The Best American Poetry

Playground, East 67th Street

Playground, view from the 4th Floor (c) Stacey Lehman

So this is where the children hide all day,

These are the nests where they letter and draw,   

where they put on their bright miniature jackets,   

all darting and climbing and sliding,

all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

 

And now I am listening hard

in the grandiose silence of the snow,

trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,   

what riot is afoot,

which small queen is about to be brought down.

 

        from "Snow Day" by Billy Collins (Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems)

 

-- sdh

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As France’s summer vacations juddered to an end, Jean-Claude Mailly, Secrétaire général of Force ouvrière, or FO, announced continued action against the reforms of the country’s labor code. With an independently-estimated 300,000 members in a workforce of 22 million or so, FO is the country’s third-biggest labor union.

A coalition of unions, including FO, began street protests and random micro-strikes, especially in transportation, in the early spring. These had petered out by the start of the summer but spokespersons were vowing to continue actions in the fall. The summer holidays are the traditional moment for dropping controversies deemed politically necessary but otherwise senseless. That is, most, if not all, official “social conflicts”.

Possibly speaking for the anti-reform coalition, Jean-Claude did not specify how or whose political fortunes might be held hostage and/nor what occasional harassments might be visited on commuters, nor when or where any of these might happen if they should happen.

Was Jean-Claude talking about real street protests and strikes or was he all metaphor and allegory, thinking only of meanie-beanie catcalls in the direction of recalcitrant parliamentarians and talking sour grapes to the scribblers and talking heads?

However it may be, the pronouncement was enough to make one remember the distinctly un-delicious frisson of hearing, on a dark and deserted suburban train platform, that “in the context of ongoing industrial action by a certain category of staff” the last train had been abruptly cancelled, leaving one stranded in the context of one’s perhaps foolish, possibly disastrous, break up with Karine.

In two contexts, then, Jean-Claude was also reminding his hearers that one later would somehow learn, perhaps in the newspaper, but also surely gabbled from a television or radio, that if proof of it were to exist, the cause of the lonely midnight frisson might very well be laid at the door of non-specified union sympathizers somewhere, somewhere presumably vital, who likely probably localized on the clogged Northern freight periphery and were likely blocking transnational thru-traffic most probably in the environs of the Southeast corridor spur. But other scenarios were highly possible.

Opposition to labor law reform, one would further learn, might, perhaps, have had something to do with all this. Gawd.

But why, Jean-Claude? Why? Why must one finish up the long vacation with such memories? What can the motives be? Indeed, why and wherefore, from February to June, all these trillions of pounds psi of revolutionary rhetoric, protest marches and harassing micro-strikes, all against a law that had already passed parliament in the context of years of debate and discussion?

In the context of loneliness as well as confronted with Jean-Claude, one has been able to see that the whys and wherefores of much of French politics, as for those of any country, may only be grokked, never understood.

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A sufficient tot forces one to recall that one has been invited from childhood onward to laugh at the antics of Falstaff, a rapist, a corpse robber and boon companion to the heroic Henry V, for eight long years instigator of war crime after crime and arch-despoiler of France’s peasantry.

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Just two days back, for instance, Jean-Claude blithely declared that that day’s public demonstration against labor-law reform marked the end of anti-labor reform demonstrations.

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Here are just a few examples among a myriad that one will discover: Jean-Claude wished to remind everybody that institutionalized “social partners” such as his organization can take the bloom off one’s rosy little life when they feel like it; he feels organized labor’s more enthusiastic and sincere supporters and sympathizers had not yet been sufficiently disillusioned – they might not yet have been completely and permanently put off political involvement; he wanted revenge on those who this year chose the less autumnal late August-early September over Christmas-like June-July for vacation; and, finally, Jean-Claude was mandated by the mysterious forces that dictate that while there shall be no news worthy of a highly-paid reporter between July 15th and August 30th, a return from holidays must be clouded with a dull prospect if a full-blown menace is not yet reasonably credible.

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Avid Reader: Robert Gottlieb on his Life in Publishing [by David Lehman]

Did you know that in college Richard Howard was known as Dick Howard? Or that Robert Gottlieb, one of the great names in American book publishing, got his first job (at Simon & Schuster) by writing, when asked to state why he wanted to work in publishing, that he found the task impossible "since it has never occurred to me to be in anything else"? These are among the facts and anecdotes that enliven every page of "Avid Reader," Robert Gottlieb's memoir of a life spent in publishing, which was published this week (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Though I feel like this book's ideal reader -- because, like the author, I went to Columbia, spent two post-graduate years in Cambridge (England), and have devoted my life to books -- I can recommend "Avid Reader" to anyone who would understand publishing as a profession and a business in the second half of the twentieth century and since. At S & S, Gottlieb was the wunderkind who revitalized the firm. He published a varied list ranging from William Shirer's monumental "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" to "Calories Don't Count." His great achievement was the publication of "Catch 22" by Joseph Heller, which was originally entitled "Catch 18" but had to be renamed because Leon Uris had come out with "Mila 18" about the Warsaw Ghetto. Gottlieb believes that Heller's "Something Happened," which disappointed the world, is even better than "Catch 22," so I promise to look for it next week at the Strand.

At Knopf, Gottlieb directed the list of the most prestigious (and "literary") of all New York houses, and for five years, he was at the helm of The New Yorker, succeeding William Shawn

If there is a moral to Gottlieb's memoir, it is that "personal conviction" is the most important thing that an editor brings to a book. The editor's job is not just to recognize the quality of the manuscript and to improve it but also to champion it, promote it, to share the good news. This is something that Gottlieb and his colleagues grasped before others did. But the anecdotes beat the morals.

Gottlieb has written on ballet and is co-editor of a volume of American songbook lyrics that I find indispensable. You will enjoy reading about "Dick" Howard, Lionel Trilling (whose generosity to the author was extraordinary),and Andrew Chiappe at Columbia; about F. R. Leavis and the Cambridge theatre scene in the 1950s; about "Mad Men" era New York; and about all the other arts in which Gotttlieb has a cultivated interest,.(His favorite things include plastic handbags from the 1950s.) There are a lot of pointers that everyone in publishing ought to have: "Titles and covers can make all the difference." 

I loved learning that Bob Gottlieb liked reading till all hours and couldn't be bothered to attend morning lectures. I feel the same way. This is a sweet book.

