The Best American Poetry

What Is the Great Test of any Poem? (by Nin Andrews)

 

Reading Michael Dirda’s review  of Best American Poetry 2018, I was stopped by these sentences:

The great test of any poem is simply Would I like to learn this by heart? Alas, nothing here quite merits that reward, though Dick Davis’s autumnal reflections in “A Personal Sonnet” come close.

I asked myself, Really?

That seems like such a limited view of both poetry and poetry appreciation. But it made me wonder: What is the great test of any poem? Especially now when, as Dana Gioia asks in the introduction: How do you measure something that won’t hold still? American poetry is now so large, so complex, and dynamic that no one can actually describe it.

I thought about the first poem I ever fell in love with: Hopkins “The Windhover.” I was thirteen, recovering from eye surgery, and my mother read it aloud to me. I had no idea what the poem was about, nor was my mother interested in explaining it. But somehow the sound of it broke inside me like a wave.

I caught this morning morning' minion, kingdom
of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling  level underneath him steady air . . . 

I remember looking out the hospital window at swarms of birds and feeling this strange sense of magic and awe overwhelming me. Maybe it was just the aftermath of anesthesia. But I like to think the poem gave me what I call a Namaste experience in poetry—something like the experience I feel when watching this little movie sent to me by Nancy Mitchell:

IMG_5340 from Nathalie Andrews on Vimeo.

In other words, I felt as if Hopkins was offering some of the mystical wonder within himself to the mystic in me. And I had a similar experience with some of the poems in this year’s anthology.

When I read Tony Hoagland’s “Into the Mystery,” which I read as a farewell poem to his readers (even if the Contributor Notes suggest otherwise), I felt such pangs of sadness and gratitude for this poem and for all of his many, beautiful poems. I was also stunned by the poems, “Angels in the Sun” by Ruben Quesada. “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen," by Dante Di Stefano, and “Pied Beauty,” by Nausheen Eusuf, “Invitation" by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, "Walking Home" by Marie Howe. 

I am such a fan of Terrance Hayes, and so, not surprisingly, I thought his "American Sonnet from My Past and Future Assassin," was brilliant. I especially loved his description of Sylvia Plath: “My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not/ Especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned,/ And skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary./ What do you call a visionary who does not recognize/ Her vision?”

But I don’t mean to suggest that the anthology is full of uplifting or mystical poetry. In this day and age, it would be impossible not to include many poems that address our current political nightmare, poems like Frank Bidart’s, “Mourning What We Thought We Were,” Bruce Bond’s “Anthem” or Ilya Kaminsky’s “We Lived Happily During the War” and Christian Wiman’s “Assembly.”

After reading those poems, you might need another interlude with Nancy's birds. 

In any anthology, I always look for my favorite moment, and in this one I have a few, but I keep going back to two poems, Paul Hoover’s “I Am the Size of What I See” and a long poem by Robin Coste Lewis, “Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Hensen.”

And that brings me back to my first question. So what is the great test of poetry? And in this case, why do I love these poems so much?

I think the answer is simple. Because I can’t answer that question. If I could, I don't think I'd like the poems nearly as much. In my opinion, there is no such thing as a test for love. Or poetry. There is no equation, no X plus Y = the best poetry. Beauty and magic defy easy explanations. But if I had to make up an answer, I might say that both poems make me dream. I will post Paul Hoover's poem first:

I am the Size of What I See
    ---Fernando Pessoa

You hurry but you are late
to every party and dinner date,
so naturally they begin without you.
Like a pale leaf through the window,
you make your entrance secretly.
Now you can shine in the corner
as quietly as any leaf,
rarely speaking and then in puzzles;
in English when they are in Spanish,
in cliff-edge when they are hanging.
They are the size of what they see,
swimming in their vocabularies
as desire and principal interest.

You’re a bird too young to fly,
a map without its pink and salmon.
You’re so late you arrive on time,
and later slip out unnoticed,
not even a smudge on the glass.
They never knew what passed them.

You walk to the absolute corner,
where the roof of the sky
meets the limit of the eye
and a breath lasts a lifetime.
Beautiful dreamer,
you’re the size of what you see.
The sky is the size of the sky,
and the sun is just the sun.
But a tree is the size of the flame
you hold in your fingers.

What shirt to wear to eternity
and tomorrow to dinner?
And what size will it be?
You’re asking while you can.
There are things you can’t forget
like the life before this one.

And this is end of Robin Coste Lewis’s long poem, “Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Hensen.”

When I look at photographs of Matisse, unable to walk, drawing on the wall from the bed, his charcoal tied to the end of a very long pole, I stop breathing.

Him, I think, Yes. I could marry him.

I could slip into his bed.

We could talk about real things.

I could be his dark line hovering above.

We could watch the light turning the room every color.

Interview with Mindy Aloff, Editor of Dance in America: A Reader's Anthology

Library of America’s latest anthology, Dance in America, brings together dancers and choreographers, impresarios and critics, and enthusiastic literary observers to present a kaleidoscopic portrait of a great art form. Edited by the veteran dance writer Mindy Aloff, the book tells the story—through more than a hundred selections spanning two centuries—of how dance took on fresh life with new, vital, and distinctly American innovations and adaptations.

Aloff is Dance Editor of The University Press of Florida and has taught dance criticism and history at the Macaulay Honors College of CUNY (at Hunter College) and at Barnard College. She is a former editor of the Dance Critics Association News and serves as a consultant to The George Balanchine Foundation. The author of Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (2006) and Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation (2008) and the editor of Agnes de Mille’s Leaps in the Dark: Art and the World (2011), Aloff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and The New Republic, among many other outlets.

In this interview, Aloff explains how she made her selections. 

Library of America: In your introduction, you write that Dance in America “was not intended as a book of greatest hits by hall of famers.” Can you elaborate a little on what you mean by that?

