The Best American Poetry

Marie Ponsot Honored by Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project [by Catherine Woodard]

Marie Ponsot received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award by the Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project at Fordham University at Lincoln Center. The Oct. 20 celebration also marked the 75th essay posted on the timeline, which aims to be the largest international database of women poets in the world.

The timeline project was founded in 2010 by Kim Bridgford, poet and editor of “Mezzo Cammin,” an online journal of formalist poetry by women. The inaugural award was co-sponored by the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University.

“Ponsot's poetry is an amalgam of fierce intelligence and courtly grace,” said Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, poet and Fordham professor, and author of the Ponsot essay, Marie Ponsot & the Difficult Art of Ease.”

Born in 1921 to a family that loved poetry and literature, Ponsot still claims the Catholic identity of her Queens childhood. While raising seven children, Ponsot translated 37 books from French to English, co-authored two books on the pedagogy of writing, wrote numerous radio and television scripts while teaching at Queens College. A beloved mentor, she also taught at Columbia University, the New School and 92St.Y

 “Being raised in a household respectful of the power of language and the mysteries of faith clearly provided a strong linguistic and imaginative foundation upon which a young poet could build,” said O’Donnell, who teaches American Catholic studies as well as English and creative writing.

Ponsot has published seven poetry books. Numerous awards include the Lily Prize and Frost Medal for lifetime achievement. She was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010.

Ponsot uses poetic forms in her own work and as a teaching tool as “instruments of discovery,” O’Donnell noted. She popularized tritina, a shortened version of a sestina. Discovery is another theme in Ponsot's deep interest in the primal poetry of an infant's babble.

 

Language Acquisition

by Marie Ponsot

Burn, or speak your mind. For the oak to untruss
its passion it must explode as fire or leaves.

The delicious tongue we speak with speaks us.
A liquor of sweetness where its root cleaves
ripens fluent, as it runs for the desirous
reason, the touching sense. The infant says “I”
like earthquake and wavers as place takes voice.
Earth steadies smiling around her, in reply
to her self-finding pronoun, her focal choice.
We wait: while sun sucks earth juices up from wry
root-runs tangled under dark, while the girl
no longer vegetal, steps into view:
a moving speaker, an “I” the air whirls
toward the green exuberance of “You.”

 

Ponsot, 96, read two poems celebrating women from Collected Poems  (Knopf, 2016): “Aunt Grace Wears Beautiful Clothes” and “Among Women.”

 

Among Women

 

by Marie Ponsot 

 

What women wander?

Not many. All. A few.

Most would, now & then,

& no wonder.

Some, and I’m one,

Wander sitting still.

My small grandmother

Bought from every peddler

Less for the ribbons and lace

Than for their scent

Of sleep where you will,

Walk out when you want, choose

Your bread and your company.

 

She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”

 

She looked fragile but had

High blood, runner’s ankles,

Could endure, endure.

She loved her rooted garden, her

Grand children, her once

Wild once young man.

Women wander

As best they can.

  

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.

On the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature [by Jeffrey Meyers]

Our Literature desk have come up with some opening odds on this year's Nobel prize. Margaret Atwood is 6/1. https://t.co/cNZEoerevz pic.twitter.com/dCf8ccd2Ub

— Ladbrokes Politics (@LadPolitics) September 7, 2017

Ladbrokes betting odds for this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature—like the list of all the Nobel winners since 1901—is more significant for what it leaves out than what it includes. Many of the greatest authors never won the prize. The recent winners, the Austrian Communist Herta Müller and the Belarusian interviewer Svetlana Alexievich were notably poor choices.

Kazuo Ishiguro—a Japanese-born Englishman and pupil of Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia--deserves the prize but wasn’t even mentioned by Ladbrokes as a possible candidate. Like the previous winners Wole Soyinka and J. M. Coetzee, English was not Ishiguro’s native language. The same was true of Conrad and Nabokov, who had an engaging idiosyncratic style and should have won the prize. The Japanese bookstores filled their shelves with the works of the hot-tipped Haruki Murakami (5/1 odds), then quickly cleared them and restocked the space with Ishiguro’s books. 

Many writers have won for political as well as literary reasons. The novelist Ismail Kadare, who defied the Communist regime in Albania, and Adunis, the Syrian poet who opposed Assad’s regime, deserve better odds. Salman Rushdie suffered self-inflicted persecution, but is unpopular and unclubable among the English literati. James Ngugi—who, like William Least Heat Moon, gained fame by changing his name to the more ethnic Ngugi Wa Thiongo—was touted as the potential winner (4/1). He may eventually win because the politically correct Nobel Committee is always keen to reward a black writer.

It was absurd to give the same long (25/1) odds to Joyce Carol Oates and to Philip Roth, who’s an infinitely better writer. He certainly deserves the prize but couldn’t win because the American songwriter Bob Dylan absurdly won it last year. For the same reason Margaret Atwood (6/1) couldn’t get the prize soon after another Canadian woman, Alice Munro. It was weirdly unfair to mention Julian Barnes, but not his superior countrymen Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Paul Theroux and Tom McGuane, and the Italian Elsa Ferrante, should also have been serious contenders. Major Asian countries such as Pakistan, South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines have never won the prize, so watch out for promising writers from those eager-to-win nations.

Jeffrey Meyers’ memoir with biographical chapters, Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy will appear with the University of Virginia Press next year.

"A Feast for John Ashbery" -- a true account of a dinner we had in 2005 [by David Lehman]

This article was written after a dinner for six -- John Ashbery, Mark Bibbins, Brian Chambers, Stacey Harwood, David Kermani, and me. 

Here's a a brief excerpt:

<<<

In the time-honored male manner I elected to leave the planning entirely to my wife. Stacey loves spending time with John and David, and the prospect of planning a princely menu excited her. Still, it didn’t take long for an element of dread to surface. Although she loves to cook, and I think she’s exceptional, Stacey would describe herself as merely a “decent home cook,” meaning she can get a healthy simple dinner on the table mid-week in under an hour. But when it comes to entertaining, she is seriously out of practice. Ever since moving to New York City in 1998 she has curtailed her entertaining because of the limits imposed by a small apartment with a tiny kitchen and no dishwasher.