-- David Lehman

Fears and Phobias and the Spirit of Adventure [Lynn Domina]

A confession: I lived in the same house in the western Catskills for 15 years, and I never went up into the attic. I wasn’t afraid that my lovely spouse had a secret wife hidden away up there, and it wasn’t because I wasn’t tempted to explore—I watch Antiques Roadshow, and I know that some guy bought a painting at a flea market a few years ago, and he found an original printing of the Declaration of Independence taped to its back. He’s a millionaire now. I could be set for life if only I’d had the guts to go up to the attic (ok, probably not, but you never know).

It was the bats. I don’t know for sure that there were any bats living in our attic, but our neighbors had bats in their attic. And once, when the 200-year-old ceiling in one of our closets collapsed, we had a couple of bats in the house. They likely came from above the ceiling, I’m thinking, which is another way of saying they came from the attic.

Yes, I know that bats and eat upwards of 1000 mosquitoes an hour. I know that they pollinate and distribute seeds similarly to bees and birds. I know that some of you will probably say that they’re more afraid of me than I am of them (but how do you know, really, how afraid an afraid bat is?). I also know that they’re really truly creepy, and I hope never again to wake up and spot a bat’s soft bulging belly right above my face. So, no attics.

I’m afraid of a few other places, mostly high up places, places even higher up than attics. Those big Ferris wheels that cities like Niagara Falls promote to tourists, the London Eye, balconies at the tops of lighthouses—I’m afraid of them. But I ride or climb up because my desire to see all that can be seen exceeds my terror. I usually convince myself that I’m camouflaging my panic effectively, but the last time I walked down the open spiral staircase of a lighthouse, a woman on her way up stepped side and said to her companions, “I think we better get out of her way.” So, I’m phobic and it shows.

 

What is fear, I usually think, but something to be pushed through? In January, 2015, I spent a few weeks in India, visiting sites sacred to Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains. In the village of Pushkar, my companions and I had reserved a “sunset camel ride”—it didn’t involve any interfaith dialogue, the purpose of the trip, but it certainly involved some interspecies dialogue. I’d been imagining myself atop a camel for months. Up close, camels are bigger than you’d think. They kneel down, and you climb up upon a saddle, and then they rise, front legs first. You feel like you’re going to tumble right off the back. Then they raise their hind legs, and that feels slightly more stable, but their pace has a very different rhythm than a horse’s, and it took about half an hour before I felt I myself relax. Actually, that’s a lie. I never felt relaxed; I just felt slightly less terrified. But during those first few minutes, as my stomach lurched and my head whirled, I grew determined—I was not going to be controlled by my fear. I was not going to relinquish something I’d been looking forward to just because I was afraid.

I loved Pushkar. I loved seeing cows mosey down the road, nuzzling motor scooters and pedestrians. I loved the breakfast porridge and the marketplace with its vibrant fabrics and the 2000-year-old temple where we had our yoga class, overseen by monkeys. I loved the people and all of their warmth and hospitality. I’ve been trying to write about Pushkar ever since. My notebook is filled with failed poems, with isolated lines and stanzas, references to sand and camels. Someday, I think, I will capture the meaning of that trip, but not yet.

I will get on a plane and fly half way around the world to a country that requires a typhoid vaccination and malaria pills, but I will not climb up to my own attic. There’s undoubtedly a poem in that, too.

 

Looking Out [Lynn Domina]

I went to our local maritime museum the other day which is adjacent to the Coast Guard station and the water treatment facility and the swimming beach and other riparian entertainments (I know, “riparian” more often refers to a river bank than to a lakeshore, but it can refer to any body of water, and it’s one of my favorite words and I hardly ever get to use it). The museum features substantial exhibits on shipwrecks, including the Edmund Fitzgerald which still haunts the memories of many local residents, as well as on weather reporting out on the water and shore life. What I remember most, however, is the exhibit on WWII, because the central piece of equipment in that room was a submarine periscope. So for the first time in my life, I looked through a true periscope, and lo, I really could see out onto the beach and all along the shore. I could see who was playing Frisbee and which cars were entering and exiting the city, and how many sailboats were leaving the harbor. I felt voyeuristic—but isn’t every writer deep down a bit of a voyeur?

I’ve watched tv, and so I knew that submarines were equipped with periscopes, and I’d seen representations of a sailor’s periscopic view. Still, I was surprised to see what I knew but did not believe would be there. The experience reminded me of the first time I looked at the moon through a telescope. I kept turning the lens all over the black sky, observing lots of darkness, until somehow I pointed the telescope in the right direction and saw all those craters, looking as if they were close by.

I’m told often that what you see depends on where you stand, and that’s certainly true. But it also depends on how you look—through a periscope, a telescope, a microscope, binoculars, bifocals, or cataracts. I suspect I’m not alone in noticing that I focus more attentively when I’m looking through a magnifying glass or other device than when I’m relying on my own ordinary eyes. Magnified sufficiently, anything ordinary becomes extraordinary—as this microscopic photograph of sand illustrates. Access to visions like this still feels like magic to me—they can’t possibly be true, and yet they are.

But.

There’s a difference.

Looking through a telescope or microscope, I often feel awe. All that complex life, or at least creation, contributing minute by minute to the conservation of the world—and most of the time, it’s absolutely invisible to human eyes. Poets like Pattiann Rogers observe nature this closely; when I read her poems, I take nearly as much pleasure from learning about the processes of biology and astronomy as I do from her language, as in this stanza from “The Rites of Passage” in her first book, The Expectations of Light:

At 77 degrees the single cell cleaves in 90 minutes,
Then cleaves again and in five hours forms the hollow
Ball of the blastula. In the dark, 18 hours later,
Even as a shuffle in the grass moves the shadows
On the shore and the stripes of the moon on the sand
Disappear and the sounds of the heron jerk
Across the lake, the growing blastula turns itself
Inside out unassisted and becomes a gut.

Reading her work for the first time set me on a new path with my own, away from the (apparently) autobiographical, written often as an heir to the Romantics and the centrality of the “I.” I turned further outward, as have many contemporary poets who explore national history, as Martha Collins does in Admit One or Claudia Rankine does in Citizen, or catastrophic events, as Nicole Cooley does in Breach, without entirely abandoning the personal and the internal.

 When I looked through a periscope, though, I felt surprise but also a twinge of guilt, as if I weren’t observing but monitoring, seeing without being seen. It’s different than sitting in a coffee shop, mildly eavesdropping, as we writers (and, let’s admit it, everyone else) occasionally do. Writers can claim that such behavior is not nosiness but research. And anyone having a conversation in a coffee shop ought to realize that they’re likely to be overheard—there’s no, as lawyers say, expectation of privacy.

