The Best American Poetry

Obtuseness around the world series, Part 1

La question française: Is there a truly, special English stupidity?

Once, when I was first here in France, I hurriedly hopped on a wrong train. With a particularly absorbing novel close to my nose, I settled in at once and that was that. I only discovered how really wrong that wrong train was when the conductor passed through, took my ticket and laughed out loud.

I slapped my forehead and exclaimed “Burbelsdorf! How could I be so stupid!”

In those days, seats on trains faced each other. The woman in front of me smiled broadly and said, in heavily accented English, “You are so stupid because you are English.”

Stupidity explained but not cleared up

By “stupid” she meant “obtuse”, the inability to see or understand something logically obvious. For instance, people who propose free circulation of firearms fail to understand that the arguments for restricting guns are about tolerable levels of public violence, not about guns. The right to bear arms folks are therefore exercising obtuseness, or “stupidity” when they try to deny the link between violence and unrestricted sale of firearms.

The French question hot today

I quickly corrected the French lady as to my nationality. But the French question, La Question française, is a hot one today. Is there or is there not a peculiarly English stupidity? And if there is, will it be checked at the urns on the June 23^rd United Kingdom referendum on leaving or staying in the European Union?

Given the importance of the decision and the country’s success within the Union, it is surely a head-scratcher that the English leave campaign has any traction at all. Unless a peculiarly English stupidity exists, nothing even faintly rational explains it.

The economic, social, security and political cases for staying in the EU are, each one after the other, obvious no-brainers, like gun control.  When questioned leave campaigners, like the promoters of unrestricted sales of firearms, are forced to shout snarling lies impossible to answer on Twitter.  The tension created by the snarling is followed on with naked appeals to “xenophobia”, something which nowadays is mostly found in sparsely-populated hollows in Appalachia or outer Mongolia or deepest Africa or something.

Not many of us have heard the frightened, passive-aggressive squeak of this nowadays rare psychosociopathology. It requires definition. Most Americans have heard – if they’ve wished to hear – racist propos. Racism focuses on the supposed failings of an identifiable group. Nasty and undemocratic as it may be, racism usually serves some social purpose and many people feed at the trough of its consequences. Xenophobia, on the other hand, is the mother of all racism, its primary form. It is a sort of generalized passive-aggression practiced in thought, word and deed against any and all persons not included in a particular socio-cultural, “ethnic” or “national” imagination. Like a paranoia, xenophobia is usually present as a gooey, poisonous subtext that sane persons fear to get caught up in.

Able to use the xenophobic subtext to perfection, English leave proponents may then freely make lurid claims that Euro-spongers are glomming on their country’s niggardly, poorly delivered, chronically underfunded, under-staffed, low-rated schools and health and social services! The boshiest bullshit you’ll ever hear. Yet, defense of French waiters, Polish plumbers or Bulgarian farm workers is rare. Realistic assessment of England’s social provision even compared to what poorish Eastern Europeans are used to is even rarer!

Though I do sometimes wonder, it is hard to argue that xenophobia and denial of evident truths are peculiarly English forms of stupidity. However, when looked at closely, most stupidity disguises a rational self-seeking that benefits one group at the expense of the general good. Yet, most of the consequences of England’s leaving the EU are quite predictably –  obviously –  the opposite of what leave promoters say they want for their country. Absolutely nobody seems to benefit from leaving, unless you count masochistic neurotics and those who are looking to become the US’s 52^nd state (after Puerto Rico) or those who wish the break up of the United Kingdom –  or power-hungry national politicians eager to throw off the trammels of outside scrutiny.

At first, this lack of any apparent beneficiary seems suspiciously like a special form of national stupidity. 

Then again, policies that are clearly against nearly everybody’s rational self-interest have clear historical precedent. In my adult life alone, and just off the top of my head, if I could name every country on the planet, I would. Suffice it to say that political foot-shooting, like half-witted economic, social, security and political decisions or fear & loathing of strangers, is not a mark of a special English stupidity.

Daladier's unquiet ghost

If you listen carefully, under the roar of anti-European rhetoric you may hear the anxious retching of Edouard Daladier’s restless ghost. He is considering the news that the English want to retake the heights of national sovereignty. As the prime minister’s shade well knows, by leaving the European Union, England will be taking back power that has been pooled ever since his and Chamberlain’s peace-in-our-time gambit failed so miserably.

 

There is, finally, something bafflingly, peculiarly, stupid in the attempt to regain pre-war sovereignty. Everybody knows the UK's current status as US poodle isn’t going to be undone by a vote against Europe.

On the contrary, it’s likely to go from bringing in the slippers to being the footstool.

Remain campaigners, however, seem to accept that England would gain in sovereign power by a leave vote, when the opposite is so obviously likely. This too has the hallmarks of strange and peculiar stupidity. Why otherwise would rational people accept what is so obviously untrue without a whisper. Could it be that, afflicted themselves with this stupidity, they cannot see what is obvious to others?

I believe that the claim of gain and the passive acceptance of the claim has to do with the peculiarly English notions of national victimhood. While the need to see one’s group as victimized is nothing special –  is indeed spectacularly in view every time one group or another is invited to take responsibility for some cruel action –  the English seem to wish to be themselves at the origin of their victimization. In this encompassing responsibility they are very different than nearly all other groups, which lends them a certain superficial charm as they thank you for taking their money.

The French, for instance, are content to merely snivel and whine about their supposed bad treatment, safe in the knowledge that whoever or whatever the agent of evil, the victim-feeling is quite exquisite pleasure enough. No need to spoil it by being responsible for it. In addition, the French generally believe that bad treatment is simply a fatality of living among and as human beings. The English, on the other hand, believe, in a sort of Darwinian-Christian social order: we humans merit all the bad treatment we receive; unpleasant moral realities –  unfairness, inequality, snobbery – are immutable and useful biological realities.

It is the need to be responsible for the immutable unfairness of existence that is specifically English stupidity. And perfecting such stupidity requires that one of their own to hold the stick that beats this stupidity into all citizens and permanent residents. Thus, all those years ago, slapping my own forehead rather than lashing out at the conductor gave the French woman cause to believe me English. Who but an English person would take a wrong train and then punish him or her-self for doing so?

Satisfyingly stupid on a very little island in a big, big world

English stupidity is playing out in the leave referendum insofar as leaving will enable full scope to the political ambition of the country’s national politicians. Whether England is more or less sovereign in the world is actually irrelevant as far a materialization of the English stupidity is concerned. What is important is that, once the English have left the Union, they can all imagine that they hold the stick that beats them within their country, within their own hearts and minds; before their own eyes, with their own consent. Remember the movie The Ruling Class, with Peter O’Toole? Where the scion of the noble family only gets popular and powerful when he stops being a saint and becomes a brutal, cruel and repulsive hypocrite? Eh-beh, voi-là, as the French say.

Once outside the Union, the English will never again have to worry that their well-connected, unprincipled, nakedly ambitious ruling class will have to listen while all those plodding Germans and pooh-poohing French and hysterical Italians point to a bunch of tiresome, carefully negotiated, equitable rules for doing business and ensuring justice. And when their specifically English stupidity returns the country to the good old days of unwholesome food, unclean water, unsafe and unhealthy workplaces and crap-level employment rights, they can blame it on their own unscrupulous political hacks! Here is total victimization triumphant!

