilbur.  But I didn’t really know their work well, not yet.

But I lucked out.  Just across the border, in the village of West Wardsboro in Vermont, lived Robert Penn Warren and his wife, Eleanor Clark.  I met them through a mutual friend, and their openness to young people – especially young writers – was palpable.  I took to Warren at once, and we became friends.  Their house, near Mount Stratton, was a modern affair, open-plan, woodsy, unpretentious.  There were several “shacks” on the property, and guests would occupy one or two of them.  Warren and Clark each had their own writing shed.

I liked how they lived their lives:  writing in the morning, breaking (in summer) for a swim in the cold pond on their property, where we would drink sherry on a small raft before lunch.  Red – that was how he was known -- always took a nap after lunch, and then he went for a long walk in the woods.  I loved joining him on those walks, and we talked mostly about poetry.

Warren was in his seventies when I met him.  I only knew him for the last decade or so of his life.  But he had come into his own as a poet after a long life of writing that included ten novels, including All the King’s Men, and lots of essays, even a play or two.  He taught classes at Yale and elsewhere.  In many ways he put before me a kind of model of how to assemble a literary life, a life in teaching, a life in poetry and prose.  He told me never to bother about genre.  “Write whatever you like, and pay no attention to critics.”

That was good advice, and I’ve ever since not worried about crossing the boundaries of genre.  Although I’ve kept poetry at the center of my life, I’ve never fretted about whether I wrote poetry, fiction, criticism, or whatever. I worry about the quality of writing – not its genre.

Warren had, late in life, really found a deep poetic vein, and this inspired me then, much as it inspired me now.   I often reread, for instance, a late poem of his called “Heart of Autumn.”  It’s a poem written by an older man who sees the birds flying south.  He wonders where they go, and where he will go.  The poem rises to an amazing finale:

 

              I stand, my face lifted now skyward,

Hearing the high beat, my arms outstretched in the tingling

Process of transformation, and soon tough legs,

With folded feet, trail in the sounding vacuum of passage,

And my heart is impacted with a fierce impulse

To unwordable utterance--

Toward sunset, at a great height.

 

I can quite literally see Red Warren – with his craggy face -- standing in the woods, looking up at wild geese on their journey to god-knows-where.  He asks himself:  “Do I know my own story?”

There was a granular, off-kilter quality to his verse.  The style looked back to Hardy, with its oddities of diction, its awkwardness, its sudden glories of expression.  Warren didn’t mind asking big questions.  He thought it was the poet’s job to reach for comprehension, to discover his or her place in the universe, to state boldly whatever could be stated.

I remember once coming to Warren with a sense of emptiness, saying that I hadn’t been able to write, or write well, for months.  He looked at me sternly and said, “Cultivate leisure.”

He was right.  I had been rushing about, trying too many things, wasting my energies.  What I needed was long walks in the woods, time with friends, quiet reading.  I dug into Hardy and Auden at Red’s insistence, and we talked about these poets.  Warren would take my poems and comment frankly, urging me to ask large questions.  “Don’t go small on me,” he once said.

I don’t want to go small on Warren.  I want my own poems, as I move toward the next phase, to ask large questions.  I want to see what can be seen. 

It’s an astonishing gift, this life, the language that we find ourselves speaking and spoken by.  We absorb the voices of the past and present and, if we’re lucky, we add a few lines, maybe a few poems.  The important thing is that we participate in this great conversation.  

BOB DYLAN'S PATHS OF VICTORY (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

The Reverend John B. Matthias was born on the first day of 1767. He eventually joined the clergy of the Methodist Episcopal Church and, like other ministers of the church, he became a circuit rider traveling around his assigned territory serving those who lived there and starting new congregations. In 1836, he was serving the areas of South Huntington and Islip on Long Island, and it is then that he supposedly wrote a gospel song titled Palms of Victory (alternate titles are The Wayworn Traveler and Deliverance Will Come).

That, at least, is what is presumed. The song, unlike other hymns, doesn’t have the easily memorable lines associated with a composition that arose bit by bit from a community. So it seems to have sprung from the mind of one author, an author deeply influenced by John Bunyan’s religious classic The Pilgrim’s Progress. Nevertheless, in truth the authorship is unclear in part because the Reverend Matthias was not known as a songwriter and no other song is attributed to him. He died in 1848. His singular achievement in songwriting was not widely known or used in church circles.

But it was recorded by various singers, most famously by the Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon, and Ralph Stanley.

It is not clear how or when Bob Dylan heard the song, but its melody certainly impressed him.  The most plausible explanation is that Dylan heard the Carter Family’s version which used the title Wayworn Traveler. He probably wrote his song Paths of Victory around July 1963. What Dylan did to the song was interesting. He took a traditional gospel song and made it secular. Even more particularly, he made it political. In Dylan’s hands, the song became an anthem of hope for those engaged in social action, not a song to nourish believers.

On August 12, 1963, Dylan was in the studio for a recording session for his third album.  None of the songs recorded that day, including Paths of Victory, was considered good enough to be included on the album. Dylan then took a break, briefly traveling with Joan Baez and performing in a number of concerts. Evidently in the time gap between sessions for the album, Dylan re-considered Paths of Victory. He had a new vision and transformed it, reworking the verses in a whole new, much more sophisticated, way, changed the time signature to ¾, and had a new song, the one that became the remarkable song that gave its name to the album’s title: The Times They Are a-Changin’. He recorded the song on October 24, 1963. Paths of Victory is included on Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 released in 1991.  

Once Dylan, seeking artistic freedom, separated himself from those who wished to have him keep writing protest songs, he soon found himself caught in an emotional and spiritual maelstrom. Seeking a new form of shelter from this emotional storm, he experimented with religion, family, and rural values before settling on a more or less consistent religious view. For the past decades, this religious lodestar has, with moments of deep doubt and confusion along the way, guided Bob Dylan on his Earthly journey.

What he did then was exactly the opposite of what he did with Paths of Victory. Instead of transforming religious songs into secular sounds, he took secular experiences and found religious meaning in them. Last year he sang songs Frank Sinatra performed. These songs were meant to be entirely secular, but in Dylan’s rendition, they have deep religious undertones. He may do the same on his forthcoming album of other songs Sinatra performed.

Such is the unique artistry of Bob Dylan.

A Personal Note: The Times They Are a-Changin’ was the first Bob Dylan song I ever heard. Without knowing of its connection to Paths of Victory, I used to play Paths every day during the writing of one of my books.

My Mentor Alastair Reid [by Jay Parini]

My old mentor Alastair Reid died only two years ago at 88.  He was a Scottish poet and translator, and we met him in 1970 in Scotland, where I lived for seven years.  He was an astonishing fellow:  wry, witty, learned, and lavishly gifted as a poet and critic.  My sense of what a poem should “sound like” came from reading him carefully.  There was a deep musicality in his work, an accessibility as well, that struck me then and has remained with me throughout my life.

