Charlie Parker and the Mrs. loved this song. . .
I'm in the seventh heaven / there's more than seven / my heart discovers. . .
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Charlie Parker and the Mrs. loved this song. . .
I'm in the seventh heaven / there's more than seven / my heart discovers. . .
Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 16, 2019 at 07:00 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Movies, Music | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 16, 2019 at 10:54 AM in Adventures of Lehman, Music | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Dear, I can’t subsist on this diet
(really more of a fast — celery
seed and a soft word every other
month) any longer. Is that blood
on your pillowcase or another girl’s
lipstick? I want you to know
I’ve had such unalloyed joy
over the past several decades,
smelling your hair and petting
your sweat-beaded feet while
you were asleep. It was far sweeter
than I ever thought possible.
But my ancestors are welling up
in me now and keep nudging me
towards the door. Bells are rung,
harps are played: recessional music.
We both know the theater will close
in a few minutes. If you had been
more attentive or a better pretender
I could have run on fumes for a few
more years, sipping snow melt,
remaining quite high on it. Let
the record show I recited prayers
for your perpetual ascension
and good health as I laid this note
in its frozen envelope on your desk
and left, taking both dogs, the teal
parakeet and the black cat with me.
They got custody of our love.
– Amy Gerstler
from American Poetry Review (July-August, 2008)
Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 16, 2019 at 01:00 AM in Poems | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 16, 2019 at 12:23 AM in Food and Drink | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Entry
by Caridad Moro-Gronlier
Tortillera, n.
Pronounciation: Spanish /tor-ti-lle-ra/, Spain, Latin, Central and South America, U.S.
Forms:Torti, Torta, Tort, Tortilla
Etymology: < Latin tortus (twisted), <Spanish torta, <Germanque<English queer. Compare French tortille
Origin:<From term torticera (tortious), derived from Latin tortus, with the meaning of crooked, twisted, etc. torticera, a highbrow word, by a process of popular etymology pronounced wrongly as tortillera by their phonetic similarity as in "she is tortillera" instead of "she is torticera" by an error in pronunciation.
Synonyms:amaricada, arepera, bollera, bollo, buchona, cachapera, cambuja, camionera, come coños, desviada, ententida, fricatriz, hombruna, invertida, juega tenis, kiki, lechuga, lela, lencha, lesbiana, machorra, marimacha(o), obvia, sáfica, sopaipilla, tijeras, tribada, trola, troquera, virago, webiá, zapatona
1.
a. Homosexual woman; lesbian.
I outed myself as a tortillera at Noche Buena dinner last Christmas and I was roasted along with the lechón.
b.Transatlantic traveler term known to connect homosexuality with the beginning of homophobia; refutes all sexual and onomatopoeic explanations (i.e. the supposed equivalency between the clapping sound made from kneading corn pancakes to the sound made during lesbian sex) as seen through the consideration of homosexual behavior as something twisted, deviant, first referenced in 1830 in the Spanish-French dictionary by M. Nuñez de Taboada, published in Madrid, in which the French word tribade is translated as tortillera and defined as "a woman who abuses another”.
My mother did not allow me to play softball in high school because the coach was a tortillera and she didn’t want me to end up a tortillera, too.
c. Derogatory slang that denotes deviant, twisted behavior, the lowest form of female debasement, term known to induce emotional distress such as shame and self-loathing, as well as physical symptoms including, but not limited to anorexia, bulimia, cutting, dermatitis, depression, enuresis, flushing, gastritis, heart palpitations, hyperhidrosis, insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, kyphosis, lethargy, malaise, mania, nausea, nightmares, OCD, panic attack, paranoia, rash, rosacea, scarring, sleepwalking, stuttering, tachycardia, tongue biting, teeth gnashing, thinning hair, ulcers, vomiting, xerostomia.
Better my daughter be dead than a disgusting tortillera.
2. Female producer and seller of maize pancakes.
According to Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, upon the arrival of Spaniards exiled to Mexico due to the Civil War, some were greeted by a sign that read "El sindicato de Tortilleras les da la bienvenida!", which caused someone to quip, “This is a very cosmopolitan country if even tortilleras have a union!”
Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the award-winning author of Visionware, published by Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women's Voices Series. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pintura:Palabra, An Anthology of Ekphrastic Writing; Rhino Reading Queer: Poetry In a Time of Chaos; Bridges To/From Cuba; The Antioch Review; The Tishman Review;The Cossack Review; Moon City Review; The Damfino Review;The Collapsar; The Notre Dame Review; The South Florida Poetry Journal; The Comstock Review; This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching; The Lavender Review; and others. She is an English professor at Miami Dade College and the Editor-In-Chief of The Orange Island Review. She resides in Miami, Florida, with her wife and son. "Entry" first appeared in Rhino Poetry.
Posted by Emma Trelles on August 12, 2019 at 05:56 PM in Emma Trelles, Feature, Latina/o Poets, Poems | Permalink | Comments (0)
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313: “Are you back?” Yes, from every place I have ever been.
314:
Citi Field offers Nathan‘s hot dogs with free sauerkraut out in the open for anyone to take in any quantity, just like in the 60s at the second Nathan’s, in Oceanside on Long Island, run by Murray Handwerker (son of the original Nathan), who set up a stage in the back where you could see the likes of the Dillards for free as you ate your hot dog with unlimited sauerkraut. Yankee Stadium also offers Nathan’s hot dogs, but not sauerkraut.
315: Here’s your petard back. Now go hoist yourself.
316: My elementary school music teacher, Dr. Frisch, selects all but five fifth graders to be in the chorus. I am one of those left behind. Instead, I join the school newspaper, and play drums in the band (run by another teacher), marching in town parades. (I can still play “Cadence Number Two” with my fingers.) One day in music class Dr. Frisch overhears me say something snide about the chorus. “You think because you’re in the band you’re a musician. You’re not a musician—you’re a drummer. Drummers aren’t musicians. You’re a faker!” A couple of decades later, I return to my high school as Poet in Residence, warmly welcomed by former teachers. In the faculty room, I spot an old man in the corner dozing in an easy chair, his few tufts of hair like spent tumbleweed. Dr. Frisch. I slowly approach him, and he snorts awake, as another teacher says, “Alan Ziegler has returned to us. He’s famous!” I indulge in a few seconds picturing the young Vito Corleone being reacquainted with Don Ciccio. “Dr. Frisch, your chorus made me a writer!” I say. He smiles and nods his head. “Yes, yes, Alan…”
317 (from the untold history of baseball—Pitchers and Catchers): Herbert Steadmire, after noticing a large number of early-season arm strains, was the first team owner to see the wisdom of having pitchers come early to Spring Training. The following season, his team outpitched early opponents, but the pitchers suffered an inordinate number of leg strains. “We’d better also bring catchers next year,” he told his manager.
