The Best American Poetry

One more cup of coffee... [by Steven Rea]

I've got a clutch of vintage photographs that didn't make it into Hollywood Cafe: Coffee With the Stars -- acquired too late for publication, but too good to pass up. Here's a backlot, between-scenes shot of Janet Leigh and Jack Lemmon getting their cups freshened by a snazzily-attired unnamed Columbia Pictures gent, on the set of 1954's My Sister Eileen. The caption on the back of the photo is headlined "COFFEETIME,"  it's credited and stamped "Van Pelt," the studio's veteran photographer, Homer Van Pelt. A World War II Army colleague of director John Ford, post-war, Van Pelt was hired on to shoot production stills for almost all of Ford's films.

 

And nothing to do with Janet Leigh, Jack Lemmon, Homer Van Pelt or John Ford, here's a poem by Ron Padgett, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation. A Google search reveals that there's actually a roaster and cafe in Knoxville, Tennessee, called Three Bears Coffee. Maybe the proprietor was inspired by Padgett's caffeinated musings? (P.S. -- Note the name of Padgett's publisher. It's a caffeinated conspiracy!)

Prose Poem ("The morning coffee.")

BY RON PADGETT

The morning coffee. I'm not sure why I drink it. Maybe it's the ritual
of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of
brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the
day on. It's something to do between being asleep and being awake.
Surely there's something better to do, though, than to drink a cup of
instant coffee. Such as meditate? About what? About having a cup of
coffee. A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink
is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear's por-
ridge, just right. Papa Bear looks disgruntled. He removes his spectacles
and swivels his eyes onto the cup that sits before Baby Bear, and then,
after a discrete cough, reaches over and picks it up. Baby Bear doesn't
understand this disruption of the morning routine. Papa Bear brings
the cup close to his face and peers at it intently. The cup shatters in his
paw, explodes actually, sending fragments and brown liquid all over the
room. In a way it's good that Mama Bear isn't there. Better that she rest
in her grave beyond the garden, unaware of what has happened to the
world.

Ron Padgett, "Prose Poem" from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2013 by Ron Padgett.  Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press. www.coffeehousepress.org

Source: Collected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013)

 

St. John's, NL: where real food and real art are so (un)common we may lose them [by Emily Deming]

The Pen may be mightier than the sword elsewhere, but, in St. John’s Newfoundland it is just a colloquialism for our dilapidated prison (Her Majesty’s Penitentiary) and paperwork trumps pen, sword and … fork. It came out this past week that Service NL (provincial food licensing and inspection for Newfoundland and Labrador) suggested that Mallard Cottage reclassify itself from “restaurant” to “other” due to it’s “obscure” food practices. These “obscure” methods of food preparation include buying and cutting up whole pigs instead of buying and cutting up pieces of pig, making pickles and curing meats and vegetables. In other words, preparing the food you serve makes you less of a restaurant. There is no threat of actions and no health standards have been violated. This is not big drama. It is small bureaucracy. And it is oh so very “Pigs is Pigs.”

This happens as St. John’s city council has received demolition requests for two prized historic buildings. One of which was maliciously neglected to circumvent a weakly written and unenforced agreement with the city to restore the property. That same developer had begun to strip the inside of the other property prior to its demolition order being filed, much less approved.

So what. So two rotten old houses may rot and more boxes may need ticking before the weekly pig roast. And all this in a very small city dwarfed by its offshore rigs and its icebergs. So this. Last night was a magically silly fundraiser for a local music festival (Lawnya Vawnya). It was the sixth annual “Fake Prom” and two costumed cover bands rocked the bar while folks from nineteen to well past mid-life danced in crinolines and boutonnieres well past mid-night. I had invited a filmmaker, visiting from Montreal, to come to the event and, as I was pointing out various band members, it hit me how integrated the artistic talent is in the town: “that guy with the nationally touring, award-winning band is a taxi driver; that woman nailling “Like a Prayer” is a famous singer-songwriter, helped start the local Girls Rock Camp and looks after toddlers by day; the one with the banter we all call “Captain Handsome” and he teaches Jr High. In St. John’s, half the folks in a given room downtown are likely to be both professional artists and the people making the neighborhood economies run. Old buildings and live talent are so much a part of tradition here they are are almost endangered. If we are “maggoty” with the arts, as locals might say, how are they endangered? Why preserve something so prevalent? Because it takes only a little time and the machinations of an incurious government for basic traditions to be deemed “obscure”.

