The Best American Poetry

“The New Colossus” Translation Project [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

“The New Colossus” Translation Project (spearheaded by Alicia Ostriker, Mihaela Moscaliuc, and Tess O’Dwyer and to be hosted by AJHS)

This past summer, faculty and students in the M.F.A Program at Drew University honored the formidable Alicia Ostriker for her work as poet, mentor, scholar, feminist, activist, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and New York State Poet Laureate. As part of the celebration, we had translated and read some of her poems in our native, heritage, or acquired tongues. Something magical happened within the walls of the room as it gradually filled with Spanish, Arabic, Yiddish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Sicilian, French, German, Russian, Romanian. Afterwards, Alicia and I decided that we needed to replicate and extend that experience. It didn’t take much to realize how that polyphony was about more than sound and multilingualism. As we left the celebration, we stepped back into a world steeped in inflammatory nationalist rhetoric, a world that had incorporated monolingualism into its mechanisms of oppression.

I proposed we choose a poem and reach out to poets willing to give it life in other languages. Brilliantly, Alicia suggested “The New Colossus,” which had been resonating, for more than a century, with millions of people. Written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, as part of an effort to raise funds for the Pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, it was etched on a plaque and attached to the pedestal in 1903, seven years after the statue was erected. Alicia’s personal involvement with "The New Colossus" was lifelong. She knew the poem as a child, because her mother would quote it to her, along with poems by Tennyson and Browning. Like so many immigrants, her mother believed in America as "the melting pot," and the Statue of Liberty poem and its symbolism fit into that understanding. Alicia’s mother, and in fact all her grandparents, arrived in the New World at the turn of the 20th century.

I arrived from Romania in 1996, just a few years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and although my point of entry was not Ellis Island, but the Newark International Airport (NJ), I thought I had caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty before landing. I wanted to believe so anyway, as I had spent the last leg of the trip peering out of the small window, searching.

A month after Alicia and I first spoke of the “The New Colossus,” in an interview with NPR, Principal Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli argued that the Lazarus poem should be amended to convey that immigrants are welcomed only if “they can stand on their own two feet, be self-sufficient, [and] pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” This, he argued, was in line with the “American tradition.” Such rhetoric rendered our project particularly timely. “The New Colossus” was written in a time of acute nativist and anti-immigrant sentiment. We are reliving that time. The targeted immigrant groups differ, but the fervor of the rhetoric is strikingly similar. Our project became inevitable. An idea that emerged on the playground of translation took root in socio-political terrain. We sent a call out to poet-translators and the overwhelmingly positive response was encouraging. At this time Tess O’Dwyer, whose mother is Korean and her father Irish-American, and who is a superb translator and editor whose non-profit management firm works with various cultural organizations, joined our project. We received translations of “The New Colossus” into Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish, Spanglish, Persian, Sicilian, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian, Ukrainian, French, Albanian, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Basque, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Slovak, German, Swedish, Irish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Turkish, Czech, Haitian Creole, Argentinian Spanish, Filipino, Korean, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, Esperanto, Greek, Shona, Kumanji, Turkmen, and Isthmus Zapotec. The poems are accompanied by the translators’ brief comments on their or their ancestors’ immigration experiences.

Tess O’Dwyer was instrumental in helping us to secure a host. Here are her words on the process: As soon as I heard about The New Colossus Translation Project, I contacted the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), which hosts the Emma Lazarus Project. Amidst their Lazarusian archival exhibitions, curricula, and poetry contests, I saw a heart-snatching video of talented children writing poems to The Statue of Liberty today—and that cinched it. 

The New Colossus Translation Project has joined The Emma Lazarus Project at AJHS (https://ajhs.org/emma-lazarus-project) and will launch later this spring. It will be an integral part of public programming for the exhibition “From the Sitting Room to the Soap Box: Emma Lazarus, Union Square, and American Identity,” and part of their permanent archives.

The forty plus trove of translations (including an intersemiotic one into a musical composition) gifts the Mother of Exiles with the ability to welcome migrants, immigrants, and refugees in their own native or heritage tongues. Such a gesture of unconditional hospitality might remain, especially in the current political climate, utopian. The radical multilingualism of Mother of Exile is a metaphor. Metaphors, however, are not without agency.

As Alicia Ostriker points out, in a world of escalating tensions, of fear of (im)migrants, and of xenophobia, this poem remains radical. What’s significant too is that the poem doesn't attack the haters; instead, it offers an alternative ideal. Also, think of the thousands of heroic statues of Men on Horseback. "Mother of Exiles" may be a stereotype, but she's a new, exciting one: a female hero.

Years ago, when invited by the Library of Congress to record something for its “Poetry of America” project, Alicia chose this sonnet and talked about it as key to defining who we were. Then in 2018 she quoted it as part of a lecture on “Poetry and the City,” mentioning that it was a perfect refutation of Auden's famous pronouncement that "Poetry makes nothing happen": Auden is wrong! When France gave us the statue, its official name was "Liberty Enlightening the Nations," and it was all about how America and France were allies; we were both republics that had overthrown monarchies. It had nothing whatsoever to do with immigration.  But the poem changed all that. It transformed the meaning of the statue, the meaning of the Port of New York, and ultimately the meaning of America. It directly opposed the pervasive sentiment that saw immigrants as dirty and diseased criminals.  It insisted on re-defining us as a nation of immigrants.

We hope the project grows (through further ‘installments’) and that, in time, the Mother of Exiles acquires enough languages to speak to all minority groups in the U.S. and beyond. Tess, who is herself a consummate translator (see her translations of Alberto Blest Gana’s Martin Rivas and Giannina Braschi’s Empire of Dreams and Yo-Yo Boing!) remarks upon the already impressive range of our collection: As an indication of linguistic range, the project features Emma Lazarus’ biographer Esther Schor translating “The New Colossus” into Esperanto, Israeli-based poet Karen Alkalay-Gut rendering it into Hebrew, Rose Waldman into Yiddish, Ming Di into Chinese, Dunya Mikhail into Arabic, and Emma Asonye into Igbo. The range of artistry is inspiring. With Spanish, for example, we have Argentine poet Lorraine Healy translating crisp to the literal edge of each line, while Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi riffs metaphorically on “The New Colossus” as though it were an arrangement of a song to American immigration in the Obama and Trump era, rather than a sonnet addressing immigration in the Cleveland and Roosevelt era. 

We have been asked, at various points, to comment on the translations themselves. That is beyond the purpose of our project, although we hope for opportunities (perhaps through the AJHS platform and/or other online venues or discussion panels) to engage our contributors in discussions about the process. Each poet-translator approached the highly formal qualities of the poem (a Petrarchan sonnet whose diction may feel highly elevated and antiquated) on their own terms. I assume choices were informed by multiple factors, including the nature of the synergy between the host and guest language, the translatability of form and music, personal aesthetics, and/or politics. Some initial contributors withdrew when they realized how impossible a task preserving the sonnet’s formal qualities might be, while others declared themselves surprised by how amenable their mother tongues had turned out to be to those same qualities. Others sensed right away that they needed to do away with the sonnet form and compensate in other ways. We imposed no restrictions and provided no particular guidelines, choosing to trust instead the craftmanship of the contributors from whom we solicited work.

Alicia mentioned in a conversation that for her this project was not about “making artistic judgements,” but “about getting at a significant human experience.” I agree, and also embrace Tess’s view of the project as having the potential to provide a deeper understanding of translation as an art form. Tess writes: Literary translation is a living artform.  I have always shied away from the concept of definitive translation. Translations are originals in the same way that arrangements of songs or symphonies are originals. You can recognize the origins of a composition, thought, concept, while simultaneously recognizing what is original in the tempo, tone, feeling, imaging, etc. That space between history and creation is where translation thrives. Let there be many more translations of this poem into other Asian, African, Scandinavian, and indigenous languages. Let readers appreciate that the new does not void out the prior. Let there be a wider understanding that literary translations contribute not only to the evolution of poetry, but to language itself.