318: Lyrics on the cutting room floor:
You set me up just to knock me down
You could win a prize at the carnival.
You invite me home then you skip town
Never enough is always that’s all.
319: At Allard in Paris, after the lunch crowd has thinned out, Erin and I have two things in common with the old man under the painting: fine food on our plates and precious time on our hands.
We are luxuriating in our canard de Challans aux (beaucoup) olives when we notice the old man seems to have fallen asleep.
The serveurs leave him be. This is Paris. As we devour our profiteroles, the old man calls out, twice. A serveur approaches and the old man continues his chant, clearer: “Camembert! Camembert! Camembert!” The serveur bows and returns with a fine looking piece of cheese surrounded by grapes imbued with the seeds of life.
Posted by Alan Ziegler on August 11, 2019 at 03:45 PM in Alan Ziegler | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The latest installment of the dialogue between Lehman and Lummis on film noir centers on this question:
What is your opinion of Lizabeth Scott as a noir heroine?
Suzanne Lummis:
I have a feeling I’ll enjoy hearing you talk about her. I like her fine, but I think the noir actresses who fare best within our contemporary understanding of acting, how spontaneous and authentic it should be, are Barbara Stanwyck and Gloria Grahame. Oh, and Claire Trevor. Back then, actresses especially were either permitted or required to be phony—and sometimes it sets my teeth on edge. In The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers, where Scott's not a femme fatale but a friendless woman down on her luck, in one scene she did this thing that would be unthinkable for an actor on the screen today—out of the blue, she put her head in her arms on the table and made crying sounds. Have you ever seen anyone do that in life, cry noisily face down on a table? And in Dead Reckoning you can see the glycerin under her eyes. It didn’t matter to audiences then, but our expectations have changed. I shouldn’t blame Lizabeth Scott; it was symptomatic of a larger problem re. how actresses (far more than actors) were trained. Also, I haven’t seen all her movies—I hear she did one with Dan Duryea that’s her best performance.
David Lehman:
I became aware of a bias against Lizabeth Scott some time ago; she was disparaged as the poor man’s Lauren Bacall. Dead Reckoning is pretty terrible, but that’s not specific to her. On the other hand, her work in Too Late for Tears – the movie with Dan Duryea to which you refer – is marvelous. Eddie Muller showed it on TCM recently and she was, in her own blonde way, as superb a noir heroine as you could want, dispatching both Arthur Kennedy and Mr. Duryea and outfoxing a lot of other folks until she meets a bad end in Mexico. She is as ruthless, as narcissistic, as beautiful and blonde, and as exploitative of her gender as one could ask for in a noir heroine.
Click here to read last week's installment and here for the whole series, of which this is #6 in the series.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 11, 2019 at 12:01 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, Film noir, Movies | Permalink | Comments (0)
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One of the questions poetry asks us is how do we live in a fractured world? Suicide rates in the United States over the past two decades have been on an alarming rise. According to the American Psychological Association there has been a 30 % rise between 2010 and 2016. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in our country. Mental health is still less understood and accepted and treated as is physical illness. The brain is a complex organ.
Poetry is art and art knows truths that science doesn't have terms for yet. Medical studies on the effectiveness of treating emotional disorders is mixed, but expressive writing in psychological therapies has long been used. Confessional poetry was birthed from the womb of psychiatry. Today, the medical humanities and the study of literature as a means to heal and understand is gaining traction, deepening understanding, and building bridges.
Robert Frost once said that every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world. And so it is with Didi Jackson's forthcoming book of poems from Red Hen Press, Moon Jar. To heal from the terror and pain of surviving the suicide of a loved one is a tall order. Moon Jar seeks to find wholeness in the fissure through art and the natural world.
I spoke with Jackson about the title poem recently. Moon Jar is an ekphrastic poem that uses ancient Korean ceramics as a way to build a metaphor and allegory. The moon jar’s beauty lies in its imperfection. The surface of the moon jar is like the surface of skin, full of various markings and freckles, but perhaps the better for it. The moon jar defines beauty to include imperfection. Here, ekphrasis understands that nothing is perfect. It reminds me of quilters of yesteryear who used to make sure to have one imperfection in their quilts because only God is perfect.
The idea of modesty in the act of creation informs the tone of this achingly beautiful lyric. The finely hewn couplets and elegant syntax draws us down the page using assonance and shorter lines. The poem has a quiet power in its own testimony. The speaker is lit up by the moon’s nudge toward epiphany, which allows the speaker to merge with all color, all light, a kind of redemption that fills the fissure. A momentary stay.
Moon Jar
My wedding ring is missing
one small diamond, and
I like it that way: a reminder
of the imperfect in
all of us, like that keyhole
size of grief that remains crystalline.
In Korea, ceramicists for centuries
have made moon jars: testimony
to the virtue of modesty: asymmetrical
warping on the wheel, slumping
in the pine-heated kiln,
impurities when fired — black
dots and pocks on its surface
like freckles on skin.
I have been kept awake
so many nights by the moon:
its pull on the pines and night birds
and who, like a monk, keeps a sharp order of time.
Never a perfect sphere,
the milky moon jar joins two
clay hemispheres into one.
When the light of the moon
finds me, I am the color
of everything in the winter night.
(originally appeared in Southern Indiana Review)
EP: Suicide continues to be a major killer in the United States. Your forthcoming book “Moon Jar” speaks to the suicide of your second husband. How did you navigate the difficult terrain of healing and writing? Artistically, were their beacons of light that lead the way?
