Pursuant to our conversation of the other night, the one in which we discussed what various movie stars meant to us, I have decided to write not simply one email to you, but several.
When I was very young, say, around seven or eight, I went in for cowboy flicks. I usually went with a pack of boys my own age, we paid our dime and watched a double feature. The National Anthem was played and sometimes there’d be a yo-yo contest. There were usually one or two cartoons, a serial of Superman or Captain Marvel and always Movietone Newsreels. I had no use for Tom Mix or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers. I liked Randolph Scott, I guess because I admired his perfectly chiseled features and the fact that he didn’t sing. But I’ll talk about the male stars of my past at another time.
Now I want to discuss the females that I had begun to want to watch, the many on whom I developed a crush. I was nine or ten when I thought Esther Williams was hot. It was her swimming, naturally, that did it for me. In those days I like women who evinced some athleticism. I never really thought of them as women, but as grown up girls, Esther Williams could swim. That was it for me. I thought her face a little broad, especially when she wore a swimming cap. The crush was short lived. I moved on. Athleticism ceased to be a necessity, since almost none of the female stars was athletic, at least not on screen. That is, with exception of Ginger Rogers, whose dancing I considered a kind of athletic event. (As I grew older I ceased to think of it as merely that.) I should also mention Betty Grable, who does a terrific solo in “The Gay Divorcee.” But this and other Rogers/Astaire movies I saw sometimes as many as ten years after they first appeared. It wasn’t simply Rogers’ athleticism that got to me, it was her energy, he perkiness. That’s it: she was perky, despite those eyes that could be a shade soulful, a little hurt.
Other Perky cuties I had a crush on were Janet Blair, Joan Leslie. I have not seen Janet Blair since I was ten years old, so I can’t say what effect she would have on me now, but I recently watched “Flying Down to Rio” and took a good hard look at the young Ginger Rogers but was not overwhelmed. More overwhelming was the seemingly endless Carioca dance numbers with Fred and an ensemble of hundreds (it seemed). And most overwhelming was Dolores Del Rio to whom I had paid no attention when I was a boy. Ah Dolores! I ran into her once in an elevator in Mexico City back in 1953. I was with my father and he noticed her right away and practically fainted on the spot. She was then 48 and I was 19. She was still beautiful, but not the way she was in “Flying Down to Rio.” She was darkly glamorous, which is about all that I could be certain of in the few seconds we were on the elevator. In “Flying Down to Rio” you noticed the playful intensity of her eyes and her perfect features. But more about the true beauties next time. >>>
This week's prompt centers on a mix between the homophone and the Freudian slip: create a poem titled "Honor Role" incorporating less of rhyme and more of mix-ups. Words with double meanings, such as "whole in one" or "roll model," as well as altering a word in a well known phrase by one letter, "track meat," "over hall," or "the golden role," can both prove fruitful.
Nearly four years ago, David Lehman and The American Scholar began Next Line, Please with the mission to diversify the poetry education available on the web, and to get more poets, many emerging and unpublished, into the ring. Not only have both of these goals been realized, but they created a virtual community that offers both support and constructive criticism. Everyone who participates or reads benefits, and in that spirit comes forth a new publication on creative writing.
The first copies of Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers are out and about, and trust me, you'll want to get your hands on this book as soon as you can. The design is utterly beautiful, and the content is like no book on creative writing that you've read before. Great for individuals looking for prompts and for writing groups looking for guidance.
Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate! And to read more on the new book!
I recently moved back to my hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia. One of the most exciting events in Charlottesville is their annual Virginia Festival of the Book. In preparation for the festival, I have been reading the books of some of the featured presenters. I thought I might interview a few of the poets that I am most looking forward to hearing read, starting with David Wojahn's collection, For the Scribe.
NA: Tell me about the evolution of your latest collection, For the Scribe? How did it begin?
DW: Thanks for the kind words. I’ve always considered myself an elegiac poet, but in the case of this book I wanted to break out of that mode. I’d never really had much interest in writing about “nature,” so I thought I might start there—with some animal poems, for example. But I found that the only poems of this sort that I could write were about extinct animals: passenger pigeons, Tasmanian tigers, ivory-billed woodpeckers. These poems became a series within the book, and the collection started to arrange itself around them. And so I couldn’t escape from elegy after all, despite my efforts! The intention of the book, I guess, is to find the means to move between personal losses—death of family, beloveds, and friends—and loss on a grander scale: threats to what used to be called our democratic institutions, ecological destruction, apocalypse. I also tend to arrange my books around sequences, groups of related poems, or poems in multiple sections that can run to ten or more pages. There are five such sequences in the new book, and I try to get these longer pieces to be in dialogue with the shorter lyrics.
NA: I love how you make the political personal and vice versa. While eating bivalves, for example, you think of prisoners being force-fed at Guantanamo. I’m wondering if you might say a few words about your poetic intuition, your process, and this kind of weaving you so beautifully do.
DW: The poets who have most inspired me over the years are figures like George Oppen, Thomas McGrath, Muriel Rukeyser, and especially Robert Lowell. These writers didn’t draw a great distinction between the personal and the ideological, and they taught me how important it is for a poem to try to navigate between the micro and the macro, the private life of the individual and a public reckoning with history and politics. Finding the means to make those two things merge and commingle is a task that feels essential to me--as a moral imperative as much as an aesthetic one. “Political” poetry that merely rants in a preaching-to-the-choir way simply bores me; so does autobiographical poetry that doesn’t seek to find some respite from mere self-disclosure. But when these two intentions can come together, can alchemize into a third thing, then the poem has a chance to avoid agit-prop on the one hand, navel-gazing on the other.
NA: I had to laugh out loud when I started reading “Nineteen Eleven Blues,” which opens with Ronald Reagan talking about Elizabeth Bishop. I wondered if we could post that here. And maybe say a few words about it?
DW: I wrote an essay awhile back about Bishop and Reagan, about the America Reagan represents and the one that Bishop exemplifies. I am bewildered by the way that even people on the left who should know better think of Reagan as great leader—to me he was simply an intellectually impoverished reactionary and a genial criminal. Bishop was a fundamentally apolitical individual, but her work is profoundly democratic and progressive; it continues, on its smaller scale, the transcendentalist tradition of Emerson and Whitman.