Stay tuned for news about the launch of The New Colossus Translation Project on the AJHS site and for a call for further contributions.

Two articles of interest accessible online:

• David Lehman’s “Colossal Ode,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 2004

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/colossal-ode-103151288/

• Walt Hunter’s “The Story Behind the Poem on the Statue of Liberty,” January 16, 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-story-behind-the-poem-on-the-statue-of-liberty/550553/ 

Mihaela Moscaliuc, Guest Author February 17-21

photo © Valentin Moscaliuc

This week we welcome Mihaela Moscaliuc as our guest author. Mihaela was born and raised in Romania. She is the author of the poetry collections Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books,2010), translator of Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015) and Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2019), and editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016). Her scholarship explores issues of representation, appropriation, cultural identity, exophony, and empathy. She has published essays on the works of Agha Shahid Ali, Kimiko Hahn, Shara McCallum, Colum McCann, C.K. Williams, Gerald Stern, and in the field of Romani Studies. The recipient of two Glenna Luschei Awards (in poetry and prose, respectively) from Prairie Schooner, residency fellowships from Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship to Romania. Moscaliuc is associate professor of English at Monmouth University (New Jersey).
You can find her most recent article, "Accessorizing (with) 'Gypsyness' in the Twenty-first Century" here.
Find out more about Mihaela at her website here and on her faculty page here. 

Welcome, Mihaela. 

-- sdl

Poetic License [by Jim Cummins]

 

I booked a four-way once.  I was sitting in a bar when War & Peace sidled up and sat down on the stool next to me.  "Gotta light?" she asked in a heavy Moscow accent.  "I don't burn books," I replied; she laughed a long, low, melodious Russian laugh.  "Actually," she said, "I only smoke afterwards," and winked, as she gently dragged a long blood-red fingernail across my cheek.  "Have you met my friend, Naked Lunch?"  I'd been so transfixed by the Russian beauty--there was so much of her!--that I hadn't seen the thin, waif-ish tart slipping up behind me.  She looked like a walking STD--tattoos, piercings, nose & navel rings, wearing a black leather jacket that couldn't conceal the fact she had nothing on underneath.  She must've seen the involuntary look of revulsion that passed over my face before I could readjust my bar mask.  She looked hurt.  "I know," she whispered, "but I bring a lot of coke to the table."  I hadn't thought of that; this could be my lucky night!  We continued to drink until W&P suggested we go over to her apartment and "sort things out."  I agreed, but Naked Lunch said, "First we need a little spice."  We pretended we didn't know what she meant but she knew we did.  So we looked around the room.  I saw Beloved sitting at a table with The Bluest Eye, but NL pointed out that Beloved was too old and TBE a little too young.  War & Peace agreed.  She said, "I met The Intuitionist at a signing once," motioning with her chin toward a table in the corner where TI sat, drinking alone.  "Whoa," I said.  "That's too spicy for me!" and we all laughed.  "How about a poet?" Naked Lunch asked.  "Don't turn around but Thomas & Beulah is sitting a few tables over."  T&B was writing assiduously in a notebook, next to a half-empy (or half-full, depending on how you looked at it!) glass of wine.  "I'm in," I grinned, and W&P and NL flipped a coin to see which one would make the approach.  As it turned out, T&B was more than eager to join us--and in fact, showed us all what "poetic license" really

meant, "all night long," as the song goes.  Damn, I love curling up with a good book!

A Few Love Poems for Valentine's Day [by Nin Andrews]

How can I resist? It's a day for love, so I feel compelled to post just a few love poems here. First off, from one of my favorite poets, Shivani Mehta:

The Butterflies

You unzip my dress, a curve from the side of my left breast to the top of my hip. My body is a column of butterflies. One by one, roused by the light and cool air, they wake from sleep. One by one they open their wings, answering the instinct to be free. They scatter in all directions; I learn what it means to be in many places at once.

            -- from Shivani Mehta’s Useful Information for the Soon-to-be Beheaded, published by Press 53

 

Next, from Dante di Stefano. As a Parton fan, I love this poem.

While Listening to Dolly Parton Sing “Lover’s Return,” I Imagine the Girl in You Talking to the Boy in Me

The old gods gather in my chest and throb
the miracles of flame and rusted fender,
composing a ballad for blue flowers
and grandmas toting shotguns up the hill.

I arm my grievances with handwritten
recollections of twirling skirts, moonlight,
hot mouths coming together in the dark,
the burning rafters of adolescence.

Call my kiss a romp through threshing machine
and clawhammer me up a sweet cudgel 
of melody as plain as a mattress
filled with straw tick, where we can trundle on

the big feelings of us joining as one
against the hogtied malice of the world.

            --from Ill Angels by Dante di Stefano, published by Etruscan Press

 

I am so looking forward to Nicole Santalucia's next book, due out this month. Here's a poem from that collection:

Keystone Ode to My Wife after Reading Anne Bradstreet at a One Hundred and Three Year Old Farm House

Between two clouds
and two seedless grapes
and two dandelions,
there are days that fall.
Between two horses
or two farm dogs
or two blackbirds,
there is breath.
Between two mice
or two lightning bugs?or two blades of grass
or two fallen crab apples,
there is a silent place to love.
Between two yellow wildflowers
or two fox kits or two red oak leaves,
there is energy that crashes.
Between two frogs and two trees,
there are two rain drops and two gusts of wind
that blow through darkness,
where two stars
and two far away planets
light up the sky.

            --from The Book of Dirt by Nicole Santalucia, published by NYQ Books

 

Then I think A. R. Ammons, who makes me laugh. 

Their Sex Life

One failure on
Top of another

 

Tryst

I’m going to see you tonight:
birds that know where to fly
are loose under by ribs:

your eyes fly here to my mind’s
eye: I dwell on them;
what if I’m frozen

when I see you; what if I burn
completely up: the birds
may break out and go

too soon; too bad
if my self flies to you
early, and I can’t follow.

            --from A. R. Ammons, The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammon, published by W.W. Norton & Company

And finally, a few translations from the wonderful Mexican poet, Ulalume González de León that remind me of the Ammons' poems. 

Bird

More song than body
More flight than time
It doesn’t fit in itself
or in all its days

Tired of All Metaphysics

Simply put
           I think of sex with you.

            --from Plagios/Plagiarisms Volume 1 by Ulalume González de León,  translated by Terry Ehret, John Johnson and Nancy J. Morales, published by Sixteen Rivers Press.

From "Showboat": "Make Believe" (Jerry Hadley, Frederica von Stade)

From Showboat (1927) -- seven and a half minutes of genius.  -- DL

"Come Rain or Come Shine" with Eileen Farrell & Leonard Bernstein

For Valentine’s Day tomorrow
I recommend Come Rain or Come Shine
with born-today Eileen Farrell
proving an opera singer
can sing great jazz and
Leonard Bernstein proving
he could have been a contender
in the jazz piano arena

Eileen Farrell (1920-2002), one of the great sopranos of the twentieth century, had a radio show in the 1940s, launched a sensational recital career in the 1950s (culminating in Carnegie Hall), sang with the Metropolitan Opera in the 1960s, and on one occasion pinch-hit for Louis Armstrong at a jazz concert. Her first theatrical role was as Little Buttercup in "H. M. S. Pianofore," though little she was not. She was married to a distinguished officer of the New York Police Department. This post is dedicated to another daughter of February 13, Stephanie Paterik. And let's not forget the heroine of Vertigo, Kim Novak, born on the thirteenth day of the second month.-- DL

See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2019/02/come-rain-or-come-shine-a-perfect-division-of-labor.html

"Next Line, Please": Five Glorious Years [by David Lehman]

          In September 2019, my tenure as editor and quizmaster of “Next Line, Please,” the weekly challenges that The American Scholar introduced on its website in May 2014, came to an end. Two years ago, Cornell University Press published a selection of the first two and a half years of the project under the title Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers. Proud as we are of that book, many NLP regulars, myself included, believe that much of our best work was done in 2017 and 2018.