Mindy Aloff: Gladly. A “greatest hits” approach would require including pieces that are too long, too familiar, too expensive, or too arcane to be interesting to the general reader. If you wanted to put out an anthology of “greatest hits” relating to dance in America, you’d have to include some of the writings of aesthetician Susanne Langer because her legacy is so pervasive, even for writers and dancers who never heard of her. Then you’d have to include the “Burnt Norton” section of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a poem of universal veneration, where dance indicates a concept rather than a practice, and Edwin Denby’s game-changing essay on the photographs of Vaslav Nijinsky, which has been so widely reprinted that it’s included in other anthologies from Library of America. The same is true of Albert Murray’s chapter “The Blues as Dance Music,” from his widely admired and widely available collection Stomping the Blues, a crucial contribution for a dance hall of fame.

You’d have to include other major essays from the landmark 1940s monograph series Dance Index, which the Eakins Press has just made easily available in its historical entirety online—essays such as Ann Barzel’s 1944 “European Dance Teachers in the United States,” a unique history of the origins of ballet in America. For range of research, no subsequent history of American ballet pedagogy can touch this one-hundred-page monograph. And among the greatest hits, I think you’d have to include the full version of Lillian Ross’s “Dancers in May,” her majestic Reporter at Large story that follows one public school teacher over an academic year as she introduces a class of Lower East Side fifth graders of diverse heritages to six European folk dances, which they learn and practice for months and then perform at an annual Mayday fête of Manhattan’s public schools, in Central Park. A story that offers dance in America as a democratic ideal, it takes up most of a 1964 issue of The New Yorker and would have occupied a tremendous chunk of our current anthology.

So, instead, I opted for a counter-intuitive compendium of mostly well-known writers and mostly unfamiliar, even unclassifiable, writings on subjects that can be surprising. My first standard for choice was that the prose had to stand on its own, without accompanying illustrations. The accident of inclusion produced some improbable yet provocative associations: Janet Collins on Léonide Massine’s imperial authority and Massine himself on eking out a living at the Roxy, La Argentina in performance as rekindled in awe by Agnes de Mille and the tangos of exhibition ballroom dancer Tony De Marco as portrayed with a smile by Margaret Case Harriman, Black Elk’s sacred vision as embodied in choreography for living horses and Edmund Wilson’s gently profane invocation of the “ponies” at The Follies.

Three highly anticipated books on Balanchine are in preparation—by Arlene Croce, Elizabeth Kendall, and Jennifer Homans. All those authors are represented in our anthology, but only one small writing by Arlene, of her three here, focuses on Balanchine’s choreography. I wanted readers to see that even the most knowledgeable scholar-writers devoted to him as a subject have also written brilliantly on a great range of dancing and dancers.

LOA: The contributors to Dance in America include a number of non-specialists, or names we associate with other contexts, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and George Catlin. Why did you think it important to bring in these perspectives?

Aloff: Unlike art or theater writing, which, in the United States, were thought worthy for cultivated American readers from at least the eighteenth century, dance itself was considered so specialized, or so far outside polite society, or so downright blasphemous, that dance writing of any type, outside technical manuals, isn’t easy to find until the 1900s. Still, beginning in the nineteenth century, one encounters more than we might expect: in poems (Dickinson), journals (Emerson), travel reports by missionaries and adventurers (Catlin). Fiction writers would bring descriptions of dancing into their stories as presentation pieces: Washington Irving, for instance, apparently loved to dance himself, but Irving’s most sustained dance writing that I found discussed European social dancing when he was abroad.

The thing is, most writers—whether they dance or not—are fascinated by dancing, perhaps in part because to bring it back alive on the page presents interesting literary challenges. And, as in the poems and writings of Langston Hughes, included in our anthology, not all of the dance written about is theatrical. Another gorgeous example of such dance writing in our book is George Washington Cable’s long-ago remembrance of the Sunday dancing and music by African American slaves in the Congo Square of New Orleans. Cable not only had a great memory but also a keen eye for fast movement, and that facility is as rare today as in his time. Try it yourself: The next time you watch a dance, see if you can isolate two adjacent steps and then describe them so that a reader who wasn’t there can visualize them. Or, even harder, see if you can describe the way steps and music connect in time for one passage of the dance. Good luck!
Continue reading here.

Sonnets and Seeds [by Hollis Robbins}

Metaphors of seeds appear in three sonnets by African American poets during the two decades of literary optimism of the 1920s and 1930s often referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. These are not seeds of hatred but seeds of hope and possible flourishing. Countee Cullen’s “From the Dark Tower” (1924) tells of artistic yearnings that will not always be thwarted by social injustice:

We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not always countenance, abject and mute
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;
Not everlastingly while others sleep
Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,
Not always bend to some more subtle brute;
We were not made eternally to weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark
White stars is no less lovely being dark,
And there are buds that cannot bloom at all
In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;
So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,
And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.[1]

“From the Dark Tower” is one of Cullen’s most anthologized sonnets, reaching back to the Shakespearean tradition of authorial immortality, which Cullen deploys ironically to indict the physical and emotional suffering of Jim Crow that prevent him from flowering as a poet. Eugene Collier calls it “a restrained, dignified, poignant work, influenced in form by Keats and Shelley,” but she misses the anger implicit in his evocation of Shakespeare.[2] Cullen had studied and admired both Keats and Edna St. Vincent Millay in college (Amy Lowell’s widely praised biography of Keats had just been published), but Cullen’s poem contends with English tradition more broadly. Cullen’s first quatrain opens with an allusion to slavery in the bible; the second quatrain focuses on suffering under slavery.[3] The first couplet in the sestet praises blackness; the second alludes to Thomas Grey’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), notably the line “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,” near lines about darkness and a mute Milton.[4] Allusions to Grey’s “Elegy” appear regularly in African American poetry. Cullen will make the point about the agony and futility of black artistry more strongly in his more famous sonnet, “Yet Do I Marvel.” Here, he is contending with sonnet traditions that promote suffering to achieve spiritual awakening to argue that abjection can also destroy the drive to create. Cullen’s “agonizing seeds” are his poetic works that both agonize him and agonize the formal tradition in which he situates himself and demands a voice.

