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Posted by The Best American Poetry on February 10, 2018 at 12:01 AM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, Music | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Jimmy teaches Sinatra how to sing. . .'
"It doesn't have to be witty or smart / just along as it comes from the heart"'
Posted by The Best American Poetry on February 10, 2018 at 12:01 AM in Birthday Poems, Feature, Music, Sinatra | Permalink | Comments (1)
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I became a convert to James Tate’s poetry when he published Constant Defender and Reckoner in 1983 and ’86 respectively. I was asked to review his work for the Washington Post Book World, and this in part is what I wrote:
“Tate brings to his work an extravagantly surrealistic imagination and a willingness to let his words take him where they will. Nonchalant in the midst of radical uncertainty, he handles bizarre details as though they were commonplace facts. [Tate’s poetry draws upon] so rich a fund of comic energy that it may well prove an antidote to the anxiety some readers feel with poems that refuse to lend themselves to instant analysis.”
What I did not suspect was the break-out success that occurred a few years later with Distance from Loved Ones. Tate had always had a unique comic sensibility – he was hilarious but with an edge, almost a menacing edge. He continued to write poems that enlarged the boundaries of the comic imagination. But suddenly there was an overflow of wonderful prose poems – the title poem of Distance from Loved Ones, for example -- and for the next twenty-five years, Jim managed to reinvent the prose poem as a form while turning them out at an astonishingly prolific rate. Some could be read as parables, some as shaggy dog stories; there were those that depended on a single idea carried to an extreme and others in which the dialogue took over. He was a master of the uncanny.
It is quite possible that no poet of our time has done more to integrate narrative and poetry than has James Tate. Poets are greater than the sum of their influences, but to get an idea of where Tate comes from you would need to consider the tales of the "grotesque and arabesque" of Edgar Allan Poe, the French surrealists with their exaltation of chance and accident, the casual diction of New York School poets and the value they place on variety and possibility, and the wild fabulism of certain South American writers – an assemblage that suggests a diversity of impulse while conveying only the vaguest idea of what Tate was up to when he undertook to satirize a concept in such prose poems as “National Security” or “Bounden Duty."
For the writer interested in the prose poem there is no one’s work that will prove as rewarding as that of James Tate. In Dome of the Hidden Pavilion, Jim’s latest book, scheduled to appear from the Ecco Press in August, there is a poem entitled “Invisible,” which I find charming although it doesn’t have the metaphoric richness of, say, “The Key to the Universe” in the same book. The story in “Invisible” is deliberately banal, concerning the chance meetings of two men. One of them knows the other, or acts as if he does; but the speaker tells us he “didn’t know the man,” so the encounters are always just this side of ghostly. When the mysterious stranger calls him Chester, the speaker exclaims, “How did he know my name?” It turns out that both men have been “here” for many years: "“But I’ve never seen you here before,” I said. “Maybe one of us is invisible,” he said." There is a further twist but I cite this exchange not only for the beauty of the logic but because of the resonance of the repeated “here” and because the title fits the poem expertly and with stunning simplicity.
I had the good fortune to collaborate with Jim on The Best American Poetry 1997. He read the poems of the year with the generosity and eclecticism that the task requires and with such acumen that the book remains a classic of the series. As an editor I learned much from Jim’s judgments and instincts – he enlarged my sympathies as a reader. We did most of our work by telephone but when we got together to confer, we discovered that we shared a taste for Tanqueray martinis and responded to an exhibition of Elizabeth Bishop’s paintings with the shared conviction that one of her pictures would suitably grace the cover of our anthology. And so it did.
We have lost too many important poets in the last twelve months. But I feel the loss of James Tate with an especially sharp pang. He was one of our best, most original and exemplary poets. Read his books – any or all of them – and know, as surprise follows surprise, that the experience will change you forever.
From the Archives, July 21, 2015
***
(Ed note: James Tate and Dara Wier visited the New School for a poetry forum with David Lehman in the fall of 2008. You can read our account of their visit here. sdh)
Posted by The Best American Poetry on February 09, 2018 at 11:47 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Every day I produce a minimum of five lucrative ideas. Unfortunately, I lack an entourage of five people needed to make them successful, namely, 1. a scribe, 2. a translator, 3. a designer, 4. a publicity agent and 5. a VC (that's Venture Capitalist, not Viet Cong). For a time, I tried to be all those people but it was exhausting. For instance, five years ago when I was living in the slave quarters of a grand house in New Orleans I put a stack of books on the steps of my building with a sign that said $5. The tourists and riff-raff who wander the French Quarter with heads full of kitsch, passed the tower of my quality volumes without paying attention. They were in search of adventure, and books, which are full of them, had already happened to other people. A young man stopped. He picked up the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound and said incredulously: "Five dollars?" I explained: "It's not your five dollars. I'm paying you five dollars to take it and read it." That seemed to appeal to him, but I added, "Under one condition. That you actually read it." He nodded in agreement. "And," I continued, "you have to come back in five hours and tell me what your thoughts about it are, to make sure that you really read it." He thought about this for a bit. "Seven dollars?" he said. I agreed.
Word got around fast and, by evening, when the serious drunks started their rounds, I had a line of customers. It cost me about $200, but it was worth it. I had distributed some of the best minds of several generations to a number of individuals. I didn't think my idea was a success until, next day, at the same hour, I sat on the steps with a new stack. My first customer showed up. "I'm giving you back three dollars," he said. "I understood mostly nothing. Besides, it's poetry. Still, I got four dollars' worth because I went to Molly's and I met a guy who bought me dinner and my rather expensive special services." Molly's is a bar. It's true, I hadn't told him it was poetry. "Did you read any of it?" "The preface," he said, "It was interesting. " A triumph. A preface is not nothing. The only thing more satisfying than a preface is a blurb. In the next few hours several of my previous day customers showed up: some of them returned my money, some of them had actually read the books, and some of them, actually said perceptive things about them. And some of them (maybe most of them) never showed up.