          In the five years of our existence we wrote a sonnet line by line, and a sestina stanza by stanza; seasonal haiku that we expanded into tanka; and limericks, acrostics, centos, improvisations, impromptus, addresses, epistles, rejoinders, and prologues. We built poems out of anagrams, synonyms and antonyms, and games of what Nabokov called “word golf,” in which, instead of rhyme, the end word of each line is the end word of the previous line with one letter altered, e.g., “When you're shooting well, you're unconscious, you're sick. / No thoughts distract you, your touch is as the silk / of your rich sister's scarf. Now don't sulk.” [A subset might be called poetic alchemy, in which you can go from lead to gold in six lines (lead, leaf, loaf, load, goad, gold) but you might have more fun spinning it out to sonnet length (lead, leaf, loaf, loan, load, road, read, rend, send, mend, mind, mild, mold, gold).]

We completed poem fragments by Emily Dickinson, such as her poem no. # 1639:

          A Letter is a joy of Earth –
          It is denied the Gods –

Some of our poems were triggered by aphorisms or messages like Napoleon’s memo to Josephine, “Home in three days. Don’t bathe,” or Anna Kamienska’s notebook entry, “Sleep is what I’ll miss most when I die.” We translated a poem from a language none of us knew, without resort to a dictionary or an existing translation, and we composed poems with titles borrowed from the names of chess openings (e.g., “Queen’s Gambit Declined”). One week our assignment was to write a poem entitled “The Minister of Loneliness” – a title Wallace Stevens may have liked – prompted by the news that in January 2018 a member of parliament named Tracey Crouch was appointed to the position of Britain’s “Minister of Loneliness.” We also wrote two-line poems, poems entitled “The One Thing That Can Save America” (a John Ashbery title), poems beginning with the first line of Coleridge’s “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison,” and poems ending with the last line of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” We rewrote lines from Milton’s “Lycidas,” refreshed clichés, issued fake apologies, composed false confessions, concealed secrets while telling them, collaborated with one another, and ended poems with questions in the manner of Shelley and Yeats. Did we ever write brief critical essays that had to conclude with a quote from Hamlet, or was that something I meant to do?

Angela Ball has, I believe, formed a coherent manuscript of poems out of her consistently imaginative responses to prompts. Other NLP all-stars also show up in literary magazines. I sometimes wonder what certain pseudonymous players are up to, since it is entirely possible that our Millicent Caliban existed only in our space and is now writing under some other bewitching sobriquet. I miss the sophisticated handling of exigent forms (and bemoan the absence of such poems from many journals that will not allow the whimsy of the weekend to spoil the solemnity of a Sunday church morning). The great thing about a constrictive form is that it is not a hindrance to the imagination but a stimulant.  Here's what Christine Rhein did with the twenty-six-word abecedarius on December 12, 2017:

Alphabetical Order

Assertion by committee: 
double-dare ethos. 
Fibbed goodwill, 
handshakes. Insider 
justice. Know-how
laughter. Mere near 
onus, pious quid-pro-
quo-ing. Redeployed
stereotypes—taxing
underdogs. Votes 
warped, x’d, yea-yea-
yea’d. Zoopathology. 

.Zoopathology, yea-
yea-yea’d. X’d warped 
votes. Underdogs 
taxing stereotypes. 
Redeployed quid-pro-
quo-ing. Pious onus 
near. Mere laughter—
know-how justice insider 
handshakes. Goodwill 
fibbed ethos. Double-
dare committee
by assertion.            

On June 11, 2019, I invented a form I called the “Impromptu,”which I defined as “a nine-line stanza that can serve as the prologue to something else that either has or has not yet been written.” The stanza should have “the feel or tone of an improvisation” with a “unifying formal element.” For “Preparing to Blow Out the Candles,” the pseudonymous Herbert McDunnough took “The new year’s walk, restoring” for his epigraph, which he attributed to T. S. Eliot:

The look back has not gained us fruit. The
First time’s no more sweet than the second
Tragedy’s glad to share what belongs to tragedy
To blind young eyes with what it forever sees
Not holding back, not limiting itself to buy one
Get one free. It keeps coming, one keeps getting
One’s caught again in traps of why, in lust of what
Own and other’s ends mixed up. My one
Wish—unwise?—to not want what the other wants.

The wonderful thing about the writing here is that you can read the poem in a state of puzzled wonderment and then go back and notice that it is a double acrostic spelling out “The first tragedy’s to not get one’s own wish” and “The second tragedy sees one getting what one wants.” Reading it a third time I spotted the concealed acrostic running diagonally down the page: “The time’s glad eyes limiting one in lust. One wants.”

To the editors of The American Scholar go my thanks and my admiration. They were willing to take a chance on poetry --  willing to bet that once and future students of the liberal arts would rise to the occasion of such challenges as get a poet's juices flowing. To everyone involved in “Next Line, Please,” these words are dedicated with an appreciation of what we managed to achieve: not only poems of wit, ingenuity, and excellence, but a forum blessedly free of snark, smirk, and insult, where people could exchange enthusiasms, suggestions, and opinions while adhering to an ideal of civility and respect that, in our academic and intellectual institutions, is too often honored more in the breach than in the observance.

Letters from Russell Edson [by Nin Andrews]

Last week, I interviewed Peter Johnson about his new anthology of prose poetry, A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Really Fly, the title of which comes from Edson’s explanation of a prose poem:

“A prose that is a cast-iron aeroplane that can actually fly, mainly because the pilot doesn't seem to care if it does or not."   

I began to think about the second half of the quote—the idea that the poem works because the writer lets go of it. I have such difficulty trusting in my prose poems as he suggests one should. I asked Peter if he had any other insights or quotes or ideas from or about the enigmatic godfather of prose poetry. Peter informed me that he was not only a good friend of Edson’s, he also has hundreds of letters from Edson. So I asked if he would be willing to talk about Edson and his letters here.

Peter Johnson: I came to Edson’s work later than most prose poets. As I’ve said in numerous interviews, early on I was influenced more by Kafka, Novalis, and Theophrastus. But then some numbskull editor told me that one of my early prose poems was a “cheap imitation of Russell Edson.” Thinking I should at least know who influenced me, I checked out one of his books, and then we became friends after I started my journal. We are very different personalities but we ended up having a long correspondence over the years, and our wives even got along. We did a few events together, one being a week-long conference with you and Robert Bly, which was organized by Chard deNiord, and then Chard invited Edson and me to read at New England College’s MFA program, where we met a few prose-poem haters. He ended up writing me over 350 letters, some detailing everyday life but most being flat-out brilliant. When I asked him to do an interview, he balked, so I went through his early letters, created questions that fit his ideas, and then we went back and forth, creating a kind of long collaborative prose-poem interview, which you can find at https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1596&context=prosepoem. Robert Bly once told me it was the best interview ever done with a contemporary poet. If that’s true, the brilliance comes all from Edson and certainly not from my questions. After Russell died, I met his brother-in-law at Russell’s house to discuss what to do with his estate. Frances, his wife, was there but was experiencing early signs of Alzheimer’s, so it was a bit trying and sad because she’s such a sweetheart. His study contained a wealth of knowledge about him: composition books from grammar school, early drawings, letters to famous poets, even a manuscript of verse poetry. It’s been astonishing to me that no poetry special collections have shown interest in purchasing this archive or my letters, and one guy who heads one of the most important contemporary poetry archives in the country didn’t even know who he was. Just unbelievable, though Russell would have appreciated the snub. The two letters here occurred when I was trying to get my first book published and when he also was reentering the literary world. I was teaching “An Historical Breakfast” and my students were looking for satire in it. Russell talks about this and offers a response to the world of Po-Biz. In the second letter, he discusses process in his own brilliant way.