We live on the top floor of a six-floor walkup, eighty steps from ground level, far too many for John, now 78, to climb. So where could we hold the dinner? I thought of Mark Bibbins, who lives with his tech-whiz companion Brian in a spacious Chelsea apartment with a wraparound porch. Like Stacey, Mark loves to cook and is very good at it, and he, too, is very fond of John and David. Mark and Brian agreed to collaborate with us, and after a flurry of e-mails with all parties, we settled on a Sunday night in November, the 13th to be exact, and we were in business. That was two months from now. I entered the information in my calendar and did my best to forget about it, which was just as well: Stacey proved herself capable of obsessing enough for two.
>>>

Go to the Inquisitve Eater  to find out how that evening worked out. -- DL

Photo credit: Stephanie Paterik, 2011.

The Sweet Scientist [by David Lehman]

There were greater heavyweights -- Dempsey, Louis, Ali -- but only one champ retired undefeated, having won all fifty of his bouts, most by knockout. Rocky Marciano of Brockton, Mass., may have been a clumsy boxer, but he had the force of Zeus in his right hand and he could knock you out with an unexpected left hook as well. The saga of his championship years is at the center of A. J. Liebling's The Sweet Science, which even foes of pugilism recognize as one of the greatest of all sports books. A compilation of articles written for The New Yorker, Liebling's book combines close and savvy observation of what goes on in the ring (and in training camp, at the weigh in, and in the cab that takes you to the Garden or the old Polo Grounds) with a wondrous prose style.

Liebling's simile-machine produces such long-playing hits as these, to quote just a few: "Marciano looked like the understander in the nine-man pyramid of a troupe of Arab acrobats." Former featherweight champ Abe Attell "looks at you with cold eyes around his huge beak that is like a toucan's with a twisted semptum."  After absorbing the punch you see depicted here, Jersey Joe Walcott "flowed down like flour out of a chute." Randy Turpin, a Sugar Ray Robinson opponent, punched "always at some curious angle. One punch for the body looked like a man releasing a bowling ball; another, a right for the head, was like a granny boxing a boy's ears." Here's looking at you, Rocky, just before your last fight, when you took out the old Mongoose, Archie Moore, in the ninth round, on September 20, 1955 in Yankee Stadium: "Wrapped in a heavy blue bathrobe and with a blue monk's cowl pulled over his head, he climbed the steps to the ring with the cumbrous agility of a medieval executioner ascending the scaffold." The similes are as precisely accurate as they are wildly imaginative -- wit at the service of truth.

The Sweet Science and four other books by the versatile writer (about food and Paris, the press, night-club owners and other Broadway personages, and a Louisiana politician) are available in one beautifully designed, admirably edited volume from the Library of America. The Sweet Science and Other Writings includes, in an appendix, the best essay on boxing ever to use poetry as a unifying and organizing conceit. And who is the poet who provoked Liebling to this figurative flight of fancy? Well, a hint: What killed boxing as Liebling knew it and loved it in its glory years? Television, he would answer, but there was one individual who, by the force and witty complexity of his personality, rescued the sport and extended its life by two decades, the way Sinatra extended the life of songs first performed by Ruth Etting. You know who. -- DL

"Part-time naughty/part-time biblical": Mitch Sisskind Poetry Forum at the New School [by Virginia Valenzuela]

            Mitch Sisskind, sporting his newest collection of poetry and prose entitled Do Not Be a Gentleman When You Say Goodnight, read for The New School’s MFA Writing program on October 11th 2017, and was joined by David Lehman for a conversation which proved memorable and intriguing from the start.

            Those familiar with the work of Mitch Sisskind had an idea of what to expect: a witty, playful, part-time naughty/part-time biblical writer who is not afraid to “go there.” And for those who were unfamiliar, well, I think the title of the book speaks right to that tumultuous core. Reading his work some weeks before the forum, I had contrived a mixed opinion over the work of Mitch Sisskind. Many poems were inviting, such as “To No Place He Is Called…” a poem which captures the never-ending instability of living, and leaving, or the well-known poem “Like a Monkey,” which touches upon religion, beauty, and the arguments among sages. The wife in “The Devotions of Jean Blysema” also had me charmed and intrigued, but often some of the characters in the book were downright unlikeable and had the uptight feminist in me blushing, or worse.

            But of course, these notions were the first to be dispelled, once I heard the pieces from the writer’s mouth, coupled with hilarious interludes, some giving background, some talking about writing, some laughing in the middle of a particularly funny or outrageous line, signaling to me that he was not quite a vulgar man, but a guy who liked to have fun. I was won over right away, not only by the author’s authenticity but by his ability to lower the stakes, thus, bringing us into the realm of the familiar rather than the formal.

            Among the pieces heard at the forum were “Balzac Speaks of Salvation Through Sexual Intercourse,” the playful/experimental “Then All Hell Breaks Loose: Thirteen Films of Tokyo Lipscomb,” and “Three Sonnets,” at request. The Tokyo Lipscomb poem is a list of films made up of interchangeable characters, each with an iconic epithet which is repeated throughout, and various storylines ending in, “and then all hell breaks loose." The other poems mentioned are sonnets. “And just so you know,” Mr. Sisskind added, “a fourteen-line poem is a sonnet.” This comment opened up a conversation between Dr. Lehman and Mr. Sisskind which wondered at the essential mechanics of a sonnet. If not a strict rhyme scheme or meter, then length and a turn or complication after the eighth line must suffice, and well, said Mr. Sisskind, doesn’t a turn usually come toward the end anyway? I like that Sisskind’s sonnets are sarcastic and casual, unlike so many other sonnets that turn out to be quite stuffy.

            We also heard the title poem, “Do Not Be A Gentleman When You Say Goodnight,” which is a villanelle, “Like a Monkey,” and parts of “Twenty Questions,” which is an imagined dialogue between the author and his deceased father. The interludes between these poems gave the audience more on Mr. Sisskind’s background as a boy from Chicago (with a noticeable midwestern accent, I might add) and as a student of a particularly hip rabbi who taught Mr. Sisskind a great many things about how to perceive the stories of the Bible and all the people in it with an open heart, even the ones we think evil. These footnotes gave depth to the poems’ inquiries into Beauty and Heaven and God and the Afterlife, which are lighthearted and approachable, but poignant. I thought back to characters in Sisskind’s work that I had thought of as, if not evil, certainly unpleasant, and I asked myself, did I learn anything about them or about myself through encountering them? If so, it was well worth the read.

