The Best American Poetry

David Lehman as a Spy [poem by Lucas Smith]

(Ed note: I can't begin to count the number of times I've heard David introduced before a reading. These introductions are always respectful, sometimes celebratory, and often quite eloquent. The introduction below , written and delivered by Lucas Smith before a packed house at Shippensburg University last Thursday night, hit me hard. In addition to Lucas's deep engagement with David's work, I responded especially to the third and fourth stanzas. He brings to mind Frank O'Hara's line in "Meditations in an Emergency": ". . .it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth." I've spent a lot of time over the past several years in those doctors' office waiting rooms;Lucas's keen eye for just the right details had me nodding in recognition. He says that it was his responsibility to take what he observed and "make some kind of art out of it." He has certainly succeeded. Thank you Lucas for letting me share your poem here. sdl)

L to R: David Lehman with Shippensburg University Professor Nicole Santalucia and Lucas Smith, before last week's reading. photo(c) Stacey Lehman

In a 2013 interview with NPR,
David Lehman commented on his book,
The Perfect Murder,
which analyzes homicide mystery
and crime thriller novels.
He said that he could discern
certain elements that linked
hard-boiled detectives
with the life of an American poet,
going on to say that
sometimes he feels like he has
a secret identity, like a spy.

Lehman talked about feeling this way
when he was a journalist for Newsweek
and during the years he spent in England
and France while he was a Kellet Fellow at Cambridge.</p

In what ways do poets become spies?
I think they have an ability
to act as a spectator and digest
the world around them
without disturbing the order
of that world. While at a recent
cancer check-up for my father
in Philadelphia, I sat
in the waiting room
and wrote down everything
I saw that I couldn’t see
somewhere else:
a woman pushing a red walker
with a black wreath
draped over the front of it,
the plaque that said
“The Sarah and Dan Keating Waiting Room” on it,
because of course
someone has to pay
for those sorts of places.
The pamphlet on the corner table
beside me about pancreatic cancer,
and the older gentleman in the chair
at the end of the row across from me
wearing a red, white, and blue track jacket,
gray hair slicked back,
the fingers of his left hand interlocked
with the fingers of his wife’s right.

I felt like it was my responsibility
to take what I saw there
and make some kind of art out of it.
Something to convey the surrealness
of that room, and, like a spy,
take my evidence and expose
The Sarah and Dan Keating
Waiting Room for what it really is,
for how cozy and clean it looked
when just beyond the doors behind
me I would enter a labyrinth
of examination rooms,
and the droopy, listless-face
of the old man that crept
paper-frail past me
as I rounded the corner
in the hallway.
The exhausted red lining
inside of his eyelids,
and his eyes,
cloudy, drifting,
lost at sea.

Lehman is constantly making observations,
meticulously webbing
aspects of the world around him
together, and, like a detective
pinning up an evidence board,
he makes connections that
translate into poetry.
Take for example his poem
“The Real Thing,”
in which he compares poetry to dancing.
Lehman dances across culture
with his allusions to poets,
advertisements, musicians,
and authors. He takes
just what he needs from each
to maintain the focus
of the poem and to make
his point that the dance,
and moreover, poetry,
is what makes life
have purpose for no
particular reason.
It is the simple back and forth,
the gentle, gracious contemplation
of existence and all things
that exist that take part in that dance,
and no matter how flat-footed
we might be, we would all be wise
to join in,
or at the very least,
tap our feet a little.

Ladies and gentleman, David Lehman.

Lucas Smith is a junior Political Science/English double major at Shippensburg University. He is a member of the honors program and Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honors Fraternity. He serves as a writing tutor and his work won the First Place Editor’s Choice Award for Introductory Level Writing and was published in the 2015-2016 Edition of "Write the Ship." He has poems published in the 2017 issue of Shippensburg University's undergraduate literary journal,"The Reflector."

