The Best American Poetry

Barbra Streisand sings Avinu Malkeinu

On the eve of Yom Kippur listen to Barbra Streisand 

 

"Did I Miss Anything?" [by Tom Wayman]

The one time this question is OK to ask is when you are chastised

by your department chairperson because you have missed a faculty meeting

devoted to bitching about the athletes in the class who didn't even know

X tweeted Y about Z and there's something spooky abut ninety degree weather

in Autumn and tell ma about one good thing the human race has done, just one!

 

For all other instances of "Did I miss anything" I recommend this poem by Tom Wayman -- DL 

Did I Miss Anything?

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

     Everything. I gave an exam worth
     40 percent of the grade for this term
     and assigned some reading due today
     on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
     worth 50 percent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

     Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
     a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
     or other heavenly being appeared
     and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
     to attain divine wisdom in this life and
     the hereafter
     This is the last time the class will meet
     before we disperse to bring the good news to all people  on earth.

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

     Everything. Contained in this classroom
     is a microcosm of human experience
     assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
     This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered

     but it was one place

     And you weren’t here

—Tom Wayman

 from Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools, Hosted by Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2001-2003

Mixed media artist Emilie Chaix: expressing creativity and living creatively

The mixed-media painter and sculpteur Emilie Chaix will probably be surprised to learn that a chat with her nearly two years ago shook my verities, showing that my modest hopes for personal evolution were too modest and my own slowness to change has been a measure of nothing but myself.

My checkered career of silent desperation has of course been mostly lived by according most space in it to my knot of unplumbable personal fears.

The late Bob, the godless engineer-philosopher appointed to dress my infant nakedness in sturdy shoes, wool trousers and button-down shirts, once summed up, as only the Ohio-born can, what have become my views on the possibility of positive change, evolution and creativity. Theatrically wiping his brow, he caught my eye, asked for the crescent wrench and, with casual finality, remarked, “What of Happiness, Trace?” and went back to whatever dreary household task he had in hand.

Obviously, since then, mostly, filial piety oblige, I have been –  meetings with mixed-media artists notwithstanding, and in the absence of a Messiah promulgating true low-fat ice-cream – very, very modest in my hopes for personal evolution and better, changed, states and skeptical, too. And, according to some, too damnably slow to change intolerable situations, too.

All the same, since Chaix succeeds both in expressing creativity as art and in living creatively (keeping in mind that I don’t think all creative expression is art and I do think we all should strive towards living creatively) these fixed views of mine require some revision.

As far as I can see, Chaix must be counted of the “Aquarians”, of those who, unlike myself, were born while Yahweh was adjusting his kippah and who then grew to adulthood while Dad was too concentrated on snaking out the toilet to notice the hopeful twittering in the peanut gallery.

Chaix and her work came to my attention because I saw two radically different sides to it in two widely separated places on the same day, while walking with Fifi, Karine’s sister and my dear friend. Fifi, for whom only steamed vegetables can maintain the steel-whip muscles that enclose her, who sleeps four hours a night and has apparently made an energy pact with the demonic powers, walked me in under 30 minutes – she was in heels – from the Porte de Champerret, where we met Chaix and her artistic production, to the top of Montmartre, where we encountered, quite by chance, in a shop

window, Chaix’s haute couture work.

Fifi thought I should look into it, so I did.

Chaix’s stand-alone art creations, like her former work on designer accessories, are composed in varied media – including wood, textile, bone, paint, collage  –  with a heavy use of textures – and featuring much textile. Her art uses mostly natural colorations, striking me, in person, as very much “sea-born…”

I want to say “primitive” – but “primitive” could be taken to imply the “naïve” or the “ritual-tribal” art borrowings used in luxury accessories. Chaix’s creative inspiration is, I think, rather, to look for the esthetic in our corporal interior. It’s an esthetic of “reptilian brain”, in the sense of “original” or “originating” forms and movements, rather than other, previously-developed, esthetics.

In a visit to Chaix’s workshop in Montreuil, an inner-ring city where many Paris artists now live and work – I asked her to tell me a little bit about how her evolution and change came about.

Like almost all French people, I understand, she began adult life by being winnowed out of an aspirational or vocational course of action by something academic and hopelessly competitive.

For her, Chaix says, the winnower took the form of a philosophy teacher who suspected her of wanting to be a journalist.

So, like most of us, she fell back on real experience and figured something out.

She first went to work at the Maison des écrivains et de la littérature, where she learned a proper distaste for indoor work at fixed hours. She was also lucky enough to learn early to avoid the exquisite pain of being under the thumb of a jerk.  

Then, one day, Chaix tells me, her Grandmother taught her to embroider.

She never looked back. From that day, she began working with embroidery, soon becoming a market-recognized creator.

For over 10 years she made embroidery for the wedding dresses of the likes of Madonna as well as more than 500 jewelry pieces for the haute couture houses.

Then she started to feel she was running in place. She called time out although the jewelry job was more than paying the rent.

Trying to find what motivated her decision, Chaix generally down-played the inequalities involved in the employer-employee relation, where any artistic recognition redounds to the brand-marketer, not to the actual creator.

She points rather to upbringing, physical resistance and taste.

She says that, as a child living much among and with the creations of the legendary Niki de Saint Phalle, the former wife of her stepfather, she had come to take it for granted that a woman could live independently on her production, whatever that might be.

So, in her head, at least, whatever she might decide to do in terms of artistic creation seemed, d’emblée, legitimate.

And then, she says, there is real labor involved in sewing. As any ordinary seamstress can tell you, bending over a table and working with your brains and hands is trying; add production demands and deadlines and it’s a physical challenge.

However, Chaix says, when all is said and done, the sense of going nowhere is a greater spur to trying to go somewhere than anything else.

All things considered, Chaix, who keeps up her ties with haute couture, feels the change has worked out well enough.