            In between the poems, we captured glimpses of a wonderful philosophy of writing with roots in the New York School of writing and branches and leaves in the contemporary poetry world. This is a philosophy of writing in which one need not be so gosh darn serious all of the time. One can take liberties. One can be silly or gritty or gruesome as long as the quality or intention of work doesn’t suffer. Dr. Lehman and Mr. Sisskind spoke afterwards about the way humor has been far underrated in modern poetry as a cheap device or an easy way out of doing hard work, a construct that their teacher, the celebrated Kenneth Koch, struggled with and fought, because, as Mr. Koch said, something can turn out to be funny, but it’s not only funny. Mr. Sisskind’s poems proved to me that a poem can well succeed by having fun, by getting a good laugh, and by sharing the gritty along with the sentimental. Along with comedy and poetic forms, Dr. Lehman and Mr. Sisskind talked about the way in which one could write in voices, allowing characters to develop through the lines without his crafting much at first, but following the momentum. This discussion, along with the way Mr. Sisskind read his less likeable characters with a playful grin, reminded me that poetry need not always be a poet's philosophy of Life, or even a representation of truth or reality at all. It can just be a piece that flows and takes the reader somewhere.

            Besides the intricacies and joys of literature and writing, I enjoyed learning a few secrets, not only of our guest, Mitch Sisskind, but of our own David Lehman, who could not help but bring up a few lost frogs from their years in the halls of Columbia. It was a drizzly Wednesday in Greenwich Village I will not soon forget, where two poets sat and talked literature, Kenneth Koch, teaching writing, and practical jokes, and everybody had a grand old time.

(Ed note: Find recent poems by Mitch Sisskind, including a series of Milania [Trump] poems, here.)

Virginia Valenzuela is a poet, essayist, and yogi from New York City. She holds BA’s in Creative Writing, Literary Studies, Women’s Studies, and a minor in Film Studies. She is a second-year MFA candidate for Poetry and Creative Nonfiction at the New School. You can find more of her work on her blog, Vinny the Snail.

TALES FROM UNDER THE PALAPA #2: "He Says, She Says" [by Bianca Juarez]

(Editor's note: This is the second 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. sdl)

photo (c) Nick Triolo

Odds are I was conceived under a palapa. As was this:

I wrote it in 2016, at the end of my first week in Jeanne McCulloch’s memoir workshop at the Todos Santos Writers Workshop.  In the course of conversation about families and how to tell those complicated stories, I said, “My mother says they only did it once.” “Great line to start a story,” said Jeanne. A couple of days later, our assignment was to write about conflict. Sitting under the palapa at magical Casa Dracula, hummingbirds flitting back and forth between the bougainvillea, it was easy to go back in time, back to the beginning of my story, and how I came to be. Bianca Juarez

HE SAYS, SHE SAYS.

My mother says they only did it once.
My father says she was the love of his life.

She says he said they had to get married otherwise he could be accused of statutory rape.
He says she said if he didn’t take her away and marry her she’d run off with my future stepfather.

He says they met at a party and she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
She says nothing.

He was a 32-year old interior decorator from Hollywood, movie-star handsome.
She was an indulged 16 year-old from the Bahamas about to make her debut in London society.

He says he was decorating the British Sheraton Colonial Hotel.
She says he was decorating the elevator boy at the British Sheraton Colonial Hotel.

He says it was love at first sight.
She says he was a gold-digger.

He says he begged her to wait.
She says he made her do it.

He says they flew off in the middle of the night with only the clothes on their backs.
She says my grandmother had detectives chasing them.

He says they thought you could get married in Puerto Rico at 16.
She says you couldn’t.

He says maybe they can get married in the Dominican Republic.
She says they couldn’t get married there either.

He says let’s try Haiti next.
She says she was wearing the same dress in all 3 wedding photos.

The newspapers said it was so romantic.
The star-crossed lovers.

Nothing could keep them apart.
Nothing could keep them together.

He says she was a spoilt child who didn’t know how to cook or clean and was wildly extravagant.
She says she was imprisoned in Beverly Hills with her mother-in-law and had to cook, clean and had nothing to wear.

He says they were sitting together reading the ‘Taming of the Shrew”and that’s why they called me Bianca.
She says my father never read Shakespeare in his life.

He says I had a Louis Fourteenth style bassinet.
She says she had to get out of there.

He says he did everything for her.
She says she was bored out of her mind.

He says there were 6 men cited in the divorce papers.
She doesn’t say anything.

He says a child’s place is with her mother.
She says that was only if she’s paying him.

He says he just wanted what was best for me.
She says he just wanted money.

The lawyers said $50,000 was more than enough.
She says they only did it once.

He says she was the love of his life.

>>>>>

My parents met in January, eloped in February and I was born in November. They
honeymooned in Haiti. (BJ)

 

Bianca Juarez is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Southern California.  From the time she first picked up a pencil, she has used her art to explain, explore and engage the world around her. 

Fragments 184-193 from Selected Squibs [by Alan Ziegler]

184. She broke his heart in two. Then she quartered it. But each portion regenerated. Now he could run for miles, make love, weep at a sad movie, and still have one cold heart for her. In a dream of drowning, his life flashed before his eyes. She wasn’t there.

185. How many individual French fries were consumed in the past hour by someone other than the person who ordered them?

186. My first writing café was The Balcony on the east side of Broadway and 107^th Street, with a life size mannequin of Genet’s Madam Irma on the balcony above the bar. Another writer was usually there when I arrived and still there when I left. The French waiter would fill my coffee at the exact right intervals. After about six months, the other writer nodded hello. After about a year, he asked me what I was working on.

187. In college, a friend says “I’m horny and I thought about fucking you, but I knew you wouldn’t because of your girlfriend. You put a circle around yourself. You’ll do anything within that circle, but you won’t even consider going outside of it.” I tell her that I am always working on widening that circle. She replies: “You’ve missed the entire point.”