Cullen appreciated the sonnet form and anthologized the young Sterling Brown’s sonnet “Salutamus,” which also includes seeds, in his collection Caroling Dusk (1927):

            —O Gentlemen the time of Life is short. Henry IV, Part I

The bitterness of days like these we know;
Much, much we know, yet cannot understand
What was our crime that such a searing brand
Not of our choosing, keeps us hated so.
Despair and disappointment only grow,
Whatever seeds are planted from our hand,
What though some roads wind through a gladsome land?
It is a gloomy path that we must go.

And yet we know relief will come some day
For these seared breasts; and lads as brave again
Will plant and find a fairer crop than ours.
It must be due our hearts, our minds, our powers;
These are the beacons to blaze out the way.
We must plunge onward; onward, gentlemen. . . .

Brown’s epigraph is a line spoken by Henry Percy, “Hotspur,” one of the manliest (if unsuccessful) heroes in English literature. Using an Italian rhyme scheme (rather than the expected Shakespearean), Brown’s sonnet speaker speaks in first person plural, as a spokesman for a hated, branded people. The opening couplet, “The bitterness of days like these we know;/ Much, much we know, yet cannot understand” evokes the opening couplet of Paul Dunbar’s sonnet “Douglass” (“Ah, Douglass, we have fall’n on evil days, / Such days as thou, not even thou didst know”). Brown’s sonnet speaker is, like Dunbar’s, mournful, all-seeing, and determined; yet resolute, in the manner of Claude McKay’s sonnet, “If We Must Die,” without the outrage. Brown’s seeds recall Cullen’s seeds, as well as the dark path from Dunbar’s sonnet, “Slow Through the Dark.” Brown’s sestet appears to turn to optimism. If in the octave the speaker differentiates knowledge from understanding, in the sestet, the speaker knows that the future will be fruitful. He speaks for faith in future generations who will “plunge onward.” And yet, optimism is tempered by knowledge that Shakespeare’s Hotspur failed in battle.

Langston Hughes too tried his hand at sonnets, publishing several in Opportunity in the 1930s, though he did not include them in his collected works. Arnold Rampersad describes Hughes striving to overcome writers block in the late 1920s and trying everything he could, including sonnets. “For a poet of Hughes's rhythmic originality, however, this was a backward step in almost every way,” Rampersad argues, rationalizing that “perhaps it was a class exercise for his course in the art of poetry.”[5] Yet read alongside the sonnets of Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Cullen, and McKay, Hughes’s “Terminal” (1932) (later published as “Pennsylvania Station”), shows their influence:  

The Pennsylvania Station in New York
Is like some vast basilica of old
That towers above the terrors of the dark
As bulwark and protection to the soul.
Now people who are hurrying alone
And those who come in crowds from far away
Pass through this great concourse of steel and stone
To trains, or else from trains out into day.

And as in great basilicas of old
The search was ever for a dream of God,
So here the search is still within each soul
Some seed to find to nourish earthly sod.
Some seed to find that sprouts a holy tree
To glorify the earth—and you—and me. [6]

Using a Shakespearean rhyme scheme, Hughes’s speaker, in the octave, ponders a grand building and those who pass through it. The use of the term “basilica” evokes Classical halls of justice as well as Christian churches, suggesting that the station is protective of legal rights as well as souls. The sestet repeats the comparison to “great basilicas” but expresses a new mood, from hurrying to dreaming and searching. The seeds in Hughes’s sestet again evoke Cullen’s “agonizing seeds,” though in Cullen’s poem the seeds are being tended, not sought for; here the search is for seeds rather than for soil to plant them in. It is tempting to think of Hughes’s search for seeds as the search for a poetic theme and that Hughes structured that search as a sonnet.

 

[1] Countee Cullen, “From the Dark Tower.” Color (1925).  
[2] Eugenia W. Collier, “I Do Not Marvel, Countee Cullen.” College Language Association Journal 11.1 (1967).
[3] Psalms and Proverbs as well as Galations 6:7-8 and 2 Corinthians 9:6 refer to sowing and reaping.
[4] Thomas Grey “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751).     
[5] Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol I 1901-1941. 2nd Ed (Oxford UP 2002) 160.
[6] Opportunity (Feb 1932), p. 52. And later republished as “Pennsylvania Station” in Approach (Spring 1962), p. 4.  

Hollis Robbins is Dean of Arts & Humanities at Sonoma State University. Her most recent book, the Penguin Portable Nineteenth Century African American Women Writers, co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017.  From 2017-2018 Dr. Robbins was a research fellow at the National Humanities Center in Durham, NC where she completed her forthcoming book, Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition.

Cold Blood runs on the boulevard de Strasbourg [by Tracy Danison]

Cold Blood: Photo©JulienLambert03122015-JL-5187.jpg

It turns out that “You don’t need language to understand it” about a performance piece is just as true as that other cliché I once doubted, “He done drank himself to death”. I learned the refulgent truth of the latter just recently, when my friend Udo cashed out, and that of the former, when I saw Michèle Anne de Mey & Jaco van Dormael’s Cold Blood at La Scala Paris.

To acquire truth, both clichés require real-time application of a thorough mastery of storyline, stage mechanics, scenario and direction by cast and management. The thing itself must be of a piece from start to finish.

For his part, Udo had a snoot full from the moment when nobody could any longer knock the bottle out from between his lips right up to the moment he groaned, slipped his fleshless hand under the sweat-soaked pillow, scrabbled for the greasy flask that held sweet liquor’s most fatal drop, gulped with bobbing Adam’s apple and promptly shuffled off the mortal coil: He done drank himself to death”.

