The Best American Poetry

John Ashbery Steals the Show in "Marjorie Prime" [by David Lehman]

There's plenty of competition: a Beethoven string quartet, Poulenc, Mozart, "I Shall Be Released," some choice bits of dialogue from Casablanca, a plot summary of My Best Friend's Wedding  that spares you from having to watch the damn thing, and a fine cast headed by Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, and Lois Smith. But the highlight of Marjorie Prime, Michael Almereyda's new movie occurs when the character played by Stuyvesant High School alum Tim Robbins (class of '76) reads aloud a love letter addressed to his mother-in-law, now deceased, written by a tennis-playing French-Canadian suitor who expresses the usual sentiments then abruptly switches to the first six lines of John Ashbery's "At North Farm" (from A Wave, 1984).:

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, 
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through      narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

The lines are quoted without attribution, and it is conceivable that not all viewers will realize that they have heard a stanza of verse unless they attend to the credits where they will see a formal acknowledgment and the director's "special thanks" to John Ashbery (left; photo by Stephanie Paterik, 2011). 

And what of Marjorie Prime? Michael Almereyda's compelling movie is uncompromisingly melancholy, a somber tech-fantasy set in the not too distant future in which avatars animated by artificial intelligence take the place of deceased loved ones. The pace is slow, and if your neighbor has had a busy day, her or his mind may wander, but you who are in the know will stay absorbed. The film's intelligence is undeniable, and the structure of the movie, the jumps in chronology, the handling of time, all work well. There is beauty in the idea of robotic replacements for ourselves, though the speculation is no match in the end for the fear of death. The movie can also stand as an allegory for the way memory works, the way fantasy can displace fact, which is illustrated perfectly by the partnering of an octogenarian widow with the dashing identical twin of the erstwhile Don Draper. All in all, the viewer comes away with an appreciation of how this talented filmmaker has put the spirit of experimentation to strategic narrative and thematic use.

As for Mr. Ashbery, it's good to hear his words in this context of love, marriage, death, and widowhood. The film's heroine is eighty-six years old. John turned 90 on July 28. The movie was released on August 18, Stacey Lehman's birthday. It's playing at the refurbished Quad on 13th Street just east of Sixth Avenue in New York City. The Quad was a sad-looking place not long ago, but oh, look at it now. -- DL

Snips, snails and puppy-dog tales: What’s (contemporary) dance made of?

Pencil and ink, De la sensation intérieure à l’apparition des voyageurs (“On the sensation within as travelers arrive”). Gare de Rennes, Spring, 2011 - Céline Le Tixérant

The baby's sleeping in the crib up top/And baby's sleeping above you/You will lift him to the parking lot…/I would like to see a little more propriety,/Cooperate with me and answer me/I know now, I know now, I know now,/ I'm never gonna tell on you… /The lady's got no clothes she's at the shop./But if she'd knew then she'd kill you./The bugs are out cause they come out at night,/Usually they just bite our hands./Cause normally we have clothes on without a fight…/And baby's sleeping against you./I think he'd pray for an old motor car./Or any bed made without you…

                                                                                                            “Baby’s Romance” – Chris Garneau

It’s not a coincidence that Orpheus embodies music, poetry, prophecy and dance together. Dancing is a natural expansion for a poet who has not ruined herself or himself by poetical excess; dance is a natural topic study when vice has done its work. Not everybody knows that Emily Dickinson had a little secret dancing spot near the left-hand flower pot but she did. Everybody knows that Walt Whitman, as does still Lana Del Ray, sang the body electric; I once saw Alan Ginsberg wriggle his hips on the Berkeley campus midway.

I also want to tell readers that contemporary dance works pretty much like Chris Garneau’s lovely “Baby’s Romance” does – parts are cited above. And dance works for pretty much the same reasons and with pretty much the same elements of composition.  

And I want to say that I like dance a lot, a lot not just because I’m a poet but because dance, especially contemporary dance, always speaks to what concerns me in ways that touch me even when it bores me to tears.

This is worth notice because into the end of 2017 and the first part of 2018, I – and I hope others will, too – be writing around, sometimes, on, sometimes about, sometimes, up contemporary performance actors – choreographers, dancers, circassiens (contemporary circus performers) such as Jann Gallois, Oona Doherty or Cécile Mont-Reynaud – as well as variously tinted visual artists, culture creators, actors or facilitators such as Emilie Chaix, Céline Le Tixérant, Pierre Ajavon, Carla Querejeta Roca, Philippe Rillon or Caroline Wei or Tatjana Jankovic.

 Jann Gallois exploring sharp angles – Photo ©Roger Fusciardi 

I say writing “around”, “on”, “about”, “up” rather than “commenting” or “critiquing” or “reporting” on them, or on the many others I’ve met these past years because I see myself in ongoing conversation with them, in the same way that I am conversing in thought word and deed with my remembered and unremembered pasts and presents, especially, with songs off the radio.

My notion of “conversing with being and perceiving” is what I think Jann Gallois meant when she told me this past summer that every encounter has meaning – she used the word “signification”, which connotes “importance” as well as “meaning”.

French usage implies, and I personally believe, that a signifier is always significant. What is meaningful sticks to your life, and is, of course, important for you and yours.

