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NA: I wanted to start by asking you to post the title poem and say a few words about it.
SBD:
Echolocation
The whales can’t hear each other calling
in the noise-cluttered sea: they beach themselves.
I saw one once—heaved onto the sand with kelp
stuck to its blue-gray skin.
Heavy and immobile,
it lay like a great sadness.
And it was hard to breathe with all the stink.
Its elliptical black eyes had stilled, were mostly dry,
and barnacles clustered on its back
like tiny brown volcanoes.
Imagining the other whales, their roving weight,
their blue-black webbing of the deep,
I stopped knowing how to measure my own grief.
And this one, large and dead on the sand,
with its unimaginable five-hundred-pound heart.
“Echolocation” became the title poem very early on in the book’s eight-year evolution. Echolocation is, of course, the way whales locate themselves through the sounds that they bounce off the ocean floor, corals, other sea creatures. A poet too locates her/himself through a particularizing of sound. If the poem reaches a reader, then the speaker and the reader are located for each other precisely. I guess that is a goal anyway.
NA: I just realized that like me, you spend a lot of time in Maine, and I was wondering what, if any, influence the beautiful Maine coastline might have on your poetry?
SBD: The room where I write looks out on a tidal reach that is always changing as the waters rise and fall. The shape and speed of the small waves is in constant transformation as is the water’s color in relation to the sky—emerald green, sage, brown, robin’s egg blue. A friend once called the view from our windows, water television. I find looking at Long Reach, which is the name of this body of water, creates a mental state quiet enough for my mind to slow and gather words; the water’s motion too seems to prevent a kind of stale stasis. At eventide, the water is still, but this too has its own reflective way of calling up poems.
My mother died in the Spring of 2017 and during the summer following, I wrote many of the more elegiac poems from this room in Maine. The spot where we live in Harpswell is also very quiet, but for the wind. The wind through the oaks and pines is affecting as well, invisible but for when it moves the trees, the water.
NA: I especially love the way your poems address the mother/daughter relationship in particular as well as the spoken and unspoken questions that arise between loved ones. Your mother's discomfort in talking about sexuality is an example. It mirrors the tension, present in so many of your poems--between what can and cannot be said—or known. I wondered if you could say a few words about that tension?
SBD: I think tension, opposites pulling on each other, creates a mirror of how our minds often work, all the ambivalence we carry, how two or three or four opposing feelings can all be true.
I am very interested in looking at my subjects closely while knowing there is a point at which I can’t perceive further. The closer I get to that point, the happier I am with the poem. I think this is another reason why “Echolocation” became the title poem, the lines, “I stopped knowing how to measure my own grief./ And this one, large and dead on the sand, with its unimaginable five-hundred pound heart.”
As far as my mom, there were many tensions and joys in our relationship. As she grew more frail, I found that writing about her allowed me to understand and appreciate more fully what there was between us. In the poem, “Diminution,” I was able to discover a loving impulse behind my mother’s overuse of cliché, which isn’t to say that I did not find them confining and irritating, just that writing the poem allowed me to experience their inadvertent humor and her love.
I think writing the poems that chronicled her physical and mental deterioration made losing her more bearable by attempting to transform the loss into art. Octavio Paz said something about needing to write in order to transform pain, that joy does not require transformation and is therefore more difficult to tether.
NA: I am just so in love with this book, I don’t want to say or even ask. It is so achingly beautiful. I wondered if you could just talk a little more about the backdrop of the book, the occasions that inspired this particular collection poems.
SBD: Nin, I think so highly of you and your work… I am thrilled that you like ECHOLOCATION and have spent so much time with it! Thank you!
Many of the poems concern the natural world. I am not a religious person at all, but I do find that nature holds answers for me and soothes. Just by looking closely at an animal or plant something shifts and a weight is lifted. I don’t really know how to explain it any further.