I met Alastair in a pub, having been introduced by a mutual friend.  He invited me to bring him poems to read, and I accepted this offer gratefully.  I would pedal out to his cottage by the sea in the afternoons, at tea time.  We sat in his kitchen, drinking mugs of tea, eating toast and biscuits.  He would hunch beside me and silently “correct” my poems, as he put it.  He circled words, crossed out lines, rearranged stanzas.  Sometimes he would just draw a thick line through the whole poem and push it back to me.  I knew exactly what that meant!

Alastair directed my reading as well.  (I was not enrolled in any course with him.  Indeed, he had nothing to do with the university, where I was a graduate student when I met him, in the midst of writing a thesis on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the influence of St. Ignatius Loyola on his poetry.)  I had never before heard of Borges or Neruda; but Alastair turned me in the direction of their work, which he was translating.  Indeed, he introduced me to both Borges and Neruda – the former came from Argentina to visit Alastair in Scotland.  The latter, Neruda, came to London at one point from Paris, and we went to dinner together – a vivid evening for me.

Learning to write was, for me, also learning to read.  I remember reading “Among School Children” by Yeats and complaining to Alastair that it was beyond understanding.  So he led me stanza by stanza through this complicated poem and its stream-of-conscious movement toward a blazing final stanza where the whole poem focused in the symbol of the chestnut tree, which cannot be separated into leaf, blossom, and bole.

Often I can hear Alastair’s voice in my own as I write and read.  His accent – a mild Scottish lilt – seems vaguely to undergird my own way of speaking, although only I can notice this.  His impeccable ear for the sound of poetry certainly taught me how to listen to a line of verse.

Frost once said that a poem has to carry a tune.  I still believe that, and I listen for the tune in any poem.  I want to believe its music.  I want it to play freshly on my ear.   I’m always looking for what Frost famously called “the sound of sense.”

In Scotland at that time, there was a kind of poem afoot that Alastair wrote and, perhaps even more sharply, could be found in the work of Norman MacCaig.  I met MacCaig through Alastair, and he also became an important figure for me – someone whose work I really cared about, learned from, imitated.  In a new poem that’s in my NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS, just out from Beacon, I have a poem in the manner of MacCaig, although Alastair is there too:

    I take some comfort from old frogs

    who squat around the pond

    like Bodhisatvas, contemplating

    nothing but their own exclusion

    from the world beyond them, falling

    deeper into selfless

    silence and the dereliction

    of all duty but to sit like this,

    apart from offspring

    leaping in the air or falling

    through their parachutes of flesh

    or dying on the road like Jesus,

    with their arms outstretched.

    Articulate composure

    is their mode, as unheroic as

    the rocks around them,

    clumped and cooling as the night comes on.

I can only read this poem to myself in the voice of MacCaig, who had a marvelously whimsical manner.  Alastair used to call it “a whim of iron,” and that pretty much summed up the case. 

As I get older now, moving into my seventh decade, these looming presences from my youth become more important.  They played such a role in helping me to shape an image of what poets did, how they did it, and what their poems could do on the page.  I think I’ve spent the past four or more decades working my way toward what I saw then, trying to find and reframe it.  In a few poems, I think I’ve actually got to that point – a kind of arrival that is satisfying.  As Eliot wrote so wonderfully in the fifth section of “Little Gidding”:  “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning.” 

Daniel Halpern on Hyam Plutzik's "Letter from a Young Poet" [by David Lehman]

The new, just-published edition of Hyam Plutzik's Letter from a Young Poet (Watkinson / Trinity College / Books and Books Press, 2016) is a welcome event. Plutzik (1911-1962), the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, studied at Trinity College in Connecticut and at Yale, and later established himself as a beloved professor of English at the University of Rochester. A poet ripe for rediscovery, Plutzik wrote the ambitious book-length poem Horatio in which Hamlet's confidante takes to heart the injunction to absent himself from felicity awhile and give a true account of the events that wrecked the royal court of Denmark. Begun while Plutzik served in the U. S. army during World War II, the book narrowly missed winning the Pulitzer back in 1962. Plutzik's acclaimed collection Apples from Shinar appeared from Wesleyan in 1959 and was reissued by the same publisher on his centenary

While in residence at a Connecticut farmhouse as a young man, the Brooklyn-born poet found himself bedeviled by an aggressive woodchuck about whom he wrote, "There was a sort of agony in his desire. . .[and] I saw in this brutish creature the kin and symbol of mankind, bestial in form but aspiring to heaven." From this quotation alone one can sense the spiritual connection that the poet felt with the prince of Denmark, who wonders at man, the "paragon" of the animals, who yet amounts to nothing more than a "quintessence of dust."

 Letter from a Young Poet -- perhaps inspired by Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and by the ideal of literary mentorship -- was written just before the United States entered the second World War. The poet is buried in Queens, New York, with this simple epitaph on his gravestone, the concluding lines from one of his own poems: "Nothing can be done / But something can be said / At least."

We are pleased to post, with permission, Daniel Halpern's foreword to the new edition of Letter from a Young Poet. -- DL

<<<
It's slightly ironic that it took twenty-nine year old Hyam Plutzik seven years to compose this novella of a letter to his college professor at Trinity College, Odell Shepard. An outpouring of heart and soul, to be sure. A young man's Biographia Literaria, a biographical ars poetica, sent to a man who, it's never clear from the letter he wrote in response, was more of a projection of Hyam's youthful self than true mentor or confidante, but whose remembered existence allowed Hyam to pen so openly such an impassioned and insightful epistle of his literary dreams and ambitions. Ironic, because Professor Shepard's return letter, three pages to Hyam’s seventy, was never sent. 

In Hyam's fervid letter, he addresses the concerns of an artist coming to terms with the world he's inherited. The prose is filled with determination, philosophic wonderings, thoughts on the nature of the artistic endeavor, enveloped throughout with a youthful ambition, a hopefulness, an admixture of self-confidence and self-doubt that in Hyam’s voice never rings contradictory. Large issues, and minor details, the sometimes temperate meanderings of a young artist, trying to come of age. He writes, "A friend of mine the other day, when I taxed him with certain venomous fanaticisms in literature and the arts, said that it was in his nature to have them; while I (he added) had a natural mellowness of character and had never said anything malicious about any man. The mellowness is a premature sign of old age perhaps." 

Reading this letter reminded me of the sensibility I discovered when I was Hyam’s age, opening Edwin Muir's Autobiography. A plain-spoken intellectual memoir that braids the life of the mind with the quotidian. Hyam writes, "The things most people take for granted I do not take for granted. The realm of sense, on whose existence my neighbors seem to rely implicitly, I know is a film as thin as a dragon-fly’s wing."