What makes Mallard Cottage, what makes St. John’s, so mighty, so powerfully affecting to those who were born here and those from away, is the absolute normality of the extraordinary. Those guys painting your house? One’s photographs hang in the art banks of Hotel conglomerates and oil companies, the other is a poet so gifted that his 2011 book, Gifthorse, helped me save my life when I was sick enough to wish for death. This extraordinary art fills this city, this province, my heart. But sometimes a thing’s very prevalence, like old buildings we barely notice for the very length they’ve existed, leads to its devaluation. For the second half of my residency at Mallard Cottage, I will pay even closer attention, I will watch more of this town on my way there and back. I will celebrate the abundance of tradition around me, before it becomes a rarity to protect.

And I will start right now with some love for some poems by a poet who pulled out a chair for me at a bar on my second night in town and said, “Do I know your mother? No? Well, if you’ve come alone, sit with us anyway.”

 Agnes Walsh reading her poem “Going Around with Bachelors”

 

And, you, reading Walsh’s, “The Laying Out, 1956”:

Wash the corpse, put on the habit,

put the pennies on the eyelids,

the prayer book under the jaw,

fold the arms with the rosary beads

entwined around the fingers,

stop the clock, turn the looking glass

to the wall, knock him on the forehead

With the hammer to make sure he’s dead.

 

 [Photo of my walk to work ... which will now be soundtracked with poetry podcasts]

-- Emily Deming, Writer-in-Residence at Mallard Cottage

A picture's worth a thousand words... [by Steven Rea]

I've been collecting photographs seriously for the last seven years or so: First, focusing pretty much entirely on vintage Hollywood images of movie stars riding bikes, issued by the studios' publicity departments to promote their melodramas and westerns, rom-coms and noirs  -- and the actors and actresses playing all type of hero and heroine, villain and vamp, in them. It's an ongoing obsession: I post a few new (old) photos on my blog, Rides a Bike, every week. Movies and bikes are two of my passions, and landing on, say, a photo of a Mad Men-era Paul Newman pedaling around the backlot on a clunky delivery bike, or Virna Lisi in a white sundress on an Atala step-through, stopping on a country road somewhere... well, pretty much bliss.

Same thing happened -- the kick of discovery, surprise, joy -- when I started searching through dealers' collections and movie memorabilia shops for photographs of stars having coffee, making coffee, clinking their mugs next to craft services tables (and grabbing a donut while they're at it), refilling from a trusty percolator in their dressing room, or in their kitchen back home. Coffee: another passion, and, yes, probably an addiction, too. Last night my wife and I went to hear Kelly Jones and Teddy Thompson play at a club in Philadelphia -- the two singers and songwriters have teamed for Little Windows, a collection of heartbreakingly beautiful duets that recall classic country couples like George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner,  Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris (and the Everlys and the Louvins). There was one song with a line about sugar in a coffee cup, how it dissolves like true love can dissolve.... It was a sweet moment, or bittersweet, anyway.

Where am I going with this? Well, as I continue (daily) to troll for bike photos and coffee photos on the eBay sites of dealers in Canada and California, France and Argentina (yes, there's a gentleman in Buenos Aires who has a collection of 50,000 photos, 20,000 posters, all hailing from Hollywood), I sometimes screech to a stop on an image that has neither a bike nor a steaming cup of joe in it,  but it's a photo that I nonetheless feel compelled to bid on, to own. An iconic star from an iconic movie, a still from one of my all-time favorites (I've got an expanding folder of press photos from Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, with Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake in and out of their hobo gear), an incongruous, odd or just-plain-beautiful shot. So, on this a.m., as guest author on the Best American Poetry blog, I thought I'd share two of these gems, at least I think they are. Poetry in motion... pictures.

First, here's Jean Parker in an artfully staged shot from 1934's Sequoia, an MGM wildlife drama set in California's sequoia forests. Parker's character, Toni Martin, grew up in the woods, befriending puma and deer, and then loggers came rolling in threatening the animals' -- her pals' -- sanctuary. An environmental cautionary tale, way-back-when!

Second, Vanessa Redgrave, clapping her own clapperboard in a production still from Isadora, the 1968 Karel Reisz biopic, from Universal, in which the British actress starred as modern dance legend Isadora Duncan. (Who died, by the way, strangled, in a flukey accident, by a long, flowing silk scarf given to her by her close friend, Mary Desti, who happened to be Preston Sturges' mother.) It's the 84th scene, the first take. Action!

If you like, I'll share a few more images over the course of the week. For now, have a cup of coffee, get on your bike, go watch a movie! 

 

Steven Rea, Guest Author April 4-8

This week we welcome back Steven Rea as our guest author. Steven is the movie critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, a member of the National Society of Film Critics, author of Hollywood Cafe: Coffee With the Stars and Hollywood Rides a Bike: Cycling With the Stars. He is also the producer of the photo blog ridesabike.com . You can read his movie reviews here and follow his twitter feed (which is really fun) @Steven_Rea. 

Welcome back, Steven. 