188. On the bus, a six-year-old taunts his younger brother, who has been allowed to sit on their mother’s lap while he has to stand: “I’m gonna grow up before you.”

189. What my dying mother misses: “If only I could walk from room to room.”

190. In the diner from behind me they bickered, then a jarring noise like a chair being overturned. “Aren't you going to pick it up?” No response. “Stupid old man.” And that was the last I heard from them. On my way out, I almost tripped over the cane.

191. Song lyric: You set me up just to knock me down / You could win a prize in the carnival

192. No word Monday. No word Tuesday. No word Wednesday. Thursday just words.

193. Now, while the time since your death is still counted in weeks, I'll be walking along and there, just beyond the ability of my eyes to distinguish faces, I'll see someone who looks like you, and for a few milliseconds my brain will form your face. At first it was a little unnerving, but I've come to look forward to and treasure those milliseconds, and I will mourn them when they are gone.

Poetry in outer space with Billy Collins and Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli [by David Lehman]

Billy Collins went to outer space, at least his voice did, and launched Emily Dickinson in orbit.

Come fly with me, let;'s fly, let's fly away
If you can use
Some exotic booze
There's a bar in far Bombay

Come fly away, I'll take you to the stars
To Juipter 
I'll sup on soup with her
and drink champagne on Mars
with all its cool cool bars

Come fly with me let's fly up to the stars

[the first stanza by Sammy Cahn, the second by DL]

. Grazie a Billy Collins, il più grande poeta contemporaneo vivente, grazie all'astronauta Paolo Nespoli nel ruolo di lettore dei versi di Emily Dickinson. 

Or the full treatment:

Abbiamo visto un poeta ed un astronauta parlare di poesia. Il poeta era un americano, e interveniva dalla sede dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei a Trastevere. L'astronauta era un ingegnere aeropaziale italiano, e interveniva da bordo della stazione internazionale in orbita attorno alla Terra. Chi avrebbe detto che un giorno i ruoli assegnati dalla storia contemporanea - l'arte agli italiani, la tecnologia agli americani - avrebbero potuto così paradossalmente scambiarsi? Oggi, forse, comprendiamo meglio il significato primario del termine "rivoluzione": che nel linguaggio della scienza, l'unico che è sempre sinonimo di progresso dell'umanità, significa compiere un giro per ritornare, gli astri ad esempio, nella stessa posizione tra le stelle. Il 12 ottobre, anniversario della scoperta dell'America, abbiamo visto annullarsi la piega del tempo e rivisto un italiano, esploratore degli spazi fisici dell'universo, incontrare un americano, esploratore degli spazi metafisici del linguaggio. Grazie a Billy Collins, il più grande poeta contemporaneo vivente, grazie all'astronauta Paolo Nespoli nel ruolo di lettore dei versi di Emily Dickinson. Grazie alla John Cabot University che li ha invitati in occasione dell'apertura dell'ottava edizione di "Italy Reads Program" http://www.johncabot.edu/italy-reads/default.aspx , grazie all' Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, all' ESA - European Space Agency e alla NASA Earth.

Or, in an official translation amended by DL, with some parts left in the original translationese (the troles "could have so paradoxically exchanged")

<< 
We [heard] a poet and an astronaut talk about poetry. The poet was an American, and [did whatever he did] from the headquarters of the accademia nazionale dei lincei in trastevere. The Astronaut was an Italian Engineer, and [took part] from the international station in orbit around the earth. Who would have [predicted] that one day the roles of contemporary history - the art of Italians, technology to the Americans - could have so paradoxically exchanged [could be flipped to their mutual profit, DL guesses]? Today, perhaps, we understand better the primary meaning of the term "revolution": which in the language of science, the only [language] that is [indispensable is  the] progress of humanity, is [DL gives up] to take a turn to return, the stars, for example, in the same position among the Stars. On October 12th, the anniversary of the discovery of America, we saw cancel the fold of time [DL would like to do that] and revised an Italian, explorer of the physical space of the universe, to meet an American, explorer of the spaces of the language [DL likes the idea of revising an explorer as if he were a poem,]. Thanks to Billy Collins, the greatest living contemporary poet, thanks to the astronaut Paolo Nespoli in the role of of Emily Dickinson [DL !]. Thanks to the John Cabot University that invited them to the opening of the eighth edition of "Italy reads program" http://www.johncabot.edu/italy-reads/default.aspx, thanks to Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, ESA-European Space Agency and NASA Earth

I toast thee, Billy Collins. -- DL

Time, Fear, Lust, Truth, and Grant’s Tomb [by David Lehman]

Next Line, Please this week features outstanding poems by some Next Line, Please regulars in response to the previous week's prompt that I posted.

The column is called "Time, Fear, Lust, Truth, and Grant’s Tomb."

Come give us a visit and check out recent columns. In my posts I quote some of the best poems submitted that week, but for a full flavor of the experience check out our comments field.

 

-- DL

The Ghosts All Wear Confederate Gray: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Nin Andrews' Miss August

Miss August
Nin Andrews
CavanKerry Press, 2017

Nin Andrews’ newest collection, Miss August, provides further evidence that she is perhaps the most agile practitioner of prose poetry writing today. Written from the alternating perspective of three characters, Sarah Jane Lee, Gil Rhett Simmons, and May Dee, Miss August chronicles the connections that these characters forge at Chinquapin Hill Farm in Lessington, Virginia during the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Andrews nimbly shifts between registers and dialects as she moves between the three characters, rendering a lyrical, but plain-spoken and arresting, version of three mid-twentieth century southern voices. The South that Andrews evokes obsessively confronts the legacy of what the locals call, “The War of Northern Aggression,” while denying the full truth of the foundational sin of slavery and the continuous transgressions of Jim Crow.  In Lessington, the ghosts all wear confederate gray and “raspberry blight got blamed on General Sherman and the burning of the South.” Miss August ably addresses issues of racial discrimination, child abuse, mental illness, gender inequity, sexual identity, and class differences, in a coming-of-age story that resonates even more deeply in 2017 as the open wounds caused by misogyny and white supremacy continue to suppurate.