Just discovering, for example, that it is important to create, à la Carl Rogers, a “personal-universal” space justifies the change. We are sitting face-to-face in her workshop. A casual wave of her hand invites me to look around me.

Chaix’s creations, as well as knickknacks and bric-à-brac, people the place.

She says that when she created this little personal-universal world for herself, she felt she was right. And feeling right in space and time is at the heart of creation and also at the heart of living.

It doesn’t matter, Chaix concludes, if this personal-universal world intersects in any way with the “shared” world: the personal will inevitably become universal and, as some aspiring American magnate or another has also said, creative endeavor is a question of working, working, working.

Better to please yourself, then, when all is said and done.

Images

1."Poursuite" , sculpture, H66 x L38 x P 12 cm (wood, textile), 2014.Chaix’s esthetic strikes me as “bio-genetic movement”, in the sense of “original” or “originating” forms and movements.

2. Less than an hour after admiring her artistic production at a contemporary art show at the Porte de Champerret, Fifi and I ran into Emilie Chaix’s striking designer work in a shop window on Montmartre, the “Hill of Martyrs”

3. "Danse macabre", sculpture, H 53 x l21 x P33 cm (wood, textile, bone, paint...), 2015 : Chaix’s stand-alone art creations, like her former work on designer accessories, are composed in varied media – including, as in this piece, wood, textile, bone, paint, collage  –  with a heavy use of textures – and featuring much textile

4. "A dormir debout", 30 x 40 cm (aquarelle, ink, collage), 2016. All things considered, Chaix, who keeps up her personal ties with haute couture, feels the change has worked out well enough.

"What's My Line?" (1965): When the mystery guest was the heavyweight champion of the world

The one and only. . .identified as both Cassius Clay and Muhammad Alli. . . with a squeaky voice. . .and with commercials starring the leads of a successful sit-com of the period, Betwitched

 

It All Depends on You (Sinatra in 1949) [by David Lehman]

This is the best version. . .Echt Sinatra. Notice the be-bop scat in the second go-round. Yeah, I know the conventional wisdom has it that scatting is not his strong suit. Nevertheless he improvised the most famous scat line in all of popular music. You know: doobie doobie doo. da da da dee .da. . . .

 

"Take the A Train" (1939) with the Duke & band (in 1944)

 

 

Fragments 148-156 from Selected Squibs [by Alan Ziegler]

148. A child watches with delight as the worker bangs away at plaster: loud noise, destruction, making a mess—and it’s all right with everyone.

149. In our first stay in Paris, each night I stop at La Tonnelle, the grocery store across the street, where I can never get the right money to the grizzled man in the apron. I have taken to holding out my hand with all my coins, a beggar in reverse. He riffles through and selects the correct change, and I shrug and say, “Merci, désolé.” Tonight all I have is a 50 franc note (with a picture of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), and he says his first English words to me: “You don’t have seis francs?!” He gives me back 44 francs in various sizes, shapes, and textures: silver, gold, silver and gold. I study them before I go to sleep, and practice fishing by feel through my pocket for different combinations. The next night I place two large bottles of Badoit on the counter, reach into my pocket, and hand the grizzled man several coins adding to18 francs. He counts with his eyes, smiles, and bows.

150. Zasu Pitts.

151. In the 1970s, one of my roommates works for EMS but never talks about what he does. One night, we’re all watching the local news. The reporter describes a triple murder in the Bronx, and says, “One of the victims was dead at the scene, the other two died at the hospital.” “Two were dead at the scene,” my roommate says under his breath, “and the other one died in the ambulance.”

152. Orson Welles in Touch of Evil: “Well, didn't you bring me any donuts [beat] or sweet rolls?”

153. Ben Kingsley in Betrayal: “Ah. Yes. I thought it might be something like that, something along those lines.”

154. Feeling miserable about myself and everything I stand for and miserable in the March bone-chill that permeates my marrow, I make my way to the front of the 104 bus dreading the walk up the hill against the wind. I feel a sting on my back of my head and turn to see a deranged man eyeing me with disdain. I process the sensation and realize I have just been whacked upside the head. I stare him down. “What took you so long?” I ask, and descend into the bitter night.

155. Librarian to Briscoe and Curtis on Law and Order: “Verlaine popped Rimbaud. Paul loved Arthur. Paul also loved Matilda. It was a whole mess. The French—what do you expect?.... If you really want decadent, I’d stick with Baudelaire.”

156. Baudelaire: “Orgy is not the sister of inspiration; inspiration is absolutely the sister of daily effort.”

Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s one-minute dance numbers: “towards a sweeter way of living” [by Paul Tracy Danison]

Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s 60-second micro-political resistance videos open doors, bring out the poetic resonance of everyday life

Number. House number. Queue number. Social security number. Numbered bank accounts… What’s in a name, indeed.

What’s in a number?

Our days are numbered.

Here are the numbers for one of our more recent beasts: On 7 January 2015, 2 perps, previously reduced from petty criminality to cruel idiocy by religious fanaticism, shot up the premises of the weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, murdering in cold blood the 12 people they found there. They took off and went into hiding. The next day, another perp, presulably working in tandem with the two others, murdered 1 unwary trainee police woman. The next day, 9 January 2015, he went to a specialty supermarket and slaughtered, gangland execution-style, 4 shoppers – taking care to describe them as “Jews” – in the process taking more than 20 hostages. All 3 murderers were killed by special police on 9 January 2017, 2 of them in a building where they had holed-up, 1 at the scene of his crimes, at about 5.15 pm.

On 14 January 2015, Charlie Hebdo published as usual, going from its usual 60,000 copies to 7.5 million and Nathalie Vadori-Gauthier started dancing one minute a day, she says, to “resist barbary” with an act of “poetic resistance”, which will continue until 10 October 2017; at the time, she did not envisage an end. Each dance is posted on video and archived on the Une minute de dance par jour site.