DJ: So many who take their lives believe there is some part of themselves that is flawed. Maybe someday we will come to value each other exactly as we are. I took consolation and inspiration in the works of a number of poets and artists who served as guides in my writing of Moon Jar. I found myself looking for poets who write about their grief, whether it be from the loss of suicide or not. Ruth Stone, Matt Rasmussen, Mary Jo Bang, Nick Flynn, Edward Hirsch, Anna Akhmatova, Beth Bachman all served as inspirations as writers who have seen the darkest of days and moved through that darkness with their poems. Just after my husband’s suicide, I was especially buoyed by Kevin Young’s anthology on grief, The Art of Losing. Just to know that I wasn’t alone in facing what seemed to be an impossible recovery was incredibly beneficial. Visual artists helped too, modern and abstract artists especially Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Richard Serra. In his essay, “Why Modern Art Matters Now,” Kirk Varnedoe argues that modern art “is a source not of absolutes and enduring truths, but of uncertainties constantly exacerbated, of pieties constantly exploded” and therefore opens itself to a range of human experiences. The work of writing the poems in Moon Jar became a way for me to process what had happened and a way for me to begin to recover by investigating my own range of emotions.
EP: In the title poem, Moon Jar, the speaker is reckoning with the imperfect life and how to live it. The moon jar itself is an object that represents a larger trope. I know you are also a teacher of art history, but what made you want to write about the Korean ceramic moon jar and how it relates to the overall narrative of the collection?
DJ: I taught art history for almost ten years. Recently, I was teaching a course on the intersection of language and visual art. Before I could introduce my students to any type of art, I wanted to offer several good reasons why we should look at art in the first place. The moon jar, as Alain de Botton and John Armstrong mention in their book Art as Therapy, is a great example of morality taught through visual art. They ascertain that art can serve many functions. Moon jars are made by joining two hemispheres of clay. That metaphor alone is so beautiful. My poem mentions a wedding ring, a western symbol of unity. But, what I love most about the moon jar is that it is beloved for the imperfections that come from combining the two halves, firing in the kiln often adds blemishes and spots. In a time when we are obsessed with perfection, this idea is refreshing.
Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
Posted by Elizabeth Powell on August 10, 2019 at 02:43 PM in Art, Interviews | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: didi Jackson, ekphrasis, moon jar, poetry, red hen press, suicide
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My Orgasms
a survey of surveys on the Sex Lives of Men and Women
I accept no responsibility for statistics, which are a form of magic beyond my comprehension.
-- Robertson Davies
The average couple is said to have sex 2.2 times per week. (Though the definition of .2 sex varies depending on one's gender.)
85% of couples said they would like to have sex at least twice a week. (Only 27% of couples claim to have sex twice a week and like it.)
80% of British men suffer temporary mental setbacks the night after they have sex. (It has yet to be determined if this is a cultural or universal phenomenon.)
75% of American women prefer chocolate to sex. (This, most scientists believe, is a world-wide phenomenon, depending on the availability of chocolate.)
54% of Christian women say fidelity is what they most love in a man, but only 6% say the faithful also need to be good in bed. (Yet another good reason to be an atheist.)
40% of sexually active adults distinguish fucking from sex. (Sex without fucking? Is this another Christian sect? )
38% of men pray for divine aid with their sexual performance. (Examples soon to be released in The New Book of Common Prayer.)
35% of married women consider sex as important as any other household chore. (And who knew doing the dishes could be so much fun? For details on exotic dishes, check out Dish-sex.com)
25% of men say their sexual advances are turned down at least 50% of the time. (Women are always better at advancing in such matters, alas.)
10% of men admit to lying about their sex lives, and pollsters suspect the number to be higher. Even when filling out anonymous, men admit they want to keep up with the Joneses. (Such lies! Do tell!)
1 out of 15 women admits she fakes her orgasms. (But she still refers to them as "my orgasms.")
-- NA [from the archive; originally posted April 29, 2008]
Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 09, 2019 at 08:49 PM in From the Archive, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (1)
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from The New Yorker, January 28, 2010
<<<
Last Wednesday night, I was fortunate enough to be at the Allen Room in Frederick P. Rose Hall for "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," Hal Willner’s inspired rejiggering of the “Great American Songbook.” With the lights of New York forming an ideal backdrop through the venue’s glass back wall, Rufus Wainwright crooned Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” (1936). Sting emerged from the audience and lustily sang the Gershwin brothers’ “Love is Here to Stay” (1938), in what was likely the only time the standard had been performed by a man wearing cargo pants and a sleeveless T-shirt. And, following numbers by Shannon McNally, Marc Anthony Thompson, Van Dyke Parks, Jenni Muldaur, and Christine Ohlman, Lou Reed stomped his way through the great 1943 Harold Arlen / Johnny Mercer hit “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).”
The show was held in conjunction with David Lehman’s exceptional new book “A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs,” which inspired a freestyle narration by Ken Nordine, whose pre-recorded voice was piped into the room last night from on high, sounding like the received word from a better, more devious God.
Lehman’s central theme is that while the success of great popular composers and songwriters—Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II—owes much to their Jewish cultural heritage, the songs they wrote often served as a way to escape “their Jewish origins and join the American adventure.” (Philip Roth writes about this exact idea in several novels, perhaps most movingly in “American Pastoral,” and most histrionically in “The Plot Against America.”) Lehman’s foremost example of what he calls this paradox (Richard Rodgers actually attended Camp Paradox as a child), is Irving Berlin (born Israel Baline) [pictured left] who in writing such songs as “God Bless America” and “White Christmas,” was preaching a new religion, that of America itself.
Yet Lehman is both proud and protective of his own connection to these great songwriters, going as far as to cast himself as a fictional nephew to Uncle Jerry (Kern) and Uncle Harry (Arlen)[pictured right]. And he offers a clever turn on a famous line from “West Side Story” (Bernstein / Sondheim), noting that, “When you’re a Jew, you’re a Jew all the way.” His most intriguing argument is that even the songs by non-Jews of the era, “are in some fundamental way inflected with Judaism.” Lehman’s thrust is a cleaned-up riff on the classic Lenny Bruce Jewish/goyish bit: “If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish … Negroes are all Jews. Italians are all Jews. Irishmen who have rejected their religion are Jews.” The connection between Jews, blacks, and goys is not inconsequential: it forms one of the central components of music from the standards era, perhaps best exemplified by Frank Sinatra singing “Ol’ Man River,”
[pictured right on the radio in the 1940s] or as Lehman puts it, “the lean Italian dressed in white singing a song by Jews about the plight of blacks.” (It’s worth noting, also, that Lenny Bruce made an appearance last night, in the person of Steve Cuiffo, doing a version of the above bit. A crazy show!)