Bishop and Reagan were born within 48 hours of one another, in February of 1911. Czselaw Milosz, another figure who’s a touchstone for me, was born a couple of months later, as was the greatest of the Delta Blues singers, Robert Johnson--in one of her letters to Robert Lowell, Bishop rhapsodizes about hearing an LP of Robert Johnson’s songs. Bishop, Milosz, and Johnson had more in common than their birthdates: they’re artists who obsessively write about the conditions of loneliness and exile, and do so with immense invention. So I wanted to find a way to write about them, and came up with the notion of having each of them compose little essays on one another. So Milosz speaks about Reagan in a sonnet that samples some lines from one of his essays; Johnson speaks about Bishop and Milosz in a poem modelled after one of his blues lyrics, and Bishop writes about Johnson in a villanelle. That left Reagan to write about Bishop, again in the form of a sonnet, though in the poem Reagan’s not exactly capable of much insight. In college he actually attempted to write some poems, although I can’t say I’d recommend them.
NA: When I was a student at Vermont, one of your colleagues called you a poet of dark lyricism and a poet who is not afraid to be challenging. He contrasted you with what he called “chatty, undisciplined poets of our day.” Is that how you see yourself?
DW: I suppose my poems are dark. I love good comic poetry—Kenneth Koch is a favorite of mine—but couldn’t write comedy if you put a gun to my head. But I have a special affection for poetry that challenges me, intellectually and emotively. And that often means difficult or allusive poetry. I love something Geoffrey Hill wrote: “Whatever strange relationship we have with the poem, it is not one of enjoyment. It is like being brushed past, or aside, by an alien being.” My sense of what a poem should do isn’t that haughty and dyspeptic, but the poems I most admire are always aware that the diction of poetry can be different from the conversational, that it can be strange and majestic like the language of The Book of Common Prayer—you heard passages from that book a lot if you grew up, as I did, as an Episcopalian in the ‘50s. On the other hand, I write a lot about popular culture, music especially, and also films. Subjects like these don’t always mix very well with a Grand Style. I like it when my poems can function as mash-ups of high and low cultural allusions, of high and vernacular diction. I also like to write in a variety of formal and metrical approaches—free verse in one poem, received form in another. What purpose does it serve to favor one method over the other? Louis Zukofsky said that poetry’s upper limit is music, its lower limit speech. I want a poetry that moves steadily between one limit and the other.
NA: You are often referred to as a political poet. How do you keep your head, your heart—your poetry alive in this insane time?
Terrance Hayes won the National Book Award in 2010 and was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014. His books include How to Be Drawn (Penguin Books, 2015), Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002). Two books, American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight, are forthcoming in 2018. Find out more about Terrance Hayes here.
Moderated by David Lehman, faculty, Creative Writing Program.
Last week's prompt, most broadly, was to translate a poem from a language which the author does not know. Next Line, Please contributors were given Armando Frietas Filho’s “Cartão-postal sem fôlego” (“Breathless Postcard”) to translate into English from the Portuguese.
In the spirit of community--which launched the first ever prompt of Next Line, Please, a communally crafted sonnet, which can be found here--David Lehman chose single lines from different author's translations, rendering something altogether new, fresh, and downright good. Here is the "translated" poem:
Nature nurtures nothing, [David Lehman] neither one’s name nor one’s trousers. [Emily Winakur] A pair of dice is paradise [Millicent Caliban] that falls like false promises, [Erik Chaney] words ad infinitum [Patricia Smith] or the verbiage of infinity. [Angela Ball] Sadness [Justin Knapp] is born … overarching like parasols. [Charise Hoge] For there the rivers are paradises, [Courtney Thrash] and all the verbs and infinitives [Ralph L. Rosa] pass as rapidly as the water flows in the river. [Elizabeth Solzurg] I am reason’s nudist, [Emily Winakur] like mountain peaks overlooking [Charise Hoge] tits of rock, ah! sacred, scared, and scarred. [Erik Chaney] Where is our cave? [Emily Winakur] And on which page? [Courtney Thrash] And in whose book? [Angela Ball]
Happy birthday, Wystan, born today 112 years ago (February 21, 1907).
Here's an article that appeared in the Guardian in 2009. Note that the newspaper uses a photograph of Auden the elder statesman, face cracked; Auden would never have written poems in praise of Lenin after 1939.
<<< Unpublished Auden poems surface in film archive Translations of Soviet propaganda songs discovered in the British Film Institute archives Alison Flood Saturday May 23 2009 guardian.co.uk
Three unpublished poems by W. H. Auden have surfaced in the archives of the British Film Institute more than 70 years after they were written.
They were discovered by David Collard while he was working through the papers of Ivor Montagu, the co-founder of the Film Society, as part of the research for a study of Auden's career in the cinema. The verses are a poetic translation of anonymous Russian peasant songs extolling the virtues of Lenin and his political heir Stalin, which Auden was asked to produce for the world premiere of a Russian propaganda film, Three Songs of Lenin, in October 1935.
When arranging subtitles for Three Songs of Lenin, Montagu had decided the songs -- around which the film is structured -- needed a more poetic English rendering, and approached Auden. The poet worked from a literal translation to produce three songs, published for the first time this week in the Times Literary Supplement. >>>
Nausheen Eusuf’s protean debut collection, Not Elegy, But Eros, shuttles between elegy and ode, nimbly shifting between formal styles as it memorializes and praises subjects and people ranging from Hitchcock’s Psycho to Northrop Frye. Eusuf bears witness to her own family history and to the political violence and repression in her native Bangladesh. The collection’s title poem delicately honors the life and work of Xulhaz Mannan, an LGBT activist murdered in Bangladesh in 2016: “I fathomed the fall of that abyss, held / only by the thought of one I loved—.” Not Elegy, But Eros also includes poems about selfies, her father shining shoes, riffs on lines from A.R. Ammons and Paul de Man, an “Ode to the Joke,” and an “Ode to Apostrophe.” In lesser hands the leaps between topics and tonalities might seem too jarring, but in Eusuf’s work these leaps appear as the natural outgrowth of a wide-ranging razor-sharp intellect; given this, not surprisingly, the most pronounced influence in Not Elegy, But Eros is Wallace Stevens, who is evoked at every turn, but most directly in “Mind of Winter” and “Nocturne on a Winter Night,” which ends: “if only we could let the seeming be / in love’s endless mise en abîme / until the scraping of shovels at dawn.”