Endarkenment is the Mother of Beauty: on Michael Palmer’s “A Dream of Sound Inside the Mountain" [by Susan Lewis]

In his most recent book, Laughter of the Sphinx (New Directions, 2016) Michael Palmer gifts us with his characteristically spare and muscular lyricism, as rich and musical as it is bleak. In the meantime, each passing day of the contemporary world’s real-life “endarkenment” seems to validate the prophetic echoes of this book’s sobering lament. Consider this one:

 

A Dream of Sound Inside the Mountain (after Anish Kapoor)

 

It is too brief this life inside the mountain
where headless horsemen sing
fevered songs

of self and war
When did we first notice
the trees of mottled bone,

when first hear
the cawing of crows,
contention

of the orchard orioles,
the sleepers’ echoing cries,
rehearsing their final words,

resisting final dreams
(These dreams were mine
and not mine

say the walls of stone,
walls of the poem)
Hedge-crickets sing

and the white whale
its whiteness sings
in the stone dream

and the lost hours have each
their silent song
in the heat of bee time

and the shock of desire
those times when time is not
and the endlessly shifting stones

carelessly speak
and rain floods the rutted roads
It is too long

this spiral life
It is too brief
How the wind and light pass

through our bodies of glass

 

The first thing to do is listen to this “dream of sound.” I say listen, because this poem (along with the others in this book) is a song. As such, it makes use of rhythm, a variety of sonic effects, and even – perhaps especially – silence, in order to underscore its inextricable relationship to sound, and therefore music itself. Some of the poem’s silence issues from its use of the line break, such as the weighted gap between the first and second lines: “It is too brief / this life,” an irrefutable assertion which is later mirrored, challenged, and echoed: “It is too long / this spiral life // It is too brief.”

In this poem, as elsewhere, Palmer probes the dialectical tension between interdependent opposites. Here, a synthesis emerges from the tension between song and silence, to propose a “silent song.” Likewise, in “[t]his life” within these “walls of stone, // walls of the poem,” headless horsemen (the folkloric ‘dark men’ who kill by stopping, and by naming) “sing / fevered songs / of self.” In this poem, their (deadly) song is the poet’s song, which destroys even as it creates — singing its own silence.

As always, Palmer’s prosody is gorgeous. Consider the sonic stitches linking “brief,” “life,” and “fevered” in those opening lines, the opening and terminal “f” sounds bringing to mind the exhalation of air from dying lips. Or the assonance and alliteration in “rain floods the rutted roads:” those three “r’s” interwoven with the sprung rhyme of “road” and “flood;” the terminal “d’s” in flood, rutted, road weighing down the phrase with the inevitability of endings. Or the third stanza, in which the long “o” in “crow” and the short “o” in “contention” bud out from their secondary position within the hard “c’s” that contain them, to ripen into the internal rhyme of “orchard” and “oriole:”

the cawing of crows,
contention
of the orchard orioles

Woven into this lush sonic tapestry is Palmer’s erudition, which situates this particular attempt to grapple with mortality within an established and persistent artistic conversation. Consider the ekphrastic project of the poem itself, setting “this life” within the harsh and isolated cone-shaped prison of Anish Kapoor’s sculpture, “Large Mountain.” Or the poem’s engagement with that iconic Romantic take on mortality (and one of the pinnacles of musicality in Anglophone verse): Keats’ “To Autumn.” In Palmer’s poem, we hear “the cawing of crows, / contention / of the orchard orioles” instead of Keats’ “twitter of swallows.” And the great Romantic’s vine-wreathed cottage is supplanted by a stone fortress rimmed with spikes. But now, as then, “this life” winds down too late and too soon, “in the heat of bee time,” while “hedge crickets sing.”

This poem also recalls Wallace Stevens’ immortal line from “Sunday Morning.” Here, death and beauty are paired in “silent songs,” “trees of bone,” and crows and orioles (from the Latin, aureolus). The use of paradox generates ironic distance, even while it binds “dreams [which] were mine / and not mine,” “these times when time is not,” and this “spiral life” which is “too brief” and yet “too long.” The echo of Melville also haunts these verses, in which “the white whale //. . . sings /in the stone dream.”

Arm in arm with the iconic work it invokes, this poem’s mournful beauty brings us face to face with a harsh world — ours — in which not only poetry, but life itself is the white whale we can’t help chasing, until “the wind and light pass / through our bodies of glass.”

 

The Laughter of the Sphinx

by Michael Palmer

New Directions (2016)

Paperback 

ISBN

9780811225540

$15.95

Next Line, Please: What Can Save Us?