 “Resistance”, if I understand Vadori-Gauthier, means affirming one set of values in the face of another. In my own mind, in face of nihilistic hostility, the only sensible answer is throw yourself at it, fists and feet flailing. Again, Vadori-Gauthier, following Nietzche, believes “the day is lost if one has not danced at least once.”

One moment of representation of a representation represented in performance by Nadia Vadori-Gauthier

Dancing 1 minute each day, she says, is an act of positive resistance for liberty in two ways, Vadori-Gauthier says. “It affirms the body” in a society that tends to dismiss it in favor of a narrow definition of mind and “it affirms the female body in the face of the patriarchy’s effort to define then control it.”

Besides, she says, dancing is something that she has been able do herself, alone, while being with us all: it is a “micro-political gesture”, a tiny drop of water on the stone of Moloch. At any minute the water, against all expectation, will pierce the stone through.

Vadori-Gauthier believes “poetry is life living”. The body is always real, like the weather, she says, and “dance is poetry’s port of entry; dancing leads to connection.” Above and beyond the political gesture, she began dancing as a contribution to our co-evolution towards “a sweeter way of living.”

“Une minute de dance par jour” will stop at the 1001^st minute, at the 16.683^rd hour – she says 6 hours of preparation lies behind each video number, so also at the 1001^st workday –  on the 10 October 2017. Vadori-Gauthier has not yet decided whether the 1001^st performance will be a denouement, a consequence, a result, a look forward or a look back, inside, outside, solo or plural. The pre-finale, dance 1000, will be 9 October 2017 at 8 pm, will however, include all those who have taken part in the dance until then. In the days that follow the finale, Vadori-Gauthier’s looking forward to working on dance on its “vibratory” side – "our bones shine," she says. Stay tuned.

The dance video archive of Une minute de dance par jour – nicely organized by themes and place, mostly – is a

Nadia Vadori-Gauthier performing a possible archiving performance for the performance archive

fantastic resource.

Vadori-Gauthier’s dance numbers have been and will continue to be, up until the 10 October finale, at least, sometimes spontaneous – one one-minute rush from a number of danced minutes – sometimes spontaneously reworked, sometimes made by design. Sometimes the dance is accompanied with music, sometimes without, sometimes in unexpected places – which explains why disembodied security people seem always to say “Stop dancing like that” – this Vadori-Gauthier woman knows a lot of dances, but apparently not all of them. Sometimes a dance is solo Vadori-Gauthier, sometimes her together, with friends or strangers.

The dances wind up covering every conceivable condition and mood, I think, that can be represented by a single, good-humored, sincere human being.  Vadori-Gauthier’s fantastically accurate at showing what words mean: former President François Hollande’s announcement that he’ll not seek re-election, for instance, is quite simply a piece of dancing genius.

Above and beyond this lovely idea of poetic resistance through dance and the loveliness of many of the performances, the archive, à la Blaise Pascale, might constitute a kind of videoed Pensées… a Gestes de ressentis (“Deeds of feeling”) you might say, a dictionary of representation of mood and feeling. And as well as a dictionary of gesture, the video archive is a tour guide,  taking you on one of the most intimate tours of Paris you can take, not just through places but through the news and ideas and emotions of 3 years.

The following dances were the 20 videos most liked on Facebook over the past 3 years, out of a total of 893, 000 views

1. 29 November 2015 - dance 320 – CRS Riot police during a demonstration for the climate accords

2. 22 March 2016 - dance 434 – Brussels terrorist attack

3. 16 April 2017 - dance 824 – support for homosexuals in Chechnya

4. 5 June 2016 - dance 509 – Raphael, a handicapped dancer

5. 23 January 2016 - dance 375 – the Calais immigrant “Jungle” encampment
6. 13 December 2015 - dance 334 – polling station

7. 7 June 2017 - dance 876 – a chemotherapy patient in a hospital

8. 27 May 2016 - dance 500 – MCC with Théo Lawrence and a passing minister
9. 24 February 2016 - dance 407 – Little girl
10. 8 January 2017 - dance 726 – 13th arrondissement, Paris, violoncello

11. 15 November 2015 - dance 306 – Bells tolling at Notre-Dame

12. 30 May 2017 - dance 668 – 13th arrondissement, Paris
13. 7 January 2017 - dance 725 – Charlie, 2 years old
14. 21 December 2016 - dance 708 – Retirement home
15. 1 July 2017 - dance 900 – Simone Veil (former minister, feminist, author of abortion rights law)
16. 24 January 2017 – dance 742 -ballroom

17. 10 April 2017 – dance 818 – the Butte aux Cailles neighborhood, 13th arrondissement, Paris

18. 5 January 2017 – dance 723 – Christmas tree on the sidewalk
19. 18 January 2017 – dance 736 – Cold snap
20. 31 January 2017 – dance 749 – Francine, 94 years old

Une minute de dance par jour has been supported by Paris Reseau Danse, L'Etoile du nord, Micadanses-ADDP, Le Regard du cygne performance studio and the City of Paris. 

Red Smith Hits It Out of the Park, with Roger Angell's comments [by David Lehman]

Red Smith would never have predicted that the illustrious Library of America would collect the columns he typed on short deadlines for the New York Herald Tribune, publish them lovingly, and dub him "America's greatest sportswriter." The involvement of the Library of America -- which has published two volumes by A. J. Liebling, including The Sweet Science, his masterly book on boxing -- reflects the growing recognition of sportswriting as a craft and Smith's elevated standing in the scribe's fraternity. 