 

Cry Hard, Cry Fast: Ken Tucker Takes on John D. Macdonald

Continuing my fitful John D. MacDonald reading, I just finished ‘Cry Hard, Cry Fast’ (1955). It’s about a highway auto accident. In each of the first five chapters, we’re introduced to people in cars who’ll be involved in the accident. MacDonald sketches in their lives, and what led them to be on the road on this day. It’s a tricky narrative challenge, to keep starting with a character, stopping, and going on to someone new, but MacDonald does it so deftly that you keep everyone in your mind. The middle of the book has a discussion of the physics of auto crashes and how insurance companies calculate the results: great, precise stuff. ‘Cry Hard’ isn’t even a thriller, really—just one car contains people who’ve committed a crime, but no crime is committed in the course of the novel. I loved it. I have some other stuff to read now, but my next MacDonald will be, I think, ‘A Bullet for Cinderella.’

-- Ken Tucker

Squibs 373-380 [by Alan Ziegler]

373: Would you prefer to:

    a) be a mule

    b) be a pig

    c) be a fish

    d) swing on a star and be better off than you are

    e) none of the above

374: Mr. Plant, my senior year high school history teacher, “confided” in us that the government and our textbooks don’t tell the whole truth, but there’s a book that does, except you can’t find it in a bookstore. He asked us each to bring in $3.00 and he would buy the books for us, but don’t tell anyone because it would take too long to get official permission. A few weeks later, Mr. Plant was absent several days in a row. The principal asked me to come to his office, and keep the meeting confidential (he trusted me because I was editor of the school newspaper). “We have not been able to reach Mr. Plant. There’s a rumor that he collected money from his students for a book.” I confirmed the rumor. “Did you receive the book?” He was relieved to hear that we had not, and told me the book was None Dare Call it Treason, a right-wing polemic adopted by the John Birch Society. The school reimbursed our money and we never saw Mr. Plant again, though one of my classmates swore he spotted him walking on the Long Beach Boardwalk wearing a dress.

 

375: Paused at an intersection on a desolate Northern Michigan road. A blue vintage Corvette whizzes by, the model used in Route 66. I used to dream about being the Todd of a Todd-Buzz Corvette-rambling duo. (Todd went to Yale and will have a lucrative future when his drifting days are done.) Another vintage Corvette, followed by another and another. I count to 16, when the intersection becomes still, ominously bereft of Corvettes.

 

376: I wake in the middle of the night and can’t find my left arm. Not draped over my wife or squished under my chest. I panic for a few groggy seconds. There it is: by my side, but somehow detached. I remember hearing that prisoners in German concentration camps were sometimes forced to sleep in such confined spaces that their whole bodies fell asleep while their minds remained conscious. I muffle a scream into the pillow as I shake my arm awake, breathing rapidly until I can once again embrace my wife.

 

377: On the 1-train, the ragged man blesses me for my dollar. At my stop, the train lurches and I stumble toward the door somehow eluding passengers. With a final harrowing jeté I land upright on the platform. The ragged man yells out, “Good balance, sir! Not bad for an old dude.”

 

378: I am five, in the hospital with a mysterious infection, led into a small auditorium—the audience a sea of white. I stand on stage and realize my pajama bottoms are sagging. I keep them up with one hand, while the audience listens and takes notes. I hear something about my parents “claiming” I am allergic to penicillin. A nurse takes me back to my room and gives me fresh pajamas to change into. While I am naked, a little black girl in a hospital gown walks by. Our unhappy eyes meet, and I feel no shame as she passes the portal that briefly connects our lives. Oh, little girl, I so hope you made it out of there. Oh, old woman, I so hope you are still out here and now know that the sad, naked little boy made it, too.

 

379: I float over what remains of her life as her voice shrivels like smoke born in a faraway explosion, getting weaker as it wisps into a whisper. But still I hear it, I hear what she is saying, her words like birds shot in flight carried off on a stretcher of wind. I drown to the ground, having breathed my first breath without her.

 

380: Assignment: Identify every hat (by manufacturer, model, and retail price) worn in This Gun for Hire (1942, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake). You may substitute any black and white crime drama made between 1940 and 1955, or, in the interest of fairness, restrict your search to the second screenshot.

 

"A Matter of Pride": on Gentleman's Agreement [by David Lehman]

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It’s funny to think of a movie that won an Oscar for Best Picture as underrated, but highbrow (and even middlebrow) critics have long looked down on Elia Kazan’s 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement, which screenwriter Moss Hart adapted from Laura Z. Hobson’s best-selling novel of the same name. The movie has its flaws—Kazan himself, looking back on the film 30 years later, described it as “patronizing”—but Hart’s script is powerful, and the movie packs a punch.

Gentleman’s Agreement is one of two late 1940’s pictures that wrestle with the ugliness of anti-Semitism. The other is Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire, also from 1947, a noir featuring three Roberts: Robert Young as an investigator, Robert Mitchum as a friend of a suspect, and Robert Ryan as a demobilized soldier who brutally murders the hospitable Jewish man whom he and his army buddies meet in a bar. But while Crossfire centers on a homicide for which the only motive is drunken anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement deals with the sort of suburban, exclusionary anti-Semitism practiced by those who claim that “some of my best friends are Jews.”

In Gentleman’s Agreement, Gregory Peck plays Philip Schuyler Green, a widower who has moved from California to New York with his mother (Anne Revere) and his small son, Tom (Dean Stockwell). A talented writer with a degree from Stanford, Phil works for Smith’s Weekly, a liberal magazine, whose publisher, John Minify (Albert Dekker), wants him to write a series of articles on anti-Semitism. The assignment disappoints Phil, who thinks that the subject is old news. He agrees to do it only after Tom overhears him talking about the articles with his mother and asks, “What’s anti-Semitism?” and “What are Jews, anyway?” Phil has a dickens of a time explaining things.

Phil needs an angle for his articles and can’t find one until he thinks of his Jewish boyhood friend, Dave Goldman (played by John Garfield, a Jew whose real name is Julius Garfinkel), and imagines himself in his place. He decides to impersonate a Jew whose real name is Philip Greenberg and see what it’s like from the inside. (He’s even worked out the title for the series: “I was Jewish for six months.”)

For the ploy to work, it has to be clandestine. Besides his editor, his family, and Dave, the only person who knows that Phil is really a Christian is Minify’s niece Kathy Lacy (Dorothy McGuire), a divorcee who quickly becomes Phil’s girlfriend. Kathy has sold her uncle on the idea that combating anti-Semitism in print is a good and timely idea. Nevertheless, she recoils when Phil confides his plan to tell everyone that he’s Jewish. “Jewish? But you’re not, are you?” she asks, before quickly adding, “Not that it would make any difference to me.” It’s the first hint that for all her avowed liberalism, Kathy’s tolerance extends to genteel anti-Semites and the “gentleman’s agreement” among them to keep Jews out of their neighborhoods, hotels, and clubs.

At the editorial board meeting where Minify announces the series on anti-Semitism (“We’re going to call a spade a dirty spade”), Irving Weisman (Robert Warwick), a Jewish industrialist, voices his disapproval. He says it’s a “very bad idea” and may even be “the most harmful thing you could possibly do now.” Weisman stands for all the Jewish movie moguls who dodged this subject, preferring a strategy that Minify disparages as “a conspiracy of silence.” Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century Fox, the studio that made Gentleman’s Agreement, was one of the few studio heads at the time who was not Jewish. He decided to take on this project when the Los Angeles Country Club rejected him, assuming that he was as Semitic as Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, and David Selznick.

At the meeting, Green lets it be known that he is Jewish, and by the time he gets back to his office, the news of his religious affiliation has spread like wildfire. Green’s secretary (June Havoc) reveals that she, Elaine Wales, has changed her name from Estelle Wilovsky. Otherwise, as a Jewish woman, she would never have landed her job.