It's clear that during the seven years it took to get this letter onto the page, Hyam grappled with his art and his past, however brief the span of that past. Of course, the weight of those particular years far outweigh our later years of dailiness repeated and ground down through gravity’s routine, as he was well aware. Sadly, he would leave this world at the age of fifty, in his prime and quickly becoming one of our major post-World War II poets.

So this letter is an attempt to define his life at twenty-nine, to fix his place in the world, physical and intellectual, so that he might move on. An overview of the years since leaving Trinity College with unfinished business left behind. I was curious to read Professor Shepard's letter, in order to find a clue that would reveal what his old professor represented to him—or at least Hyam's memory of him. My question: Why did Hyam select this man as the beneficiary of his heartfelt ruminations? Hyam ends his letter with a touching (and trusting) post script: "I  have changed or crossed out nothing, you see. And the many things divulged I allow to remain."  

Seventy-five years later, we have no way of knowing how closely Shepard had grasped the substance and tone of the remarkable letter he had received. In his unposted reply, was he purposefully adopting a more restrained voice to counterbalance Plutzik’s youthful enthusiasm with the gravitas and wisdom of an elder scholar? The highlight of Shepard's letter is the following passage regarding the nature of writing, of the writer/artist:  "... and hence comes that feeling of being 'superfluous'... and a sense of utter solitude as a mask of his genius, and soon after, despairing of communication, he comes to write...  For himself alone, in a prolonged soliloquy." Was Shepard invoking what Rilke wrote forty years earlier in his letter to another young poet, "Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself."?

The notion of mentorship feels, in some ways, a somewhat dated notion. The speed at which our worlds now spin seems to obviate the time collaboration requires. The handing over, the sharing, the openness of informed conversation between experience and inexperience, tradition and ambition. Raw talent and proven artistic accomplishment. In any case, it makes me happy that Hyam never saw the response to his expansive missive.

As for epiphany, ambition and the quotidian, he writes, "I see the world as a cloud shielding us from Truth. The cloud changes and twists and thins out, and sometimes momentary gaps appear in it, and for a moment we catch an outline of a form beyond, and then the cloud closes, and soon the experience itself becomes unreal and we return to the vegetative life of everyday, and until the soul is (by subtle preparation) ready for another groping toward the real, we live like other people—in their world." Had Hyam, too, read Rilke? Had he come upon, “Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you?”

Along with the seriousness of a young man’s articulation, there is, throughout Hyam's letter, a beguiling if somewhat submerged humor, a  playfulness, often at his own expense. He tells us, simply, that he intended to write "an epic...  concerning a leaf that hung on a branch just outside my window. Unfortunately, the leaf fell down before I could get started, so the whole thing entered the realm of the might-have-been, from which no traveler returns." 

He comes across in these pages as grounded, wise beyond his twenty-nine years—and for sure, impatient and intolerant.  He writes, "... at the age of 23 one’s impatiences are more urgent than they are later on; one's intolerances are at their height; one can detest things more vividly." 

Hyam's letter is a song of the self and the soul. He found a transparent mirror through which he could locate and articulate the place where he found himself standing after seven years in the wilderness of his own making. That mirror might have been the illusion of his teacher. And Hyam reports back: "Who is this creature of flesh and bone that, on a world whose position in the universe and in the gradation of things no Copernicus will ever completely explain, walks among things of dimension, color and texture and booms forth sounds like a veritable frog in a marsh?"

One of the discoveries to be made in this text is the particular type of observation that Hyam makes palpable for us, and which he makes good use of in his later poetry. The following passage, and the six lines of verse that follow, from his poem entitled "Seventh Avenue Express," give a sense of himself in the “city.”  There’s something reminiscent of Weldon Kees' memorable Robinson poems, and even certain atmospheric passages from Hesse's Steppenwolf.  Here is Hyam in NYC, reporting on what he finds around him.  A portrait of the city that is at the same time a projection of the self onto the landscape ahead.

I saw the world-city as an obscene but fortunately evanescent island in a dim sea. And the people in it? Well, in a poem I once wrote there was a character (obviously myself), whose picture may perhaps give you an idea of what I am trying to say. What did he think of the city and the people in it?

     He thinks he knows them but he knows them not.
     He does not know himself, nor does he know
     Her he embraced, or who has heard his voice
     Over the table and the pungent smoke.
     He calls a name and knows not who he calls.
     He seeks himself by strange and devious ways...

One could say he has found some profound part of the meaning of his letter in the lines of this poem.  I'm reminded of a memorable comment by the British poet Thom Gunn, which seems apt here:  "He has a most unusual freshness of vision which enables him to be the master of two worlds, the natural and the supernatural...  His imagery is both astonishing and appropriate..."

Mentorship notwithstanding, it would seem that, in fact, Hyam served a number of masters—not all of them literary—as he developed his poetic skills. Reading this letter you will find sources for the poems that would later be written, along with his poetic methods of perceiving the world, and his understanding of himself as an occupant of that inherited domain, momentary as it was to be.

—Daniel Halpern

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Oughta be in Pictures (by Jennifer Michael Hecht)

Hi again Bleaders,

 

I wanted to show you this. 

 

On fb the photographer Reuben Radding and I have stumbled into a collaboration. Here's the first official one. RR had posted a photo on his page and our mutual friend posted a poem of mine in the comments, and she was right, it was a compelling match up. So we're going agin. 

Reuben Radding

April 18 at 12:40pm · New York ·

 

History

Even Eve, the only soul in all of time
to never have to wait for love,
must have leaned some sleepless nights
alone against the garden wall
and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild
and wished to trade-in all of Eden
to have but been a child.

In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace,
that she might have a story of herself to tell
in some other place.

photo © Reuben Radding text © Jennifer Michael Hecht
http://www.reubenradding.com http://tinyurl.com/hofhadt

The the girl in nature but confined, the grown woman walking away, the line between adulthood and childhood formed by the other children, in stages of growth, and the main girl's amazing expression which could mean several things. I see the face of being surprised while doing something illicit, or just about to pounce, or.

I hope you are all well, but the very questions thus phrased informs me that this is impossible. To the woeful, courage! To the vibrant, maybe write another line?

Love,

Jennifer

Poetry [by Jay Parini]

I was at a literary festival in Montreal this past weekend, and I met a man – middle-aged, with a white beard, Canadian – who asked what I wrote.  When I explained that poetry lay at the heart of my writing project, he grimaced: “Ah,  poetry.  I can’t understand it.  And I no longer seek it out.”

Early – in my twenties, as a student – I swore to myself that I would never write a poem that I myself didn’t understand.  This has proved more complex at times than one might imagine.

The fact is, I’ve spent a good deal of my life teaching “difficult” poetry to students – from T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens to Charles Wright and Louise Glück.  I still gravitate naturally to poets like Frost and Seamus Heaney, poets I have very little trouble “following.”  But I appreciate the complexity – the necessary difficulty – inherent in some verse, which in its obscurities pushes toward the boundaries of thought and feeling.