There really isn’t any option: the meaningful either makes itself a part of you or you make yourself a part of it.

That’s how people generally work. Or is it?

Isn’t it?

Just how do people work, really?

I thought I did know but now I am sure I don’t. Maybe I can’t.

Oona Doherty lighting blurring lines – from "Lazarus and the birds of paradise" – lighting, Matt Burke & Simon Bird 

There are clues, though, that come through to me through dance, both through the ongoing conversation and because of its nature.

Northern Ireland’s up-and-coming performer-choreographer Oona Doherty told me that she had believed that sectarian prejudice was a thing of the past… until she started working on what I think of as her “joy and gladness” dance project, Hard to be soft.

Sectarian comity, it seems, has not replaced sectarian hatred chez elle any more than personal identity has replaced “race” identity chez moi – I mean you, America!, who still haven’t done the right thing by those damned h-bombs...

Apparently, the hatreds of religion, like the hatreds of race, have just been displaced…

So, what are people? And, if we aren’t on the road to perfection through replacement of our doubtful parts, how does displacement work, and how can it be made to work in favor of human virtue, exactly?

Dance won’t tell me, of course, but it’s corporal nature lets me look with my eyes, roughly, wordlessly. Unlike the poets, priests and politicians, dance will only ever show human beings – no amount of choreographical megalomania or political blithering will ever lift that blessed optic of silence.

Look!

Sergei Polunin is flying! So that’s what “Take me to church” was really about!?

Jann Gallois synchronizes bodies. Human fusion is perfectly possible!?

Betrand Russell, I knew that pain ain’t exactly subjective!?: Doherty makes bread and butter portraying pain! 

Even on stage, even in the Espace Cardin, even on the Champs Elysées, dance lets Kaori Ito split her Dad off from that crabby old guy who’s been mooning around her Mom since she can remember!?

So how does dance work for me?

Air dancer Cécile Mont-Reynaud takes fate by the skeins – photo ©Pauline Trumel 

As with song, contemporary dance, in particular, but dance in general, too, works makes sense of “sensibility” – like Jane Austen meant it in her other classic book: sensitivity with spontaneous feeling and emotion.

“Sense” can mean lots of things. For Jane Austen I think it meant “employed sensitivity, reason with emotional restraints”.  

Today, I think “sense” means a savant structure of reason, intuition and emotion that adds to soft rather than hard knowledge. I’ll say, with reserves, that I know “sense” when it’s there and, especially, I know when it’s not.

As with song, dancing is the art of control of tempo, specifically, for dance, control of the flicker of consciousness of the spectators. Choreography gets human consciousness moving faster or moving slower through instrumentalizing corporal expression and, through expression, sensibility.

Tempo is done within a “narrative frame”, as we said in my college days.

I define “narrative” largely since both the means of perceiving and perception structure what is perceived even without the intervention of “story” – that is, any sort of intentional formatting of structure.

The structuring principle of perception and the sensibility contained in words is why Baby’s Romance works ‘though you can’t make head or tale of the story.

Bringing these four elements of story, tempo, sensibility and sense in the proper pot and seasoning them with luck, technicity and talent or genius, or both, will generate a delicious ragout of sense for choreographers, performers, crew and spectators together.

On Broadway from 90th to 110th in the 1970s and 80s; Fragments 81-89 from Selected Squibs [by Alan Ziegler]

81. 96^th to 110^th on Broadway is commonly known as “No man’s land.”

82. Small, empty storefronts blossom into dedicated rose shops, a dollar a bunch. First there’s one, then many, then few, then none.

83. A stationery store has the saddest window display in the retail world. A few Bic pens strewn about, a couple of worn steno notebooks, a small box of paper clips. I actually need paper clips and open the door. The only sign of commerce: a few teller-like windows.

84. Prostitutes work openly on Broadway. When it rains, they go to the Grandstand Bar on 91^st and Broadway to retrieve their umbrellas. Faces become familiar; nods without solicitations. During the 1976 Democratic Convention, new faces appear, temporarily displaced by police from midtown. One asks me if I want to go out. I say what I sometimes say to the regulars, “I’m already out.” She replies, “Fuck you asshole.”

85. On the corner of Broadway and 106th Street one man says over and over, “Spare-some-change-appreciate-it?” in one William-Carlos-Williamsian American beat. A few times I see him give money to someone even less fortunate.

86. On 107th and Broadway, the guy with the brown corduroy jacket chants: “Spare some change for a cup of cawfeee?”

87. On Broadway between 99^th and 100^th, a pizzeria run by some kind of collective serves the first whole wheat pizza in the area and maintains a huge vat of homemade soup, ladled free of charge to the homeless. Occasionally they chant as they work.

88. A gaunt man in his thirties wears a gabardine trench coat no matter the temperature, skulks from block to block, getting kicked out from store to store. He disappears during the winter and somehow reappears as a harbinger of spring.

89. A cop walks the beat.

"How Little We Know" times two! [by David Lehman]

Here is one song of that title, words and music by Carolyn Leigh (nee Rosenthal), the lyricist on such Sinatra standards as "Young at Heart," "Witchcraft," and "The Best is Yet to Come" (the latter two with music by Cy Coleman).