The cast and direction of Cold Blood get it as right as Udo. Each and every body and every thing and every gesture of the performance enables each cast member to seamlessly shine in synchrony with all the rest. As with Udo, it’s impossible to tell where idea-special effects-, originators; light-, set-, machine-designers and directors, performers, technicians and stage hands begin or end their collective exercises. It’s all of a single piece, a seamless execution of intent, right up to denouement, which surpasses Udo’s in that all players walk away with an appetite.

Cold Blood: Photo©JulienLambert-JL-8201.jpg

“You don’t need language to understand it”: Seamless means wordlessly effective as well as “of a piece”. Thomas Gunzig’s text rings like one of those storied tolling bells from Cold Blood’s complex ballet of Lego & Hollywood. Players, performers, dolly guys, hands, managers, cameras, projectors, boom microphones, special effects, multi-mini-sets, hand-work and cinematography show the seven ways to die as effectively as a prayer book might lay out the seven deadly sins. You don’t need words to understand Cold Blood any more than you need them to understand whether your dance partner fits your arms or not.

Succeeding on every level, including the French language, hypnosis, understanding of mid-20th century esthetics and special effects, irony, literary theory & practice, dancing, acting and knowing what really counts in life, Cold Blood is the second in a performance triptych directed by Anne de Mey & Jaco van Dormael at La Scala Paris, following on Kiss & Cry and to be followed by Amor. All three pieces have had previous international success.

In featuring performances skillfully inventive enough to be unclassifiable and unclassifiable enough to go beyond entertainment and entertaining enough to really enchant an audience, La Scala Paris, which opened last year, is shaping up as one good place to see contemporary performance at its best. You can also eat dinner there. Hope it’s a trend.

Cold Blood, directed Michèle Anne De Mey, Jaco Van Dormael and developed with Grégory Grosjean, Thomas Gunzig, Julien Lambert, Sylvie Olivé, Nicolas Olivier and the participation of Thomas Beni, Gladys Brookfield-Hampson, Boris Cekevda, Gabriella Iacono, Aurélie Leporcq, Bruno Olivier and Stefano Serra. Performance 12/1/2019, La Scala Paris, 13 boulevard de Strasbourg.
Production : Astragales asbl

What do Mahler, Matisse, Artie Shaw, Doris Day, and Cannonball Adderley Have in Common?

 

Coming from Pittsburgh on April 2: Lehman’s latest “writing spree” pays tribute to acclaimed poet Ammons

PITTSBURGH, Pa.—Written on the daily installment plan between November 21, 2017, and January 15, 2018, David Lehman’s new volume Playlist pays homage to A. R. (Archie) Ammons, whose great Tape for the Turn of the Year chronicled a similar period in 1963-1964. Playlist will be published this spring by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

“Writing Playlist was one of the most enjoyable writing sprees I've ever been on,” Lehman says. “Every day I would wake up looking forward to composing that day's poem. Some days I would turn on the radio and start writing about Mahler, or Artie Shaw, or Doris Day, or Cannonball Adderley,” he explained. “I wanted to record my responses to the music of my life at the same time as I chronicled those weeks my wife and I spent shuttling between Ithaca, New York, and New York City. Rereading it, I can see that Playlist is also a love poem to Stacey [Harwood, his wife]."

Lee Upton praised Playlist by saying, “What a gorgeous and ambitious poem this is—an elegy, a calendar, an enactment of beauty, a tribute to singers and musicians and those who love them, a musical compilation, a meditation on friendship and art, an evocation of hopefulness and the possibility of enhanced life,  a summoning . . .”   

“Playlist is entirely wonderful,” stated Donald Revell. “I'd meant just to take a quick glance and then to read it through with my afternoon tea. But once I began, I could not put it down . . . that hasn't happened to me since the passing of Schuyler. Really, it's splendid. Apt and tender and candid.”

James Cummins put it simply: “Pure joy.”

Lehman is is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and Great American Prose Poems. He is also the general editor of the annual The Best American Poetry, which he initiated in 1988. His recent books of poetry include Poems in the Manner Of and New and Selected Poems. He has authored eight nonfiction books, including The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014. Lehman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

#  #  #

Playlist, a poem by David Lehman, will be on sale April 2, 2019 from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Cover art: Henri Matisse.

72 pp.    ·    6 x 9    ·    ISBN 9780822965848    ·    Paper $17.00    eBook available

 

When You Discover A Bruegel Is Not A Bruegel [by Lloyd Schwartz]

(Ed note:  Lloyd Schwartz made an interesting discovery. Read about here and over at ARTery. sdl)

The Netherlandish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569) is one of the most admired painters in the history of Western art. His ravishing and poignant "Hunters in the Snow" is one of the world’s best loved paintings. And he’s especially loved by poets. William Carlos Williams was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his 1962 collection "Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems," which includes his extraordinary series that gives the book its title. (The "h" in Bruegel, once commonly used, is no longer considered correct.) And one of the great poems about art is W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (from 1938, on the brink of world-wide suffering), which is about a painting called "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" in the museum in Brussels that gives the poem its title.

If you look very closely, you can see the spindly legs of a small body that has just fallen into the sea, while the country folk on the shore are just going through their daily routine:

About suffering, they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure…

[Ed note: Click here for David Lehman's take on Auden's poem.] I was in Vienna at the end of October, to see the once-in-a-lifetime Bruegel exhibition (on view through Jan. 13) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which owns the world’s largest collection of Bruegels — 12 of his surviving 40 paintings. That one room with all 12 paintings has been one of the supreme locations for great art. Now this show, celebrating the 450th anniversary of the master’s death, has brought together for the very first time practically every Bruegel painting not too fragile to travel, plus his even rarer drawings and a selection of contemporary prints based on original Bruegel drawings mostly lost.

continue reading here. 