My sense is that, at their best, Eliot and Pound, Stevens, and others in the camp of difficulty, move toward a beautiful clarity.  I love moments in The Waste Land, in Four Quartets, where Eliot achieves a kind of pellucid beauty – in the latter more than the former, these passages abound.  He himself addressed the difficulty of writing in “East Coker,” where he notes that “each venture / Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”  I understand that only too well.

His friend Pound actually crumbled in middle age into deep obscurities.  The Cantos are general a mess.  But I’ve spent a good deal of time with his Cantos, and I do so partly to treasure those breakthroughs into bright light, as in LXXXI, where he writes:

    The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.

    Pull down thy vanity, it is not man

    Made courage, or made order, or made grace,

       Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

    Learn of the green world what can be thy place

    In scaled invention or true artistry,

    Pull down thy vanity,

                                 Paquin pull down!

 

There is a stately radiance in passages like this. 

Wallace Stevens, of course, can be mind-bogglingly complex, and it requires a huge effort to move through even the best of his poems.  Yet I love it when he gathers his wits and writes with absolute clarity and force, as in the last stanza of “Sunday Morning” – an early poem – or in those very late poems where he strips reality of its caked mud, where “After the leaves have fallen, we return / To a plain sense of things.”   Stevens seems to me among the finest poets in the language, and I keep his Collected Poems near my writing desk for refreshment, inspiration.  I wouldn’t like my life as much without “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” “Of Modern Poetry,” “The Rock,” and so forth.  In a strange way the verbal and intellectual difficulties in these poems makes them re-readable.  I keep going back to find them, to see what I’ve missed. And there is always something fresh to find in this verse, where one does find clarity.  And yet, as he says in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “It is not an empty clearness, a bottomless sight.”  No, not that.  “It is a visibility of thought, / In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.”

I love the idea of “hundreds of eyes” all seeing “at once.”  It’s as if the readership of all eternity trained their eyes on his poem.

A plain sense of things – that lovely phrase of Stevens -- is what I treasure.  But sometimes you can’t get there without having moved through dark passages, confusion, clutter.  I sense this myself as, over forty or more years, I’ve tried to write plainly, clearly.

It’s very difficult to write clearly, just as it’s difficult to see clearly.  I write about the process in “Lend an Ear,” a poem where looking for clarity I liken to walking in the thick of woods:

 

I move along the ground,

through wiry brush, picking my way,

talking my way

 

through quiet stretches, word

by word, building a path

toward an opening, where I might say

 

some things that matter,

fill a silence that insists

in sounding like itself and nothing more.

 

I’ve always written a lot of lines of poetry in my notebooks – filled page after page with often incoherent scribbling.  But I feel an obligation, when I’m actually gathering the lines into a poem that might one day see the light of day, to write in a way that will appeal to the eye and ear of the reader, and will not seem impenetrable.

Thinking of Frost [by Jay Parini]

I find it hard to get Robert Frost out of my head.

Of course I wrote a long biography of him in the late nineties: Robert Frost: A Life. That book, in one way or another, took about twenty-five years to write.

I had adored the poems of Frost in high school and college. But in the summer of 1975, I arrived on the campus of Dartmouth College, to begin a career in teaching that continues to this day. I had an office in Sanborn House, only a few steps from the Baker Library, and remember going into the manuscripts room only a couple of weeks after my arrival. I asked the man at the desk what was there, and he mentioned some notebooks and letters belonging to Frost, who had once studied at Dartmouth. He took them out for me to examine, and my journey with Frost began in earnest.

There were many people in the area who knew Frost, who had died just over a decade before. One of these was a retired Dartmouth president, John Dickey. Another was the elderly poet Richard Eberhart, who became a very close friend of mine. They introduced me to others who knew Frost, including Peter Davison – an editor and poet living in Boston. I began to accumulate material for what would become my own biography, written to some extent in response to the biography by Lawrance Thompson, a man who knew Frost well.

Thompson knew Frost a little too well, in fact. Both he and Frost were interested in Kay Morrison, who was Frost’s secretary. Thompson grew to dislike Frost, and his biography reeks of his distaste.

I loved Frost’s work --- the beautiful simplicity of the writing, the alert mind, his sense of metaphor, an ability to phrase things in memorable ways. Auden once described poetry as “memorable language,” and Frost was insanely good at finding a memorable phrase or line. Sometimes these were sentimental, of course, as in the last line of “Birches,” where he writes: “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” Oh, dear. Nevertheless, even that sentimental poem is filled with strangeness marked by a strong Freudian undercurrent: the boy wants to “subdue” his father’s trees. There is a hidden sexual element to the poem. And some astonishing beauty: “Earth’s the right place for love.”

Frost’s ability to frame an aphorism powered his short poems, such as “Fire and Ice.” Anyone who has ever tried to write a brief, aphoristic poem will know how difficult it can be. The ancient Greek were good at it; but one doesn’t find many examples of great short aphoristic poems in English.

Frost could do anything in verse. Some of his sonnets – “Design,” “A Silken Tent” – rank easily among the best of American sonnets, or sonnets written in English. But then he could do conventional stanzas, as in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” or run at some length with blank verse: “Directive” is probably his finest achievement in this form, a late version of what the critic M.H. Abrams once characterized as the Greater Romantic Lyric, which is really a kind of ode that could be traced back to Wordsworth and Keats.

Some of Frost’s poems can hardly be classified. “After Apple-Picking” is a manner of ode, something in the vein of “Ode to Autumn” by Keats. But it defies description, and lures the reader in. It’s a stunning piece of work that is, at least partly, about writing itself.

It so happens that many of Frost’s best poems are about writing. “Hyla Brook” is a good example, a poem from Mountain Interval (1920) about a brook that has “run out of song and speed” by June. Like a poem, it persists in the author’s mind before it gets to the page. Or comes up as something else, such as “jewel-weed.” Perhaps a fragment of thought or feeling will disappear and reappear as a poem? Certainly the stream’s dry bed “is left a faded paper sheet.” My own notebooks of years past will reveal many a “faded paper sheet” that once seemed bright with lines.

I never tire of Frost. I go back to him for ideas, inspiration. I have many of his poems by heart, and only need to recall them, to say them again in my head. No need for a book.

Frost’s life was, in some ways, exemplary. He never lost interest in his work, in reading and writing. He persisted through dark years of obscurity, not publishing much until nearly his fortieth year. He dealt with family tragedies, including the early deaths of children, the later suicide of a son, an adult daughter’s death. He fought depression. He had self-doubts in abundance. He could be jealous about other poets. He craved attention.

But he persisted, and he left behind a dozen or more poems that will be read as long as poetry in English is read.