Writing this, I’ve realized that in “spying,” so to speak, through a periscope, I never lost track of myself. I remained too aware of my qualms of something like dishonesty. In looking through a microscope or telescope, or in engaging intently with nature or art through other means, I do lose track of myself. And that loss, that freedom from the self, is what leads me back to art, to writing, to poetry.

Art's Intrigue [Lynn Domina]

As I mentioned yesterday, last June I drove over to Toronto, crossing Michigan’s upper peninsula and then driving south through a comparatively remote region of Ontario. I wanted to see an exhibit by artist Lilian Broca. I’d come across her work online and been intrigued by her interpretation of the stories of Queen Esther and Judith from the Bible. She creates large-scale mosaics, and they are stunning. The depth of color and quality of light in compositions of glass is different from paint, regardless of how saturated the color of the paint is. Even when the viewer can’t actually see through it, glass suggests translucence. Paint can suggest depth, but even when I’m looking at watercolors, I’m seldom as captivated by the light itself as I am when I look at objects made of glass.

Edward Hopper said that “Maybe I am not very human” because all he wanted to do was “paint sunlight on the side of a house.” Reading that quotation at an exhibit of Hopper’s drawings at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York a few years ago, I realized that visual artists are often trying to translate their response to the world into a particular medium, the way we writers experience a gut feeling during certain events or conversations, knowing that a poem awaits us, and our task is to translate our own responses into language.

What was most intriguing about Broca’s exhibit, after I recovered from my awe at the mosaics themselves, was that she included the initial drawings, the cartoons with the sightlines angled across the paper, beside painted versions of the drawings, and then the actual much larger mosaics. For someone as woefully uneducated in visual arts as I am, her revelation of her process was astonishing. If art conceals the artifice, Broca unconcealed hers. Yet the magic remained, for I sensed that the final version had hovered at the edge of her mind long before she committed pencil to paper, and that the drawings—these were finished drawings, not casual sketches—were an early stage of her translation of her vision into glass. The drawings were a middle step in the process of articulating her vision, just as writing down the words sometimes occurs well after a poet’s conception of the poem.

I’ve tried to talk to visual artists about the images in their minds that precede the images they create on paper or canvas or through clay or glass, but such conversations often lead more to bewilderment than to clarity. They feel the way writers feel, I suspect, when we’re asked where our ideas come from. Who knows why our attention is captured by one situation and not another? Artistic inspiration flees when it is actively sought; they arrive when we are receptive but not engaged in active pursuit.

I don’t exactly haunt art museums, but I enjoy them. I’m lucky now to work at a university whose art museum is only a few feet away from my office. Exhibits of drawings, paintings, photography, and now mosaics have substantially informed my own work. Poets have been inspired by other art for millennia, of course, and we can probably all name our favorites. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts" is among the most famous modern examples, and I learned a lot from his strategies there (as well as from Bruegel’s representation of the myth). Among my favorites are Stephen Dobyns’ Balthus Poems, and I own an anthology of poems inspired by Hopper’s paintings.

Museums are unusual spaces in that they almost relieve us of the limitations of space. Or they foreground different spatial limitations—the frame—so that the space where we literally stand recedes. Gazing at a painting of a forested path becomes the opposite of walking along a forested path. Both experiences inspire me and my work, but it’s often the museum more than the world beyond it that truly engages my imagination.

Getting There from Here [Lynn Domina]

I was visiting some friends the other day, engaging in a little poetry soiree to celebrate that fact that Foster Neil, founding editor of The Michigan Poet, had traveled to the U.P. for the first time in his life. As we drank beer and ate cheese and chips and guacamole and cannoli, several people read poems referring to Phil’s 550. They couldn’t believe I had never been there. Truth be told, I had never even heard of Phil’s 550. So I drove out there this afternoon, making only one wrong turn, finally figuring out that it’s called Phil’s 550 because it’s located on Route 550, and hoping it would be like Ma ‘Cille’s Museum of Miscellany outside of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It is not. I don’t think I saw Phil (I saw Ma ‘Cille every time I visited her museum). Phil stocks a lot of beer; there may be more beer per square foot in Phil’s than in any other store north of the 45^th parallel. Some of it is good beer, brewed locally and named creatively—Flying Sailor, Flying Hippo, Barbaric Yawp. Phil also sells wine and Doritos and tie-dyed sweatshirts advertising Phil’s. I did not buy one because I possessed only ten crumpled dollars and there was no cash machine. Phil also sells ice cream cones, but just three flavors remained, it being after Labor Day. So I pulled back onto 550, passing the Tourist Park trailhead, and turned toward home.

I don’t think I will write any poems about Phil’s 550, but you never know. I thought I would write a poem about Ma Cille’s or at least steal some imagery, but here it is thirty years after I moved away from Alabama, and I never have. I would like to write a poem set in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, and every time I pass through Philadelphia I vow to stop there, but I never have. The Mütter Museum has on display 139 human skulls, amputation tools used during the Civil War, and pieces of Einstein’s brain. Who could resist?

The trouble is whenever I come across objects or words or names that really should be in a poem, they never end up in mine. Last June, I drove across the eastern half of the U.P. and crossed into Canada at the Soo. The bridge across the St. Mary’s River is uniquely designed, an American crest lit in red, white, and blue, and a Canadian crest lit in red and white. From a distance, you think you’re going to cross two bridges. Then I turned south toward Toronto and drove a few hundred isolated miles through rocky outcroppings. No restaurants. No bathrooms. No wildlife even. But there were roads, and they had truly tempting names: Hanging Pot Rd., Seldom Seen Rd., Go Home Lake Rd. When I give directions to my house, I would like to be able to say, “Turn left on Seldom Seen Rd.” I would like to write a poem that refers to Little Go Home Bay. I’m saving up names the way I save up words beginning with the letter X for abecedarians.

When I turned onto Rte. 550 this afternoon searching for Phil’s, I turned away from a sign with an arrow that said “Wildlife.” Next time, I’m going to turn toward wildlife. And then I’m going to hunt out Country Rd. 492, where I’m told there’s a historical marker commemorating the invention of the highway center line. There’s undoubtedly a poem in that too, but you can have it.

 

The Mission Poetry Series Presents Mary Brown, William Archila, & Catherine Abbey Hodges.

The eighth season of the Mission Poetry Series opens with a reading on Saturday, September 17, at   1 p.m. at Antioch University Santa Barbara.