Smith sat in the press box and, in his phrase, "opened a vein" when it came time to stare at the typewriter. Barely minutes had gone by since Bobby Thomson won the 1951 pennant for the Giants ("Reality has strangled invention"), or Rocky Marciano knocked out Archie Moore (Rocky threw "a left that made him curtsy like a convent girl"), or Secretariat pulled away from the field at Belmont on my birthday in 1973 ("It seems a little greedy to win by thirty-one lengths," the horse's owner said), or the Yankees beat the Dodgers for their fifth World Championship in a row twenty years earlier. The title of the last piece mentioned, a quote pulled from the piece (and not, alas, the original headline), is a beauty: "Like Rooting for U. S Steel."  And I wondered whether the Godfather auteurs remembered this line about the New York Yankees and their fans when they had Hyman Roth -- celebrating his birthday in Cuba -- say "Michael, we're bigger than U. S. Steel."

It has been a long time since U. S. Steel was the measure of power, size, and importance, and American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith (edited by Daniel Okrent) comes from that time as remote from us and filled with nostalgic glamour as the early seasons of Mad Men. You could, if you were a lazier columnist than Smith, call it the golden age of American sport; certainly it might have seemed that way to a New Yorker spoiled by having three major league teams within subway distance. Joe DiMaggio patrolled center field for the Yankees, and when he stepped down, Mickey Mantle came along to take his place. Willie Mays played center for the Giants, who, with Leo Durocher at the helm ("a controversial guy, and that may be the the understatement of the decade"), were the unlikely victors of a four-game World Series sweep of Cleveland in 1954. Sugar Ray Robinson, the best fighter "pound for pound" in any weight class, performed regularly at the Garden. Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, made West Point a college football powerhouse. Between 1949 and 1960, Casey Stengel managed the Yankees to ten pennants in twelve years. In 1947, Branch Rickey ("the greatest of all double-talk monologists") put a Dodger uniform on Jackie Robinson and revolutionized baseball.

Smith made an art of deadline sportswriting. He was especially handy with a simile. When Sugar Ray was past his prime, in one of the Carmen Basilio bouts, Smith conjectures: "Maybe, like an aging shortstop, he can no longer go to his right." Or consider these sentences from his piece about the 1947 World Series game in which the Dodgers' Cookie Lavagetto ruined the Yankees' Floyd Bevens's no-hit bid with a bottom-of-the-ninth game-winning two-out double. "In the third [inning] Johnny Lindell caught Jackie Robinson's foul fly like Doc Blanchard hitting the Notre Dame line and came to his feet unbruised. In the fourth Joe DiMaggio caught Gene Hermanski's monstrous drive like a well-fed banquet guest picking his teeth." In the same game, Tommy Henrich of the Yankees took a hit away from Hermanski: "Henrich backed against the board and leaped either four or fourteen feet into the air. He stayed aloft so long he looked like an empty uniform hanging in its locker. When he came down he had the ball."

To write for a newspaper requires a strict brevity of means. It takes artistry to write in short paragraphs, as in this one about Brooklyn southpaw Carl Erskine, hero of game five of the 1952 World Series: "Erskine is an agreeable young man with good habits and an equally good overhand curve. He does not drink, does not smoke, and does not choke in the clutch. On out-of-town business trips, while his playmates sit in the hotel lobby waiting for somebody to discard a newspaper, he visits art museums." There is wit in Smith's parallel structures. but what I like most is this glimpse into road-trip life, circa 1952.

Smith has his sour moments. He is down on Jersey Joe Walcott (for being old) and Ted Williams (for spitting his displeasure with the fans), He is right to voice a city's frustration and anguish when the Dodgers and Giants left for the West Coast at the end of the 1957 season. Their departure from New York "is an unrelieved calamity, a grievous loss to the city and to baseball, a shattering blow to the prestige of the National League, an indictment of the men operating the clubs and the men governing the city." Two years later, a certain amount of revisionism has taken hold. Baseball's West Coast expansion "was a development long overdue and greatly to be desired, but effected in an atmosphere of deceitful contriving which left the game wearing the dollar sign like a brand."

American Pastimes has been edited, and is introduced, with exemplary intelligence by Daniel Okrent. Chapter headings are wonderful. What had been "Nice Guys Finish" -- the piece about the exodus of the Dodgers and Giants to the Pacific Coast -- now sports the title "East Goes West and League Goes South." There is one error, no doubt the product of an oversight, that should be fixed in the next printing: In an October 1966 piece recollecting Fridays in previous decades at Madison Square Garden, Smith would never have referred to "Rocky Marciano's three wars with Tony Zale." It was a completely different Rocky, Graziano, a middleweight, who did battle with Zale. I make a point of it because Rocky Graziano was the first prize-fighter to take my fancy: I was eight years old and saw Somebody Up There Likes Me with my parents and sisters at a drive-in movie. Paul Newman played Graziano.

The sportswriter's occupational risk is hyperbole, and Smith is not exempt. Of Whirlaway, winner of the racing's Triple Crown the 1941, Smith writes, the colt "was Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones -- not just a champion but" -- you finish the sentence. The remarkable thing is how few lapses there are in such a long career.

Like Liebling, Red Smith writes with particular verve about Marciano. The undefeated heavyweight champion was "victorious, invincible, indestructible." But it is DiMaggio who best fits Smith's idea of the heroic athlete, the demigod who does everything with majesty and grace -- and is therefore the proper model for a prose stylist, doing his job with consistency and great skill and without ostentation or temperament. In a game against the Red Sox in 1950, Bobby Doerr hit what looked to be a sure double when "Joe raced in on a long angle to his left, thrust out his glove, palm up like a landlord taking a payoff under the table." When Joe retired in October 1951: "the simple, flat fact [is] that the greatest ballplayer of our day and one of the greatest of any day quit baseball yesterday." The last sentence in the last column Smith ever wrote was something he told himself whenever he felt disappointed with the current crop of ballplayers: "Some day there would be another Joe DiMaggio."

-- David Lehman

This post appeared originally on our blog on June 21, 2013.