Why, from the day after obtusely wrecking the European Union – and Britain’s departure will wreck it, mark my words – a simple majority in the House of Commons will enable the handsome and egregious Boris Johnson (or any half-dozen like him) to reintroduce forelock tugging and hat doffing. The “labor-lefty” Jeremy Corbyn can then deplore it –  even as he tones down the affair because doughty England is fighting silly, overbearing Europe to assert its right to overfish! Gimme that stick! John Bull’s back in the saddle! Here is Darwin’s biological order the victor and the reign of Saint Paul commenced!

So, will truly English stupidity jump into the saddle on June 23^rd? Or will the rational English nation prevail? If only to prove the French all wet? Will the late, lamented (at least by me) Alexander Cockburn be forced into fervently unwanted rebirth to verbally combat the mud-tide of phony conflicts and false premises belching from a Britain reduced to a proudly obtuse England?

Remembering James Tate by Mikko Harvey

(Ed note: On February 4, 2016, poets and poetry lovers gathered at the New School to celebrate the life and work of James Tate, who died on July 8, 2015. As one would expect, his work continues to be read and appreciated. Just the other day, this message arrived in David Lehman's mailbox. Thank you Mikko Harvey for giving us permission to share it here. We hope it inspires others to read his poetry. -- sdl)

 

Dear Mr. Lehman,

 

I know this email comes out of the blue, and many months late, but it occurred to me just today that I could write to you and tell you how much the James Tate Tribute back in February meant to me. It was one of the most moving nights of my life. As is often the case when reading his poems, I both laughed and cried. Tate has been my favorite writer for years, and it was wonderful--almost religious--to be in a room with so many other fans of his, to see pictures of him projected against the backdrop, to hear his words. Your introduction to the event was especially memorable, and revealed a true understanding of Tate's poetry and personality. For that I thank you. I will always remember the image you shared of him drawing a crude--yet somehow functional--map using the lines on the palm of his hand.

 

I hope all is well, in life and in writing.

 

Sincerely,

Mikko Harvey

Here's Mikko Harvey writing in The Rumpus about James Tate's Dome of the Hidden Pavilion. 

 

The Right Day to Read "The Second Coming" [by David Lehman]

Today -- Yeats's birthday.

<<<

If our age is apocalyptic in mood—and rife with doomsday scenarios, nuclear nightmares, religious fanatics and suicidal terrorists—there may be no more chilling statement of our condition than William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.” Written in 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the epoch-ending disaster that was World War I, “The Second Coming” extrapolates a fearful vision from the moral anarchy of the present. The poem also, almost incidentally, serves as an introduction to the great Irish poet’s complex conception of history, which is cyclical, not linear. Things happen twice, the first time as sublime, the second time as horrifying, so that, instead of the “second coming” of the savior, Jesus Christ, Yeats envisages a monstrosity, a “rough beast” threatening violence commensurate with the human capacity for bloodletting.

Here is the entire poem:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

As a summary of the present age (“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”), stanza one lays the groundwork for the vision spelled out in stanza two, which is as terrifying in its imagery as in its open-ended conclusion, the rhetorical question that makes it plain that a rough beast is approaching but leaves the monstrous details for us to fill.

As an instance of Yeats’s epigrammatic ability, it is difficult to surpass the last two lines in the opening stanza: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” The aphorism retains its authority as an observation and a warning. We may think of the absence of backbone with which certain right-minded individuals met the threats of National Socialism in the 1930s and of Islamist terrorism in the new century. Both dogmas demand of their followers a “passionate intensity” capable of overwhelming all other considerations.

Yeats works by magic. He has a system of myths and masks—based loosely on dreams, philosophy, occult studies, Celtic legend, and his wife’s automatic writing—that he uses as the springboard for some of his poems. In a minute I will say something about his special vocabulary: the “gyre” in line one and “Spiritus Mundi” 12 lines later. But as a poet, I would prefer to place the emphasis on Yeats’s craftsmanship. Note how he manages the transition from present to future, from things as they are to a vision of destruction, by a species of incantation. Line two of the second stanza (“Surely the Second Coming is at hand”) is syntactically identical with line one (”Surely some revelation is at hand”), as if one phrase were a variant of the other. It is the second time in the poem that Yeats has managed this rhetorical maneuver.The first occurs in the opening stanza when the “blood-dimmed tide” replaces the “mere anarchy” that is “loosed” upon the world.

The phrase “the Second Coming”—when repeated with the addition of an exclamation point—is enough to unleash the poet’s visual imagination. The bestial image that ensues, “A shape with lion body and the head of a man,” is all the more terrifying because of the poet’s craft: the metrical music of “A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”; the unexpected adjectives (“indignant desert birds,” “slow thighs”); the haunting pun (“Reel shadows”); the oddly gripping verb (“Slouches”); the rhetorical question that closes the poem like a prophecy that doubles as an admonition.

In a note written for a limited edition of his book “Michael Robartes and the Dancer,” Yeats explained that “Spiritus Mundi” (Latin for “spirit of the world”) was his term for a “general storehouse of images,” belonging to everyone and no one. It functions a little like Jung’s collective unconscious and is the source for the “vast image” in “The Second Coming.” Yeats writes in his introduction to his play “The Resurrection” that he often saw such an image, “always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast that I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction.”

As for “gyre” (pronounced with a hard “g”), in Yeats’s system it is a sort of ideogram for history. In essays on Yeats I have seen the gyres—two of them always—pictured sometimes vertically, in the shape of an hourglass, and sometimes horizontally, as a pair of interpenetrating triangles that resemble inverted stars of David. The gyre represents a cycle lasting 2,000 years.

But I maintain that knowledge of the poet’s esoterica (as set forth in his book “A Vision”) is, though fascinating, unnecessary. Nor does the reader need to know much about falconry, a medieval sport beloved of the European nobility, to understand that there has been a breakdown in communications when the “falcon cannot hear the falconer.”

Read “The Second Coming” aloud and you will see its power as oratory. And ask yourself which unsettles you more: the monster “slouching toward Bethlehem” or the sad truth that the best of us don’t want to get involved, while the worst know no restraint in their pursuit of power?

—Mr. Lehman’s “New and Selected Poems” (Scribner) appeared in 2009. He teaches in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City.

from The Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2015

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"The Birthday of the World" [by David Shapiro]

The Birthday of the World  
               for David Lehman's birthday

In Jewish theology, there are reasons why certain holidays are two days and some are one.
Why, do you think, David Lehman?
You might say because one is more important than the other.
This seems on the famous surface to be correct.
Or you might say it gives people in strange lands time to celebrate.
And that is valid as a Sukkah has holes.
But we say:
Just as your birthday should be beautiful
beauty itself means you should want to prolong it
as in Stay, birthday. Stay, little Valentine, stay. Each day is David's birthday.
So here is the rub: Prolonging the beautiful means that I am sending you
a late card it seems, but only late to those who don't stay up with their martinis
and prolong and prolong and when we are so pro-life that we don’t know the difference
between David and David, between good and evil, Mordechai and David,
then we know we are celebrating something secular sacred and beautiful.
How often can I use that wretched word? As many times as will prolong this birthday.
My wife asks: Are you MUCH younger than me?
Every year we take our breath and hold our breath to prolong our breath
   the birthday    best of all. 

– David Shapiro
June 12, 2009

from Jacket

Happy Birthday David Lehman!!