 “The Ringing and the Bell: Three Poets in Autumn” features three award-winning California poets: Mary Brown, William Archila, and Catherine Abbey Hodges. The title of the event is taken from a poem by Barry Spacks, a beloved Santa Barbara poet who is widely admired and who served as the city’s inaugural poet laureate from 2005 to 2007.

The reading will be held at Antioch University Santa Barbara • 602 Anacapa Street • Santa Barbara, CA•  and is free and open to the public. The event offers complimentary broadsides, refreshments, and poets’ books for sale. The Mission Poetry Series is hosted by program director Emma Trelles and production coordinator Mark Zolezzi.

 

 

Let's All Try This, Shall We? "Cleaning Piece III" by Yoko Ono

-- sdh

Whence I Write [by Lynn Domina]

A few days ago, my friend Janet McAdams poked fun at me for referring to myself as a “Yooper.” I am accustomed to Janet’s teasing—we’ve been friends for over thirty years, and much of our conversation has focused on my unduly heavy Midwestern accent, my unfortunate childhood spent among Yankees, and my unfathomable fashion sense. Even her mother once scolded her for teasing me so much, but the thing is, her critiques are, well, pretty much accurate. I didn’t realize, though, that not everyone knew what a Yooper is, just as I didn’t appreciate until I left Michigan for Alabama thirty-some years ago, that not everyone holds up their right hand and points to a spot on their palm to designate where they’re from.

Now, after decades wandering around the eastern half of the United States, I’m back in Michigan, in the upper peninsula this time, in the city of Marquette, right on the glorious shore of Lake Superior. In Michigan, we don’t say “upper peninsula”; we say, “U.P.” A resident of the U.P. is a Yooper. (According to Yoopers, residents of the lower peninsula are trolls, because they live under the (Mackinaw) bridge.) And though I’ve lived in Marquette for only about fifteen months, I’m claiming the label proudly. I don’t speak like a real Yooper; that accent is an exceptionally melodious half-Canadian, half-Minnesotan. But I love the landscape, and the land, and the water—mostly the water. I can trek through the deepest snow, and I am unduly proud of the fact that we have a special snow shovel named for us, the Yooper scooper.

Several years ago, Martha Rhodes, a founding editor of Four Way Books, suggested I apply for writer’s residencies. I said that I never had trouble writing, that I could build writing into my schedule easily enough, whether I traveled away from home or not. She said that one of the advantages of getting away is that you observe different landscapes, and those images become available for your poems. I’d traveled a fair amount by then, but I didn’t really know what she meant. Then I moved from the metropolitan New York area to the western Catskills. Snow showed up more frequently in my poems, and mountains, and the footprints of deer and wild turkeys and coyotes. Eighteen years later, I moved to Marquette, and I find myself trying to describe Lake Superior’s multiple blues, its different character from one hour or day or week to the next. I’m noticing the iron in the rocks here, in contrast to the slate I often dug up in my backyard as I tried to garden in the Catskills. And thunder here booms like it did when I was a child, the ferocious quality of the storms something I hadn’t realized was missing out east, among the mountains.

As a reader, I’m often surprised at how a poet’s work shifts from one collection to the next. Last year, for instance, I read and reviewed Michelle Kwasny’s meditative and memorable collection of prose poems, Pictograph, which differed dramatically in mood and style from earlier work I’d read. Janet McAdams’ new chapbook, Seven Boxes for the Country After, also consists of a series of prose poems, and is stylistically very different from either her earlier Feral or The Island of Lost Luggage. Peggy Shumaker’s Toucan Nest takes it imagery from–and is able to explore its themes because of—her time in Costa Rica, whose landscape must have been stunning to a poet who’s lived a few decades now in Alaska. As a poet, I find that my own work shifts unexpectedly, sometimes simply because I’ve mined a particular vein of memory or obsession as deeply as I can, other times because I’ve shifted not only my attention but my physical space. If you look out at mountains every day, you notice how clouds stripe their ascent on foggy days, how maple leaves blaze during autumn, how pines stand out so darkly against snow. If you look at a lake every day, you notice how indistinct the boundary between water and sky can be, how a breeze can create a chevroned pattern on the surface, how a true wind shoves the water toward shore.

This week, I’ll be blogging about poetry and place—places I’ve found myself, places literature has taken me, places mythic and mystical and maybe even real. Places I’ve lived or traveled or escaped. Places I’ve written about and places I’ve banished from my poems. Places like Presque Isle and Black Rocks and the ore dock, all here in Marquette, in the U.P., where we fondly call ourselves Yoopers.

 

Voltaire: "I disagree [with you] but will fight to the death to defend your right to say it. . ." [by David Lehman]

In Russia, according to the Independent, a vodka-soaked advocate of poetry killed a prose partisan in a brawl. Last month, apparently, a similar dispute, with the same fatal outcome, occurred over the theories of Immanuel Kant.

When Stacey and I visited Russia, I breakfasted with a novelist and asked her whether she could write while drinking. She said: "My dear David, if you could not write while drinking, there would be no such thing as Russian literature."

This story comes to my attention thanks to Beth Gylys:

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from The Independent

Russian teacher 'kills friend in heated poetry versus prose argument'

Suspect stabbed his friend to death after victim insisted prose was superior as literary genre

The discussion on the merits of poetry over prose soon escalated into a lethal brawl GETTY IMAGES

A Russian teacher allegedly killed a friend in a drunken argument over literary genres, investigators have said.

The pair engaged in an animated discussion on the merits of poetry over prose during a drinking session, which soon escalated into a lethal brawl, after the suspect stabbed his friend insisting that poetry was superior.

In a statement, federal police in the Russian region of Sverdlovsk said: "The host insisted that real literature is prose, while his guest, a former teacher, argued for poetry.

"The literary dispute soon grew into a banal conflict, on the basis of which the 53-year-old admirer of poetry killed his opponent with the help of a knife."

The suspect fled his home in the town of Irbit in the Ural mountains, where the 67-year old victim was killed on 20 January, before he was found in a nearby village and arrested by Russian police on charges of murder.

The incident comes four months after a similar argument over the theories of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that reason is the source of morality, resulted in a man being shot in a grocery store in southern Russia.

>>>

Lynn Domina, Guest Author September 12-16

This week we welcome Lynn Domina as our guest author. Lynn is the author of two collections of poetry, Corporal Works and Framed in Silence, (Four Way Books) and the editor of a collection of essays, Poets on the Psalms (Trinity University Press). She lives in Marquette, MI on the beautiful shores of Lake Superior and  serves as Head of the English Department at Northern Michigan University. You can read more here: www.lynndomina.com.