That's right, everybody! Tuesday is here and so is another week in the life of Next Line, Please. Last week's prompt was inspired by the clever, punchy, and thoughtful poetry of Marianne Moore. This week's winner was a poem by Angela Ball:

"To Marianne Moore"

Your poems, steam rollers
from beneath we emerge re-dimensioned. They are
used for leveling surfaces without traction,
their live steam festival flattening genuine dilations

such as a bill of
lading, an introduction to computing Ve-
nus, an action bracketed by double colons,
a pseudo-element. Smokebox far extended at the top

to incorporate
support for assembly. “Steam Roller” first meant a
fixed machine for rolling and curving steel plates for
boilers and ships. Some have seen you walking by the harbor un-

der a distinct pole
star, your hat a sextant, your consciousness a crow’s
nest sighting solid constellations, stars like spark-
ling chips of rock above scrip of river, silence’s storehouses.

Next week's prompt asks you to either write a poem entitled, "The One Thing That Can Save America," or, to decode John Ashbery's poem of the same title, in ten lines or fewer. Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!

Virginia Valenzuela

Halloween Parade [song by Lou Reed]

I didn't fully appreciate the poignancy of this song until I moved to NYC and watched the parade:

sdl

Comment c'est (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

 

As feminine beauty such as that

Of Annabella Sciorra, for instance,

In the 1990s irrefutably testifies to

Celestial virtue, does contrarywise

Harvey Weinstein’s graying flesh

Express nature’s malevolent side,

So that Harvey abusively ejaculating

On Annabella’s leg allegorizes the

Paradoxical dualism of light and dark,

Love and hate, or for that matter

Life and death which, mysterious

As they are, seem to be how it is?

I haven’t the answer but I do suspect

His masturbation has some meaning..

 

  

 

 

 

40s Sinatra: "Body and Soul" and "Stardust"

 

and also

 

 

This! On “breath to oblivion no ladder no chaser” from Finely Tuned Static by Charles Borkhuis [by Susan Lewis]

When I was invited to guest blog for Best American Poetry, I immediately thought of a marvelous post on Harriett by John Beer, in which he thoughtfully explores one poem by Carol Ciavonne (a fine poet and Posit contributor, who has recently become one of our associate editors). Beer’s reminder that reading is at the core of what we writers do and love, evokes “a sense of one reader’s process, not a method per se but a set of explorations,” and seems eminently worthy of emulation.

I’ll start by dipping into “breath to oblivion no ladder no chaser” from Finely Tuned Static by Charles Borkhuis, in collaboration with painter John McCluskey (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2017).  The conversation in this lovely book between text and image is direct and intense, without seeming constricted or constrained. Although its visual and verbal components are fully capable of standing alone, together they make magic. Seasoned and grave, yet crackling with irony and pleasure, these poems are also erudite, salted with references to Duchamp (a “nude descending an escalator”); Orpheus (a narrator who “turned back to see you disappear”); and Turner (“the red buoy bobbing on the waves.”) Their engagement with the paintings yields a tapestry of responsive, but imaginative, tropes, such as the structure of matter, fragmentation, the entangled relationship between creation and destruction – and, of course, static.  This book handily refutes the counsel (mentioned in “where was it      I”) of those “frozen in place” to “stay inside the lines.”

Here’s John McCluskey’s Plate Five, and the poem (the first of a triptych addressing it):

breath to oblivion no ladder no chaser

sizzle-cage crossing the shatters

or a child’s braces tightening water on lightning

my new home on a boat of sticks

rowing through a haunted love tunnel

the long flow of ink spreads across uncertainty

the target pulls an arrow through a stranger’s shadow

pinholes of light deep in a deserted sky

no one here but animals of ice grazing on the sunset

light approaching from a dead star the body

displaced by negative space

a caesura shimmering between day and night

what is it like this striptease of body parts this

splintered angle of image crystals watered down

to an empty shoe darkness opens me like a tin can

my secret light my hand burned down to the wires

continues writing to you from another space curled up

inside this one don’t paint yourself too thin no going back now

red rider come in come in get ready for razor static

thundering hooves through the whites of your eyes

through the hole in the next word string a sound

up and over the yawning toothless abyss this this this

 

Take a look at the efficiency, wit, and depth packed into that incredible opening, which somehow manages to summarize our mortal existence: the passage from breath (life) to oblivion, with no help from any (literal or figurative) ladder, nor hope of a chaser (afterlife). It’s a characteristic Borkhuis line: snappy and funny; inflected by the imagery, lingo, and hard-boiled attitude of noir; brunt and exhilarating in its clarity and directness. This line also establishes the poem’s ekphrastic project: a duality echoed within the painting, with its parallel linear assemblages of black shards crossing a pale field sprinkled with brightly-colored scraps. The very duality of the poem’s project mirrors the image of a ladder even while its explicit language, as well as the painted image itself, dashes any hope of one: consider the absence of any marks resembling rungs connecting the parallel black lines. A rung-less ladder as the best tool available to help us muddle through our lives? It’s a metaphor worthy of Beckett.