My brilliant beautiful brave husband!

photo (c) Gabriel Don

-- sdh

Judy Gemini Could Go On Singing [by David Lehman]

Judy Garland: The Road Gets Rougher

            As a boy in Minnesota, Robert Zimmerman listened to a Minnesota girl sing the ballads of Harold Arlen and thought he could travel down the road taken by Dorothy and the Scarecrow. By the time he took up the guitar and changed his name to Bob Dylan, he had wandered so far into Woody Guthrie territory that a reader confronting an article in The Nation entitled “Woody, Dylan, and Doubt” could be forgiven for thinking that it concerned the singer’s relation to Arlo Guthrie’s papa on the one side and the condition of epistemological uncertainty on the other when in fact the piece addresses allegations that Woody Allen had misbehaved with his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow. 

    Judy Garland had to endure many indignities in her star-crossed career but the heartache of child abuse wasn’t one of them. Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, happy and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate, given to coming late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.

    On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death.

          Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

         The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands.

         An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars.  From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted bythe National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001. She teamed up with Mickey Rooney and their versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.

            In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.

            In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Torme’s account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Torme was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Torme says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pull for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.

           Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

            If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

-- David Lehman (2014)

A Mystery Novel (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

I’ve spent my life writing non-fiction almost exclusively, and I thought it was time to walk down a mean mystery street. I could have sat down at the computer and just started typing to see what came out. But I thought of Ernest Hemingway. He once told George Plimpton in The Paris Review that he had re-written the final page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. Eventually, the endings were discovered in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Only Hemingway was incorrect. There are in fact forty-seven different endings.

I didn’t have Hemingway’s talent or doggedness, so I figured that maybe before I started writing I should do a whole lot of planning. I knew I wanted to write a mystery. I wanted to make it in the 30,000 word range (it ended up being 32,000), and I wanted for several reasons to publish it as an ebook. That still left about 125 empty pages.

I knew that any planning was tentative. I knew that as I wrote new ideas would arise. New characters would pop out of nowhere. Elie Wiesel once told the story of taking a character out of a story only to have the character appear in a dream that night and beg to be put back in the novel. Wiesel obliged, and the character returned. My characters were not so bold or lively, but I expected some would by force of personality need to be included.

I wanted to have a protagonist who was struggling to be moral and live at an interesting time in an interesting place. If there were a literary genre titled “Ethical Novels,” then I wanted to try to write a book that would have found a home in that genre. I considered various options and recalled how much I had enjoyed researching my book At the Edge of a Dream about Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. So I had a location. I picked the year 1914, just as World War I was beginning and therefore just as the world that existed was ending.

Having a setting, I sat down to consider the other elements of fiction, plot (including point of view), characters, theme, and language. All the guidebooks say to start with characters, but after I had the setting, I looked at the themes I wanted to develop. That led me to characters. I was partially constrained in choosing characters because in a mystery there are specific sorts of characters to develop.

As with a thriller, the mystery story really begins with the villain’s plans. A killer had to choose a victim. Then I had to find a hero to confront the villain. There needed to be suspects, red herrings, and carefully planted clues. 

My book is titled The Gallery of Missing Husbands. As I write on my website, the title refers to a weekly section of the newspaper Jewish Daily Forward. The Gallery consisted of mostly grainy pictures of men who had abandoned their families. The novel opens as the protagonist, Daniel Levin, witnesses the death of the area’s greatest psychic. Asked by the victim’s attractive sister-in-law to investigate, Levin uncovers a web of romantic deceits, blackmail, and murder. His investigation leads him to a midnight break-in at the city morgue at Bellevue Hospital, an anarchist determined to avoid being forced back to Russia, a corrupt police officer filled with hate, and a friendship with a crime reporter. Eventually, Daniel understands the complexity of missing husbands and fragile families.

If you would like a free PDF of my mystery, it is available at http://www.lawrencejepstein.com/the-gallery-of-missing-husbands/.

You can also get an ebook for 99 cents at any of the normal places. Here’s a link to the Amazon site for the Kindle version: https://amzn.com/B01GQFFCUA

After dud floods, Paris pundits hesitate on floofy skirts, muscle shirts

 
Rue des Pyrénées - Rubbing their eyes more vigorously than usual, Parisians woke to hazy blue skies this morning. With temperatures topping nearly 60 F°, pundits are not yet predicting floofy skirts or muscle shirts, but they will, especially if conditions improve on Thursday, as some experts now say. However, high-tax welfare-state policies ensure that no spontaneous day off from drudgery can be called.

Citing possible areas of concern, sources said some suburban and rural trains might be late. Spokespersons for many groups said that work stoppages by the radically entitled and morally bankrupt will continue as usual.

Parisians, however, continue to be Parisians. Anna gets three baguettes at retail from Nour, a Muslim bakeress and harried mother of two, or perhaps more, children, before she opens the café next door. Up before 9 o’clock almost four days a week, Anna is typical of poorly-paid, overworked people here in this poor immigrant neighborhood in Northeast Paris.

“Salue,” (Hi) she says this morning, shrugging Gallicly when told by this reporter of the authorities’s unpopular decisions and the ineffable iniquity of her neighbors.

“Putain,” (fuckaduck) office employee Myriam exclaims when this reporter points to the sun bathing the carefully-tended flowers in the little park that serves the low-income housing project and, along with it, its many non-European immigrant tenants, “It can’t last. They say storms for this afternoon.”

 

 

 

Author Agonistes: The Struggle to Publish [by Jeffrey Meyers]

 

At a time when universities are cutting funds for the arts it has become extremely difficult to publish serious books on literature and letters. The tortuous attempt to get my latest book into print provides a specific case history on the current state of academic publishing and reveals the problems that scholarly writers now face. As an experienced professional and widely published author I mistakenly thought, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the doom of man might be reversed for me. I tried to publish The Mystery of the Real: Letters of the Canadian Artist Alex Colville and Biographer Jeffrey Meyers. Edited, with Four Essays, by Jeffrey Meyers for more than two years. But my struggle, after many setbacks, eventually succeeded. I can now warn scholars to expect hostile readers and dispiriting negotiations, and suggest how to place a minor but significant book.

I naively thought that presses, especially in Canada, would be eager to bring out my correspondence with, and the first published letters of, their country’s greatest painter—the equal of his fellow realists Andrew Wyeth and Lucian Freud. The two major Alex Colville exhibitions in Toronto in 2014 and Ottawa in 2015 had sustained widespread interest in his art, and I had an endorsement from his daughter and executor Ann Kitz. She wrote, “I enjoyed reading this—I actually just sat there with my coffee and read it right through immediately—and am pleased.” She gave me permission, without a fee, to publish his letters and reproduce in color sixteen of his late paintings.

I tried to interest publishers in this book by describing its content: “I spent several days with Alex Colville (1920-2013) on each of three visits from California to Wolfville, Nova Scotia. I received seventy letters from him between August 1998 and April 2010, and kept thirty-sex of my letters to him. He sent me photographs and slides of his work and, in his eighties, discussed the progress and meaning of the paintings he completed during the last decade of his life.  His handwritten letters, precisely explaining his thoughts and feelings, gave me a rare and enlightening opportunity to compare my insights and interpretations with his own intentions and ideas. He also discussed his family, health, sexuality, politics, reading, travels, literary interests, our mutual friend Iris Murdoch, response to my writing, his work, exhibitions, sales and meaning of his art. Alex’s letters reveal the challenges he faced during aging and illness, and his determination to keep painting as his health declined. He stopped writing to me when he became seriously ill two years before his death. In this context, the late paintings take on a new poignancy.” Alex, normally reserved and even reclusive, delighted me by writing, “I am touched by your friendship, which I think is as important to me as to you.”