Andrews explores how her characters’ lives are circumscribed and poisoned by the racist southern worldview that surrounds them. When Sarah Jane asks Gil’s father, Mr. Simmons, an abusive, manipulative, philandering, alcoholic, whose family bloodline “traced back to the Order of the First Families of Virginia,” about lynching, he replies: “You know they only lynched criminals, Sarah Jane. Some white folks were lynched, too. The way I see it: Lynching is a whole lot cheaper than the electric chair. And quicker too.” Mr. Simmons embodies a type of witless equivocation that continues to perpetuate white supremacy on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line in the twenty-first century. Running counter to Mr. Simmons, and all that he represents, are the countless silken ties of affection that Andrews draws between Sarah Jane, Gil, and May Dee; these characters are powerless in Lessington: an illegitimate daughter, a boy struggling with his gender identity, and an African-American servant. The care that these characters show each other mitigates the indignities they suffer. As they gallop across the alien landscapes of the stories they tell each other, they dream of planets where everyone is “destined to be an angel”; as Gil puts it: “At night we slept on our bellies so our wings could grow.” Miss August allows us access to the interior lives of three fully realized characters, who, much like many of us, strive to see past the hummingbird into the honeysuckle bloom. Nin Andrews’ Miss August is a must-read examination of the ways personal and collective histories perpetually rewrite the present.

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

"Entrapment" [by Terence Winch]

Terence Winch

The people in the songs want out.
They will not be your baby anymore.
You cannot call them sweetheart.
You must stop telling them how
lovesick you are, how you can’t get
by without them. How you cry, smoke,
walk the floor. How you can’t stop
loving them. They don’t want to hear
about your dumb hurt, your feelings
about rain and moonlight, how much
you miss their kisses. How you want
to hold their hand. What you think
about their lips and eyes. They’re done.
Your desperate love has stolen all their fun.

Bonus question:: Reading this poem do you hear Ray Charles singing "I Can't Stop Loving You" or The Beatles's "I Wanna Hold Your Hand"?

From Beltway Quarterly Review,  this poem from "inside the beltway" comes from a formidable poet who has been named by Irish America Magazine as one of its “Top 100 Irish Americans.”  For a second poem by Mr. Winch click here. 

"What's My Line?" [Guess Who? from November 27, 1966]

 

 

Richard Wilbur, March 1, 1921 - October 14, 2017 [by David Lehman]

Richard Wilbur, who died last night, was born in New York City in 1921 and grew up in rural New Jersey. His father was a portrait painter, and his mother came from a long line of journalists. A graduate of Amherst College (class of 1942), he served during World War II with the 36th Infantry Division. He saw action in Italy, France, and Germany. He taught at Harvard, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Smith, and his alma mater. Dick liked living in the country. With his late wife Charlotte he lived year-round in Cummington, Massachusetts, birthplace of William Cullen Bryant, and spent many springs in Key West, Florida. In 2004 his Collected Poems 1943-2004 appeared from Harcourt. Twice he won Pulitzer Prizes. He wrote the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, and his translations from seventeenth century French drama (Molière, Racine, Corneille) are performed widely in the United States and abroad.

Dick's greatness as a poet, translator, and wordsmith are (or should be) self-evident to all practicing.poets. He was also the most genial and gracious of individuals. It was an honor to know him and work with him. I profited from his expertise on many subjects: Edgar Allan Poe, the great American songbook, French classical tragedy, Milton, riddles, the haiku stanza put to narrative or expository use. In a New York City hotel in 1981 or '82 I heard Dick read his poem "Lying." He prefaced the reading by rehearsing his doubts about the merit of the work. But James Merrill had reassured him that it passed muster. "Lying" was one of Dick's great poems, I like teaching his "Boy at the Window" alongside Stevens's "The Snow Man." We were lucky to have Richard Wilbur among us for so many years. -- DL

 
Advice to a Prophet
Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters.  We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

(1961)

Elegy [poem by Angela Ball]

Elegy

“She has a knee,”
the TSA agent said.
a pat-down situation--legs
in wrong position. One forward,
no, back. No arms
overhead. Same strokes
for all.

First flight since the insertion
of a prosthetic knee, first since vacation
in a cabin named “Golden Memories.”

I was watching the movie Michael chose for me,
Scandal Sheet, 1952, with Broderick Crawford and Donna Reed.
Michael was in the bathroom, place of danger. Was,
in fact, dying.

The squad arrived, positioned him,
applied the riveting voltage.

A tech set my I-pad
to the address but I didn’t know
how start route. Place with name
of hospital was shopping mall, closed.
Where Saint Dolly is a billboard,
a serene welcome, a beige lace bodice with a feint
of cleavage. How nice for her
to be outside all the time,
part of the scenery.

An hour or so before the attack
Michael had suggested we go the next day
to a magic show. At this, heart sank. Mouth said, “Sure,
I’ll go with you.”

What magic now and never, what baton,
mirror, slipped lock?

Arrived at Emergency, the first of grief’s little rooms
with its fresh supply of tissues. I didn’t see Michael.
He was being prepped
for transport to the city:
a pallet swung, a spinneret of wings.

I drove after, to the big hospital. Shut all down
one side, as if by stroke.
His chute-like bed. The black
board’s goal of the day:
Wean From Ventilator.

When visiting hours ended, I was shown
to a room filled with grief’s La-Z-Boys,
grief’s Barcaloungers. People on and off
cellphones.

The day before, we had cruised the drag
of Gatlinburg. It occurred to me that now
we would surely never attend
the “All-You-Can-Eat Lumberjack Feud
Dinner Theater, or dine again at the over-hyped
restaurant, its patio with a creek
like a bandaged pet stretched alongside.

State of the patient’s brain unknown,
on the second day its controls sputtered,
dials spinning, thermostats deceived—
the board erased. “Your partner is very ill,”
the nurse said.

The summons. The neurologists’ announcement:

“We feel we can be direct with you.”

--“Just enough brain stem for some respiration.
   Imagine an aperture retracting, receding
   as at the end of a cartoon.”

“Always assume that they can hear”

The brain, swirling with movies, had starved
into itself. All medicine too late,
though the heart pulsed, stented.
Unstinting.