There’s a bleak humor at work here, reinforced by the horizontality of those black lines, belying any hope of a progress narrative to redeem life’s so-called journey. In the world of this collaboration, there is no ascent; there is only pushing through, “crossing the shatters” in our “sizzle-cage.” In these images from the second line of the poem, Borkhuis draws on theology and physics for resonance and depth, characterizing the body, that earthly vessel, as a pain-filled trap (“sizzle-cage”) from which we can only hope to be liberated once it conveys us across “the shatters:” a resonant description of the painting’s shard-strewn ground, as well as the violently fragmented fabric of matter itself.

By the fourth line a first-person narrator is introduced, and with her, a change of scale, even while the imagery continues on its double mission. The narrator’s “new home” becomes a “boat of sticks” (another perilously incommodious vessel assembled from the shards suspended between the black swaths bisecting the painting) “rowing through” the sexually resonant “haunted love tunnel” with its menstrual-like “flow of ink” spreading “across uncertainty.” Here, the poet seems to evoke the puny cluelessness of human existence as revealed by the existential implications of particle physics. Am I the only reader also reminded of the philosophical angst of the protagonist sperm in Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask)?”

I’d like to point out just a few more brilliant bits, like the “striptease of body parts” in the second stanza, which carries forward the first stanza’s sexual imagery, highlighting the resemblance of the painting’s strewn and scattered shards to the skimpy bits of clothing cast off in a striptease. Except that this is “striptease of body parts,” connecting the earlier references to death and destruction to those that follow, such as “darkness opens me like a tin can,” “my hand burned down to the wires,” and the “thundering hooves” of the “red rider” (a reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse).

One source of this poem’s energy is its accelerating pace. The increasing omission of punctuation, and the eschewal of ‘natural’ or ‘intuitive’ line breaks (which otherwise tend to function as punctuational proxies), creates a headlong rush from image to image: “another space curled up / inside this one don’t paint yourself too thin no going back now.” The poem, considering its own project (“my hand . . . / writing to you,” “through the hole in the next word”), circles back to its opening vision of mortality, via a powerfully rushing, hissing, terminal rhyme: “the yawning toothless abyss this this this.” It’s a masterful ending, one that evokes the uncontrollable hemorrhage of breath that defines life on its journey towards death, even as it echoes the lusty vitality of Molly Bloom’s final words in Joyce’s Ulysses: “yes I will yes she said yes.”  

What's My Line? -- an early episode (1950)

Louis Untermeyer, the rgeat editor and anthologist, is one of the panelists along with Arlene Francis and Dorothy Kilgallen.  And the mystery guest plays a mean clarinet.

 

Susan Lewis, Guest Author October 30-November 3

This week we welcome Susan Lewis as our guest author. Susan is the author of Zoom, winner of the Washington Prize (The Word Works, 2018) as well as nine other books and chapbooks, including Heisenberg’s Salon, This Visit, How to be Another, and State of the Union. Her poetry has been published in a great number ofanthologies and journals, including The Awl, Berkeley Poetry Review, Boston Review, Cimarron, The Journal,The New Orleans Review, Raritan, Seneca Review, Verse, Verse Daily, and VOLT. She lives in New York
City and edits Posit, an online journal of literature and art.

Welcome, Susan. 

-- sdl

Commuters Who Found "Heaven" in the NYC Subway [by Catherine Woodard]

 

 When "Heaven" appeared in the NYC subways, many admirers of the poem asked author Patrick Phillips for permission (not that they needed it) to highlight his poem in funerals and memorials. Several mailed programs that reprinted "Heaven." One father wanted permission to make t-shirts of “Heaven” for the third anniversary of his son’s suicide. 

"It felt incredible to have people speaking back in that way," Phillips said at an Oct. 25 celebration of 25 years of Poetry in Motion. The program is a partnership between the Poetry Society of America and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts & Design. 

Fans typically reached Phillips through his website to describe why the poem touched them. Several composers wanted permission to set “Heaven” to music. One woman carried a MetroCard with the poem on the back for a year; then retired it to her bulletin board at work once it expired.