-- sdh

What Really Happened When Lehman Brothers Fell [by David Lehman]

<<<
Fortunately for the family, my uncles and brothers had liquidated most of their holdings in the firm by the time of its collapse in September 2008. Nevertheless, whether out of nostalgia or pure forgetfulness, or perhaps just in order to keep getting annual reports and the like, a few of us kept some odd lots and attended shareholder meetings once in a while. And I maintained friendships with old friends, including the source of some scuttlebutt that I am now legally entitled to share.

One villain in the tale is the little known Peter Rubella, who headed the firm's missing documents department. The department comprised debentures, affidavits, flight manifests, stock certificates, and bills of lading, each one a surprising source of revenue for financial outfits wary of IPOs and LBOs but acutely conscious of the millions that go unclaimed each year in the form of lost lottery tickets, savings accounts of the deceased, uncanceled autopay, insurance reimbursements sent to defunct addresses, payments to remittance men, dead letters, the contents of grandma's safe deposit box, and the like. The department proved that working for an investment company is not just being a glorified broker or accountant but has elements of detection as in the dime novels you devour, though it has been decades since any book cost a dime. James M. Cain, author of Double Indemnity, would have been considered a classic if he had only taken the precaution of being born in France. But for the analogy to hold, you need an Edward G. Robinson in the driver’s seat -- not an unctuous snot like Rubella.

According to spokesperson Dana Goodrear of the YWC, an NGO whose turf is serious white-shoe wingtip investment-banker crime, Rubella engineered a complicated Ponzi scheme that cost an estimated 1.2 million investors upwards of $225 billion dollars. He put together a consortium of Indian companies that was thought to be running so-called "chit funds" in Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, and Eastern India. A partial list of the celebrities he defrauded includes Phyllis Dietrickson, Lucky Garnet, Julie Jordan, Ilse Lundt, Joel Cairo, Garance, Sam Malone, Fred Derry, Norma Desmond, Peter Joshua, Alicia Huberman, Noah Cullen, Melanie Wilkes, Pepe Le Moko, Schuyler Green, Privates Finch and Moss, Sergeant J. J. Sefton, Commander Shears, Mark Dixon, Waldo Lydecker, Carmen Sternwood, Khartoum, Roger Thornhill, Terry Malloy, Popeye Doyle, Sally Draper, Barbara Doll, Bunter, Sollozzo, Alice Kramden, Dianna Scott, Madelene Elster, Robert E. Lee Prewitt, Frankie Five Angels, and Addison DeWitt. The scheme had become so vast that it threatened to sink the whole company.

How did Rubella elude the scrutiny of investigators for so long? And how, even after the crisis of September 2008 broke and he duly went to jail, did he avoid the unfavorable publicity that lesser thieves, cheats, con artists, and other felons received?

While operating the scheme, the son of a bitch went unsuspected largely because he bribed the right officials and purported to be an advocate of liberal causes. He gave it out that he had put his family's German Measles fortune to philanthropic use. This was a fiction. He also enjoyed a reputation as a photographer who unknowingly witnesses a murder in Hyde Park, a tennis pro who plays a slow baseline game but turns on the motors because he needs to get to a certain merry-go-round a train ride away, an entry-level bachelor who lets senior execs use his pad for assignations, a producer of a rigged game show sponsored by Lever Brothers, and a fortune-hunter who courts a plain but principled heiress in Washington Square. He was generous with other people's money. His drug-free policy -- every employee under his supervision was guaranteed a free month's supply of percoset or cialis -- was good for office yucks and morale.

When finally confronted with his misdeeds -- by special investigator Bruno Anthony in December 2008 -- Rubella smirked unpleasantly and claimed that he had the approval of the firm's CEO as played by Jeremy Irons in the movie. The suspicious deaths of the three individuals who had filed harassment complaints had long constituted an effective deterrent to disclosure. Rubella's white marriage to socialite Miriam Hanes also lent him protection until her dead body was discovered at a missionary church an hour's ride from San Francisco. Rubella, an expert at misdirecting the public, released a statement asserting that "Obama uses your tax dollars to rebuild Muslim mosques around the world."

"It's painful to discover you've been a chump," said Hanes's brother, Guy, who released a statement to the press on the day Rubella was sentenced to share a cell in hell with the worst boss you ever had. Guy tried putting a good face on things, joking gamely: "What else is April first for?" His shares had lost eighty percent of their value, but he was determined to keep his cool. This endeared him to the press corps. Unfortunately his watch had picked this time to stop, or possibly he had simply forgotten to consult it. Fifteen days were about to go by unnoticed. Death and taxes wait for no man.
>>>

-- from "What Really Happened When Lehman Brothers Fell" by David Lehman. Reprinted with permission.