And here's a second song entitled "How Little We Know," this one -- by Hoagy Carmichael (music) and Johnny Mercer (words) -- a great favorite of Jacqueline Bouvier, who translated the bridge for the benefit of her French family when she spent her junior year abroad in France. Lauren Bacall introduced the song, with an admiring Bogart looking on, in To Have and Have Not.

i never told you how boring i thought you were [by Sara Di Blasi]

you smoked blue american spirits
and hid unfinished ones
in between the jutting bricks
of our house
so that the walls smelled tired

you offered me a pull
even though i always said no
it was part of your hospitality
how you welcomed me in

is it kindness if you want me to suffer
the same way you suffer
so that we can have things to talk about

your mother told me she wanted
us to marry
she wanted to wrap me in her old veil
like a doll she’d display in a glass box
my eyelashes dusting over

you slept with a 100 dollar
white noise machine
it made sounds of nothing
you said there was science behind it
it didn’t sound like whales or waves

you said only people who can’t go to the ocean
want to dream of the ocean

The Play-by-Play Poetry of Baseball [by David Lehman]

You  remember when Kirk Gibson hit perhaps the most unlikely home run in baseball history. Hobbled with injuries, he pinch-hit with two out and a man on first base, and the Dodgers were one out away from losing the first game of the 1988 World Series. Gibson could barely walk. But Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda fired him up and he was motivated further by Vin Scully, who, covering the game for national television, kept his eye on the dugout and reported on the dim possibility that Gibson would get into the game. Gibson stepped in against Dennis Eckersley, the Oakland A's ace reliever. Two strikes: the Dodgers were down to their final strike when Eckersley threw the slider Gibsn has been waiting for and with one swing Gibson the slugger reversed the team’s fortunes.The series pivoted on that seemingly miraculous moment, but play by play men don't have any time to prepare. On the radio Jack Buck said “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Beautiful: a totally colloquial line of iambic tetrameter. Scully, describing the same at-bat, let a few seconds of silence pass before saying grandly, “In a year of the improbable, the impossible has just happened.”

I am going on memory and it is possible that I may have a word or two wrong there but the point of this piece has to do with memory -- I am typing an appreciation of play-by-play announcers and the memorable things they say. This is Vin Scully’s last go-round in his astounding sixty-six-year career as the voice of the Dodgers, and I dedicate these musings to him, the red-headed gentleman who invites viewers to "pull up a chair" and join him in Dodger Stadium. He did that at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn from 1950 to 1957, before the team abandoned the city in favor of Chavez Ravine. And in 1957, an eight-year-old boy got hooked on the Dodgers of that era (Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Carl Furillo) and the broadcast team of Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett. 

As we head toward Vin's final days in the broadcast booth, the accolades are coming his way. Everyone loves his call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. Later that year, in October, when Koufax on two days’ rest shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the World Series for his team, Vinny said, “Sandy, two days ago you said you felt like a hundred years old. Now how do you feel?" “Like a hundred and one,” Koufax replied. For weekly anecdotes from long-time listeners, read Houston Mitchell's "Dodger Dugout" columns (such as this one) and get on his e-mail list. From a recent e-mail: "With Clayton Kershaw returning this week, what better time to revisit Vin Scully's best calls from Kershaw's no-hitter? Watch and listen to it here."

Every so often Scully will sneak in a literary allusion, and he usually doesn’t repeat himself, though Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait” has served him well over the years when describing a patient batter. When a great pitcher (Zack Greinke) has a miserable night, Scully quotes Horace: "Even Homer nods." In the summer of 1993, when he broke the news of the untimely death of Don Drysdale, the great pitcher who had become his broadcast partner, Scully said, with simple eloquence, “Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart.”

On Labor Day [2016], I watched the Dodgers trounce the Diamondbacks, 10-2, for the pleasure of watching the action under the guidance of Scully. The TV execs are smart enough to show us a lot of Dodger games called by Scully this year. Unlike most announcers, he does the whole game unassisted, unaccompanied by what used to be called a color man -- usually an ex-star who is articulate, amiable, and knowledgeable (e.g. Don Sutton with the Braves, Rick Monday on the Dodgers' radio broadcasts, Bill White with the Yankees in the 1970s, the late Ralph Kiner with the Mets). To go solo is quite a feat. Even experienced play-by-play men consider it a challenge. But Vinny, who has had excellent partners over the years, doesn't need one.

One reason Vinny is the best is that he is unafraid of silence, unafraid to let the action and crowd reaction speak for itself for precious seconds. (I wish Aaron Boone and Jessica Mendoza took this hint.) A second attribute is a lesson the Fordham graduate learned from Red Barber, his mentor: never make it too apparent that you favor the home team. And be fair. Zack Greinke took a shellacking on Monday evening but Scully made sure the audience knew what an anomaly this was, Greinke being a terrific pitcher. Red Barber also advised Vin Scully to stick to facts and avoid opinions. Barber, a longtime Dodger announcer, joined Mel Allen and Phil Rizzuto in the Yankee booth in 1957. I always liked Red’s way of describing a failed pickoff attempt. "Nothing doing.” 