While navigating these elaborate and often fraught ideas, Lehman consistently applies a light touch, perfect for a book about songs with lyrics such as: “The eyes, the arms, the mouth of you,/ The east, west, north, and south of you.” That one’s from “All of You,” by Cole Porter [pictured left], a Midwestern WASP who went to Yale, yet who wrote lyrics that fit squarely into what Lehman understands as a tradition that “followed a Jewish imperative in their abundant humor, wit, and cleverness and in their ability to mix sadness and elation and to produce thereby the mysterious tingle of romance.” Porter was all about romance, and his songs “Let’s Do It,” “Let’s Misbehave,” and “You’re the Top,” can make even the most hardened stoic grin like a fool. If you’re not convinced, check out Bobby Short’s debonair version of “You’re the Top,” which includes such improbable rhymes as: “You’re a rose,/ You’re Inferno’s Dante,/ You’re the nose / On the great Durante.”
For all the fun of the pop song, however, there is an underlying sadness throughout the book. “An ode to the great songwriters is bound to turn elegiac,” Lehman writes. He includes a chronology at the end of the book that starts at 1,000 b.c., with King David (“a musician”) ruling over the Kingdom of Israel, and ends with Bob Dylan performing an electric set at the Newport Film Festival in 1965. (Interestingly, last night’s bassist was Tony Garnier, a longtime member of Dylan’s current touring band.) Lehman likes Dylan, and even links him to Harold Arlen and the other Jewish songwriters of an earlier era. But Dylan heralded, in many ways, the death of the popular standard. He—along with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—made the guitar king, and eliminated the composer/lyricist dynamic by doing it all himself. Additionally, folk and rock music communicated the anger and confusion of the time, rather than scoring points with cheeky internal rhymes and charming pathos. “The new music devalued cleverness and irony, not to mention the clarinet and the trombone,” Lehman writes.
The standards celebrated the American “good life,” something that in the nineteen-sixties suddenly seemed bourgeois, old-fashioned, or narrow. An example: As the boys in the Barry Levinson movie “Diner,” (set in 1959) argued about who was better—Sinatra or Johnny Mathis—Mickey Rourke, the beautiful young Mickey Rourke, ended the discussion, and the era, by naming “Presley,” as in Elvis, as his choice instead. That movie’s great opening scene at the dance hall now looks like a museum piece. The gentle notion of “romance” had turned to camp. Dancing was finished, and for those who have lamented the last fifty years of pop music, so was sophistication and style.
Which brings us back to last Wednesday, to Lou Reed and “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).” That killer interpretation, along with Marc Anthony Thompson’s gorgeous rendition of “Spanish Harlem,” suggested that at least for that moment—with the city lights shining in the distance, and the traffic inching cross-town—the old popular standard could live alongside rock, and that hits are hits no matter when they were written or how they are performed.
from The New Yorker, January 28, 2010. Pictured top left: George and Ira Gershwin. Bottom left: Rufus Wainwright and David Lehman after the concert. See also the write-up that appeared in Tablet.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 09, 2019 at 03:10 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, Music | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Just down the steep hill from where I teach at Northern Vermont University in quaint Johnson, Vermont is a precious artistic resource, Vermont Studio Center. Known for its artist residencies since it began in 1984, the rural Vermont enclave hosts a series of talks and readings by visiting artists and writers for the surrounding community. What a score! It is part of the rich fabric of the arts that Vermont inspires and makes possible.
Through Vermont Studio Center programming, I have had the pleasure of being introduced to new work and making new friends and acquaintances. Indeed, it was through VSC that I met up with the dynamic duo, sometimes known on their reading tours as The Ladies Lazarus, also known as poets Erin Adair-Hodges (author of Let’s All Die Happy, University of Pittsburgh Press) and Jenny Molberg (author of Marvels of the Invisible from Tupelo Press and forthcoming Refusal: Poems from LSU Press). They inspire me. I love their smart, stunningly brilliant poems.
They also are editors at the prestigious Pleiades Press, which is woman-run. Little did I know that there is a poetic renaissance brewing, a feminist literary scene with chops, in the Kansas City area. Kansas City, Here I Come! The area boasts other formidable women poets that I am a fangirl of, such as Hadara Bar Nadav, Traci Brimhall, and Bridget Lowe. Next February I will be featuring their work in a special issue of Green Mountains Review.
Here’s a sampling of their fine work. First, Erin Adair-Hodges’, Unmappable, a poem that tries to locate the source of feminine dislocation. The poem interrogates the vast expanse of Kansas, how it can make the speaker disappear not only in size or scope but also through the political and social oppression of women in Kansas. Like Emily Dickinson’s “done with the compass, done with the chart,” Adair-Hodges’ speaker will find her own way, following the power of lightning, which also has power over the landscape of Kansas. “Anyone can be buried” in this place, but the narrator rides the Plathian arrow away from the deadly cooing of wheat and into the bullseye of her own unmappable power.
Unmappable
Kansas coos me into its wheat.
Done with direction, I follow the lightning,
God’s arrows insisting even the desolate
can be a destination.
In the black and white of a winter dawn
a train zippers the wetland
to a sky clouded with intention.
It looks more like a photograph
than a photograph resembles the moment
it captures, its frame diverting, its filter
slanting truths. Say I make of this a photo—
what would the evidence show?
That I was in a body here for awhile
and I wanted this to mean something?
Is this the alibi or the crime?
And who is the jury to receive this—no one
knows I’m here. I loaded the car in Technicolor
and drove east—had done milked the west
of fresh starts—but the time changed
so I don’t know when I am.
Kansas says it does not matter. Time
rolls over its husks and soil like fog, changing
nothing. So much land—
anyone could be buried out here.
(originally in The Sewanee Review)
Next, in Molberg’s poem, “Note”, there is the speaker’s desire to disappear from the oppressive patriarchy. In this cutting, yet almost quiet poem the reader understands that the aggressor’s threat of suicide becomes a part of the oppression of the speaker, a victim of domestic violence. Here the speaker’s life, like her favorite poem, is ripped out for a suicide note by a man who wants her to disappear so he can live, putting the other woman in her place. Here we have the very enactment of gaslighting, one of the methods by which oppression happens.
Note
He said he would hang himself
so as not to make a mess.
But he was still there the next day.
And the next. And the next.
He wrote the note for the cops
on a page he tore from my favorite book
of poems. That’s all I saw of it—
in absence—the ripped-out page
like a jagged fin down the spine.