The first poem I ever wrote was about my father’s death when I was ten or so. His death long ago but more my mother’s recent death figure prominently in ECHOLOCATION. The book is dedicated to her. In a way, the book is a chronicle of losses and the poems are an attempt to wrap words around them, make these losses communicable to others.
Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches Modern Poetry at Manhattanville College and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poems appeared in New Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, the NYT, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her two books, Talking Underwater and Second Skin were published by Wind Publications in 2007 and 2010. Galapagos Poems was published by Kattywompus Press in 2016. Her third full-length collection, Echolocation, was published by Plume editions Madhat Press in March of 2018.
In last week's post of Next Line, Please, contributor's were asked to write an abecedarian poem in 26 words that would recount the plot of a particular novel, book, or play. We thought this one might be challenging, but the Next Line, Please contributors filled the poetry caravan with enticingly good recapitulations.
Diana Ferraro’s “Hamlet” tells us a little something about betrayal, violence, and the essence of truth:
Ardent betrayal casts dice!
Elsinore fights ghosts!
Hamlet is jinxed.
Kingdom, law, mother,
new occurrences
pose questions, raise subjects.
Truth unearths violent wisdom.
Xyphoid yarn zips
Elizabeth Solsburg’s “Garden of Eden” yields such gems as “devil’s ethereal food” and “repitilian slithering”:
Adam becomes concerned—
devil’s ethereal food grows
here—its jaded
knowledge like memory.
Night opens pretended quiet,
reptilian slithering—
turbulence unimpeded.
Victorious wickedness.
Expelled, yearning.
Zero
Donald LaBranche chose an interesting and unexpected book to summarize: Varina by Charles Frazier. It concerns Varina Davis, the wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy:
A book concerning defeat.
Every foray grows hell-bound.
Irascible justice kills legends
marching nightly
overcoming persistence.
Quirky road signs tragically
undergird Varina’s waxing xeric—
yesteryear’s zeitgeist.
And finally, a cento created by our own David Lehman to illustrate the many exceptional lines created for this week's prompt:
Absent belief, —Patricia Smith
As before, —George Collodi
Adam becomes concerned. —Elizabeth Solsburg
Abel: Buried; —Keith Barrett
Cain: Detained. —Keith BarrettAnne beheaded! – —Millicent Caliban
cockney dream —Angela Ball
devours elephant —Charise Hoge
emancipating friends —Michael C. Rush
for grown-ups — —Charise Hoge
hat inferred —Charise Hoge
ghost, gentlemen, graves. —Ferraro; Caliban; JoyceHamlet is jinxed. —Diana Ferraro
Jesus! Krapp’s —Keith Barrett
Jumbo knockout. —Christine RheinKeys lend meaning. —Pamela Joyce
Matrimonial negotiations —Millicent Caliban
openly pursue —Michael C. Rush
quest requiring serious thought, —Pamela Joyce
rose-fingered skies. —Bryan Johnson
Quest realized: —LB
reptilian slithering. —Elizabeth SolsburgOpaque
Party people
Quicken
Results. —Stephanie CohenReality —Michael C. Rush
slams the unctuous, viscous wallop, —LB
seeks triumphant union —Millicent Caliban
underground. Violins wail: —Steve Belin-Oka
Vixen-vengeance: —Christine Rhein
victorious wickedness: —Elizabeth Solsburg
vaulting whiteness. —Bryan Johnson
Weltanschauung —Angela Ball
extinguishing yahoo zealots. —Michael C. RushYaqui zen. —Michael C. Rush
Youthful zest. —Millicent Caliban
Yesteryear’s zeitgeist. —Donald LaBranche
Yearning’s zenith. —David Lehman.
For more abecedarians check out this post from December, and visit the American Scholar's page to read the whole post from last week!
"He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime--the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazzling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April--name a month, and they had it in spades. They'd had endlessness. He'd grown up on endlessness and his mother--in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother . . . and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistling until December 1944.