Phillips always wrote back. His replies are tender and personal; the exchanges are moments of civility and connection. A few excerpts from the more than 25 that arrived directly in his inbox:

Ashley: Your poem "Heaven" is one of my most favorite ever. After the recent death of my mother, I find myself coming back to it again. It comforts me and brings out tears as well. I like the world you created in that poem very much.

Phillips sent condolences to her and her family for the loss. Ashley continued the conversation with a question: I was wondering if I might ask you the inspiration for that poem. If it's too personal I understand.

Patrick: Not too personal at all, Ashley. I wrote it around the time my wife's father died, too young, from really merciless prostate cancer. He was a dear friend of mine, and I was feeling very sad that my sons would never know their wonderful grandfather. Around that same time I was also reading a lot of Renaissance poets like George Herbert and Ben Jonson. I was moved by and envious of their faith in a heavenly reunion, and the poem was really my version of that... My imagining how beautiful it would be if we could all be together again somehow, with Ollie there with my sons... Not sick, not weak, but the way he used to be. The poem is just a dream in which "time avails not," as Whitman put it, and my grown sons somehow get to know my lost friend. And now I'm all teary on my commute home!

***

A rider whose kitty had recently been poisoned: what you said soothed my heart…

Patrick: I'm also so sorry to hear about what happened…, and can really sympathize, as our silver tabby Simba is curled up on the desk next to me even as I write this (as he is most days!). We both send condolences. All the best, P

 ***

Others were just appreciative of a moment of reflection during their commute.

Tom: I was on the C train today, jammed against the wall in front of the 
Poetry in Motion panel. I enjoyed the poem so much i scanned back up to find the author and was pleased to see your name attributed to it.
I love the idea of Heaven to be our personal world of remembrance as 
well as the looping rhythm of the poem itself. I kept reading it in a continuous loop like a prayer or mantra and for a few minutes I was able to forget the handbag wedged in my lower back. Thank you for that.


***

Dear Mr. Patrick Phillips b. 1970: Just wanted to let you know that tonight I read your poem again on the Queens-bound A train. I love your poem because it is simple and written in plain English. It makes sense and it rhymes in perfect harmony. It is also very powerful. Thank you for creating this masterpiece that I enjoy ever so often when I get on THAT car on THAT Queens-bound A train on my way home after a long hard day of living in New York City.

 

"Heaven" is among 100 poems in a new anthology The Best of Poetry in Motion: Celebrating 25 Years on Subways and Buses. Published by W.W. Norton, the anthology is edited by PSA executive director, Alice Quinn. Phillips, Billy Collins, Aracelis Girmay, Major Jackson, Jim Moore, Paul Muldoon, Marilyn Nelson, Elise Paschen, Molly Peacock, Katha Pollitt and Kevin Young launched the anthology Oct. 25 at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at Lincoln Center. 

 

More about Poetry in Motion from The Best American Poetry blog:

Jim Moore's Poetry in Motion surprise on Spring Street. 

Reflections by Marilyn Nelson

Happy 25th Birthday Poetry in Motion  & video of "Grand Central" by Billy Collins

 

Catherine Woodard is the author of Opening the Mouth of the Dead, a story in poems recently published by lone goose press in two editions: paperback and limited-edition book art. She helped return Poetry in Motion to the New York City subways and is a vice president of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies and CNN online. A former journalist, Woodard chairs an advisory committee for the News Literacy Project.

 

Stephen Paul Miller remembers John Ashbery

<<<
As an English professor and New York poet, John Ashbery was not only my greatest artistic influence but also a friend. So it shocked me when the late, great poet reached out to me from his New Yorker obituary in what felt like a bop on the head. In Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorkerelegy “The Gentleness of John Ashbery,” based on several of her past interviews with him, my idol called me out.

Discussing ludicrous interpretations of his poetry, Ashbery told MacFarquhar: “There was this one guy, Stephen Paul Miller, who wrote an essay on ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ in which he said it was based entirely on Watergate. I said to him, It has nothing to do with Watergate, and more importantly, it was written before Watergate happened. But this made absolutely no difference to him.”

My relationship with Ashbery started in 1974, when I was 22 and heard him reading his poetry on a record at the Donnell Library in Manhattan. Reading at a Poetry Project event, Ashbery seemed aloof. However, recognizing him soon afterward on a Soho street, I instinctively blurted out, “You’re the new Walt Whitman!” He smiled and said thanks.

I ran into him again later, on the crowded self-service elevator up to a party, when he joked, “Third floor, ladies’ underwear, everyone out.”