I wrote to seventy-three firms: twenty-five Canadian (including four that had brought out books about Colville and another that had published two of my books), twenty-seven American and twenty-one English. There were four vanity presses, four trade publishers, forty-four small (mostly art) presses and twenty-one university presses. Most felt there was no market for letters, were not interested or didn’t bother to answer. Nine read and rejected it; four vanity presses offered contracts; and one accepted it.

A HUNDRED REVISIONS OR A MAN WITH A SINGLE WHITE WING [by Nin Andrews]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

      1. Different Ways to Say Fuck

I had five eye operations as a girl. After each one, I imagined myself emerging with perfect and uncrossed eyes. I would wait anxiously for the day I could peel back the bandage. But the surgeries were never entirely successful. The doctor always suggested that I have just one more operation.

These operations were complicated by my reaction to the anesthesia. The eye doctor had difficulty waking me after surgery. He once called me his Sleeping Beauty, but it was a sleep that worried him. I was sick, too, and usually confined to bed for a week or two afterwards.

During that time of recovery, my mother would visit my room with a pile of old books to read aloud. She always chose volumes of myths, fairy tales, poetry, parables, or folk tales, usually antiquated books with beautiful pictures and ornate language. She read one story after another, hour after hour, as I lay, dozing, hypnotized by her beautiful reading voice. A former school teacher, she liked to ask questions about the stories. My answers, she complained, didn’t stay close to the text. I usually told her what a story reminded me of.

When I was eight and recovering from my third operation, for example, my mother read me the myth of Persephone. I said the myth made me think of a fight I had had with Trig, the farmhand’s son, a fight that began when he asked, You see what those cats are doing? pointing at the mating tabbies, Tigger and Rain. People do that, too. Only they call it fucking. And one day I’m gonna’ fuck your sister, Sal. I couldn’t help it. I slugged him as hard as I could. That was the day I got my first black eye.

My sister, I told my mother, was like Persephone. Only she wasn’t stolen yet.

My mother blinked a few times before saying, You shouldn’t get in fights. It’s not ladylike. And then she added, Don’t ever use that word again. And you know which word I mean. If you ever tell a story like that, find another way to say that word.

 What other way? I asked.

Think about it, she said. You’re a smart child. For every word you use, for every sentence you speak, there are many other and better words or sentences to say the same thing.

For years after I thought of different ways to say fuck.

***

2. Fucked Up

In my freshman year in college, I had a nervous breakdown. I rarely talk about this. Instead I prefer to edit that year out of my life. But the fact remains; I developed what I called a stutter in my mind. I felt as if I were becoming a stuck-record, going over and over the same sentences, thoughts, and ideas.

I don’t know if this experience is particularly unusual—after all, many people obsess. But it became a problem when I was writing. I would try to write a paragraph, but struggle to get past the first line. I would write and rewrite it as many as ten times. Then I would do the same with the second sentence and the third. When I completed a paragraph, I would revise it.

I would also change my topic, or my approach to a topic.

This problem began when I had a certain professor, Dr. B., who assigned an essay a week and then insisted on examining every sentence his students wrote, suggesting alternate ways of saying the same thing. He wanted to open us up to the possibilities of the imagination, grammar, and the English Language.

I can still hear his voice in my head as he read aloud one of my essays, pausing again and again to say, This sentence works okay, but how could you say it differently? Or, Are you certain that’s how you want to say this? If I didn’t answer, he would suggest alternatives.

After a while I saw every sentence as many sentences, or as a potential multiple choice test.

Worse were the grammatical options the professor offered. In this paragraph, he said once, I see three compound sentences in a row. Why not rearrange the third sentence so that you have an introductory subordinate clause? And break up the second sentence into two simple, declarative sentences.

 A grammarian I will never be.

Soon my choice of sentence structure became another kind of multiple choice test. Or a game show. Will it be sentence structure number 1, 2, or 3?

I also found myself pondering the use of commas, particularly the Oxford comma which he preferred to leave out but said, at least in some cases, is necessary. And the comma before which, which is used when which is nonrestrictive but not when which is restrictive, and which I still find confusing. A case in point: the which in the first sentence of this paragraph.

It’s just comma sense, the professor would joke, but I wasn’t sure I had it.

In addition, there were the professor’s obsessions, particularly with the conditional and subjunctive cases. He said on one of my papers, Your use of the subjunctive is correct here, I think, but not necessary because the conditional would serve just as well unless you really think uncertainty is paramount. You should know that use of the subjunctive is currently in decline in the English language. But the conditional is also not ideal. Why not write in a more assertive tone?

 He especially disliked semicolons. He hated how we students used them willy nilly, saying, The link between two independent clauses must be logical if one is to use a semicolon, just as the link between human beings should be logical if they are to get married, but of course, it rarely is.

And there were also the problems with the elliptical clause, as in better than me vs. better than I, and the split infinitives, and sentences ending with a preposition.

 Finally there was his suspicion of the zeugma. Your compound direct object, he said once, could be considered a zeugma, but I would want to know that you know what a zeugma is. And that you decided consciously to use one here. Otherwise consider changing or dropping this sentence.

Instead I said I needed to drop out for a while.

Why? he asked me, looking startled. I said that I had just changed too many sentences, paragraphs, and my mind. Sometimes there is no more time for decisions and indecisions and visions and revisions. I was trying to be funny.

I am sorry to hear that, he said, adding under his breath, That’s fucked up.

***

3. In Defense of Madness

That fucked up experience, or mind-stutter as I call it, has haunted me ever since. I still rewrite excessively, trying and failing to correct my grammatical errors. I still think I should edit any piece of writing, at least one more time. I still dream I am in Dr. B.s class, writing and rewriting those weekly essays. And I remember many of essays from his class. After all, I tried to write them as many as twenty or thirty times.

Just last week I was reminded of the essay I wrote on Jane Eyre when I watched a video by the amazing Jen Campbell, who, in her witty and entertaining style, illuminated aspects of the text and offered her insights, including the idea that Bertha is an aspect of Jane. (Who else could get 4,000 people to watch a talk on Jane Eyre?)

I was reminded of my title from freshman year, In Defense of Bertha, and how I wrote that many women should have a mad woman in their attic. After all, I was meeting aspects of my own just then.

I remember how I wasn’t certain that I could or should write about madness, Bertha’s or my own. My professor pointed out, I spent entirely too much time in the conditional case, pondering and overusing the words like perhaps, probably, maybe, might, would, should, and could.

He added that women are more prone to this problem, which he called conditional-overuse, adding that men speak more naturally and emphatically, a comment which has stuck with me and might or might not be true. Perhaps and maybe. Either way, it’s maddening.

***

4. THE SEVEN SWANS

The more I worked on my Jane Eyre essay, the less I said about the book or Charlotte Bronte.

Instead I wrote about the fairytales my mother read aloud to me, specifically about the princesses in fairytale towers (Rapunzel, Maid Maleen, Sleeping Beauty) who were and weren’t like Bertha in her attic. The princesses were, instead, pre-Berthas. Prepubescent. Still waiting for their moment to be kissed and liberated. Or to be de-towered and deflowered.

Like Persephone, they were unwittingly waiting for a king to sweep them away. But would he be a king of the underworld or this world? And how could they not want to scream?