Needless to say, I had distributed only quality books, by canonical or should-have-been canonical writers. The reason for this Reverse Sale, as I called my business, was to put great books in "the hands of the people," as the communists used to say, or did they say "to educate the masses?" I could have sold them to a used book dealer or placed them into an archive (some of the living classics had actually signed them because they were my friends), but bureaucracy unnerves me and I am truly something of a populist. By the end of the week, my entire library was gone, a number of French Quarter tourists and locals had profited from the "sale," and my back thanked me. I was moving. After all my moves I had to see a chiropractor, an acupuncturist and a drug dealer immediately, because of the books.
Now imagine just the health-benefits of this business: Americans could stand straight again, maybe even proudly. In addition, if my Reader-for-Pay scheme is adopted on a large scale by authors, publishers, and by the innumerable owners of unread libraries, there would be a public sigh of relief. Publishers, for instance, would make an actual profit from the word-of-mouth fate of their books, instead of relying on the ponderous network of ass-kissers and dealers that eke a living out of them, not to speak of the real way they make money, which is to sell the books back to their authors at a pitiful discount. Needless to say, the Reader-for-Pay business has nothing to do with e-books because e-books are culturally insignificant: they depend on content and party chatter. In other words, e-books are not literature. They are not even furniture.
Another of my ideas, unrealized for its prohibitive price, was to turn millions of unsold hardbacks into bricks, and to build forts with them. This would work well in desert climates but it's not practical in the South. I discussed glues with a chemist. The price of a glue that would seal a book for humidity and vermin is too much for southerners, who as everyone knows, possess the largest for-sale libraries in the world. By the South I don't only mean Alabama and Southern Illinois, but South America and the tropics as well. I have many other ideas that are not about books and are infinitely more profitable. Some of these are: Quadripedal Yoga, Body-Writing Seminars, and the Disposition of Famous People's Body Parts to the Religious Proletariat.
If you are a 1. a scribe, 2. a translator, 3. a designer, 4. a publicity agent or 5. a VC, contact me via this newsletter.
Posted by Andrei Codrescu on February 09, 2018 at 11:18 AM in Feature, Guest Bloggers, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)
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It likely got by you in 2016 when a working group for the International Commission on Stratigraphy recommended that the commission vote to accept that we are now in a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. The debate about this new geological period had been raging for a while however, and the recommendation was no surprise. This new epoch is the result of human influence on the planet’s geology, which is enormous and now a permanent part of the geological record. Climate change, mass extinctions, nuclear testing, hydroelectric dams, and mining of all sorts (the list could go on) have altered, and are altering, our planet drastically, not to mention our psyches, relationships with one another, and our appreciation of nature. John Lane - poet, novelist, essayist and educator – has written a new collection of poems, Anthropocene Blues,(Mercer University Press) that gets at the heart of these issues and by doing so gives us insight into what we are making of the world, and ourselves, in this new troubling epoch.
It's not an easy subject, and writing poetry about it can’t be easy either. And that, in many ways, is what makes Anthropocene Blues unique and without parallel. Arguments about the Anthropocene have been largely academic, with the fallout from these arguments coming largely in debates about how we save nature and ourselves, given our perceived superiority over other species and our perceived role as Lords over the planet. While Anthropocene advocates acknowledge that humans are what got us into this mess, they also advocate that humans can get us out of it. Concepts such as Wilderness and wildness are considered antiquated romantic notions that have no place in this new epoch, as we have outgrown such concepts, and the planet is now ours exclusively. We need to have access to every square inch of it in order to manage it sustainably, restore it to our liking, and mold it to our wills.
So where does art reside in such a world? This is but one of the questions that Anthropocene Blues gets to the heart of. Art has always served the role of transcendence, assisting us in seeing our way through difficult times, both personal and societal, and has always drawn immensely from our appreciation of the natural world. But what is nature in this new epoch, and what is natural anymore? And what exactly are we anymore in this digital age of innumerable platforms of self-aggrandizing social media?
Lane explores these questions deftly in the poem “Erosion,” which, when taken literally, makes one think of geology, deep time, canyons, oceans, and cliffs – images that are used throughout the collection. But erosion in this particular poem is a metaphor for the ephemerality of digital information, and indeed our digital selves, all sliding somewhere into time and the ghost world of data servers. Consider these lines:
The present erodes, each online search, or was there ever
a present to start with? Photos stored off-site, “in the cloud”
as we say (and let me tell you there are enough
clouds to go around these days), no holds, or holds, barred
in the fist fight we call a digital culture, like those photos
on Facebook we wish to disappear:
It’s a shallow, haunted world in this poem, and further on he illustrates the new digital insensitivity to death and tragedy as people post on line stories regarding a paddler’s death on a river, where the videos go viral:
where there is no fog, but these digital ghosts don’t go away,
(at least until the solar flare or the half-mile wide asteroid
predicted by a panel of experts on The Weather Channel)
web pages left up, abandoned like the Bi-Lo grocery,
the roof collapsed, the windows like eyes thumbed shut:
the messages piled up in Gmail, comments, numbers still live
(for dead people) on Skype, these will never compost,
like discarded beer koozies in a black plastic bag,
our digital life built up toward heaven in its ghost mound:
Many of the poems in Anthropocene Blues are written from the first-person perspective of a fictional geologist, one who wrestles with this stratum of human influence now so visible in the geological timeline. In “The Geologist Speaks of Phosphate,” he ponders the record of extraction that transformed the American south:
In that ooze began one of the many new beginnings -
Not an oil strike like Texas, but phosphate, just as rich,
But a short-lived commodity – ancient fish shit
In veins 6 to 36 inches thick, settled in shallows
By oligocene, miocene, and pliocene tides and currents,
a geologic jackpot spread like mayonnaise below,
the buried economic beginning after the end,
at least for farming, as post-war entrepreneurial
clodhoppers donned their slouch hats, abandoned,
40 acres and a mule, dropped their hoes, strode out
of cotton fields and found in rich mineral seams
an extravagance of profit – a future . . .
Such poems ask the questions of where humanity is heading, and what, if anything, does it all mean (or what is meaning in this new epoch?). Rich in language, dark in texture, and filled with insight, Anthropocene Blues is a visionary collection that provides anyone concerned with the fate of humanity an opportunity to explore some of the most profound questions of our time, and to do so while enjoying the great writing that we need in order to explore them, and perhaps even answer them.