Peck is sometimes denigrated as a wooden actor. But no actor is as good at being earnest and righteous (not to mention tall, handsome, and all-American) as Peck in fedora, suit, and pocket square, bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. This is a terrific role for Peck—one that he took on despite his agent’s warning that doing so would endanger his career.

The love affair that develops between Kathy and Phil is marked less by romance than by their constant quarrels about Jews and Judaism. On the verge of breaking up, Kathy says that she’s sick of Phil’s “lessons in tolerance” and that she’s relieved he’s really a Christian. “It’s just a practical fact,” she says, “like being glad you’re good-looking instead of ugly, rich instead of poor, young instead of old, healthy instead of sick.” Moreover, she believes that “they”—Jews—“always make trouble for everybody, even their friends! They force people to take sides against them.”

In contrast, there’s Anne Dettrey (the radiant Celeste Holm, who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress). As the magazine’s fashion editor, she is Phil’s most sympathetic colleague. Though Green is chivalrous and doesn’t want to hear it, she tells him the truth: Kathy is a hypocrite. “She doesn’t rate you, Phil,” she tells him, capping her pitch with the best line in the movie.
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For the rest of this essay, click here for The American Scholar, which commissioned it as part of the "talking pictures" series. See also Lehman's columns on Robert Mitchum and William Holden.

Taming “digital art”: Gaïté Lyrique chooses cultural context

Where, when, who for?: Adrien M. & Claire B., “Faire Corps” © Romain Etienne

Until the other day I associated with the Gaïté Lyrique with music & sophisticated light and sound shows; last year, among many others, the venue featured the inimitable Alice Phoebe Lou  and a fifth annual music-film festival (F.A.M.E). So it was really good to see Adrien M. & Claire B’s digitally-generated Faire Corps (“All Together”) installation – material sculpture, virtual visual, public and performance interaction, sound, music and environments.

Even more through-provoking, in some ways, than the Faire Corps installation – which is proving a big attraction – was to hear Jos Auzende, Gaïté Lyrique’s artistic programmer, take the opportunity of the Faire Corps opening to clearly place “digital” in the context of culture and creative achievement.

Nearly 10 years ago, the city of Paris re-inaugurated the historic Gaïté Lyrique – Jacques Offenbach was once its director and Diaghelev started his Ballets Russes there – as a “center for digital art and culture”, without, I think, knowing what that could mean.

Now, Auzende seems to say, just as we all see Fantasia as the achievement of Walt Disney animators and storytellers working, say, in a “pre-empire Americanization culture”, not just as the result of applying color-film technology, so we should see that the achievement and interest in digitally generated work such Adrien M. & Claire B.’s lies not in how, but in where, when, for whom they have re-invented or appropriated digital technology to make it work.

Taking a stand for cultural context as the primary lens through which to look at esthetic achievement where contemporary digital technology is involved seems to me really challenging.

For music, for example, no matter how it is generated, we take the centrality of creation and culture for granted. “Digital music” means “music generated using digital technology”, not “music that is (somehow) digital”; it is indeed hard to think of any music generated in any way that is not essentially viewed and critiqued through its cultural context.

But, when it comes to “digital art”, the same casual assumption of cultural primariness is not true. People do often mean “art that is digital”, dropping culture all together and identifying the creation with the technology the creators used to achieve it.

A Simulation: Adrien M. & Claire B., “Organismes Typographiques” © Laurence Fragnol

The tendency to squeeze creation and culture into the tool is due, partly, I think, to intense commercial promotion of digitalized stuff (saleable) and digital uses (rentable), of course. But more especially, I think, digital technology is seen to be and is presented as, a competitor to humans.

Contemporary digital technology simulates human physical and mental movement: repetitive gestures such as driving or abstract processes such as judgment. Most funded digital R&D in industry and entertainment (and a lot of institutionally-funded Middle and high-brow art) turns around substituting digital technology for (saleable) movement and behaviors: slicing off and splicing up bits of recorded human movement and converting it into a saleable catalogue of products, services, tasks and processes – think consumer-service robots, virtual reality video, micro-targeted advertising, automatic public security identification.

It is not just difficult to get people to look at digital technology (or any technology for that matter) through the lens of cultural achievement. Looking at anything is to betray critical interest. Looking at digital technology through a culture – from where, when, for whom – is automatically “political”: what kind of cultural context generates a market for automatic public facial recognition; what kind of people systematically mistake the mediums for messages and vice versa?

In terms of intention, achievements and content, in Faire Corps, Jos Auzende chose a good talking piece for her speech.

As creators, Adrien M. & Claire B. declare an intention to “resist corporate colonialism”, inciting creators and audiences alike to remember both that digital technology is just technology and that, just as for other technologies, who controls and who uses digital determines why and how it gets used.

Adrien M. & Claire B. take digital technology use a step further than, say, a savvy contemporary choreographer such as Mourad Merzouki would do. Comparison of Merzouki’s dance-performance Pixel and Adrien M. & Claire B.’s sound-movement-performance Equinoxe speaks to their will to move away from technology as show-enhancement and -support to technology as sensory interaction with the show (without its becoming virtual reality). Pixel’s wow-me tech stuff was created by Adrien M. & Claire B.

Overall, each of the different parts of the Faire Corps installation, much like the Equinoxe performance piece, emphasizes sensory interactions with its onlookers. But each of its magic lanterns, its pools, patterns and projections suggests increased potential creative interface and esthetic interest in available technology.

Auzende’s Gaïté Lyrique’s approach to “digital art and culture” come in the context of a recent change of management – the current energetic director, Laëtitia Stagnara, was appointed only at the end of 2018. She has apparently determined to use Gaïté Lyrique’s existing noos: Jos Auzende, for example, is the originator of the theater’s popular children’s arts workshop Les Voyages du Capitaine Futur, billed, unsurprisingly, as “art taming technology”. Stagnara was formerly in charge of “digital development” at Cité des sciences et de l'industrie (La Villette). La Villette does a notably good job of getting past wow-me promotion of amazing (must have) technology to actually popularize science and technical achievement.

My hat is off to Jos Auzende, Laëtitia Stagnara and the esthetic team at Gaïté Lyrique.

Billy Collins Scores Big Time in London

OK everybody, before going to brunch, ask yourself this one question:
Who wrote the world's biggest big-ass poem?
Hint: the title of the poem is "Breakast"
Hint: this poster is located near a construction site in London.
If you guessed Billy Collins, you win.
"Post Poetry is a great new genre," Ida Noise told this reporter.
Partisans of Jennifer L. Knox's "Hot Ass Poem" may advocate magnifying it on a poster in Portland, Oregon.

OK now. . .off to brunch you go.  -- DL

Roger Kahn, Author of "The Boys of Summer" (1927-2020)

When there are so many to mourn 
-- in one week Kirk Douglas, George Steiner, Alice Mayhew --
the death of Roger Kahn is what I am thinking of
as I nurse my martini at the Knickerbocker
and his great book "The Boys of Summer"
about my boyhood team the Brooklyn Dodgers
when I came of baseball age in 1956, age 8,
the last hurrah (Newk 27 wins, Duke 43 hrs,
Erskine and Maglie no-hitters and, for the last time,
Jackie Robinson danced off third base)
and then the team moved to LA in 1958.
The Boys of Summer! They were giving away
paperback copies of this wonderful book
at a bank in Brooklyn in 1973, with five former players
on hand, to sign copies. My copy is in Ithaca
and I'm in New York City, so I can't name
all the guys who signed my book but one of them
was Carl Furillo and this gave me the chance
to praise his post-season clutch hitting heroics in 1959
and tell him he was my father's favorite Dodger.

-- David Lehman
Note: Shotgun Shuba was definitely there; I think Billy Cox also.