What is my body but a rainstorm?
What are my bones
but flightless shards of light?
I did not feel secure,
though I married the only man
I believed was safe. Two children.
Three dogs. The dying cat.
Papers signed and unsigned.
The woman who pasted her face
over mine in our pictures
and mailed them as proof of their affair
before she tried to kill herself.
This, too, he does not tell me.
In the dream, he cuts
the air around my body
with a giant pair of scissors,
origamis me
until I am small as a ring-box.
In I go, with the rest
of my clothes, to the cardboard crate
where dress-sleeves stick out
like the arms of paper dolls. I nestle there.
I fold and fold. I try to disappear.
(originally in Ploughshares)
What follows here is an interview with Jenny Molberg and Erin Adair-Hodges about, among other things, The Ladies Lazarus Tour. Molberg and Adai-Hodges collaborated on the answers.
Posted by Elizabeth Powell on August 09, 2019 at 08:48 AM in "Pitt Poetry", Collaborations, Guest Bloggers, Interviews | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: american poetry, Elizabeth Powell, erin adair-hodges, feminist poetry, Jenny Molberg, ladies lazarus, pleiades press, Sylvia Plath, vermont studio center
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Aedes Aegypti
by Brian Turner
With the audio on mute, the television
flickers over the bodies of lovers
tangled in dream, carbon dioxide
pluming from their mouths
the way factory smoke billows
from the industrial park outside of town.
Mosquitoes circle in a holding pattern above.
As the female’s wings beat 400 times
per second, the male’s at 600 hertz,
their wingtips trace the smallest figure-8s
into the invisible, a gesture toward the infinite.
Such brief lives they have. One month,
maybe, their coupling a conversation
at 1200 hertz, the high pitch of their union
an A above concert C—
Beethoven’s last note,
perhaps, the note he chose not to take
by feather from the well of ink
the way a mosquito might dip a stylet
in blood.
He let the note play itself out.
To recognize the cry of the bat
with its hunger returning. Blue notes
smoldered out from the throats of lovers.
That no matter how certain
the crushing weight of the indomitable,
even the smallest of flyers
raise their wings in music.
Brian Turner is a writer and musician; author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, two poetry collections (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise), and a debut album with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team. He edited The Kiss anthology and curated the series on Guernica. He’s received a Guggenheim, a USA Fellowship, an NEA, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. He’s published in The New York Times (online), National Geographic, Harper’s Magazine, and more. He directs the MFA at Sierra Nevada College.
Posted by Emma Trelles on August 08, 2019 at 06:40 PM in Emma Trelles, Feature, Poems | Permalink | Comments (0)
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“In the dark times. Will there be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.” These words by Berthold Brecht have been on my mind a lot lately even from my privileged point of view in rural Vermont, where peace is mostly as abundant as the long sweep of hay and cornfields. Still my television set blares the discord and hate, a technological vomiting that gets harder to subdue.
The Brecht poem appears in one of my favorite poetry anthologies, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poets of Witness, edited by the esteemed poet Carolyn Forche, who has recently published a highly anticipated, lyrical memoir What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance about her time in El Salvador in the 1970s bearing witness to the horrors of war and human rights abuses.
With the brutality and crimes against humanity happening along our southern border, in addition to bloodshed from white supremacist terrorist attacks in El Paso and Dayton, it is hard not to think we have firmly crossed the threshold into our own dark times. Language has consequences. It has been said, our lives are human documents. What is written in those documents is us. Philosopher/theologian Martin Buber once said,“Whoever speaks one of the basic words enters into the word and stands in it.”
Poetry is one way to enter into the words of witness. This autumn I will be using Forche’s 1993 anthology as part of my poetry workshop at Northern Vermont University, where we will learn all we can about the poetry of witness. I can’t stress this enough in my blogs this week: “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there,” William Carlos Williams once said in his poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”. We are collectively staring into an abyss right now. It’s important to remember history. What is past is prologue. People are dying right here, right now.
I began reading Carolyn Forche’s seminal book of poems “A Country Between Us” when I was in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1980s. In hindsight, I see how her writing and witness about El Salvador helped bring to light, along with other organizations for which she worked like Amnesty International, the brutality and horror of what was happening, bringing a palpable awareness of human rights onto campus. One of the most important poems to me from that collection has been “The Colonel”, a poem that recounts a harrowing experience when her friend and mentor Leonel Gomez Vides, an El Salvadoran revolutionary, brings her to a dinner party at the home of a Colonel, who confronts them in a terrifying manner on the eve of all out war:
“…He spilled many ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves….As for the rights of anyone, tell
your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears on the floor with his arm and held the last of
his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap
of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
(May 1978)”
I remember reading it as a young person, my eyes rushing back and forth over the page, the image, the meaning, the language, the form. I could sense those ears on the floor of the poem listening for help. Up until then I was unsure if poetry could make a difference, if I should just go with my original plan to go to law school to become a civil rights lawyer, stop my formal poetry study and training. But that poem lead me down a road to read other poets of witness like Celan and Akhmatova. I began to understand that poems were a different kind of law. I learned a poem was an argument. Reading “The Colonel” made me immediately understand Shelley’s dictum ”Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Go read or re-read this poem, now. Share it with young people that you know. Reread or read The Country Between Us and then read What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance. That’s your assignment. Then talk about the issues of brutality, torture and death, and human rights abuses with your friends and neighbors. Be an unacknowledged legislator. We co-create this world with our actions. In the words of my grandfather, notice whoever you meet, you never know how they will change your life (or vice versa).
Here is a case in point, an event from which we benefit. When Leonel Gomez Vides, a man of mystery, the El Salvadoran national who showed up on Forche’s door step with his two young daughters in the 1970s, implored her to come to El Salvador to witness and report back to the people of the United States what was happening. Back then, she was a young poet, teaching in California, having recently worked on translating the work of Salvadoran writer and poet Claribel Alegria, from the Spanish. This was how Gomez became aware of Forche. He was related to Alegria. He also understood that a poet’s eye could bring critical information back to the United States and urge people and politicians to take notice of the brutal violence and help. So begins the memoir, which is filled with vital information of the revolution and civil war in El Salvador and how Forche became a human rights activist. It is the story of a young woman’s education in poetry and in life.