Lloyd Schwartz’s latest book of poems, "Little Kisses," was published by the University of Chicago Press. His work has been selected for the Best American Poetry, the Best of the Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize. He is the classical music critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and senior editor of Classical Music for New York Arts. Longtime classical music editor of The Boston Phoenix, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1994. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English.

Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson: Encounters of the Intriguing Type [by Tracy Danison]

Photo©Martin Argyroglo

From “Forme Simple”, around the Goldberg variations by performer, choreographer and professor Loïc Touzé at the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson 

I’ve always liked the expression haut comme trois pommes. It means “rather (darlingly) little”.

Haut comme trois pommes –three apples high – always comes to my mind with little kids, the ones between one-and a half or two and four – just learning the basics of troubling the world with long stares, grunts of restless effort, crawling, grabbing, stumbling, holding, walking, a regard, a coo that becomes a burble that becomes a brook that becomes a stream that becomes a river of words that becomes, splash, whizz-bang: a person. A person haut comme trois pommes.

Sometimes, these little pommes are of a noos not canny, something I was reminded of when I was sitting at a picnic table at the Cartoucherie – in June? I was waiting to see a dance performance put on by the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson.

It must have been June, because at the Cartoucherie, formerly a gunpowder and bullet factory situated behind the Parc floral de Paris and made famous by Ariane Mnouchkine’s innovative Théâtre du Soleil,  I – or you – can sit outside under the trees, eat and drink nice food and build a good time. The Atelier de Paris’ different stages and studios are dug and plugged into or shared with the Cartoucherie.

The Cartoucherie, formerly a gunpowder and bullet factory situated behind the Parc floral de Paris, houses the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson. A little bit of country at the end of the city bus line

Also, before the program begins, you can hone your powers of observation by staring at people. Honing my own powers of observation is how I happened to see the flaming-red-haired kid haut comme trois pommes, Hans im Glück – straight out of Grimm.

Honestly, at hardly two-foot tall, Lucky Hans was too small to join with the mixed group of pre-teens and daddies on the make-do soccer field away to the right. All on his own, this prodigy of human development was positively riding a full-size soccer ball through rough grass and battered playground stuff.

 

Memory! I could only have observed Lucky Hans outside in nice weather, so I was certainly at the Atelier for last year’s edition of the annual June Events dance performance program.

Was it maybe for Daniel Léveillé’s Quatuor Tristesse? Or Loïc Touzé’s Forme Simple? Hard to say. Last year, for instance, over a bit fewer than 30 days, June Events featured more than 100 dance and musical performers and presented 30 creations, 16 of them new.

The Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson, currently under the direction of Anne Sauvage, took up residence at the Cartoucherie in 1999.

Since its founding, it has become a key player in dance performance development. As coordinating organization for Paris Réseau Dance, it collaborates creatively with dance and performance innovators at Etoile du Nord, the Regard du cygne studio and MICADANCE-ADDP.

Photo©RaphaëlStora

From “Cellule” by débutant Krump-inspired hip hopper Nach at the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson

Creations produced (or co-produced with) by the Atelier in the various dance festivals such as Rencontres internationales en Seine Saint Denis or the Festival d’Automne as well as in theaters in Paris east of the Hôtel de Ville such as Théâtre de la Bastille, the municipal Théâtre Berthelot in near-suburb Montreuil, the neighborhood-oriented Paris Anim’ Centre Montgallet in the 12^th  arrondissement or Le Générateur, a performance-art venue in the near southeast suburb of Gentilly.

Just at the end of the city bus lines, in the long translucent shadows of early summer, going to the Atelier de Paris makes for an evening in a kind of ideal country château. For the citadin out for a bit of green space and fresh air, the château’s clever residents dish out creative sorcery: juxtapositions of choreography and scenario, of dance and performance, of theme and content. Sometimes, with the aplomb of an antique chamber orchestra playing familiar melodies you just can’t place, a performance at the château slips into emotional exaltation.

I am thinking of Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard’s pure-dance pieces, Relative Collider, To Claude Shannon and Maps, whose physics and psycholinguistics manage to cross the border into magic. Presented as a triptych, the three dances closed out Santoro & Godard’s three-year stint as associates as well as opened the Atelier’s Fall 2018 program. Illustrating the Atelier’s diversity in creative productions, the program closed on performance choreographer Joanne Leighton’s fascinating I am sitting in a room, a visual study of how the sitting position fits into the immediate world, and Joris Lacoste’s Noyau ni fixe (“Center nor held”) on the magical power of words.

Photo©Asobi

Jann Gallois' "Quintette" premiered at the Atelier de Paris 

The Atelier’s 2019 winter season, which reflects both its institutional role and creative and production collaboration, has opened with Yasmine Hugonnet’s Chro no lo gi cal, which dances time as perceived by the body’s breath, its eye and its step. This reflection on time is followed by Rush, a two-person choreography of running into and getting on top of each other by Ashley Chen, which in turn opens onto Sylvère Lamotte’s L’Echo d’un infini (“Echo of an infinity”), which uses the possibilities of contact in dance to explore present life and the sediments of past ones.

The Atelier’s spring offerings are co-produced with the Théatre de la Bastille and, for Northern Ireland’s Oona Doherty, the Biennale de Danse du Val de Marne.

Doherty presents her lively cinematic, almost-a-musical studies of British conundrum, Lady Magma and Hard to be soft - A Belfast prayer, while Israel’s Shira Eviatar’s Body Roots/Rising tries to perform a political genealogy – looking at her “Mizrahi” – Jews of Middle Eastern, “semitic”, origin. Nina Santes, an Atelier de Paris associate, presents her 2018 creation, the stage-abolishing Hymen Hymne, a dance performance on witchery, inspired by the eco-feminist neo-pagan personality Starhawk. Santes’ participative coven is followed on by “body musician” Simon Mayer’s SunBengSitting, a performance that puts together Tyrolean vocalizing and folk dance and contemporary and urban dance.

So, if I forget, precisely, why I was in a position to watch Hans im Glück, I was surely to the Cartoucherie on the
chance to see something, at the very least, interesting at the Atelier de Paris.