The Perfect Valentine’s Day Gift: A Constellation of Kisses, Edited by Diane Lockward [by Nine Andrews]

It’s February, and Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. I know the perfect gift for someone you love, especially someone you love to kiss: A Constellation of Kisses, edited by Diane Lockward and published by Terrapin Books. It’s a beautiful collection from start to finish. As Lee Upton writes in the foreword:  

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A kiss is never just a kiss—heat-seeking, information bearing, coded. In this inspired collection, poet and editor Diane Lockward has assembled over 100 poems about kisses written by many of our best contemporary poets. You'll find kisses longed for, kisses auditioned, kisses rehearsed. Ritualistic kissing. Delicious kissing. Kissing that comforts the grieving. Kissing that blesses a union . . .  

May there be no end to the most genuine kisses, the right kisses, the ones that are good and meant for us to savor. And while we're at it, let's wish for no end to poems about kissing.
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I thought I’d ask Diane Lockward to say a few words about the anthology.

What inspired you to put together an anthology of kisses?

I don’t remember when the idea first hit me, but it churned in my brain for quite a while. Then I saw that the poet Brian Turner had just put out an anthology about kissing and my great idea hit the floor. I figured he’d just beat me to it, but ordered his book from the library. To my great delight, it turned out that his book is all prose. So my idea was resuscitated. I then put my plan together and put out the call for submissions.

How long did it take to collect 100 great kiss poems?

The call was open for six weeks. From the day it opened, I was bombarded with submissions. The idea seemed to be very appealing to lots of poets. After all, who isn’t interested in kissing? And there are so many different ways to approach the topic. I’ve done three anthologies; this one received by far the most submissions. Making selections was very difficult. I had to consider not only the quality of the poems but also the variety of approaches, tone, form, length. I had to say no to many worthy poems. And I am haunted by the fear that I said no to some poems I should have said yes to. But I did not want an enormous collection. So about 100 poems seemed a good limit.

I’d love to have you post a few kiss poems below, and say a few words about them.

Last Kiss

First, in your seventies and alone, you read that those who
count such things say an average person kisses for a total

of two weeks in a lifetime. And you realize your two weeks
was up some time ago. Suddenly there is kissing everywhere

you look. And you learn that cows kiss and squirrels. Puffins,
snails and meerkats! And you are overcome with sorrow and

an overwhelming desire to kiss—to be kissed. And you learn
that’s called basorexia and you have it. You watch the lips

of strangers in the supermarket—wonder if one would want
to kiss you. You know now that a minute of kissing burns

twenty-six calories and that a man lives up to five years
longer if he kisses his lover before he goes to work. You want

to tell someone that. And what’s worse, unlike the first kiss,
the last slipped by unnoticed—unnoted. It might have been

a spring day when daffodils answered the sun’s invitation or
an autumn day when everything else was burning. Or simply

a day you took out the garbage, did a load of wash. Then, someone
comes and takes your hand and you remember words

to a song you thought you’d never hear again and you remember
all those sunsets you forgot to watch and the smell of woods in rain.

And you remember the river, the river—how it presses
its mouth again and again to the swollen sea.

                                    —Jane Ebihara

Nightmare Kiss

The middle of a kiss, and though he opened
up wide and wider, her own small jawbones gave
a little crack and stuck, and look what happened:
as if she’d fallen in an open grave,
he swallowed her at last, and then she wandered
in a dark saturated country where
the red land throbbed with capillaries under
electric stars. A kiss had brought her there,
a simple kiss that rained and filled her head
with blood, a nightmare kiss, a wrong man kiss;
why had she kissed a man with such a mouth,
with such thick teeth and jaws, such tongue, instead
of kissing someone who would let her out,
kissing someone nicer, who ate less.

                        —Tony Barnstone

How could I not love Jane Ebihara’s “Last Kiss”? There’s so much to be learned here about kissing. The poem is full of facts. Who knew about the kissing of meerkats and puffins? Who knew the word basorexia? The poem is also full of whimsy and longing. It breaks my heart that the speaker’s last kiss is one she does not remember. The longing is contained and controlled within the two-line stanzas, yet spills out so tenderly in the closing images of the poem—that river kissing the swollen sea! What a perfect ending.

With the Barnstone poem you get a sense of the variety in the anthology. This poem is, of course, also about kissing, but it takes a very different approach to the subject. It’s grotesque with its monstrous kiss, the poor woman literally consumed by the wrong man’s kiss. There’s nothing tender here. But what a smart poem! It’s a beautifully executed, two-sentence sonnet, though the reader is so pulled in by the subject matter that form might easily be missed. As in Ebihara’s poem, the imagery is wonderful. There’s the landscape of the man’s mouth where the woman now dwells and the stunning final image of the nicer man she might have kissed, one “who ate less.”

I’d also love a poem from you—maybe a romantic poem, or that wonderful poem, “My Husband Discovers Poetry”?

My Husband Discovers Poetry

Because my husband would not read my poems,
I wrote one about how I did not love him.
In lines of strict iambic pentameter,
I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.
It felt good to do this.

Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.
Towards the end, struck by inspiration,
I wrote about my old boyfriend,
a boy I had not loved enough to marry
but who could make me laugh and laugh.
I wrote about a night years after we parted
when my husband’s coldness drove me from the house
and back to my old boyfriend.
I even included the name of a seedy motel
well-known for hosting quickies.
I have a talent for verisimilitude.

In sensuous images, I described
how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes,
got into bed, and kissed and kissed,
then spent half the night telling jokes,
many of them about my husband.
I left the ending deliberately ambiguous,
then hid the poem away
in an old trunk in the basement.

You know how this story ends,
how my husband one day loses something,
goes into the basement,
and rummages through the old trunk,
how he uncovers the hidden poem
and sits down to read it.

But do you hear the strange sounds
that floated up the stairs that day,
the sounds of an animal, its paw caught
in one of those traps with teeth of steel?
Do you see the wounded creature
at the bottom of the stairs,
his shoulders hunched over and shaking,
fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?
It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

Diane Lockward is the author of four poetry books, most recently The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement (Wind, 2016). She is also the editor of The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics and two previous craft books, The Crafty Poet and The Crafty Poet II. Her poems have been included in such journals as Harvard Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Writer’s Almanac. She is the founder and publisher of Terrapin Books. 

A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: a Continuation of an Interview with Peter Johnson [by Nin Andrews]

How did this anthology come about?

            I’m very proud of A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry. There are many excellent anthologies out there, but I think A Cast-iron Airplane is unique, and I was extremely happy that Marc Vincenz at MadHat Press had the vision to publish it. How did it come about? The seed was planted forty-three years ago, when I came across Alberta T. Turner’s Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process. At the time it was published people were speaking seriously about the writing process, even in freshmen composition courses. What made Turner’s anthology significant was that poets no longer feared that they might diminish their genius by describing how they wrote. Some of the poets in Turner’s anthology even reproduced various drafts of their poems with original cross-outs and annotations, so we could see how ideas and strategies for poems came about. Their commentaries affirmed my suspicion that there was no one way to write a poem. 

            Turner’s questionnaire was very specific, so much so that some poets refused to participate. They thought her questions were uninspiring or too rigid. One poet, whom she did not name, in a fit of hysteria, likened the questionnaire to something out of 1984, which suggested how distasteful it was for some poets to discuss their process. After all, one way to crown yourself a genius is to suggest that your poems are tiny gifts delivered by the gods in the wee hours of the morning, bestowed upon only special people, of whom you are one.

Alberta Turner was a friend of mine, and I think she would have been very happy to hear you talk about her book, especially about her questionnaire. She loved questionnaires.  So it was her anthology that inspired you?  I remember you talking about her when you were editing the journal.