William Holden [by David Lehman]

Born in O'Fallon, Illinois, on April 17, 1918, William Franklin Beedle was the most energetic kid in his class. He was popular among the boys because he was a good teammate in sports. The girls liked his good looks. His teenage years coincided with the Depression that brought his father, a chemist, to his knees. "We didn't talk about it much at home. We walked. My father was not big on talking. My father liked to walk. I liked walking with him." According to some accounts he came from a wealthy family whose fortunes brought them to Southern California in the 1930s but that's just talk.

The peripatetic young man played clarinet, sang in the school chorus, and got his big break when Barbara Stanwyck took a liking to him on the set of Golden Boy in 1939. She saved his job. By then he had changed his name to William Holden, the first of many shrewd career decisions. He and Stanwyck became lifelong pals.

It has been said that William Holden is the greatest celebrity born on April 17, the closest competitor being Khrushchev. It would be nice to have a movie of Khrushchev with George C. Scott in the title role and with William Holden as the hard-drinking, poker-playing (fictionalized) American secretary of state who didn't go to Harvard but averts war because his poker instincts tell him that Khrushchev would back down unless you didn't give him a chance to back down. Firing first was always a mistake with a potato farmer. Call his bluff but at the same time make a secret concession and you all come out ahead, though history doesn't quite work like that. A year after the crisis the young president had his head blown off and a year after that Nikita was out of office.

Holden has many of the traits of an Aries with Libra rising whose moon is in Cancer and whose dominant Venus is abetted by a thrust of Plato. The emphatic Venus in his chart suffices to explain why an able lad with rugged good looks would succeed in his chosen profession, as you would, if you turned twenty-three the year Pearl Harbor was bombed and you were blessed with courage, honor, leadership qualities, and a high libido, unless life threw you a curve ball in the form of a lousy marriage or some other trace of trouble in Tahiti that will someday blow up like a huge aerial photograph to expose the places that were bombed in the war. 

Still, if you look like Bill Holden shirtless in Picnic or The Bridge on the River Kwai, you can't miss. You can be a Swedish industrialist who was neutral until he saw first-hand what monsters the Nazis were, or you can be Humphrey Bogart's high-living younger brother, or a journalist in a convertible in Asia, a corporate vice president who resists bottom-line pressures because he values quality, a TV network executive who's seen it all, the head of a band of hombres who rob trains and ride into Mexico just when cowboys are becoming a thing of the past. But the role that suited BIll Holden best was that of prisoner of war: in Stalag 17, captured by the Nazis; in The Bridge on the River Kwai, a captive of the Japanese in the jungles of Burma.

To understand why Bill Holden became a great movie star, emblem of masculinity, and hopeless alcoholic, you must understand that his brother, Robert, a fighter pilot, was killed in combat in World War II. Holden himself served in the army for three years, 1942-1945, and served valiantly. Yet he suffered in silence the guilt of the unworthy survivor.

What William Holden brought to the movies was a masculine ideal. He was a grown up, sometimes a wise ass but never a fool, who had what it takes to make it, whether "it" was an escape from or into danger. But he was versatile. He could as easily be found face down in a swimming pool, dead from the start like the narrator of Sunset Boulevard in 1950. In that movie Holden played Hollywood screenwriter Joe Gillis who meets a diva from the silent screen star era and becomes a kept man. Others have remarked that it seems as if his fate as a dead man who can't stop talking epitomizes the role of the writer in Hollywood movies.

Set in a German POW camp in a dreary December in World War II,Stalag 17 won him the Academy Award in 1953. Look at all the things he is in that all-male movie: a loner, a shrewd guy who knows the odds, a successful exponent of the free enterprise system, a scapegoat, the victim of a vicious beating, a detective, a skillful interrogator, and an expert planner. He turns the tables on the real traitor in the group and devises a means of escape that allows him, the outcast, to become a hero and save a doomed man from frostbite.

In Executive Suite he is the executive most likely to succeed because he is dashing, decisive, has a conscience and a vision, and is married to June Allyson who plays catch with their son. He has a natural ally in Walter Pidgeon, the world's greatest number-two man. Barbara Stanwyck, playing the sister of the corporate CEO was has suddenly dropped dead, unexpectedly throws in her lot with him, and he carries the day against Fredric March, an antagonist who sweats too much and whose chief ally, Louis Calhern, is unreliable. A pleasure to see them all at work, with elegant Nina Foch as the executive secretary. Also in the cast are Dean Jagger, Shelly Winters, and Paul Douglas.See photo of Holden, Stanwyck, and Calhern below: The cigarette smoke lingers in the air. "Is that what you want on your gravestone when you die -- that you raised the dividend to three dollars or four or even five or six or seven?" And at the end of the movie: "Who won?" "We did."

Holden plays not a cynic but a skeptic and a pessimist whose pessimism is validated in The Bridge on the River Kwai, David Lean's greatest movie in my opinion. Shears would much prefer to lie on a South Pacific beach with an army nurse drinking martinis. Anyone would. And he deserves it. He did his time in the jungle and escaped from a Japanese POW camp run by a sadist. To escape required tremendous luck. And here they were interrupting his lucky life, blackmailing him into returning there by parachute with the insufferable, hale-and-hearty Jack Hawkins, the Oxbridge-educated Brit who is able to speak seven languages competently. Also on the mission is a Canadian solider, a kid really, capable enough but with a thing about killing. They have to bomb the bridge that the crazy English major Alec Guiness is helping the Japanese construct. I will not give away the explosive climax, but the last word in the picture, spoken by James Donald, is "Madness."

What Holden's character has done that makes himself vulnerable to blackmail by British intelligence is exactly what Don Draper does in the Korean War in Mad Men but again I'm not going to give that away here.

I have written elsewhere about The Counterfeit Traitor, as fine a movie about espionage as has ever been made. In The Wild Bunch, Holden and pals Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson, ex-pal Robert Ryan, and old fogie pal Edmund O'Brien, preside o'er the slow-motion death of the west. Cars have made horses defunct, and machine guns can wipe out the whole lot of them plus innumerable Mexicans in uniforms led by a heartless slob with a vicious streak. The outlaws may be on the wrong side of the law, but they are on the right side of political history. The men know they will die. But they do not falter. After Holden finishes his business with the whore, he puts on his gun belt and his hat, walks outside, eyes the others, and says, "Let's go." Warren Oates replies: "Why not?" Holden's last word in the picture is "Bitch."

Holden was married to the beautiful Brenda Marshall. He served as Ronald Reagan's best man when the Gipper wed Nancy Davis in 1952. In Italy in 1966 he was charged with vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence. This added another reason for drunken depression.

Holden was Joe Bonaparte in Golden Boy, George Gibbs in Our Town, Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, Stefson in Stalag 17, Shears in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Eric Erickson in The Counterfeit Traitor. It was downhill after his work as Max Schumacher in Sidney Lumet's Network brought him admiring notices in 1976.