From “Labourer” (as a work in progress) by young choreographer Madeleine Fournier at the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson

So, I sat there at the picnic table wondering, What bewitched raven had flapped Lucky Hans-haut-comme-trois-pommes up out of Grimm and dropped him in range of my senses?  

I called out to some likely-looking women picnicking on the grass.

“Who belongs to the boy”? I pointed into the distance.

The raven turned out to be a red-crested 30-something whose link with the prodigy seemed hard to doubt.

She hopped with alacrity onto the picnic table, perching right next to me, as if we’d known each other lo! these 30 years or more. She began to talk.

It seems Lucky Hans, the prodigious soccer boy-genius, is prodigious in every aspect of life.

Even after almost three years of 24-hour care and caring for other young kids besides, my red-crest raven friend was still as amazed and touched as I.

“He’s so well-brought up, you see”, I mean,” she said looking down shyly, “He was well-brought up before being born to me”.

She smiled, looked a little embarrassed.

“From the moment we met, he’s been a perfect gentleman. He seemed to tell me right off, ‘I am a noble houseguest. My needs are privilege, a joy…” she paused.

“My boy is not wrong. In fact, he’s right. Absolutely right”.

My habitual smile twitched a little.

I said, referencing the scene in the Spielberg movie where the doe-eyed alien squeaks ‘Home’, “… As if you’d pulled back that little baby hoodie and saw it was E.T. under it.”

Making her own quite serious doe-eyes, she answered, “Yes”.

“Parfaitement.” She nodded vigorously. “Since Lucky Hans’s come along, I’ve come to realize that a solid knowledge of magic is worth much more than my degree in physics… “.

Then, all in a rush, she exclaimed, “What can explain it, do you think?”

She pointed to a fashionably rough-shaven, ruffle-topped, sweating 30-something playing horde-soccer in the adjoining field. Two pre-teen children wove in orbit around him.

“That’s my husband… And my other two kids… All we are is attractive,” she laughed, again embarrassed.

I understand that embarrassment.

Liz Santoro and the troupe Principe d'Incertitude dance a finale of "Maps" at the Atelier de Paris, Fall 2018

This mother of three might be thirty years younger and be the red crest raven sent by the shades of Grimm and she might be the true mother of Hans in Glück. E.T. might be her progeny. But she was brought up, just like I was, believing that not finding an explanation among the river of words that flood from us after two years of life is tacit admission of congenital idiocy. After all, isn’t it just that flood that made me a person when I was haut comme trois pommes?

Photo©Frédéric Iovino

From "Quatuor Tristesse", by Québecois choreographer and contemporary dance developer Daniel Léveillé at Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson

Even if, after all, neither she nor I can shake the feeling that the grunt, sweat, stare, effort, crawling, grabbing, stumbling, holding, walking, regard and coo that become a burble that becomes a brook that becomes a stream that becomes the splash and whizz-bang is the becoming that a person really is? And, even if after all, neither she nor I can shake the feeling that an explanation makes a person peu de chose, “not much”.

It was time for the performance

I shrugged and spread my hands and told her  – she had told me her name but I’ve forgotten it – what a pleasure it was to meet her. Also what a remarkable encounter that prodigious boy of hers is. And it was a pleasure and wonderful too.

We shook hands.

I went in to the theater.

When I came out – I think the performance was in the theater space called the “Aquarium” – prodigious boys and puzzled mothers, picnickers, dads and kids had been swallowed by the end of day, just as my memory of what show I had been to see has been swallowed by the encounter with Hans im Glück and the mother of prodigy.

And it came to me again that I surely don’t know what can explain anything or even if anything does explain anything.

My perplexed red-crest raven friend is right in every point and especially this: putting aside cooking, indoor plumbing and successfully waging war, a solid background in magic is better preparation for living life than physics or, even, astronomy.   

And it occurred to me all of a sudden: Why not make this the starting point of performance and performers beyond words?

Aussitôt dit, aussitôt fait and abracadabra: Paris Performance Calendar will highlight the performances and performers who have passed through the Atelier de Paris – Carolyn Carlson through 2019 and beyond.

Sonnet to Rubens [by Mitch Sisskind]

She longs for the loud mouth action man
While I am of the diffident dreamy tribe.
However, if life of the party is her desire,
Then let’s get the show on the road will be
My jocund motto, and later, when I tell her
She’s looking good tonight, her chatoyant
Sidelong glance and the adamantine luster
Of her brown hair will ignite or intensify
My pit bull dog determination to please her,
This young woman whose name is Cynthia.
Though I am seventy-one to her twenty years,
I take heart from the audacious marriage of
Peter Paul Rubens to Hélène Fourment,
Who was sixteen. Rubens was fifty-three!

"Get that ice or else no dice" R.I.P. Carol Channing 1921-2019

Next Line, Please: Four-Word Lines [by Virginia Valenzuela]

It's the very first prompt of the new year, and in it, we turn to May Swenson and her poem “Four-Word Lines” for inspiration. Here is the original:

Your eyes are just
like bees, and I
feel like a flower.
Their brown power makes
a breeze go over
my skin. When your
lashes ride down and
rise like brown bees’
legs, your pronged gaze
makes my eyes gauze.
I wish we were
in some shade and
no swarm of other
eyes to know that
I’m a flower breathing
bare, laid open to
your bees’ warm stare.
I’d let you wade
in me and seize
with your eager brown
bees’ power a sweet
glistening at my core.

“The poem is breathtaking,” the writer Sharon Preiss observes. “The precise and compact ‘four-word lines’ move the poem ‘forward,’ yet the form forces line breaks that slow the reader down so that she can revel in the mellifluous aural flow of the poem. The sound of longing that the interlinked long i’s and e’s create in the first few lines then floats down and through the lilting feeling of relief the double f and l sounds create in ‘feel like a flower.’”