On Monday evening, Arizona's Socrates Brito stepped to the plate. Scully explained -- "for the kids, really" -- who Socrates was. Vinny had done his homework. We learned  "what Labor Day is all about."  It was in June 1894 that the first Monday in September was designated Labor Day. In 1916 the eight-hour working day became the norm and the obscenity of child labor was put to rest. Canada is said to have originated the idea of a holiday to celebrate the labor force. I didn't know these facts. But I did appreciate it when, after the history lesson, Vinny described Greinke at the plate. Greinke, not an easy out, obliged the pitcher to make a lot of pitches.  "And after all that laboring," Scully said, "Greinke goes down for the second out." Possibly my favorite moment of the evening came when: a wicked curve ball -- can't remember whose -- caused the batter to fall down like a knocked-down boxer "for a mandatory eight-count." It was "a genuflection for a great breaking ball."

The Mets at the moment have an outstanding trio calling their games on television: Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling. The versatile Howie Rose and Josh Lewin handle the radio. Columbia graduate Cohen (a government major) is like a one-man encyclopedia of Mets’ history. Here is his description of one of the greatest catches in Mets’ history, the catch made by Endy Chavez in the National League Championship Series in 2006, which the Mets ultimately lost to St. Louis. “Edmonds at first and one out, and Pérez deals. Fastball hit in the air to left field, that's deep, back goes Chávez, back near the wall, leaping, and....he made the catch!!  He took a home run away from Rolen! Trying to get back to first is Edmonds... he's doubled off! And the inning is over! Endy Chávez saves the day! He reached up high over the left field wall, right in front of the visitors bullpen, and pulled back a two-run homer! He went to the apex of his leap, and caught it in the webbing of his glove, with his elbow up above the fence. A miraculous play by Endy Chávez, and then Edmonds is doubled off first, and Oliver Perez escapes the 6th inning. The play of the year, the play maybe of the franchise history, for Endy Chávez. The inning is over.” This one I didn't know by heart except for "He went to the apex of his leap, and caught it in the webbing of his glove."

All announcers have their signature phrases. When the Mets’ win, Howie Rose says, “Put it in the books.” Bob Murphy would conclude every Mets’ victory by saying that he’d be back “with the happy recap” after the commercial break. Win or lose, Cohen says “and the ballgame is over,” strongly accenting the “o” in “over” when the good guys prevail. John Sterling, the Yankees' voice on the radio, stretches the phrase "the Yankees win!" -- and then repeats it -- with a kind of euphoria implying that God is in heaven and all is right with the world. Joe Nuxhall would sign off his Cincinnati Reds' broadcast by saying goodbye from the "old leftander, rounding third and heading for home." Nuxhall, who did Reds' games for forty years, was the youngest player ever to appear in a major league baseball game.

Cohen’s home run call is “it’s outta here!” The classic home run call is from Mel Allen when, with his straw hat and friendly smile, he covered the Yankees of Mantle, Maris, Berra, and Ford. Mickey would launch one, and Mel would follow the course of the ball and conclude “it’s going. . going. . .gone.” I cannot leave unmentioned Russ Hodges’ immortal call of Bobby Thomson’s home run off Ralph Branca in the 1951 National League playoffs between once and future opponents, Brooklyn and New York (and, after 1958, Los Angeles and San Francisco). “The Giants win the pennant!” he exclaimed and repeated the sentence four times

Sometimes the humor of play-by-play announcers is wonderful if unintentional. Michael Kay, the Yankees’ TV announcer, remarked that some pitcher had a zaftig ERA.” The color man, I forget who, a former player, looked blank. “What,” Kay said. “You don’t know zaftig?” The other guy said sheepishly that he may heard the word “in English class.” Phil Rizzuto unabashedly rooted for the Yankees, In the 1970s Bill White and Frank Messer were the straight men and Rizzuto provided ardor and comic relief during Yankee games. "Holy cow!" he would exclaim. And he wouldn't forget to say happy birthday to a friend in Boca Raton or Delray Beach.

I hate the phrase "If the season ended today.  ." and all the hypotheticals that follow. But I admit to a soft spot for this common play-by-play sentence: "And the Mets are down to their final out." I used that phrase with a big grin when I told my wife about the tenth inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series between the Mets and the Boston Red Sox. Roger Angell headed his brilliant New Yorker piece on that unforgettable post-season with a palindrome: "Not So, Boston." In danger of wandering off message I think of the greatest cover phrase in the history of Sports Illustrated. It was when Pete Rose, after playing for Philadelphia and Montreal, returned to Cincinnati. "Rose is a Red." Gertrude Stein couldn't beat that.

A heartfelt apology: There are so many great play-by-play men whom I haven't named. . .but only because time is finite.

Lastly,the art of radio announcing is very different from calling a game on television. The radio announcer cannot afford to let the camera tell the story. It is his (or her) responsibility to make the game come to life in the listener's imagination. It is a craft bordering on an art. There is no better illustration of Marshall McLuhan's contention that radio is a "hot" medium while television is "cool." There is no better preparation for a TV play-by-play man than to have done the job on the radio -- as Gary Cohen did for many years before the Mets' management joined him with Darling and Hernandez, alumni of the '86 World Champs.

-- David Lehman (September 6, 2016). From the archives.

Fragments 71-80 (from Selected Squibs) [by Alan Ziegler]

71. Overheard: “I admit to being abstract and I don't deny it, and I don't think it’s a bad position. On the other hand, I find you very academic.”