And then I began to digress even further . . .

I wondered whether fairytales ever put men in towers—or in some purgatorial space between heaven and earth. I concluded that there was one fairytale, The Seven Swans, where this is the case.

In The Seven Swans, seven brothers are trapped in the bodies of birds. And it is a girl, or their sister, who breaks the evil bird-spell and turns the swans back into men. But she doesn’t completely succeed. One brother is left with a wing in the place of an arm.

(Forgive me--I am short-changing the story here, skipping important details including the fact that the sister-savior of the story also spends time in a tower. And she is, of course, rescued and married to a king.)

I wondered if the sister worried forever after about the wing she didn’t fix? Did she stay awake at night, thinking of that single wing, dreaming of it rising out of her youngest brother’s back.

The wing, I think, is emblematic of how people live happily and unhappily ever after with their odd limbs, their crossed eyes, and troubled minds. Of how, after being poisoned or possessed, after becoming a bird or a sleeping princess or a prisoner of the underworld, one is marked for life. No matter how many hours of therapy one endures, a trace of the sleepiness or poison or the wing is still there. It can be tucked beneath a jacket or otherwise disguised. But the mind remembers, even if it wants to rewrite the past and make it perfect. And then rewrite it again.

I have always loved the image of a man with a single white wing.

Nin Andrews' most recent book, Why God Is a Woman, was published by BOA Editions. You can check out her website here.

Women's Voices Mentorship Program for Writers Needs Your Help! (by Laura Orem)

As the founder and director of Women's Voices Mentorship Program for Writers, I'd like to ask your help. Our program is a way for women writers of all expressions to find advanced writing instruction and mentorship outside the MFA. I'm honored to be working with an extraordinary group of writers who are also experienced and committed teachers. One of those is poet Jessica Piazza, author of Interrobang (Red Hen Press 2013) and co-author with Heather Aimee O'Neill of Obliterations (RHP 2016). Jess is raising money to fund program scholarships for women writers of under-served populations. Jess explains:

"We all know that creative writing isn't the most lucrative field in the world, but true writers are still driven by passion and talent to bring their voices to the world. We write after work, between diaper changes, between shifts. We take loans for MFA programs that we know might be impossible to pay back. We do our best to make it work and to share our unique vision....

...unless we can't. So many writers--especially women from under-represented populations--aren't able to afford quality, empathetic, graduate level creative writing mentorship and education. Ironically, these are the very writers whose voices our industry most needs: women of color, single mothers, lgbtq writers, women of small financial means.  

These are the stories that need to be heard and the poems that need to be written, honed and published. But in the literary industry, who you know and where you've gone counts; most people who publish widely have done university masters programs or PhDs in writing.  But the artists who would write the stories we so need to hear often can't afford to spend the money, time or energy on graduate writing programs, or they feel ostracized because higher education historically treats women in these positions (and their stories and poems and memoirs) with less dignity, vision and respect than other students.

The Women's Voices Mentorship Program (WVMP) was created specifically to address these problems. Mentors work one on one with writers to nourish, guide and hone their work, treating each student to a level of indivudal guidance and education many MFA programs can't match. We make targeted writing goals and plans with each student, give them readings and assignments, edit and work through each piece of writing, truly building toward a full body of work and publication with every session and every meeting.

As a mentor, published poet, university professor and literary citizen, I'm proud to help women achieve their writing goals. But even though our program costs far less than the price of a master's education in writing (with far more individual attention), I recognize that not all women can afford even our program's rates. So I decided to raise money to provide scholarships to three or four women writers this summer. I believe that as a mentor in the WVMP I can offer these poets and fiction writers something that they might not otherwise ever have: graduate level creative writing education that's focused specifically on their unique voices, goals and talents.

Which is, hopefully, where you come in.

The cost per scholarship is $3250 (plus GoFundMe fees.) If we can raise $9750 plus fees, we'll be able to provide writing mentorship to three talented women whose voices desperately need to be heard. $13,000 will allow us to fully fund four women writers. These scholarships will go to women who demonstrate excellent writing potential already, and they will all be women of color, single mothers or LGBTQ writers, as so often these are the communities that lack access to comprehensive education (in the arts and elsewhere!)

If we do not raise enough money to fully fund three scholarships, we'll fund as many full programs as possible and offer the rest as partial scholarships. If we meet our goal of three scholarships, we'll continue on to try to fund four women's mentorships.

Each mentorship session runs the length of a university quarter and provides a comprehensive apprenticeship and education.  You can read more about the program and exactly what I do as a mentor here: http://www.womensvoicesmentorship.com

I truly hope you'll kick in even a few bucks to help bring these voices to the world.  Any amount will help. Also, consider chipping in with friends to sponsor one woman's scholarship on your own! It's an amazing way to be a patron of the arts for someone who truly deserves it."

Please consider donating. Even a small amount can make a big difference. You can find our GoFundMe page here: DONATE

Thank you!

 

Paris news splash: a (relative) flood (of emotion) in the streets [by Paul Tracy Danison]

It was the third, fourth, fifth of June/also the first, second and end of May,/I was always workin’/ and the sky’s been a pissin' rain – “Ode to Tracy D.”

Watching the greenish-brown waters swirl and swell beneath the Pont au change, perchance to carry off a selfie-snapping tourist, does certainly capture the imagination of some. However, it is not the rising waters below (ici-bas), but the lowering clouds above (là-haut) that have captured imaginations in this famous Somewhat Luminous City on the Seine.

First, context.

Let’s keep in mind that in Paris, one can make a good economic case for unemployment as opposed to working. In short, life ain’t bad. Also, getting a good photo of some things is really a challenge. One has to weigh carefully the trouble of being forced to trouble yourself to get an arresting image against continuing your promenade de dimanche with Karine, who just happened to be in an, ah, uneasy mood…

What is sinister news in Paris, therefore, isn’t the same as in, say, Kinshasha or Raquaa or Beijing. Strikes, for example, are mostly unrealizable threats made by comfy-looking union bureaucrats.

Actual work stoppages or picket lines or slowdowns touch small numbers of poorly-selected but generally helpless strategic targets. They are generally carried out by relatively well-paid, tenured public services-workers. These men - and they are virtually all men - use an antique rhetoric of insurrection and social-incendiarism that is mostly directed at sympathizing left-wing politicians. And while they do manage to truly harass segments of the more public-services dependent and suburban population, other than disappointing people hopeful for change and provoking hours of bilious TV-yelling matches, they are pointless.

To the floods.

True, many staff at the famous museums along the Seine, as well as maintenance and emergency personnel, will be working overtime to ensure that absolutely nothing will happen. Some may actually have to cancel their girls’ night out or put off the postponed visit to an aging and rebarbative relative. So far, they’ve been successful in holding back the possibility of real problems. Just today, the experts say, the rivers are falling back to more manageable levels.

But, really, it’s not the fate of waterproof storage along the Seine or strikes that are getting people worked up, or, rather, down. It’s the the overcast and rain, which is really tough to live with and really very difficult to take as an action photo.

The weather has been mostly cool, grey and rainy since at least January 1st, I believe. It sure seems like it, anyhow. That’s what counts for us. We don’t care a bit if you think it’s frivolous; we’ve got the Seine for soaking heads. Keep it in mind and get on with your selfie.

It has rained so pitilessly during this particularly interminable period since the first of June that I personally have lost three (3) umbrellas and have felt obliged to buy a fourth (4^th). I have got so used to smelling like a wet dog that I have not used the foolish thing, in spite of the constant spitting and spluttering of the sky.