L.A. Johnson’s chapbook, Little Climates, takes place at the intersection of fragility and acquiescence, “in a house full of breakable things / and reassuring porcelain we never touch.” In these winter spaces, “foxgloves with their toxic mouths open for us,” and yet, “stars reveal their combustible selves.” Johnson is a poet of passionate inwardness, testing the tensile strength of the silken tethers that bind us to those with whom we live, and fight, and love, and disappoint, in the small strange fickle weathers of our lives. Little Climates holds open its wounds that they might be lustrated by the poems themselves. Johnson’s poems are luminous icicles, dangling on the edge of warmth, want, and danger. Little Climates is a haunting book, full of broken continuums, bi-furcating paths, night passages, and moments of transmutation. L.A. Johnson’s ultimate subject here is impermanence, and its ambiguous blessings: “In the future, this house will become honeycomb / and bees will make clear honey out of all our mistakes.” This is another remarkable chapbook from Bull City Press.
Blind Flowers ranges from ancient Babylon and Alexandria to the Deep South and back again, blazing forth with elemental, numinous, finely-wrought lyric poems. Roberta Senechal de la Roche writes with a pen of bone, words that “float the world / into the coming tide.” This chapbook recalibrates regret, weaving a requiem to the crowded dirt from a bibliography of absences. From “the floating empire of memory” Senechal de la Roche constructs a “lexicon of old surprise,” wherein, a resting heron becomes “a hieroglyph that conjugates / pond and stubble field with sky.” These poems exist in the space just before the deer finishes its leap. Blind Flowers tugs at the stars and tries to drag them down into streets lined with honeysuckle, lilac, and unending desire. Reading this book is like dancing on the empyrean edge of a strange, unrelenting, barbed, and beautiful horizon. Sadly, this is the last chapbook to appear from the now disbanded Arcadia Press. It is, however, a high note for such an excellent, and unfortunately short-lived, press to go out on.
Raena Shirali’s debut collection, Gilt, begins with a bride and groom harbored under the gilt dome of a traditional Indian bridal procession; the collection ends with a poem in which the speaker imagines herself an extremophile: “…I’m here to burrow, follow the borehole to lake’s / end. Feeding off those that are most like me, I become another link / to remote moons—soar, pitch, shimmer.” The lavish and daring poems in Gilt do indeed soar, pitch, and shimmer as they unravel and restring the intricate brocades of culture and memory Shirali seeks to understand. The best poems in this collection (“Dare I Write It,” “to miss America,” “Between Here & Predictable Characters”) examine gender and race through the prism of the American South and through popular culture. Gilt is an impressive first book, one that presages great things to come.
Daniel Brown’s What More? collects a group of tightly-made, affable, quick-footed, and formally precise poems. Brown moves from recollections of childhood to poems about Brooklyn Heights, Godzilla, Yeats, Jesus, Wittgenstein, and, poetry itself. In Brown’s hands the making of a poem is always a “seeing something home.” Brown’s poems exist at the place cello string kisses bow. His short poems are particular diamonds, most notably the ars poetica, “Judo”:
I.e., the kind of verse That doesn’t try to force People to their knees (Seeing as it sees To people’s being thrown By forces of their own).
What More? contains many such thoughts, expertly quieted into consequence.
Faces Somewhere Wild contains a wide-range of lively lyric engagements with the landscapes of Love, Grief, the Berkshires, and Language itself. David Giannini jukes artfully between aesthetic approaches and angles of vision, influenced by everything from nineteenth century transcendentalist prose and Emersonian verse to the Objectivism of Zukovsky, Niedecker, and Williams. Giannini’s Berkshire localism ripples out expansively to contain a cosmos of lived experience, demonstrating the mastery achieved by a lifelong apprenticeship to the art of poetry. Or, as Gianinni puts it at the beginning of the collection: “Because we are here, we ample our vicinity / to the whorl of a leaf.” For Giannini, poetry is “an original blade, not / exactly grass, not exactly knife, / more like some unfound / god’s unclipped nail.” At its best, Faces Somewhere Wild uses that “unclipped nail” to scratch away the veneer of seeming and propel its readers into the realm of true, intense, musical experience. The last poem in the book, “After Writing,” exemplifies Giannini’s light, masterful, touch:
AFTER WRITING
You think yourself its true shadow but the poem precedes another dark. Nerves behind the scar suffered years ago twitch & throb. There’s longing to be out in the snow.
You take up the maul, split oak. Knock of it on hard ground. Something clicks. The crouched outline of a frosted bush resembles the man who stole your wood, bent now and saying the poem you intended, in the shadow of chimney smoke.
The happiest moment in a woman’s life Is when she hears the turn of her lover’s key In the lock, and pretends to be asleep When he enters the room, trying to be Quiet but clumsy, bumping into things, And she can smell the liquor on his breath But forgives him because she has him back And doesn't have to sleep alone.
The happiest moment in a man’s life Is when he climbs out of bed With a woman, after an hour’s sleep, After making love, and pulls on His trousers, and walks outside, And pees in the bushes, and sees The high August sky full of stars And gets in his car and drives home.
Seksizmas [translated into Lithuanian by Saulius Vasiliauskas]
Laimingiausia akimirka moters gyvenime, Kai ji išgirsta, kaip durų spynoje trakšteli Mylimojo raktas, ir apsimeta mieganti, Kai jis įslenka į kambarį, bando būti Tylus, bet žengia kaip dramblys, kliudydamas daiktus, Ir ji užuodžia nuo jo tvoskiant alkoholiu, Bet atleidžia, nes susigrąžino vyrą, Ir nebeteks miegoti vienai.