Brent Martin is the author of three chapbook collections of poetry - Poems from Snow Hill Road (New Native Press, 2007), A Shout in the Woods (Flutter Press, 2010), and Staring the Red Earth Down (Red Bird Press, 2014), and is a co-author of Every Breath Sings Mountains (Voices from the American Land, 2011) with authors Barbara Duncan and Thomas Rain Crowe He is also the author of Hunting for Camellias at Horseshoe Bend, a non-fiction chapbook published by Red Bird Press in 2015. His poetry and essays have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Pisgah Review, Tar River Poetry, Chattahoochee Review, Eno Journal, New Southerner, Kudzu Literary Journal, Smoky Mountain News, and elsewhere. He lives in the Cowee community in western North Carolina where he and his wife Angela Faye Martin run Alarka Institute, a nature, literary, and art based business that offers workshop and field trips. He has recently completed a two year term as Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the West.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on February 08, 2018 at 04:58 PM in Book Recommendations, Feature, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Two evil geniuses of the 20th century died nearly at the same time, after surviving the century that they helped shape: Edward Teller and Leni Riefenstahl [pictured left]. Edward Teller, the father of the Hydrogen bomb, had one of those brilliant mathematical brains that showed up quite frequently among Central European Jews born near the dawn of the last century.
Leni Riefenstahl made brilliant use of the 20th century’s native medium, film, to create a grand propaganda machine for Adolf Hitler. She documented and exalted Nazism for the masses, insuring and consolidating Hitler’s power, and thus contributing, in no small measure, to the policy that nearly eliminated such brains as Teller’s from the world.
The thing that accounts for Teller and Riefenstahl’s longevity is the same thing that accounts for ours. That is to say, if Teller’s hydrogen bomb had ever been used, none of us would have been around long enough to survive the 20th century. And if Riefenstahl’s Hitler had had his way, the same would be true. Happily, they both failed, and here we are, wondering what it’s all about.
On the one hand, it’s about technology. Teller’s work made use of the existing physics and technology of the A-bomb to create a more powerful weapon. Riefenstahl improved film technology by making those 24 frames per second yield their potential for persuasion. Neither Teller nor Riefenstahl created anything truly original, but they uncovered the latent powers of the originals to bring them –and us—to the brink of extinction. The original technologies of moving pictures and quantum physics were born, like all new things, without any idea of good and evil. However, it didn’t take long before they lost their innocence and were put to use by the demonic dialectic of the deposed century.
From an intentional standpoint, there is no equivalency between them. Edward Teller’s H-bomb was created as a deterrent to evil on the scale of Hitler, though his name happened to be Stalin. Riefenstahl’s work today is used only to exemplify the power of the medium of film for propaganda, not to recruit Nazis. Or, at least, I hope so. On the other hand, the H-bomb still has the potential to annihilate us, as do neo-Nazis just waiting to be unleashed by the right movie.
The passing of Teller and Riefenstahl marked the true end of the 20th century. My guess is that Edward and Leni are together in the next world. They have eternity to work out the implications of their work.
Posted by Andrei Codrescu on February 07, 2018 at 12:38 PM in Feature, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0)
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David Hockney at the Tate Gallery in London,
David Lehman composing "Dutch Interior" in a winter twilight in Ithaca,
and Trinachka (i.e. Trina Enriquez) puts them together.here
Posted by The Best American Poetry on February 07, 2018 at 11:40 AM in Adventures of Lehman, Art, Poems | Permalink | Comments (0)
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If you are moving to New York to do your obligatory two years of poetic apprenticeship among the sophisticated, critical, merciless, and horribly smart (or not) natives, be sure that you move to Queens. You heard me right. Not to Manhattan or G-d forbid to gluten-free Brooklyn, but to Queens.
The first thing about it, it's a lot cheaper.
The second, it's full of working New Yorkers of the sort that lace their boots tight, talk with an attitude, and go to Manhattan only if an exiled relative from Cincinnati comes back before dying.
The third thing is that they speak 167 languages in Jackson Heights alone, which is just one part of Queens.
The fourth thing is that the Unisphere from the World Fair that every American has tattooed at birth in the deepest part of the brain, is in Queens, too.
The fifth is that all your friends in Manhattan and Brooklyn have a hard time keeping a smirk off their mug when you tell them you live in Queens.
The sixth thing is the restaurants that deliver 24 hours any variety of non-American or American food your cholesterol-hungry heart might yearn for. The seventh is that. the best comedians are from Queens, like Don Rickles, as are other great Americans, like Cyndi Lauper, Nicki Menaj, and 50 cent. In passing, I'll say that the Queens zoo has a hell of a puma that looks you straight in the eyes until you feel lucky there are some bars between you.
I ended up in Queens because the Romanian Great Writers' League of Queens (as opposed to the Romanian Minor Writers' League of Queens) found me a studio in a lovely apartment building reminiscent of the best Soviet architecture, which costs me less than a parking place in Manhattan. I have a view of a fire-escape and a synagogue, which is all a writer needs: a means to escape from a fire into the arms of an unforgiving G-d. My friends from the Romanian Great Writes' League in Queens know everything about New York, all four boroughs, and can barely conceal their feeling of superiority, for at least one reason: no tourists. Manhattan is all tourists and Brooklyn is all slumming rich kids who want to be famous.
Nobody in Queens wants to be interrupted by gawkers while writing novels and poetry. Regular Quuenzites don't want to be famous at all: it might attract the IRS. So take it from one who's been everywhere, the breadth and length of US and other places where they speak pigeon English: do your time in Queens, young poet. And don't ever show your MFA in public. "Keep old hat in secret closet," as Ted Berrigan said, and you'll go back to flyover America with superpowers.
[Editor's note: We thought this provocative and engaging article would best be illustrated by a couple of Queens. -- DL]
Posted by Andrei Codrescu on February 07, 2018 at 12:30 AM in Feature, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Like everyone else with money in the market, whether directly in shares of common stock or indirectly in mutual funds held in an IRA or a Keogh account, we knew we weren't supposed to get anxious but we did nevertheless when the Dow plunged five hundred points last Friday and threw down another thousand points on Monday.