Karine is typical when she says, “Mais, mon Tracy, c’est le mois de juin!” That’s it. In June, for pity’s sake, short sleeves and floofy skirts are normal; hoodies and muddy sneakers are an abomination.

I have, personally, witnessed hats on people who weren’t getting married or in some religious movement or another.

However, good news is here. At 6 pm today, June 5, at the corner of rue des Pyrénées and rue de l’Ermitage, the sun poked out of the clouds and illuminated a whole square of asphalt in front of the gym. To the great delight of his little family, the customers at the café on the corner and myself, a man burst into a comic but quite sincere version of the halleluiah chorus.

Météo France to Paris: The worst is over! Halleluiah!

Pourvu que ça dure! ;-

                                                                                                            - Tracy Danison

Fifty Years Ago Today in Mets History [by Greg Pattenaude]

As far as "on this date" goes, today is a big one. Fifty years ago today - June 5, 1966 - I attended my 1st New York Mets game. Just like today, it was a Sunday. Shea Stadium was only in its 3rd season. My father, mother and I left early for the 1pm doubleheader against the Dodgers. On the way down - as we traversed the Taconic, Saw Mill River, Cross County, and Hutchinson Parkways - I learned about the 7th inning stretch. We made it over the Whitestone Bridge and got stuck in traffic on the Whitestone Expressway but eventually made it to Gate C. We weren't certain where the seats were, but the usher said keep going up the escalators, all the way to Upper Reserved - at the time the green seats. My mom picked a bad day to wear heels. Walking through the tunnel from the concourse opened up a sea of color. Watching games on a 19 inch black and white TV didn't prepare you for that vision. Finally planted in our seats directly above home plate, I settled down to learn the basics of scorekeeping from my mom. She was the big baseball fan: more about that in a moment. Sandy Koufax versus Gerry Arrigo. Yes, I got to see Koufax in his final year. Ron Hunt had the 1st Mets inside the park homer. Gerry Arrigo hit a double, but was removed from the game the next inning. I asked why; my mom said it was because he gave up 4 runs in 5 innings. The Mets would go on to lose this game 16-3. But fear not, the Mets would win the nightcap by a score of 3-2. So in one day, I saw the ups and downs of being a Mets fan. 20 years later, I would be there with my father when they won their 2nd (and most recent) World Series and 42 years later with my wife Susan and son Andrew for the Mets final victory at Shea.

So why the Mets? In the late 40s and early 50s, my mother worked in the City as a registered nurse. She attended a lot of baseball games, sometimes at the Polo Grounds for weekday matinees but mostly Ebbets Field. After all, she was born in Brooklyn. She knew a man, Bill Gibson, who worked for the Brooklyn Dodgers in their ticket office. Bill would get my mom great seats for games. When the Dodgers moved west, Bill didn't follow. And in 1962, he ended up working for the Mets in their ticket office. Every March, Bill would make sure to mail our family a ticket brochure. And in 1966, at 8 years old, I was old enough to go. And that's the story. I thank for parents for bringing me to that game and thank God that Bill didn't end up working in the Bronx.

In honor of this occasion, here is a link to the song played by Jane Jarvis on the Thomas organ when the Mets took the field in the 60s and early 70s. It's called Let's Go Mets. It's a rare find that was posted last month on the WOR website by Mets broadcaster and life long Mets fan Howie Rose. This song instantly transports me back to growing up and attending Mets games at Shea. ‪#‎LGM‬

 

Muhammad Ali: Boxer, Poet - January 17, 1942-June 3, 2016

Freedom - Better Now

Better far— from all I see—
To die fighting to be free
What more fitting end could be?

Better surely than in some bed
Where in broken health I'm led
Lingering until I'm dead

Better than with prayers and pleas
Or in the clutch of some disease
Wasting slowly by degrees

Better than a heart attack
or some dose of drug I lack
Let me die by being black

Better far that I should go
Standing here against the foe
Is the sweeter death to know

Better than the bloody stain
on some highway where I’m lain
Torn by flying glass and pane

Better calling death to come
than to die another dumb,
muted victim in the slum

Better than of this prison rot
if there’s any choice I’ve got
Kill me here on the spot

Better for my fight to wage
Now while my blood boils with rage
Less it cool with ancient age

Better violent for us to die
Than to Uncle Tom and try
Making peace just to live a lie

Better now that I say my sooth
I’m gonna die demanding Truth
While I’m still akin to youth

Better now than later on
Now that fear of death is gone
Never mind another dawn.

        --  Muhammad Ali

(Thanks to Laura Orem, Women's Voices Mentorship Program)

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Joseph Spece of Fathom Books

DD: James Longenbach has written: “Wonder is the reinvention of humility, the means by which we fall in love with the world.” The poems you’ve published as the founding editor of SHARKPACK Annual oftentimes resist the intelligence almost successfully, as Stevens would say, and in so doing, throw us into a deeper kind of wonder. Could you begin by talking about the poetic value of difficulty and its attendant wonders?

JS: I wasn’t familiar with the Longenbach quote at all. It rings very true. Thank you.

Navigating this idea of ‘difficulty’ can be a dodgy business. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is difficult, but not for ideas the poem itself contains; it utterly fails to be a compound searching art object; it is, in my opinion, the worst kind of bourgeois pastiche; it’s ‘difficult’ because it demands homework. Do you remember the gravitas with which a professor in your past handed-out the Eliot Addenda Packet? Aha, aha, his PhD at sudden good material work. This sort of ‘difficulty’ doesn’t interest me, obviously. I translate your mention of difficulty to a pretty ubiquitous term at fathombooks.org and sharkpackpoetry.com: ‘estrangement.’ I’m in debt to Paul Valéry’s “Poetry and Abstract Thought” here, his concept of poetry as the opposite of ‘utilitarian language’—that language used ‘to express my design, my desire, my command, my opinion; this language, when it has served its purpose,’ Valéry continues, ‘evaporates almost as it has heard.’ Difficult poetry reinvests the read word with its latent symbology, with language’s own native object-power. The words and phrases give up their being marbles and become, once again, nasty caltrops. To read them is to wake to the alien, anti-disappearance of that word, that phrase. No level of ‘understanding’ compromises such writing. And that’s wonder: to see the twisting power beneath the glyphs in your grocery list. Those very words, in the hands of the true poet, come to gross life.

DD: On Fathom Books’ website you explain the genesis of this publishing endeavor: ‘Fathom began with a sense of unrest that found friends. More specifically: “Fathom was driven into being by a belief that much gnostic, searching, profound verse is buried by the prevalence of contemporary talk-poetries and the politicking of certain pobiz ‘powers.’” Can you elaborate further on the problems of talk-poetries and politicking in contemporary American poetry?

JS: Reading my explanation of ‘estrangement’ likely makes clear all I oppose in talk-poetry. (And I oppose all of it.) I won’t rail on. You’ve stuck me to the wall on the ‘politicking’ charge, and I’ve got to thank you—your question has brought a relatively amorphous disgust into clear terms. I mean, largely, ‘pobiz’—that reprehensible businessy custodianship that policies awards, the little dick-sucking institutional circles that reinscribe each other’s decisions so as to bolster their repellant custodianship machine (awards-before-poems; how quickly the winner of a ‘major’ poetry prize ends up in residence at the Radcliffe Institute; the foregone conclusion of final interviews for professorships at AWP, as if there’s something to be lauded, or even located, in proclaiming oneself a writing ‘professional’; the anti-critical common inevitable sad-sack MFA-as-franchise). Contemporary poetry’s ‘leadership’ is a leadership of forfeiture. The regular question seems to be: ‘What is poetry doing? What’s trending?’ not ‘What ought it do? What can it do?’