            I was thinking about Turner’s book when in the last two volumes of The Prose Poem: An International Journal (digitized at https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/prosepoem/), I asked a few selected poets to choose one of their prose poems and to write a commentary on it. Unlike Turner, I didn’t give much guidance. It would be nice, I said, to comment on it as a prose poem, but I didn’t want to restrict anyone. As it turned out, many of the poets chose to discuss the prose poem as a genre, anyway. 

            A Cast-iron Airplane is an expansion of that project. I think it’s a useful book. For one thing, it’s a solid collection of prose poems written by some of the best American practitioners of the genre. It also provides a good way of looking at the prose poem as a legitimate genre by focusing on what the poets themselves have to say. Certainly, if poets call their poems prose poems and confess that they were self-consciously writing them as prose poems, thinking about a tradition that preceded them, then we should pay attention to that. If we find, as Charles Simic suggests, that he never thought of the short prose pieces in The World Doesn’t End as being prose poems, then that, too, is significant. In short, by hearing poets describe their writing processes, we can often situate their prose poems in a broader literary, historical, and cultural context, which helps us to evaluate and appreciate their poems. 

            Two submissions—one from Charles Simic, and the other from Carolyn Forché—provide very different examples of the commentaries in the book. Rather than comment on them, I’ll let these two poets speak for themselves.

Carolyn Forché

“The Colonel”

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

COMMENTARY

I wrote the poem in a single night on an electric typewriter that faced a window tufted with frost. Between the sentences of the poem, I watched the snow fall on the other side of the black glass. The room was painted white and did not belong to me. I was not present in the room during the writing of the poem, but somewhere else. I was there again, in the colonel’s house, typing from memory verbatim the details of that night because one day I thought I might write about it and I didn’t want to forget anything. I worried that I would forget but I need not have: everything still comes back very precisely and sometimes in slow motion although the night I was taken to talk with the colonel is now forty years in the past. The poem that was not intended to be a poem emerged as a cube, shaped like a room. The moon in the poem hangs from a black cord the way a lightbulb hangs from the ceiling of an interrogation room. It may have to do with a trick of the mind, turning the room into the site of an interrogation. Or that is what I have thought at times in the years since. The parrot said hola not hello. I could have written hola but kept it in English. As children, we used to press our ears to the ground to listen for trains coming. Trains about to arrive. In that sense, we were listening for something that would happen in the time to come. I know that dead ears cannot hear anything. I know that. I had no power to convey the colonel’s sentiments to the American president.

Charles Simic

I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.

It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.

COMMENTARY

I remember the night well. It was quarter to three and I was about to compose a poem. My dog Igor was barking viciously at the moon out in the yard and getting on my nerves. In my laboratory, Ligeia had just put the final cleaning touches to a test tube and was reaching for a jar labeled prose poetry on the shelf, when to my horror I noticed that this admirable woman of rare learning known for her singular yet placid cast of beauty was chewing bubble gum. I threw a fit so loud and protracted, it even made that stupid dog out there shut up. You’d think, I asked heaven to be my witness, that after everything she had to put up cohabitating with that bum and souse, Edgar Poe, she’d have learned how to conduct herself in the presence of another lofty poetic genius sensitive to the slightest distraction? I must have blacked out after that, since I remember nothing else of that horrible night.

So how did the poem get written then? I’ve no idea. What I can swear on a stack of Bibles is that never in my life did I sit down with the intention of writing a prose poem. My book of untitled prose fragments, The World Doesn’t End, was not originally labeled prose poetry. In fact, the manuscript I sent to the publishers wasn’t called anything. What I had done is to copy some of my nearly illegible scribblings from old notebooks, which after I rediscovered them and read them, struck me as having poetic qualities of their own and strung all together surprisingly read like a tongue-in-cheek autobiography. After tinkering over them for several months and reducing the manuscript to sixty-eight pieces, I showed them to my editor at Harcourt who to my surprise offered to publish them. However, just before the book was to appear, I got an urgent call from her asking me what do we call this? Don’t call it anything, I told her, but she explained to me that a book needs to be called something, so that libraries and bookstores know on what shelf to put it. After giving the matter some thought, I agreed to call it prose poetry.

Looking at the poem today, I can guess what was in my mind when I wrote it. Warning children about being stolen by the gypsies if they wander off is a stock phrase East European grandmothers and mothers use to scare children. As a city kid, stuck living in an apartment building, the life of the gypsies, from what I saw of it in Yugoslavia, seemed far more attractive to me. Of course, I knew my little tale about how I kept changing identities had to be short. I had read and liked plenty of prose poetry before I wrote what I wrote here, but I admired most of all the brevity and stunning lunacy of Max Jacob’s, Daniil Kharms’ and Russell Edson’s finest poems. They are like parlor magic tricks which make you scratch your head after you see them, like the one called “Miser’s Dream” where a seemingly infinite supply of coins is plucked out of the air by the magician. That’s the marvel of a prose poem too. It looks like prose on the page, but acts like a poem in your head.

“The Colonel,” from The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché, Copyright (c) 1981 by Carolyn Forché. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Commentary used by permission of Carolyn Forché.

“I was stolen by the gypsies,” from The World Doesn’t End, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989. Poem and commentary used by permission of Charles Simic.

Peter Johnson’s most recent poetry titles are Old Man Howling at the Moon  (Madhat Press, 2018) and A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry(Madhat, 2019). His prose poetry has received an NEA and the James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poets. See his other poetry and fiction at peterjohnsonauthor.com.

An Interview with Prose Poet Peter Johnson [by Nin Andrews]

When I think of prose poets from this country, the two names that come to mind are Russell Edson and Peter Johnson. Neither you nor Edson ever write (or wrote) in verse, and both of you have (or had) a lot to say about the prose poem. I’d love to hear you talk about your own work today, and about the new anthology, A Cast-Iron Airplane That Can Actually Fly, tomorrow.

How did you become a prose poet?

            I’m the least likely candidate to be a prose poet. I had four years of French, nine of Latin, and five of Classical Greek. My Masters thesis was an introduction to and translation of the Psychomachia, a thousand-line Latin poem written by Marcus Aurelius Prudentius. With that background, I probably should be writing sonnets. So why the prose poem? For one thing, I was a terrible verse poet, mostly because I couldn’t have cared less about line breaks. But, of course, my situation was more complicated than that. Perhaps the best, and most concise, way to explain why I became a prose poet is to look at one of my early poems, called “The Millennium.”

                                                    The Millennium

            In the basement, in the playroom, Ken’s throwing darts at another Ken while the flies of fairy tales nod off on a concrete wall, on a red plunger by the sink, on a lonesome cue ball. Upstairs, a pair of twins dancing on a hardwood floor, pushing tiny Santas in miniature baby strollers. I need help to sit down. “Next you’ll be wanting a back rub,” my brother says, then leaps from a coffee table, toppling our Christmas tree. Not enough bulbs to poke holes through this night’s black logic. No one strong enough to turn The Great Telescope, still partially unwrapped.
             Four hours to midnight, my niece embracing her Sleepy-Time Barbie, eyelids set to close at the turn of the century.

            “The Millennium” is the last poem in Pretty Happy!, my first volume of prose poetry. It changed everything for me. I’m very fond of Pretty Happy!, but, looking back, I see how haunted some of the poems were by other texts, such as, Kafka’s parables; Novalis’s short prose; the character sketches of the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus (whom I had translated in graduate school); and even things as silly as the “Fractured Fairy Tales” episodes from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show and sketches from my beloved old copies of Mad magazine. Those influences were present long before I came to the oneiric landscapes of Charles Simic, Russell Edson, and Max Jacob. That’s not to say I didn’t have a voice or subject matter. I’m a mix of high and low cultures. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood near the steel plants in Buffalo, New York, but I went to a Jesuit high school where, as I said, I studied classical languages and was immersed in the Western Canon. It’s not surprising that in one of my later prose poems I have Socrates picking a booger from his nose while pontificating on father/son relationships. But how to the find the right way to express my high/low sensibility? How to find a style and form that was, well, “natural?”
            And then “The Millennium” arrived.