Director Billy Wilder said that Holden was a good citizen, concerned about such things as endangered species.  "What he didn't realize was that he was himself an endangered species."

Died drunk in his Santa Monica home on November 16, 1981. In 1982 Barbara Stanwyck received a long overdue honorary Oscar. She said, "A few years ago I stood on this stage with William Holden as a presenter. I loved him very much, and I miss him. He always wished that I would get an Oscar. And so tonight, my golden boy, you got your wish." -- DL

In Conversation with Older Poets [by Jay Parini]

 

My New and Collected Poems, 1976-2015 has just appeared from Beacon Press, and I couldn’t be happier with the results – a lovely looking book that has allowed me to gather my poems of the last ten years – the “new” part of the title – and reprint most of the poems I really want to stand by from earlier volumes. It’s not a “complete” poems, but it’s close.

As a young man writing poems – mostly in Scotland, where I spent seven years at the University of St. Andrews – I never really envisioned a day when, as approached the age of 70 (I’m 68), I would have an opportunity like this, to gather my poems of four decades under one cover. I remember holding in my hands the collected poems of Eliot and Frost, Stevens, Roethke, Bishop, and others. There was something immensely satisfying about seeing the work of a lifetime in a book.

Of course, I hope this is not “the work of a lifetime.” I wouldn’t mind having a couple of more decades to write poems, and I’m assuming that with the experiences I’ve had in poetry down all these decades, somehow I’ll be equipped to face my later years freshly, finding a language adequate to this experience.

I’ve always been drawn to the work of older poets. Frost, for instance, found the most perfect poem, “Directive,” and quite late in his writing life. It’s the best of Frost: subtle and deeply in command of the kind of blank verse he had made his own, with memorable lines, with a spry and off-kilter humor, with a ruefulness that only Frost could muster. It doesn’t have the slightly cute feel of “Mending Wall” or “Birches” – poems I love, but not in the same way. This long poem is about winding your way “back” into the woods, back to a house in the woods that has been reduced to a cellar hole, near a brook. It ends: “Here are your water and your water-place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”

For Frost, life was confusing. A poem for him was “a momentary stay against confusion.” It was a clearing in the crazy woods of our time, his time, his own psyche. And I can’t help but thinking Frost’s own mind was, at times, a miserable thicket – I wrote a biography of Frost in 1999, so I’m familiar with the issues that drove him: a lack of self-confidence, a narcissistic turn, a persistent battle with depression. I’m not a shrink, but it seems obvious that Frost struggled with a mood disorder that informs his poetry from the beginning to the end.

I’m going to be writing these blogs for the coming week, and in them I will explore some of the difficulties that poets have faced in the later parts of their careers. I’ll look at Yeats and Stevens. I’ll think about T.S. Eliot. I’ll talk about my old friend and mentor Robert Penn Warren, whom I knew very well in the last decade or so of his life (he lived not so far down the road from me in Vermont, where he is buried in a country churchyard in West Wardsboro). And I will hope these explorations prove useful for younger poets.

I will also take the liberty of talking about my own poetry – a craft that has obsessed me, informed my life, shaped my dreams and opened my heart, over this past fifty years or so.

It’s fair to say I started writing seriously in college, as a freshman – exactly fifty years ago. I was a very bad poet, one who had read almost nothing of consequence – so my work had the immaturity and adventurousness of young people. It wasn’t until I got to Scotland in 1968 that I began to read poetry with a kind of steadiness that has become part of my continuing work. I ran into the poet Alastair Reid, who became an important mentor; and I met a young teacher called Tony Ashe – a brisk and bright lecturer who had recently finished his graduate work in Oxford. He took me carefully through poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donne, Yeats. Eliot, Pope and Wordsworth.

Those classes were a revelation to me, and I learned what “close reading” meant. To my amazement, I’ve continued to reread so many of these poets. And I’ve continued to allow myself, as a writer, to join their conversation.

I never really like the idea that poetry was a contest, with writers struggling to outdo each other. I much prefer the notion of dialogue, and I have found myself in perpetual dialogue with Frost and Stevens, Roethke, Charles Simic, Louise Glück, Seamus Heaney, Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Wright – just to name some obvious ones. I’ll explore the nature of this conversation in these posting as well.

Jay Parini, Guest Author April 18-22

This week we welcome Jay Parini as our guest author. Jay's five books of poetry include Anthracite Country, House of Days and New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015 (Beacon Press, March 29, 2016). He has written eight novels, including Benjamin’s Crossing, The Apprentice Lover, The Passages of H.M., and The Last Station—the last was made into an Academy Award–nominated film starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. Parini has written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and, most recently, Gore Vidal. His nonfiction works include Jesus: The Human Face of God, Why Poetry Matters, and Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America.

Welcome, Jay. 

-- sdh

 

...And the Poets are Budding [by Emily Deming]

Post 6 from Emily Deming, Mallard Cottage’s Writer-in Residence, St. John’s Newfoundland

I took last week off from daily work and home-life to be both horribly sick and to celebrate a friend’s fortieth birthday in Montreal. Since I last posted, Newfoundland has had an unprecedented run of sunny weather, a rallying in mass rage at an announced austerity budget (which heavily and regressively taxes the lower income brackets), and a massive four day long provincial liquor store clearance sale.

With this backdrop, I was fulfilling the pledge from my previous post to walk to and from work in order to take some time each day to notice all of what I have around me here in St. John’s, and I found two poems. A flick-flick of pink by the lake’s edge caught my attention. We may have had some extra sun, but we certainly don’t have leaves or flowers yet (other than a few crocuses that make us all lose our minds each April). Two poems, each printed on pink cotton fabric squares were clothespinned to bare branches.

The last few lines of one did just what a poem should and stuck with me, repeating itself to the cadence of my feet as I walked the rest of the way home.

 

“...that in the waking edge of rage

we are still beautiful

wild and with a special grace”.

 

 

 

 

 

The smell of the Mallard Cottage smoker, the feel of the fog on my skin as it settled down the slopes beneath a blue sky, and the alders just soft with fuzz like pussy willows, which I had never seen like that before, did something to my eyes, my mind, the things around me: the gulls above Her Majesty’s (moldy, crumbling, overcrowded) Penitentiary; the razor wire wall between the blue sky and the graveyard; the color palettes of peeling paint around the boathouse docks; a blue buoy in the water.

One morning at Mallard Cottage, a serving of their house pickled salted herring, two hours of good writing accomplished, and that anonymous gift of bold pink poems, and everything had meaning.

