The Best American Poetry

"Drinking Buddies" and Tony Hoagland [By Steven Rea]

It wasn't until I hunkered down in a screening room one weekday morning in the summer of 2013 that I finally found out about Tony Hoagland. I was there in my then-capacity as movie critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, watching the new Joe Swanberg pic, a walk-y, talky, beery study of two couples and their intersecting lives. Drinking Buddies, it's called, with Olivia Wilde, Ron Livingston, Anna Kendrick and Jake Johnson. It's a smart, shambling affair about friendship, fidelity (and infidelity), temptation and temperament, set in Chicago, where Wilde's Kate works at a craft brewery, and sleeps with Livingston's Chris, a somewhat older, somewhat insufferable record producer. One night he gives Kate a hardcover edition  of John Updike's Rabbit, Run to read, because, he says, "you kind of remind me a little bit of the hero."

Really, he's just calling out a book that reminds him of himself.

Later on, as Kate and Chris' relationship fractures and he drifts towards Kendrick's Jill (and Kate towards her beer business best bud, Johnson's Luke), the self-appointed literary mentor has another book at the ready as a gift: it's the perfectly titled 2003 collection of  Hoagland poems, What Narcissism Means to Me.

There in the darkened theater I chuckled to myself, and quickly jotted down the title. Afterwards, back at my desk, I read a few Hoagland poems online, and then ordered the book (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award that year),  and then ordered every other Hoagland collection published to date. How did I not know about these finely tuned, keen and insightful, deadpan, heartbreaking poems? Thank you, I mumbled to filmmaker Swanberg, for the recommendation! Thank you Tony Hoagland for being Tony Hoagland!

Sadly, Hoagland -- who taught creative writing at the University of Houston -- died last year in his adopted hometown, Santa Fe: pancreatic cancer, age 64.

Happily, his words survive -- continuing to resonate, reverberate, digging into those places that only a good poem can go.  And showing up in Drinking Buddies, of course -- and Judd Apatow's I Found This Funny anthology-- too. 

Reid Hall Gets a Re-do [by David Lehman]

Years ago, as a graduate student shuttling between England and France, I spent a lot of time at Reid Hall in Paris, Columbia's footprint in the city of lights. It was and is at 4 rue de Chevreuse, near the corner of boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail, an easy walk from the Vavin and Notre-dame-des-champs metro stops. Reid Hall served as headquarters for many junior year abroad students. (I am pretty certain that Jacqueline Bouvier spent time at Reid Hall in her year in France.) When I got the news that the buildings are getting a make-over, I excitedly phoned Oscar Hammerstein, who evoked the time and place, the romance of being young in a foreign tongue, and suddenly we were at a nearby cafe. "No matter how they change her, / I'll remember her that way."

<<<
The 18th-century rue de Chevreuse building has a new roof and facades, and the repurposed southwest corner building is now home to Columbia's Institute for Ideas and Imagination. The institute, a presidential initiative led by Columbia Professor Mark Mazower, aims to promote collaboration across the arts and academia through fellowships, workshops, conferences, exhibitions and events. Plans are being finalized to create new gardens and restore the Grande Salle.
>>>

For more, link here: https://news.columbia.edu/news/fresh-start-reid-hall-paris

Ithaca Alert: Lehman to give "Lecture with Musical Illustrations" at IC Monday 9/16

Ithaca alert:

On Monday evening,
September 16, 2019,
at 7:30 PM
I will give a talk
-- punctuated by wonderful music --
about the great American songbook.
at Ithaca College, Textor 101.

The talk is based on my book
A Fine Romance:
Jewish songwriters, American Songs
and will include songs by
the brothers Gershwin,
Jerome Kern & Dorothy Fields,
Irving Berlin,
Rodgers & Hart,
Ziggy Elman,
Leonard Bernstein
Betty Comden and Adolph Green,
Kern & Oscar Hammerstein.

An Interview with Sydney Lea (by Nin Andrews)

NA:  On Monday, I posted an interview on this blog in which I talked about the anthology, Here, Poems for the Planet, edited by Elizabeth J. Coleman. I want to follow it with this interview with Sydney Lea, whose latest poetry collection is also called Here. I thought I’d start by posting the stunning opening poem from the book.

Here at Summer’s End

                                                                         –for Jerry Dennis

That birds have largely quieted may distress us,

and like neglected mail, the garden’s lettuce
went yellow weeks back, then simply dissolved. But we ought to pause
before we focus on loss
in a season still teeming with vegetation.
No matter the month, our sense of wonder remains–
unless we will it to leave.
Even now the mercury flirts with 85,
so it’s wondrous, say, how starlings decide
to convene for migration.  We can watch their flocks in the roadbeds.

It’s a marvel as well, whatever the force is
that already starts to blanch the legs of the snowshoe hares.
Our longing is always for now to endure,
though since the dawn of thinking, many a thinker
has found death an engine of beauty.
Truth is, however, our world will never go dead:
those heads of lettuce have fused with humus below,
and after those starlings wing off, the juncos and titmice will show,
and the ghostly hares of winter

won’t be ghosts at all but creatures
with dark flesh packed onto bone under ivory hides.
Coyotes will hunt them to keep alive
through the ineluctable –I almost said awful– chill,
and even then, the ice-beads on softwood boughs may look,      
if we want, like permitted fruit. As a season nears,
or lingers, or ends, an amplitude can tell us
we still are subject to spells.
We’re here after all. Let’s chant it throughout the year,

like so much birdsong: we’re here we’re here we’re here

NA:  When I first read this poem, I read it as an exhortation to remain optimistic in the face of inevitable loss, and to keep our sense of wonder alive. It’s an appeal that I find hard to follow these days, thanks to climate change. Were you thinking of that when you wrote the poem?

SL: Well, in all candor, though I am as full of anxiety about climate change and fury at its deniers as I can possibly be, I don’t think confronting its apocalyptic threats is what I was thinking about. For me, a poem tends to begin not with some « idea » but  with a little inkling. I rarely have a sense of what it bodes until I have finished the poem…at which point that poem will reveal its about-ness to me– and even then only partly, perhaps.

As I recall, I was reading in Jerry Dennis’s terrific book, The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas, and I came on a passage suggesting that the sense of wonder will never leave us unless we allow it to do so. I happened to look up and notice a pre-migratory aggregation of starlings (invasive species!) gathered in our field. Then I started to write.

Given Jerry’s words, there can be small doubt that an impulse to optimism, or maybe rather a yearning for it, despite all the reasons for pessimism anybody can muster, preceded what I wrote.

Truth is, pessimism is too damned easy. It’s a safe escape. Anybody can do it, as I know too well, because I am inclined in a gloomy direction a great deal of the time. (Our GP calls me Eeyore and my can-do wife Tigger.) But the fact remains that unrelieved dreariness is a lazy person’s recourse, and it contributes nothing in the end.

NA: Peter Taylor, the southern fiction writer and a friend of my parents, once told me that in order to become a writer, I should rely on what he called my gift of gab, or what my father jokingly called my gift of circumlocution. In some ways, your work reminds me of Peter Taylor’s. I think, at the core, you are a New England storyteller, just as Peter Taylor was a Southern short story writer and a natural raconteur. I wonder what you think of that comparison, and of his advice.

SL: To be compared to Peter Taylor is an honor of which –no false modesty here– I am not worthy. But Robert Penn Warren, an early and precious encourager of my poetry and a friend of Taylor’s too, said something very similar about garrulity. He recalled sitting in the company of older countrymen and –women in Kentucky and being moved by the way they told stories. My upper New England connections go far back, and they provided similar experiences in kitchen, lumber camp, canoe, hunting cabin, and so on, and at a very early age I was enthralled by those voices, but also by the way in which the stories became a kind of community property.

So even if pure narrative is for me not as important an aim as it was when I was a younger writer, what I call narrative values– the speaking voice, character, setting– remain crucial to what I do. I do not, by the way, propose what I do as a self-evident virtue; it is merely what I do, and scarcely precludes my love for all manner of other approaches, including your own, my dear interviewer.

NA: In both your work and Peter Taylor’s, place is almost a character, a voice, a presence. And of course, the title of this book is Here. I wondered if you would say a few words about the importance of place in your work.

SL: Well, place is obviously a crucial matter to me. (My one novel is entitled, tellingly, A Place in Mind.) And in a curious way, that matter relates pretty directly to the whole narrative impulse to which you just referred. I would have to be a hell of a lot more « postmodern » (whatever that means) than I am to imagine a story devoid of physical associations. In my case a drifting away from sensory reality –here I am: what does it feel-look-taste-smell-sound like?– is a drifting into…what? Foolishness. Sometimes I like to make cases in my poems, to argue, to use rhetoric in its classical sense; but if I do that without « grounding » my commentary in something tangible, I just become an inane talking head.

NA: Many of your poems reflect on loss, or immanent loss, and speak of loved ones who have died. But I don’t think you mention the poets you have admired and known. What one poet (besides Frost) is or was a major influence in your work?  Just talk about one.

SL: I’ve spoken of Mr. Warren. I should also mention Maxine Kumin, who blessed me by suggesting that I avail myself
of common sense, which she had in uncommon and dazzling measure. Anthony Hecht strongly approved of my early efforts, also a blessing. To be absolutely honest, however, I’d say that Romantic English poets were my most compelling models, especially Wordsworth, with his conviction, as he says in the uncompleted Recluse, to find exalting poetic themes in   “the simple produce of the common day.”

Frost, another obvious mentor, as you note, was if anything anti-Romantic, but in one of my favorite of his lyrics, “Hyla Brook,” he asserts that “we love the things we love for what they are.” To refer to the poem with which you started, when I write that

               it’s wondrous, say, how starlings decide

               to convene for migration.  We can watch their flocks
                                             in the roadbeds

I am almost perversely aware that starlings are in most respects very unexalted birds; they are not eagles– but what’s wrong with “what they are”? The common day often can and must suffice.

You told me to limit my comments to one poet, and I seem to have defied you.

NA: I love this poem:

Chimera

The eagle’s wings were angled
In a stoop that seemed almost languid,

And yet in an eye-blink it flew
Past the window and out of view.

For me, now in my seventies,
It can feel as if everybody

Were gone, or about to be gone:
For instance, my brother-in-law,

dead some time now, young.

I loved him for years and years.
Parents. A sibling. Peers.

The great creature’s cutting across
The window: less sight than loss,

As if flight had exemplified
The concept, brevity,

And the bird were conscious of me,
And consciousness were crucial

In you or me or an eagle.

SL: Oh, I hadn’t known you’d be quoting me on an eagle. It’s kind of a good segue, though, in the sense that that poem is, I think, a corrective to sentimental views of nature, which Tennyson was right to describe as “red in tooth and claw.” Let’s marvel at the natural world, all right, but let’s not Disney-fy it; above all, let’s not imagine it as a great storehouse of metaphor, whose function is to provide poets with compelling figures of speech. One can be hopeful without lying.

NA: I am still wondering about your influences, particularly your spiritual influences. The title of the book, Here, sounds very Zen to me. And so many of your poems show a profound reverence for nature. Nature, a source of metaphors for many poets, is far more than that in your work. 

SL: I am skeptical of poetry –particularly my own!– as prophecy. And yet there are some odd prognostications in this book. Looking back, I note how many of the poems, including the title poem with which you started, express a sort of wonder at the fact that I am still living in a physical world. This may just be a product of being in my seventies. Many, probably most of these poems were composed before late August of 2016– when, at 73, I had a heart attack, and came close to not being in that world.

Had my own male forebears not all collapsed from cardiac events, including my father at 55, I’d never have thought to visit the tiny clinic an hour from our Maine camp on the New Brunswick border. I’d been training for an annual flat-water kayak race, thinking I’d do the twelve-miler rather than the six that year, because I felt about as fit as I had even the summer before. I noticed a pinch, something like a mosquito bite, in my chest. I didn’t pay it much mind. I had  no dizziness or shortness of breath, though I did feel unusually tired. I figured things would sort out if I took a nap. They didn’t, so off we went. After a three-hour ambulance ride from that small hospital, I arrived at the cardiac unit of the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor.

I don’t smoke or drink, and I exercise pretty vigorously. When I said that to the cardiologist, he said « Hmmm…Think genes might have something to do with it? » My right coronary artery was 100% occluded. A stent was put in and, three years later, this summer, I established a personal best in the race.

The poems that followed my coronary seem more consciously aware of how physical presence, here-ness, matters. In the collection’s final poem, for example, I write about sitting in my my long-time barber’s chair:

            I contemplated the ancient jug of Lucky Tiger,
            Paul’s horseshoe-pitching trophies,
           The snapshot, curling around its tacks,

           Of the 350-pound bear at his feeder.
           And Paul. And myself. Right there in the mirror,
           As ever. 

All those simple details felt like marvels. I have always known (and this may be the Buddhistic inclination you surmise) that I am at my best when I am as fully engaged in the present as I can be, at my worst when I am projecting problems and outcomes into the future. I am not a Buddhist but rather a radically unorthodox Christian; and I can get similar lessons from my church’s tradition: « Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself »; « Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? » And so on. Of course, I betray my own sanity every day, but I do know where it lives.

NA: There is such love of family, home, neighbors, and nature in your work, such happiness, such gratitude—even when you write of grief, sorrow, sickness, or your own mortality. I think of you as one of the rare happy poets I know. Or rather, one of the rare poets who writes well about happiness. That’s one of the things I admire about your work—I who come from a father who always said, “If you have something nice to say, don’t bore me.” Is this a conscious decision? To be uplifting?

SL: I have had several interludes of clinical depression, a couple demanding hospitalization, in my life. So, for all the countless blessings I have been granted, I do know what the dark side looks like, and I think my poetry collections may wander into it in their opening sectors. But I do purposely arrange those books (and sometimes individual poems within them) to suggest that there can be a path or paths out of despair. One sure way to block the escape, I believe, is the egotistical delusion that I can make immense changes in the universe by way of exerting my puny self. There is a Power, indeed many, far greater than trvivial me.

The final section of Here suggests that a lot of un-hip, bourgeois pleasures– matrimony, fatherhood, grandfatherhood, friendship– lie along the way up and out of the mire. As I may just have implied,I placed “Here Itself” in the final position by design. It rehearses some simple behaviors like getting a haircut or paddling the Connecticut River, which turn out to be subtly redemptive.

I know, I know: such redeeming moments would scarcely be available, say, to a Honduran mother robbed of her children as she endures life in one of the vile Trump's accursed camps. I have, I suppose, written my share of poems lamenting or attacking human-imposed suffering. Yet I remain utterly unconvinced that poetry is the best means of helping to alleviate such horrors. Rather than writing raves or boo-hoo poems about the conditions poets may observe (in too many cases out the window on their way to the faculty meeting), why not do something more practical? As for me, for two decades I’ve been deeply involved in a land trust whose mission is to conserve forest (400,000 acres of it, a pretty good carbon bank), but not merely to set it aside: we strive equally hard to provide sustainable provide timber-products jobs in the poorest county in Maine. For a quarter century I also taught in and chaired an adult literacy organization in Vermont, a wonderful outfit that, of course hardly because of my efforts alone, offered its own path out of despair for a great number of people.

None of my endeavors, none by the worthy institutions to which I lent what help I could– none fixed Syria. Nor Libya, Sudan, Guatemala...on and on. But the plain fact is that I am where I am, and where, I trust, poetry is available, to quote Wallace Stevens, "merely in living as and where we live."

NA: I know what you mean about the limitations of poetry. That’s why I’ve written The Last Book of Orgasms, which I imagine to be my last book of poems. Who has time for orgasms or poems these days? I am only half-joking. But again, I am reminded of something Peter Taylor said—that we write what we are given. I’ve always been interested in the word, given.

SL: Well, no more talk of quitting writing from you, maestra! That awful notion dispatched, I agree that the notion of the given–whether or not « religiously» construed– is an absorbing one.

It is, for one thing, despite all I’ve said about living  in the palpable world, often hard to say where « reality » leaves off and our subjective take on it intrudes. One might even make the case that since the Romantics, that issue is the one that poetry is meant to explore. And of course the dichotomy may be, probably is, a false one altogether. To revert to the influence on me of those old New England yarn-spinners, I have known men and women whose character and existence made it hard to distinguish capital-N Nature from human nature.

NA: I’d like to close the interview the poem, “Easy Wonder.”

Easy Wonder

                                        Oxbrook Lake, July 2014

My love, we floated for hours 
in kayaks, side by side, scarcely dipping our paddles.
No motors allowed here, no soul in any
of the southerly shore’s three other cabins.

Still, we orbited north,
through a calm, sequestered cove, where beavers had left
musked piles of mud on four flat rocks.
We didn’t smell fetor: the breeze bore it off.

The beavers somehow know
to place their mounds at every point of the compass.
We wondered how they could be so precise,
though ours, to be sure, was easy wonder.

The same breeze lifts the curtain
in our room, from which we’ve banished watches and clocks,
having no obligations, our children grown,
they and their children not due here for weeks.

The wind raises tendrils of hair
from your pillowed head. How I adore your hair.
The water, quiet marvel, appeared to lift us
above all tension, above despair

at those wrenching deaths last year,
your mother’s and brother’s, and whatever else could appall.
You trailed an arm in the water. I love
your arms, and your legs, which were tucked in the hull.

As if fixed in one place, the sun
shed just the right warmth on us as it floated there.
We floated too, between water and air,
as if we’d never be let down.

 

Sydney Lea, a former Pulitzer finalist, founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review. His twentieth book, and his thirteenth collection of poems, Here, is now available from Four Way Books, NYC, in 2019.  In summer of ‘18, Green Writers Press re-issued his collaborative book of essays with former Delaware laureate Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives.In spring 2020, Vermont’s Green Writers Press will publish The Music of What Happens: Lyric and Everyday Life,his collected newspaper columns from his years (2011-15) as Vermont Poet Laureate.  Lea and former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate will publish their hybrid epic Wormboy with Able Muse in 2020.

Does anybody have my Ram Dass? [By Steven Rea]

You know how you lose books, lend books, spill a pot of coffee on books, slip books into Little Libraries around town, put books on the sidewalk in a box marked "Free!" -- never to see them again?

There are books I've owned over the years that I don't own now, and most are not missed, but every now and then you're reminded of a volume that was significant in your life that is now nowhere to be found. Of course there are public libraries, and Amazon, eBay, Indie Bound and used book shops, but why didn't I hang onto that British first edition of John Fowles' The Magus with the purple spine, or the Black Sparrow Press paperback of Charles Bukowski's The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills issued when the indie publisher was still using a Los Angeles PO Box as its address?

And then there is Baba Ram Dass' Be Here Now (Lama Foundation, 1971, San Cristobal, New Mexico), a big square trade paperback, in which I had dutifully inscribed my name (neatly, I think, in ink) and drawn a little Om symbol alongside. Spiritual was me! 

Lots of readers were reminded of Ram Dass, nee Richard Alpert -- the Timothy Leary cohort turned Hindu/Buddhist-inspired guru to a generation of questing Aquarian Agers-- by David Marchese Talk interview in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. There's a lot to mull there, and if some of the lose-your-ego stuff is hard to hang onto now, Ram Dass, 88, living in Hawaii, remains one of the first extollers of "mindfulness," and the stories he tells in his book, and the spiritual lessons imparted therein, still resonate.

Or at least I think they do. I'll have to go out and rustle up a copy -- there are more than two million in print. But if anyone has the dog-eared edition that says "Steven Rea" on the inside page, hey, I'll make a deal with you. Namaste! 

My Trouble with Optimism and an Interview with Shara McCallum (by Nin Andrews)

Lately, I have been having trouble with optimism. And I have been having trouble with my trouble with optimism. I am, quite simply, depressed. I'm not even sure of the role of poetry anymore—both in the world as it is, politically and environmentally speaking, and in the world of po-biz as it is, with all its emphasis on social media and self-promotion. Poetry, which I like to think of as a contemplative art, is becoming anything but. For that reason, I have written what I believe to be my last book of poems, The Last Orgasm, in which the orgasm, like the poem, bids us farewell. I sometimes think I’ve become like the madwoman in Shara McCallum’s poem, "Why Madwoman Shouldn't Read the News."

Why Madwoman Shouldn’t Read the News

I know you’ll say I’m overreacting,
but my mother’s prophesying has come to pass:
Armageddon is upon us. Just look at the evidence:
the carriers of our species at every second
being raped and killed and the rare ones
who survive offing their lovers and children
(or worse, if it can be believed, wearing bangs),
molesters and gun-toters skulking
in every lunchbox, the environment
churning into an apocalypse. Oh, kids,
please save us the heartache and leave
in advance: calmly but quickly
abandon your seesaws and swings. Friends,
do you remember when we were young?
Life plump with promise and dreams?
Me neither. Anyway, who’d be naive enough
now to believe in anything so impossible-
to-attain as happiness or justice? Sure
we had a run of it. Even some laughs.
But the day’s arrived, as deep down we knew
it would, and spectacles streaming
from across the globe should convince
even the most skeptical of our soon-extinction.
Not that we listen to true madmen
anymore, but the older I get
the more certain I become: my father
would have been heralded a prophet
had he lived, would have joined his brethren
and sistren on every street corner, trumpeting
this end from the beginning.

 

The poem, from her book Madwoman, is also included in the anthology, Here, edited by Elizabeth J. Coleman. You can see her reading the poem here: 

Of course, there are many Cassandras out there, and who wants to listen to them? We humans are naturally designed to avoid pain and suffering—to shut our ears to any suggestion of it. Certain religions tell us we won’t even die. Not forever anyhow, not if we're good people, however that is defined.

As the popular Stanford Biology professor Robert Sapolosky points out in his book, The Science of Intelligent Achievement, one person’s negativity has a profound impact upon others' outlook on life. And worse, listening to negative speech for thirty minutes or more can cause neurons in the hippocampus to die. That’s right, those brain cells just give up the ghost when you tell them bad things are happening. After listening to negative speeches, a person’s problem-solving abilities are measurably compromised. I translate this to mean that after two years of listening to Trump, we Americans are dumber than ever. 

But, I remind myself, I should not be negative. I am not sure about this. 

When I was a girl, the youngest of six children, my mother read aloud to us to keep us from fighting at the dinner table. In the beginning she read the usual children’s books and fairy tales. Then one day she announced that she was tired of happy endings. She said American children and their parents like to think we all live in a Disney film. (She despised Walt Disney.) So she began reading us The Gulag Archipelago instead. I was only seven at the time. I remember my mind shifting from fairyland to the Soviet Union, where a boy could be imprisoned for stealing a cucumber, nude women were paraded before lusty men, and prisoners were tortured in unthinkable ways for crimes they never committed. For most, the only escape was death. “No happy endings here,” my mother announced gleefully.

I think I suffered from a form of literary PTSD back then. But I sometimes wonder whether my mother was right—Americans are raised to believe in a happy ending despite all evidence to the contrary. We think of ourselves as exempt from global crisis. Why else would we seek so desperately to deny the facts we are currently facing—that our planet is overheating, that we humans are to blame, and that we are in grave danger? 

But I keep telling myself I should not be negative. How can I be optimistic in this day and age? I feel so helpless. Can we poets do anything to help save the planet? Or to change minds about the reality of climate change? Is there a way to inspire hope in the curmudgeonly gloom-and-doomers like myself?   

That’s the challenge taken on by the environmental anthology, Here: Poems for the Planet, from Copper Canyon Press.
And what a beautiful anthology it is. I have rarely read an anthology from beginning to end without pausing, but this one was an exception. I felt, while reading it, that poetry was working is magic in me again, offering a renewed sense of faith, if not in the future, at least in the mystical power of poetry. There were so many stunning poems in the book, including “For the Children” by Gary Snyder (posted below), “Kiss of the Sun” by Mary Ruefle, and “First Verse” by Tim Seibles.  In the Forward, the Dalai Lama writes that “if we have the capacity to destroy the Earth, so too, we have the capacity to protect it.” I want to believe him. 

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light 

 

I opened this post with a poem by Shara McCallum, so I thought I’d close with a totally different kind of poem by her—and ask her a few questions. Shara McCallum is a poet I trust profoundly, and I always look forward to reading her work and hearing what she has to say.

Springbank, Great House
Port Antionio, 1796

Place of memory now in ruin.
This point overlooking the sea,
this cliff, this perch, paradise
to none but one who came
imagining he could be laird, could be
unmoored from class and caste.
The way past is always the way
through. Overland, we traversed
Blue Mountain, rocky passages
flanking us, abutted by gullies,
oversized plants casting their shadows.
The horses’ hooves trod and trod
until stone gave way to field,
and we entered the Rio Grande Valley,
approaching the house from behind—
first sight rising still in my mind,
bodying forth its false promise.
Leuk twice or ye leap ance echoes
now, late and fruitless. O, what foolishness
lies in the heart of man, gleaming
wish to be more that waits
for its chance to pounce and savage.

 

NA: I think of you as a social activist as well as a poet, professor, and mother. And you are writing these wonderful poems about Robert Burns. I’d love to hear you say a few words about your life as a poet in this difficult time—and how you put it all together.

SM: Thanks for all your kind words, Nin, and the good question here. I wouldn’t call myself a social activist. For me, that connotes being directly in the thick of political engagement or community organising and would mean being part of larger organisations or movements for social change in ongoing, sustained fashion—which I don’t do very much these days. Having said that, I do still distinguish between the work I do as a poet, when writing a poem, as being private vs. the work I do when reading poems and especially when teaching poetry, as being public and social. The latter comes out of being a poet but channels that self/knowledge/experience into my engagement with others and my service to others. When I’m in the role of facilitating workshops in community settings for example, which I do quite often, I am in the lucky position of being in the service of the art. It’s an ethical responsibility and one I take seriously. The bridge for me between being a poet and being a citizen of the world is in consciously seeing and speaking of the way that poetry, as with so many arts, can spur activism, how it can be a catalyst for change and for imagining the kind of change in the world we want to make manifest.

NA: Tell me about your new Burns project. How did this begin?

SM: The project began about four years ago when I was then living in London and had gone up to Scotland to give a reading. Being Jamaican and with a Scottish surname, I was naturally asked if I knew the story of Burns’s Jamaica connection. I didn’t. The story is a true one and is this: Burns had signed on to be a bookkeeper (an overseer) on a slave plantation in Jamaica. He had booked passage and was set to sail until a stroke of fortune changed his life. For many reasons, I found this story to be a thorn under my skin. Ultimately Burns didn’t go—he didn’t become imbricated in slavery—but what I couldn’t let go of is that he was ready to go. The book I’m writing is a book-length sequence of poems that imagines an alternate account of history, that gives one answer to the question of what would have happened had he gone.

NA: What is your secret to keeping the fire going—the poems, the engagement, the optimism?

SM: I love this question as it suggests I do all of this at once. I think, very much like you, I struggle with remaining optimistic right now, so I’ll speak to that part of your question at least. There are things I turn my attention toward deliberately that seem to help. One is history. As a poet, I am a lover of and lay student of the past (as the Burns’ project suggests) because it is a hopeful act for me, ironically, to interrogate the stories we tell of who we are. The past is always palpable to me, in the same way I know I carry my dead with me wherever I am in the present. This might sound morbid, but I often experience an eclipsing of myself—it is a tyranny the self!—in this way as being just the opposite. It’s a relief to see myself as small! Knowing and trying to sit with the disquietude of history reminds me that as bad as things might feel to me in the present, there have always been other moments like this one—and worse. This doesn’t diminish the losses I’m witnessing. Trump, who you mention specifically, is an unmitigated blight on this country and planet. The potential for ecological collapse is real and there is a huge amount at stake right now. But when I train my gaze on a different moment in human history or I take in a larger swath of time, that helps me to see this moment with greater perspective and, yes, with hopefulness. The other thing that helps has nothing at all to do with being a poet and everything to do with being a mother. I simply find I cannot endure for long the negative narratives you speak of so incisively in your blog here because I have a responsibility not to become entirely the Madwoman who wrote that poem you began with, who is very much drawn from the part of me that can easily and quickly fall into the mode of speaking she does. Knowing this about myself, for my children’s sake I have to sometimes shut out the ‘news’ and remind myself that life on this planet has always been chancy and that, yet, against those odds, it endures.

NA:I love that—against all odds, it endures. May we go together then, against the odds!

 

From Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books of poetry, published in the US and UK, most recently Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the 2018 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her work has appeared widely in the US, the Caribbean, and Europe, has been translated into several languages, and has received such recognition as a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress and a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. McCallum is a Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State University.

From Pity to Wisdom to Coercion [by Lionel Trilling]

 

 

<<<

Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

from The Liberal Imagination 

>>>

TITLE WAVE [By Steven Rea]

Ever write a poem, a story, a novel (hundreds of them, right?), and find yourself, at the end, in the throes of epic indecision, stymied and desperate to come up with the right title? The place-holder you have is either too telegraphic, or soporific, or sophomoric, or just plain wrong. 

On the other hand, ever find yourself staring at a blank page or screen, ready for the words to come pouring out in an exhilarating rush of killer metaphors and breathtaking reflections on the meaning of life, and the only thing stopping you from starting is the absence of a header, a title? How can you truly get going if the brilliant thing you're poised to produce comes with the wishy-washy appellation "Untitled?" 

As someone who has spent a good chunk of time delving into Hollywood history -- mostly via the satisfying-hobby-turned-ridiculous-obsession of collecting vintage publicity stills issued by the studios to promote and publicize their latest releases -- I think I may have a solution to this titular dilemma. I've purchased photos over the years (from dealers, auction houses, movie memorabilia shops) full of striking images of sultry starlets and dashing leading men, marvelous scenes of comic mayhem, romance, film noir menace and sci-fi strangeness, heralding movies that otherwise I would never have known existed.

 

Down through the decades since Silent Era days, the major motion picture studios and B-movie factories issued hundreds upon hundreds of movies every year, and most of them have faded into obscurity. But the titles of these movies? A few of them are priceless, and deserve to be resurrected and repurposed. There are no copyrights on movie titles, of course, and anyway, there's really nothing ethically shaky about taking found materials from popular culture and redeploying them in an altogether different context. Warhol, the Dadaists, Mark Bradford's multi-tiered canvases full of torn pages from old Marvel and DC Comics....

Inspiration can come from any corner, so herewith a list of a dozen titles, from films decades old, half-remembered or wholly forgotten, to get your creative juices flowing. The studio and year of release is included with the respective names, so you can duly note on your Acknowledgement page. Or maybe not.

Attack of the Puppet People (American International Pictures, 1958)

Doughnuts and Society (Republic Pictures, 1936)

The Great Mr. Nobody (Warner Bros., 1941)

Half a Sinner (Universal, 1934)

Hotel Haywire (Paramount, 1937)

I Dream Too Much (RKO Radio Pictures, 1935)

The Incredible Melting Man (American International Pictures, 1977)

The Magnificent Lie (Paramount Pictures, 1931)

Married Before Breakfast (MGM, 1937)

Naked Alibi (Universal Pictures, 1954)

Pardon My Past (Columbia Pictures, 1945)

The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (American International Pictures, 1958)

 

Squibs 327-333 [by Alan Ziegler]

327: My socks do match—they’re just not identical.

328: Two movies in which Robert Redford has a one-item, no-preparation, hand-held meal:

    All the President’s Men: Cellophane-wrapped grocery counter pastry.

    Brubaker: Chunk of raw cabbage.

 

329: If criminals really could turn themselves into the police they’d get away with almost anything.

330: Mr. Honeywell, meet Mr. Todd

331: From childhood through college I had a habit of playing with the hair behind my right ear. Playing doesn’t do it justice: I did masterful manipulations, curling my hair into satisfying textures. One day in a college class, a voice behind me said, “Stop it. You’ve got to stop it.” I did—forever. Now my habit is to manipulate words into satisfying textures, and I sometimes hear that voice: “Stop it. You’ve got to stop it.” I won't—ever.

332: Mr. Honeywell and Mr. Todd, meet Mr. Dithers.

333: When I was five, I was in the Peanut Gallery of The Howdy Doody Show. Buffalo Bob promised us a gift after the show if we behaved. I imagined perhaps a Mr. Bluster figure (I had to wait for Ebay to get one). But it was just a candy bar from a sponsor.
Recently, I realized there must be archival clips from the Howdy Doody Show and maybe I could spot myself. I went through the openings of several shows (smirking like a kid when Buffalo Bob addressed "Mr. Doody"), and there I was, a tad awkward with absolutely no idea that the future me would one day be watching. But was it really me? Erin said no, but she didn't know me then. I sent the clip to my sister, who also said no, but had evidence: "I was sitting next to you." I was most disappointed, until I watched again, imagining it as a clip from the bio-pic of my life, with an actor who would be billed as "Alan at Age 5." 

Steven Rea, Guest Author September 9-13

This week we welcome back Steven Rea as our guest author. Steven is the author of The Hollywood Book Club: Reading with the Stars, just out from Chronicle Books, and also Hollywood Cafe: Coffee with the Stars and Hollywood Rides a Bike: Cycling with the Stars. Formerly the film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, he lives and works in Philadelphia and Maine, and keeps a collection of archival Hollywood photographs that now numbers in the thousands. He posts new photos several times a week at Rides a Bike. Follow Steven Rea on Facebook and Twitter, @Steven_Rea.

Welcome, Steven.

In other news: Don't miss the Best American Poetry 2019 launch reading on September 19, 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM (EST) at the New School. (The Auditorium, Room A106, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011. More information here) 

-- sdl

Smoking Noir [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

What do you make of the cigarettes that get smoked in any Noir movie?

David Lehman:

Goddamn, they’re sexy.

Suzanne Lummis:

Sure are, and it’s clear that cigarettes had to go—no question about that—but the cinema lost a language. Aside from the smoking, the lighting of the cigarette could be handled so many ways with such different effects. Richard Conte, Robert Mitchum, all those guys—in two smooth gestures they’ll slide out that silver lighter and make the flame leap up, and we get the message—this is what unflappable cool looks like, virile confidence. 

Sometimes, men light each other’s cigarettes and that has meaning; often it’s about camaraderie. In Out of the Past, an easy-going ritualistic exchange occurs at the start of the first meeting between Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey and Kirk Douglas as the gangster Whit Sterling. Whit offers Jeff a cigarette almost before he’s got his foot in the door, but he already has one so he smoothly lights Whit’s who is reaching for his matches. It’s all quite friendly. Then, the camera cuts to Whit’s unsmiling gunman, Joe, whose eyes shift darkly between the two, sizing up this new guy, watching for unconscious indicators or one false move.

Those who don’t watch much noir, early or neo-, probably think a woman never has to light her own, a man’s always near-by and quick on the trigger, but, no, not always. For example, Faye Dunaway in Chinatown shakily lighting up, and Nicholson’s nasal drawl off-camera, “You’ve already got one going, Misses Mulray.” (The camera shows us her bejeweled hand rubbing out the live cigarette in the ashtray.) “Does my talking about your father make you nervous?”

Most often, and most memorably, men light women’s cigarettes.  I like Clare Trevor everywhere I see her, and I like a moment in Murder, My Sweet, when Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) fires up his lighter and she puts her hand on his and moves it toward the tip of her cigarette, “You will help me, won’t you?”  Marlowe: “Am I doing this for love, or will I get paid with money?”

But those moviemakers could achieve other affects outside of social interactions. I’ve never come across a mention of this in any writings about film noir, but I spot an eerie, ominous illusion near the end of Murder, My Sweet when, outdoors, Marlowe’s starting to make his way up to the luxurious piece of property perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. It’s night. He’s going to confront Helen, who is actually Velma, who is actually a killer. Inside the shadowy beach house, the camera focuses on the couch sunk in darkness. Heavy smoke rises from it and, all along, specks of light begin to glint like embers. Someone, something, set fire to the couch—this whole place is going to go up. Then Velma rises from the shadows with her cigarette, in her gown slashed with stripes of glinting sequins.   It’s a premonition of danger embodied by this woman. Soon, characters will be lying all over the room, dying of bullets.  

And me? I smoked for years then gave it up overnight. It was easy. It was nothing—I was never hooked on caffeine.  I did love the play of hands, the motions, the waving away of smoke, that mysterious shared thing between myself and whomever I was talking to, man or woman, who, without fail—in those days—was also smoking, both of us reaching for the same ashtray. Nothing can replace that wordless, silent lexicon of gestures, and I will never stop missing it. It just wasn’t worth dying for. 

David Lehman                   

I miss them. If I may quote myself, "Watching the stars / as they smoke in film noirs" makes me want to throw caution to the winds and light up an unfiltered Camel or Lucky. There’s an entire ritual involved: pulling the cigarette out of the pack, tapping it (if it’s unfiltered), lighting it with a match or lighter, taking the first satisfying long drag.  I have considered writing an ironic “modest proposal” in the vein of Jonathan Swift advocating the return of cigarettes to movies, but people have dissuaded me on the grounds that the irony would not be grasped.

This is the tenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here 

"Opening Shot": Toward "Chapter One" [by David Lehman]

Marsh Hawk Press, under the direction of Sandy McIntosh, has launched a monthly on-line feature in which poets are asked to write up the "chapter one" of their vocations. Among those who have written for the project are Denise Duhamel, Philip Lopate, and Jane Hirshfield. My own contribution is up now. I've called it Opening Shot and this is how it begins: 

<<<
In high school I read “Song of Myself” in a course in American literature that began with the poets who had three names (William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Julia Ward Howe, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and never reached the moderns who went by their initials (T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden). In that context it meant something that Whitman used no middle name and only a shortened version of his forename. I liked this fellow who was “mad for it to be in contact with me,” whether “it” stood for nature, the grass, a particular person, a brook—that was how I felt, too, in my more uninhibited moments. I liked the anthology excerpts so much I bought, with fool’s luck, a thin paperback of Leaves of Grass that called itself the “original edition,” edited by Malcolm Cowley. To this day I maintain that the 1855 edition is the greatest version of this great American poem, which Whitman revised often and not always for the better. >>>

Pictured above: David Lehman Stacey Lehman, Yukiko Kaneda

Four Amazing Quotes from Schopenhauer

<<<
Consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain. The brain, together with the nerves and spinal cord attached to it, is a mere fruit, a product, in fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism, in so far as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner working, but serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the external world

*
All philosophers before me, from the first to the last, place the true and real inner nature or kernel of man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul, as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking, and only in consequence of this, secondarily and derivatively, as willing .... My philosophy . . . puts man’s real inner nature not in consciousness but in the will.

*

For years we can have a desire without admitting it to ourselves or even letting it come to clear consciousness, because the intellect is not to know anything about it, since the good opinion we have of ourselves would inevitably suffer thereby. But if the wish is fulfilled, we get to know from our joy, not without a feeling of shame, that this is what we desired….

*

[Satisfaction can never be anything but temporary, because] it is always like the alms thrown to the beggar, which reprieves him today so that his misery may be prolonged till tomorrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with its constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we never obtain lasting happiness or peace.

>>>

The painting on the right is by Gail Campbell, 2016.

True News from Paris: eight well-loved performances [by Tracy Danison]

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker talks through "Violin Fase", Lafayette Anticipations 2018 © Tracy Danison

Over the next couple of  months I would like to report True News on creators and performances worth looking out for. A concept for a True News Mechanism came to me during the most recent unprecedented heat wave.

An individual whispers his or her sensory experience into the True News Mechanism’s reception trumpet. True News processors use the same COBOL X12-49A algorithm that enabled Jesus a smooth resurrection. Forty acres of glistening brass tubes offer honest whisperers designer glimpses of those dark gears that grind toward the True. Mechanism engineers heave suspect fabulators into the relentless mesh. There they go from being parts of the problem to being parts of the solution.

Metaphorically speaking, Hang Huang, who runs the English-language dance and travel blog DanceVisa, Catherine Zavodska, a culture influencer who heads up DanseAujourdhui, a dance-appreciation community that offers culture-oriented events and tourism, along with myself are the first persons to whisper into the Mechanism.

Catherine and Hang have a deep and abiding love for dance performance. Hang seems always to see where a performance is coming from, has the knack of seeing where the depths and weights of a performance lie. Catherine has more useful knowledge about dance than I could ever hope for; she always knows how to measure creative effort and execution.

With the aid of Catherine and Hang, the Mechanism and myself can report its first eight bits of True News from dance performance: eight well-loved pieces from the Paris Season 2018-2019. These include Ohad Naharin’s Decadance, performed at the Opéra Garnier, Ousmane Sy’s Queen Blood, performed at La Villette last Winter; Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Faun, performed at the at the Opéra Garnier last Fall; Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Violin Fase, her initiation piece revolving around Steve Reich’s music of the same name, danced by Yuika Hashimoto,  renewed last Fall at Lafayette Anticipations; Oona Doherty’s Hard to be Soft – A Belfast Prayer at Atelier de Paris in Spring 2019; and Damien Jalet’s Vessel, also last Spring; Noé Soulier’s exceptionally moving, almost-baroque Les Vagues, produced at the Palais de Chaillot last Fall; and Crystal Pite’s Season’s Canon, equally last Fall at Opéra Garnier.

Catherine Zavodska and I both well-loved Cherkaoui’s [Après-midi d’un] Faun[e]. The piece got me thinking about how Maurice Béjart and Rammallzee (‘The rhythm [dance] that breaks’) find shared culture space, but Catherine saw an orgasm in it. She is surely closer to Nijinksky’s intention. Her idea is that Cherkaoui has a talent for working performance “movement” from the ground up (as in break-dancing) then pushing it beyond “choreography” to discover (experience the unknown of), or uncover (experience beyond), a “real thing”, in which the performance is a visual, physical and emotional meeting point of spectator and creator intention.

Oona Doherty dis-covers a new continent of emotion in Northern Ireland © OonaDoherty

The Mechanism has identified four, including Faun, of the eight well-beloved pieces as visual, physical and emotional real things. Catherine delighted in Decadance, performed by the junior rank of the Opéra de Paris ballet, calling it “true” thing with “neither beginning nor end”, outside of time, as “a letting go”,  “a jubilation”. Touched by the deep realness of the performance, the Mechanism observes, last year I wrote of Crystal Pite’s Season’s Canon “… Way down there where once was Hell, I saw a man picking up a woman and knew that picking Karine up just like that [would make] her mine forever.” And. Ahh, God. There’s Noé Soulier’s Les Vagues. The choreographer’s sense of poetic schwerpunkt is penetrated and perfumed by the consistent kairos of movement. My performance note reads: “… and suddenly she says, gesture like an Egyptian – gestures that emphasize, underline, give meaning to her words rather than be words:

I begin to long for/A language lovers use/ Broken words

Inarticulate words / Like the shuffling of feet/ On the pavement

I have to tell you, it still makes me cry.

A burgeoning real thing also lies behind a focus on the particularness of a performance.

Catherine, for instance, sees “choreography” as the mesh of music and movement, not just movement with or to or around music as I often do. So, Cherkaoui’s achievement in Faun would be more about completing Débussy’s erotic impulsion than, as I feel it, about fleshing out the sense of Mallarmé’s poem. When Hang speaks of the performance of Violin Fase that he attended as “exceptional”, he is also using a particularity to speak of achieving a real thing performance. He points to de Keersmaeker’s “danced commentary” as key. Injured and unable to dance herself, as originally scheduled, de Keersmaeker came on to the performance floor to talk with spectators in the wake of the Hashimoto’s 15-Minute performance. As she talked, her movement physically, visually, emotionally doubled Hashimoto’s dance; she effectively (re-)created it as a “real thing”.

Critical focus, the Mechanism suggests, can even switch from the performance itself to the experience of uncovering or discovering the real thing. Hang characterizes Oona Doherty’s Hard to Be Soft - A Belfast Prayer as a “discovery” by display of impressive ability and energy. That’s entirely on target. Doherty, whom I discovered myself at her exceptional pictogram-performance Lazarus and the Birds of Paradise for Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales 2016 is a stochastic calculus of Hollywood musical, avant-garde contemporary dance and cinéma noir altered for performance theater. It puts across an extremely powerful performance-pictogram of the emotional state of Northern Ireland’s humans.

Ousmane Sy’s Queen Blood and Damien Jalet’s Vessel can also be looked at as real things uncovered or discovered. Vessel, according to Hang, uncovers “a new genre” of dance performance. Hang feels that Jalet, known for innovative scenography (Skid, which featured at Palais de Chaillot in the Fall, very nearly literally had performers dancing (vertical) on a wall) creates a new body language that pushes the performance into a thing identifiably new.  Queen Blood, according to Catherine, discovers a “conductor” within a choreographer. The all-women cast of Sy’s piece is made up of distinct individuals (so much so that I, for one, “forgot” their status as female and “remembered” their status as individual during the performance.). Sy’s choreography and directorial approach conduct rather than direct or manage the performers of his cast, solo and together. That is to say that under Sy’s “baton” each performer is a separate instrument of distinct sound and role, uncovering dance movement as corporal music.

For each of us, these eight pieces were True News, real things that you can share through our eyes. Mark the Creators on your bucket list as talent worth seeking out and the performances as new eyes to see through they made just for you.

Remembering JA the Day After He Died

<<<
Writing about him in the Times, poet Rae Armantrout reflected on how Ashbery’s down-to-earth humor manifested within his poems. “He is one poet who can somehow be simultaneously elegiac and playful, even goofy,” she wrote. “If you could find the impossible space where Franz Kafka overlapped with the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, John would be sitting there happily, grinning like the Cheshire cat.”
>>>

Click here for more of Daniel Witkin's piece, "How Poets And Novelists Are Mourning John Ashbery" (from The Forward, September 3, 2017)..

See also "Remembering JA," which David Lehman wrote for The American Scholar. https://theamericanscholar.org/remembering-ja/#.XSqz15NKiM9

Kent Johnson asks "Could Someone Tell Me Why?"

Kent Johnson has written an eight-page poem about The Best American Poetry, the American poetry scene and his place in it. "It is all in the honorable, august traditions of satire," he says. The poem is entitled "Could Someone Tell Me Why?" Click here to read the poem, which he prefaces with these sentences:

<<<
Yeah, so some of the people who were my former
friends are now dead. I feel bad about that, but then I
think to myself, Hey, life is short and at least you were
published in the Best American Poetry! No, I don’t
really mean that, just kidding, I’ve never thought that,
and never would I.
>>>

Met Percent: Week Five [by Alec Bernstein]

Streams and Mountains Without End

I did some Met mezzanine stuff, but now the second floor . . . 

China: The landscape in length: “The Mountains in Fog” is a scroll (1’ high and over 20’ long) and is “time over size”, “like time over strength” in “ruin lust” (see Week Two). The involvement of the viewer - walking the path - is a “different” form of  contemplation. 

The landscape in sheer size: “The Palace of Nine Perfections” [Yuan Jiang, Qing dynasty, 1691] is over 6’ high and 18’ long. It dominates the room; the impact is immediate. 

 

On the Importance of Being: Flowers and Birds

Exaltations of Nature. 

Vase with flowering plants and birds, China, late 17th-early 18th century, gallery 200.

Mankind . . . we regard as only one of Nature’s varied manifestations, and less worthy of appearing in the annals of Art than any other element: the fragile beauty of a flower or the graceful motions of a bird in flight rouses in our hearts, an emotion as poignant as any human loveliness or pain. - The Chinese Eye, Chiang Yee, 1935.

 

Moon Vase

Moon-shaped bottle, China, 18th century, “slippery stone”, gallery 200.

“Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do”. - Montaigne

 

The Celebration of Error

Kenzan-style Dish with Bamboo Leaves, Japan, 17th–18th century (not on view) kintsugi (kintsukuroi) gold lacquer repair.

Artist Uses Kintsugi to Mend Cracked Streets with Gold. https://mymodernmet.com/sidewalk-kintsukuroi-kintsugi-art/

 

Window onto Bamboo on a Rainy Day

“There are four principal ways of painting bamboo. In fair-weather, the leaves are spread out joyously; in rainy-weather, the leaves hang down despondently, in windy-weather, the leaves cross each other confusedly, and in the dew of early morning the leaves all point up vigorously.” - Henry P. Bowie, On the Laws of Japanese Painting, 1911.

Family apocrypha claims that at 2 I was bilingual in English and Japanese. Our gardener Mr. Yamamoto spoke no English, but our talks gave me an appreciation of bamboo, gardens, and the Japanese grid.

 

SAVE THE DATE: September 19, 2019, The Best American Poetry 2019 Launch Reading

7:00 PM to 10:00 PM (EST).

The Auditorium, Room A106, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall. 
66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011

The celebration to kickoff fall in NYC! Series editor David Lehman and guest editor Major Jackson headline an all-star roster of poets included this year's volume of the celebrated annual anthology. Featuring: Dilruba Ahmed, Catherine Barnett, Joshua Bennett, Chen Chen, Laura Cronk, Thomas Devaney, Martín Espada, Nausheen Eusuf, Camille Guthrie, Edward Hirsch, James Hoch , Bob Holman, Didi Jackson, Major Jackson, Deborah Landau, David Lehman, Gail Mazur, Shane McCrae, Jeffrey McDaniel, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Andrew Motion, John Murillo, Sharon Olds, Nicole Santalucia, Philip Schultz, Lloyd Schwartz, Jane Shore, and Kevin Young.

This event is free and open to the public. Books will be for sale and contributors will be available to sign your copy. 

Find more information here. 

--sdl

Why We Paint it Noir [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

Why are poets attracted to film noir?

Suzanne Lummis:

 

Well, out this way there aren’t as many poets who double as film noir buffs as one would expect, but, for some, my YouTube series produced by poetry.la, They Write by Night, has been their introduction to film noir and the poem noir, or my UCLA Extension Writers’ Program workshop, “Poetry Goes to the Movies.” In Los Angeles, the poet Cece Peri has struck black gold with her poems noir, which get published and re-published.   

The poem noir, when it works, can be remarkably appealing, and not necessarily as grim as one might think—so many different values, tones and approaches can come into play. Some of these poems conjure a kind of dark laughter in the face of the inevitable. That’s certainly an element of noir’s appeal for me, in film or on the page.  

One thing for sure, these days more women poets than men seem drawn to these movies, and they’re bringing unexpected perspectives. The poet Marsha de la O did something extraordinary—right after my own heart—with Janet Leigh’s appearance as the preyed upon Susie in Touch of Evil followed by her role as slashed-to-death Marion Crane in Psycho. “Janet Leigh is Afraid of Jazz” reads as one long hysterical plunge from damage to death, and—without being heavy-handed about it—speaks to the specific vulnerability of women in a violent world. 

David Lehman:

Many of us are attracted to the shadows, the stuff beneath the surface of human relationships, the things we do or fantasize doing when no one is looking. In noir, sex is the ultimate prize, but also the consummate killer. We love forbidden fruit. Of all the mammals, only humans have sex for reasons other than to perpetuate the species. The intensity of desire creates the motive for murder, whether acted on or not, and makes guilt and paranoia inevitable.  The tensions between man and woman animate this genre, are palpable, feel real. “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them”: the fundamental things apply as time goes by. The genre recognizes that we are fallible people, sinners, gamblers, drinkers, addicts, dreamers, losers. We occupy the night as night-club singers, piano players, thieves, detectives, kept women, greedy men with criminal minds almost as infinite as our lust for sex first and money second.

In a curious sense the poet’s identity in our society has more in common than meets the eye with a hard-boiled detective or noir loser.

Also, the genre has a certain charm. I can never get over the fact that gangsters and hit men wear double-breasted suits in these movies, the women are as stylish as they are dangerous, and many of the background songs (“Tangerine,” “How Little We Know,” “Laura,”” Too Marvelous for Words”)  have lyrics by Johnny Mercer.

Finally, this column appears on September 1, 2019, exactly eighty years to the day that Germany invaded Poland, World War II began, and W. H. Auden wrote "September 1, 1939." That poem more than any other explains we love noir.

This is the ninth in a series of exchanges about noir. Pictured: Janet Leigh on set and in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. For previous posts, click here

Auden Changes His Mind [by David Lehman]

Here it is again: September 1, 1939, eighty years later.

 

Can you picture Auden at that "dive" on Fifty-Second Street, (aka Swing Street) on that terrible day when the Germans invaded Poland and quaked the earth? One of the best stanzas, the fifth, is a metaphorical description of that bar and others like it.

Quiz of the day:
WHA disliked the last line of the penultimate stanza because he felt it was "dishonest," by which I think he meant "untrue."

He changed it to
(1) We must love one another and die
(2) We must love one another or die
(3) We must love one another or diet
(4) One must love mother nature or die
(5) If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Light up a Winston and think of dear Wystan. Bragging rights go to the winner!