Recently, I had the thrilling opportunity to see Forche speak and read for the first time at Bookstock, The Green Mountains Festival of Words, a literary festival held every July in Woodstock, Vermont. It was thrilling, inspirational, necessary.
Here's my interview with Carolyn Forche about her new memoir, What You Heard is True: of A Memoir of Witness and Resistance:
Posted by Elizabeth Powell on August 08, 2019 at 11:09 AM in Guest Bloggers, Interviews | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Against Forgetting, Carolyn Forche, Memoir, Poetry, What You Have Heard is True
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Walking the lush, wooded trails near my home in northern Vermont, I have come to appreciate the beautiful, sometimes elegiac, liminal spaces between heaven and earth. I have grown to love that fuzzy line between what is and what I cannot know. As a teenager I thought I knew everything. How exhausting that was! Youth mostly believes in sheer will mixed with magic, at least mine did. Sometimes I yearn for that solidarity of mind and opinion, but mostly not. This week on my walks, while communing with raspberries and Queen Ann’s lace, mosquitoes and moths, I have been contemplating this saying: “The number of things unknown to Buddhas outnumber the grains of sand on the bank of the Ganges.”
Indeed, we have only a finite understanding of the ineffable world, and poetry seeks to remedy this human dilemma. This week our Vermont State Poet Laureate has reminded me of these eternal questions in his splendid and resplendent new collection of poems due out next year from the University of Pittsburgh Press. In his forthcoming collection of poems, In My Unknowing, Vermont’s own deNiord explores the nuances and paradoxes of unknowing.
The inviting, lyrical voice in these luminous and accomplished poems extends a hand to the reader to come on the philosophical/spiritual voyage of the via negativa. Indeed the ars poetica at work in this collection is a kind of via negativa. These searching poems seek to explore the white light of unknowing and knowing coexisting inside the room of a poem. For as soon as we think we have acquired knowledge, something in the natural world reminds us that all is flux, that to grow spiritually and otherwise is to unburden oneself into a quiet, questioning wisdom. For, as the poet Richard Wilbur once wrote: “Love calls us to the things of this world.”
The book’s first and title poem, In My Unknowing, recognizes that in order to begin to understand we must, as the Psalm 34.8 says, “ taste and see” what is good—understand it with our earthly senses first, in the physical way our bodies can “know”. Our senses are one force of understanding, but there is also a counterforce that exists in the world that seeks to not know because the prime mover of this world, whether one believes in God or not, is ultimately unknowable. Our greatest knowledge is to know that we do not know. Why is that?
These poems are deeply searching and smart, engaging with the immutable, and the epistemological insights that delve into these human conundrums of understanding. Further, this work reminds me of deNiord’s generation’s clarion call of “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” sung about in the song “Woodstock” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. In writing “Woodstock”, the great Joni Mitchell implored that we all must work toward making heaven on earth, an Eden, especially during tumultuous times, and let’s face it most of the times in America have been tumultuous and full of suffering, except for a privileged few: We are stardust/ We are golden/And we've got to get ourselves/ Back to the garden.
The work also brings to mind a Christian biblical text, 1 Corinthians 13:12: “When I was a child I talked like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I set aside childish ways. Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” This text signals to me that part of paradox of knowing/unknowing is also being known fully, having faith in things seen and unseen, converging to make knowing someday possible. What we can say about the unknown is that we do not know and that we can use the natural world to try and express what our unknowing might contain and reveal. This is the work at hand in deNiord’s brilliant poems filled with musical propulsion, quiet images, the deep searching of a philosopher and poet for spiritual food.
Here is the opening poem, one of my favorites:
IN MY UNKNOWING
Oh taste and see.
Psalm 34, 8
I was driving through the fields of Heaven when I realized I was still on Earth,
because Earth was all I had ever known of Heaven and no other place would do
for living forever. I had grown beyond belief from seeing that everything I felt
had sprung from lives I’d already lived, so that I could feel the way I did, which
was so much I had no idea where to begin. The crawling? The slithering? The
leaping? The flying? The dying? If you had been there with me in the passenger
seat and asked me about the newt or flea or pachyderm, I would have told you
everything I knew, which was a frightening amount, and not only that, but just
how much I loved them all—those Heavenly beings: the serpent, the lion, the
mosquito, the hawk, the antelope, the worm; and not only beings, but stones as
well. Each particular thing so mysterious in my unknowing, I knew I was living
forever. I knew the fields through which I was driving were the fields of Heaven in
which I was tasting and seeing, seeing and tasting.
AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARD deNIORD
Rilke said, "We must live the questions" which were your questions here in this book, this part of your life? What questions did this book answer for you in the writing of it? Or did it bring you more questions?
Continue reading "In My Unknowing: Vermont’s Poet Laureate Chard deNiord [by Elizabeth Powell]" »
Posted by Elizabeth Powell on August 06, 2019 at 11:23 AM in Feature, Guest Bloggers, Poems, Portraits of Poets | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 06, 2019 at 12:21 AM in Spontaneous Aphorisms | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Paris is surely a bit above the best when it comes to fostering and presenting creative, innovative, art-quality, live dance and performance, including circus. But, what with Paris lately as hot and dry as Sana’a, Yemen, I have been a little slow to act on getting True Dance News out to the English-speaking world.
I’ve been wanting to put up a series of short, sweet articles on watch-for performers and performances such as Catherine Diverrès’ remarkable Jour et nuit, her latest piece, which I discovered during the Faits d’Hiver Winter 2019 festival. A reprise of a later work, equally smashing stuff, Blow the bloody doors off… figured at the Théâtre Nationale (Palais) de Chaillot in Spring…
In between, there was work by Liz Santoro, Sylvère Lamotte, Nina Santes, Nathalie Béasse, Vincent Thomasset, Mats Ek and many others at Atelier de Paris’ June Events and Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales… Diverrès, among others, is a veteran of the scene but there are scads of accessible, practicing newer talents, too, such as Marie Desoubeaux, to mention only one, who debuted her fine dance-performance Rester (Stay) in April at Le Regard du Cygne, a devotedly contemporary dance performance theater in Belleville.
So, there’s plenty of movement art to write about.
Stillness
But even innovative, art-quality, live dance and performance suffer from This weather!