-- from Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth
-- sdl
Our research shows the ideal reader for Jennifer L. Knox is a man, dressed like a woman, is over 40 but wider than a mile, 9 feet tall, all that, is a Camaro owner, parakeet aficionado, Michelob drinker, half-Canadian, half-sausage, half-cowboy hat, is bad at math and bad in bed but is very, very horny, is covered with crumbs, is both unwilling and unable to perform the functions on this card, watches at least 22 hours of TV a day, would “fuck your mother under a picture of you,” happily answers all telephone surveys, and reads poetry only if he’s going to be tested on this shit. Other favorite books of this ideal reader include Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, and the one Bugs Bunny cartoon where he helps the little penguin go home.
[from Drunk by Noon by Jennifer L. Knox, Bloof Books, 2007]
I'm drunk and it's noon so I'll say it again:
[from Drunk by Noon by Jennifer L. Knox, Bloof Books, 2007. Bloof is edited by the redoubtable Shanna Compton].
At first he was Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers
But he kept on doing it and by the end he was in
The Library of America – two volumes, mind you.
“Here a scarf flies, there an excited call is heard,”
That’s his best line I believe, but “Attention, shoppers”
Is also wonderful and there are so many good ones.
Some might say that “mild effects are the result”
Sums up his oeuvre but I certainly don’t agree
And if I ever said that it was just to get his goat
As the shadows lengthened and we were wondering
If man is horrible, for instance, as he wrote in
“These Lacustrine Cities.” Once I recalled to him
His recommendation of years past that I read
The poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and he replied,
“Are you sure it was me?” with that sly grin and
The hint of insinuation like old wine that has
Almost turned to water except there’s something
Still going on there, but what? Or is it just you?
Last week I mentioned that I often compare poets to dogs. I received a few emails asking me to elaborate. So I want to ask, Am I the only one who thinks this way? Should I teach a seminar on helping poets find their inner dog? There are, after all, just so many similarities between poets and dogs.
For starters, everyone is familiar with those social media fiends, yappy little dogs that want to become everyone’s FRIEND and that LIKE everything. And the equally enthusiastic large dogs that stick their noses in everyone’s crotch. (I’m not talking about the Me Too movement here. Crotch-sniffers come in both genders.) And the German Shepherds that, given the opportunity, bite fellow poets—I remember one such poet telling me he really enjoyed writing negative reviews. In contrast are the Cocker Spaniels, great family dogs—Ted Kooser, Stanley Kunitz, and Billy Collins are prime examples. It’s always safe to take a Cocker Spaniel poem to a yoga class or family gathering—no need to worry that they will wander into alarming territories. Unlike the Springer Spaniels that resemble Cockers but often roam and need obedience classes.
One of the more appealing breeds to my mind are the majestic Bernese Mountain Dogs that make me wish I lived in the Alps, or at least the Appalachians, or anywhere far away from po-biz and other such nonsense. I don’t think Sydney Lea or John Lane would mind being compared to a Bernese. And there are the tireless Border Collies whose work is beautiful to witness and who can herd other poets as if they were sheep. For this reason, they are known to organize events and conferences like the God-awful AWP. Examples: Kelli Russell Agodon, Grace Cavaleiri, Didi Menendez, and January Gil O’Neil. There are also the Papillons, or dogs from another planet—their large ears are clearly designed for hearing signals from outer space. Poets like Claire Bateman, Stephanie Strickland, Shivani Mehta, Charles Simic, and Harvey Hix might be Papillons. And the Jack Russells. I always fall in love with Jack Russells, those clever, surprising, and witty poets who are great entertainers and make me laugh. You never know what they are going to get into next. Poets like Jennifer Knox, Denise Duhamel, Amy Gerstler, James Tate, Nicole Santalucia, David Lehman, and Jan Beattie qualify as Jack Russells. I would be negligent if I didn’t mention the ever-present urban poodles, all dolled up, as if by Glamor Shots. Poodle-poets tend to be smart, or at least a lot smarter than they look, and they often win prizes. Also popular today are designer breeds like the Golden Doodle that blends the best aspects of poodles with retrievers. I love anything mixed with a retriever.