72. The first student I connected with, a teenager in Great Neck, discovered and excised a pre-cancerous melanoma on my back 47 years later.

73. On a draft of " Tyger Tyger Burning Bright,” Blake changed form to frame.

74. I really really saw, in the same day, a dog barking up the wrong tree and the blind leading the blind.

75. Cartoon Caption: Dog says to person, “Quit damning me with faint praise and give me a fucking treat!”

76. Among the celebrities my father saw in Hollywood and obtained autographs from during his 1940 cross-country trip: Freddy Bartholomew, Eddie Albert, Greer Garson, Robert Young, Rosalind Russel, Mary Astor.

77. While the moon is being eclipsed, a mama rat and her children cross Riverside Drive in front of a taxi paused at a Stop sign. The mama stops in the middle, waiting for the kids to catch up. The taxi driver honks two gentle beeps. The kids speed up and the whole family reaches the other side. The taxi goes on its way. The moon returns.

78. Overheard: “Subliminally when I got burned at the stake it was tough for me.”

79. A small parrot perches behind the counter of a tiny antique shop in Paris. I stare at it and smile. The clerk says, “Babu,” and gestures it is all right for me to approach. The bird nibbles on my hand and watch band. I try to explain in French that I am waiting for my wife (“femme”), and the clerk thinks I am talking about Babu, whom she turns upside down and says, “Pas une femme.” I purchase a quill pen, and go looking for Erin so I can introduce her to Babu. When we enter, the clerk smiles and hands me my eyeglasses, which I didn’t even know I left there.

80. Overheard: “You got a problem, you pull a man to the side and you talk to him.”

In Memory of John Hollander (1929-2013) [by David Lehman]

When John Hollander died, four years ago, I wrote,

John Hollander died last weekend. He was two months shy of his 84th birthday and had been in poor health. We join the many who mourn him. He was the eleventh guest editor in the history of the Best American Poetry series, an obvious choice to take the helm of the 1998 edition. John, who taught at Yale, did so many things, all of them well. He was a poet of exquisite wit and formal prowess; a tireless scholar and critic of rare acumen; a distinguished editor and anthologist, with an extraordinary range that included the whole of American poetry, modern fiction, light verse, satire, and the great flowering of poetry criticism that marked the first two thirds of the twentieth century. (See, for example, Modern Poetry: Essays in Criticism, which John edited for Oxford University Press in 1968.) He was a born teacher; Chaucer had him in mind when he wrote, "And gladly wold he lerne, and gladly teche." He is an inspiration and his influence is something we are badly in need of today.

Among his books I have a special fondness for Rhyme's Reason, an indispensable "guide to English verse," in which the poet exemplifies each form or metrical arrangement he defines. Reflections on Espionage, a book-length poem, uses the apparatus of spydom to demarcate the territory of American poetry. Everyone has a code name: Auden is Steampump, Frost is Morose (because it sounds like the Russian word for "frost"), Lake is Elizabeth Bishop ("Lakey" in Mary McCarthy's The Group), Lac is Robert Lowell ("Cal" backwards), Image is James Merrill, and Hollander himself is Cupcake. If spies are poets, each needs a cover -- just as each poet needs to make a living or figure out some other way to subsidize the true work he or she does.

Powers of Thirteen, a stellar sequence of thirteen-line poems, may be my favorite of all of John's poetry collections. I reviewed it in Newsweek (January 23, 1984):

<<<
No one has ever doubted John Hollander's poetic virtuosity. As early as his first volume, "A Crackling of Thorns" (1968), his technical mastery and ingenious wordplay were in abundant evidence. There are, however, those who charge that Hollander lets his sheer talent get the better of him; they find him too allusive and elusive, too self-delighting in his poetic conceits. "Powers of Thirteen" doesn't so much vindicate Hollander as show such complaints to be largely beside the point. An audaciously original sonnet sequence that in effect reinvents the rules of the game, "Powers of Thirteen" prove that it's sometimes wise for a poet to exaggerate the very traits in his work that some critics most loudly deplore.

"Ecstasy affords the occasion and expediency determineds the form," wrote Marianne Moore of the genesis of a poem. In Hollander's case, it would be nearer the mark to say that all the occasions of poetry, be they ecstatic or ruminative, public or esoteric, follow from his choice of forms. Here Hollander has fashioned a form remarkable for its rigor -- or, rather, its supple responsiveness to his touch. There are 169 poems in the sequence: exactly 13 to the second power. Verging upon but veering from traditional sonnet structure, each poem contains 13 lines; each line, 13 syllables. These constraints liberate rather than inhibit Hoillander's imagination. The poems' formal design gives the sequence its unity, leaving this most protean of poets free to vary his delivery, his tone, his subject matter -- even his personality.

