The Best American Poetry

"Come Rain or Come Shine": two versions (Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald)

Here's Sarah Vaughan:

and here's Ella Fitzgerald:

Dodger Fans Take Note: It's Sandy Koufax's birthday

So Artie Shaw (born today) goes to Mexico and comes back with "Frenesi"

 

 

"If they asked me. ." [by David Lehman]

If they asked me to choose one of my favorite words leaving out the pronouns I would skip to "if."
At the heart of rhetoric is "if" or sometimes "as if."
If has the greatest potential.
If they asked me I could write a book.
And then then I put on the Modern Jazz Quartet and they asked me about improvisation
and I improvised
on the theme of "if"
and the greatness of the subjunctive mood,
and the secret is that the hypothetical becomes the imperative in one fell swoop.
All you have to do is turn "if" into "let," and what you get is a cordial imperative, a command concealed as an enthusiastic suggestion from an avuncular friend.
Listen to "Pyramid" (MJQ) or Thelonious Monk ("Straight No, Chaser") or John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" (1964). Just let it happen, man. Listen attentively or let your mind wander. Let it be the background music of your life in elevators and office buildings and your own backyard. If you play "Pyramid" or Monk or Coltrane and continue with your day, ignoring the music but hearing it and soon becoming conscious of it and conscious of your listening, it's as if your mind has traveled from a Mozart symphony to a Rachmaninov piano concerto in the company of Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, Connie Kay, and John Lewis, and the pace is the pace of your heart because you live in the city of caffeine, and well, that's what poetry does, too, it jumps all over the place, it cant stay still for long, it takes up a theme and rides with it, then it lets another instrument have its say, and if you're that way, you get up, blow your horn, sit back down, take another sip, and write a poem.
-- David Lehman

 

Neither speak lost Estrucan; too short, too sibilant, too clear

We are in a former state, in a principality, of the Holy Roman Empire – it seems lost Etruscan is the way of speech here, filled with short sibilance and long silent vowels. Like soaring gothic; I can’t be sure; you are asleep. The quilts are separate; you are under yours; I am awake; there are watery streaks of light – in them I see a pale flash of breath as it catches and is carried off into uncertain dark. Neither one of us speaks the language; I am cold. The quilt doesn't quite cover me all, my chest is bared – my foot juts out, it rests on your thigh, which is warm; it feels good. The line of your jaw, your ear, your scent of sleep is balm to me; you turn on your side, face me, think, “he fucks me nice”; I think I fuck you good; I do it as often as I can, as well as good; you smile as you do in your sleep; you mutter something; you pull me toward you.  I know. You are sick of me, with me. I note the he; I can feel it in your fingertips on my palm, when I squeeze them, make us fists. On your back, too, as you search through the closet, rifle the drawers, looking for something, what? I reach under the quilt, scoop up your head and all its lines in my hand. Christ, your hair is rough; bleaching has dried it, bled it, frightened vanity has brittled it; the tight curls are spongy, though, and soft in your way; your idea of beauty is tough on you; all silk to cherish between my fingers. God, I'm so lucky to love you; I am a restless male; my jerky sleeps are filled with encrypted passion, perilous, unremembered moments – a world subtly strange, pregnant with motions and colors and fracturing constellations; so close to crazy in the sinews as makes no difference. Go ahead; I can take you, your body, person, your need, habits: you, you easily feel your delicious dreams punctuated by pleasure while I, stretched as if to break, I push the temple crashing down and fail thereby to break the iron chains that bear me down, Christ. In another state, one not so enduring as the Holy Roman Empire, where the day and night through words fill the air, you once said, when once I could hear, you said, “you fuck me nice”. You open your eyes just for a moment now, smile into my wide-open eyes; uneasy, hard to control, I am strong and insistent – you are nowhere there; you have always felt that, haven't you? You have and put it aside: that it isn't about just you; my need’s for she, it’s power, it’s possession, it’s for a woman, my need’s penetration, her, a scent, a touch; having, holding, never letting go. Now, you reach for me; I am he.  Ahh, Early Bird, you whisper, hoarse. I pull you to me and kiss under your eyes and at the corner of your slightest smile; you do not kiss me back; you let him, with pleasure; I do not understand it; he does not understand it; I feel sticky heat  from between her breasts crushed against mine and the chill over the whole back of me, the tickle of that gold chain I once bought you; her sweat warms my heart’s skin; I hold you, he holds you; he has you as gently as ever I might as if she were her, were you, the fragilest crystal of the fastest hourglass reflected in the most infinite mirror; we are back to sleep as we have been so often before. God, you are sweet.