I adore retrievers. Just saying the word, I can almost see one in the meadow, one leg raised, nose to the air, every fiber of her being alert to any scent or sound or movement in the water or wind. In fact, I just read the book, Echolocation, by the poet, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, and I thought, What a sensitive and magical read! I also thought, What a retriever! In her poems, full of grief and beauty, the internal world is in perfect sync with the natural world.
I could go on and on about dogs, but instead, I will post the cover of this lovely book and close with two poems by Sally Bliumis-Dunn.
Ode to Autumn
So many colors abandon the earth,
and go skyward to the trees
like origami birds.
scarlet, orange, creased
and folded into the mind
where these paper birds come alive,
the trees quiver a little—
this is where I can
still see you
in these gray branches
with brightly colored
birds that are not birds—envision you
still darning
the heels of Jimmy’s socks
those evenings after school
at the kitchen table when
you’d run your finger down our list—
not here in the duller green
where the last of the pink roses
are browning on the vine,
and along the fence,
your favorite lilies, wilted,
and everywhere
the hungry bees.
Pond
Metallic rain
cuts into
The pond’s bank,
each day a little deeper.
The clear
watery blades.
Each hour
widening cracks,
Loosened rocks
tumble.
This is where
sadness goes.
This is how
it tunnels the body.
Invocation
Come Inspiration,
sweet as two beautiful hookers
in a dream.
Don't go girls --
even if you don't know a thing
about poetry,
at least help me decide
what to wear
-- Elaine Equi (whose birthday is today, July 24). Click here for more about this all-star.
There was a day I mused to the class
How making love with Queen Elizabeth
Would be interesting – surely at Columbia
I was the only professor who thusly mused
And I often mused, as when I mused how
Poets would be interested in the word ashtray
But prose writers would be interested in all
The different people who used the ashtray
Or when I mused on Friday, February 7, 1964,
As the Beatles first arrived on these shores
That it would be interesting to be famous like
The Beatles and meet beautiful Brit women
And one of the students said, “Elizabeth again?”
So I laughed and mused, “God save the queen.”
What did you think was going happen, anyway?
Don’t say you were never warned! Old Herrick’s
“Live here blitheful while ye may” gets the message
Across, or how about this one: “The worms crawl in,
"The worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on
"Your snout.” It’s not like having tenure at Columbia,
Where it’s almost impossible to get rid of you. In fact,
You’ll get rid of yourself, the only question is when.
That grumpus-wumpus Philip Larkin put it this way:
“Most things never happen, this one will.” Well, okay,
You get it. Uncle! Call off the dogs! “Though he slay me,
"Yet I will honor him,” spake Job in the Book of Job
So let’s go to the Cedar Bar. Except that’s closed.
What about Max’s Kansas City? The West End?
The New School After Hours on July 20th, 2018
Come one, come all, to the hippest literary scene in the East Village!
Hosted by Virginia Valenzuela
Every third Friday of the month, New Schoolers new and old come to the Red Room
to strut their stuff. Poets, novelists, essayists, musicians, and YA galore!
The Red Room at KGB Bar (3rd floor)
85 E 4th Street, New York, New York
Doors open at 6:30pm
Event to begin a little after 7pm
We can't wait to see you there!
Come one, come all, to the newly renovated digital platform for Next Line, Please on the American Scholar! You will like what you see. And now to the good stuff.
Last week's post featured poems inspired by the style of abstract things, or in other words, "poems in the manner of." Faced with the job, Angela Ball chose to define a style of living:
Louche glamor
bound me to Dietrich,
Garbo, and Bacall.
Subversive Hepburn
wore my power
with knowledge.
From me Dunaway
and Keaton gained
swagger, sparked
fads. Habitué
of war
and escape,
I pocket
time. Don’t look,
here I am now,
shouldering my way
into the room.