The market's wild mood swings are unprecedented -- as befits the age of proactive prozac. But a thousand points in a single day! We wondered, (whiskey tango foxtrot under our breath) what happened.
So today we turned as we often do to our old friend Marty Schumacher of Goldman, Sachs, who sat next to us in Rosand's course in Venetian painters, which focused mainly on Titian.Marty took half an hour off his busy desk to down a mug of espresso with us at ten thirty this morning. This is an account of our conversation:
"Help me make sense of this, Marty. It's as if the market forgot to take its pep pills on Friday and repeated the offense yesterday." "That's not bad," Marty said. "We got hooked on easy money from the Fed. Now Mr. Market's afraid that they're going to take the punch bowl away." "But everyone has been saying that the Fed is going to hike rates this year -- a full hundred basis points, maybe more." "True, but when the jobs report came in last Friday, a lot of traders thought of the one word that always spooks the market." "You mean inflation?" "I mean classic inflation, which is what happens when the market digests good economic as bad because of the fear it arouses." "But these losses are colossal, and the swings back and forth, back and forth, but south at the end of the day, are nerve-wracking." "That's why you're not supposed to check your account on such days." "I agree. The best thing to do is nothing. But you have to admit the smell of panic is in the air, and there has to be a probable cause."
"Passive indexing is the culprit," Schumacher said. "Index funds have been all the rage for the last five years, and that's been fine so long as the market was busting new highs every day. But when there's a crash, which is only a fast-paced correction, computer-triggered sales hit ETFs and especially ETNs faster than the speed of a cat thrown out a twenty-first floor window, which hits the sidewalk at a velocity higher than 32.2 feet per second. We even have an equation for it: SCV, surplus cat velocity, sort of the inverse of the dead cat bounce.
"What's worse, the loss gets tabulated at close of business. So it's like velocity times velocity, and everyone is going twenty miles over the speed limit." "That helps account for the ups and downs -- but why both on the same day?" "The cheap money is getting cleaned out, by which I mean the last-minute speculators caught up in January's fireworks, people who need to cover their calls or their margin accounts. Leverage is a high, or it's time to jump off a bridge."
We finished our coffee, and Marty (pictured left) checked his Apple watch and headed back to the elevator. "You know what Emerson said when he was asked what the market will do tomorrow? He said, 'It will fluctuate.'" "That wasn't Emerson, that was J. P. Morgan." "Whatever. Like everyone in Los Angeles has always said, you never know when the big one will come along. But it's inevitable.The earthquake is sometimes preceded by a shake or two, a tremor, and you know what will follow but you don't know when. It could come six days from now, or six months, or six years. Hell, the Journal yesterday reported that the Millennials are as into the market as the boomers didn't get to be until they reached fifty, and way more than Gen X, about whom nobody talks anymore. What can I tell you? Except for Einstein, the market has defied everyone since Newton. But wait and see. It'll be entertaining."
"What do you think is going to happen today?" "The market goes down some more. How about you?" "Well, it wouldn't astonish me if the Dow ends the day five hundred points up." "Really?" "Wait and see." -- DL
Posted by The Best American Poetry on February 06, 2018 at 11:10 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, Financial Market Report | Permalink | Comments (0)
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This week on Next Line, Please, writers were asked to write a poem in the form of a string of haikus. As usual, many excellent candidates rolled in, and here are but a few!
Eric Fetzer’s “Erased de Kooning, 1953” reads like a "spontaneous essay—in this case on a pivotal moment in the history of modern art." I enjoy how lines one and three rhyme and how the rhythmic structure of the haiku helps the poem along.
Rauschenberg erased
A tough de Kooning drawing
Leaving a smudged trace.Was it a lecture,
Destruction as creation,
A dada gesture?But the gesture left
Subtle marks on white paper
So we’re not bereftOf media, form
As expression of movement:
Not out of the norm,Just new medium.
But many of these would be
Awful tedium.
Michael C. Rush’s “Blow, Wind” "seems to advocate discarding poetry while exalting the deep source of all poems." It reminds me a bit of Marianne Moore's "Poetry" which begins, "I, too, dislike it."
No more poetry.
All rhymes are accidental,
lack utility.Only the wind now
will I listen to. It won’t
insist why or howthings happen, or can’t.
Or tell me nothing matters,
or chide, cut, or grant,grudgingly, a sense,
a temporary feeling,
worth all this expense.Blow, wind, blow. Give me
sensation without meaning—
the truth, probably.
Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post and to enter your own candidate for this week's prompt! Spoiler Alert: it's Valentine's Day themed.
--Virginia Valenzuela
Posted by Virginia Valenzuela on February 06, 2018 at 04:53 PM in Feature, Guest Bloggers, Next Line, Please | Permalink | Comments (0)
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"Did you pick that cravat?" "I did that." "Here's your hat."
And here are Nancy Walker and David Craig with the same number. . . "Don't you know how to cook?""I can look / in a book" "I don't think I'll fall in love today." Take it away, Mel Torme and Cleo Laine."Perhaps it's better after all / if we don't answer nature's call."
Vote for your favorite version today!
Posted by The Best American Poetry on February 06, 2018 at 11:01 AM in Music | Permalink | Comments (0)
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It isn't often that one has a gaggle of virgin writers on one's desk, ready to answer any question, important, trivial, philosophically or gastro-erotically significant..Thus, an earnest question meets a prophetic answer. (With an occasional aside by the oracle.) This seance begins thus:
_____
QUESTION: from Jeffrey Cyphers Wright "Blue Lyre" (Dos Madress Press)
"Don't give me those woof-woof eyes,
the Dark & Stormy look at KGB bar,"
ORACLE interprets:
WHY YOU GIVE ME THOSE WOOF-WOOF EYES IN THE DARK & STORMY KGB BAR?