The two funniest words in the language: Groucho Marx. As the gang roasts Johnny Carson.

Groucho proves that, as Alan King says, he " makes Don Rickles look like the flying nun."

Groucho: "I went to Nebraska to talk to Johnny's mother. I am happy to report that she remembers Johnny. She doesn't remember his father. Then I looked up Johnny's high school teacher. She doesn't remember Johnny. But she does remember his father. .  ."

 

Poem for the Season: "December 25" by David Lehman

Christmas defeated Chanukah
once again last night
by a margin of three billion dollars
or so, but every time I hear
a Yiddish word like bupkes
in a movie (L.A. Confidential)
or when Oleg Cassini in that new play Jackie
calls a garment a shmatta, it's "good
for the Jews," as our parents used to say.
Meanwhile some things have
stayed the same; the drunken lout
in the street is still somebody's father.
Hey, kid, how does it feel to have a pop
that's a flop? And we had such good ideas
for changing the mental universe, if only
as a project in philosophy class, the one
I still dream about failing when I have
that dream everybody has, of being back
in college and needing this one course
to graduate, which I forgot to attend 

-- David Lehman 

from The Daily Mirror: a journal in poetry (Scribner, 2004)

 

-- sdl

The Rule of Three: Movie Multiple Choice # 1 [by David Lehman]

Why are there always three sailors or soldiers, never two or four, on shore leave or furlough?

(a) Because Gene Kelly favored the “rule of three”

(b) Because one can sing, one can dance, and one can provide comic relief

(c) Because human kind cannot bear very much reality

(d) Because, according to Freud, “three” is a magic number and a phallic symbol

(e) Because the sergeant tells the captain to lay off his daughter until the sailer marries Wilma.

 

Which movie illustrates the condition described by T. S. Eliot in the garden?

(a) All of them 

(b) All musicals except It's Always Fair Weather

(c) .Hitchcock's Hollywood films except Rear Window and Vertigo

(d) The Third Man but only if seen in Vienna on a Friday evening

(e) Casablanca

 

Who is "the third man" in The Third Man?

(a) Fred MacMurray 

(b) Claire Bloom's lover when they reach the Berlin Wall and begin to climb

(c) Harry Lime

(d) Hamlet

(e) Franz Kindler 

 

 When Carol Reed made The Fallen Idol,

(a) he understood that he could not be faithful to Graham Greene's story

(b) he asked Orson Welles for advice on casting the butler

(c) he cast his own butler as the butler 

(d) he was dating Carol Burnett

(e) he and she sang carols with Carroll O'Connor

 

The star of the movie was

(1) Arletty

(2) Ilse Lund

(3) Laurence Olivier as Hamlet

(4)The man who didn't shoot Liberty Valance

(5) Madeleine Elster's gray dress at Ernie's

 

Who is the “odd man out” in Carol Reed’s film with James Mason?

(a) Shell

(b) Lukey

©  Kathleen

(d) Johnny McQueen

(e) Father Tom

 

How did the British top brass get William Holden to volunteer for the dangerous mission to blow up the bridge in a Burmese jungle?

(a) Because they appealed to his sense of fair play.

(b) Because he was a queer bird, even for an American.

© Because he has done what Don Draper will do in Korea: he steals the identity of an officer killed in an action that he survives. But unlike Draper he is found out and hasn’t any choice.