Consider the attack that was ‘Foetry.’ Nearly every pundit thought the critique of contest nepotism valuable (well, cosmetically; doesn’t Graham remain in residence at Harvard in apparent service to literature? and Sacks? and Ramke at the University of Denver?), but a great of amount of attention was directed away from the attack’s purport to questions of Foetry’s ‘tone’ and the search for its web author. This is pure political gamesmanship—demand, so as to make filthy and unfit, the name of the outsider, while protecting the good names of establishment cogs; demand, and have your friends at the papers demand, a recognizable language and academic course of action in the very assaults on the academy. Civility of tone happens when one is complicit with a conversation’s terms; why ought an attacker of the machine speak in eliding clicks and beeps? This insistence on petting the bellies of our laureled profligates is just what’s made a little monster like me. An itinerant adversarial force has begun to poke holes in the bot’s armature, if only by rejection and leaving-off. My method is more confrontational; I will not respond decorously to the enemies of high concept.

DD: One thing I admire about you is your willingness to engage contemporary poetry with a critical eye. You are not afraid to fight for your aesthetic vision of poetry. Also, you are not afraid to say things that might be labeled controversial. Can you speak about the role of criticism in your writing life?

JS: It’s vigorous, vital; simply knowing SPR requires posts means I never stop looking into magazines and books. It all begins unremarkably: you say This won’t do, that won’t do; then you begin to see strings connecting your bêtes noires; then those strings begin to demand as much of self’s explicative time as every one of your loves. (—And how I’ve grown to understand the coverts of what I love in this critical search.) I remember hearing Helen Vendler speak about Sylvia Plath. A man in the audience railed against her verse; Vendler said he perhaps ought spend less time with her poems, since they didn’t bring him satisfaction. To me, that is wrong acquiescence; there is revelatory power in the No; I learn a great deal about my method for loving by knocking at the shell of what I despise. Speaking exclusively of my harshest critiques, of Dorothea Lasky, James Franco, Billy Collins, Henri Cole, Ada Limón: Fathom didn’t come to be simply as an embrace. I am repulsed by certain currents in contemporary poetry, and they will not escape my acid touch; this is another kind of ‘Negative Capability.’

DD: SHARKPACK Poetry Review is a beautifully designed and well-curated website. It contains very insightful commentary on poetry of the past and present moment. It also showcases wonderful poetry through features such as the SHARKPACK Annual, OUR ALCHEMICAL VALENTINE, and the Prospero Prizes. Please tell us a little bit about these features.

JS: We can’t take much credit for the design of sharkpackpoetry.com, which is a WordPress site. But our man Eric Westerlind made the Annual far more beautiful than even my lofty plans laid out. Submission to the Annual is free, and this year we’ll start paying small stipends to every contributor. The Prospero Prizes award $150 to the piece or group of pieces we think most searching in a given year; OUR ALCHEMICAL VALENTINE and Valus’ Sigil are contest initiatives (also free to enter, also awarding $150) calling for weird love poems and literature on video games, respectively. All monies paid by Fathom / SHARKPACK are out-of-pocket, and out of dedication to the art.

DD: On the SHARKPACK Poetry Review website, you say: “We believe deeply in the power of the poetic imaginary and in the intimate revolt.” Would you explain these concepts for us?

JS: By ‘poetic imaginary’ I mean an imaginative coming-to-glyph; as the dreamer rises in trance to make abstract red and puce marks, fingers half-blind across her canvas, so the poet must embrace the past-rational in her writing act, the Q as—what?—coiling snake, nebula, tiara without a head to hold it, one blank eye with a moustache. If Q can contain that many valences, what lakes are in the word Quorum? As I’ve said before: poetry must be fit to meet—or be—the Gorgon.

The concept of the ‘intimate revolt’ belongs to Julia Kristeva. Her eponymous book is worth every one of its 200+ pages; but allow me a sliced-off, telling (both in- and outside this interview’s context) selection:

Against whom can we revolt if power is vacant and values corrupt? Or, to put it more gravely, who can revolt if man has become a simple conglomerate of organs, no longer a subject but a patrimonial person, a person belonging to the patrimony, financially, genetically, and physiologically, a person barely free enough to use a remote control to choose his channel. I am oversimplifying and darkening this depiction of our current state in order to highlight what we all sense: not only that political revolt is being mired in compromise between parties whose differences are less and less obvious to us but especially that an essential component of European culture—a culture fashioned by doubt and critique—is losing its moral and aesthetic impact. This moral and aesthetic dimension finds itself marginalized and exists only as a decorative alibi tolerated by the society of the spectacle, when it is not simply submerged, made impossible by entertainment culture, performance culture, and show culture.

‘Decorative alibi.’ Rather good nomenclature for 19/20 poems read in the papers these days.

DD: In 2016 Fathom Books will publish its first three titles: Laura Goode’s chapbook Become a Name, Stephanie Adams-Santos’ full-length collection, Swarm Queen’s Crown, and, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, Owen Vince’s The Adrift of Samus Aran. Tell us about these three poets. What can we look forward to in these inaugural Fathom books?

JS: I prefer, D, to cut every tie with the terms ‘chapbook’ and ‘full-length collection.’ They are divisive and petty appellations used by publishers and academics to determine which sorts of bound objects count towards the properly progressing careerist mode. Bar codes. Rubbish. It is the poems, the objects inside, that matter. Exclusively. Let’s use ‘shortbook’ or ‘longbook’ or nothing at all, considering most book catalogues list page counts for those interested.

And from these poets? Force. The Oblique. Imagination. Formal invention. Restlessness. Reach. Linguistic and intellectual challenge. Strands of rope. Sublimity. Movement. Vince writes: ‘vocal; a Disintegrating - / tells you of how many / feet i have dropped or swollen into.’

DD: What has been most challenging in the initial phases of starting Fathom Books?

JS: Beyond securing friends (web designers, printers) aligned with my philosophy, the most challenging thing has been deciding to dedicate funds, to have none of the Orphic double-check. There’s so much unlearning to do, D. One’s got to wriggle free of years and years of meek pragmatism about money and ‘security’ and simply say ‘I must.’

DD: You are a talented poet. Your collection, Roads (Cherry Grove, 2013) is densely allusive and employs ornate, sometimes anachronistic, diction to great effect. You open up a fierce dialogue with the poetry of Tennyson, Shakespeare, H.D., Dickinson, Melville, and a host of others. Reading Roads, one is tempted to echo H.D. herself (as you have in your own critical work): “you have flayed us / with your blossoms.” How has your work as an editor and newly-minted book publisher influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your editorial and publishing work?

JS: I appreciate your attention very much. And a common phrase is the right one here: nothing influences writing like reading. What incredible stylistic thefts I’ve made and permissions I’ve come upon reading Vince, Goode, and Adams-Santos—and many, many of the writers we’ve published in SHARKPACK’s tenure. Like your question about the critic’s influence on writerly self, the editor’s eye is likewise constantly influencing the writer. In a writerly-moral sense, I feel brimming with purpose; and that, most valuably, has torn every sagging sleeve from the truly strident, darkly joyous, animal me.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor?