Welcome, Lynn.

In other news . . . 

"Best American Poetry 2016" Launch Reading: Sept 22 at the New School in NYC 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm. David Lehman, poetry coordinator for the Creative Writing Program and series editor, will moderate the event. He will be joined by contributors to the anthology as well as Edward Hirsch, guest editor of the 2016 volume. 

The Auditorium, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011

More information here. 

sdh

Yoga on the beach: my prayers are ever blasphemies [by Tracy Danison]

Ne te fie aux apparences, pardner: the warming sun is a million miles off, the charming doohickeys jostling the surf are man traps from the last  really big war and that man on sat nam walkabout agonizes, in the oldest sense of the word

My appearance is an inspissated imp clung upon a whited soul.

A white man of a certain age who, certainly, shares an ancestry with Colonel Blimp and Kaiser Wilhelm, my doughy visage transforms even the sublest utterance into what seems overfed bluster. So, unlike for some, no one ever mistakes my purport when I’m just plain blustering.

Also, since infancy, I have been incapable both of a straight face or a sacred feeling; my prayers have ever been blasphemies.

Also, for many years, typically, I’ve made a point of reading Le Monde in August.

Featuring hyper-critical, well-informed, in-depth articles on quite abstract matters, Monde editors seem instinctively to understand the summer relaxation needs of your bourgeois-bohème, or “bobo”. Appropriately, the paper is dated for the next day, emphasizing both the naturally unthreatening nature of somebody else’s tempest in somebody else’s safely-distant teapot and underlining the thrill of anticipating it.

Reading Monde in the summer helps, I think, along with not too-infrequent sips of Ricard and Campari, and the sea air, of course, effectively mute the hubbub of the hucksters and grabbers wading through their lakes of crocodile tears who clutter my otherwise perfectly satisfactory life.

Also, there’s the squinty-typed monthly Le Monde Diplomatique for the train rides back and forth from the lieu de vacances, like fat quote marks around “August”.

So it is that laying me down wiped out after a session of yoga on the beach led by the remarkable yogini Katja Thomsen, my mind turns instantly away from the spiritual to the enthusiastic, sensual, vulgar.

Subtle political schemes, not vigorous exercise, nor tickling Atlantic sun, nor brisk breeze, nor flavorful wines, turn my face red.

“Karine,” I say after five minutes of visualizing a brave new world, or two. She stirs on her mat, “Mmmmm?”

One of the very many good things about Karine is that she’s always ready for a little chitchat, whether she’s in some sort of spiritual mode, as she often protests too much to be. Or not.

“There're a couple of guys,” I continue, “that say we could tax Facebook & Google and all the others – spammers, too. We could go after them for tax evasion, like Al Capone. Tax ‘em just like we tax the use of other public resources, like land or oil. These fellas say we could use the money to fund a universal minimum income.”¹

“Mmmm. Good. They deserve it.”

• Deserve it?

“Yes. Merit it. They are robbers, these internet people. Bandits. Your Facebook and such, I mean.”

• Taxation is punishment for robbery?”

“Mais, oui. Or…”

Karine turns on her side, props her head onto her hand and looks past me, along the stretching beach.

“… A little bit,” she continues.” It’s part of why we tax rich people, isn’t it? To punish them?” She pauses.

“It’s like we arrest only some people, not everybody. Or, you can’t arrest everybody for every crime they commit. But you can be sure that everybody is, at bottom, un vicieux, deserving punishment for undetected crime. Everybody has some crime on her conscience. Non? Taxes are to rich people what arrest is to ordinary people, punishment, because is very difficult to arrest rich people in the usual way. Such persons can pay lawyers and legal fees are deductible. So, taxes remind them they are vicieux and not above the law and mostly scare them enough to keep them just honest enough to keep the ball rolling. Vois-tu?”

What I see is that Karine’s rolling the goddamn ball I got rolling and is sweetly, innocently, firmly, deflating it along the way.

This is one of the many things I can’t bear in this other human being that I nevertheless passionately adore. Yes, adore, from the bottom of the soles of her feet to her sixth chakra and to the farthest echo of a persnickety female voice that sounds of my mother but is not, cannot, must not, be.

In an instant, I feel tingly, warm, when she comes around me. And I have felt this, this, this love from the very first moment I laid eyes on her, on her frizzy head, her pert, boyish bottom.

Worse, as she goes along, I know, she will get me interested in her, her words, her other sense of things. Get me liking it, get me thinking about something else entirely. I don’t know what.

I turn on my side, prop my head in my hand and stare at her scrunched-up face as she sums up.

“So. Punishment is only to make an example. That is why we don’t any longer have a death penalty here in France, mon Tracy. That would take the game too far, like in America. An American like you still wishes to prove that her neighbor is really the vicieux. C’est quoi, l’expression? ‘Oliest than t’ou?’ Oui… Mieux que son prochain. It is a privilege of conviction pour assasinat, mon Tracy; we French have been made too wise to believe that anyone but Americans are worse than the others. Even Germans. Most especially Germans.”

A merry smile broadens her face.

• Do you think so? Really?

“O! Yes. Is the wine in the cooler?”

• Yes, it is. But where’s Katja?”

“Katja? What about Katja?”

• We’re being pure, Chou, for yoga week. Remember? We don’t want Katja to see us boozing.

Karine twists around like a snake, both hands free, and, bending from the hips, snaps the cooler open, grabs the wine bottle by the neck. I seem to see the popping eyes of a plucked chicken just above her grasp.

“Where did you put the glasses?”

_________________

¹ « Se réapproprier une ressource d’utilité publique : Données personnelles, une affaire politique , » Pierre Rimbert, Le Monde Diplomatique, septembre 2016. Citing, in particular : Nicolas Colin & Pierre Collin , « Mission d'expertise Sur la fiscalité de l'économie numérique , » La Documentation française, Paris 2013 ; Dominique Cardon & Antonio A. Castillo, « Qu'est-ce que le Digital Labor ? » INA Éditions , Paris 2015 ; Mona Chollet , « Le Revenu garanti et ses faux amis, » Le Monde Diplomatique, juillet 2016.

 

Part IV: Nibblers and Snow Cones [by Dean Smith]

Oriole starter Wade Miley took the loss Sunday against the Yankees. Since joining the O’s a few weeks ago, his name has been nibbling at the edges of my consciousness.

I’d seen him pitch in person once before.