(d) Because Holden was a natural hero, the American who has to get talked into putting his life on the line for a good cause.

(e) Because he is depicted shirtless at the POW camp reminding the viewer of Picnic with Kim Novak.

 

What made Barbara Stanwyck scream?

(a) She phoned the number her lover gave her and the voice on the other end said, "City Morgue."

(b) She said we're both rotten and he said only you're a little bit more rotten

(c) She beat Henry Fonda at poker

(d) She saw Addison De Witt commit a murder and try to pin it on her

(e) When she went to bed with Robert Taylor, he called her Ruby Catherine Stevens

 

What are the last words spoken in Double Indemnity?

(a) "Round up the usual suspects."

(b) "Straight down the line."

(c) "I love you, too."

(d) "How fast was I going, officer?"

(e) "Sorry, baby, I'm not buying."

 

In The Best Years of Our Lives, Hoagy Carmichaael

(a) orders a beer for the navy but lets army and air force get drunk as a skunk

(b) doesn't play "How Little We Know" on the piano for Lauren Bacall to sing 

(c) teaches Homer to play "Chopsticks" with his hooks while Al watches and Fred in the phone booth breaks things off with Peggy

(d) owns the bar where Dana Andrews meets Teresa Wright 

(e) invented the hoagy by shoving in a roll everything he could find in the icebox.

"Amapola" [as sung by Bob Eberly and Helen O'Connell]

The next time you see Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Leone's great masterpiece, be sure to listen to "Amapola," which plays a key role in the movie as Robert de Niro ("Noodles") pursues Elizabeth McGovern ("Deborah") in vain and pain. "Amapola" is one of several great one-word, foreign-word songs, the others that come to mind being "Frenesi," "Perfidia,," and "Volare." -- DL

 

"Sing, Sing, Sing" [with Benny Goodman and company]

Clarinetists are often asked whom they prefer, Artie Shaw (born May 23) or Benny Goodman (born May 30). It's a good cocktail party icebreaker for swing enthusiasts. Here is Benny's great statement of the swing era. I once heard Mel Torme on this song, playing drums. -- DL

 

"My Flu" [by Reetika Vazirani]

Subj:   My Flu
Date:   96_12_21 15:22:57 EST
From:  [email protected] (Reetika Gina Vazirani)
To:  [email protected]

Hello.
I caught the flu
there is nothing I can do
but entertain myself as u-
sual, it's fun reading your books which out of the blue
put up sprigs of mistletoe
rapid random kisses ensue
achoo, achoo, achoo
it's all a dream on my part I know
but a good one thank you
David I am walking on broken glass it’s so
crunchy!  If there's ice or snow
I won't be able to check my email, it’s cold the wind is blow
ing, I blow you good wishes Blow
you in this case has a direct object O-
kay master explainer of interpretive theo-_                                     
ries of our day -- take care of you sweet ego
You friend, Reetika Also
do Not get a Flu
Shot that's how I got this horrible disease the flu
I don't need a doctor I need a lawyer so
I can approach the Nat’l Agency on Flu
with one sentence:  I plan to sue!
O, so do go ahead and get a flu shot we can sue
them together just we two
we will threaten the agency execu-
tives: Look you -- holding up a photo
(exhibit A) of you with a silencer to your head, ready for death to
take you The flu
is a silent killer and to kill off po-
ets is a terrible thing for a country to do!
Achoo, is that your sneeze, God Bless You!

-- Reetika Vazirani, December 21, 1996

Joyeuses Fêtes! Eight “street portraits” from Sarah Meunier: eight reasons to love suburban Paris

 

all that

About two million people live in the 40 square miles of Paris intramuros, each enjoying an average annual share of national income of 75K €. Five million people, each getting along OK and sometimes not on an annual average 40K share of national income, live in the very rich, very poor and middling communes just beyond the congested ring-road called the "boulevard Périphérique," which was built along the line of the city walls of 1871 between 1956 and 1973. ©2017 Sarah Meunier

If you’ve been to Paris, you’ve seen the urban tableaus.

The miscellany of blue-jeaned and be-suited, be-skirted individus hustling from métro station to a host of previously unremarked glass, wood or steel doors of every shape and size, all of which, surely, must lead to some form of, more or less obscure, money-generating activity …

You’ve seen them. The bustlers and moppers in the hotels, the stork-standing servers armed with brown trays haunting the restaurants and cafés, security guys in cheap suits, usually cheerful-seeming, shelf-stockers and cashiers… And firemen! And I’ve only ever seen fire “men”:  well-filled, clingy, muscle shirts and pants, discretely streaked with a glisten of attractively trickled sweat, jogging and jiggling hither and yon as the working day clatters open…

You’ve seen them, usually in white or blue pants and lab-style cotton jackets: plumbers, heat and lighting technicians, deliverers, mail-people on yellow bikes saluting concierges, those who gesticulate in the ubiquitous pharmacies and medical-test laboratoires.

Finally, perhaps most especially, you’ve noticed the drivers and passengers of the little white utility trucks that bear mysterious names – the raisons sociales, as they say, of enterprise –“Socranil” or “Cefelec”, “Sofrapup”, “Pippubli” or “Acrosoc”.

At home, many of the above-mentioned tableau thems are my neighbors.

As such, they go back and forth to jobs, have children, pastimes, apartments, taxes to pay, errands to run, points of view, tastes, quiet thoughts, bref, as Robert Graves once famously summed up the routine of life, “all that”. 

                    back and forth

The nearest suburbs, north & south, east & west, are linked to Paris’ social fabric by metro termini. ©2017 Sarah Meunier

Sarah Meunier, also a neighbor – also a photographer of "street art" who works closely with the Lavo // Matic “graffiti” gallery in the thirteenth arrondissement – has made “street portraits” of many of these, our mutual thems, our mutual neighbors, hors tableau, as they go about their lives. As if for study, an outsize proof sheet of her portraits was hung above the drinks table during the open house of La Fabrique Bagnolet arts center this past Fall.

Meunier has managed to pull forth a certain, almost Hollywoodian, glamor in the familiar, most-often anonymous, human beings whom I run across every day in the stairwell, on the street, at the market, in the stores, in the bus, in the metro: those who animate the thems we see in the Paris tableaus.

I offer these eight Sarah Meunier street portraits as my end-of-year-begin-the-year gift. I offer them as eight reasons to be of good cheer about the true state of humanity, eight reasons to love and esteem the people who make France and, above all, eight reasons to love our neighbors.  

Joyeux Noël 2017, Happy New Year 2018.

      in the metro

The people recorded in Sarah Meunier’s street portraits live within an arc defined by the stations Porte de Pantin (Line 5), Mairie de Lilas (Line 11), Gallieni (Line 3), Robespierre, Croix de Chavaux, Mairie de Montreuil (Line 9) and Château de Vincennes (Line 1). ©2017 Sarah Meunier

points of view

Sarah Meunier told me she only recently began doing these portraits, after long hesitation. Although she now says she enjoys the often tense interpersonal negotiation involved in doing a street portrait, getting one doesn’t really get easier with experience. “It’s tricky,” she says. “Taking a photo, it’s like getting into somebody’s private life – “ ©2017 Sarah Meunier

pastimes

“People, generally,” says Sarah Meunier, “they just have a problem with their body image. And that’s really why they are reluctant to be photographed, at least in public.”©2017 Sarah Meunier

 

those who animate

Sarah Meunier uses black and white for its “timelessness”; these are public records, after all. ©2017 Sarah Meunier

                    the raisons sociales of enterprise

Meunier most often accosts her subject in the street, asks permission and does a rough and ready shoot. That’s what she was doing the day we met to talk, going around the neighborhood garage sale, asking to take portraits. ©2017 Sarah Meunier

        glamor in the familiar

Sarah Meunier can also shoot on the sly. She then goes to the subject and shows what she’s done – she says she gives the photo to all the people she takes. This fait accompli approach is difficult, she says, because, while it can capture the un-self-consciousness that so often reveals a human personality’s beauty, she has to “‘hose people down” with the camera if she wants to have a chance of capturing the expression or the look that really brings the person out. © 2017 Sarah Meunier

The Poet and the Poem, the Artist and her Art, The Criminal and the Crime, How Similar Are They?

 

I know--it's a funny question, but it first occurred to me when I was getting my MFA at Vermont College, and my beautiful friend, Alicia, with her long, wavy golden hair (I mean, she's one of the most gorgeous women I have ever met) went out on the town one night with some famous visiting poets, and when she came back, she was horrified. "The poets!" she said. "They were such creeps!" She added that she thought, after reading their work, that they would be "like angels." 

I told her how, before I went to church, I thought Christians were, well, Christian. "Wow, you really are out of touch!" she laughed. "What planet did you grow up on?"

I have often wondered: how far we are from the message or story or image we send into the world? Of course, fiction writers aren't held up to the same standard as poets. We don't expect Stephen King to be a psycho-murderer. But poets are often equated with the work they create. Maybe it's a problem of the the first-person in poetry.  Am I really the I in my confessional poems? Are you? Yes or no, we create a certain kind of expectation. After all, I think readers like to identify with writers in one way or another. 

It's that kind of identification I wonder at. I wonder about it with cities, too. Because I think of places as stories, as personalities, and I travel to them with certain expectations. 

When I was moving back to Charlottesville, the story I read about it was of a lovely, exciting, liberal University town. I was relieved to think it had changed so much from the Charlottesville I grew up in, which was a stunningly beautiful but racist, sleepy, southern town, much like the fictional Lessington, Virginia I wrote about in Miss August. But then, last summer there was that horrific White Supremacist rally in Charlottesville. And since I've moved, many have written me to ask what it's like here. Is Charlottesville a racist city? How is the town coping with what happened? Do people talk about the tragedy? I don't know the answers, but from what I have  read in the Heaphy Report, the story is both beyond upsetting and it's ongoing.

In the aftermath of the event, many of the counter-protesters are being sued, and until a week ago, there were plans for another Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August of 2018. The  protesters, as one friend explained it, have learned to tell a legally defensible story. They have figured out how to situate themselves on the right side of the law. And how to frame the story in their favor.  And our dear President has joined them in that effort. 

Is that even possible? I am still just dumbstruck by the whole thing.

But it brings me to my last point, or the last thing rambling around in my brain today . . . 

In his recent article in the New Yorker, The Double Murder Case That Still Haunts Me, Nathan Heller writes about a gruesome double-murder that happened in the 1980s in Lynchburg, an hour down the road from Charlottesville.  It was a murder that caught the attention of the public back in the '80's, and that the short story writer, Peter Taylor, and his wife, the poet, Eleanor Ross Taylor, talked about at length when we visited with them that year. The murderers, Elizabeth Haysom and Jen Soering, were top UVA students and talented writers, which was why the Taylors were especially stunned by their story. Now, years later, a documentary has been made about the case. Everyone is still questioning what exactly took place.

But it is the murderers' ability as writers that causes Nathan Heller to question them. He writes: 

Both Haysom and Soering were writers in college, and both have become successful authors who have published from prison. That haunted me, too—partly because there’s an inherent slipperiness involved in interviewing people who know how stories are composed, and partly because the coverup itself seemed to have literary attributes. As I put it in the magazine piece: “At least one of the people implicated has been hiding the truth with a writer’s mind."

 

Next Line, Please: Double Your Pleasure

This week on Next Line, Please, the prompt is to play with double alliteration, an experiment introduced to us by Aaron Fogel in a poem called “BW,” which was published in 1988. 

Building on this idea, Jim Dolot used his own initials in writing “Dictionary Jazz,” (1996). The poem begins, “Jack Derrida / Identifies himself / To the police / Of Jewish dreams / As John Doe” and has this memorable riff:

Jeanne d’Arc
A jailbird—
A jackdaw—
Her jeremiads
Became his
Jeux d’esprit.