ANSWER: from Pat Nolan "Exile in Paradise" (Nuallain Press)
"cup raised i challenge my shadow"
ORACLE interprets:
EVERY TIME YOU HAVE ANOTHER DRINK I LOOK IN THE MIRROR
________
QUESTION from Vincent Katz "Southness" (Lunar Chandelier Press)
"fork in the path but you
could come back always
could see one again,"
ORACLE interprets:
MAY I RETURN THIS FORK?
ANSWER: from Alan Watts "The Culture of Counter-Culture" (Tuttle Publishing)
"you might first try to reason with him"
ORACLE forks up an Ouroboros to an earnest zendik:
ALL VIRIGIN WRITERS ON THIS BLOGGER'S DESK WILL BECOME ORACULAR FODDER (REVIEWS) IN OUR NEXT DELPHIC DEBAUCH
________
QUESTION: from Dorothea Lasky "Awe" (Wave Books)
"The murder took place on a day that was made for the children."
ORACLE interprets in the language of goofy whodunnits:
ON WHAT DAY DID THE MURDER TAKE PLACE?
ANSWER: from David Shields "Enough About You: Notes Toward an Autobiography" (Soft Skull Press)
In Janette Turner Hospital's novel The Last Magician, Lucy, the narrator, asks Charlie, an avant-garde photographer, why he takes photographs so "constantly, so obsessively, why he collects other people's photographs, why he scavenges in secondhand shops and buys, by the box full, old, cracked, brown-and-cream records of other people's pasts."
ANSWER: from David Shields "Enough About You: Notes Toward an Autobiography" (Soft Skull Press)
"So that I will see what I've seen, he says"
ORACLE:
DAVID SHIELDS IS A NARCISSIST!
________
QUESTION: from Sandra Liu "On Poems On" (Ugly Duckling Presse)
"it's miserable to be deprived
of sex you can't live this way"
ORACLE:
WHAT IS LIFE WITHOUT SEX?
ANSWER: from John High "Vanishing Acts" (Talisman House)
all the hours fallen away from the body into bowling pins & acrobats & letting go into vast air"
ORACLE:
WHEN QUESTION FITS ANSWER SEX WAS HAD (IN VERSE)
________
QUESTION: from Basil King "mirage: a poem in 22 sections" (Marsh Hawk Press)
"No. This is my country
and I'm staying here."
ORACLE:
EVEN IF EVERYBODY FLEES TO CANADA?
ANSWER: from Jose Luis Peixoto, translated by Hugo Dos Santos "A Child in Ruins: Collected Poems" (writ large press)
it's a secret i will keep my entire life for not knowing how to say it."
ORACLE:
ONE DOESN'T NEED TO FLEE THE PLACE THE QUESTION REFERS TO BECAUSE JOSE IS ALREADY A CITIZEN OF ANOTHER PLACE
Posted by Andrei Codrescu on February 05, 2018 at 11:06 PM in Feature, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0)
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"I know it well, that melody. . ."
This was the first venture of the team of Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, who wrote many of Sinatra's songs from the late 40s ("Time After Time," "Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are," I Fall in Love Too Easily," etc). Sammy, who wrote the words,had the habit, when working on a new lyric, to close, his eyes, listen to a theme, and come out with a title phrase. Jule played the theme and Sammy went into a trance, then burst out, "I've heard that song before!" "You can't have heard that song before," Jule said, paranoid as all songwriters are about their music. . .
Harry and Helen recorded the song on July 31, 1942, the day before the devastating musicians' strike started.
And now here's Benny Goodman and company with "Perfidia" for Helen (pictured above left) to sing. and if you're wondering what Betty Grable is doing here (bottom right), well, folks, the GIs' favorite pin-up girl of World War II married Harry. It is possible that both Helen's autobio and Betty's could have the same title: "I Had the Craziest Dream." I had it, too, one time period removed.
As for Woody, watch his movies (.e.g "Hannah and Her Sisters") and you'll see how deeply he loves the sound of Harry James's trumpet. -- DL
Posted by The Best American Poetry on February 05, 2018 at 11:02 AM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, Music | Permalink | Comments (1)
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This week we welcome Andrei Codrescu as our guest author. Andrei's recent books are Bibliodeath (My Archives with Life in Footnotes) (2012) and The Art of Forgetting: New Poems (2016). Find out more about Andrei on his website is codrescu.com and follow him on Twitter @acodrescu.
Welcome, Andrei.
-- sdl
Posted by The Best American Poetry on February 05, 2018 at 08:02 AM in Announcements | Permalink | Comments (0)
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I signed up to write an introduction to Lafcadio Hearn's collection of ghost stories, to be published by Princeton University Press next year. Hearn lived in New Orleans for a few years in the late 19th century and was a beloved local. His Louisiana novel, "Chita" is still in print. I used his wonderful travelogue "Two Years in the West Indies" when I visited Martinique. The city of St. Pierre, featured in the book, was no more, blown up by a volcano, but his other landmarks and vivid people lived on. I thought I knew plenty about Lafcadio Hearn when I took on the job. As it turns out, I knew little. There are over a hundred collections of books by Lafcadio Hearn: essays, stories, novels, travelogues, philosophical dialogues with Shinto and Zen monks, and, the strangest thing of all, there is a whole other Lafcadio Hearn, named Koizumi Yakumo, who is revered in Japan. There have been movies, operas, Noh plays, and hundreds of illustrated editions of his Japanese writings. He collected folk stories, interviewed monks, taught English literature in Tokyo, took Japanese citizenship and hated the West and the Meiji era that corrupted, as he saw it, the Japan that knew no shadows in painting before it opened to the West. He had four children in Japan, two of whom wrote books about their father. In the U.S. there are dozens of memoirs and correspondence published after his death. He died young, at the age of 54. At the end of the nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn was one of America's best known writers, one of a stellar company that included Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Twain, Poe and Stevenson have entered the literary canon and are still read for duty and pleasure. Lafcadio Hearn has been forgotten, with the remarkable exceptions of Louisiana and Japan. Yet, Hearn’s place in American literature is significant for many reasons, not least of which is how the twentieth century came to view the nineteenth. This view, both academic and popular, reflects the triumph of a certain futuristic modernism over the mysteries of religion, folklore, and what was once called "folk wisdom." Lafcadio Hearn was a Greek-born, Irish-raised, New World immigrant who metamorphosed from a celebrated fin-de-siècle American writer into the beloved Japanese cultural icon Koizumi Yakumo in less than a decade, in roughly the same time that Japan changed from a millennia-old feudal society into a great industrial power. In other words, in the blink of an eye, or, as in one of his stories, the time it takes to burn an owl's feathers so that the nocturnal beautiful-girl-shape