*

Roger Angell writes that Red Smith "was a hero of mine, long ago, because he always made it clear that it was OK for sports fans be smart and educated enough to own an extended vocabulary. and also to appreciate and, above all, enjoy sports. To be like him, that is.  He was serious about this but never took himself seriously.  He was also (by the way) a heavy drinker and often filed copy with seriously shaking hands.

"My only beef about your review is that you omitted Red's weird ending in that column about that Bevans-Lavagetto near no-hitter: a line saying  that the unhappiest man in North America when the tilt ended was a sportswriter there with a broken "v" on his typewriter, which made it it impossible for him to write either of those names.  This was Red himself---he told me later that the "v" snapped off along about the fifth inning and flew like an escaping sparrow out of his Smith-Corona and out of sight over the lip of the pressbox.

 

"Thanks for bringing this all back.  I've got the Okrent collection and now I'll actually read it."

 

*

For Mitch Sisskind's response, click here. 

-- DL

"nothing is complete now without architecture" [by Andrei Codrescu]

My lovely freedom my little chestnut blinking your one eye
bring back to me a quarter of a century of missing melancholia.
For each Fall I missed there was a drought of wistfulness
as if I drank my own sweat instead of eyes-shut naked on
the balcony I just saw lowered in its entirety by a super-crane
operated by Hart Crane in the new Manhattan fantasy of drafting
its new skyline that to its credit and to Hart’s allows for better
places for jumping from its heights. How thoughtful. Suicide
must be given beautiful places to be conducted from. 
Personal esthetics aside the city owes this much to its surplus
of sensitives. I don’t owe anyone any money, I’m a jewel
in this city making itself like all America out of the future that
will happen whatever the state of your soul bank account or
opinion. I can go into business now: there are so many books.
They are all about the future when no one will read them.
The ones I have written can by themselves tower above us.
To the bricks I say don’t worry about me I’m well prepared

-- Andrei Codrescu

Save the Date: September 28, 2017 - The Best American Poetry 2017 Launch Reading

cover image (c) Anna Cypra Oliver

 

Thursday, September 28 at 7 PM - 9 PM

The Auditorium at The New School

66 W 12th St, New York, New York 10011

 

Every year, poets travel from near and far to celebrate the launch of the popular annual anthology. This is your chance to hear poems selected by guest editor Natasha Tretheway and to have the books signed by contributors. Series editor David Lehman will introduce the 2017 volume with readings by the following contributors: Dan Albergotti, Mary Jo Bang, David Barber, Bruce Bond, Jericho Brown, Allison Cobb, Carl Dennis, Vievee Francis, Jeffrey Harrison, W. J. Herbert, David Brendan Hopes, John James, Rodney Jones, Meg Kearney, John Koethe, Jamaal May, Judson Mitcham, John Murillo, Joyce Carol Oates, Sharon Olds, Matthew Olzmann, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Taije Silverman, Emily Van Kley, Crystal Williams, and Monica Youn. Lehman will also read the late John Ashbery's poem fr om the volume.

Sponsored by The New School's Creative Writing Program.

Free.

 

Fragments 137-147 from Selected Squibs [by Alan Ziegler]

137. In 1957 Bobby Darin introduced me to Paul Anka.

138. In 1875 Stéphane Mallarmé, carrying a large portfolio, wanders the streets of London looking for Algernon Swinburne, intent on discussing their shared admiration for Edgar Allan Poe. In the portfolio is Mallarmé’s translation of “The Raven” and illustrations by Eduoard Manet.

139. Two things my mother used to say: “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” and “Like this you kill a day.” “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken” is attributed to John Buchan in 1919, and later appropriated into a song made famous by Faron Young and Maurice Chevalier. “Like this you kill a day” seems to be hers.

140. You are so close to the way I want someone to look that I see you different when not around. Then you show up and I think, “What have you done to yourself?”

141. Francis Williams—who played trumpet with Duke Ellington—started out as a pianist in his hometown, Toledo. Williams thought he was pretty good until he met a neighbor who was so much better. Realizing he wasn’t even the best in the neighborhood, Williams changed instruments. His neighbor’s name was Art Tatum.

142. While my dentist waits for his assistant to join us for a procedure, we start exchanging reminiscences, having lived through some common times. Eventually he realizes the assistant has been in the room for several minutes, silently impatient. “Stories,” he explains to her with a sweet, wan smile. “Stories.”

143. If Yankee Stadium had no fences, would a ball that lands in Montreal be fair or foul?

144. Charles Laughton was plagued by self-doubt, especially during the 1937 filming of I, Claudius, which was never completed. Laughton would put his head in co-star Merle Oberon’s lap and weep, “I can’t find my character. I can’t find the man.” Years later, one of the other actors lamented that Laughton “needed sun and got frost” from the director.

145. Who among you agrees that Larry Keating is an underrated comic actor?

146. Hemingway wrote in the Closerie de Lilas in Paris, equipped with bluebacked notebooks, pencils, and a pencil sharpener on a marble-topped table; he carried a horse chestnut and a real rabbit’s foot in his right pocket for luck. Peter Altenberg wrote at Café Central in Vienna, which he used as his mailing address; his presence continues to be felt—and seen—in the form of a dapper statue seated at a table. In the 1920s, Borges spent Saturday evenings at tertulias hosted by Macedonio Fernández at Café Perla in Buenos Aires.

147. Mid-winter, late Sixties, late-night Adirondack Trailways to Schenectady. A teenager strums a guitar across from me. We talk music and he offers his guitar. I strum an E Major Seventh easing into an A Major Seventh, over and over. “Whoa, what was that!?” “Magic Major Sevenths,” and he strums them, over and over. Years later I see his name listed as a sideman on an album. No doubt he thinks of me fondly and often.