For next time, please write a poem or poems—with a 16-line limit—that plays on two letters. You may use your initials, or letter-pairings in wide use (such as Uncle Sam, us, upset, untied slates, unusual surface, screwed up, und so weiter). I think NLP regulars will go to town with this prompt.

Visit the American Scholar's page to read the post in full, and to enter your candidate.

 -- Virginia Valenzuela

Proof that the Brain Is a Bucking Horse: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Tim Seibles's One Turn Around the Sun

One Turn Around the Sun
Tim Seibles
Etruscan Press, 2017

Tim Seibles’s newest collection, One Turn Around the Sun, examines the chimaeras and constellations of selfhood that make up a life. Seibles ranges from six months after his own conception to his fifty-ninth year, depicting with great nuance the complicated lives of his parents, and meditating on how those lives dovetailed into his own.  The interlocking poems of One Turn Around the Sun read more like an autobiographical novella punctuated by villanelles, or a suite of jagged solos played on the bad axe of the self, than as a traditional collection of poetry. Reading this book is like listening to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: one comes away with the impression of a fully articulated vision of awe at what it means to live, to age, to long, to acknowledge death, and to attain an infinitesimal speck of paradise through music. Seibles aims to cull the quark from the neutrino, to apprehend the bits “of your life straggling / behind you—empty cans / hitched to the newlyweds’ car.” In the title poem, Seibles voices the collection’s central concern: “I believe it is hard to be human, to be these / new animals, hard to say yes to this singular / blood   and to the flying world that made us.” For Seibles, it is the flux of personality and the fleetingness of our time on this planet that binds us to one another and allows us to remain partially intelligible despite the difficult bonds that sing us to distance.

Seibles constantly navigates and remaps the distances between parent and child, citizen and state, lover and beloved, self and world, poet and reader. Although the details of a life skitter away and memories scuttle, although the stifling sleet of American history rains through these lines, Seibles inveighs with Blakean fluency against the displacements caused “by jobs, by septic religion, ghost-dick capitalism, television—.” Against all that stultifies, Seibles enjoins:

            Suppose, just once, you saw a middle-aged maniac
            skating telephone wires like a squirrel, or one
            glad woman jumping balconies and boulevards
            as if time were a trampoline—think how gladly
            you would lose your mind: look
            what the Takers have taken and the monsters

            they have made, the tame zombie-playmates
            they have made of us: smiling, bobbing
            for the job, trotting along, when we might be trolls
            under their bridges—billy goats butting their
            smug asses—when we might re-write the world!

            What is that restlessness? What is this rage?
            Proof that the rose still burns in your blood—
            root and branch, thorn and bloom, proof
            that your brain is a bucking horse, that
            your soul remembers and bites the leash; I want
            such teeth in my mouth. Why can’t we
            have a world worthy of the wheeling sun? 
            The Earth is a house that flies! 

            Fuck all the powers that be.

One Turn Around the Sun is proof the brain is a bucking horse, that we might re-write the world, that time is a trampoline, that the earth is a house that flies, that our orbits are circumscribed by the gravitational pull of our loves, and that we must spend what little time we have on this globe learning to bear the beams of these mysteries.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, 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.

Creativity Rules: The CDC Poetry Project [Amy Lemmon]

It's the end of the semester at FIT. Immersed in final grades and end-of-semester tasks as Chairperson of English and Communication Studies, I was trying to bask a bit in the launch of an exhibition of student projects, Communicating Climate Change, the fruits of two years of labor. But then, over the weekend, I read a December 15 Washington Post article about a directive given to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to the article, official documents being prepared by the CDC for their 2018 budget were not to contain the words "vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity," "transgender," "fetus," "evidence-based," or "science-based."