Breath held too long while my eyes and brain took in
Scandal Sheet, while Michael was scandalously
alone then more
much more alone.

*

Death deranges the shoe size. The formal wingtips
would not fit. No matter. So apropos, the dark suit,
the Jesuit School tie
with mascot Blue Jays
midflight.

I was left alone with him, tissues
within reach.

To the touch, marble-like.
Not the igneous stone—
the spherical toy
knuckled down into dirt.

He had talked of his drawstring bag
of keepsies, ushered by manmade flood
down the 17^th-street canal. Tigers,
Swirlies, Deep Blue Seas,
Green Ghosts.

He had talked of the New Orleans that called out:
Knife Sharpener, Genuine Hot Waffles, Taffy Wagon,
Haha the Icecream Man, Haha of today’s flavors.

Our trip to the mountains doesn’t end,
though Michael was flown to MSY in an outsized shoebox,
Human Remains. No seat selection,
no view, no warmth to lean against.

Doesn’t end, though I wrote
the owners of “Golden Memories ”
that my partner had died,
and the Jacuzzi, with its surcharge,
remained unused.

Let me hear that Michael hears.
In his fashionable Tiny House,

His burial plot in Metairie Cemetery,
near what was once the finish line
of the city racetrack,
he hears the chorus of wagers,
percussion of hoof beats
over hoof beats, the quiet
of laid dust.

I travel, searching the perfect vacancy.
I have sent memories out ahead. They gleam.
I have sent a knee.

The Real Reason Linda Reagan [Amy Carlson] Left "Blue Bloods" After 7 Seasons [by Walter Carey]

Editor's note: Walter Carey writes: "David Huntley, my source for this story, is the pseudonym of an executive at CBS who asked that he or she not be named.  -- WC." For an update ("Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?) click here. And here for the latest on Erin's love life.

For seven seasons, Linda Reagan as portrayed by the actress Amy Carlson was a stalwart figure in the hit series Blue Bloods. She plays the wife of hot-headed Danny Reagan, mother to their two boys, daughter in law of police commish Frank Reagan, sister in-law of Erin, brother-in-law of Jamie, aunt of the Columbia undergrad who used to go to Catholic school, granddaughter-in-law of grandpa, and a normal human being, who works as a nurse, lives in Staten Island, demands to be respected by her husband, and concludes phone conversations with him with this exchange:

"Love you."

"Love you more."

"Love you most."

Several theories have been making the rounds regarding Linda's sudden departure from the program. In episode one of season eight it is explained that she died in a helicopter crash transporting a patient. To those who believe that this is what happened to Amy Carlson, my source is happy to report that she is very much alive. There is also no truth to the rumor that she got sick -- "totally" -- with husband Danny always going off the rails and blowing his stack. That was actually something that endeared him to her, Linda admitted tearfully after one of their quarrels., according to Megin Draper, a close friend. 

It was really very simple, the actress confided, nursing a glass of Jameson's on the rocks as she negotiated her farewell package. It was "time to move on."

The network executive who bears a resemblance to Ned Beatty gave her a skeptical look.

"It really is time to move on," repeated the Knox College-alumna, who graduated cum laude, made her TV debut as Josie Watts on Another World in 1993, and currently resides in Chinatown with her kids and her partner. But she winked and touched her nose like Robert de Niro in Good Fellas so her interlocutor knew there had to be more to it. The pro bono work she has done on Frenchkiss Records has never interfered with her work on Blue Bloods, and while her significant other plays bass guitar for the Seth Meyers show on another network, that has never raised any red flags let alone hackles in legal.

"Does the real reason have to do with Frank Reagan's political ambitions?" she was asked. "Warmer," she said. "But if you print it, Danny will kill you." Therefore my source has adopted a pseudonym and will employ the subjunctive to describe what the smart money is saying, which is this:

Frank Reagan, as played by Tom Selleck, has the distinction of wearing nearly the same tie on every episode of Blue Bloods. Each is a rep (or regimental) tie featuring a red field with diagonal stripes usually containing white, blue, or a combination of the two. I happen to own two such ties myself, purchased at Brooks Brothers, and from a study commissioned by the triumvirate of Rogers Peet, Hart Schaffner and Carlo Marx it has been ascertained that for a municipal leader, this is the tie of choice, inspiring trust and confidence in the populace.

The consistent use of ties of this order has long led Reaganites to suspect that Frank has political ambitions. The speculation, fueled by dissatisfaction with the de Blasio regime in New York coupled with the gag-me-with-a-spoon shenanigans in DC, has resulted in a "draft Frank" movement. Linda Reagan is said to have taken a position on the net-yet-official campaign. One of her pet ideas: a series of TV commercials featuring endorsements of Reagan by various Franks -- such as Frank Sinatra, Frank O'Hara, Frank Hogan, Frank Costello, Frankie Machine, Frank Malzone, Fenway Franks. Frank Bullitt in his 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback, Francis Ford Coppola, Pope Francis, St. Francis of Assisi, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Francine York, and Connie Francis. 

But this is all speculation, and the rocky relationship between the police chief and the mayor is nothing new. Still, the fact that Frank Reagan polls higher than the mayor in all five boroughs, with an almost unheard of 90% favorable rating in Staten Island, may affect Frank's decision, and if Linda Reagan has anything to say about it, it's a go. -- WC

Friday the 13th [by David Lehman]

It's Friday the 13th and I wonder
how the superstition got started.
I'd always thought it was because
there were thirteen diners at the
Last Supper but I recently saw a
documentary about the Knights
Templar according to which
King Philip of France mounted
a ruthlessly efficient surprise
attack on the Templars
and tortured them until they
confessed they were heretics,
gnostics. That happened on
a Friday the 13th in the 14th
century, and ever since it's been
an unlucky day to be caught
in a storm or shoplifting or in bed
with a person other than your mate
or just crossing the street before
looking both ways in New York
where, from one point of view,
it's always Friday the 13th

-- from The Daily Mirror (Scribner, 2000)

TALES FROM UNDER THE PALAPA #1: The Forgotten Language [by Rex Weiner]

(Editor's note: As part of a series about new under-the-radar writing workshops, we've asked Rex Weiner, co-founder of the Todos Santos Writers Workshop to tell our readers about the experience of this magical place. Rex tells us that a few spots are open for the January session. sdl)

Writers journeying south of the border in January for our fifth annual Todos Santos Writers Workshop will gather under the palm-thatch palapa behind our haunted hacienda for an ancient ritual: Storytelling.