The budget is still ruinous, the best of the liquor clearance has been bought up, and I doubt the sun will be that bold through the fog again for a week, but there is no way to be bored in the world when armed with a drop of poetry. To remind myself of that, I captured a few video clips of the lake water lapping and the wind and gulls. Each ten second scene is a small meditation and a call back to how clear things can look on “... the waking edge of rage”

 

 

And in honour of our collective crazy spring auge, here is one more poem I “found” this week by a very young poet in Vermont who so beautifully and succintly captured that moment of first crocus sighting after the plow-slush and freeze and driving snow of winter, regardless of how cold the wind remains:

A Springtime Poem

By Elizabeth E. Daley (age 5 at time of composition)

Walking with my sister,
I find the first small, purple flowers in bloom.
My heart pops with joy!
Spring has come!

“Oh that was a voice and that was a band” Remembering Al Bowlly [by Michael Palma]

On the night of April 16-17, 1941, the Luftwaffe conducted a raid over London. Several hours after midnight, two bombs fell into Jermyn Street, causing extensive damage and killing 23 people. One of the victims, a well-known professional entertainer named Al Bowlly, had declined the offer of overnight lodgings in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, after having performed there the previous evening, preferring to catch the last train home. He was in bed reading when the parachute bomb went off outside his apartment building. His bedroom door, blown off its hinges by the force of the explosion, was propelled across the room, hitting him in the face and killing him instantly. He was 42 years old.

        

Al Bowlly, January 7, 1898 – April 17, 1941

Though he is still well remembered in Britain, Al Bowlly’s name is not widely known here. Many know it only as a reference in the title and lyrics of Richard Thompson’s song “Al Bowlly’s in Heaven” (from which my title is taken), on his 1986 album Daring Adventures. Yet, for every American who knows his name, there are scores who have heard Al Bowlly’s music. His recording of Noël Coward’s “Twentieth Century Blues” was used over the main titles of the 1968 BBC miniseries (shown here on PBS in 1972) made from Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. Stanley Kubrick used Bowlly’s “Midnight, the Stars and You” and “It’s All Forgotten Now” in The Shining (1980), and Steven Spielberg featured his “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” in Empire of the Sun (1987). Al Bowlly songs have been used in films as recent as The King’s Speech (2010) and Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight (2014). Everything Is Copy, Jacob Bernstein’s documentary film about his mother, Nora Ephron, which premiered on HBO premiere only four weeks ago, concludes with Bowlly’s “Love Is the Sweetest Thing” playing over the closing credits.

         But beyond all doubt, the one person most responsible for keeping the name and music of Al Bowlly alive was the late Dennis Potter, whose enthusiasm for the singer bordered on the obsessive. In fact, Potter’s 1969 teleplay Moonlight on the Highway (the title of a 1938 Bowlly recording) starred Ian Holm as a sexual abuse victim whose own obsession with Bowlly becomes a psychological coping mechanism. Potter made use of Bowlly’s music in several other television dramas and serials, including his last major work, The Singing Detective (1986), but it is Pennies from Heaven (1978), the six-part series that is universally acknowledged to be Potter’s masterpiece, that makes the most prominent use of Al Bowlly’s records, fourteen songs in all. Long before we knew one another, my wife, Vicky, watched it when it was broadcast on PBS and was overwhelmed by both the drama and the music—so much so that she flew from New York to London shortly thereafter, partly to visit her then-favorite city, but principally to find, in those pre-Amazonian days, the otherwise unobtainable soundtrack LP. Years later, it was through her insistence that I watch the series that I discovered Al Bowlly.

Jermyn Street looking towards St. James's Street, where Al Bowlly lived in 1941.
(photo © Westminster City Archives)

         A shilling life—there have been several[1]—will give you all the facts, and so, nowadays, will a number of Internet sources. Born to Lebanese and Greek parents in Mozambique, Albert Alick Bowlly grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. Though trained as a barber, he spent his middle twenties touring various Asian countries as a singer with several bands. In 1927 he made his way to Germany, of all places, and in Berlin on August 18 of that year he made the first of what would be more than one thousand recordings, a performance of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” (which, like a good deal of his work, is available on YouTube). The start of the 1930s brought his breakthrough, when he began recording with the superb Ray Noble Orchestra and singing live with the band at the Monseigneur Restaurant, led first by Roy Fox, later—and brilliantly—by Lew Stone. The first half of that decade saw more than half of his entire recorded output. At the time, singers tended to be anonymous members of the bands with which they performed, but he became so popular that his name began to be featured on show posters and record labels. His wave crested in mid-decade, and after two years in the United States and recurring vocal problems, he wound up touring throughout Britain and recording when he could with a variety of orchestras. But, complicating the inevitable speculation about what would have happened if he had not been killed, the quality of his work remained undiminished. Among his most striking records are jazz settings of two Shakespeare songs, “Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind” and “It Was a Lover and His Lass,” which he cut with Ken “Snakehips” Johnson and His West Indian Orchestra a year before his death.

         The best treatment of Bowlly’s art that I know of is the long entry in Will Friedwald’s Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers (2010), a vast, opinionated, astonishingly informed, and frequently hilarious compendium. Friedwald calls Bowlly “one of the finest swinging jazz singers of any era, and like Django Reinhardt, one of the first Europeans to understand the blues…. He also was, like Armstrong and Crosby, a clear predecessor of Sinatra’s Swingin’ Lover style.” Needless to say, in a catalogue of a thousand recordings[2], there are many that are not worth listening to a second time—or, in rare instances, even a first time. Bowlly recorded his share of throwaway ditties and banal ballads, and outside of his work with Noble and Stone and the sides he cut with his longtime piano accompanist Monia Liter, many otherwise fine performances are hampered by off-the-rack arrangements. Yet from the beginning to the end of his recording career, Bowlly’s singing is consistently excellent. His clear phrasing, unerring rhythm, and warm yet flinty voice are unmistakable on every number. Friedwald concludes: “Bowlly is simply one of the finest spirits ever captured on record. With his slightly husky timbre that anticipates Tony Bennett as much as it echoes Crosby, he is a genuine, three-dimensional personality that speaks to us across the generations on shellac surfaces that spin at 78 rpm. Journalists at the time tended to use the term ‘crooner’ and ‘jazz singer’ as if they were interchangeable. In later years, this was proven not to be apt, but, in Bowlly’s work, the two roles are one and the same.”

         If you don’t know Al Bowlly’s music but your curiosity has now been piqued, I advise you to take this simple test. Go to YouTube and listen to the following: “All I Do Is Dream of You,” “Love Is the Sweetest Thing,” “Over the Rainbow,” and the stunning “My Woman.” It will take about ten minutes, and, in all likelihood, one of two things will happen. Either you will decide that you simply don’t carry the gene for Al Bowlly or else you will be instantly hooked, a lifelong fan. My money is on the second one.

 

[1] Sid Colin and Tony Staveacre, Al Bowlly (London: Elm Tree Books, 1979); Ray Pallett, Goodnight Sweetheart: Life and Times of Al Bowlly (Tunbridge Wells: Spellmount Ltd, 1986); Ray Pallett: They Called Him Al: The Musical Life of Al Bowlly (Duncan, OK: BearManor Media, 2010; this volume contains a complete discography).