Laimingiausia akimirka vyro gyvenime, Kai jis išsiropščia iš lovos, Palieka joje moterį – po valandos miego, Po sekso, ir užsimauna Kelnes, ir išeina į lauką, Ir myža ant krūmų, ir regi Giedrą rugpjūčio dangų, pilną žvaigždžių, Ir įlipęs į savo mašiną patraukia namo.
Sexism [as translated back into English by unknown person or entity]
The happiest moment in woman's life When she listens, she's gonna break the door lock The beloved key, and pretends to be sleeping When he enters into the room, he tries to be Quiet, but goes like an elephant, blocking things, And she shines with alcohol in her spirits But forgive, because he has restored the husband, And you will not sleep anymore.
The happiest moment in a man's life, When he scissors out of bed, Leaving a woman there - after an hour of sleep; After sex, and hang on Trousers and goes out into the field And the moss is on the shrubs, and see Girless August sky full of stars And getting on your car pulls home.
Link here for the original page of Siaures Atenai, the cultural weekly (Kultūros savaitraštis) in which appear the translations into Lithuanian of "Sexism" and two other poems by David Lehman. Saulius Vasilauskas (pictured left), who translated the poems, is a graduate of Vilnius University who plays basketball for Egzistenciniai klausimai, an amateur team whose name you could, with poetic license, render as the Existential Clauses or possibly the Existential Queries. Although it would be difficult to do better than "The moss is on the shrubs" three lines from the end of "Sexism," what happens when you re-translate "When a Woman Loves a Man" back into English, using rudimentary computer tools, is an equally high form of surrealism: When a woman loves a man, there is ten minutes after the first,/ she is sleeping, he watches baseball and cremation of the guinea pigs. The poem concludes on a sublime note: Stars fluctuate like vintage earrings. -- DL
The late Bill Knott, born February 17, 1940, was a terrific poet who distinguished himself from nearly all other American poets by wanting to keep his poems from the public eye. For the late Thomas Lux's Paris Review appreciation of Bill, click here. Click here to read Robert P. Baird's "Remembering Bill Knott" from The New Yorker of March 17, 2014. If you can find a copy of Are You Ready, Mary Baker Eddy? the charming and sometimes hilarious book of poems Bill wrote collaboratively with James Tate, buy it. Lux (1946-2017) edited Bill's posthumous I Am Flying into Myselffor Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2017).
Poems by Bill had been chosen by Jorie Graham for The Best American Poetry 1990, by Paul Muldoon for The Best American Poetry 2005, and a third time as well – and for different reasons each time he declined to be included
For The Best American Poetry 2007, Heather McHugh selected Bill’s poem “Another False Execution” from Tin House, whose poetry editor was Brenda Shaughnessy. Notified in due course by Mark Bibbins, then as now my right-hand man at BAP, Bill said no, I wrote back, and here’s the exchange.
Reading it you’ll see, I hope, why it was hard not to love Bill no matter how ornery he was. And you'll have another reason to dig into his oeuvre.
> -----Original Message----- > From: William Knott [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 3:01 PM > To: Mark Bibbins > Subject: RE: The Best American Poetry 2007
> Dear Mark Bibbins:
> No, I'm sorry, I can't. . .
> I don't like that poem anymore, I wish > now I hadn't written it, and I was > irritated when Brenda Shaughnessy > took it for "Tin House" because > she chose it over some better > poems I included in the batch > I sent her . . .
> and I'm sorry but I don't want to be > in BAP, or Pushcart, > my poetic career is over,
> I've retired. . .
> I'm too old for it, anyway. . .
> it's not worth the angst and all of it. . .
> I apologize, but I'm sure number 76 on > your list will be happy to accept. . .
> sincerely,
> Bill Knott
>
-----Forwarded Message-----
> >From: David Lehman > >Sent: Jan 4, 2007 8:51 PM > >To: [email protected] > >Cc: McHugh Heather
> >Subject: BAP 2007
> >Dear Bill,
> >Mark Bibbins sent along your note indicating that you would prefer not to have your poem "Another False Execution" appear in "The Best American Poetry 2007" on the grounds that the poem isn't good enough.
> >I'd like to take a moment to persuade you to change your mind. I think it's a damn good poem, and regardless of your present feelings about it, why not let the choice stand? After all, there are at least three of us now -- Heather McHugh, Brenda Shaughnessy (who published it in Tin House), and I -- who believe in this poem enough to want to publish it and stand behind it. Though diffidence may be admirable, there is also a case to be made that once a poem is in print it is public and readers have the right to read it and judge for themselves. That's what I think, and in any case I am quite sincere in saying that your poem will make a difference, and a positive one, to the volume in which it appears.
> >I am going to copy Heather McHugh on this letter, for she took her editorial duties very seriously and her choice of your poem for "Best American Poetry 2007" is not one that she made lightly.
> >Please think it over and let me know if you decide to change your mind.
> >David
_____Forwarded Message_____
>From: William Knott <[email protected]> >Sent: Jan 4, 2007 9:50 PM >To: David Lehman >Subject: RE: BAP 2007
>No, I'm sorry, but I can't do it.
>It doesn't matter whether the poem is good or >bad. Even if I thought it was good, I can't >go through this agony anymore. >I wouldn't want it in Pushcart either. In >fact someone nominated another poem for >Pushcart, but I won't let them do it >if they ask me.
>I can't take it anymore,
>I'm too worn out by it.
>If I knew then what I know now, I >would have never begun to write poetry. >I'm 67 years old, can't I retire?
>Why do I have to suffer this cycle over >and over, why can't I quit. Why can't >I just write my crummy poems and post >them on my blog; why do I have to >present them for judgement?
>I'm sorry, but I can't stand it anymore. >I can't do it. . . sending the poems >out, getting them published or rejected, >I don't care anymore.
>I used to care. For almost five decades >I put them into the envelopes but this >past year?? I can't explain it.
>It's partly the heart attack I had >this past summer, but even before that >I had reached the point of abandonment.