For sheer cleverness it would be hard to compete with Steve Bellin-Oka’s “Poem in the Manner of the Muse as Real Estate Agent”:
This new sonnet’s amortization rate is unfavorable—
by the time your closing couplet pays off, you’ll
have needed a new polyethylene heating oil tank,
two water heaters, and a full copper re-pipe job.
And the loan inspector’s report notes that even though
the shiny iambic pentameter paneling in the octave
looks solid, underneath in the sestet the wall joints
are starting to fray like the hem of a well-worn skirt.
Your volta creaks as it turns—there’s another costly repair
on the horizon. May I speak frankly? You’re not young
anymore. Down the street in your discarded draft drawer
there’s a better investment. It may look like a shithole now,
but all it needs is a stanza wall knocked out to let the light
breathe. Hardwood floors enjambed and buffed and shined.
Darren Lyons’s effort to construct a poem out of materials derived from the year of his birth came up with an intriguing, choppy, and visceral piece. Here is “1975 (to Rothko)”:
five years gone,
something reached up and bit my mom,
as if you entered the blood flow,
as you painted, as you bled. Red.
my sign is red.
watergate does not bother me,
you entered me
as i left the womb.
Dad has a scared left knee
from Kent State, student-thrown concrete,
from the day before the four.
five years gone,
the boat people flow.
The challenge for next week: to sum up a novel, movie, book, or play in a 26-word abecedarius. Usually an abecedarius consists of 26 words, the first beginning with “a,” the second with “b,” and so forth. For example, David Lehman's "Antigone":
Against brutal Creon,
doll establishes
fugitive greatness.
His internal
justice, knowledge
law mean nothing,
only piety.
Questing revenge,
she triumphs,
uttering virginal
wounds extravagant,
yearning’s zenith.
Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post and to enter your candidate!
Of all the pinball machines in all the zinc-bar cafes in Paris, and there were many, the one that I recall playing most often with my chums was Dipsy Doodle. The name didn't mean much to me then, but it was a good machine -- the kind of machine that you could play competitively. Years later I heard the 1940s song called "The Dipsy Doodle." The Tommy Dorsey band was the first to play it; the Andrews Sisters made it a hit; Ella Fitzgerald recorded it with the Chick Webb orchestra. It's a dance song of the period with a rhythm suggestive of "In the Mood."
Some ink has been spilled over the puzzlement that the lyrics for "The Dipsy Doodle" may arouse. What does "the dipsy doodle" mean? Many feel it is a meaningless phrase on the order of sha-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, an expedient occasion for an uptempo dance. In 1982 Ronald Reagan characterized a political argument he opposed as "the real dipsy doodle," prompting William Safire to speculate that "dipsy" was shorthand for "dipsomania" (now more commonly known as alcoholism) and that "doodle" added both a nice alliterative touch and an allusion to the contortions of a body in motion, as when one is dancing or trying to elude a tackler in football. In discussing Reagan's use of the term, Safire reminded readers that "dipsy doodle" was slang for a curve ball in baseball and was used by Raymond Chandler in The High Window as a down-home way of saying trickery or chicanery.
My own feeling is that, in the song, "dipsy doodle" is code for the state of mind of one who is at risk of falling in love -- and that in its young and playful way the lyric illustrates the idea that the first time you fall in love is the first time anyone has ever fallen in love. In defense of my admittedly speculative theory, I will point out that "digga-do" served in the 1920s as slang for lovemaking.
Here are the lyrics (followed by Ella's recording). The song was written in 1937 by Larry Clinton. He wrote it for Tommy Dorsey who backed Larry when he embarked on his own career as a top bandleader. -- DL
"It's very difficult to criticize my French,
since I speak perfectly."
-- Kenneth Koch, in conversation
It’s very difficult for me to write this poem
After I’ve been dead for eighteen years
Or maybe even longer depending on when
You’re reading it but it’s very difficult
For me to know exactly when that might be
Since keeping track of time is very difficult
For the dead with one day much like another but
Not writing this poem would also be very difficult
Because I started writing poems at a young age
And it’s one of the things I got used to without
Ever getting completely used to it like making love
Is something else I never exactly got used to
Since it’s very difficult to make love perfectly
Like I could speak French perfectly.