[2] Several two-disc Bowlly sets are available on CD. The one in AVC’s Essential Collection series (2007) is the most comprehensive, and also has the highest proportion of top-drawer material. For those who want more, there is The Al Bowlly Collection (2013; four discs, 100 tracks).

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Carrie Olivia Adams and Janaka Stucky of Black Ocean Press

DD: Walter Benjamin tells us that all great literature either dissolves a genre or invents one. Your own poetry, Carrie, and much of the poetry in the Black Ocean catalogue, either dissolves a genre or occurs in the interstices of genre.   What draws you to these spaces? What is the value of being aesthetically in-between (prose and poetry, high and low, clinical and colloquial, et cetera)?

COA: I often think I’m a poet by accident, rather than by intention. I’m someone who always wants to be someone else, or at least is very curious about the idea of being someone else. Why not a filmmaker? A diplomat? Spy? Why not be all those things at once? Life’s a lot more compelling when it’s unlimited. And so is poetry, literature, art. The space in between is where all the energy is. The freedom. The play. The frisson. The experimentation. It’s where everything can rub up against each other. Choosing one path or another, immediately negates. But when you start out thinking about a poem, without thinking about how poet or poem should think, it opens the world. No form is off limits. No language is off limits. And then the poem can truly represent life and the life of the mind. It can be a living, organic thing. Isn’t that the most value of all?

DD: Black Ocean Press celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Congratulations on a successful first decade! In the past ten years, you have published 36 poetry collections, including one anthology. Although the authors that you publish cross continents and range from Julie Doxsee to Michael Zapruder, your catalogue presents a remarkably unified poetic vision. What makes a Black Ocean book?

COA: We definitely take pride in the idea that you immediately know a Black Ocean book when you see it. There’s a design sense and style you can’t help but recognize. And I feel the same way about the poems inside those awesome packages. When I’m reading submissions, I know I’ve found a book that will be a Black Ocean book when it changes how I think or how I see the world. It suddenly offers me a vision of something overlooked or something I never knew had a name. The poems give words to sensations or ideas that I’ve always wanted to describe or never realized needed describing. It fondles an itch in the mind. It wakes me up. It has to feel essential and purposeful. Not in a manipulative way, but in that the poems have a reason and now you can’t imagine a world in which you did not have that phrase.

DD: You met Black Ocean’s founder, Janaka Stucky, in a workshop as part of the M.F.A. Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Can you tell us about him and explain how the press came into being?

It's a dog's life... [by Steven Rea]

I don't think a book is going to happen with this set of photographs, but I've got a couple of portfolios' worth of images of, yes, movie stars with dogs -- professional Hollywood canines, beloved pets, mutts that just walked into the picture. Here are a few. And what do you know, Peggy Cummins, it appears, is having a cup of coffee as she offers her terrier a treat! That's Gary Cooper with pipe and pooch, Mr and Mrs Bogart sharing some lawn time with their Boxer, and Joel McCrea, in western wear, fooling around with his springing spaniel. Arf!

 

 

Chet Baker sings... [by Steven Rea]

Earlier this week I was writing up my review of Born to Be Blue, Robert Budreau's appropriately jazzy tribute to the great trumpeter and singer Chet Baker -- with Ethan Hawke in the lead as the cool cat West Coast horn player with the tragic end story and the knocked-out teeth. It's a very good film, evoking 1950s/1960s L.A. and New York, and that's Hawke singing his way through a couple of the standards ("My Funny Valentine," "I've Never Been In Love Before") that Baker made his own.

So, by way of due diligence, and as an excuse to put the headphones on at work and take myself somewhere else, I listened to one of the best of Baker's collection of vocals: (Chet Baker Sings) It Could Happen to You. The LP came out in 1958 on Riverside, and Baker's song choice and silky readings are sublime. There's Rodgers and Hart here ("Do It the Hard Way," "Dancing On the Ceiling"), and the Gershwin boys ("How Long Has This Been Going On?") but maybe my favorite of the bunch is the Matt Dennis/Tom Adair woebegone ballad, "Everything Happens to Me." How's this for poetry:

Everything Happens to Me

I make a date for golf, and you can bet your life it rains.
I try to give a party, and the guy upstairs complains.
I guess I'll go through life, just catching colds and missing trains.
Everything happens to me.

I never miss a thing. I've had the measles and the mumps.
And every time I play an ace, my partner always trumps.
I guess I'm just a fool, who never looks before he jumps.
Everything happens to me.

At first, my heart thought you could break this jinx for me.
That love would turn the trick to end despair.
But now I just can't fool this head that thinks for me.
I've mortgaged all my castles in the air.

I've telegraphed and phoned and sent an air mail special too.
Your answer was goodbye and there was even postage due.
I fell in love just once, and then it had to be with you.
Everything happens to me.

I love that line: "I've mortgaged all my castles in the air!" 

Sinatra recorded "Everything Happens to Me," too, and it's none too shabby. But I'll take Chetty. Give a listen...

 . 

Skip your afternoon coffee: listen to this instead. Sinatra sings "The Coffee Song"

When Steven Rea agreed to blog this week, I immediately thought of this song in connection with his new book Hollywood Cafe: Coffee With the Stars. I promise that if you listen to it you won't need your afternoon pick-me-up. 

"You date a girl and find out later she smells just like a percolator."

-- sdh

"Together we saw an imagined buffalo" [by T. Danison]

Together we saw an imagined buffalo

 

This is the bison I rode when Cherokee
and you were not, did not.
I rode it to ride with the Wind Gods.
On open plains bordered by clumps of brushy cottonwoods so distant they seem other
countries.
This is the shaggy creature you see, the magnificent beast we share, whose temblor gallop
shakes and remakes the features of your face
I see I saw you before quite indistinctly.
This was before you rode this bison to ride with the Wind Gods when Cherokee
and I can just turn my head to see you true.

Merci to Muriel Patarroni, painter of natures

Wednesday, April 6, 7:30 PM: Steven Rea's Hollywood Cafe at the County Theater, Doyelstown, PA

Philadelphia Inquirer movie critic Steven Rea hosts an evening of coffee-centric film clips, including a Charlie Chaplin silent classic, a mid-'60s Michael Caine spy thriller, scenes from a pair of highly caffeinated Hitchcock classics, Quentin Tarantino talking gourmet beans in "Pulp Fiction," Audrey Hepburn sipping from a to-go cup in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," plus lots more! Copies of Hollywood Cafe: Coffee With the Stars, the new coffee table celebration of cinema and a cup of joe, will be on hand for sale and signing. And coffee from Parry Coffee Roasters, the amazing artisinal roastery based in Ambler, PA, will be served. And did we say that the whole show is free?!

The County Theater
20 East State Street
Doylestown, PA 18901
|215-345-6789