>I don't send my poems out anymore, I just >post them on my blog where anyone can >read them or not read them as they wish. . .
>I vowed when I began the blog this past >April that I would never submit my >poems to any magazine ever again, and >so far I've stuck to it. I hope I will >die before I change my mind about >this. Hopefully I will die before that.>
>Over the past year or so I've >rejected book proposals from five or >six publishers. Jonathan Galassi wanted >to do a 240 page Selected, Iowa wanted >to reprint a book, two local presses solicited >me for book mss, and two others queried >me. . .
>I would rather die than do another book >(ironically another book I was blackmailed >into doing has just been published >to my shame and disgust). . .
>I wish to hell you hadn't bothered >McHugh with this. It's nothing to >do with her.
>And it's nothing to do with your anthology, >either. I've been critical at times >of it but that has nothing to do with >my refusal.
>I'm sorry for wasting your time with >this nonsense.
About a year ago, the Chicago-based theater artist Erica Barnes approached David Lehman for permission to adapt his poem "Mythologies" for the stage as a dance performance piece [photo credit Lauren Sudbrink]. According to Erica, she was in the midst of a somewhat fallow period when on a whim she visited the Poetry Foundation website, clicked on the "Poem of the Day" and "fell in love." David's sequence of thirty sonnets "Mythologies," first published in the Paris Review issue 106 (1988) and awarded the Bernard F. Connors prize, was the Foundation's featured poem. Erica has this to say about David's poem:
We need new myths. Our old heroes are too unattainable, too perfect, too… heroic. David Lehman’s poem ‘Mythologies’ tells the story of a man struggling to construct new myths in the wake of the disintegration of his expectations. Blending the language of poetry with the ritual of theatre, ‘Mythologies’ searches for the answer to the age-old question -- what is it to be human?
David granted permission and over the next several months Erica dispatched periodic updates of her work- in-progress. She secured funding, hired a full cast and crew, found performance space, and held rehearsals. On November 1, "Mythologies" opened at the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater in Chicago. "It was a success," writes Erica, and her excitement is palpable. .
Meanwhile, you can find out more about "Mythologies" in Chicago by visiting the dedicated website. You will find Erica's interview with David here. And check out this link and this one for more about Erica and the various works she has adapted for the theater since 2012: https://www.ericawray.com/about.html
Erica describes herself as "a proud Chicago theatre ex-pat [who] served as Co-Founder of Knife & Fork, a theatre company dedicated to social practice around food, feminism, and body politics and as Co-Artistic Director of Blank Line Collective, a movement-based and devised theater company." She "holds a certificate in Laban Movement Analysis and is currently seeking certification for Intimacy Direction. She uses aspects of these movement modalities to create work that is highly kinetic, physically expressive, and makes the impossible possible. Specializing in directing new plays by feminist and queer writers that explore relationships, loneliness, and the need for human connection, she is fascinated by shifting energy between people onstage and attempts to harness this energy to tell stories."
Congratulations Erica!
"Mythologies" was included in David Lehman's New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013).
The old Verdi is the new Joe Green, you know what I mean? The known universe is a known unknown. So it’s decided. The computers turned us on. The new Nixon and the old Nixon are one.
The new Terence Winch is the new thirty. Clean is the new dirty. Birds are the old proverbs. Nouns are the former verbs. New is the no yes, old fact, best guess. Now is the new then. Then is the new never.
“O Sole Mio” is “It’s Now or Never,” is my only sunshine, and “There’s No Tomorrow.” Joy was once sorrow. The Old Testament was once the new wave. English is the new French. The Known Universe is the new Terence Winch.
Today, a student walked into my office at Wichita State University and wanted to talk about sestinas. Yes, please! We got to this place from her interest in poems that channeled crime, noir, and sustained narrative, which had led me to suggest Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man, by David Lehman and James Cummins.
The sestina was a new form to her. She had looked up the basics of the history and patterning of end words. From there, we talked about organic modes to which the sestina might lend itself--poems of fixation, of worrying--and looked at a few favorite examples.
Since she seemed a bit nervous about the process, I offered to show her some drafting notes from way back when. I first scanned these to appear in Issue Two of Pelorus Press, a nifty resource for anyone interested in tracking the art of literary editing. >>> For more of Sandra's column, click here.
As I prepare a recital program for my concert at San Francisco Performances next month, I return to a work that has accompanied me for most of my life. Modest Mussorgsky'smasterpiece, Pictures at an Exhibition, is a unique bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries. Debussy and Stravinsky, two giants of the 20th century, were influenced by this work. Pictures have inspired an epidemic of orchestrations – from Maurice Ravel's famous symphonic transcription to the imaginative electronic adaptation by Isao Tomita, more than seventy versions exist to date. What is the unique magnetism which attracts musicians and composers to this piece? Is it a secret fascination evoked by the childlike, fairytale images hidden in the work?I think that Mussorgsky was inspired not directly by Hartman's artworks, but by the idea of creating a musical exhibition in itself. The connection between Mussorgsky’s music and Hartman's images is tenuous at best. Mussorgsky's music cannot be regarded as representational of Hartman's subjects any more than Hartman's images can be interpreted as illustrative of Mussorgsky's music.
Mussorgsky chose the form of a suite as the most natural for his musical exhibition. The suite starts with the Promenade. It is a musical self-portrait of the composer walking through the halls of the museum. The Promenade recurs seven times in the work, (only five times under its own title), each time sounding different, thus creating a subset of variations. I believe that these promenading variations reflect the alterations in the mood of a person passing a series of paintings in a museum gallery. Thus, Mussorgsky gives us both: a series of brilliant musical sketches, and their reflections in his own soul; he is an author who creates his work and finds himself changed by it.
Unexpectedly, I found yet another hidden form of variation in this work. It is a partita-like structure, which occurs within the musical architecture of the piece. Bach designed his partitas to include several common elements, which unify the widely contrasting dance movements. These elements are usually a recurring interval relationship or a melodic and/or harmonic device. This is true of Pictures at an Exhibition. The entire work is based upon two primary intervals: a descending second and an ascending fourth. These two intervals appear within the opening three notes: G, F, B-flat. These three notes become the foundation upon which the entire work rests. Each movement is based on these intervals or their inversions.