It’s very difficult to write about my future at this point
Since I don’t have one but I can draw inspiration
From John’s lines in Civilization and Its Discontents,
“I could only gaze into the distance at my life like
“A saint’s with each day distinct” and in fact each day
Is so distinct that even long-forgotten remarks
Flit into one’s consciousness like the randomness
Of a hummingbird’s flight across a table set for
A charming breakfast in the backyard of the parents
Of a beautiful and brilliant girl you want to marry
Despite a rather obvious age differential and suddenly you
Hear yourself saying, “Rubens married Helene Fourment
“When she was just sixteen and they even had five children.”
Wait a minute, where was I?
You see, it’s very difficult to manage a train of thought when
The tracking mechanisms of time and space are
Removed but I was about to say that slapdash reminiscences
Now crop up like bumblebees not entirely unwelcome
But somewhat alarming all the same and in particular I had
In mind the first year I taught writing at Columbia when
Apropos of who knows what I observed to the startled class,
“When you’re twenty you think you will never die but when
“You’re forty you know you will.” Funilly enough (funnily enough!)
I was only thirty-nine so I was kind of looking into the future
Except not like when you meet a beautiful girl and you know you
Will make love with her without knowing exactly when
But more like you’re speaking French with her and she speaks
Perfectly and then she uses a word you’ve still got to learn.
Everyone knows that stocks these days, especially US stocks, are overvalued. But picking a market top is no easy matter. David Aronson, former professor at Baruch College,now president of a research firm that develops methods to enhance stock market trading systems, says, "the process of topping out can take a really long period of time, evolving over a year or more." Aronson demonstrated his credentials as a two-armed economist when he told Mark Hulbert of the Wall Street Journal.that only time will tell whether the coming top will precede a major bear market or something less dire, something of merely "intermediate-term significance." (See The Myth of Stock-Market Tops," September 5, 2017, p. . R1).
Admirers of Sergio Leone's masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America know that the character named David Aaronson, played by Robert de Niro (top left), bears the nickname "Noodles" from the time he and his buddy Maxie were the most notable personalities of a gang of Jewish teenagers in New York's Lower East Side in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Noodles remains "overweight" on emerging-market equities. as well as overweight in the old-fashioned sense, as befits a man of his mature years who has done his share of losing, done what he had to do and now finds it all so amusing to think he did all that . "All that" includes knifing a vicious rival, for which act he serves time. He has fallen hopelessly in love with Deborah (played by Jennifer Connelly as a youth [top center] and by Elizabeth McGovern as a grown up [top right]). She is his one true love, yet, alas,he date rapes her in the back of a rented limousine. He has also smoked his share of opium with the song "Amapola" in his brain, cried in his sleep, carried on with Tuesday Weld, a decoy during a jewel heist, and teamed up with "Uncle" Maxie (James Woods) and buddies to smuggle booze during prohibition and run a fabulous speakeasy,
Thirty years have gone by in some remote upstate burg after his gang buddies are shot in one fatal last caper. During this time, and prior to mysterious letters that lead him to return to New York City and learn that he had been deceived and betrayed, David Aaronson has had the opportunity to make an independent study of stock market trends. In the book that made his academic reputation, Aaronson writes that "bottoms are easier to identify, in real time, than tops." When asked whether he had in mind either Jennifer Connelly or Elizabeth McGovern, Noodles just winked, whistling a few bars of Cole Porter's classic "You're the Top."
The take-away: Major bull market tops are a process, not an event. The long-term topping process may have begun without anyone taking note. Many people have shunned the market since the 2008-09 collapse. Only when they start buying stocks will we know for sure that the long-awaited end has come. Will there be a correction -- or a crash? How painful will it be? The jury is still out .Meanwhile when they ask me what the market will do tomorrow, I always say: it will go up and down. -- DL
originally posted September 8, 2017
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