“I’m a poet too,” I told him. And he invited me to come to his Brooklyn College poetry workshop.
>>>

For more of Stephen Paul Miller's piece, please go here  It's a very good and charming article, which appears in Publishers Weekly 
For what it's worth, it was I who sent JA the magazine containing Stephen's nutty but enjoyable essay to the effect that "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" was allegorically about Nixon's last days in the White House. -- DL

Poetry in Motion Fans Find Ways to Thank the Poets [by Catherine Woodard]

Some fans of Poetry in Motion are moved by the poems they read in the New York City subways to write to the poets, contacting them through the internet and social media or via the sponsors, the Poetry Society of America and MTA Arts & Design. Here's poet Jim Moore of Minnesota talking about the good wishes he literally walked into on Spring Street during a visit to New York City.

 

Moore's poem is in a new anthology, The Best of Poetry in Motion: Celebrating 25 Years on Subways and Buses, published by W.W. Norton and edited by PSA executive director Alice Quinn. Moore, Billy Collins, Aracelis Girmay, Major Jackson, Paul Muldoon, Marilyn Nelson, Patrick Phillips, Katha Pollitt and Kevin Young read from the anthology Oct. 25 at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Several told stories of how grateful fans tracked them down to relay what the subway encounter meant to them. 

After “Love in the Ruins,” ran in 2013, Sue Mattison emailed appreciation to Moore and he wrote back to her. She reached out to him again this summer:

Hi, Jim. It's Sue Mattison from Connecticut, your subway poetry fan. I keep the poem about the tablecloth tucked into my calendar holder. It allows me every now and then to come across it as a little gift to myself. Yesterday was one of those times. I sat down, read it, teared up. thought about my mother and all the beautiful tablecloths she had, and how they set the stage(table) for so many loving holidays, special occasions, and every night dinners for my parents, 4 sisters, and me…The memory of the subway, my finding you, and your incredibly generous response remains so lovely in my mind.”

Mattison met Moore face-to-face for the first time at the launch reading. A fourth grade teacher in Darian, CT, she posts quotes from her students' writing around the classroom. "It's important to celebrate words," Mattison said.

 

More about Poetry in Motion from The Best American Poetry blog:

Reflections by Marilyn Nelson

Happy 25th Birthday Poetry in Motion  & video of "Grand Central" by Billy Collins

 

Catherine Woodard is the author of Opening the Mouth of the Dead, a story in poems recently published by lone goose press in two editions: paperback and limited-edition book art. She helped return Poetry in Motion to the New York City subways and is a vice president of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies and CNN online. A former journalist, Woodard chairs an advisory committee for the News Literacy Project.

Poems to People Who Might Not Seek Them [by Catherine Woodard]

 

When Marilyn Nelson's poem, "A Strange Beautiful Woman" appeared in New York subway cars this year, she saw lots of selfies with the poem on Facebook. Most fans presumed the narrator in the poem was an older woman coming to terms with aging.

In reality, Nelson wrote the poem in her thirties. The power of poems popping up in surprising places is an invitation for a moment of reflection, a pause in the everyday for a conversation with oneself or with another, regardless of the interpretation. The Poetry Society of America and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have collaborated for 25 years to place poems in the path of 6 million daily subway riders.

Poetry in Motion presents "poems to people who might not seek them," Nelson said.  "But there they are."

Poets in Motion poets and Alice Quinn, center

Nine Poetry in Motion poets celebrated a quarter century of transit poems Oct. 25 at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at Lincoln Center. 

Billy Collins, Aracelis Girmay, Major Jackson, Jim Moore, Paul Muldoon, Nelson, Patrick Phillips, Katha Pollitt and Kevin Young read their poem and two others from a new anthology The Best of Poetry in Motion: Celebrating 25 Years on Subways and Buses.  Published by W.W. Norton, the anthology is edited by PSA executive director, Alice Quinn. Elise Paschen and Molly Peacock of PSA read poems by Lucille Clifton and Walt Whitman from the early years of the program they co-founded with the MTA. 

Many of the poets told stories of how honored they are to hear back from appreciative readers via social media and email. "Poems once in motion...continue to move their readers," according to Collins.

Veronique Hakim, MTA managing director, agreed. "Our customers tell us they love this program."

Hakim and several poets praised MTA Arts & Design director Sandra Bloodworth for pairing the poems with MTA art commissions and placing poems on the backs of about 5 percent of MetroCards since 2012.