On April 26^th, 2015, Miley started for the Boston Red Sox. It was the day after a riot swept through downtown Baltimore and included the destruction of a police car and widespread acts of vandalism. Peaceful demonstrations in response to the death of Freddie Gray suddenly spiraled out of control. Just before the game, protesters clashed with Red Sox and Oriole fans alike a short distance from the gates of the ballpark.

I attended that Sunday afternoon game believing the Orioles had lost the night before. The coverage on WJZ had been preempted by the riot and the Birds were behind by a run entering the tenth. Amidst the swirl of helicopters and sirens, the Orioles tied the score. David Lough then drilled a liner into the right field seats to win the game. Still, a newscaster reported that dejected O’s fans were filing toward the parking garages. Baseball was the last thing on anyone’s mind as the camera from above tracked a mob smashing storefronts.

A day after the melee, Oriole bats thrashed Miley and the Red Sox 18-7.

***

Now an Oriole, Miley lost 5-2 to the Yankees. He was picked up at the trade deadline to bolster the starting rotation and pitched better than previous outings but not well enough for the win. Now their only left-handed starter, Miley is a low-risk acquisition brought in to eat innings before the bullpen takes over.

The Yankees capitalized on Miley’s walks in the first to jump out to a 3-0 lead. He nibbled and painted the corners and his curve fooled some hitters but it wasn’t enough. He lasted longer than the game I saw more than a year ago.

The Yankees never looked back and the Orioles squandered a host of chances to score. New York veteran Chase Headley, reduced to a limited role in the youth movement drove in two runs along with teammate Austin Romine. They waited for Miley to throw strikes. Yankee pitcher Joel Pineda craftily escaped several jams with a nasty slider that dipped under Oriole bats. Still eyeing a trip to the postseason, Manager Joe Girardi said it was the most important game of the year for his team. Girardi is masterfully giving experience to his young players and milking the veterans to keep their postseason aspirations alive.

Miley is 1-4 since joining the team. There are a number of issues related to his acquisition that are vexing to the average Orioles fan. We’ve known since before last season that the pitching staff needed an upgrade. Pitching talent has left Baltimore in recent years. Eduardo Rodriguez was traded for relief specialist Andrew Miller in 2014. He came within a few outs of pitching a no-hitter on Sunday for the Red Sox. Cy Young winner Jake Arrieta now pitches for the Cubs – and that one doesn’t sting quite as much because Jake was floundering in Baltimore and needed a change of scenery away from the threshing machine of the AL East. Wei-Yin Chen and Miguel Gonzalez left before the season and you wonder whether the team would now be better off with them.

General Manager Dan Duquette has done brilliant things but Miley hasn’t been one of them thus far. Throw in free-agent acquisition Ubaldo Jimenez whose delivery often resembles a jockey rearing a horse onto its hind legs and tachycardia-inducing Yovani Gallardo and there are nights when it’s better not to listen at all. These pitchers continuously peck at the strike zone and everyone in the park fidgets and bites their nails.

Just as I wrote that sentence, Jimenez finished two-hitting the Tampa Bay Rays this afternoon. The Yankees toppled the Blue Jays and the Orioles crept closer to the division lead. The baseball gods are listening.

***      

Baltimore writer and former Sun reporter Rafael Alvarez predicted months ago that the division would go down to the final weekend. He claims Buck Showalter’s incessant tinkering and fine-tuning is worth twenty wins a year. Alvarez mostly penned Season Two of The Wire (Frank Sobotka and the Baltimore docks) and has written tantalizingly beautiful stories about his beloved Crabtown including the book, Orlo and Leini. His latest collection is Tales from the Holyland.

After that Sunday game in 2015, my eight year-old son Quinn and I drove over to Little Italy for dinner. We parked and he wouldn’t get out of the car. He was afraid of the riots. I told him they were over. He stayed there for five minutes.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

My hometown had terrified him.

I didn’t know that the next day would be one of the darkest in the city’s history. It was manager Buck Showalter who later put things into perspective. He told the media that he’d never faced the challenges of being a black person in America. He understood the emotion but he couldn't comment because he didn't know what living their lives was like. He went on to say that he wanted the Orioles to be a rallying cry for the city in everything the team did—not just baseball. You understood clearly in that moment that Showalter was far more than a baseball coach. 

Over Labor Day weekend across the city, nineteen people were shot. The 2016 Orioles are doing everything in their power to make a positive statement. 

Rafael Alvarez writes:

Sports radio shows this season have frequently accepted calls blaming a winning team's current poor attendance on the rioting of April 2015 which led to the unprecedented sight of a ballgame being played in a stadium empty of fans. A pennant this year--not just a wild card win or a league championship playoff--would make all that moot as quickly as it takes a Mark “Trumbo Jumbo” to leave the Yard. A 2016 pennant for the Baltimore Orioles would be a gift from the baseball gods to one of the greatest sports cities in America.

A city I will always love.

***

Tonight, the Yankees held off a furious comeback by the division-leading Blue Jays and the Orioles beat the Rays, 11-2. Manny Machado belted a towering grand slam to deep centerfield in the droll jai alai stadium in Tampa Bay. 

Down 7-5 in the ninth, the Blue Jays loaded the bases in the Bronx with one out and the Yankees behemoth of a closer, Dellin Betances couldn't finish the job. He induced a grounder from Justin Upton and couldn't cover first base in time. The Jays were within one. Girard replaced Betances--despite the pitcher waving his manager back to the dugout. Blake Parker came in and fooled the dangerous Kevin Pillar with a change-up for strike three. He almost a allowed a run to score on a wild pitch but Gary Sanchez somehow kept the overthrown slider that bounced in the left-handed hitter's batter's box from going past him. Parker then faced Justin Smoak who hit a deep drive to left field. Brett Gardner, the soul and grit of this Bomber team raced back to the wall and jumped up to make a snow cone catch to save the game. 

"The greatest win of the year!" yelled announcer Michael Kay. 

The Orioles are one game out. The Red Sox are leading the Padres and could be tied with Toronto by the end of the night. The Yankees are hanging in there only four and a half games back. 

The race is on.  

 

Dean Smith

Save the Date: "Best American Poetry 2016" Launch Reading: Sept 22 at the New School in NYC

Thursday, September 22, 2016 at 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

The Auditorium, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011

For the fifteenth consecutive year, the New School  Writing Program sponsors the launch reading for the latest edition in the celebrated Best American Poetry series.

David Lehman, poetry coordinator for the Creative Writing Program and series editor, will moderate the event. He will be joined by contributors to the anthology as well as Edward Hirsch, guest editor of the 2016 volume. 