A flea bite, in a famous poem by John Donne, develops into the occasion for a sexual invitation. In "Powers of Thirteen," poetic logic similarly links apparently disparate phenomena. Among the most engaging poems in the sequence are the 13 that deplore that curious number and everything that it calls to mind, from "triskaidekaphobia" (fear of the number 13) to the "thirteen-tone scale / Of falsifications" and the 13 stripes on Old Glory. One of these poems delineates the flag; the terminal rhymes ring changes on "red" and "white," while stitched into the upper left corner of the poems are six "blue" rhymes, marking off the flag's "changing crew of constellations." In the preceding poem, the fact that there are 13 cards in a suit and as many weeks in a season gives rise to this fusion of metaphors: "Winter wields only the spades, Summer brandishes / Hot, black clubs, Spring showers hearts about and Autumn shows / A fall of diamonds in our climate of extremes." The conceit is anything but gratuitous; it widens into a meditation on paradise lost. In contrast to "our parents in Eden," who were "dealt / The perfect year's full hand of intermingled weeks," we do not enjoy "continual spring and fall." A last pun clinches the case: "Death deals, and cheats with the false promise of final trumps."

Writing in serial form enables Hollander to conceive his work as "a perpetual calendar." Along the way we pause to ponder the anomalies of "May-day," an "inglorious" Fourth of July and Labor Day ("when shirking hardly looks like working / Yet sounds far too much like it"). Investigating the sources of his inspiration, Hollander invokes an all-purpose "you," who stands for any number of "bemused" muses. The subjects treated to these I-thou dialogues range from philosophy to public statuary, from the seasons to erotic desire. Above all else, "Powers of Thirteen" celebrates linguistic possibility, "The power of 'might' that makes us write" -- and the multiplication of metaphors that ensue.
>>>

We ran the piece under the heading "Triskaidekaphhilia." -- DL

Powers of Thirteen, a stellar sequence of thirteen-line poems, may be my favorite of all of John's poetry collections. I reviewed it in Newsweek (January 23, 1984):

<<<
No one has ever doubted John Hollander's poetic virtuosity. As early as his first volume, "A Crackling of Thorns" (1968), his technical mastery and ingenious wordplay were in abundant evidence. There are, however, those who charge that Hollander lets his sheer talent get the better of him; they find him too allusive and elusive, too self-delighting in his poetic conceits. "Powers of Thirteen" doesn't so much vindicate Hollander as show such complaints to be largely beside the point. An audaciously original sonnet sequence that in effect reinvents the rules of the game, "Powers of Thirteen" prove that it's sometimes wise for a poet to exaggerate the very traits in his work that some critics most loudly deplore.

"Ecstasy affords the occasion and expediency determineds the form," wrote Marianne Moore of the genesis of a poem. In Hollander's case, it would be nearer the mark to say that all the occasions of poetry, be they ecstatic or ruminative, public or esoteric, follow from his choice of forms. Here Hollander has fashioned a form remarkable for its rigor -- or, rather, its supple responsiveness to his touch. There are 169 poems in the sequence: exactly 13 to the second power. Verging upon but veering from traditional sonnet structure, each poem contains 13 lines; each line, 13 syllables. These constraints liberate rather than inhibit Hoillander's imagination. The poems' formal design gives the sequence its unity, leaving this most protean of poets free to vary his delivery, his tone, his subject matter -- even his personality.

A flea bite, in a famous poem by John Donne, develops into the occasion for a sexual invitation. In "Powers of Thirteen," poetic logic similarly links apparently disparate phenomena. Among the most engaging poems in the sequence are the 13 that deplore that curious number and everything that it calls to mind, from "triskaidekaphobia" (fear of the number 13) to the "thirteen-tone scale / Of falsifications" and the 13 stripes on Old Glory. One of these poems delineates the flag; the terminal rhymes ring changes on "red" and "white," while stitched into the upper left corner of the poems are six "blue" rhymes, marking off the flag's "changing crew of constellations." In the preceding poem, the fact that there are 13 cards in a suit and as many weeks in a season gives rise to this fusion of metaphors: "Winter wields only the spades, Summer brandishes / Hot, black clubs, Spring showers hearts about and Autumn shows / A fall of diamonds in our climate of extremes." The conceit is anything but gratuitous; it widens into a meditation on paradise lost. In contrast to "our parents in Eden," who were "dealt / The perfect year's full hand of intermingled weeks," we do not enjoy "continual spring and fall." A last pun clinches the case: "Death deals, and cheats with the false promise of final trumps."

Writing in serial form enables Hollander to conceive his work as "a perpetual calendar." Along the way we pause to ponder the anomalies of "May-day," an "inglorious" Fourth of July and Labor Day ("when shirking hardly looks like working / Yet sounds far too much like it"). Investigating the sources of his inspiration, Hollander invokes an all-purpose "you," who stands for any number of "bemused" muses. The subjects treated to these I-thou dialogues range from philosophy to public statuary, from the seasons to erotic desire. Above all else, "Powers of Thirteen" celebrates linguistic possibility, "The power of 'might' that makes us write" -- and the multiplication of metaphors that ensue.
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We ran the piece under the heading "Triskaidekaphhilia." -- DL

Toward a Stranger Home I Home: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Adam Houle's Stray

Stray
Adam Houle
Lithic Press, 2017

Adam Houle’s Stray exhibits a technical virtuosity uncommon in a debut collection of poetry. Not only does he demonstrate a mastery of sonnet and couplet, but in poem after poem Houle’s finely wrought lines and exacting syntax “turn their leverage in tight spaces.” The poems in Stray are “checkpoints in the interior,” “scattershot/ into the fractures of fugitive rays” emanating from love, desire, and the difficulties constituted by daily life. Houle constantly revises the rapture upon which he verges, cues up puzzlement, and privileges the “helixed descent” that ends only when ear meets earth. Stray contains loving portraits of a woodworking father and of a studious wife, alongside persona poems from a future timber baron and from a Yellowknife girl. Houle praises equally the lonely bedbug, “tag-a-long armed / with anticoagulant / and an endless gut,” and an armadillo stretching to climb a fence, “a hardback hymnal / opening, taut and self-explained.” Houle’s gift is to present the world in all of its black ice menace, besieged and fissured, yawning against hope, and yet to allow for the consolation that comes in the continued twirl of the Northern Lights, in the last green dance of the day, in the conjugations and declensions mouthed beside a spouse in the dark. 

Stray abounds with a Frostian darkness and dread; as in Robert Frost’s best work, Houle’s best poems concern themselves with the interstices between grief and reason. Also, like Frost, Houle is fundamentally a poet of married life. His poem, “A Paper Hive Earns No Quarter,” exemplifies Houle’s commitment to the philosophical and to the connubial in the face of all that is fraught, dumb, and stinging. The poem reads in full:

            It’s hell, I think, to see them flit that way
            at dusk back to us, swarming our willow
            where, limb-perched, they flex in shadows. You pray
            they quit us; I pump the poisoned bellows.
            Love, things can grow too large for us to love,
            so let my labor mean. I’m wreathed in smoke,
            an axe-handle clenched in a leather glove.
            You cough and gripe. I give the nest a poke
            then, cocking back, let loose a full-on swing.
            It all explodes. They’re too smoke-drunk to know
            it’s me they hate and fail to sink a sting.
            The job is done. I clasp the bellows closed.
            Look, wife: dazed on your chipped garden gnome
            one dumb wasp thinks she drives her stinger home.

Smoking out the wasp nest in this sonnet, like the writing of the sonnet itself, initiates a dialogue with the beloved, and in both tasks meaning accrues through a labor that is meant to contain the expansive, the threatening, the random swarm encroaching from the shadows. Here, as everywhere else in Stray, revelation is shared and gestural, the result of a tandem perspective, a communion earned by callouses on wreckful, busy, rosary-wrapped hands. It is with such hands that one might build a strange and grateful home, a small stanza of light in which to dwell. I have lingered in the light of Stray a long while and I recommend that you do so, too.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

"One More Eclipse" [by Hilton Obenzinger]

August 21, 2017
The Grand Eclipse
I have it in my calendar
The next time it comes around
I’ll be dead, or at least I hope so
But no Totality here 
In San Francisco
Only the Path of Partiality
And I’m not at all impartial
When total or even partial darkness
Blots out fear
Or does it erupt with fear?
Will there be mobs screaming in the streets
Nazis on the loose
Like some old movie?
Teenagers running out of the movie house
Ahead of The Blob?
In fact I plan on watching that movie
Or digging into a book
While everyone else slips on their glasses
To take a look
At the Cosmic Clock
Ticking to a stop
I have no need to witness
The Solar System as it makes its rounds
I have seen it circle in my Heart
I have felt it revolve around my Soul
As Suns and Moons orbit
Marking all of Time
Should I forfeit Eternal Life?
Or should I savor Partial Life?
I’ll look inward
When the Sun gets to blot
Or I’ll watch the flowers in my yard
As they tilt upwards
Towards the Dark

-- Hilton Obenzinger.

Note that Gertrude Stein liked sitting with her back to a beautiful landscape. -- DL

"It sounded as if the Streets were running" [poem by Emily Dickinson]

XXXIV

It sounded as if the Streets were running
And then - the Streets stood still -
Eclipse - was all we could see at the Window
And Awe - was all we could feel.

By and by - the boldest stole out of his Covert
To see if Time was there - 
Nature was in an Opal Apron,
Mixing fresher Air. 

                  -- Emily Dickinson

-- sdl

 

 

 

"the revolution: return to new york" [by Andrei Codrescu]

             for Allen Ginsberg 92^nd birthday: Allen, let’s fix America

we are having a revolution: a marketing revolution.
we are still in the wine roses goat and sesame seed phase
of the revolution with a meat body full of unopened taste buds
waiting for the unborn entrepreneurs to open new fragrances
to palates that won’t die until we’ve tasted them. Our revolution
will not stop for dead anybody because as the endorphin receptors
multiply there needs to be a lot more cinema and monsters
sliced thin in our glass cages diddling Echo and maybe Eros.
Any time now art is just going to land inside and let us out.
Flesh runs a smooth outfit here in the big city brain.
I’m here for altruistic reasons so deliciously selfish
I scream from when I wake up until my credit card expires

-- Andrei Codrescu

"Moonlight in Vermont": Music without rhyme with Sinatra & Ella

For Robert Pinsky, who observed that "Moonlight in Vermont" is one of the only standards -- possibly the only one -- without a rhyme. I'll have to check; I have a feeling that Hammerstein at some point or other tried writing a rhyme-less lyric. Here's the best recording of the great Green Mountain State standard. John Blackburn wrote the words, and Karl Suessdorf the music, of this 1944 song.

And here's what happened when Sinatra and Ella got together on the song: 

-- DL 

Let's take an old-fashioned walk. . .