On December 16, my friend, poet Sarah Freligh, posted a writing challenge to her Facebook friends: “Write a sestina using six of the prohibited words, the seventh as your title.” To say the unsayable, as if were, and what better way to say the words than in a repetitive form like the sestina?

I idly posted a comment, “We need an anthology!” Sarah challenged me to edit one, and I declined but instead created a WordPress site – The CDC Poetry Project. Starting this week, we’re actively soliciting poems that say the seven words and do so in a way that speaks truth to power. 

Go to our Submission Guidelines for details! 

Dorangrichia Ceramics Mug - Perfect! by Stacey Harwood-Lehman

My tapered-wall "Seismic Wave" mugs arrived this week from Dorangrichia Ceramics and I'm here to tell you that my search for the perfect hot beverage drinking vessel is over. This mug is perfect and here's why:

1. I have an aversion to drinking dark liquids from a dark mug, perhaps because I'm somewhat color-blind. If you have no such concern, you can have this mug in "Amost Shale" a rich olive; for me, white is the way to go. 
2. The handle provides a good secure grip, with room for my index, pointer, middle, ring, and pinky fingers to fit comfortably. I don't understand why anyone would want a mug without a handle or with a handle that only fits one or two fingers.  
3. My theory is that the slightly tapered walls keep the liquid hotter longer. I like my coffee hot, not warm, and I won't drink reheated coffee (though this mug is microwave safe for those who do reheat. My friend J makes a week's worth of her morning coffee in a Chemex and reheats a cup every morning. Not for me.). 
4. The mug holds roughly 10 oz of liquid. I hate huge mugs because (a) I couldn't drink that much coffee before it cooled down too much (see above) and (b) I make strong coffee with an Aeropress and add steamed milk; 10 oz is the perfect amount. 
5. Speaking of heat, I don't know how she does it but while the walls of these mugs (I got two) aren't thick, they don't get too hot to handle but they do conduct enough heat to warm my hands. 
6. The white part of the mug is smooth white matte, the green band has a bit of pleasing texture that feels good, as does the rough textured base. 
7. Finally, while I didn't anticipate this and it wouldn't have mattered anyway, the mug fits perfectly in my Ikea cork coasters. It's as if they were made for each other! 

I drink coffee every morning and herbal tea in the afternoon and evening. I want something that I hold in my hand every day to give me a lot of pleasure. This is it! You can get yours here. 

-- sdl

ps: this is not a sponsored post! I ordered and paid for these mugs. 

Go Fund Me Campaign for Documentary Film "MICHAEL LALLY: I WANT TO CALL IT POEMS"

Rachel E. Diken, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and now film director, has established a "go fund me" page to raise money to make a documentary about Michael Lally and his life as a poet on the occasion of the publication of his 30th book, ANOTHER WAY TO PLAY, a big collection of poetry from 1960 to 2017 due out from Seven Stories Press in late April 2018. Here's what Diken has to say about Michael:

The widely impactful career of poet, actor, screenwriter, playwright, and activist Michael Lally celebrates a milestone in 2018 with the publication of his 30th book, ANOTHER WAY TO PLAY, by Seven Stories Press. After a lifetime of building unlikely communities across the United States, Lally’s book tour reunites him with New York City, Washington DC, Los Angeles, New Jersey, and the Berkshires.

Lally’s mission to facilitate change through accessible language reveals its footprints in pivotal moments of the civil rights, LGBTQ, punk, feminist, and progressive movements—a motivational template for any believer in equality. Featuring original interviews with poets, activists, artists, movie stars, and more, I WANT TO CALL IT POEMS captures the trajectory of a curious, pugnacious spirit that dares to lift its gaze beyond current limitations.

Michael Lally has been a regular contributor to these pages and we are fans of him and his poetry. This is campaign worth supporting. You can find more information about this project here. 

-- sdl

Happy Birthday Frank! Michelle Dunton interviews David Lehman about Frank Sinatra

Michelle Dunton of Writing Fun interviewed David Lehman upon publication of Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World

Love Me or Leave Me (with the birthday boy)