With poets Christopher Bakken, Catherine Barnett, Jill Bialosky, Paula Bohince, Michelle Boisseau, Marianne Boruch, Lynn Emanuel, Martín Espada, Charles Fort,  Emily Fragos, Juliana Gray, Linda Gregerson, Mark Halliday, Jeffrey Harrison, Cynthia Hogue, Garrett Hongo, Erin Hoover, Richard Howard, T. R. Hummer, Major Jackson, Lawrence Joseph, Julie Kane, John Koethe, Loretta Collins Klobah, Keetje Kuipers, Deborah Landau, Robin Coste Lewis, Paul Mariani,, Debra Marquart, Hai-Dan Phan, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Stanley Plumly, James Richardson, Patrick Rosal, Brenda Shaughnessy, Anya Silver, Taije Silverman,Tom Sleigh, A. E. Stallings,Susan Stewart, Nomi Stone, Adrienne Su, Lee Upton, Eleanor Wilner . . .

It will be historic.

Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program.

The American Scholar "Next Line, Please": So sorry you didn't win! Please try again.

The American Scholar's "Next Line, Please" contest continues apace, with David Lehman crafting a new challenge each week. Lehman's "fake apology" contest of August 23 was among the most popular in the contest's years-long history. If you didn't win, so sorry! You can still enter this week's contest. Here's what Lehman had to say about fake apologies and this week's rules, which require contestants to craft a list poem in the manner of the great list songs in the American songbook: 

This week we wrote non-apologies in the model of William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just To Say,” a kind of Post-it-note poem in which the husband apologizes to the wife for eating the plums she had saved for her breakfast.

The responses persuade me that the insincere utterance provides fertile ground for poets. Our tendency to lie, distort or revise follows from the inability of the language to discriminate between truth and falsehood: Language is not self-verifying. Fiction is based on just this discrepancy between language and the duplicitous and calculating writer. Is it a discrepancy—or a struggle? Writers often describe their writing as a kind of wrestling match with language, as T. S. Eliot does in “Four Quartets.”

My favorite fake apologies are a pair submitted by Marissa D’Espain:

Congratulations!
I saw your
new book
at a bookstore

and:

Oh no! I forgot
To have your baby. Now
it’s too late. Sorry!

For next week, let’s begin a list poem—on the model of the great list songs in the American songbook—e.g., “You’re the Top” (Cole Porter), “Thanks for the Memory” (music Ralph Rainger, lyrics Leo Robin), “Can’t Get Started” (music Vernon Duke, lyrics Ira Gershwin), “They All Laughed” (Gershwin and Gershwin), “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” (Gershwin and Gershwin), “My Favorite Things” (Rodgers and Hammerstein), “(We’ll Have) Manhattan” (Rodgers and Hart), to mention just a few. The formula requires a stanza with a refrain.

Ready, set, go! 

-- sdh

 

Part II: Home Run [by Dean Smith]

The Orioles took Wee Willie Keeler’s advice last night and “hit them where they aint.”

Adam Jones lifted a seeing-eye RBI single to centerfield that broke a scoreless tie and four home runs took care of the rest in an 8-0 victory. The win boosted their record to 44-24 at Camden Yards. The Orioles have dismantled the opposition at home this year as through they were using mallets and shell crackers at a crab feast.

The Birds ended the game in the second inning. They struck quickly and surgically unleashing a cannonade of home runs to stun the visiting New Yorkers and take a six run lead. In the third Manny Machado homered to make it 8-0 where it stayed. The Yanks managed two hits.

Even though I could watch the game on cable, I listened. The sudden explosions of Oriole home runs, coming in bunches and the frenzied voices of Joe Angell and Fred Manfra slicing into the silence and breaking up the mundane reportage have made this season unique and exhilarating. I held my daughter Julia’s arm.

“Listen sweetheart, there it goes,” I said.

“Is that the Ravens?” She looked up from her anime.

Home runs taught me to read. I discovered a whole range of exciting verbs in the Baltimore Sun when I seven and mesmerized by Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson and Boog Powell who regularly “clouted,” “crushed,” “demolished,” “socked,” “clobbered,” and “whacked” balls out of the park. Though I love pitcher’s duels and abhor statistics, the home run is the most exciting event in sports.

Marianne Moore wrote in the poem Baseball & Writing, “the massive run need not be everything.” The Orioles have hit 213 homers. The Major League record is 264 by the 1997 Seattle Mariners. The home run, the tater, the big fly, the dinger, the moon shot, the jack, the big fly, and the souvenir—whatever you call them--the 2016 Birds can't live without them. 

Orioles’ radio announcer Jim Hunter called Manny Machado’s third inning round-tripper “a majestic blast.” The ball traveled high above the stadium before landing deep into the left field bleachers. You can see it here in the 4^th spot.

Campbell McGrath has a “majestic” description of an Eddie Murray home run in Captalist Poem #25:

And when Eddie swings at 1-1 pitch we know it’s gone before the ball rockets off his bat in a tremendous arc, moving slowly and even gently through the air, perfectly visible, stage-lit against the deep green of the grass, the right fielder not moving, just turning his head to watch it go, and it’s like the perfect arc of youth…

That’s just the overture in the greatest description of a home run I’ve ever seen in print. There are 250 more words that follow before the ball lands in the bullpen. That took place in Memorial Stadium. McGrath’s Capitalism is a grand slam of a book—please bring it back in print.

Roger Angell wrote eloquently about Memorial Stadium but Camden Yards is a poet’s ballpark. Its sightlines lines are pristine and breathtaking. The piece de resistance is the longest and narrowest warehouse in the United States, a vestige of the Baltimore & Ohio railroad that looks on its south end like the face of locomotive and defines right field. On Eutaw Street looking north, still within the confines, the Bromo Seltzer tower looms and for a second you are in a foreign city. George Herman Ruth, Sr. owned a saloon now covered by centerfield and where the young Babe hurled stones at police officers landing him in Brother Matthias’ care at St. Mary’s Industrial for Boys. Edgar Allen Poe also lived in the neighborhood and I imagine them both commiserating in eaves of the left field bleachers. Eddie Poe and the Babe holding court with the ghosts of ushers and beer men.

Even with a big lead, I still watched the game until the final out—keeping tabs on the Blue Jays, Tigers, and Red Sox.