Andrew Epstein's Locus Solus (The Blog) [by David Lehman]

The New York School of poetry has long merited a blog or three of its own, and in Locus Solus, edited and written by Andrew Epstein, we who follow the lives and words of Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler and all the great others affiliated with them, we have a superb resource. The name of the blog is taken from the remarkable novel by Raymond Roussel, whom Ashbery and Koch and Trevor Winkfield have done so much to promote to an initially indifferent public. The title has a further ring inasmuch as Ashbery, who toyed with the idea of writing a dissertation on Roussel, grew up in Sodus, New York, a fact not lost upon the editors of Locus Solus, one of the two greatest avant-garde literary magazines of the early 1960s. The editors -- Ashbery, Koch, schuyler, and Harry Mathews -- sometimes called it "Locus Sodus" in their playful transatlantic correspondence.

Here is a splendid piece Andrew Epstein posted about Karin Roffman's superb biography of JA's early years. I'll quote a paragraph or three below. -- DL

<<<
~ The book includes a few more details about Auden and Ashbery that were new to me: six years later, Auden would of course choose Ashbery’s manuscript for the Yale Younger Poets Prize (passing over Frank O’Hara’s manuscript in the process), an award which led to the publication of Ashbery’s first book.  That much is known, but apparently it was Auden “who insisted he pick a title from one of the poems in the volume, and thought Some Trees best, a decision about which John was ambivalent.”  Ashbery informed Roffman in an interview that he “had included his best experimental poems in the manuscript, but Auden removed any poem that had objectionable language, including ‘White’ (because of ‘masturbation’) and “Lieutenant Primrose” (because of ‘farting’).  Ashbery accepted all Auden’s changes, but he privately objected.”

Also, as is well-known, Ashbery wasn’t crazy about the begrudging introduction Auden wrote for Some Trees.  Roffman suggests Ashbery’s displeasure may have gotten back to Auden himself, who — she reports for the first time — once told a friend that Ashbery was “‘the most ambitious person’ he had ever  known,” which, given Auden’s circle of acquaintances, is saying something…

This is just a glimpse of the many gems of literary gossip and new insights that abound in this biography.  As I said in my review, “The Songs We Know Best offers up a feast of new details, documents and colorful anecdotes that will be foundational for any future understanding of Ashbery.” >>>

Down the rabbit hole of literary enjoyment [by Alice Spiegel]

Alice slid down the cute and stopped along the way to enjoy

-- the poetry of F. T. Prince, represented with three exemplary poems, on Tom Clark's blog

-- a profile of Mets' announcer Gary Cohen, the best play-by-play man in baseball today

-- Notice that the caption on the TV had it that "Game of Thrones" was not eligible of this year's holocaust." With the sound turned off, I wondered whether it was "telecast" that was meant?

-- an interview with French scholar Vincent Debierre of the Unversity of Lyons: the subject, deconstruction; the guest, David Lehman.

-- Alice thought about Stanley Fish's statement that as a professor and scholar he was obliged not to speak the truth but to be interesting. Was this statement an example? 

-- Kafka: "A melancholy conclusion. It turns lying into a universal principle." (The Trial)

-- Do you think deconstruction and its strategies as adopted in various disciplines has anything to do with the emergence of "fakery" and the underlying debate on what constitutes truth and falsehood?

-- Did you write a poem called "Fuck You, Foucault"? Yes, I did. It was published in Hanging Loose, the new issue of which has some wonderful stuff by such poets as Robert Hershon and Terence Winch.

-- Aren't Alan Ziegler's "squibs" swell?

-- Whether you have seen "La La Land," or not, the idea that its box office and critical success aroused controversy will seem either a foggy memory or a strange piece of info. But it did, and for its explication, and for excellent insights along the way about the art of Hollywood musicals, you can do no better than read Geoffrey O'Brien's essay "Let's Face the Music and Dance" in The New York Review of Books, April 6, 2017.

-- Then Alice, gainfully employed, had to go back to work.

on http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2017/09/ft-prince-three-poems-mimicry.html

Groucho joins John Daly, Bennett A.Cerf, Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis, et al, on "What's My Line?" (1959)

Hooray for live television. On this week's episode of "What's My Line?", Groucho joins the panelists: Of one guest whsoe occupation must be guessed he asks, "Are you a corrupt politician? Or am I being redundant?" As tis is an era of decorum, the double entendre flourishes. "What a Freudian panel this is!"

On another evening, when Alfred Hitchcock was featured, the blindfolded Bennett Cerf, Random House publisher and What's My LIne? regular, asked whether the guest was a gentleman. "Sometimes," Hitchcock replied. The new movie he was promoting was Rear Window.  The names of Jimmy [Stewart] and Grace Kelly are dropped. The third guest that evening was Marilyn Monroe's dramatic coach. The producers did a terrific job that evening. The panelists -- Random House publisher Bennett Cerf,  NY Journal American columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, and actress Arlene Francis, one of the most likeable gals in show business..

Too bad the show went off the air before Mark Strand could have revealed his poetic line. -- DL

 and that should put you in the right frame of mind for this performance, a "classic by Mendel Picasso":

 And this: 

 

Jerome Sala Positively Shines in "Posit" [by David Lehman]

In the December 2016  issue of POSIT, Susan Lewis's magazine, you'll find a Jerome Sala poem that reflects the brilliance of his mind confronting the actualities of culture. In "To 'Content," Jerome takes on that big important word that looms so large in the lives of writers who may become content-providers in the not so distant future, like maybe 2018.  Here's a cascade-like stanza:

<<
like Marx’s ‘value’
made labor
between a bricklayer
a dog walker
a shoeshine boy
and an atomic scientist
equivalent
if translated into proportionate measure
of time, effort and general difficulty
or ease
so you
like Marx’s dad
Hegel
turn quality
into quantity
helping to accomplish
in your case
not the discovery of the ‘Absolute’
but the absolutely
complete
commodification
of all
human
and
artificial
minds!
>>>

For the whole of Jerome's poem, click here -- and here for the rest of this sparkling issue. And then read the new issue (the cover of which adorns this post) with work by Charles Borkhuis and Patty Seyburn. The issue is dedicated to the late John Ashbery. Susan Lewis writes in her editor's note, "all of the work in this issue offers 'what we need now:' these 'unlikely / Challenger[s] pounding on the gates of an amazed / Castle' (“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”). So I hope you’ll honor his passing by reading, or re-reading, his work — and theirs." -- DL

Fragments 113-135 from Selected Squibs [by Alan Ziegler]

113. My paternal grandfather, Philip Ziegler, AKA: Crookedneck, Sam Ziegler, Ziggie, Philip Abrams, Philip Seigel, Philip Zeigler.