The awesome array of problems that challenge creative minds await them. Point of view, voice, structure, the revision process, that bottle of tequila beckoning from the bar. And most daunting of all: finding the guts to put pen to paper.

For inspiration, our writers have only to look around them. The little fishing and farming village of Todos Santos is engaged in multiple existential struggles. Open pit gold mines up in the mountains threaten to poison the water that irrigates their fields, the water they drink. Fishermen battling foreign developers find their shores bulldozed for a boutique hotel. Barely recovered from last year’s direct hit from Hurricane Odile two years ago, battered by Hurricane Lidia just last month, this fragile oasis between desert and sea on Baja’s Pacific coast— so unique it’s been officially designated by the Mexican government as a Pueblo Magico—battles for life.

As writers and good neighbors we are compelled to respond. Our rallying point is the 27^th anniversary of “The Forgotten Language,” an anthology of “Contemporary Poets and Nature,” curated by Christopher Merrill, its title taken from W.S. Merwin:

I want to tell what the forests
were like 

I will have to speak
in a forgotten language

The works by ninety-three poets were assembled twenty years after the first Earth Day, in the wake of Love Canal, Bhopal, the Chernobyl meltdown and not long after the Exxon Valdez fouled the Alaskan coastline with 750 thousand barrels of crude oil. Its publishing in 1991 was, and still is, a timely reminder of what really is at stake, and how writers may “heal the split between the nonhuman and human realms of existence,” in the words of Merrill’s introduction.

Luckily enough, we’ll have Merrill joining us, escaping the Midwest this winter for Baja to inaugurate our poetry workshop. The peripatetic poet, author, translator, journalist and Director of Iowa University’s International Writing Program shuttles between book fairs in Siberia, poetry workshops in the Ukraine, literary confabs in Seoul and other far-flung corners of the globe, lately touting his widely-hailed work, “Self-Portrait With Dogwood.”

His earlier volume, “The Forgotten Language” brings strong voices to the front. They include Louise Erdrich, whose Grandpa tells her: “These are the ghosts of the tree people, moving above us, unable to take their rest.” The late poet Agha Shahid Ali counsels us that “Certain landscapes insist on fidelity.” We accompany Jim Harrison on a stroll, “Walking back on a chill morning past Kilmer’s Lake” into a landscape alive with memory.

The poems approach nature in all of its manifestations—rocks, trees, flowers, birds, water, sky—as more than metaphysical fodder. These writers go beyond allegory and metaphor to address some measure of responsibility. Nature demands action, requires passion and anger often spills out of these pages. As James Dickey, in “For The Last Wolverine,” exhorts us: “How much the timid poem needs the mindless explosion of your rage.”

Many of the poems, from A.R. Ammon’s “Dunes,” Margaret Atwood’s “Elegy for the Giant Tortoises,” and Stanley Kunitz’ “Wellfleet Whale,” to Philip Levine’s ode “To a Fish Head Found on the Beach in Malaga,” come close to Baja in spirit and tone, their authors surveying seascapes, traipsing shorelines much like ours. But none comes closer than Nathaniel Tarn’s “Journal of the Laguna de San Ignacio,” describing a remote bay just to the north of our pueblo, where he encounters “whales breathing all around us in the night,” and he sees:

The mountains rise out of the desert
way out over Baja
the whales rise out of the sea
the mountains rise out of the sea
the whales rise out of the desert
the whales are taller than the mountains

That’s exactly how it is in Todos Santos, the way it’s always been, and how it should stay. We’ll do what we can to help. “Language, like nature, is an order larger than any individual,” Merrill says in the introduction to his anthology, a few rare copies of which I obtained on Amazon, to be distributed to our workshoppers—and an essential book that deserves re-issue so that we may all re-discover the Forgotten Language with which to tell our stories.

And then, under the palapa, our writers will have their own tales to tell.

Fragments 169-183 from Selected Squibs [by Alan Ziegler]

169. He believed her orgasms were authentic, but he suspected she was faking her compassion: “Oh. Oh. Oh. Yes. Yes. Yes. You poor thing, you!”

170. Within the past hour, how many people passed a stranger on the street whom they once passed on a street in another city?

171. The guy who used to sit on the bench is long gone. The bench is short gone. I miss him even more.

172. The softball team is coached by an English teacher and a social studies teacher. The English teacher misses an away game, the first I start at second base. The next day the two teachers huddle over a piece of paper. “How did the second baseman do?” “He did all right.”

173. At the flea market: “No, the Buddha by the bike, not the bike by the Buddha!”

174. The infinite wisdom of a circle.

175. The last phrase of Baudelaire’s “Dog and the Flask” (the title is also translated as “The Dog and the Vial” and “The Dog and the Scent Bottle”) is des ordures soigneusement choisies, which has been translated as “carefully raked-up mire,” “dung, chosen with care,” “carefully chosen sweepings,” “carefully selected scraps of nastiness,” “carefully selected garbage,” “meticulously selected garbage,” and “carefully selected crap.” And in Baudelaire’s “The Stranger” (also translated as “The Foreigner”), one of the speakers uses the familiar tu and the other the formal vous. It is impossible to capture this in English, though a Spanish translator would have no problem.

176. Part of me must be a damn genius or part of me a moron, because it’s oh so easy to outsmart myself.

177. Walking down the freezing street with a pizza box blanketing my hands, I've become one of those people I always envy.

178. My mother lies in the hospital bed with radium inserted into her abdomen, trying to kill the killer. She cannot move. Visitors cannot stay long because of the radiation. She tells us this story: “An older woman peeked in, wearing a volunteer’s outfit. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ the volunteer said. ‘Do you remember me? From when you were up on the sixth floor? I was just up there, looked for you, and something pulled me to come down here. I’m sure it was to tell you that everything will be all right.’ I asked her name. ‘Sadie.’ My mother’s name, and I never met another Sadie after she died. And she came down from ‘up there’ to tell me everything will be all right.” My mother laughs, for the first time in weeks, and for the last time.

179. In East New York we sit on the stoop waiting for the street fight. Not our battle—this one for the younger kids. From the next block comes the swarm, outnumbering our friends. We look at each other and attack screaming. “Look out, it’s the big kids,” someone shouts, and they run off. We are in third grade and I will never feel this big again.

180. In a gym class football game, I get clear in the end zone with the pass floating toward me. The closest defender—on the varsity football team—stops running and makes jinx signs. The ball slips through my hands. “That’s what you get for reading too many books,” he says.

181. I had some kind of intestinal bug that wouldn’t be snuffed. To make sure I didn’t have an exotic parasite, the doctor sent me to a diagnostic lab that specializes in feces. You need to get several negatives before they rule out parasites. The lab is a converted apartment. Every patient leaves a sample; often, chemical inducements are required. I could go on, but I don’t want to write it. And you wouldn’t want to read it.

182. My first recorded pun, in my journal of a family road trip; age 12: “We woke up early and hit the road. When our hands hurt, we got into the car and drove off.”

183. Manny Roth, owner of the Café Wha in the Greenwich Village heyday, is now helping to run the West End, near campus. I keep meaning to talk to him, let him know how much his club and his cohorts meant to me, but I am too shy. One day I see him in the lobby of the campus building where my office is located. He is going down the stairs to the exit. He looks old and alone, out of context. It’s now or never. “Mr. Roth,” I say, and he looks surprised to be identified. “Café Wha was very important to me.” He stares at me blankly and turns back down the stairs. Manny Roth grasps the door handle, then turns to me. “Take care of yourself,” he says. “There aren’t too many of us left.”

A Lost Gem is Found: "Something Wonderful May Happen: The New York School of Poets and Beyond." Film with With John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Larry Rivers, David Lehman, Charles Bernstein, and others . . .

 

Thank you Mitch Sisskind for alerting me to the availability of this film. 

-- sdl

 

Mitch Sisskind writes The Iliad! [with comments by David Lehman]

Iliad

Old age, Tolstoy wrote, is the biggest surprise
In a man's life. So true! Childhood hours
In the ancient car I now recall, the hot months,
Sox game on the radio, soporific Bob Elson
Mumbling in the microphone, "Um, strike one,"
And at bat Sherman Lollar, sloth-like catcher,
Elson droning, "Ball four. It's a base on balls,"
Henri Bergson called this perceived duration,
The sense of time as elastic phenomenon
Stretched or compressed by stoic's fortitude
Or child's impatience: "Are we there yet?"
And this is where the surprise comes in.
Yes, my good man, you have arrived there.
Yes, you are there all right, ya big dummy. 

In fact, you've already been there for a whie
Except "there" is not "where" or even "what"
You would have imagined. "There" is "here,"
Wherever you happen to be at the time.
As the snail everywhere bears its shell,
You and the destination are one now,
Not where you're going but what you are.

But we will grieve not, as Wordsworth wrote.
Or perhaps we will grieve. Shall we? No matter,
It doesn't really amount to a hill of beans.
That's just how the cookie crumbles,
That was the funeral of Hector. 

-- Mitch Sisskind

Veteran sportscaster Mitch Sisskind, prize-winning author of "Monsters of the Midway," who has covered the Chicago White Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers in a career spanning four decades, has now branched out in verse and written his "Iliad." My source is Pierre Menard, who under a pseudonym acted as the first United States citizen with a French first name ever to be a president's press secretary. To call Menard an informed source is to obfuscate the understatement. For those not in the know, a brief synopsis is in order.

Back in the day, Menard flexed his chutzpah chops by dropping his last name in favor of that of the notoriously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye. His project: to write, with word-for-word fidelity to the original, "The Catcher in the Rye" with the difference that the book became an allegory of the life of Roy Campanella, catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers in their heyday, who befriended pitcher Don Newcombe in his losing battle with rye, bourbon, scotch, and Canadian whiskey. Yet Newk, who squandered his great gifts and faced a depression like you wouldn't believe after Yogi Berra went deep on him twice and the Yanks clobbered the Bums 9-0 in the seventh game of the 1956 World Series, is one of the few from that legendary team still alive and well.

It was in 1959 that the soi-disant Pierre Salinger adopted the pseudonym of Mitch Sisskind.

On a dare from Deejay Shap and Larry Weed, Sisskind agreed to hole himself up in a Hilton hotel -- the one in Pisa known to the natives as the "tiltin' Hilton" -- for twenty-four hours with no books or reading material handy except the Gideon Bible and the San Francisco Chronicle. At two hour intervals a kindly hotel staffer would knock on the door saying "My name is Alan, and if it isn't Alan, it's Donald" and offering snacks: "Coffee's a dime." But Sisskind vowed to disregard any such temptation and to limit his responses to the names of wrestling holds.

By the end of twenty-four hours Sisskind had written his Iliad after escaping from handcuffs and leg-chains. He then took a bath, watched porn on demand, had a Coke, read three war novels by Herman Wouk, James Jones, and Norman Mailer, and became a gemologist. We post the written results above and invite readers to compare the lines with the Homeric original (chapter 22: pages 397-411 in Rieu's prose translation; or see Lattimore, lines 265-261). "There is no question in my mind that Achilleus was the greatest athlete of all time," Sisskind told Janet Benderman in their Partizansky Review interview of 2008. "Achilleus was god's man, less mortal than divine."

About his accomplishment Sisskind said, "I did not write The Iliad. I wrote my Iliad, and I called it 'Iliad,'  for each of us must have his own Iliad, alas, do we not?"

"Iliad" is posted together with other compelling works -- by Angela Ball, Terence Winch, Sharon Mesmer, Jim Cummins, Ron Padgett, Led Upton, Bill Zavatsky, and worthy others including Denise Duhamel, guest editor of the 2013 edition of Best American Poetry -- in the one-shot, hot-shot, big-hit lit mag that Martin Stannard put together for the world to see on August 1, 2013. -- DL