The American League East is another slugfest this year. I’m not a Toronto fan and have never been going back to their beginnings in those robin’s egg colored space suits—all the way back to when Alfredo Griffin played shortstop. They lost in Tampa Bay. The Sox obliterated the A’s. With Betts, Bradley, Jr., and Bogaerts driving the offense and a solid pitching staff with David Price, they may take just the division.

The Yanks are at bay for the moment. The Orioles gained a game on the Blue Jays but stayed tied with the Tigers who beat Kansas City.

I know one thing. The Orioles will keep swinging for the fences.

For Labor Day: "The Fee" [poem by Bill Zavatsky]

Portrait of John Keats by Joseph Severn

Dear Author:

We are preparing
the definitive, illus-
trated catalogue
of our international
exhibition, “Urns
Around the World”
for publication.
May we, The State
Education Department
of New York, The Uni-
versity of the State
of New York at Albany,
Time/Life Books and their
subsidiaries, the
Smithsonian Institution,
and the licensees
of the foregoing
have permission to use
your poem, “Ode on
a Grecian Urn,”
throughout the world
in all editions of our
catalogue and in any
material based on it
for all printings
of all editions?
The press run of our
catalogue is 150,000 copies
in cloth and 300,000 copies
in paperback. The volume
features 200 full-color plates
and will be printed
on 90 lb. glossy stock.
These editions
will sell for $98.00
and $45.00 respectively.
Due to the fact that
so many authors
will be represented
in the catalogue,
we cannot offer
remuneration. However,
upon publication we will make
copies available to authors
at a ten percent discount
(postage and handling
not included).
Of course we will
make certain that you
receive credit in these
publications for the use
of your material.
If you agree to
the terms of our contract,
please sign below
and return this form
at your earliest convenience.

Part III: Pitcher's Duel [by Dean Smith]

The essence of the rivalry between the Orioles and the Yankees revealed itself last night. Tense, cerebral, nail-biting, four-hour pitching duels have defined their contests over the past three decades. Add managers Buck Showalter and Joe Girardi into the mix, two of the game's great tacticians and you're in for a satisfying nine course movable feast.

In a season of decent outings and little to show as far as wins for their efforts, C.C. Sabathia and Kevin Gausman hurled gems last night and the game turned on three plays. 

In the 4th, the Yankees loaded the bases with one out. With the count full, Gausman uncorked a mid-80s splitter that dove to the bottom of the strike zone. Starlin Castro couldn't hold up and swung at ball four. The game hung in the balance and Castro had the chance to alter it. Brian McCann hit a fly ball to deep center for the final out. 

In the bottom of the inning, an error by the rookie right fielder Aaron Judge on a Chris Davis single allowed Mark Trumbo to score from second base. 

Sabathia brilliantly worked the edges last night. He relies on location to confuse the hitters -- extending them little-by-little into his zones. He mixes speeds and locations and then sneaks fastballs by hitters. It's difficult to pick up the ball because of his mammoth presence and his ability to hide the pill. He has great success against Baltimore but he made one mistake. In the fifth with two out, Sabathia left a ball up and in the middle of the plate for Adam Jones, who connected for his 26th home run. 

Writers often talk about persona. Pitchers are no different. Since losing his Kent Tekulve spectacles and growing a goatee, Kevin Gausman is on a streak of nineteen scoreless innings. He no longer grooves ninety-five mile an hour fastballs down the middle of the plate. His ball bends and darts as it reaches the hitter. 

Both teams played solid defense and O's third baseman Manny Machado once again flashed his prowess on a ball hit by Brett Gardner. Orioles closer Zach Britton notched his 42nd consecutive save in preserving the win.

This series is the exact opposite of what happened last week in New York when the Yanks took the first two games. American League East teams spend so much time trying to beat each other, they often lose touch with the rest of baseball where the Cubs, Giants, Dodgers, Rangers, Mets and Nationals lie in wait. 

The Orioles gained a game in the Wildcard hunt and crept closer to the division leading Blue Jays.  

Only 30,000 fans showed up last night and much has been written including this screed by Thom Loverro in the Washington Times as to why fans aren't going to Oriole games this year. Was it last year's riots that led to the first Major League baseball game ever in any empty stadium? Are the Orioles bad marketers? Are tickets too expensive? It made me recall a moment in Fenway Park during the 1990 playoffs when the Red Sox pulled Roger Clemens after six innings and a one-run lead. Fans headed for the exits. They knew how bad their bullpen was.

There were enough people there for me to hear the boos directed at Mark Teixeira, the Severna Park native and Mt. St. Joe grad who spurned the Orioles offer in 2009. That's now lasted seven years. It's a fickle city--a place where former Oriole pitcher turned Yankee Mike Mussina is referred to as Judas on message boards.  

The last two nights, Oriole pitching has shutout the Yankees. Going back to last Sunday's game, the Yankees haven't scored a run against the Orioles in 27 innings. The last time that happened to the Bombers was in 1973. Oriole starters have been untouchable. The lack of off season moves in the pitching department is a sore spot with O's fans but it's being dealt with.

According to some, Baltimore has always been "a football town with a baseball problem." Legendary manager Earl Weaver was jealous of the city's love for the Colts. Take the poet Moira Egan who hails from Baltimore. Moira and I were born in the same hospital only months apart. Our fathers ran the streets of West Baltimore together during the late '50s. She happens to be in town this weekend from Rome, Italy--attending a wedding and partaking in crab feasts.

"I'm more of a football gal, but when I home, I get the O's report every morning," she writes.

She once told me a story about her grandfather Ed Egan who attended St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys a couple of years after Babe Ruth. He somehow ended up with one of Babe's baseball bats. 

"He needed an axe handle, so he took that bat and made one."

That's Baltimore.

 

Dean Smith 

My boy sick in mind asked me why I wake

I wake in flooding sunlight, I said, a thousand impatient, 

tiny tongues

Licking at shadows, lapping under wood.

Along the lane.

My lips are cracked and sore, my throat dry. I am tired.

Almost dead.

Can barely see the toiling sun.

Hardly feel Her warming splash

soak me, drench me, leaven my sight.

Loosen my sense, lighten my bones.

She raises me up Her servant –

foot-foot, leg-leg, arms, hand-hand, push –

I said.

To follow (even stumbling.).

Her brilliant strand,

I tell you this my dear son sick in mind:

Her dappling waves.

Her slicking asphalt.

And Her fine rainbow mirrors.

That so much resemble the light that spills from you So.

I believe in that first step She is smiling in me.

So. I knuckle my eyes.

Brush my knees, smooth my hair.

And follow, I said.