"This is a way of making a poem something that can be used," said Nelson, winner of the PSA Frost Medal for lifetime achievement. "That you put in your pocket, not just as a keepsake, but as something that is useful."

Above Girmay's poem "Noche de Lluvia, San Salvador" is art by Elizabeth Murray, also the cover of the anthology of 100 poems. Girmay echoed the other poets when she described the personal affinity she has with her favorites. "So many of these poems feel like mine because I've ridden with them," Girmay said.

Return to The Best American Poetry blog Friday for Minnesota poet Jim Moore's coincidental above-ground exchange with a fan on Spring Street and Saturday to read email exchanges between Patrick Phillips and Poetry in Motion lovers from across NYC.

Catherine Woodard is the author of Opening the Mouth of the Dead, a story in poems recently published by lone goose press in two editions: paperback and limited-edition book art. She helped return Poetry in Motion to the New York City subways and is a vice president of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies and CNN online. A former journalist, Woodard chairs an advisory committee for the News Literacy Project.

TALES FROM UNDER THE PALAPA #3: Baja Lullaby [by Joy Wright Abbott]

(Editor's note: This is the third in a series about the Todos Santos Writers Workshop, a new under-the-radar program that flourishes in Todos Santos, Mexico. Find the first post, by co-founder Rex Weiner, here and the second, by Bianca Juarez, here. sdl)

 

I have attended the Todos Santos Writers Workshop twice. Both times, I have spent the first few nights wrestling jet lag. So when Co-Founder Gordon Chaplin challenged his fiction group to write about the Todos Santos spirit, it wasn't the neon watercolor palette of sunrise and sunset, or the whales breaching close enough to count their barnacles that I chose to capture, it was the transformative presence of the night sky.

The results of Chaplin’s challenge were as diverse as our group of Todos Santeños, both seasonal residents, and snowbound pilgrims like me. In the shade of the wild fig tree Chaplin planted, himself, we each shared our take on the geography and culture of this Pueblo Magico - even the neighbor’s rooster took a turn. Rooted in his mellow-yellow rocker, Gordon seasoned us with fresh papaya, lime, and sage. Joy Wright Abbott

BAJA LULLABY

            I cannot find sleep. Too wired, high-tuned, I lie on the patio chaise of El Hotelito, just to nurse the stars. If I’m going to be up all night - and by now, I know I am – at least I can satisfy my city dweller’s night-sky hunger.

            I count bats (two). I hope for more. They charge the heart in a trip-wired way that makes one dive for cover, emerging seconds later, thankful for the next breath. They are bright-eyed defibrillators, just searching for gnats. By the end of the night, they’ll wind up just like me, wide-awake, clinging to a warm wall by two claws. Harmless.

            I count meteors (six), one of them so close it arcs blue sparks, tracing the hump of the distant Sierra. Others drop from the sky like free-fall carnival rides. Are they hunks of old stars, or broken satellites taking lovers’ hopes and murmurs for a ride?

            Stars pulse from invisible threads. The moon, lit from the bottom, forms a perfect bowl to hold my troubles. Like a wise old friend, it gathers me at this threshold.

            The night chill seeps through layers I’ve unpacked for a week of desert magic by the sea. I trade my silken blanket for eider down. I slip inside and listen for dawn.

Joy Wright Abbott is a writer and urban planner based in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work has appeared in Landscape Architecture magazine, Carlow University’s Voices from the Attic anthology, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Fragments 194-203 from Selected Squibs [by Alan Ziegler]

194. Just to be on the safe side: A pigeon and I cross the street with a green light. A left-turning car looms, slows to a crawl ceding us the right of way. The pigeon and I hop-trot to the corner.

195. Your clothes lie undressed of you on the bed.

196. On the edge of my peripheral vision, the woman’s hand swoops down and the small child screams. I turn: a beach ball descends and the child squeals, “Mommy do it again!”

197. Butterfly flutters / in early autumn sun glare / to grass and stays….leaf

198. I keep forgetting to cancel my Wednesday doctor appointment. Monday 2 a.m. I remember and call the service. I am told: “Your appointment isn’t until Wednesday!? Why can’t you call the office tomorrow? I'm very busy here.”

199. Today I saw two who looked like but were not you.

200. Baudelaire: “Eternal superiority of the Dandy. What is a Dandy?”

201. Erin and I with our dachshund Latte in the tiny hill town of Monteriggioni (ringed by towers Dante called “horrific giants”). A woman approaches with a 5-year-old shyly behind. “My daughter fell in love with your dog in Florence!”