Like most ordinary Parisians, like most ordinary Sana’a-ites, I expect, I have no air conditioning. The cost-benefit ratio has never added up for me or them. With actual waves of killing-heat, though, the ratio might change, ‘though maybe we can all just go stand under those giant white windmills that seem to run along the national tollways. That couldn’t be expensive, could it?
While we’re all calculating, however, the trick with a heat wave, in French called a canicule, just as in Sana’a, is to keep still in a shuttered-up apartment. The word for keeping still like this is se terrer – “go to ground” – like rabbits or scorpions or slugs.
Close the shutters a few minutes before the sun pokes its angry mug over the horizon. Don’t open them again till that mug has slunk well under it. Take only body-temperature liquids (‘though lovemaking is obviously out of the question at these temperatures). Keep quiet. Move slow, mon lapin, lentement, shhh!
Stillness, anger
Unlike typing or lovemaking, moderate reading or listening to the radio, in principle, doesn’t generate (much) heat, so I’ve been listening in the silence.
Posted by Paul Tracy DANISON on August 05, 2019 at 02:37 PM in Beyond Words, Dance, Tracy Danison, Paris correspondent | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Atelier de Paris, Belleville, Best American Poetry, Beyond Words, Blow the bloody doors off… Théâtre Nationale de Chaillot, Cartesian, Cartesianism, Catherine Diverrès, circus, climate change, dance, dance performance, dance performance, Descartes, enlightenment, Epicureanism, Faits d’Hiver Winter 2019, Garrison Keilor, George Washington, Greta Thunberg, Julien Offray de la Mettrie, June Events, Le Regard du Cygne, liberal, libertinism, Liz Santoro, Marie Desoubeaux, Mats Ek, Michel Onfray, Nathalie Béasse, Nina Santes, Nouvel Obs, Oprah Winfrey, Palais de Chaillot, Paris, Paris culture, Paris Performance Agenda, paris tourism, Paul Tracy Danison, performance, performance dance, philosophy, Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales, Rester, Robespierre, Sade, Sylvère Lamotte, theater, Tracy Danison, Vincent Thomasset, Jour et nuit
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This week we welcome Elizabeth A.I. Powell as our guest author. Elizabeth's forthcoming poetry book "Atomizer" is due out in Fall of 2020 from Louisiana State University Press. She is also the author of Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, and The Republic of Self. She teaches at Northern Vermont University, where she also edits Green Mountains Review.
Welcome, Elizabeth
-- sdl
Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 04, 2019 at 09:02 PM in Announcements, Feature | Permalink | Comments (1)
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The Poetry of Kerrin McCadden and the Opioid Crisis
This week I will be reporting from my beloved home state of Vermont. Summertime is short here, but it is filled with literary and music festivals, readings, conferences, workshops, art shows, ballet on the farm. Vermont Studio Center, Brattleboro Literary Festival, Bookstock, Bread and Puppet, The Painted Word reading series, Feast and Field in Barnard, Monday night poetry readings at the Lamp Shop in Burlington, Bread Loaf. Poems are singing themselves into existence. We have a large population of writers and artists. Here, even the Burlington Chief of Police is a writer with a book contract.
But lately what troubles sleep, whatever sleep it is, (to reference our state’s inaugural Poet Laureate, Robert Frost) is not a bumper crop of apples and the hard work of harvesting. Lately Vermont has been harvesting bodies.
The nationwide heroin epidemic hides here behind bucolic vistas of Holsteins, quaint white clapboard houses, craft breweries serving farm to table gluten free pizza, and old-timey country inns. Even here many suffer poverty of pocket and soul. “Men die miserably everyday,” William Carlos Williams once said, “for lack of what is found” in poetry.
So what is it about poetry that can heal us? For starters it bears witness in dark times. There is much despair in the air. Many feel what is unseen in the zeitgeist of our troubled and troubling times. On top of that mountain oftentimes opioids are cheaper and have “more bang for the buck” than a suitcase of Bud.
How can poetry help? It gives sustenance to the human soul with the lyric enactment of narrative. Sharing stories is an ancient human way to ease the suffering of another, to develop empathy and understanding, to share solutions or ways to stay alive. The psychiatrists of the confessional poets surely understood this: Poet heal thyself.
If one can speak the truth through narrative, it will heal shame and trauma, roots of addiction. My dear friend, Dr. Anne Johnston, recently passed away, she was a world-renowned neonatologist in the area of mother/infant opioid addiction. In an interview with the Times Argus newspaper before her death she said: “I would say that all have shame and the shame is particularly bad when you are pregnant and you are using. I think that fear dominates in terms of coming forward. Most women who get pregnant and who are using opioids and are dependent upon opioids say ‘OK, now I’m pregnant. I’m going to be able to get myself off.’ The reasoning of it doesn’t follow through to the actual disease of addiction and you can’t reason yourself out of an addiction.”
Vermont poet Kerrin McCadden understands this intuitively, poetically, and gives us the perspective from the poet’s eye in her forthcoming chapbook, winner of the Button Poetry prize (March 24, 2020), Keep This to Yourself. On the loss of her brother to this crisis, McCadden says “poems are our secular prayers. They are the way we name and understand the world. Increasingly, the general public is hungry for poems. Poems are a primary engine for storytelling. The lyric poem seems to be “pre-story” in its adherence to the moment, but a series of lyric poems can tell a story, can help readers live in those moments. I think it’s important to invite those who have not lived with addiction in their families to live in the moments of poems about such families. I want to break silence about the opioid epidemic. I want poems—hopefully some of mine—to help people build compassion.”
Keep This to Yourself asks readers to reflect on the old fashioned values of family secret keeping and the damaging effects the practice has on the greater society. The chapbook’s title is, then, a dare. We can’t keep any of this to ourselves any longer; not to mention the book itself discloses the secret that is making large swathes of our society sick. Secrets force us to evaluate the nature of truth. And truth is in short supply in much of public discourse these days.
The speaker in these tightly hewn and achingly beautiful poems is/was a sister, and these poems follow the speaker from childhood into adulthood. In the first poem of the collection, “When My Brother Dies,“ the speaker muses on the fact that even when her brother was living he was of the walking dead. In life as in death, the river carries much of the narrative. The lineation, like the river, meanders and cuts into what is solid. The speaker fights for her core, she will not go to the other side:
It happened already. It has happened five times
and will happen again. My brother is dead.
We try to recover what he stole and start
by making a list we can’t finish.
I’ve been living up and down the same riverbank
since I started having families. I stay on my
side of the river, which makes our list full
of half-truths. I will not cross the river.