of the true creature might emerge. Hearn changed from one person into another, from a Greek islander into a British student, from a penniless London street ragamuffinin into a respected American newspaper writer, from a journalist into a novelist and, most astonishingly, from a stateless Western man into a loyal Japanese citizen. Yet, this life, as recorded both by himself and others, grows more mysterious the more one reads about it. It is like the Japanese story of the Buddhist monk Kwashin Koji, in “Impressions of Japan.” This monk who owned a painting so detailed it flowed with life. A samurai chieftain saw it and wanted to buy it, but the monk wouldn't sell it. So, the chieftain had him followed and murdered. But when the painting was brought to the chieftan and unrolled, there was was nothing on it; it was blank. A monk told Hearn this story to illustrate an aspect of the Buddhist doctrine of karma, but he might as well been speaking to Hearn about his own personae: the more “literary” Hearn becomes, via his prodigious output and the memories of his intimates, the more mysterious he becomes, until he vanishes like the painting. Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 not far from Ithaca, on the island of Lefkada in Greece, from the union of Charles Bush Hearn, an Irish surgeon in the British army, and Rosa Kassimatis, a beautiful woman born in Cythera, Aphrodite's island, about which Baudelaire wrote (in Richard Howard's memorable translation): "On Aphrodite's island all I found/ was a a token gallows wherein my image hung..." Hearn saw in Cythera the fatal beauty that would haunt his entire life. The island of Lefkada, said by Ovid in his “Ode to Love” to be the place where Sappho jumped to her death in the sea because of unrequited love, was Lafcadio's paradise, the womb-island from which he was expelled when his father returned and took mother and child to Dublin. While his father was abroad on another military assignment in the West Indies, Lafcadio's mother Rosa fled Dublin with a Greek man, back to her "island of feasting hearts and secret joys," leaving Lafcadio in the custody of a pious Catholic aunt. Then a schoolyard accident in one of the British schools he resentfully attended left him blind in one eye. His father remarried, and his aunt's family became bankrupt, two unrelated yet near-simultaneous disasters. A seventeen-year-old Lafcadio wandered penniless in London among vagabonds, thieves, and prostitutes. In the spring of 1869, a relation of his father's, worried about the family's reputation, handed him a one-way boat ticket to Cincinnati, Ohio, where another relation of the Hearns lived. In Cincinnati his relation handed him $5 and told him to get lost. A twenty-year-old Lafcadio found himself, once again, a penniless tramp. So far, with the exception of a few school exercises and some ghoulish poetry inspired by his fear of ghosts, Lafcadio Hearn had written nothing. In Cincinnati, he lived in the underworld, until the printer Henry Watkin allowed the young tramp to sleep on piles of old newspapers in his shop. Watkin, a utopian anarchist, encouraged him to read radical and fantastic literature. It was the age of socialism, anarchism, imperialism, untaxed wealth, unredeemable poverty, spiritism, snake-oil, newspapers, electricity, photography, telegraphy, telepathy, railroads, high art, and kitsch. A bounty of exotic objects and customs flowed in from the cultures of vanquished Native American tribes and recently freed African slaves. The astonished masses of immigrant Europeans, who were mostly peasants and religiously persecuted marginals, brought with them rich stories of folklore, customs, and beliefs. Hearn, like many new Americans, felt rightly that he was living in a time of wonder and possibility. His education took a vast leap: he underwent a kind of osmosis as if he had absorbed the spirit of nineteenth-century America from the newspapers he slept on.Clumsily, with Henry Watkin's encouragement, he started to write. And so the moral of this story is: you need to have a miserable childhood to have an interesting life, and fuck you, Trump, with your immigrant phobias. Let's all become Japanese.
Posted by Andrei Codrescu on February 05, 2018 at 12:28 AM in Current Affairs, Feature, Guest Bloggers, Travel | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Cagney and Cary Grant don't want to hear any of your lip
so here's my friend Brandy
I mean Brando mumbling
rustic Walter Brennan, the real McCoy,
Clark Gable huffy
Jimmy Stewart that's how it goes
you see Robert Mitchum's face
but no words come out
he don't have too much to say
but W. C. Fields does
Dino would rather be drinking
and his ex-partner cracks
himself up with "One for My Baby
and One More for the Road"
Posted by The Best American Poetry on February 04, 2018 at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Marianne Moore didn't make it easy on us. She revised her poems, and often the later versions are radically different from and vastly inferior to the original.Thanks to the latest scholarship, I have learned that the text of "The Student" that I selected for The Oxford Book of American Poetry is weaker (and shorter) than an unrevised version that the poet wished to suppress.
Here are two versions of "The Past is the Present" by Marianne Moore.
The first version is the one that I used for The Oxford Book. The second version is one that I found circulating in the web. What makes the second version corrupt is that it regularizes the spacing. Easy to understand why: idiosyncrasies of spacing, unusual typographical arrangements, and even simple indentation are often casualties of electronic transmission. But the spacing here is crucial. I maintain that Moore's poem if printed with conventional spacing is not the same poem –– and it is certainly not as good a poem.
The second version differs from the Oxford text for a legitimate reason as well: it is an alternative draft of the same poem. The difference is between "as on a recent occasion I was goaded into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse" and "as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse."
The alternative version is more compact, and usually this is a good thing, but in this case I believe that the original is superior because 1) it is more specific to Moore's personality and 2) it fruitfully complicates the situation and the poem. The phrase “I was goaded into doing by XY” implies that the great assertive sentence that rounds off the poem is not only a comment on what “This man” (or “the teacher”) said but also a criticism of it as insufficient. The sentence by XY is vastly more interesting in this light: it exemplifies prose that lacks “a sort of heightened consciousness.” The discrepancy between the sentence’s broad truth and its own inadequacy as a vehicle for that truth thus irritates the poet into uttering her epigram. Notice, too, that the Oxford version has the word “occasion” in line four, obliging us to understand how the epigram applies to the making of this particular poem.