To which Dr. Lehman adds, that "the music of the poem has something to do with the magnificent use of monosyllables (“ride down and / rise like brown bees’ / legs”), the near-rhymes (“gaze” and “gauze”), and the way alliteration serves as the transition between rhyme words (“bare, laid open to / your bees’ warm stare”)."

Limiting yourself to a maximum of 14 four-word lines write a poem in which each line has 4 words. Any subject will do, though your interpretation of the "May Swenson manner" will take you far.

Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!

January 10: Swing along with Max Roach [by Sean Singer]

Max Roach (c) Herman Leonard, 1954

    Though it doesn’t appear on any calendar, January 10th is Max Roach Day. He was born in Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina in 1924, but moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn when he was 4. He died August 16, 2007 at 83. Max Roach was a percussionist, composer, bandleader, and a virtuoso on the American jazz drum kit, which is multiple percussion on a single instrument.

            Max Roach was one of those singular people who, to paraphrase Phil Schaap, “was essential to making others’ music sound better and his music sound best.” He was on Stan Getz’s first recording, Miles Davis’s first recording, and the first recordings of the innovation called Be-Bop. An innovator of percussion, Roach shows the drummer’s responsibility, which is to swing.

            Seeing Roach live, which I was fortunate to do a handful of times, was a thrill. He sometimes played with wire brushes and a single snare drum, and was able to create the most harmonic and musical sound in the world that was mesmerizing; you simply lost all awareness of everything outside of whatever he was doing on stage.

            Roach appears on the most important Charlie Parker records, for example the November 26, 1945 recordings on Savoy such as “Now’s the Time” :

 
In 1954 he formed an important quintet with trumpeter Clifford Brown, heard doing magic on the standard “Cherokee,” which demonstrates Roach’s imagination and quick timing.

            When Brown was killed in a car crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1956, Roach was devastated both personally and musically. But he somehow picked up the pieces and formed a new band first with trumpeter Kenny Dorham and later trumpeter Booker Little, heard here on “Cliff Walk”:

            During the political changes in American society that happened in the 1960s, Roach emerged as an innovator again: there is no musician who more addressed the social concerns of progressive thought to freedom. He recorded explicitly political music We Insist! with his then-wife Abbey Lincoln, for example  singing “Driva Man”:

            In what remains a high water mark in the expression of not just jazz, but in all of music, in 1962 Roach recorded “Fleurette Africaine” with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus:

            In later decades, he performed some pretty extraordinary duets with Anthony Braxton while continuing the solo concerts that I mentioned earlier. He formed an innovative trio that experimented with the Chinese erhu player Jeibing Chen, and did some interesting collaborations with dance companies such as Alvin Ailey.

            Roach’s genius showed, among other things, the suspension of time. By changing the role of the drums from mere timekeeping to music-making, he was not only the driving force behind the swing element in Be-Bop, but because of his idea to shift the pulse of drums from the bass drum to the ride cymbal, was able to create a more flexible or fluid texture to the music.

            In terms of poetry, there are a few lessons I think Roach’s music gives: 1. Always be yourself in your writing. To paraphrase the comedian Bill Hicks, "if you’re yourself, no one else can be you, so you have supply and demand taken care of." 2. Use silence and not just your words to create meaning. Part of form, especially in free verse, is to create these meanings from silence, which is white space. 3. Jazz is about choosing to be joyful in spite of conditions. We must choose poetry every day, not as an academic exercise or historical artifact, but as a way of living.

(Note: Tune-in to or stream WKCR on Thursday January 10th for the 24-hour Max Roach birthday broadcast.)

Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; and Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015).

"On the Cards and Dice" [by Sir Walter Raleighj]

On the Cards and Dice

Before the sixth day of the next new year,
Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear:
Four kings shall be assembled in this isle,
Where they shall keep great tumult for awhile.
Many men then shall have an end of crosses,
And many likewise shall sustain great losses;
Many that now full joyful are and glad,
Shall at that time be sorrowful and sad;
Full many a Christian's heart shall quake for fear,
The dreadful sound of trump when he shall hear.
Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down,
In every city and in every town.
By day or night this tumult shall not cease,
Until an herald shall proclaim a peace;
An herald strong, the like was never born,
Whose very beard is flesh and mouth is horn

– Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)

"On the Cards and Dice" is my favorite poem by the redoubtable Sir Walter Raleigh. What I admire most is the sustained metaphorical ingenuity and the slippage in the analogy between games of chance (cards and dice) and the events of the Christian calendar culminating in the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. The poem achieves a stirring and ominous effect, rising to a prophetic level, though at its base it is merely a vivid description of men playing poker (or bridge) and throwing dice. The implicit relation between gambling and religion is the poem's secret power. -- DL

from the archives; first posted posted 9 / 22 / 08

Michael Dirda Reviews The Best American Poetry 2018

Michael Dirda's review appeared in the Washington Post on January 2, 2019 under the headline "How do you define authenticity? A poetry collection explores a modern problem." Here is Dirda's opening:

<< Verbal felicities, haunting or explosive imagery, the architectonic dazzlements of rhyme and meter — all these are dwarfed by American poetry’s reverence for genuineness, for authenticity. “Look in thy heart and write” advised Sir Philip Sidney’s muse, but that injunction has long been our own literature’s credo. Yet in their introductory essays to “The Best American Poetry 2018,” the 30th installment of this always excellent annual anthology, series editor David Lehman and this year’s guest editor, Dana Gioia, present dissimilar views on precisely what authenticity entails. >>

Among the poets Dirda singles out for praise are Julia Alvarez, George Bradley, Susan deSola, Dick Davis, Ernest Hilbert, Anna Maria Hong, Mandy Kahn, Jacqueline Osherow, Michael Robbins,  Allyn Rosser, Mary Jo Salter, A. E. Stallings, Agnieszka Tworek, and Christian Wiman.

"Blast from the Past" [by David Lehman]

If I were a fascist
and you were a Republican,
would you marry me anyway?
Could I be your publican?

If I were a rocket ship,
and you were a galaxy,
would you tickle my underarms?
Could I drive your taxi?

Would you give me an erection
if you were an electron
and I were a proton
and not a politician?

If I were a son of a bitch
and you were a lady,
would you let me scratch your itch?
Would you have my baby?

left: "Blast" by Adolph Gottlieb (1960)

 

"Autobiography" by Karen Schubert

In my recent posts, I’ve been talking a lot about confessional and autobiographical poetry. Last night I received an email asking me what I have against the confessional form. A short answer to that question I give in the first five minutes of this interview with Grace Cavalieri.  At a later date I might elaborate because I really do have a bone to pick with the so-called confessionalists.  But I thought instead I’d end the series on a lighter note with this wonderful poem by Karen Schubert, which won the William Dickey Memorial Broadside Contest in 2015, and which was inspired by her former professor, Philip Brady. Dr. Brady once advised his students: Don’t be married to autobiography.

 

Autobiography

 

Don’t be married to autobiography.
-Phil Brady

I may be dating myself here…
-Anja Farin

 

I am not married to Autobiography, but we are lovers. This is my first lesbian relationship. I’ve been trying to awaken my inner lesbian for years, but until now all I could muster was an artistic lust for the female figure. Autobiography is different, although she embarrasses me, won’t let me tell the story the way I want to. She reminds me about the wine stain on the satin chair, forgotten Mother’s Day cards, my fear of glass elevators. She makes fun of me, the gray tooth and the way one eye squeezes shut when I laugh. She says beauty is symmetrical. I am obsessed with Autobiography, call her late at night and leave message after message. I just want to hear her voice. I think she is two-timing me. I am afraid she will run off with the other woman. We fight. We make up. We go to our café, bookstore. Later, I will write about it. When Autobiography and I walk by people we know, they tremble.

 

Karen Schubert is the author of five poetry chapbooks, most recently Dear Youngstown (NightBallet Press), Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for a Wick Poetry Center Chapbook Prize. Her poems and creative nonfiction appear in Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Lake Effect Poetry and Winning Writers, and performed at the Cleveland Humanities Festival and The Strand Project; awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Headlands Center for the Arts. Schubert is director of Lit Youngstown, a literary arts nonprofit in Ohio.

 

photo credit, Courtney Kensinger

Next Line, Please: An Ample Meal [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Happy New Year from Next Line, Please! I'll admit, this post is a little late, but what better way to begin 2019 than with a blast from the past: the last NPL publication from last year!

To refresh your memories, contributors were asked to make lists of anagrams inspired by their names, and to use those new words in a poem.

Pamela Joyce S turned the prompt into a “Sonnet on Brewing Love,” which exhibits an “ample meal,” the “leam of a lamp,” “a map,” a “male plea,” “Ma and Pa,” “a pal,” “a man,” and a “leap,” among other words derived from her first name:

After an ample meal of hearts of palm,
sweet pea puree, and pale vanilla ale,
his lap danced. Her lap sang souchong,
steaming beneath the leam of a lamp.
Aiming to amp up the fire, he read her tea
leaves like a map, foreseeing them steeped
in desire under the elm, or maybe deep in
maple sap. Heeding his male plea and hearing
the peal of distant bells across the lea, she thought
oh, dear me, la de da, what would Ma and Pa think?
He was not wise as the Dalai Lama,
more lame like an ape on the lam,
but he could be a pal and he was a man,
so she took the leap and said I am yours to keep.

Michael C. Rush contributed “Liar,” a poem rich with music and wordplay:

came churlish from the church,
cashier of mulch and mace

the lush accrues his scarce slim smile
as each rich slum mule
clears his scale of scum,
cues music of relics and rice,
charms of chile and ice

hurl him, such a sham, over the arch
into the chasm,
a sum of muscle and lice,
of lucre and cash

his crimes and cries
smirch the user, the usher, and the heir

his scam chars, cures claims

Eric Fretz’s “I Wear the Ferric Fez” adds alliteration and fun to the mix:

The words my names combined make free
when recombined, hear me recite
them, I am a crier.
Weave a circle round me thrice,
for they produce this way a fire,
and from another angle, ice.
So make that circle thirteen feet,
I wear the ferric fez,
I’m fit to tie my rite, and then retire,
to the height of a tree,
the depth of a reef.

If it is true, erect it on a fiercer frieze.

And then Eduardo Ramos Ruiz’s “Ode to Eduardo” which blends English and Spanish to produce impressive effects:

Dear Ed,
A redo of brand is due:
Dread not the red eye of critics
Who ur el nombre de pluma.
The Eddo era is at an end.

Los tiempos son duros—
Do bid ado to Edward and Edwardo.
In due time the road will bloom,
For Dude from dud shall reign.
Dare to read and write anew.

The adored era de Lalo—
Hear without an ear or resonant eye.
Leave the rod of playthings,
Heave the oar, and seek the inborn ore.
The subconscious rode shall lead.

And finally, a list of lines that we just couldn't help but include, if not in full, then in a perfectly quotable fashion:

—From Shari Ayers’s “Liminal Deities”: “Trickster—that shapeshifting Mata Hari / drifting in his ill-fitting sari to the Western Front.”
—From Keith Barrett’s “Heir to the Hatter”: “A rite of passage or just a wrong massage, / Message received, loud unclear.”
—From Millicent Caliban’s “Condemned to Life”: “Many lives have I lived: some ill and some nice, / some licit, some not, sometimes lice without limit.”
—From Emily Winakur: “your mother’s mink, / the mean shelter / of her wink and nod.”
—From Patricia Wallace: “Art’s a waste. If you ask Lit Crit, / irony laces art’s longevity. Who believes in it? / Not even Patricia. Life’s so short it could be art.”

Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post!

Let it Snow!