"But when you haven't a sou, / There's only one thing to do / Let's take an old-fashioned walk, / I'm just bursting with talk. . ." What Irving Berlin wrote in 1949 as sung in a marvelous duet by F. Sinatra and Doris Day -- Doris being the most underrated singer of the big band era. (This was in the days before she was a virgin, as Oscar Levant put it.)

doris day & frank sinatra - let's take an old-fashioned walk

written by Irving Berlin

Shall We Dance? (Rodgers & Hammerstein; 1956)

 

 

Meet Me at the Copa Tonight. . .

 

 

Sway Me Smooth with Rita Hayworth

 

 

Remembering Liam Rector on the 10th Anniversary of His Death (Terence Winch)

It's difficult for me to accept that 10 years have passed since my old friend Liam Rector took his own life. We had known each other since my early days in Washington, DC, where we were both part of the Mass Transit open poetry reading group started by Michael Lally in the early 1970s. We became better friends in the '80s and after, and I still miss his often outrageous, but always smart and funny perspective on life and poetry. I wrote about him here a year after his death. And Wikipedia offers this short bio. [photo at left by Parrish Dobson]

I learned of his death very quickly after it occurred from his longitme friend and protege David Fenza. I was shocked, but in some ways not surprised. Liam had hinted very clearly that suicide was something he regarded as a real option for him. It was over-the-top, dramatic, arresting, absolute---an act, in other words, that fit his personality perfectly. I respect his right to take his own life. I don't know what he was contending with that pushed him to this extreme, but I suspect it was a combination of medical problems and spiritual despair. He left behind his wife, Tree Swenson, herself a significant figure in the New York literary world back then; his daughter Virginia from his second marriage; and a multitude of friends, colleagues, and students.

He is a hard person to forget, and I miss him still. Here is a message he left on my answering machine sometime not too long before his death. I offer it not because of its flattering praise of my work, but to give a sense of the kind of friend he could be---full of appreciation and support for the people he cared about:

Liam Rector phone message

Here are two of my favorite poems of Liam's:

OLD COAT

Dressed in an old coat I lumber
Down a street in the East Village, time itself
Whistling up my ass and looking to punish me
For all the undone business I have walked away from,
And I think I might have stayed
In that last tower by the ocean,
The one I built with my hands and furnished
Using funds which came to me at nightfall, in a windfall....
Just ahead of me, under the telephone wires
On this long lane of troubles, I notice a gathering
Of viciously insane criminals I'll have to pass
Getting to the end of this long block in eternity.
There's nothing between us. Good
I look so dangerous in this coat.

 

MENTAL MOMMY

Home from school at six years old, first grade,
And uncle there to tell me Mommy
Gone, Mommy not be coming back any
Time soon, Liam, Mommy had to go to
Mental hospital. Nervous breakdown.
Years later Mommy, when she gets out
Of mental, often says, "If you're
A bad boy for me Liam you're
Going to send me back, back
Into mental hospital, like you did
First time." At 13
I find out Mom had been doing years
In a federal prison all that time,
For stealing, so no mental hospital for
Mommy. Breakdown ours alone.
I was on my own.

---Liam Rector

_______________________________________

Finally, here is the New York Times obituary (I have no doubt Liam would have been thrilled to know he merited a Times obit):

 

 

 

Save the Date and Spread the Word: Reading in Troy, NY, September 13, 2017

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, is also the editor of the Oxford Book of American Poetry. His newest book of poetry is Poems in the Manner Of. Other poetry books include New and Selected Poems, Yeshiva Boys, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. His most recent nonfiction book is Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. He teaches at The New School and lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York. David Lehman has been writing “poems in the manner of” for years, in homage to the poems and people that have left an impression, experimenting with styles and voices that have lingered in his mind. He has gathered these pieces in a striking book of poems that channels poets from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath and also calls upon for inspiration jazz standards, Freudian questionnaires, and astrological profiles. 

Daniel Nester is an essayist, poet, journalist, editor, teacher, and Queen fan. He is the author most recently of Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects. His previous books include How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull, 2010), God Save My Queen I and II, and The Incredible Sestina Anthology, which he edited. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, Buzzfeed, The Atlantic, and American Poetry Review, and collected in Best American Poetry, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and Now Write! Nonfiction. He is associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. 

Susan Comninos is a freelance arts journalist and poet. Her book reviews, author profiles and trend stories have appeared in The Atlantic Online, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor and Jewish Daily Forward, among others. Her poetry’s most recently appeared in literary journals including Rattle, Harvard Review Online, Subtropics, TriQuarterly, Quarterly West, The Cortland Review, Nashville Review, The Common, Hobart and Southern Humanities Review. In 2010, she won the Yehuda Halevi Poetry Contest run by Tablet. Last year, she won a Tishman Review Staff Favorite prize, a VQR Writers’ Conference Scholarship award and a Poets Respond (to the news) contest run by Rattle. She has taught at The University of Michigan, RPI, Schenectady JCC, Temple Sinai in Saratoga and The Arts Center for the Capital Region.

"Tangerine" on the dance floor, courtesy of Jimmy Dorsey, Bob Eberly, and Helen O'Connell

 

Alternate lyrics in Bob Eberly's portion of the song. Mercer wrote them.  -- DL