From the poem’s conclusion I drew the title of the anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. -- DL
The Past is the Present
If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded
into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed
Verse.
This man said – I think that I repeat
his identical words:
“Hebrew poetry is
prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy
affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form."
– Marianne Moore
corrupt / alternative version found on the web:
The Past is the Present
If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said - and I think I repeat his exact words -
"Hebrew poetry is prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.
– Marianne Moore
Posted by The Best American Poetry on February 02, 2018 at 11:57 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, Poems | Permalink | Comments (3)
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DD: In his introduction to the anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present,David Lehman notes: “Writing a prose poem can therefore seem like accepting a dare to be unconventional. It is a form that invites the practitioner to reinvent it.” Using Lehman’s words as a jumping-off point, could you talk about your experience of writing such lovely, brilliant, challenging prose poetry over the years? Why is the prose poem your preferred medium?
NA: When I began writing, I wanted to write short stories. I wanted to be the next Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor. I wanted to tell the story of Miss August, even back then, of a transgender boy, growing up in the 1950s and 60s. The title scene of the book: a young girl and boy looking at a Playboy Magazine, flipping open the centerfold of Miss August—was already written in some version or another. In that scene, the girl cringes, just as I did when I was eight or nine years old, and announces, Whatever that is, whatever made that lady into Miss August—that is never, ever, ever happening to me. (I didn’t have too much to worry about, but Miss August gave me nightmares for years.) The boy, gazing at the same centerfold, said one day he’d be Miss August, adding, Just you wait and see.
But in my last of year of college, I took a creative writing class with David Lehman in which he taught us the wonders of the prose poem. We read poets like Gertrude Stein, Russell Edson, Henri Michaux, Julio Cortázar, Günter Eich, Tomas Tranströmer, Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska, Max Jacob, Octavio Paz, and so many others. I was smitten. My whole world changed. And I knew I would never be a fiction writer.
The prose poem was and is the form I have always felt most at ease with, the form in which I could wear jeans to the literary ball. No more pretenses, no more dressing up in outfits that didn’t fit me. I like to write in smaller units, stanzas or paragraphs, and I have always been enchanted by the magic and music and mystery of poetry. I also love humor and surrealism, as do many of the masters of prose poetry. And I love how prose poetry can mimic other forms and mock one’s expectations and assumptions. Even when lean towards fiction, as I did with Miss August, I want to write each page as a prose poem. I never want to give up that tightness that poetry offers, that jewel-like quality, even if I am writing a novel.
DD: In your latest book, Miss August, you draw on your childhood experiences growing up in the south, outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, an area to which you’ve recently moved back. What insights did you gain about yourself and your writing from the imaginative return you made in Miss August, and the actual return you made moving back in real life? What can the South of the 1950s and 1960s tell us about America today?
NA: When I wrote Miss August, I thought I was writing about the past. And that we, as a culture, were finally moving towards a less racist, less sexist and less oppressive future. I thought I was writing about a time and place mostly visible in the rear view mirror. My insight—I was living in a bubble.
I should have known, I suppose, what the character, Gil, points out in the beginning of the book—the past has not really passed.
After the events this summer in Charlottesville, none of what I have to say about that is new or surprising. And I am not a journalist or a historian or a political scientist so I don’t have much to say about the state of America today.
But I grew up in a time and place where people spoke out against integration. Their logic or justification, like the logic of the Southern Manifesto, was that people are happier mixing only with their own kind. I remember one man telling me how sorry he felt for Arthur Ashe. The poor fellow, he said, he has only white tennis players to play with.
People believed in dividing lines then.
DD: Miss August is startling and beautiful. It reads like a novella, in many respects. The finely crafted characters of Sarah Jane Lee, Gill Simmons, and May Dee have stayed with me quite vividly in the months since I first read this book. Can you talk a bit about creating, and living with, these remarkable characters?
NA: Thanks Dante. You are too nice!
Sarah Jane and Gil and May Dee lived easily in my mind for years, chattering on about this and that. They are based on people I loved as a child, on a woman and friends who had inside them a kind of music I associate with the South and with a southern accent and sensibility.
I don’t know what it is, but there is something about the South, something about its character and characters that casts a spell over me. I love the landscape, the warmth, the people, and the stories people tell. And how people talk and take their time talking . . .
Some days I think I could listen to people talk all day, especially if they have a good accent going. It’s the lilt, the twang, the slow dance in the telling. And the descriptions, the similes and metaphors, and the expressions like: You don’t want just a pig in a poke, or, Put a pinch of salt on his tail for me, won’t you?
Just the other day, I was eavesdropping, listening to a guy who was describing a pretty woman he disliked. His words: She’s got the legs of a filly and the soul of an old nag. And no, you can’t steal that.
DD: As you discuss in your writer’s note at the end of the book, it took you years to engage the legacies of racism and inequality that contextualized your childhood in the south. White middle class writers seem particularly hesitant to write about issues of race and class; nobody wants to be another Vachel Lindsay—that is, to be unintentionally, inexcusably, and naively racist. Obviously, you’ve avoided those pitfalls here, by creating a layered, unflinching, and delicately nuanced portrait of the Jim Crow South. What did writing Miss August teach you about your own history, about race and class in America, about writing race and class in America?
NA: Before writing Miss August, I thought a lot about the hesitance you are describing, about the silence of white middle-class Americans. And all of the reasons I shouldn’t write about these topics. And the potential pitfalls in any effort to write about race and class. There are many reasons to remain silent. After all, as you say, no one wants to be another Vachel Lindsay.
My father used to say that if you are a well-fed man in a room full of hungry people, you shouldn’t mention the nice meal you just ate. You should stay quiet.
A writing professor told me that I shouldn’t write about my racist ancestors or parents. He said it would be like the child of a Nazi writing about the Jews or World War Two.
A friend and poet once said that she thought of the white silence around these difficult topics as a curtain, a privacy screen, behind which one can safely undress. After all, who wants to be exposed?