JS: Fathom and the Annual are the result of my once dubious, now sure apprehension that there are tremendous writing sects and Cossacks buzzing about. That’s the most encouraging experience I’ve had: finding reason to turn a critical poetry review into a little publishing family.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

JS: Small press, shortbook press, and small magazine resiliency in the face of ideological failures on the part of would-be ‘major’ houses and periodicals—those erstwhile paragons to whom we all once looked, wide-eyed, for guidance. Imagine, D, the disappointment of a truly thoughtful poet seeing Graywolf, once a standard-bearer for possibilities in poetry books, publishing a volume of unambitious tripe by James Franco. That’s capitulation by Graywolf—a sad hope to gain capital notice when something of substance (i.e., a substantive book) could’ve taken form. Yet the underground, roiling, grassroots forces of the Poetik, generally self-financed—Pyramid Editions, for example; yes, Fathom—have used digital and print forms to mobilize a set of artists doing work in knives, taking honest risk. Said presses and small magazines aspire to do more than ‘curate’ poetry. Paris Review, Threepenny Review, Poetry since Wiman left, New England Review, Ploughshares, Atlantic, that neutered and predictable verse custodianship at the New Yorker, AWP’s disgusting mixer-stylings, visionless MFA trajectories, committees for the National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes—these little pobiz conglomerates say HERE’S WHAT PUBLIC POETRY SEEMS, MADAM, LET’S BE HIP ENOUGH TO REFLECT IT. Measling ambition. The higher questioning method belongs, unsurprisingly, to Gertrude Stein, and is shared by those antithetical forces I mention: ‘IF IT CAN BE DONE, WHY DO IT?’ 

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

JS: More poets reading Clarice Lispector.

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

JS: Nooooo. In English? Let’s agree I’m allowed four. Can we agree? At this very moment: Laura Riding’s “Nothing So Far,” Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Thomas’ “Fern Hill,” Adams-Santos’ “Through the Long Greenhouse.”

DD: What does the future hold in store for Fathom Books?

JS: A biennial schedule of books and objects arriving with the subtlety of a train surging for its ocean end. Into the goddamn center of the gelid sea hot, hot.

Joseph Spece is Warrior-Poet, critic, books and design, amateur mycologist, callous vanguardist, ‘a common waitress.’ More at http://www.joseph-spece.com.  

 Dante Di Stefano's collection of poetry, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight, is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books. His poetry and essays have appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, Obsidian, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere.

Grizzly: spirit may persist after death

“Begging pardon”, “Begging pardon”,

I think that’s what that girl sings, but it’s a murmur, far off,

Just over the rumor of voices here and the smell of wine.

She sings smoky and rich and strong – Because she’s alive,

But I weep to hear her human warmth,

– Because, even after all this time,

my rough & noble brother is still dead,

but, ‘though a far-off whisper in a smoky song, a dear friend still.

Begging pardon.

“Beg pardon,” he used to say,

Hair a knotty tumble of hay-colored tangle

Hands hugely flat on his knees, “Beg pardon,”

Straining half off one of the spindly kitchen chairs.

Leaning from the waist, head cocked, eyes atwinkle.

“Beg pardon” he always broke in as my words stumbled.

Ear primed to hear some word I’d hid or slung.

Begging pardon, he says. What speech is it?

What tongue? Who is it you are? He still asks.

Still. Powerful within this far-off wine-warmed whisper.

Wagging a head too-heavy for a man,

Reddened hands thickened to threshing flails,

to the oars of blind, just Charon’s bark –

A rough soul harried and unhurried and unmoved

by the defiant thrusts and angry buzzing of angry bees.

My words remain far off hints and wine-warmed rumors of murmur to him,

dead as he still is.

A grizzly is a bear, a bumblebee,

a bee – Lean, murmur, whisper, cock, thrust, wave, strain, defy,

thresh or flail or prime or fire, harry and wag.

All that’s as all may be.

Rough, noble, still dead,

as this singing girl, alive.

Begging pardon, the soul persists

On a snow-whited ridge just above my head,

Red on white and beyond the whispering smoke and wine.

                                                        – Tracy Danison

“Grizzly”, tempera on canvas – Remerciements à Muriel Patarroni

Happy birthday, Marilyn Monroe, Queen of June Geminis (Reprise) [by David Lehman]

We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday is today), sang. Unlike Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak in Pal Joey, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, she needed no dubbing. (In another column I will salute the wonderful voices that emerge from Mesdames Hayworth, Novak, Kerr, Wood, and Hepburn in those flicks. Say, does anyone say "flicks" anymore?)  See Marilyn making the most of a secondary role in Niagara, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Mitzi Gaynor and Donald O'Connor on the Irving Berlin bandwagon in There's No Business Like Show Business, or cavorting with cross-dressers Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. She sings in each of these movies and the songs are noteworthy, each and all. The way she pronounces the "z" in Berlin's "Lazy," for example, or the electricity when she strolls among the nightclub plutocrats and sagely notes that "after you get what you want you don't want it. / I could give you the moon, / you'd be tired of it soon. / You're like a baby, / that wants what it wants when it wants it, / ah, but when you are presented / with what you want you're discontented." (Irving Berlin never fails to amaze me.) This lyric was made to order for Miss Monroe. 

Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as "Heat Wave," are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. There's a heat wave coming in from the south and you can't keep your eyes of the north of her body even as your brain wanders to the tropics. "The way that she moves / the thermometer proves / that she certainly can can-can."  No, you can't keep your eyes off her, all of her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice. Listen to her do "I'm Through with Love," or "I Wanna Be Loved By You," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" or "Bye Bye, Baby" -- but listen to the songs without looking at the visuals. You'll hear a melodious voice of limited range, thin but accurate, with a husky low register, a breathy manner, and a rare gift of vibratro. When her voice trembles over a note -- over "you" or "baby" -- the effect is seductive and yet is almost a caricature of the seductress's vamp. The paradox of her singing is that she reveals her sexual power and flaunts her vulnerability -- to flip the usual order of those verbs. She can be intimate and ironic at the same time.

Compare MM's version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" (in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) with Carol Channing's definitive Broadway treatment, and you get the essential difference between theater and cinema, New York and Hollywood. Channing's is the superior theatrical experience: funny, charming, a show-stopper of the first order. But Channing serves the song where Monroe makes her songs sound like illustrations of her life. Monroe's treatment of "Diamonds" may not be as effective as Channing's in its service to Leo Robin's marvelous lyric for Jules Styne's delightful tune. But Monroe's version is younger, friskier, sexier. When she sings it, the song is about her. Music is the food of love, and sexual ecstasy is on the menu, for dessert.

Nowhere is she better than "I'm Through with Love," which she sings in Some Like It Hot. Gus Kahn's lyric, which rhymes "I'm through" with "adieu," is as apt for Marilyn as "Falling in Love Again" was for Marlene Dietrich. In "I'm Through with Love," the singer feigns nonchalance, affects an uncaring attitude. But melodically during the bridge, and lyrically in the line "for I must have you or no one," the song lets us know just how much she does care. Monroe implies this pathos in "I'm Through with Love" at the same time as she struts her stuff. She vows that she'll "never fall again" and commands Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to cease and desist; don't "ever call again." But we don't quite believe her, because we know temptation is just around the corner. In a sense, her voice thrusts out its hips when she sings. It's a feast for all the senses. -- DL