McCadden’s expert use of repetition and dazzling, take your breath away syntax help to weave the complexity of the subject of addiction, its life and death consequences where none of us, even us readers, are spared what it means to be a witness. The lithe juxtaposition of images through most of the poems in the collection lets the reader live in the liminal space between past and present, the place of shadows, as a means to stand on the precipice of truth and survey possibility.
Continue reading "Don't "Keep This to Yourself": Dispatches from Vermont [by Elizabeth Powell] " »
Posted by Elizabeth Powell on August 04, 2019 at 07:04 PM in Feature, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Shelley was a classic Leo with Taurus rising. Born on this day (4 August) in 1792, he was the middle man in the greatest double-play combination of all time, Keats to Shelley to Byron. He had the vision of a prophet and the confidence of a madman and he was idealistic, with Saturn, Neptune, and Venus dominant among his planets and Libra, Leo, and Taurus among his signs. He shares his birthday with Barack Obama and Louis Armstrong, which gives you some idea of how he presaged the future of music, that art to which all others aspire, and the illusion of political change based on hopes that spring eternal in the human breast.
The symmetry in his natal chart is fearless. He is a man of heroic temper -- without Byron's lusty humor or Keats's morbid sensuality but with a power of breath equal to the wind. He died, fittingly, in a squall, at sea. The fire and earth in his chart were vanquished by the elements of water and air. His moon was in Pisces, his Venus in Leo.
Shelley made love to women sincerely, with attentive care, and wrote poems to her, whatever her name was, Jane or Mary or the third one. He didn't "hold" with monogamy. He went to University College in Oxford and got sent down for writing "The Necessity of Atheism." He was a strong swimmer, though this ability availed him naught in the end. His heterodox views made Shelley the hero of wannabe poets for a century after his death. To get a flavor of that old romantic aura, read Andre Maurois's wonderful bio, Ariel. Alas, Shelley's literary reputation took a hit from Arnold, an even more wounding thrust from Eliot, and then came the backlash in full intensity.
Everyone at the campfire had to tell a spooky story. Byron and Shelley had good ones, but Mary Shelley [right] won with "Frankenstein." They were in Switzerland. Who was Jane? He serenaded her with a guitar.The lyrics were lovely. She kept his picture in a locket along with a lock of his hair, and everything that he touched acquired posthumous value. Henry James's "The Aspern Papers" centers on the archive of a poet modeled after Shelley and what a single-minded professor will do to get at it. History has been kinder to Keats's reputation than to Shelley's, but it used to be that if you mentioned one you had to mention the other or you would have bad luck all day, the same as with James and Edith Wharton.
If Dante had been reborn as an Englishman, it would have been in the person of Shelley, who venerated Rousseau. Plato's parable of the cave could have been dreamed with Shelley in mind. He was probably the most complicated of the major romantic poets. Coleridge was his superior intellectually; Keats, always better loved, was Milton's true heir, able to pack as much sensual pleasure in a line of verse as pentameter allowed; Blake was crazier; Byron funnier; and Wordsworth captured, all in all, the spirit of the age more successfully than any of his contemporaries. But Shelley was the closest thing to a visionary in the lot.
When Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" sees a woman on the beach and composes a villanelle about her image, it is in the manner of Shelley. For a great poet Shelley wrote some really bad lines, in which he stumbles and falls and bleeds in his efforts to shed his corporeal self and merge his romantic soul with the wind that is the creative breath of God. His skylark sings to us less melodiously than Keats's nightingale, but that's paradox for you -- that Shelley, who was given to seeing things in retrospect, would oddly favor the bird of early morn.
On July 8, 1822, Shelley and his friend Edward Williams went out boating in Italy and drowned. Could Shelley swim? Perhaps not. But would he have survived the squall? Doubtfully. They were going to burn the bodies, but Shelley's heart defied the flames, refused to burn, and was rescued by Edward Trelawny. Byron said that his much misunderstood friend was the greatest man he had ever known. -- DL
Posted by The Best American Poetry on August 04, 2019 at 06:32 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Astrological Profiles, Feature | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Almost Gods
Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.” - Montaigne
Entering the galleries of Greece and Rome was startling, coming as I did from Egyptian art. Jackal heads in profile on frontal torsos had become familiar, normal.
But a new normal arrived: geometry, anatomical form, and gods “like us”. “Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none / more wonderful than man . . .” - Sophocles, Antigone
“Divine Proportion”
500-400 BCE. Big Math. Discovered, lost, and rediscovered . . . “Things which coincide with one another are equal one to another.” - Euclid
The original Met logo was based on a woodcut by Friar Luca Pacioli (1445–1517). He taught mathematics to Leonardo da Vinci, and Leonardo illustrated his “On the Divine Proportion”.
You get an actual measure of golden ratio proportion and “beauty” using the golden ratio face calculator that is included in PhiMatrix golden ratio design software (2012).
3G
“The Three Graces, so popular in their time . . . that they appear on mosaics, frescoes, sarcophagi, silver tableware, terra-cotta oil lamps, personal objects such as engraved gems, and even coins.” Roman art, gallery 169, MetText
Greece and Rome continue: Versace’s Medusa; Super Bowl Roman numerals (I - LIII); the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials; and of course the precedent for txting: the abbreviation.
a.k.a., a.m., p.m., i.e., e.g., p.s., (sic), vs., etc.
Laws of the Folds
Veils in stone. Glorious in execution. Whenever I feel that the artistry in representing the fold is underrated, I look to George Bridgman. I used to give copies of Drawing the Draped Figure: The Seven Laws of the Folds to many design colleagues.
Although “not on view”, the annotation of the folds of an evening dress in the Met refers to Oscar Wilde’s principles of dress: "I am not proposing any antiquarian revival of ancient costume, but trying merely to point out the right laws of dress, laws which are dictated by art and not by archaeology, by science and not by fashion; and just as the best work of art in our days is that which combines classic grace with absolute reality, from continuation of the Greek principles of beauty . . . will come, I feel certain, the costumes of the future."
Figure/Ground
Q: What is it about Greek figure that makes me crazy?
A: It grounds what will become neoclassic - the “master drawing” tradition I love.
Posted by Alec Bernstein on August 04, 2019 at 04:49 PM in Art, Beyond Words, Feature | Permalink | Comments (0)
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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