It seems logical to avoid uncomfortable subjects even if that means disowning or denying one’s own part or place in history or society.
I simply felt that I wanted to talk about my formative years. But to write about my past, even in a fictional way, composing stories and prose poems based loosely on my childhood, was to write about race and gender and class. After all, I was raised by a black nanny who hated other African Americans, by a father who helped to start an all-white private school, by a father who was also a gay man and who was kicked out of the Navy for having an affair with an officer, by a mother was from Boston and not a typical woman and not a bit like Southern women, by farmhands who were illiterate and who were my playmates, by friends’ parents who called the Civil War –The War of Northern Aggression.
But my goal as a writer is not to explain, pontificate, or change what is or was, but simply to describe, to bear witness. I know that my particular vision and filter is tainted, colored not only by my class, race and gender, but also by my inevitable prejudices, fears, eccentricities, opinions, and blind spots. Nevertheless, it is liberating to write. Silence, for me, is suffocating.
DD: All of your work, but particularly your last three books, Why God Is a Woman, Our Lady of the Orgasm, and Miss August, speak powerfully to the misogyny that is pervasive in virtually all aspects of American life. You’ve spent your whole writing life, examining nuances of gender and sexuality. I wonder what your thoughts are for making the literary world more equitable and not just for women, especially in a country where Donald Trump is president?
NA: Gender roles have always seemed silly to me, as well as arbitrary. Maybe that’s why I’ve written so much about them.
After all, it was my father, not my mother, who played what would be considered a feminine role in my childhood. He took care of me when I was sick. And he helped pick out my dresses (he insisted they had to be short or long, no midis, as they were called back then) and lipstick (the redder the better), and he told me how to style my hair (like an upside down tulip). His own closet was filled with expensive Italian suits, silky soft shirts, and hats. My mother wore LL Bean boots, men’s socks and dirty brown skirts or jeans. She was dairy farmer and an activist. She was the one in the family who took up political causes.
But that doesn’t answer your question.
Really, I don’t know how to make an equitable world, literary or otherwise.
As to Donald Trump and this country . . . Do you think he’s an ugly reflection of what we don’t admit about ourselves. Some golem-like part of our national psyche that has been dwelling underground, wearing Bilbo’s ring and yet gaining power for years, waiting for his moment to emerge?
It still stuns me that white women voted for Trump. Clearly, misogyny and sexism are not limited to the male gender. Women of color, on the other hand, did not vote for him. Women of color consistently vote in favor of women’s rights and health. Women of color might be our best hope for the future.
DD: I’d like to end with a poem from Miss August. Could you introduce one of your favorites?
NA: I’ll choose this one which isn’t really a favorite, but I think it might help to introduce the book. In it Sarah Jane is speaking as an adult about her friend, Gil:
The Story of Gil Simmons
Sarah Jane
People still talk about Gil Simmons. They say, That boy was one strange bird. They say, He wasn’t right in the head. They say, His daddy ought to have taught him a thing or two. These are Lessington, Virginia folks, mind you. When I was a girl, they shot deer frozen in their headlights and stray dogs that howled at the moon. They flew Confederate flags in their front yards. They spoke to God and ghosts and called black folks niggers. And they closed the public schools. Don’t let the coloreds in our classrooms, they said. Restrooms neither. But Gil, they thought, was the strange one. Stranger than a faggot, they said. Still do. I smile, light up a cigarette, and say, Define normal, if you will.
Nin Andrews is the recipient of the 2016 Ohioana Award for Poetry. Her most recent book is Miss August (CavanKerry Press, 2017).
Dante Di Stefano is the co-editor, with María Isabel Alvarez, of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018)
Posted by Dante Distefano on February 02, 2018 at 10:58 PM in Book Recommendations, Dante Di Stefano, Feature, Guest Bloggers, Interviews, Meet the Press, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The one and only. . ."They're tearing down part of your old neighborhood." "That's not coincidental," says Julius (Groucho) Marx,, who lived on 93rd Street and went to PS 86 in NYC.
"Ladies and gentlemen, where were you on September 5, 1969?" -- Dick Cavett
Posted by The Best American Poetry on February 02, 2018 at 08:38 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, Movies, Television | Permalink | Comments (0)
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In my John Milton class at Brandeis University (I am there attending school), time spent occasionally talking about God is evidently time spent talking about the relation between literary texts and religious ones.
In both the KJV and NIV (versions) of the Bible, the Book of John recounts the creation of the world via words thus:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
What I find lovely about this construction, literarily, is how one can use it to measure the space between saying and being, or one could say “word”-ing and “create”-ing. The repetitions and graduated iterations of the phrases describe potential geometries of the relationship between words and power: simultaneous or adjacent, identical or neighborly.
How much power do our words have to manifest what isn’t there? To portray what is?
Looking for more insight into this origin myth for language-qua-creation, I find myself grabbing for the Hebrew version of Bereishit (Old Testament) that describes the creational magnificence of words this way:
Yehi or va yehi or.
We translate that as “God said, ‘Let there be light and there was light.’” But look more closely. The actual words are not a graduated transition as the English implies. They are a sequence of identical twin-like repetitions—dual humps connected by a “v” (and). The uttered phrase (yehay ohr) is rendered identical to the performed one (yehay ohr). Only the single letter “v” (and) connects the languaging with the manifesting.
As poets and readers, we may find ourselves at times aware that words are incredible, and creative, and yet….there are often things in the manifest world that our human language can neither mimic nor summon up. Between words and being there is distance. And into that chasm falls...well, so much! childhood impotence, hocus-pocus, Lacanian lack, modes of consciousness, alternate realities, power and desire.
What exactly do words create? What do the non-word elements of the poem bring into being? In a series of blog posts, I’ll talk a bit about words—and wordsmiths—as creational, depictional, powerful and powerless.
Next Up: Plato and the Dangers of Poetry. Or Percy Bysshe Shelley and Strategies of Unsaying.
Posted by Jenny Factor on February 01, 2018 at 01:09 PM in Jenny Factor -West Coast Correspondent, Religion, The Bible | Permalink | Comments (4)
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Radio
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
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman