The Best American Poetry

"Shaking Martinis" (from John O'Hara's "Butterfield 8")

<<<

"Tell Mrs. Liggett what you told me about shaking Martinis," said Nancy.

"Oh. yes," said Farley. "You know, like everyone else, I suppose, I've been going for years on the theory that a Martini ought to be stirred and not shaken?"

"Yes, that's what I've always heard," said Emily.

"Well, in London last year I talked with an English bartender who told me that theory's all wrong. American, he said."

"Scornfully," said Nancy.

"Very scornfully," said Paul.

"I can imagine very scornfully," said Emily.

 

-- John O'Hara, Butterfield 8 (1935)

>>>

Elizabeth Taylor won the "best actress" Oscar for her work in Butterfield 8 (1960)

 

-- DL

The Halloween Poet: On Keats’s Birthday [by David Lehman]

          Poor Keats. A Scorpio with Virgo rising and, just to clinch the deal, his moon in Gemini. This is the equivalent of being dealt the Fool, the Lovers (inverted), and the Tower as the three culminating cards in an eleven-card Tarot reading. There is sadness in his life, illness, a consumptive cough. But he has a generous soul, he meets afflictions with renewed resolve, he is capable of great feats of self-discipline. Willing to work hours on meters and rhymes, he is a born dreamer, who can shut his eyes and transport himself in a second to fairy lands forlorn, an enchantment of mist, an early autumn of heirloom tomatoes and three varieties of peaches. Life is a struggle, but he prevails, and then dies young.

          Born on the 31^st of October, Keats had a soft spot for Halloween and tried his hand at writing spooky verses that would scare school chums sitting around the campfire during the season of burning leaves. The fact that Keats's moon is in Gemini, that the nocturnal northeastern quadrant is predominant in his natal chart, and above all that Mercury is his ruling planet, supports the view of this poet as a divinely-ordained messenger of the gods trapped in the frail body of an undernourished London lad with his face pressed against the sweet shop window, as Yeats wrote.^[1]

          Keats's Venus is, like his sun, in Scorpio. This is crucial. It means he is as passionate as he is sensitive and a gambler not by instinct or by social association but by his intransigent attachment to his ideals. He can be loved by many but reserves his own love for one. Auden's poem “The More Loving One” depicts a conflict that Keats resolved each time he picked up his pen to write. He felt he was destined to be the more loving one in any partnership, and he would not have had it any other way, but he didn’t live long enough to test his resolve.

Keats loved the four elements and presented their interplay with the clarity that Vermeer brought to the study of light. Vermeer, too, was born on Halloween. In an unpublished story by E. M. Forster with a strong hint of bisexuality and a blithe disregard of historical possibility, the seventeenth-century Vermeer and the nineteenth-century Keats -- accompanied by Dorothy Wordsworth (nineteenth century) and Virginia Woolf (twentieth century) – meet in Oxford and discuss aesthetics and metaphysics as they float slowly down the Isis on a punt.

          The story that Keats died because of a bad review in an influential Edinburgh journal is to the biography of English poets what history was in the mind of the automobile manufacturer who invented the assembly line, bunk, but it was kept fresh by Byron’s oft-quoted couplet in Don Juan: “Tis strange the mind, that fiery particle / should be snuffed out by an article.” But the mischievous Byron, born on January 22 (1788) -- an Aquarius trailing clouds of Capricorn, and with Cancer as his rising sign -- was as conflicted on the subject of his younger Cockney-born contemporary as Emerson was about Whitman after the former praised the latter, who proceeded to enlarge Leaves of Grass almost beyond recognition.

          The position of Mercury in the third house has caused the greatest amount of comment among professional astrologers. The consensus view is that Keats resembled certain musical geniuses in his extraordinary talent, his humble origins, and his early death. Though he was less dashing than the noble Byron and less angelic of aspect than Shelley, all the women polled said they would welcome a relationship with Keats, especially if she is in England while he is in Italy writing long gorgeous letters to her about Shakespeare plays, the nature of inspiration, the smell of mortality, and what Adam felt like waking up in Eden. Keats proved that greatness descends on the novice only after he has opened himself up to the risk of failure or embarrassment.

If Shelley is the poet of the autumn wind, the wind that destroys and preserves, animating the leaves and the waves and the clouds in a fury of activity, Keats is the poet of autumnal ripeness. Here are the last three lines of “To Autumn,” his ode to the “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”:

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft 
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The closing music shows that Keats took to heart his own advice to Shelley (“load every rift with ore”). A comparison of the two poets -- the one prospective, anticipatory, the other all righteous fire and visionary fury but also retrospective and melancholy -- is a fascinating study in comparative astrology. It has been said that the single most revealing piece of information you may have about a potential dating partner is whether he identifies himself more with Keats or with Shelley.

          The muse visited Keats often in the spring of 1819. First came “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the lovers rushing away into the night; then “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” the lover seduced and abandoned. These poems were as immediate as dreams. And then came the odes, the greatest odes that English has to offer: to Psyche, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, on Melancholy, to Indolence. No poet ever packed as much magnificence in a line or wrote stanzas of such melodious charm that a simple, naive statement of Platonic optimism, which in lesser hands would be anticlimactic or worse, should seem to penetrate the heart of the mystery: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.”

[1] Note: If you mix up the names Keats and Yeats, or pronounce one as if it were the other, the chances of your appreciating either are diminished by a seventh but not eliminated. The two names are separated by nearly five decades but linked by lyrical genius, with the prophetic mode ascendant in Yeats, while Keats -- brainy, anxious, and quick as befits a son of Mercury -- wins the laurels for sensuality and freshness: the palpable bubbles in the wine glass, the burst of a grape in the satyr’s mouth, the humming of flies on the porch screen in August, keen fitful gusts of wind.

It was 90 years ago today. . .

Ninety years ago, the stock market crashed. It was on the 29th of October, a Tuesday, as it is this year. A little known fact is that the poet, professor and scholar John Hollander was born October 28, 1929, when the market fell thirteen per-cent. On the 29th, it lost another twelve percent, and the rout -- and panic -- was on. -- DL

<<<
Black Tuesday hits Wall Street as investors trade 16,410,030 shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not handle the tremendous volume of trading. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression.

During the 1920s, the U.S. stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929, a period of wild speculation. By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stocks in great excess of their real value. Among the other causes of the eventual market collapse were low wages, the proliferation of debt, a weak agriculture, and an excess of large bank loans that could not be liquidated. >>>

for more, link here.

Met Percent: Week Nine [by Alec Bernstein]

In Situ (Ex Situ)

(Left)  Asmat Tribe, New Guinea. 
(Right) Bis (funerary) Poles, Asmat peoples, 1960, gallery 354 (Nelson Rockefeller Collection).

The question that surfaced, after 3 trips to the Africa, Oceania, and the Americas galleries was one of context. Who were these made for? 

“Two polar types [of art] stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view.” - Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”

(Left) Prestige Stool: Female Caryatid, Buli Master, possibly Ngongo ya Chintu, 19th Century, gallery 352.
(Right) Prestige Stool: Female Caryatid, Songye Peoples, possibly, 19th-20th Century, gallery 352.

Many Important ritual items were not made to be seen. For the powerful leaders, prestige stools were wrapped in white cloth and hidden in a distant village. As exhibition value has increased (by capital according to the Marxists) cult value is harder to access. The artifacts are gorgeous, even when clearly not viewed as they were meant to be.

“I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.” - Frida Kahlo

 In Absentia

Michael C. Rockefeller, son of Nelson Rockefeller, adjusts his camera before taking pictures of Papuan men in New Guinea in 1961.
Revenge: Ber, head of one of the Asmat villages, was related to the men who killed Michael Rockefeller.

In 1969, the journalist Milt Machlin investigated Rockefeller's disappearance. Several leaders of Otsjanep village, where Rockefeller likely would have arrived had he made it to shore, had been killed by a Dutch patrol in 1958. This provided some rationale for the tribe’s revenge against someone from the "white tribe". Neither cannibalism nor headhunting in Asmat were indiscriminate, but rather were part of a tit-for-tat revenge cycle. So it is possible that Rockefeller found himself the inadvertent victim of such a cycle started by the Dutch patrol.

“After having a long time treated their prisoners very well, and given them all the regales they can think of, he to whom the prisoner belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends. They being come, he ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner, of which, at a distance, out of his reach, he holds the one end himself, and gives to the friend he loves best the other arm to hold after the same manner; which being done, they two, in the presence of all the assembly, despatch him with their swords. After that, they roast him, eat him amongst them, and send some chops to their absent friends. They do not do this, as some think, for nourishment, as the Scythians anciently did, but as a representation of an extreme revenge.” - Montaigne, Of Cannibals

“I am not sorry that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror of so cruel an action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own. I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead . . . ” - Montaigne, Of Cannibals

 

“Warming the Dance Space”

(Left) Helmut Mask, 19-20th c., Mende or Sherbro peoples, Gallery 350.

(Center) Headdress  Janus Mask, 19-20th century, Ejagham, Bale peoples, gallery 352. 

(Right) Moon Face Mask, 1880, Baule peoples, gallery 352, worn to “warm the dance space” at the beginning of a sequence known as “gbagba” or “mblo”.

Worn during funerals and initiations. Some are startlingly naturalistic and may be portraits of known individuals; others are highly stylized. There are three overall types: helmet masks that cover the wearer's head entirely, headdresses that are attached to basketry caps worn on top of the head, and masks that cover only the face.

Pre-Colombian Gold

Significant precious metalwork from the early Americas surpasses local 5th Avenue Retailers . . .

“The practice (from 2000 BC) only ceased when indigenous American societies lost access to gold during the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century.” - Met Text

Nice way to put the economic workings of colonialism. After 3,000 years of brilliant design, all gold ore went directly to Europe; do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Read Before Traveling

“These stick charts are memory aids used to navigate island positions and wave patterns. The exact significance was known only to its maker, and they were never carried to sea. That would question the navigator’s skill. They represent a system of mapping ocean swells, which was never before accomplished. 

Marshallese navigators used their senses and memory to guide them on voyages by crouching down or lying prone in the canoe to feel how the canoe was being pitched and rolled by underlying swells. there are four main ocean swells: the rilib, kaelib, bungdockerik and bundockeing.” - Met Text

Imagine figuring out that by lying in a canoe, you could feel the cross currents and tell where the islands are . . . .

This is impressive. 

Or . . . You can use your Hos for weather magic. With its legs of Sting Rays and a chant. As the climate crisis grows, if you can’t navigate it, pray.

Weather Charm (Hos), Caroline Islands, Micronesia, 19th-20th c., gallery 353

Preface to Lyrical Ballads [by Mitch Sisskind]

Consider the lilies of the field, they toil
not, neither do they spin, yet I say unto
you that even Solomon in his glory was
not arrayed as one of these. -- Matthew 6:28-29

I think Jesus Christ meant that
If you look closely at something
Like a lily you would see how
It would cost a lot of money for
A nice suit like that for a man
Or a nice dress for a woman.

But, and this is a big but: Jesus
Might have been joking or being
Sarcastic like if two rich men are
Hanging out at the country club
And one of them says sarcastically
How money is only pieces of paper.

Since nobody knows what Jesus
Meant it can be one thing at one
Minute and the opposite thing
The next minute, or both at once,
As John Ashbery said, ‘It had been
‘Raining but it had not been raining.’

So when Buddha heard what Jesus
Said about the lily he said, ‘He is not far
From Buddha-hood’ and when he read
Some Trees by John Ashbery he said,
‘The most beautiful first book of poems
‘Since Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium.’

How Noir Was My Valley: Have You Written a Noir Poem? [David Lehman asks Suzanne Lummis]

Lehman: Have you written a noir poem? Lummis: Here's one.

Femme Fatale

It’s a crime story she’s in:
betrayal and larceny, few clues.
Someone stole what she lived for,
made off like a thief in the night
or high noon. What shall she do?
This: slide a heel on each foot
and set out, snapping at each step.
The man she loves smiles
from the covers of glossy and
starstruck drugstore magazines.
Looks like he’s wrapped his movie,
dropped his wife on a Frisian Island
and is flying his girlfriend to St. Tropez.
The men who love her finger coins
in the stale linings of their front pockets,
and whimper What’s your name?
The job she wanted went
to the man who tells the truth
from one side of his mouth, lies
from the other: a bilingual.
The job she got lets her answer
the questioning phone all day.
Her disappointment has appetite,
gravity. Fall in, you’ll be crunched
and stretched thin as Fettuccine. Watch
out for her, this woman, there is more
than one. 

That woman with you, for instance,
checking herself in the mirror
to see where she stands—
she’s innocent so far, but someone
will disappoint her.

Even now you’re beginning to.
Even now you’re in danger.

-- Suzanne Lummis

(from In Danger (Roundhouse Press/Heyday Books)

Click here for other recent noir features we have posted on Sundays since July 2019.

What Picasso Saw (1940) [by David Lehman]

after fifty-nine years
he saw
the woman
with two faces

there was no such thing
as an ex-Catholic
or an ex-Spaniard
living in France
first Paris with Max
then back to Madrid
an old guitarist

what can you do
with blue, blindness
and the female nude
with two faces

Ma Jolie Fernande
Eva, Gaby, Pacquerette,
Irene Lagut, Olga,
Marie-Therese,
Francoise, Jacqueline

I the harlequin and the minotaur
you the women in the mirror

10 / 25 / 19 (Picasso's birthday)

Writing In The Face Of Death: Review of David Lehman's "One Hundred Autobiographies" [by Sandee Brawarsky in The New York Jewish Week]

David Lehman, October 23, 2019. photo © Stacey Lehman

Even when David Lehman can barely walk, he can write, and he can listen.

Throughout the three years of his struggle with bladder cancer, he writes every day. He has crafted those paragraphs and pages into “One Hundred Autobiographies” (Cornell University Press), a stirring memoir that unfolds in 100 short chapters.

The title was a gift from a friend, the poet Mark Strand, who told Lehman that he wanted to write a memoir called “One Hundred Autobiographies.” In 2014, when both Strand and Lehman were battling cancer, Strand told his friend that he could have the title “if he didn’t get there first.” Strand died later that year.

Lehman is a distinguished poet, writer, literary critic, teacher and anthologist who divides his time between New York City and upstate Ithaca. Among his many books of poetry are “New and Selected Poems,” “Yeshiva Boy” and “The Evening Sun,” which was part of his five-year-long project of writing a poem a day. He inaugurated and edits “The Best American Poetry” series, and also published nonfiction works including “The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets” and “A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs.” A prolific writer, he contributes a regular column to The American Scholar.

In the summer of 2014, Lehman is in pain and senses that something is wrong. Cancer is the last thing on his mind. He is sent to a series of doctors and undergoes many painful procedures before being diagnosed. And then there are more tests, surgery, other procedures, some redone a number of times; he is at times on the edge of life.

Continue reading here.

Machine de cirque: something improbably different at La Scala [by Tracy Danison]

Machine de Cirque, quantum acrobacy with gemütlichkeit ©Loup-William Théberge

Imagine the Marx Brothers endowed with Buster Keaton’s naïve humor, tutored under Zen discipline by Cirque du Soleil’s best acrobats. You have pretty much imagined Machine de Cirque – acrobatic performers Raphaël Dubé, Yohann Trépanier, Ugo Dario, Maxim Laurin and Frédéric Lebrasseur – a circus company from Québec, currently at La Scala Paris.

Machine is funny, sweet, strong, skilled, focused.  Especially, it’s subtly exciting: perfomer leaps, twists, bounds, tricks and turns consistently touch the limits of possibility, play out where luck and ability meet in fluctuating proportions. Machine de cirque is, as Monty Python once put it, “something entirely different”. Maybe they’ve invented quantum acrobatics. Anyhow, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Witty and complicit like the Marx Brothers: like cows in the presence of a particularly well-endowed bull, we adults nervously pawed and snorted from the beginning to the end of the show. Like Buster Keaton, boyishly joyous and plain sympathique: the gurgly, delighted laughter of the children in the audience filled the air as these five big boys mimed silly suavity with girls, played with the nakedness taboo and good-naturedly whacked each other for the hell of it. Skilled like Cirque du Soleil under Zen discipline: there is, I think, some talent and mental discipline involved in holding sideways by the soles of one’s feet. I mean, what kind of force is required to stand, literally, horizontal, like a flag stretched in the wind?

Frédéric Lebrasseur, the troupe’s drummer-musician-clown, opens the show by slapping up a beat. He uses the beat as a lion tamer might use a whip butt and hoop: to keep his charges grouped and circulating in rhythm, marking territory. Acrobats Dubé, Trépanier, Dario and Laurin prowl around a tall center-stage scaffold-like construction that is drawn forward enough that it narrows stage front to the 50- or 60-foot square rectangle that they mark as performance. Hanging above them are North America’s mantraps: slack wires, insulators, pipes, poles and rails and wheels and planks.

Machine de Cirque, something entirely different with skits for the kids in us ©Loup-William Théberge

Because performers are elbow to elbow, because a spectator sees everyone moving together in the same straitened space, because of the performers’ energy and concentration, the crowding transforms such fairly standard acrobatic feats as bat juggling or mounting a high-seated unicycle into rather tense drama.

Machine de cirque’s derring-do, boyish joyousness, charm, Zen-strength skill and mastery of drama are not however what makes it entirely different. It’s the troupers’ interpersonal trust and solidarity that does that.

Other acts strive to perfect execution of the just-possible – to get to the “ooohhh-aaahhh point”. Most circus acrobats, I expect, let go of the trapeze wondering, “Have I got the trick right?”. Machine de Cirque’s acrobats, on the other hand, strive for the – “Holy-Cats! point”. As one of them launches roof-ward, I expect he wonders, “Is it the right moment for this?” That’s because, at the point where the mesh of probability begins to overtake possibility, it’s the drama of process that counts. Neither the acrobat or the spectator knows if the trick will work until it does. It’s no longer a question of getting it right or failing. Failing – missing, slipping, falling – is as much success as succeeding. And where failing means breaking your own neck or somebody else’s back, trust and solidarity are not merely necessary, but a necessary condition for daring the trick at all. So, something entirely different.

Machine de Cirque left butterflies in my stomach and it’s been a while since a show did that.

Machine de Cirque plays at La Scala Paris until 3 November but continues touring in Europe and elsewhere. Watch for it wherever on the planet you may be.

"Perfidia" [as sung by Helen Forrest with the Benny Goodman band] plus a poem

Perfidia

You don’t know who these people are, or what
They’ll do to you if you’re caught, but you can’t
Back out now: it seems you agreed to carry
A briefcase into Germany, and here you are,
Glass in hand, as instructed. You rise to dance
With the woman with the garnet earrings, who is,
Of course, the agent you’re supposed to seduce
And betray within the hour. Who would have known
You’d fall in love with her? Elsewhere the day
Is as gray as a newsreel, full of stripes and dots
Of rain, a blurred windshield picture of Pittsburgh,
But on the screen where your real life is happening
It is always 1938, you are always dancing
With the same blonde woman with the bloodshot eyes
Who slips the forged passport into your pocket
And says she knows you’ve been sent to betray her,
Or else it is seventy degrees and holding
In California, where you see yourself emerge unscathed
From the car crash that wiped out your memory,
Your past, as you walk into a gambler’s hangout
On Sunset Boulevard, in a suit one size too large.
And the piano player plays “Perfidia” in your honor,
And the redhead at the bar lets you buy her a drink.

-- David Lehman (from Operation Memory, 1990)

10/22/2019 (by Mitch Sisskind)

It’s my birthday, I’m 147, I’m 741,
I wake in darkness lying on my side
And as I feel a very slight stirring
Against my back I wonder might
This be from the Cthulhu Mythos:
Yig, or Olkoth, who enters the world
Through glass eyes in the statues
Of the Virgin Mary. Oh, you callow
Undergraduates, I’m being serious
Here and the windows tightly shut
Though they may be hardly mitigate
The I-10 freeway’s 4:30 AM roar
From half a mile away. Are you 17,
Honey? Are you 24? Moi, I am 812.

 

Noted with Pleasure [by Stacey Lehman]

On Sundays my father brought home the New York Times and a dozen bagels. We spread out the sections on the dining room table and sometimes read aloud to each other. Mostly, we ate our bagels and read in silence. The Book Review used to run "Noted with Pleasure" on its back page, a series for which it excerpted passages from a current book. "Noted with Pleasure" has gone the way of the "author's queries" (who remembers those?) but I've saved a few from the early 1990s. Here are two of my favorites: 

--sdl

Mary Jo Bang and David Lehman Read Their Poems at DIA

Happy birthday, Mary Jo Bang. . .

Harley McNair, Student [by Mitch Sisskind]

Harley McNair
Student

“Hi, are you from Possumneck?”
This is the greatest pickup line 
In the world but you got to know
How to say it like you’re excited, 
So It’s not like a question, like it
Ends with an exclamation mark!

Why is it the greatest pickup line?
Well, no matter what she says
You have something else to say. 
Most of them of course are not from 
Possumneck so you say, “I knew 
“A girl there who looked just like you!”

Or maybe she is from Possumneck,
Or maybe she just says she is from 
There to play along with you a bit.
Then you say, “I used to live there
“And I saw you on the street one day
"But I thought we would never meet!”

I am in Phi Delta Theta and we have
Passed this pickup line to each other
And we laugh about it because nobody
In Phi Delta Theta is from Possumneck.
But there actually is a place called 
Possumneck which is in Attala County.

Harold Bloom: Every Inch a Genius [by David Lehman]

Harold Bloom, the Yale University eminence who died last week at age 89, was the most famous, most prolific, and—to use the apt word—most influential literary critic in America from the time he published The Anxiety of Influence in 1973. The title of that book has entered our critical vocabulary, as has Bloom’s thesis that a “strong” poet must overcome the influence of a powerful precursor. To become himself, Wordsworth had to contend with Milton, for example, while John Ashbery had to endure a wrestling match with Wallace Stevens.

In the books he wrote in the aftermath of The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom employed an esoteric critical vocabulary—askesis, clinamen, agon—that didn’t catch on, but what succeeded spectacularly in such books as A Map of Misreading (1975) was his ingenious effort to integrate Freud usefully into the interpretation of texts. Bloom also distinguished himself by the force of his assertions and the excellence of his judgment. With great fervor, he saluted the legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and championed such contemporary poets as Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, and James Merrill way ahead of nearly everyone else.

When, during the culture wars of the 1980s and since, the literary canon came under attack, Bloom was among the most voluble defenders of great books and the related ideas of genius and originality, which academics were doing their best to deconstruct, a shifty word that in this context means “to destroy.” The Western Canon (1994) was a best seller, with chapters on Chaucer, Cervantes, Milton, Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Jane Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and other truly great authors. Bloom’s assertions were sometimes controversial and almost always compellingly worded. I just pulled my copy from the shelf, and at random plucked these three remarkable quotes:

—“All literature is plagiaristic” (inasmuch as all writing feeds on the “communal”).
—Henry James, reviewing Drum Taps, dismissed Whitman as “only, as it were, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day.”
—“Strangeness … is one of the prime requirements for entrance into the canon.”

The use of “strangeness” or “the uncanny” as a criterion for evaluating poetry was just one of Bloom’s original insights. Keep reading by clicking here.

Ballet de Lorraine’s “For Four Walls” puts a mirror to Merce Cunningham’s palimpsest [by Tracy Danison]

Petter Jacobsson/Thomas Caley, “For Four Walls”, Ballet de Lorraine 2019©Laurent Philippe

Histoires sans histoire(s) is an intercalation of Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley’s For Four Walls and Merce Cunnigham’s Fabrications and Sounddance, staged at the Théâtre National de la Danse (Palais de Chaillot) as part of the Festival d’Automne’s celebration of the centenary of the celebrated choreographer’s birth. Jacobsson and Calley are co-directors of the Ballet de Lorraine. 

Whatever Fabrications and Sounddance may say about Cunningham’s genius, Histoires certainly is (yet another) proof of the Ballet de Lorraine’s excellence as re-creator of old stories and creator of new ones.

For Four Walls opens the old story: Fabrications and Sounddance follow. With 24 performers dancing within mirrors that double and triple or quadruple movement, with pianist Vanessa Wagner perched over a single grand set two-thirds off-center stage flawlessly executing John Cage’s pure chord within a single sound, the company re-creates the “lost” content of Cunningham’s Four Walls, creating Histoires sans histoire(s). They put up a mirror where by looking straight ahead onlookers also see what is behind.

 

Merce Cunningham, “Fabrications,  Ballet de Lorraine 2019©Bernard Prudhomme

The arrangement makes Histoires work visually and psychically as a palimpsest does, showing everything all at once but also as single units, as if each thing were written on distinct, separated surface. Just as with a palimpsest, despite a saturation of apparently random positions of words and ideas, the eye and brain always know where they are as the spirit explores the potentials.

In the mirror Histoires holds up, I saw that the recursive palimpsest of Fabrications and the chaotic sensuality of Sounddance are not meant only as a questioning of dance forms. They are also as a statement of physical or psychic truth. And looking in the mirror provided by Jacobsson and Caley, I could see and feel the newness that is Cunningham play out. I could see how he empowered me as onlooker to create or “find” for myself the infinite filigrees of sense in the art of human movement: to create my personal palimpsest of Cunningham's famous 64 underlying figures (by coincidence the same number of underlying figures as the I Ching).

 

Merce Cunningham, “Sounddance”, Ballet de Lorraine 2019©Laurent Philippe

And, as the remarkably talented dance performers of the Ballet de Lorraine in the mirror before me sprang for themselves, sprang for and with each other, moved apart from and towards, through, to, one another, sprang inside themselves, as I gave these doubling men and women a pattern, as they gave each other and themselves a pattern, I felt absolutely certain that “random”, “recursion”, “synchronicity”, “dissociation”, “association”, “coincidence” are all the same damned thing, all as solidly linked and as eternally true as any reality that I can kick. I swear that I texted that to a friend while still sitting gazing at the empty stage where Histoires sans histoires had been. 

Histoires sans histoire(s), was created as part of the Festival d’Automne 2019 Merce Cunningham Centenary celebration and produced jointly by the CCN - Ballet de Lorraine, Théâtre National de la Danse-Chaillot, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, Festival d’Automne à Paris. It was staged for the first time from 12-16 October 2019 with the usual technical-esthetic verve of the Théâtre National de la Danse at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris.

Happy Birthday, Mr Pinsky [by David Lehman]

As one who believes
in the poetics of the big tent,
I say we make this an annual event
in the season of changing leaves.
And this year, as you turn seventy-seven,
whom do I see
in heaven
but Igor Stravinsky
speaking for all
In celebrating, as a rite of fall,
your birthday, Mr. Pinsky.

David Lehman

10 / 17 / 17

As one who believes
in the poetics of the big tent,
I say we make this an annual event
in the season of changing leaves.
And this year, as you turn seventy-seven,
whom do I see
in heaven
but Igor Stravinsky
speaking for all
In celebrating, as a rite of fall,
your birthday, Mr. Pinsky.

David Lehman

10 / 17 / 17

Harold Bloom: Born to Teach [by David Lehman]

Word of Harold Bloom's forthcoming book -- on the King James Version, 500 years old in 2011 and still the best of Bibles  -- excites this reader as a volume from no other contemporary critic can do. Bloom's passion for literature, his love of it, is infectious and informs every page he writes. One feels, reading Bloom on great books, that if he couldn't write, he wouldn't live; that writing for Bloom is an extension of reading, and reading comes as close to living itself as any purely intellectual activity can do. Edmund Wilson wrote that Lenin identified himself with history but also identified history with himself, a very different thing. Substitute Bloom for Lenin and Literature for History in that formulation and it works as well. Bloom resembes the characters he likes the most: he has a Falstaffian appetite, a gargantuan grasp of literature, a prodigious memory worthy of "Funes the Memorious" in the story by Jorge Lus Borges; and he enjoys tilting quixotically at windmills, which he does with the requisite zeal and the gift for a memorable phrase. 

I'll have more to say on The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible, which Yale Universty Press will bring out in September. For the moment just a few thoughts about the title, both halves. The principal title is unusual because it echoes T. S. Eliot as much as Eliot's scriptual sources, an association one doesn't expect Bloom to pursue. But it's the subtitle that I especially like, for "appreciations" in the sense intended by Bloom as by Walter Pater before him is precisely what we need and do not get from the literary critics of our time. More power to him: the very word is anathema in academic circles.

I thought I'd take one of Harold's books off the shelf in the sun this afternoon, and it's How to Read and Why (1999), which contains commentary on stories, poems, novels, and plays -- enough to fuel the reading list for at least two seminars, though the book is meant to reflect, Bloom says, "reading as a solitary praxis, rather than as an educational ernterprise." The aim is the "restoration of reading," taking it back from the academics. The book begins with a credo in five principles, three derived from Emerson, one from Samuel Johnson, and one representing Bloom's own contribution. They are:

-- Clear your mind of cant (Samuel Johnson)
-- Do not attemt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read. (Emerson)
-- A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. (Emerson and Wallace Stevens)
-- One must be an inventor to read well (Emerson)
-- The "recovery of the ironic" -- and here Bloom is at his most expansive. One senses that he hasn't said this before. Consider this short but rhetorically powerful clarifying passage and its unusually personal coloration:

<< Think of the endless irony of Hamlet, who when he says one thing almost invariably means another, frequently indeed the opposite of what he says. But with this principle I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what has been civilized in our natures. >>

The introduction of Hamlet as the supreme exemplar of a man of irony gives us a working definition of irony and implicitly conveys the professor's abilty to understand Hamlet as a version of himself. There follows the unabashed note of the personal: "despair" -- and the surprise of a simile that obliges us to consider the "ironic" and the "solitary" as related states of mind and being. And then comes the twist ("and yet") that precedes the final blunt universal assertion, which manages to sound plausible and slightly outrageous at the same time. "The loss of irony is the death of reading." The syntax is that of Wallace Stevens, an old Bloom favorite, and the thought is an adaptation of a Stevens aphorism. But Bloom makes it his own. Here he is, two pages later, summing up:

<< Irony demands a certain attention span, and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas, even when they collide with one another. Strip irony away from reading, and it loses at once all discipline and all surprise. Find now what comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and considering,and it very likely will be irony, even if many of your teachers will not know what it is, or where it is to be found. Irony will clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you blaze forth as the scholar of one candle. >>

Bravo. -- DL

from the archives; first publoished August 20, 2011

I'll have more to say on The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible, which Yale Universty Press will bring out in September. For the moment just a few thoughts about the title, both halves. The principal title is unusual because it echoes T. S. Eliot as much as Eliot's scriptual sources, an association one doesn't expect Bloom to pursue. But it's the subtitle that I especially like, for "appreciations" in the sense intended by Bloom as by Walter Pater before him is precisely what we need and do not get from the literary critics of our time. More power to him: the very word is anathema in academic circles.

I thought I'd take one of Harold's books off the shelf in the sun this afternoon, and it's How to Read and Why (1999), which contains commentary on stories, poems, novels, and plays -- enough to fuel the reading list for at least two seminars, though the book is meant to reflect, Bloom says, "reading as a solitary praxis, rather than as an educational ernterprise." The aim is the "restoration of reading," taking it back from the academics. The book begins with a credo in five principles, three derived from Emerson, one from Samuel Johnson, and one representing Bloom's own contribution. They are:

-- Clear your mind of cant (Samuel Johnson)
-- Do not attemt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read. (Emerson)
-- A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. (Emerson and Wallace Stevens)
-- One must be an inventor to read well (Emerson)
-- The "recovery of the ironic" -- and here Bloom is at his most expansive. One senses that he hasn't said this before. Consider this short but rhetorically powerful clarifying passage and its unusually personal coloration:

<< Think of the endless irony of Hamlet, who when he says one thing almost invariably means another, frequently indeed the opposite of what he says. But with this principle I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what has been civilized in our natures. >>

The introduction of Hamlet as the supreme exemplar of a man of irony gives us a working definition of irony and implicitly conveys the professor's abilty to understand Hamlet as a version of himself. There follows the unabashed note of the personal: "despair" -- and the surprise of a simile that obliges us to consider the "ironic" and the "solitary" as related states of mind and being. And then comes the twist ("and yet") that precedes the final blunt universal assertion, which manages to sound plausible and slightly outrageous at the same time. "The loss of irony is the death of reading." The syntax is that of Wallace Stevens, an old Bloom favorite, and the thought is an adaptation of a Stevens aphorism. But Bloom makes it his own. Here he is, two pages later, summing up:

<< Irony demands a certain attention span, and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas, even when they collide with one another. Strip irony away from reading, and it loses at once all discipline and all surprise. Find now what comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and considering,and it very likely will be irony, even if many of your teachers will not know what it is, or where it is to be found. Irony will clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you blaze forth as the scholar of one candle. >>

Bravo. -- DL

from the archives; first publoished August 20, 2011

In Bojaxi Gezalem (by Mitch Sisskind)

I traveled to Bojaxi Gezalem. I visited the marketplace. I said,
“Nuk mos a mund majtas,” which means, “I have been tooting
my horn.” I had meant to say, “Ndaloni a mund falamenderit,”
which means, “Fruit is what I am eager to buy.” They laughed
at me.

In the hospital I said, “Desha pulla palko te plote,” which means,
“This is the weight.” I had meant to say, “Mund ma trgoni pk
vizat,” which means, “There is no need for you to make such a
fuss about it.” They laughed at me.

I was in the airport. I said, “Eshte per quind shkone,” which means,
“I am looking for a loophole.” I had meant to say, “Eshte me
didjde det bakine,” which means, “This is the window where one
buys the funnies.” They laughed at me.

I went to the brothel and said, “Mund a mund verit kanitier,” which
means, “I need the tow truck.” I had meant to say, “Kifit mos
vazo takoni,” which means, “From now on I will try to be
spontaneous.” They laughed at me.

I prayed and said, “Ora kur mur shesh bardha,” which means,
“My sin is always before my eyes.” I had meant to say, “Ju
duhet keni prisni lema thoma,” which means, “Lead me in the
correct path.” No matter, God heard my prayer!

 

Death and Noir: Lummis Asks Lehman

Suzanne Lummis:

David, in your book forthcoming from Cornell University Press, A Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, you confront mortality, not just death in the abstract but --with your cancer diagnosis -- death as a more immediate threat.  This got me thinking of how many times in my life I thought I might die -- not eventually, but, like, Right Now. First time I was 18. I was over-reacting, sure. But it was an awful lot of blood. Out in the open air where it was not supposed to be. I don't think this is unrelated to my attraction to noir. How about you?  Did your immersion in film noir come into play when you got your diagnosis and had to think about the ultimate Noir? 

David Lehman: I am superstitious person and have had recurring nightmares in which I die because I misjudged my ability to cross the street and am struck by a car. Sometimes I fall down a steep flight of stairs because I forgot to hold the bannister. My superego is too strong for me to get into any real trouble, so I like going to noir valley for my dose of vicarious vice. When I was sick and didn’t have enough energy to get off the couch, I watched old movies – including a bunch of noirs with Dana Andrews. Laura, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, While the City Sleeps, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Fallen Angel.

In 1956 and ’57, when I was eight, my idea of the grown-up American male was Dana Andrews, whom I saw in such pictures as Zero Hour! and Comanche. Years later I saw his most successful pictures, Laura and The Best Years of Our Lives. I identified with his plight in the latter:  a returning war veteran who can’t get a job and is trapped in a bad marriage.

In the Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger noirs, he always communicates a certain nervousness – like a man who has suffered a nervous breakdown, a man who needs to play with a pocket pinball game to help control himself. There is a suppressed anger and energy, and at the same time he is capable, confident, handsome, and at ease in his body whether cast as a detective, a cop, or a newspaperman. Dana Andrews had the best poker face in noir. I read his obituary in 1992. He was an alcoholic.  Drunk or sober he never missed a word. And I thought: it figures.

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