202. My father liked his coffee dark, very dark. He’d open the wrong side of the milk container and let a few drops dribble into the cup—a technique he learned from his mother, who didn’t realize it was the wrong side.

203. Why William Burroughs wouldn’t push the button on my tape recorder at the beginning of his talk, preferring that I come up and do it myself: “I don’t like to fool with other people’s machines.”

Remembering Richard Wilbur [by A. E.Stallings}

Eric M. Crawford

I am lucky to have a number of memories of Richard Wilbur, who died on October 14. The first time I heard him read was in the mid-90s. I was working then as a secretary for a professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, hoping, I suppose, to keep some connection to academia and a library while working on my own writing. An obvious advantage was attending events in the English department when celebrated writers swanned through town. Only dimly aware of Richard Wilbur at this time, I probably first encountered his poem “Juggler” from an English department flier Scotch-taped onto the library’s glass door.  No doubt I did not fully appreciate the elegance and sprezzatura of this poem-performance—its stanzas of patterned line lengths and pure and off rhymes, the philosophical conceit, its mix of elaborate syntax and everyday statement, its precise etymological use of “resilience”—literally to bounce back—jostling with one-syllable exclamations like “whee” and even “damn.” Possibly, I thought, with the innocent bravado that is somewhat necessary in a young poet, I can do that too. Wilbur had a way of keeping all the balls in the air, winking at difficulty while making the performance seem effortless. Yet nothing is glib—even clapping becomes strange, clumsy in view of the juggler’s (and the poet’s) legerdemain—a battering of hands.

Continue reading over at the American Scholar. 

Happy 25th Birthday Poetry in Motion [by Catherine Woodard]

W.W. Norton, edited by Alice Quinn

The Best of Poetry in Motion: Celebrating 25 Years on Subways and Buses is a newly published anthology of 100 poems. Edited by PSA Executive Director Alice Quinn, the book includes half of the 200 plus poems and much of the history of the popular, trademarked joint venture between the Poetry Society of America and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. 

Since the New York debut in 1992, Poetry in Motion also has appeared in more than 25 other cities across the nation. A sampling of those poems are searchable by city and poem title on the Poetry in Motion atlas. 

Many of the poets featured in the new anthology will read their contributions and relay their stories on Oct. 25 at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at Lincoln Center. Poets include Aracelis Girmay, Major Jackson, Jim Moore, Paul Muldoon, Marilyn Nelson, Patrick Phillips, and Katha Pollitt. Return to The Best American Poetry blog for those reactions during the next few days.

Since 2012, art commissioned by MTA Arts & Design is paired with the poems. Two new poems appear each quarter and also are displayed on roughly five percent of MetroCards, potentially reaching 1.7 billion transit riders annually. Poet and artists bios available at http://web.mta.info/mta/aft/poetry/poetry.html.

Unexpected encounters with a poem in transit can "provide a sudden sense of mental and even spiritual nourishment by connecting us with the deeply human realms of love and loss, joy and death," Billy Collins writes in a forward to the anthology. The MTA has twice commissioned poems by Collins for the 100th anniversary of Grand Central and the opening of the new Second Avenue Subway.   

Poetry in Motion aims to be a moment of contemplation or whimsy and offers a respite from the daily onslaught of advertising. Collins : "The poem is not a pitch, but an offering, a gift."

  

 

Catherine Woodard is the author of Opening the Mouth of the Dead, a story in poems recently published by lone goose press in two editions: paperback and limited-edition book art. She helped return Poetry in Motion to the New York City subways and is a vice president of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies and CNN online. A former journalist, Woodard chairs an advisory committee for the News Literacy Project.

Catherine Woodard, Guest Author

Photo (c) Rachel Elkind

We're pleased to announce that Catherine Woodard is returning as a guest writer. Catherine the author of Opening the Mouth of the Dead, a story in poems recently published by lone goose press in two editions: paperback and limited-edition book art. She helped return Poetry in Motion to the New York City subways and is a vice president of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies and CNN online. A former journalist, Woodard chairs an advisory committee for the News Literacy Project. You can find Catherine's past blog posts here. 

Welcome back, Catherine. 

-- sdl

 

Once in Love with Amy (Gerstler) [by Frank Loesser]

 

 

What's My Line Jackie Gleason, 1953)