114. On November 6, 1916 (four years before my father was born), my grandfather and a crony named Finkel were arrested by Officer O’Toole for Burglary 3^rd. On January 19, 1917, they were sentenced by Judge Rosalsky to an Indeterminate term in the New York Penitentiary. Coincidentally, the judge was director of the Hawthorne School, where Finkel had gone: “Now you have thrown away the opportunity of your life, Finkel.” My Jewish grandfather put down his religion as Catholic.

115. On April 23, 1918 (two years before my father was born), my grandfather was arrested in The Bronx by Officers Armstrong and Brunchner for Burglary. On May 5, he received a suspended sentence by Judge Gibbs in Bronx County Court.

116. On November 1, 1919 (one year before my father was born), my grandfather was arrested in the 33^rd Precinct, Manhattan, by Officer Gamble, for Assault and Robbery. On November 3, Magistrate Douras discharged him.

117. On September 17, 1922 (my father was almost two-years-old), Officer Lamour arrested him for burglary in the 39^th Precinct. The next day, Magistrate Oberwager discharged him. The following day, Officer Lamour arrested him again for burglary in the 39^th Precinct. Three days later, Magistrate Oberwager again discharged him.

118. On December 6, 1922 (my father was two-years-old), my grandfather was arrested for Grand Larceny. On December 9, the charges were dismissed.

119. On December 9, 1923 (my father was three-years-old), my grandfather was arrested in The Bronx for Burglary. The charges were dismissed.

120. On August 4, 1924 (two months before my father’s fourth birthday), using the name Philip Seigel, my grandfather was arrested by Officer Reilly from the Safe and Loft Squad in Manhattan for Attempted Robbery in the 1^st degree. On November 21, 1924 (a month after my father’s fourth birthday), he was sentenced to four and a half years at Sing Sing by Judge Collins of the Court of General Sessions.

121. Sometimes my grandmother took my father along to visit his father “in college.”

122. On August 12, 1928 (two months before my father’s eighth birthday), spelling his last name Zeigler, my grandfather was arrested in Saratoga Springs as a Suspicious Person. Three days later, the charges were dismissed.

123. On December 6, 1928 (two months after my father’s eighth birthday), again spelling his last name Zeigler, my grandfather was arrested in Manhattan by Officers Casey, McGuire, Braunworth, Hastings, and Levine from the Safe and Loft Squad for Burglary and possession of Burglars Tools. On February 26, 1929, he plea-bargained to Judge Mancuso of the Court of General Sessions and was sentenced to an Indeterminate term at a Penitentiary.

124. My grandfather’s burglars tools included: “four jimmies, two braces, sixteen bits, one hammer, one saw, one screwdriver, one flashlight, one wrench, and two punches.”

125. On May 24, 1932 (my father was eleven), using the name Philip Abrams, my grandfather was arrested for Robbery; the charge was dismissed.

126. On April 18, 1933 (my father was 12), spelling his last name Zeigler, my grandfather was arrested in Toronto for attempted shopbreaking. The charge was withdrawn.

127. On April 27, 1933, spelling his last name Zeigler, he was arrested in Brooklyn for Assault and Robbery by Officer McNally from 62nd Squad; on May 2, Magistrate Haubert dismissed the charges.

128. On September 20, 1933 (three weeks before my father’s 13^th birthday), spelling his last name Zeigler, Officer Dolan, et al, arrested my grandfather for Homicide and Robbery in connection with a bank heist gone wrong. My grandfather was associated with a gang headed by Leonard Scarnici; the gang was also suspected in the O’Connell kidnapping in Albany and questioned in the Lindbergh kidnapping. Eight days later, Magistrate Ford dismissed the charges against my grandfather for lack of evidence (though it may be that he turned on Scarnici).    
     
129. 
     Leonard Scarnici was executed on June 27, 1935. His last words—as he chewed gum and puffed on a cigarette—were: “All I want to say is I want to send a message to the people in Albany, people who double-crossed me up there. I still say I’m a better man than they are. I thank you, warden.”

130. On November 24, 1935 (six weeks after my father’s fifteenth birthday), my grandfather was arrested by Officers Cassidy, Casey, Maguire, and Reynolds from the Safe and Loft Squad in Manhattan for Burglary at the Jewelers Exchange in the Bowery. It was called “the most ambitious jewel plot in metropolitan history”—two million Depression dollars.

131. In newspaper articles my grandfather and his cronies were described as “looking considerably the worse for wear” “after a thorough interrogation which included the most severe ‘mussing up’ given to prisoners at headquarters for years.” Police described “the mob as one of the most dangerous aggregations of all-around crime experts in the east.”

132. According to an editorial in The Nation, this wasn’t a case of some rogue cops letting loose: “In compliance with Commissioner Valentine’s recent order to “muss up” all tough and vicious thieves and gangsters, the New York police on November 23 administered an unmerciful beating to six safe burglars arrested while attempting to break into the upper floors of the Jewelers’ Exchange at 82 Bowery.” The New York Times reported that “the six attempted to fight off their captors in the dark, and when taken to police headquarters soon after showed welts and bruises from the efforts of the detectives in subduing them.”

133. On January 14, 1936, nineteen years after first appearing before Judge Rosalsky, my grandfather, in General Sessions, was sentenced by Rosalsky to five years in Sing Sing. (My grandfather is third from the left—with the handkerchief—in the courtroom photo on top.)

134. There’s more, but I don’t have access to subsequent records.

135. Around 1951 (I was about four), my grandfather showed up by surprise and drove me to Coney Island. My father was furious because his father was such a bad driver. The following year, my grandfather was killed in a car wreck in Waycross, Georgia.
     
136. 

 

Columbo roasts Sinatra . . .and then Don Rickles does it [by David Lehman]

When Lt Columbia received the invitation to appear on the show, his "wife deposited the telegram in their safety deposit box until we can get it framed." Columbo hands Sinatra a bar napkin and gets him to autograph it.  Present are Dean Martin, James Stewart, Milton Berle, ex-governor Ronald Reagan, Gene Kelly, Orson Welles, George Burns. Then. . .Don Rickles takes his turn."Bob Hope couldn't be here tonight. He's looking for a war."

 

 

Some Notes on Hitchcock's Movies [by David Lehman]

Three of Hitchcock's movies are allegories:

"The Lady Vanishes" is an allegory of Western reaction to Nazi aggression as Europe crept to the second World War. On the train there is an appeaser and a pair of know-nothing sportsmen of the British ("Hello, what's this!") sort. Not coincidentally the appeaser is a two-timer in his romantic entanglements, and an indecisive one at that. He is a casualty of the incipient conflict. The sportsmen, good-natured and far from quick to leap to arms, line up on the right side.

"Lifeboat" is an allegory of the allies uniting to defeat the Ubermensch.

"The Birds" is an allegory of nature -- which is either angry and unforgiving, or unpredictable and indifferent to mankind, or possibly even diabolical.

These summaries leave out the love affairs in each of the movies, but in each it is of less significance than some odd detail.

In "The Lady Vanishes," it is the tune the lady sings and makes the young couple memorize.

In "Lifeboat" it is the expensive bracelet that Tallulah Bankhead donates to the cause of landing a fish.

In "The Birds" it is the birds and how quickly they can become menacing, they, the most poetical of creatures if Keats and Shelley and Whitman are to be believed.

Nevertheless it is always useful to remember that Hitchcock had a Catholic upbringing and worked out his guilt issues with the same vexed but poker-faced countenance as Montgomery Clift in "I Confess."

The character who gets clobbered and humiliated in "The Birds" is Tippi Hedren, who, as any TV summary of the movie will state, plays a "San Francisco playgirl," a woman of easy virtue with magnificent hair and a beautiful face. 

Sex is a punishable or guilt-inducing offense except when there's legitimate issue (the offspring in "The Man Who Knew Too Much"), and the beautiful blonde in a Hitchcock movie will be poisoned almost to death (Ingrid Bergman in "Notorious"), will leap to her death from the top of a church tower (Kim Novak in "Vertigo"), or will have to fight off a murderous husband's hired killer (Grace Kelly in "Dial M for Murder").

The fate of Farley Granger's wife in "Strangers on a Train" demonstrates Freud's theory that the wish is equal to the deed as far as its potential for producing guilt. It is tempting to regard the characters played by Granger and Robert Walker as split sides of a divided personality, with Walker as more interesting than Granger (whereas Mr Hyde is less interesting than Dr. Jekyll). 

There are times when the prankster in Hitchcock prevails, as when Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane fight in "Saboteur" and an onlooking couple comments that they must be very much in love -- or when Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint climb to the upper berth and the train penetrates the tunnel at the end of "North by Northwest."

The test of a true Hitchcock fan is whether you like Joel McCrea's speech at the end of "Foreign Correspondent."   

-- Take the Hitchcock quiz part one and part two.

Fragments 103-112 from Selected Squibs [by Alan Ziegler]

103. I am four, watching two big kids play catch on Essex Street in East New York, Brooklyn. An arm thrusts forward and the ball takes flight, soaring toward the rooftops, loses steam, heading for a crash, only to land in the waiting glove. Over and over. I want one. I will always want one.

104. My mother would lay down a towel and help me out of the tub. I’d shuffle the towel across the cold floor, both of us saying “choochie choo.” One night: “Did your father tell you what happened today?” she asks. “Yes, your mother died.” I shuffle towards her, as I say, alone, “Choochie choo.”

105. When one of the older kids in the neighborhood is told he “has no balls,” he replies, “I’ve got two of them, how many do you have?” This is a question I have never asked myself. That night, in the bath, I nervously count. One. Two. And no more.

106. In eighth grade, researching an idea for a science fair submission, I read that a copper wheel can be induced to spin fueled only by a light bulb. I meticulously followed the instructions but could not get it to spin. I turned it in anyway, with a short paper about how it works, knowing it doesn’t. The teacher was fascinated and beckoned me to the front of the classroom. I plugged in the light bulb, hoped for a miracle, and feigned shock when nothing happened. The teacher consoled me, said it’s what science is all about, and gave me an A.

107. I waited and waited for them, but, to be fair to the Monkees, they only said “We may be comin’ to your town.”

108. When I am five, my mother’s dentist gives me a little vial of mercury to play with: “See, it’s metal and it’s liquid!” I love how the silvery substance slinks as I tilt the glass. “Is that safe?” my mother asks. “Of course it is,” the dentist replies. “It’s what we put in your mouth.”

109. A frigid night in a strange town, warmed by the sight of neon squiggles steaming from a cup. Many coffee shops claim they make the World’s Best Coffee. And they do.

110. How many pencils, pens, and markers are stored right now in mugs and other holders? How many are usable? How many have been nonfunctioning for more than a year?

111. “So, what brought you here?” the cab driver in Binghamton asks on the way to the airport. “I gave a talk at the college.” “You gotta be really smart to do that.” “Not really,” I say, modestly. He frowns. “I’m not smart enough to do that.”

112. Peter Yarrow tousled my hair and said “Oh you!”