 

Then “The Milleunium” arrived. That’s when your poems changed?

            It was 1995 and I was back in Buffalo, sledding with my son on Christmas Eve as the world inched its way toward the Millennium. We were riding a sled made from plastic as thin and durable as cellophane. We went hurtling over a snowboarding hump, and upon landing, I heard a crack and felt a sharp pain in my back. A half an hour later I was in an emergency room with a number of drunks who had tumbled down the stairs at a Buffalo Bills football game. Three hours later, I was hauled off to Mercy Hospital. I needed no operation but was told if I fell down over the next month or two I would probably be paralyzed. So sitting on a couch in my mother’s living room, stoned on Darvocet and Valium, I took in my surroundings, grabbed my notebook, and decided to write some paragraphs. Many of the images and sounds were before or below me: my niece’s Barbie and Ken dolls, my mother’s artificial Christmas tree, the red plunger by the sink, a lonesome cue ball banging into another ball in the basement.
            But then the “flies of fairy tales” appeared, and the poem became a bit more apocalyptic and improvisational, as images and dialogue, real and imagined, collided, with the soundtrack of the Smashing Pumpkins’s “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” providing background music from my portable CD player.
            For once I never intruded on these images or sounds. Of course, the poem went through revisions, but the method, if that is an accurate word for letting one’s imagination roam and make unusual leaps and connections, was new and exciting for me. After “The Millennium” I felt comfortable with the poetic process, and most of the poems preceding it in the book were written after it.
            And did the freedom of the prose poem allow me to make this leap? Of course. If I’m walking down the street on the way to a friend’s house, I have to stop at traffic lights or make turns. Isn’t that what verse poetry is? Isn’t that why it’s called verse, from the Latin verto, to turn. In contrast, the prose poem is like an open pasture where no direction is necessary. Where anything can happen. Where contradictions and juxtapositions (those odd leaps that often transcend logic) are not only welcome but expected—contradictions and juxtapositions that would become even wilder in my next few darkly comic collections.

Yes, I agree. I think the freedom that a prose poem offers seems exhilarating to many poets, especially young poets. 

            But this freedom comes at a very high price. I edited a prose-poem journal for nine years, and poem after poem was overwritten. “Too much language chasing too little of an idea,” as Russell Edson used to say. So much prose poetry now is nothing more than people thinking out loud about a variety of irrelevant topics. Very few surprises. Very few linguistic leaps, as if their thoughts are somehow significant because they are poets. These poets do not bring to the prose poem the same discipline they would demand from their verse poetry.
            Everything I’ve worked toward in my prose poetry can be seen in my new book, Old Man Howling at the Moon. In it, we find a Grumpy Old Everyman, who is terribly angry that the old grand narratives he’s lived by are barely recognizable anymore.  He’s a ranter and a raver. He’s outraged and often outrageous, and yet he can also be funny, and in spite of his grumpiness, the book ends with this prose poem called “Happy,” which suggests a bit of consolation.


                                                    Happy

Gentle Reader,

            In spite of persistent rumors, let me assure you that I’m happy. 
            Happy as the Brazilian beauty in a red thong cavorting half-naked on the Travel Channel.
            Happy as the local loony screaming at the same tree every morning, convinced it’s an enemy from a past life.
            I’m happy I can say, “Don’t go away I’ve got the baddest poem right here in my back pocket,” and no one thinks I’m nuts. 
            Happy for artificial putting greens, yellow buses that swallow up children yet no one gets hurt. 
            Happy for tuna fish and the piano player at Nordstrom who asked me to sing along. 
            Crusty sand dunes, orchids, a solitary grayish cloud frozen in the sky―I’m happy for them. 
            Happy for the rust-colored bottom of a rap diva, for the ant-sized beauty mark on my wife’s bum. 
            Happy a sixty-six-year-old man can dance and play air guitar in his boxer shorts while his teenage son laughs himself silly. 
            Even happy for Plan A, though I’ll never understand it, and for the chance, no, pleasure, to spend a few idle moments inside this here ellipsis . . . 

 

From Old Man Howling at the Moon (Madhat Press, 2018).

 

Peter Johnson’s most recent poetry titles are Old Man Howling at the Moon  (Madhat Press, 2018) and A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry(Madhat, 2019). His prose poetry has received an NEA and the James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poets. See his other poetry and fiction at peterjohnsonauthor.com.

On "The Bigamist" by Ida Lupino on her birthday [by David Lehman]

I saw The Bigamist, maybe the best
movie Ida Lupino directed, though
The Hitchhiker gives it a run for the money.

Edmund O’Brien has
one wife in San Francisco
(Joan Fontaine, who wants a baby),
and another wife in Los Angeles
(Ida herself, who has a baby).

Watching The Bigamist, you realize
how hard it is to be a bigamist.
Bigamy is a full-time job,
especially in 1953,
requiring
two wardrobes with one or two overlapping suits
enough money to pay the bills for both households
an excellent memory to keep everything straight
a poker face
a creative mind
a happy childhood but troubled adolescence
no siblings
deceased parents
an active libido
plus the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the 
        same time and continue to function,
an even more difficult challenge when the contradictory ideas
       are Joan Fontaine and Ida Lupino.

-- David Lehman

On Robert Lowell’s “Children of Light” [by Jeffrey Meyers]

Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones
And fenced their gardens with the Redman’s bones;
Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland,
Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva’s night,
They planted here the serpent’s seeds of light;
And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock
The riotous glass houses built on rock,
And candles gutter by an empty altar,
And light is where the landless blood of Cain
Is burning, burning the unburied grain.

-- Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell’s bitterly ironic “Children of Light” in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) is one of his most compressed and complex, highly allusive and little known poems.  Many of the fifty books in my library on Lowell, including three I’ve written, do not even mention it and none provides a thorough analysis. The biblical title comes from Ephesians 5:8  and I Thessalonians 5:5 where the children of light are enlightened believers in Christ. 

Lowell’s first line echoes John Milton’s vengeful and bloodthirsty sonnet “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” (1655), which begins, “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones,” and includes the line, “When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.”  Lowell, who also uses Milton’s stones/bones rhyme, equates the massacre of the dissident Protestants by the idolatrous Catholics in northern Italy with the massacre of Indians by Puritans in America.  Both events took place in the seventeenth century.  Milton believes the Protestants were the true children of light and the Catholics worshippers of pagan idols.  Lowell condemns his Puritan ancestors, the self-proclaimed children of light, who justified their savage genocide with hypocritical religious beliefs.  Lowell, a Catholic convert, attacks the Protestants; Milton, a Protestant, attacks the Catholics.  Like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, who decorated his fence posts with the skulls of Africans his men had killed, the Indian killers “fenced their gardens with the Redman’s bones.” 

Lowell’s “unhouseled,” a crucial theological word, comes from the Ghost’s speech to Hamlet (1.5.77) and means “without the sacrament of communion.”  Lowell uses it to describe the Puritans, some of whom left from the (hellish) Netherlands and were influenced by the strict Calvinists of Geneva.  These religiose fanatics are damned by the evil “Serpent’s seed,” the descendants of Adam and Eve exiled from Eden.  The Puritans are also cursed by the blood of Cain -- forced to wander landless after he killed his brother Abel -- and doomed to kill the Indians to take over their land.

The light imagery of the title is reflected in the seeds of light and the searchlights that probe and shock the fragile “glass houses” built on the rock that once supported the church but are now destined to destruction.  (Punning on Peter’s name Christ declared, “upon this rock I will build my church.”)  The third light, instead of preserving the “seeds” that must be placed in the ground to grow wheat and make bread, flares into flame and burns the “unburied grain.”  The “unhouseled” Puritans, wandering like Cain, lack the consolation of a sacred burial.  The weak light of the guttering candles and the empty altar suggest the extinction of the Puritans’ cruel religion.