In Gnomus, the weeping of the dwarf is built entirely on the descending second (mm. 19, et seq.). The ascending fourth in the opening of The Old Castle resembles calling of a distant horn, or, perhaps, the nostalgic song of a Minnesinger recalling the days of old. By looking at the final six measures of this movement we realize that the entire movement is built on the 'calling' fourth and the 'sighing' second.
In Tuilleries: The Children's Quarrel, the concealed descending second which is heard throughout the piece sounds like capricious children. It reminds one of Mussorgsky's vocal cycle In the Nursery, which so wonderfully portrays children's psyches. Could it be that this charming childishness is the central attraction of Pictures? We all come from the land of childhood and 'blessed be they' who shall remain children forever.
In the theme of Bydlo, the order of the two intervals is the same as in the Promenade: the descending second precedes the ascending fourth. They are rhythmically displaced so that the lamenting second is emphasized and the 'calling' fourth is subdued. What does 'Bydlo' mean? The traditional definition is an oxcart. The ostinato in the left hand resembles the slow rotation of heavy wheels. Yet there is another meaning for this word. My Polish nanny, when upset or angry would say Oh! Bydlo!,- an exclamation meaning "this is unfair!" This word can be understood in different ways, but it always stands for something heavy and unpleasant. When I hear Mussorgsky's Bydlo, I am reminded of a painting by Ilya Repin titled Barge Haulers on the Volga. In this painting, a heavy barge is pulled by tired, emaciated peasants. It is a depiction brutal, exhausting, yet meaningless labor. Perhaps, Mussorgsky's Bydlo is a tragic symbol of Russia itself
The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks is a charming and humorous confection. A childlike, bright and touching fantasy, this piece is a joy to perform. The cackling of the chicks is represented by both: 'crushed' and melodic seconds.
In Two Polish Jews, One Rich and the Other Poor the inverted fourth and the second are incorporated to represent a severe image of the rich man and the pitiful begging of the poor. The repeated notes, combined with weeping seconds remind us of synagogue chants. The duet of the two men toward the end of this movement is a counterpoint of misunderstanding in which neither hears the other. I recall the words of Marina Tsvetaeva, "… Nothing is sadder than the hunger of the hungry or the indolence of the satisfied."
Limoges; the Market (‘Great News') - a noisy, sunny marketplace with its quarreling, bargaining, and gossiping. The repeated musical figures imitate the hubbub of too many people talking at the same time. From the outset, it is clear that this piece is built on the combination of the descending second and the ascending fourth. Mussorgsky wrote a text for the market gossips but later rejected it as too programmatic for inclusion in the published work.
Catacombs. A mystery. Somber chords lead the listener to 'Con mortuis in lingua mortua,' - 'with the dead in a dead language'. The theme of the Promenade is heard as chorale and as an ethereal voice from the underground, accompanied by a ghostly tremolo from another world. In the cemetery, where dead Latin words are written on the gravestones, dead men speak their eternal language.
Baba Yaga. The Hut on Hens Legs. This movement opens with seconds and fourths heard in threatening unison. I love the folkloric image of Baba Yaga flying on her broom in a windstorm, with the trees bending their crowns to the ground. Baba Yaga's hut stands on large hen's legs, which can move on their own will. In mm. 25-30 there are cackling seconds, similar to The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, but now they sound threatening. There is an amusing relationship between the hen's legs of Baba Yaga's hut and tiny chicks. Once a chicken, always a chicken!
In the middle section, while Baba Yaga is away from her enchanted kingdom, two of her helpers, Kikimora (the hobgoblin who lives in the marshes) and Leschy (the wood goblin who lives in the forest) look at the twinkling marsh lights and listen to the owls hooting, waiting for the return of their mistress. She returns and storms right through the Great Gates of Kiev.
One last thought. In spite of the Russian, French, Polish, Jewish and Latin themes or, perhaps, because of them, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition create a quintessentially Russian atmosphere. The work projects Russia from all sides: fairy, pagan, religious, multinational, impossible and incredible!
Critics have often viewed the work of T.S. Eliot through the lens of his conversion to “Anglo-Catholicism” in 1927. His most famous poems, Prufrock, The Waste Land, and The Hollow Men, written before his conversion, and frequently labeled “pre-conversion works,” share a common theme of isolation from the divine, a questioning of both God’s existence and power. In these works God is either absent or impotent, and unwilling, or unable, to provide the salvation Eliot seeks. The conversion from unbeliever to believer occurs in Eliot’s poetry at Ash Wednesday (1930), not only his most religious poem, but perhaps also his most beautiful (others, I’m sure, will argue for Four Quartets). Although not his first “Christian” poem [see Journey of the Magi, (1920)], Ash Wednesday is the first of Eliot’s poems in which the speaker embarks on a journey of renunciation and penitence; a “turn” that is in the tradition of Biblical conversions, signaling his acceptance of an authority capable of achieving man’s eternal salvation.
All Biblical conversions share a similar narrative structure. The essential step in these narratives is “to turn,” a figurative shift away from a life of sin towards the light of God or Jesus Christ. Though belief is fundamental, it is not sufficient in itself; necessary to all Biblical conversions, Old or New Testament, is a realization of trespass followed by repentance and a commitment to obey the word of God or carry out the works of Jesus. Both realization and commitment are represented by the turn. In the Greek New Testament, the word denoting this turn is Epistrepho, which functions flexibly—to turn, bring back, return—in a variety of contexts. Epistrepho applies to all manner of conversions: non-believer to believer (Saul of Tarsus); lax adherent to devoted disciple (King David); and conversions of entire nations: “O Israel, return unto the Lord thy God; for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity. Take with you words and turn to the Lord: say unto him, Take away all iniquity, and receive us graciously: so we render the calves of our lips.” (Hosea 14:1-2) Epistrepho can also function as a “de-conversion,” or turn away from God: “But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?” (Galatians 4:9) What Epistrepho represents is devotion: to turn either way, towards or away from god, is to engage the one and to deny its other. Devotion to God, or a turn towards God, necessitates renunciation of sin; sin is thereby a turn away from God.
Epistrepho in the Biblical conversion narrative is preceded by a fall away from God or Jesus Christ. This fall is precipitated by sin; and just as belief is not sufficient enough in itself to guarantee conversion, mere agnosticism is too benign to warrant a turn. The convert must always have something to turn away from. Paul’s conversion to Christianity (from Saul of Tarsus) takes place on the road to Damascus, where he is traveling with orders from the high priest of Jerusalem to arrest followers of the crucified Jesus Christ and deliver them for trial. His sin is not merely one of “unbeliever,” but also of “persecutor,” “blasphemer,” and “injurer.” It is his unbelief, however, that leads Paul to commit his more injurious Material sins and the perniciousness of these sins, known to Ananias as evil, is what leads to his conversion: “But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel: For I will shew him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake.” (Acts 9:15-16)
At the core of Eliot’s pre-conversion work is unbelief. This unbelief is not a disinterested or enthusiastic atheism; it represents a lack of faith in any authority, divine or otherwise, to provide salvation (or even relief) to the modern human condition; a condition Eliot sees as both broken and damaging. It is an unbelief rife with despair and longing. In Eliot’s first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), this unbelief manifests itself in various forms of disenchantment, all leading to some kind of estrangement from the communion of man (That is not what I meant at all/That is not it, at all”); in Poems (1920), the unbelief leads to the poet embarking on a fully fledged attack on the Church; while in the Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925) Eliot details a rupture in both worldly and divine authority, and the unbelief precipitates Eliot’s complete fall away from God, which is, in the context of the Biblical conversion narrative, the greatest sin of all. Yet at the very end of The Hollow Men, unquestionably Eliot’s darkest work, there arrives a glimmer of hope: the next to last stanza of the poem, a fractured and broken incantation of the ending of the Lord’s prayer, at the very least represent an intent to turn:
For thine For Life is For Thine is the
This intent to turn at the darkest hour is a common feature within the Biblical conversion narrative. King Manasseh, known for doing “evil in the sight of the Lord” (2 Chronicles 33:2) and making “Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to err, and to do worse than the heathen, whom the Lord had destroyed before the children of Israel” (2 Chronicles 33:9), converts while awaiting death in a prison in Babylon: “And when he was in affliction, he besought the Lord his God, and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers, and prayed unto him: and he was intreated of him.” (2 Chronicles 33 12-13)
If The Hollow Men represents the darkest hour, then the light arrives in Ash Wednesday. Eliot’s conversion, however, is neither instant nor effortless. Ash Wednesday is not the flash of light that blinds Saul on the road to Damascus; rather, it is a series of turns (or attempts to turn), full of doubt and uncertainty, more closely resembling the conversion of the Apostle Peter. The poem takes its title from the first day of the liturgical season of Lent—a season of penitence and fasting carried out in order to prepare for the days of Christ’s passion and resurrection; and thus, Christian salvation. The Ash Wednesday sermon states that: “Lent provided a time in which converts to the faith were prepared for Holy Baptism... a time when those who, because of notorious sins, had been separated from the body of the faithful were reconciled by penitence and forgiveness, and restored to the fellowship of the Church. Thereby, the whole congregation was put in mind of the message of pardon and absolution set forth in the Gospel of our Savior, and of the need which all Christians continually have to renew their repentance and their faith.”
The title alludes not only to Eliot’s conversion, but also his awareness that salvation is achieved by continual repentance and renewal of faith. This necessity for the Christian to continually renew his or her faith is compatible with Eliot’s conception of time (explored more fully in Four Quartets). For Eliot, there are two streams of time: time temporal, in which we must live and which cannot be redeemed (the past forever disappearing, the future forever being born, and the present being renewed by the moment); and timelessness. The temporal represents the physical or sensual; and timelessness represents the spiritual. There are moments when these two streams of time intersect; however, during the speaker’s initial turn, both his sensual and spiritual entities exist in (and are thereby incapacitated by) time temporal:
Because I know that time is always time And place is always place And what is actual is actual for only one time And only one place.
It is only after the speaker of Ash Wednesday has turned on the stairs in Part III, and made his way through purgatory, that temporal and eternal time intersect; facing God, time is now able to be redeemed “restoring/With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem/The time./Redeem the unread vision in the higher dream.” Eliot’s conception of the multiplicity of time correlates with the Biblical conversion narrative. Once Eliot has completed his turn, he must look back down the stairs at his former self:
At the first turning of the second stair I turned and saw below The same shape twisted on the banister Under the vapour in the fetid air Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears The deceitful face of hope and despair.
The speaker is looking back upon his other self, to see his self in the past, a different self still reliant on “hope and despair,” a self in conflict with his current self, but a self which must remain a part of him. This duality of the individual entirely aligns to the Biblical conversion narrative: Paul, when proselytizing Christianity, does not deny his former self, he preaches that he had been a sinner and persecutor of the church, and that it was his turn towards Jesus that had granted him salvation. Paul is at once both Saul the persecutor and St. Paul the proselytizer, the former very much a part of the latter. The biblical conversion narrative relies upon the past being ineradicable; as it is in much need of the pre-conversion figure as it is the post-conversion figure.
The opening of Ash Wednesday is fraught with despair. The speaker renounces earthly pleasures and human wisdom from the material world: “Because I cannot drink/There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again,” but has not yet acquired the ability to know God or Christ (and perhaps never will): “Because I know I shall not know/the one veritable transitory power.” The turn has left him stranded, much like the Apostle Peter when he is asked by Jesus to walk along the water, the speaker must leave all that he knows, all that is real, for something that he can never fully understand; any hesitation and he will sink. It is this helplessness, however, that prepares the speaker for spiritual dependence, thereby allowing him to complete his turn: “Because these wings are no longer wings to fly/But merely vans to beat the air.” True to the conversion narrative, it is the convert’s weakness that enables him to most closely turn to god.
This recognition of the difficulty in sustaining a true conversion in a temporal world is evident from the first line: “Because I do not hope to turn again”; the speaker, having already turned, is not certain he can preserve his turn indefinitely; the uncertainty implied in the use of “I do not hope” in place of the more assured “I will not.” This doubt is echoed in the parallelism of the first three lines; the speaker in his repetition is attempting an incantation of sorts; to conjure faith from the emptiness of the waste land. The repetition and echo used throughout Part 1 of Ash Wednesday, give the opening a feel of a sermon or liturgy. A common feature of Eliot’s poetry is that the form of a poem is mimetic of its theme: Prufrock’s inconsistent meter and imbalanced structure; full of end, internal and slant rhymes is much like the protagonist’s mind;, matching The Waste Land’s theme of fracture and the rupture of authority is reflected in its fragmented narrative; The Hollow Men’s distress is matched by the austerity and starkness of language and their short, severe lines. The use of clear end rhymes in Part 1 of Ash Wednesday, evidence a measure of conformity to some kind of authority. Though not subservient to any strict pattern, the rhyme is a step towards obedience.
The structure of the first line is also significant: as a subordinate clause, it allows for the remainder of the poem to be a response to or an explanation for why the speaker does not hope to turn again. Gone is the fragmentation found in Prufrock and The Waste Land; Ash Wednesday, though riddled with doubt and uncertainty, is focused: there is one theme presented, clearly demarcated; one consistent voice; a destination both speaker and poem aim to reach. An arduous journey it may be, but Eliot is no longer wandering lost in a spiritual desert.
Here is Jeremy Irons reading T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday:
Many decades ago, my brother Jesse took a beginners’ course in the Irish language. Out of that experience, he memorized a short, beautiful poem by Anthony Raftery, usually called “Mise Raifteirí.” When we were last in Ireland, in October of 2016, he suggested that we visit Raftery’s grave, which turns out to be in the vicinity of the town of Loughrea, in county Galway, the same area where our mother was from. So, with our cousin Martin Flynn and our good friend Dominick Murray, we took the short ride from the Flynn household in Cahercrea to the Reilig na Bhfilí (Cemetery of the Poets) in Killeeneen where Raftery is buried.
As Wikipedia informs us, Raftery (30 March 1779–25 December 1835), who composed in Irish, is often called the last of the wandering bards. He lived almost exactly a century later than the great Turlough O' Carolan, the itinerant harper who composed hundreds of gorgeous musical pieces that are still widely played today, just as Raftery's poems, which were never written down in his lifetime, are taught today in Irish schools. Raftery also played the fiddle, and I have a special affection for musician-poets. Both men were blind, a misfortune that had no apparent negative effect on their creative abilities.
I thought I had taken a photo of the signage regarding the other poets buried in the Reilig na Bhfilí, but if I did I can’t find it. One Internet source gives their names as Marcus and Peatsaí Ó Callanáin. I believe the signage stated that they were brothers and both rivals of Raftery. I don’t know if any of their poems are extant. [Please see the comment below by my old friend Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, who provides some invaluable information on Peatsaí Ó Callanáin.] In any case, Raftery is without question the top dog in this beautiful, serene little graveyard. (photo of Terence Winch, Oct. 2016, by Jesse Winch)
There we were in this place to which the paths of glory but lead, caught up in its eerie, decaying beauty, when my cousin Martin gathers us to show us something. He holds up a white envelope sealed in a plastic cover. “Someone has left me a check!” he jokes. We all laugh. We debate the propriety of opening this mystery letter, but really there is no other choice but to do so. This place is nearly abandoned, with no office or staff or any other visitors. So Martin opens the envelope. Inside is a card showing a photo of children playing with a homemade little plane, with a real plane in the background, ca. 1940, and a caption reading, “ YOU WILL NOT DO INCREDIBLE THINGS WITHOUT AN INCREDIBLE DREAM.” There’s also an indecipherable message in longhand. But here’s the kicker: folded in the card is a 20 Euro bill. Money, after all. Graveyard money! We spent it all on caffeine and cake in a coffee shop in Galway City. Thank you, Mr. Raftery.
photo of Martin Flynn by Dominick Murray; photo of Raftery's grave by T. Winch)
Here is his poem, with an English translation:
Mise Raifteirí, an file, lán dóchais is grá le súile gan solas, ciúineas gan crá
Dul siar ar m'aistear, le solas mo chroí Fann agus tuirseach, go deireadh mo shlí
Feach anois mé mo dhroim le balla, Ag seinm ceoil do phocaí folamh.
I am Raftery, the poet, full of hope and love With eyes without light, silence without torment.
Going back on my journey, with the light of my heart Weak and tired, until the end of my way.
Look at me now my back to the wall, playing music to empty pockets.
And, finally, Raftery's work continues to make its way into the world, as this lovely song inspired by his poem---and performed here by Eleanor Shanley and John McCartin---attests. (I'm not sure at this point if they are the composers).
Tomorrow is Valentine's Day and to get you in the mood here's Eileen Farrell proving that a great opera singer can sing great jazz (Arlen's music, Mercer's words),and listen to Lenny play the piano in the bridge he could have been a contender in the arena of jazz pianists take it away you two
"We're calling it Instant Shave, a transformative product on the model of Instant Coffee, and it's your job to create the damn thing. I don't care how you do it but do it." The head of marketing looked with faint distaste at us in our white laboratory jackets "Even better if the gel or foam is edible and tastes like whipped cream. But the most important thing we gotta do is reduce the time of the shaving experience to an even one minute. (We could call it Minute Shave on the model of Minute Maid, which used to be a name to conjure with back when the fashion in orange juice was frozen cans of concentrate and mixing the contents with tap water. Scratch that thought. Instant Shave is a better name.) It is my sincere belief that Instant Shave could take shaving to a whole new level."
This Monday, February 12th, David Lehman and Angela Ball will be giving a poetry reading at Le Poisson Rouge of Bleecker Street. Join in for drinks, laughs, and a grand old time!
Event starts at 7:30, doors open at 6:30, Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, & it's free!
Visit the Le Poisson Rouge's page for more info, other events, and more!
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark