The Best American Poetry

Two Dogs [by Stacey Lehman]

Left: Johnny © Stacey Lehman 2020 R: Whippoorwill © 1974 by Joe Brainard

Richard Deming Takes On "A Touch of Evil"

Ray Kelly, at "Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource," reports on the new book by the poet and Yale professor Richard Deming:

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Richard Deming’s Touch of Evil — the latest offering in Bloomsbury Publishing's relaunch of the BFI Film Classics series — looks at Orson Welles' role as screenwriter, as well as director and star of the 1958 film.

Deming, a senior lecturer in English and director of creative writing at Yale University, sees the film as an outstanding example of the noir genre and explores its complex relationship to its source novel, Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson.

"Badge of Evil is a solid potboiler, but it has no grand ambitions. Welles uses the basic idea of the novel and remakes it as a meditation on cruelty, irony, and the intrinsic complexity of trying to respond justly to an unjust world. There are so many differences between the novel and the novel, it is hard to catalogue them all," Deming told Wellesnet. "Some broad differences, just to name a few, are that Welles transferred the setting of the action from San Diego to the U. S. Mexico border; the novel’s protagonist, Mitch Holt, becomes Miguel “Mike” Vargas in the movie; and Welles wholly invented the opening scene, one of the most famous in cinema, and offered it as a master class in developing suspense that arguably out does Hitchcock in its use of dramatic irony."

He added. "As ever, however, it is Welles’s deep sense of how to use the visual elements of cinema to evoke rather than explain, to gesture and suggest rather than to declaim and illustrate, that so transfigures the novel’s raw material."

Deming called Welles "one of the greatest figures in cinema."

"Whereas many directors get more and more restrained as they mature — especially if their work doesn’t always fare so well at the box office — Welles become more and more daring," Deming said. "Visually, Touch of Evil is as radical and innovative a film as any ever produced by a major studio. It is morally complicated, dark, provocative, and the more one watches it, the more one sees in every frame. I have also been so amazed with what Welles did with his own acting. It seems incredible that he wanted to make his own character so visually repulsive and would slur his lines and mumble. His voice was a precision instrument, so his willingness to take his greatest strength as an actor and do that kind of damage to it so as to make such an unforgettable character seems truly remarkable. Also, the history of the film and its multiple versions is fascinating and raises the issue of what the 'authentic' text of a film really is."

Filmed more than 60 years ago, Touch of Evil remains both relevant and radical, Deming said.
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For more click here.

"Strangers and Mirrors": On Two Noirs from Orson Welles [by David Lehman]

Today The American Scholar posted my essay on The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai, two late 1940s noirs from Orson Welles. Here are the opening paragraphs, with a link to the piece at  The American Scholar.

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Orson Welles directed and starred in two late-’40s noirs. He is the hapless hero in one; in the other, the dastardly villain. In The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Welles cast himself as itinerant Irish sailor Michael O’Hara, who narrates the film and is the fall guy in an intricate homicidal plot. In The Stranger (1946), Welles plays an unrepentant Nazi. In both, the acting up and down the cast is superb, and the direction a marvel.

The Stranger has the more straightforward plot and is the more righteous of the two. It includes newsreel footage informing an incredulous public of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. It is also the only movie Welles made that showed a profit when it was first released. Variety called it “socko melodrama.”

Franz Kindler (Welles), a bigwig in the Third Reich, who is said to have “conceived the theory of genocide,” has reinvented himself as Charles Rankin, an instructor at the exclusive Harper School for Boys (“established 1827”) in an idyllic Connecticut village. An imprisoned Nazi fanatic, Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne), is released in the hope that he will lead the authorities—in the person of pipe-smoking Mr. Wilson, agent of the war crimes commission (Edward G. Robinson)—to Kindler.
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For more of this piece, please link here. And click here for previous essays on classic movies.

"Abstand" (a dispatch from Berlin) [by Kathleen Heil]

In German, there are various nouns that can be used to convey what we mean by the word distance in English: Zwischenraum, Abstand, the cognate Distanz.

With its repellent prefix, Abstand is the one used for social-distancing measures in Germany, with posters calling for a 1,5M or 2M Abstand outside of all establishments. Last Friday, cafés and restaurants in Berlin were allowed to reopen under these restricted conditions for the first time since the lockdown began, nine weeks prior. I had some food and drink that evening at an eerily empty restaurant in Mitte, and then, while cycling home, ran into a friend, the artist Hilla Steinert. This was happenstance, but also likely enough to happen, as we live in adjacent neighborhoods. It had been a while since we had last seen each other. So odd, after all that time, to be unable to reconnect by embracing my friend.

We met in the studio on Monday and made this dance instead. The word "Abstand" in German can also denote an interval of time. Ours is presented at a distance of two minutes, rather than two meters.

 — Kathleen Heil, Berlin; May 20, 2020

"Beautiful Chaos": Revised Obit for Hache Carillo (alias Herman Carroll) [in the Washington Post]

On the ambiguities of cultural appropriation, the powers of the imagination, and the great American tradition of springing from your Platonic conception of yourself, this article from today's Washington Post is must reading. It is a revised obituary for Hache Carillo, 59, author of Loosing My Espanish  (Pantheon, 2004), about his experiences as Cuban immigrant. Carillo (born Herman Carroll) died this spring of complications from covid-19.

Novelist H.G Carrillo, who explored themes of cultural alienation, dies after developing covid-19
Paul Duggan 

May 23, 2020 at 4:52 p.m. EDT

Editor’s note: After initial publication of this article on May 22, The Washington Post learned that key elements of H.G. Carrillo’s biography had been fabricated over many years, by Carrillo himself. The story below has been revised to include the correct background, how The Post learned of the fabrication and some reaction to it.

A few excerpts:
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This weekend, in his grief, [Dennis vanEngelsdorp] suddenly learned that his husband (true name Herman Glenn Carroll, it turns out) was not the childhood Cuban immigrant he claimed to be — that Hache’s personal origin story, which he shared publicly and with those close to him throughout his adult life, was an extension of his fiction, a product of imagination. . .

<<
"Hache was always a hard guy to know — and when you take it all in, it’s beautiful chaos,” [vanEngelsdorp said.]

<<<
[The Post obituary] initially said that Carrillo was 7 when his father, a physician; his mother, an educator; and their four children fled Fidel Castro’s island in 1967, arriving in Michigan by way of Spain and Florida. It said he was something of a prodigy as a classical pianist when he was growing up, and, by his late teens, was performing at venues in the United States and abroad, before he lost interest and stopped abruptly.

He had repeated that piece of biography so many times over the years to his professors and academic colleagues, to his husband and fellow writers, that “he probably believed it himself,” said his sister, Susan Carroll, 58, who lives in Michigan.

In fact, he was born in Detroit to parents who were native Michiganders, both teachers, according to Susan Carroll and her daughter, Jessica Webley. They said no one in their family is Latino. As for the piano, he was self-taught and not a widely traveled performer. “My brother was very talented,” Carroll said. “He could see something, watch something, hear something, and do it.

<<<
In Carrillo’s 2004 novel, “Loosing My Espanish,” a Chicago teacher, Óscar Delossantos, is being fired, and he tries in his final weeks to instill a love of cultural history in his middle-class, U.S.-bred Cuban American students. But the teenagers don’t care a whit about their ancestral homeland or the terrors of revolution and escape. Unlike Óscar, none ever dangled “from a little piece of twine over the Florida Straits,” with sharks circling below.

Nor are they moved by Óscar’s familial memories of Miami detention, the “concertina wire, dogs with vicious teeth and feet and yards and cubic miles of forms with thousands and thousands of blank spaces to be completed; English, and being made to feel stupid and like a hero and unwanted and saved all at the same time.”
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Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage" [a Jamie Katz Recommendation]

Jamie Katz has been asked to select the ten musical albums that have made the greatest impact on him. He posts one album cover per day for ten consecutive days. This is his choice for day #3:

 

"Check Back on May 22, 2021" [by Milton Obenzinger]

Today is my birthday May 22, 2020
And my parents come to visit
Sitting on the couch after arriving from the dead
They whisper with each other
In Polish that I can almost understand
And they ask questions
“Are you careful to hide from the virus?”
And they tell me a story I know well
The story of the rabbi and his wife (my father’s cousins)
How they hid in a farmer’s attic
For four years to escape the Nazis
So they ask, “Do you think you can hide for four years?
For four months? Can you hide in the closet
For even four hours?”
And then they bring up my aunt’s feats of survival
“Can you slide through the sewers to flee?
The way your aunt Zosia fled the Warsaw Ghetto?
Can you even wash your hands properly?
Do you know how to wear a mask?”
It’s so wonderful to hear them, to feel their concern
How they nag me to steer clear of Death
Tell me that I need courage and luck
And how I must work for both
To hide from the virus
I thank my parents and assure them that I will do all that I can
To get to my next birthday
To live to see Trump driven from the White House
To watch my grandchildren graduate and marry
All the typical joys of home and family
To survive the planet’s growing rage
To forage for enough food to live
And to keep a simple sense of justice

Check back with me May 22, 2021
To see if luck and courage brings me here again

Julius Jaffe: The Analects (5) [by Mitch Sisskind]

RABBI RABINOWITZ

Julius Jaffe approached Rabbi Rabinowitz.

He said, "I will marry Esther Tabachnik.

I am 118 years old."

Rabbi Rabinowitz said, "'Today I have

begotten you.' (Psalms 2:7) On certain

days -- every day, really, but also on

certain days -- it is as if we are born

anew. Our sins (feh) are not just

forgotten but it is as if they never

existed in the first place."

He continued, "'Be fruitful and

multiply.' (Bereshis 1:28) This is

the first commandment in the

Torah, which all these years

you have not obeyed (feh.)

He went on, "When we will stand

before the Heavenly Tribunal we

will be judged less for the sins

we have done (feh) than for the

mitzvot we failed to do. Most

important of all, of course, are

the mitzvot we have actually done."

 

He continued, "Now, with your

marriage to Esther Tabachnik

and by your intimate embrace

of her, you will replace your

failure to enact Torah's premier

commandment (feh) with the

mitzvah of all mitzvot! Kinehora!

Mazel tov!"

 

 

NYPD BLUE

Julius Jaffe and Herman Fishman watched

NYPD Blue on television. Julius Jaffe said,

"Sipowitz must complete his tikkun, from

the sefirot of Gevurah to that of Chesed."

Herman Fishman said, "This is the reverse
of Abraham."

Julius Jaffe continued, "When his tropical

fish die, we can see struggle in the face

of Sipowitz."

Herman Fishman added, "Confucius

said the most important thing in life

is the expression on your face."

Julius Jaffe added, "No matter what

happened, Rav Zusha said, 'It is for

the best.'"

Herman Fishman added, "The younger

brother of Rav Zusha was Rav Elimelech."

 

"MY SIN IS ALWAYS BEFORE MY EYES"

David spoke before YHVH, "Why is not a blessing

concluded with my name, as it is with Abraham?"

The Holy One answered, "I have already tested

Abraham, and he stood erect before me." David

said, "Test me then, O YHVH!" -- Zohar

Julius Jaffe said, "Batsheva was the test and he

failed that test."

Herman Fishman said, "But Batsheva was his soulmate."

Julius Jaffe replied, with a teaching of Rabbi Yishma'el,

"'He ate her when she was unripe.' That is, she was

still married to Uriah the Hittite."

Herman Fishman said, "Oy."

Julius Jaffe continued, "But he passed the more

severe test of teshuvah, which is true repentance:

As he wrote, 'My sin is always before my eyes'
(Psalms 51:5) and further, 'Purge me with hyssop
and I shall be clean; Wash me and I shall be whiter
than snow' (Psalms 51:9), and still further, 'Create
me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast
spirit within me.'" (Psalms 51:12)

 

 

THE LIGHT AND THE VESSEL

Julius Jaffe said, "Rav Ashlag, elaborating

on teachings of Rav Isaac Luria, describes

desire as existing in two forms: desire for the

self alone (feh) and desire for the purpose

of sharing."

He continued, "YHVH has no desire for the
self alone. The only thing he 'wants' or 'needs' 
is a Vessel with which he can share his Light.
So he manifested a Vessel that embodied a
desire to receive -- a desire that he somehow

brought into being although it was foreign

to his own nature. Yet the Vessel was still
composed of God's essence in the same
way that a bowl made of ice remains

identical with water."

 

He went on, "Then there came a time --
and YHVA had certainly anticipated this --
that the Vessel, because it was composed
of God's essence of sharing, expressed its
own desire to share."

 

He continued, "Thereupon YHVH withdrew his
Light from pouring into the Vessel, and the
Vessel shattered into an infinite number of pieces,

or sparks, as the sages sages say."

.

Herman Fishman asked, "What happened

then?"

 

But Julius Jaffe wept and said, "Oy, I will

save that for another time."

On Fats Waller's Birthday: A Poem [by David Lehman]

Fats Waller Live in 1935

You and I both know why
“all my blondes and brunettes”
become
“all my Harlem coquettes”
when Fats Waller sings
“Lulu’s Back in Town”
after playing it on the piano
in 1935.

Think of that: in 1935
when everyone was supposed
to be miserable, here was Fats Waller
with his derby hat mustache cigarette and huge grin
playing and singing for the sheer joy of it.

Workman's Lunch [by Dean Smith]

The poem “Cardboard Note” stopped me in my tracks as I walked through New Orleans one summer in the mid-90s. I carried it in my head as a meditation for more than twenty years. I never wrote it down until recently. I read the sign out loud for the sound of it and lingered there in the doorway vestibule staring at the haphazard brown square affixed to the middle of a glass door.

Cardboard Note

The Polk Street Diner
is closed today
due to the passing
of Miss Annie Mae.

The bottom of the cardboard was torn with a ragged corrugated edge and the black letters were both upper and lower case within the words. The door frame wore several layers of brown paint. The diner was empty and old school with a Formica and chrome luncheonette counter. There were tables as well. This was a place for workers to feast on steaming collards or rice and beans, fried oyster poboys and low-brow muffalettas.

It wasn’t William Carlos Williams but my mother, Dona Carol Bartoli, who first introduced me to the concept of found poetry. Years after she dropped me off at the University of Virginia in 1981, she showed me a poem that she had written on the way back to Chicago from that trip.

It was called “Eye of the Needle” and contained a sequence of Native American words and tribal names on highway signs. She maintained a spiritual connection to the Indigenous Americans throughout her life and her classic Neapolitan features—long and curly jet black hair, high cheekbones, a dark complexion and an aquiline nose gave her a native presence. The poem begins, “Chickahoming/Lightfoot/Toano.”

I’ll never forget that when she dropped me off at UVA, she started crying. And years later, when she gave me the poem, she confessed, “I wasn’t crying because I was going to miss you. I was jealous that I wasn’t going to that school.” The last two lines of “Eye of the Needle” are my favorite and read: “Indian Head
Highway/No Exit.”

She passed away last year. I found numerous poems on Johns Hopkins University Medical School stationery from the early 1960s in her Italian villa. She had worked as a secretary for a Hopkins ophthalmologist named Dr. Knox. After she found out that she was pregnant with me, she couldn’t type letters to patients for three weeks. She kept making mistakes and throwing crinkled balls into the trashcan. I knew as early as I can remember that she had sacrificed much bigger dreams to become a mother at the age of twenty-one.

My second found poem appeared in the form of a sign in the meatpacking district in Lower Manhattan in 1987. I was living in Chelsea and was walking with my Columbia roommate Paul. It was a bitter cold Sunday afternoon in January, light fading across the Hudson. These were the post-Kojak years—when the neighborhoods around the Manhattan Port Authority building were still seedy and bleak. I memorized it exactly as it was portrayed on the sign with the headline, “The Finest Natural Veal.”

Legs, hinds, loins, racks,
shoulders, breasts, necks,
cutlets, clods, t-bone steaks
sliced roast trimmings, filet
tongues, hearts, livers, brains,
sweetbread.

Those last five words still remind me of what it means to be a poet: the process, the work, the endless cutting into bone.

In 1992, Poetry East published a poem of mine entitled “Obsession.” In that issue, Number Thirty-three, I discovered the poem “Aunt Mary Catherine Bids the World Adieu” by George Swaney. It’s a simple two-line poem, “If you want me I’ll be/ in the garage.” I would quote these lines and this poem for decades. It prepared me for being able to see the meaning in “Cardboard Note.” I had an Aunt Mary Margaret on my father’s side and would substitute her name for the title. For years, I thought about the details that were missing. Did she wear a housecoat? What was in the garage? 

Found poems like this one present the punchline but not the backstory—leaving all possibility

to the imagination. Swaney’s poem influenced my embrace of “Cardboard Note.” I’ve also thought about why it took so long to write “Cardboard Note” down. 

My mother died in Montecatini Alto in January of 2019. She didn’t know that she had terminal cancer. I spent the final days with her. A few months before she died, I’d sent her some new work. She told me that it was some of the best she’d seen from me.

On the day she died, we finally received the definitive news of her condition shortly before lunch. We said nothing to her about it—but could see that she was near the end. My brother, stepfather, and I went to my parent’s favorite lunch spot called La Tavola to regroup. The restaurant offers tre piatti for only ten euro. You can get Tortellini en Brodo, Bistecca Fiorentina, Panna Cotta, and a Coca-Cola Light—a meal for a reasonable fee that is molto buono. The Montecatini city workers were finishing up their lunch break, hunkering down with their Tiramasu and espresso. My stepfather started to choke up when Bruno the owner asked where my mother was.

Death Notice, Dona Carol Bartoli

Back at the hospital, Dona was dying quickly. We got the call and frantically drove to say one final goodbye. We missed her last breath by minutes. She was lying in state in the chapel by nightfall. A one-thousand year old Italian lawn required the casket to be open for twenty-four hours. She looked beautiful in her coffin, at peace, like a warrior after a long battle.

I finally wrote down the message on the sign in the New Orleans café window last summer. My journey into mourning the loss of my mother led me back down Canal Street into that doorway. I’ve thought for years about Miss Annie Mae. So much inside that door depended on her presence that the restaurant closed for her passing. Did it ever reopen? I didn’t find any trace of its existence. I knew that she must have been someone who smiled and engaged the customers. Like my mother, she is an important figure in the invisible history of the world. I felt the need to honor her life.

It wasn't William Carlos Williams, but Dona Carol Bartoli, pictured here in her prime, who first introduced the author to the concept of found poetry

This essay appears in the May issue of  issue of Poetry East.

Dean Smith is Director of Duke University Press. Before joining Duke, Dean was the director of Cornell University Press—the first university press in America—overseeing a program that publishes 150 new books a year and features 3,400 e-books. He is an author, poet, and freelance journalist. His book of poetry, American Boy (2000), is openly accessible. He published Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season (2013) with Temple University Press. He is an adjunct professor of publishing in the Masters in Professional Studies program at George Washington University. One of his all-time favorite moments was doing a public talk with John Cleese.  

Give Me Back My Bloomers! (Catullus 420) [translated by Molly Arden]

 

Thallus, you lump,
Lift your sorry carcass! I want 
no more of your clichés —your
Good things come to those who wait—
I who have waited till the cows come home
and never come—
you of the spontaneous overflow
of what you call—powerful feelings,
words worth nothing.

You who love to brag
You’re a big fish in my small pond . . .

Give me back my underpants
and cigarettes
The ones you say you quit smoking—
I am going back to Paris . . .

Met Percent: Week Twenty [by Alec Bernstein]

Bellini, Raw Pork and Opium

Left: Madonna Adoring the Sleeping Child, Giovanni Bellini, 1460s, not on view.
Top: The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches, Henry Fuseli, 1796, gallery 633.
Bottom: The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781, Detroit Institute of Arts.
Right: The sleep of reason produces monsters, Francisco de Goya, 1799, not on view. 

Getting the gestalt of gallery 633, titled Goya and the Eighteenth Century in Italy, was tough. Tiepolos, Goya's portraits from his “black period” - when he almost died from illness - and Fuseli’s Night-Hag. 

The influences on Fuseli are noted: Bellini’s infant on a stone slab; classical pyramid compositions; masterful chiaroscuro. And his utterly personal vision not based on typical themes of the canon.

The Nightmare became a mark of Romanticism. “She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair.” - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818.

The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) compares one of the paintings in the Usher House with Fuseli’s painting: “irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.”

Freud had a copy of The Nightmare in his study, enamored of Fuseli’s aphorism, “One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams.” Ernest Jones used the image for the frontispiece in his On The Nightmare. 

Although rumors would attribute Fuseli’s visions to consuming raw pork and opium, the results were horrific, but not diseased. Somehow the Enlightenment brought fantasies floating in clouds, winged beasts, and  demonic imagination.

Five Ways To Conjugate an Oil Sketch

Allegory of the Planets and Continents, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1752, gallery 633.
Top left: Madame Théodore Gobillard, Edgar Degas, 1869, gallery 815.

Top right: Woman with a Dog, painting and riccordo (14 fantasy portraits), Jean Honoré Fragonard, 1769, gallery 630.

Bottom left: Fontainebleau: Oak Trees at Bas-Bréau, Camille Corot, 1832, gallery 803.
Bottom right: Sketch for The Haywain, John Constable, 1820, not on view. 

The general term “oil sketch” comes long after the creation of these rapid intuitive paintings. Earlier, more specific names were derived from the function of the work. The modello, for example, was made for clients and was a business task in ateliers. All of these forms were seen only as stages toward finished works and not considered worthy of public exhibition.

Modello: A finished presentation sketch specifically for “patron approval”.  (Tiepolo’s proposal included this sketch for the Residenz Palace fresco in Würzburg, Germany.)

Ébauche: Unfinished (for any reason). (Degas, after several dry media studies, left the oil sketch unfinished. It was a favorite of Mary Cassatt.)

Riccordo: A reduced version of a large work for the artist’s records. (Fragonard, after completing his 14 fantasy portraits, copied each oil sketch as a thumb-nail for himself. Although not in oil, they are “riccordos of oil sketches”.)

Esquisse: Smaller than final. (Corot enlarged the small landscape (shown above) in his large biblical canvas Hagar in the Wilderness. Interesting to see a French Oak in the Palestine desert scene.) Met gallery 803. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435962

Étude: Study (often fragmentary). (Constable, understandably proud of his “skying” period, studied the physics of the sky. “You can never be nubilous,” he told a friend, because “I am the man of clouds.”)

The French Academy battled over the oil sketch for 40 years. The Poussinistes denounced the rough gestures of the oil-sketching Rubénistes. “The loaded brush” won. I would have been a proud Rubéniste. Et vous?

 

“(The/A) (God/Devil) (is) in the Detail(s)”

Residenz at Würzburg, Germany:  Stucco work, Antonio Bossi, White Hall, 1744-45; Insert: Allegory of the Planets and  Continents detail, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, grand staircase ceiling fresco, 1752-53.

I travelled to Germany a great many times (205 trips, 543 hotel nights, 530,000 + Lufthansa miles). When business trips spanned weekends, I kept regular company with three of the Pinakothek museums (Alte, Neue, der Moderne) in Munich. In a deep Tiepolo period, I visited his ceiling frescos at the Residenz, Würzburg.

The Residenz is an astonishing assemblage of European Arts: German, French, and Austrian architects; a Bohemian garden artist; Italian sculptors; and one lone Italian painter Tiepolo — who was brought in to create the largest fresco (600 square meters) in the world.

I had come for Tiepolo’s The Continents, especially the giant crocodile in The Americas - A rococo fantasy of our supposed wilderness. 

But then I was stopped on the stairs, looking off to the left, at the walls; the hallucinatory surfaces with floating dragons. I had not known Antonio Bossi or his stucco work in the White Hall: What a room! An explosion of detail. Excess as ecstasy.

“Der liebe Gott steckt im detail”. - Early German proverb, commonly falsely attributed to Mies van der Rohe.

"Le bon Dieu est dans le detail." - Gustave Flaubert.

“If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they ‘artialize’ nature.” - Montaigne

 

Woods Half Empty?

I had a note to follow up on a description I found, when studying Brueghel’s landscape The Harvesters: “Peace and agriculture in a pre-Romantic ideal landscape, without sublime terrors.” I didn't think much on it until Cosimo. Here was terror; how is it ideal?

So I hunted . . . back to Edmund Burke on the sublime: "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger . . . Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror . . . and know there is an inherent pleasure in this emotion.” - A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757.

After these immersions, in Burke and Breugel, beauty, Cosimo, and the sublime, I had a Met dream: “By a winged something, arrived six everything I write(s)”. These writings appeared as volumes of “Iberian ancient poetry”. Likely memories of the Arms and Armor galleries: Moorish verses engraved on chivalric weapons foretelling “a barbarous pandemic”. It felt just like A Hunting Scene.

“A Culture Is No Better Than Its Woods”

 

 

Soundtrack for "The Daily Mirror" [by Joshua Michael Stewart]

Joshua Michael Stewart has created a Spotify soundtrack for The Daily Mirror by David Lehman (Scribner, 2000). It includes Ella and Louis singing "Can't We Be Friends," Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters accentuating the positive, Dexter Gordon's "Tangerine," Sinatra's "All of Me," Bessie Smith (pictured far left in a 1936 photo taken by Carl Van Vechten) singing "Do Your Duty," Horace Silver's "Song for My Father," plus Freddie Hubbard, Coleman Hawkins, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Miles Davis ("Bags' Groove), Thelonious Monk, Peggy Lee, and Nat Cole.

Click here to order or to obtain more information.

 

Dispatch From A Distance - Enter Geese [by Cara Benson]

There is a pond at the heart of the woods down multiple hills, over more ridges than I care to count, from the church where I now live. When I think of it, the pond, from here at my home, I can feel its stillness, though of course it isn’t still, at all. Water, and certainly this backcountry collection of it, is in constant flux. What is it, then, that these pools become known as calming presences? I’ll drop the word womb here, also bodily percentages, where we come from and what we’re made of, but I’ve got other places to go in this post, so I’ll let them wash over us as I move on to how the pond ripples and drains through marsh grasses into runoff streams feeding the downslopes, all the while holding a relatively (isn’t everything) level surface.

Enter geese. There’s a pair of them I’ve come to find regularly at the pond. Surely they’d been there before, Canadian geese are what birdwatchers would call “common” in North America, but I remember the first time I became acutely aware of these particular two. The afternoon was glumly overcast, and though I’ve hiked in all manner of weather, winter being a favorite, this day my mood matched the gray and I might well have preferred working out at the gym if that had been an option. (My YMCA closed the same day New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had his last workout at the gym, some 65 days ago and counting.) My house could sport an exercise class, but getting out every day is imperative, especially because I can, both physically and also safely in regard to virus-required social distancing, so I do.

I layered up for the walk, stuffed my feet into boots, and sighed as I stepped out the door. It’s not immediately an easy path to get to the pond through the woods at the edge of the land surrounding the church; I have to walk through pricker bushes and pick my way carefully along and over a portion of the seemingly millions of miles of lichen-encrusted stone walls that crawl the landscape in the Northeast US. The stones wobble underfoot, and remnants of barbed wire fencing lie in wait in the crevices. It’s a tricky start when I head this direction, but it’s the most direct route to the good stuff, so it’s my most frequently used entry.

Up and over and then crossing back again, mindful with each step not to trip nor trod the season’s burgeoning wildflowers, I made my way down to the first of many old lumbering roads, or just plain long ago abandoned dirt roads for early automobile travel, having first been horse routes. Before that, this was Mohican territory, but that deserves its own post (which is to come). This day, as I’ve said, I wasn’t in the best of spirits, so my attention was pulled inward, the way a tree encloses itself around a wound, encompassing it with its bark. (I don’t know if that’s fully accurate, but I like it.) I tiptoed to the sides of mud ruts, leapt over puddles, and followed along animal herd paths, all the while my vision necessarily trained on where I put my feet, and I was not a little cranky about it. About everything.

Finally my descent leveled out and I could see through the open deciduous stands the glowing of the beloved pond. I made my way around the southern wetlands draining the pool, then back up the slopes flanking its western shore (this is my favorite spot). I climbed the hemlock and white pine studded rocky ledges to a small clearing nestled in the pines overlooking the pond. Through the green-needled branches extending into my sight line, I could see on a mound of ground rising out of the water – two geese! There they were, simply standing, doing what exactly? Were they a pair? There was a third! Was it their young? When do they hatch? There’s so much to know!

I pulled my phone from my pants, aimed the video in their direction, and moved forward as slowly and carefully as I was capable of without looking where I was stepping. I thought I might catch them take flight, as surely they would hear my approach. The first indication they were aware of me was when the one who looked smaller slipped into the water to swim in the opposite direction, dragging a V shaped wake across the surface. The two remaining on the mound began lifting each webbed foot, slightly rocking, clearly exhibiting agitation (getting one’s feathers ruffled is cliche for good reason). And then it began: not flight, but the fiercest round of honking as they, too, slid into the water to paddle in my direction. Then in circles. Then back my way, all the while barking at me. Clearly, at me.

How peaceful they’d looked. How annoyed they now were, and it wasn’t letting up. Just when I thought they were done, like hiccups, they’d start up again. A good five minutes passed like this, which is a long time to be yelled at. Finally I receded, sorry to have disturbed them, though I did think to myself as their protest followed me through the trees as I made my way up the hill and out of sight, if not earshot, Enough already, I’m leaving.

I’ve been back to see the geese nearly daily. Have they laid eggs? Who is the smaller one? Where do they sleep? I have found few definitive answers, though many slightly informed suppositions, but I’ve kept at it. Over time we have forged an uneasy truce. Rather, I figured out how to move in their vicinity slowly enough, and in small enough increments, to keep them relatively unflapped. Too many steps at one time and the honking winds up, sometimes for minutes without ceasing, until I sit long enough or retreat into the woods to try again another day. I have definitely formed an attachment.

The first time I went to the pond after my investment in our relationship and they weren’t there, I was distraught. The pond seemed so empty! Where did they go? Did my presence make the spot less suitable? Were their eggs picked off by predators (there’s been both a bald eagle and a blue heron circling)? The following day, still no geese, and I was downright sullen. I slumped on a rock at shoreline, hugging my midriff against the cold (where the hell is Spring anyway). I moped, uphill, all the way home, and let me just say that uphill moping requires commitment.

I took to reading about my missing friends. I didn’t acquire any sure knowledge, but I did come to believe that they hadn’t laid eggs, or the female would have been incubating (sitting on the nest) nearly continuously. The smaller of the three is likely a Cackling goose, whose mate had also appeared. Easy for me to have been wrong, though. The only way to get a better idea would be to spend more time with them, but they weren’t cooperating. They’re geese, after all.

To stave off disappointment, I’d mostly given up on seeing them again but continued to return because, well, what else would I do? To walk is to repeat a mantra with my body. An enactment of prayer, whether secular or otherwise. The poet’s “and the wave sings because it is moving”* is a neuroscientist’s “certain brain functions improve during even mild activity” is the Buddha’s “it is better to travel well than to arrive,” though having a destination to circumambulate or achieve is plenty fine, too, if that’s what gets me going. And for the love of [choose your signifier], I am desperate to get something, anything, going (aren’t we all?).

So I ventured back to the pond. There I was, sitting slopeside on a bed of pine needles, gazing at the wind spilling jewels across the water, when I heard that familiar honking, from afar, heading my direction. The sound grew and into view they came, expertly skidding in for a landing near their mound – the Canadian geese! And as if they’d been waiting off in the trees, the Cackling geese zoomed to the water to join them. All four of them settled in to their floating repose, and I leaned back against the hill, propped on my elbows for an afternoon visit, until it was time to move on.

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

*Philip Larkin
Read the first post in this series: Hello From A Distance. 

The "How To" of Eros [by Catherine Bowman]

Instructions.

Audre Lorde in her 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” writes “This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with the joy in which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate, those aspects in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventional expected, nor the merely safe.” She goes on to say “recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.” So how do we steer clear of the erotic ghetto? How can the erotic infuse the rest of our lives—our actions? How refuse to “settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventional expected, nor the merely safe?”

*

We seek instruction for the things most our own. How to breath, walk, fuck. The sex or erotic instruction book sells technique and proposes to tell you secrets that are actually open and available to all. A quick tour through a nearby chain bookstore: 269 Amazing Sex Tips for Men; Striptease Kit: Everything You Need to Take It Off; The Lowdown on Going Down; Lube Job, A Winners Guide to Great Maintenance Sex; Miss Finishing School for Boys Who Want to be Girls; How to get Beautiful Women into Bed, Ride ‘em Cowgirl: Sex Position Secrets for Better Bucking.

*

Instruction books, while entertaining and pleasurable, tend more toward a narrowing of the imagination and possibility—back to the erotic ghetto. Erotic books and sex manuals offer rules and instructions. Movies instruct on the screen. In Don Patterson’s collection of reflections and aphorisms The Book of Shadows he says: “Anal Sex has one serious advantage: there are few cinematic precedents that instruct either party how they should look.”

*

But perhaps the poet, using the very exacting forms of instruction or advice, can pursue a highly pleasurable and erotic undertaking. In his great poem “Directive” Robert Frost writes:

"The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you / Who only has at heart your getting lost."

These two lines seem a great piece of erotic instruction, yet most instruction is not about getting lost but its reverse. The erotic is both: being lost and being found. Instruction poems can be very erotic and playful. Octavio Paz tells us “The agent that provokes both the erotic act and the poetic act is imagination. “ I think now of the famous instruction: "Am returning in three days. Don’t wash."

*

The poet can subvert a form that feels overly proscriptive by taking the literal and instructive and making it suggestive, reconfiguring rules into realms of possibilities, using the highly erotic modes of instruction: recipe, precise attention to language, ritual, and mastery toward opening not closure.

*

Do you have a favorite instruction or advice poem?

*

OVIDICE

How do I satisfy my partner? With hands palms up—to heaven, begging pardon

How do I maintain an erection? When savage Frenzy dries her tears again.

How can I tell if my partner is faking? By a huge boar, that served Diana’s ends--

What and where is the G-spot? Is in the grip of chance, of sudden shifts:

Is it OK to watch porn? Magpies the mocking dwellers in the woods.

--Catherine Bowman

from the archives; first posted February 11, 2008.

"Sheltering at Home" [by John Koethe]

SHELTERING AT HOME

                                                        But sometimes standing still is also life.

                                                                            John Ashbery

I hate it---but then home
Was always a place to depart from
Or come back to, not a state of being in itself.
In the morning it’s my face in the mirror
And the newspaper in an easy chair, but then
I’m back on the shelf for the rest of the day,
While outside the weather has its way
And it’s not good.  Now and then I go for a drive
To prove the existence of an external world
Of houses and trees and no people, but most of the time
I stay in my room, while Diane works in her study.
The nostalgia for the ordinary, for the world
Of just a month or so ago keeps overwhelming me,
Although my life then was the same as it is now.
We live in our imaginations, and if the world
Isn’t up to them our lives aren’t either:  instead of 
Lofting us “above this Frame of things,”
They sink back into it, yet continue somehow.

“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”
Is a kind of travelogue that culminates in a childhood
Far away from home, in a way of remaining alone
Without knowing it, of not knowing where or what you are.
Driving in my car to Wingspread or Port Washington,
I realize I’m going there instead of staying home
Because I want to, but also because without a destination
Life feels like nowhere, like a story without an ending
Or a vast metropolis that takes you in and leaves you on your own.
I know it’s moods and cabin fever, but what is there to go on
But a sense of purpose, however small?  What is it but a travelogue,
Even when you’re inside---especially when you’re inside,
Where you think you’re free to roam because there’s no place else to go?
Let’s face it---you can’t.  We like to think of the imagination
As inexhaustible and transcendent, but it’s as earthbound as we are
As we cling to an idea of someplace better than the one we have.
You believe you see it through the window, but it’s just your own
Reflection in the mirror, in the morning when the world 
Feels simultaneously too close and too far away.  It isn’t home
Or even close to home, and yet it’s where and what you are.

Failing at Love 2.0 [by Nin Andrews]

I love this Sappho poem of pure jealousy. I love the “kindled the flesh along my arms/ and smothered me in its smoke-blind rush.” I’m just realizing that many of my favorite poems celebrate the worst parts of our beings: jealousy, lust, rage.

I am thinking about this because I have been reading this book, Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection, a book recommended by my meditation instructor. The basic premise of the book is that love is not something you simply emanate like a yogi from a cave. Rather, you have to practice it in both small and big ways. The book suggests that you create micro-moments of love by engaging with people wherever you go—the drug store, the post office, the hairdresser, the sidewalk. Just imagine all the opportunities for micro-moments of love. After many such moments, you can develop something called positive resonance. I picture it like a halo around me.

Yeah, right.

But the other day, I thought, what the hell. I might as well try it out. Supposedly, if you do this practice, you develop a well-toned vagal nerve.  And who doesn’t want a toned vagal nerve? So I gave it a shot. I went to the Y for a workout and started gabbing with everyone in sight. I don’t like to chat when I work out, and people who talk too much give me hives. But I figured this was just an experiment. And besides hives, what’s the worst thing that could happen?

First, I talked to a man who was recently divorced and was trying to sweat out his rage at his ex. (He reminded me of that George Bilgere poem, “What I Want”). I didn’t really want to pursue that topic. So then I talked to a woman who hates her ass—okay, that was a little more interesting, and made me think of Lucille Clifton’s “Homage to My Hips.”  Next, I spoke to a lady who thinks the Y is some kind of preview of hell. She did have a few good points to make, especially about the sweaty deposits on the equipment (and yes, there’s a poem for that, too.) Then, in the swimming pool, a man started telling me how to improve my swimming form. He said he could coach me a bit. Really?

So what is it with men? I mean, what woman would tell a man she would like to coach him. Seriously!

(Afterwards, in the shower, I kept thinking of that wonderful poem, “Shooter,” by Jan Beatty.)

Needless to say, I was failing at micro-moments of love. Or at least I wasn’t feeling it.

And to make matters worse, the next day there were all these people trying to talk to me. 

I put my headphones on and looked into the distance. I didn’t even have anything to listen to, but headphones are useful. I think of them now as a protection against micro-moments of love. 

I thought of all my failed attempts at becoming a better human. I am literally a disaster. Then I thought of all the poets I love and how they celebrate their disastrous selves. Consider this poem by Julie Bruck from her book, How to Avoid Huge Ships.

To Janet in Jersey

        Dear Abby: Is it OK to put a paper towel holder in the bathroom?

                                                                —Janet in Jersey

Don’t ever hide your Bounty under the sink. Nor
your conflicted feelings about family members.
Remember the midwife who handed fawning new parents
their wet, perfect baby? In six months, she said,
when you want to drop this child from a window, call me.
Drink, Janet. Smoke, if it calms you. Take secret joy
in the failings of those who judge you. Judge them back,
if it gives you ballast. When you argue with your dead,
slap anyone who uses the word closure.  Rail, Janet,
rage against the body’s small betrayals. You know
they’re only practice for the big one to come. If others
are steeped in denial, that’s their problem. Pass gas.
Should someone instruct you in the art of breathing,
cut that person off for good. Chew your nails. Cheat at cards.
If you want a roll of paper towels in the bathroom,
Janet in Jersey, you get no argument from me. Fuck, yes!

And this poem from Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems always makes me laugh.

Poem

Wouldn’t it be funny
if the Finger had designed us
to shit just once a week?

        all week long we’d get fatter
        and fatter and then on Sunday morning
        while everyone’s in church
 
                        ploop !

From the archives; first posted April 2, 2020

"When Sinatra Campaigned for FDR" [by David Lehman]

<<<
When Sinatra met Humphrey Bogart, the star of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon said that he’d heard Sinatra knew how to make women faint. “Make me faint,” Bogart said. Sinatra’s faint-inducing ability was also on the agenda when he met Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Fainting, which once was so prevalent, has become a lost art among the ladies,” the president told Sinatra in the White House on September 28. “I’m glad you have revived it.” Then the commander in chief asked Sinatra how he did it. “I wish to hell I knew,” Sinatra said.

The singer had wrangled the White House invitation when the Democratic Committee chairman asked his pal, the restaurateur Toots Shor, to a reception. FDR was glad to host Sinatra; it would counteract Bing Crosby’s endorsement of his opponent, Republican Thomas E. Dewey, governor of New York, Roosevelt’s old job before he went to the White House. “Look who’s here,” Roosevelt exclaimed and asked the singer to confide the title of the song that would be No. 1 on the hit parade next week. “I won’t tell,” FDR grinned. “Amapola,” Sinatra said. (The title may have sounded Italian to the president—and Italy was an uncomfortable subject in wartime—so he switched the subject.) The meeting went well, though the president was said afterward to scratch his head in wonderment at the idea that the skinny crooner had revived what he called “the charming art of fainting.” “He would never have made them swoon in our day,” he told an aide after the party broke up.

Sinatra joined Bogart and Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Danny Kaye, and Edward G. Robinson on the FDR bandwagon in 1944. With his talent for friendship, Frank and Welles in particular got to be great buddies, and when Orson and his wife Rita Hayworth had a baby that December, they chose Sinatra to be the girl’s godfather. There was a rally for an unprecedented fourth term for FDR in Fenway Park on the weekend before Nov. 7, Election Day. The Boston Globe reported that Welles and Sinatra—“the dramatic voice” and “the Voice”—brought the house down. On Election Night, the two men had rooms at New York’s Waldorf Astoria but before retiring they downed a few celebratory drinks and figured out a way to harass the conservative Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler, who regularly attacked President Roosevelt. Pegler had dubbed Sinatra the “New Dealing Crooner,” “bugle-deaf Frankie boy,” and probably a red. Welles had his own reasons for detesting the Hearst chain, the head of which did not look kindly on Welles’s Citizen Kane.

Sinatra donated money to FDR’s campaign, made radio broadcasts, spoke at Carnegie Hall. “I’d just like to tell you what a great guy Roosevelt is,” he said. “I was a little stunned when I stood alongside him. I thought, here’s the greatest guy alive today and here’s a little guy from Hoboken shaking his hand. He knows about everything—even my racket.” Conservative columnists predictably had a field day with Sinatra’s self-importance. At a concert Sinatra sang a parody lyric of “Everything Happens to Me.” The Republicans were “mad as they can be,” because he went to Washington to have a cup of tea with “a man called Franklin D.”

For more from this excerpt from Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World, click here.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-sinatra-campaigned-for-fdr

"Beyond the Sea" (1959 & 1973): Bobby Darin's great nostalgia trip

No more sailin'. . . Happy birthday, Bobby (May 14, 1969 -- December 20, 1973). He gave an amazing nine-minute performance of "Beyond the Sea"  in 1973, the year he died. (There's a full-length tape but we're denied access.) What a talent. He could play the trombone with his voice -- he does it here. In the fourth clip, you'll see what a tremendous gift he had for mimicry: he does Andy Williams's "Moon River" exactly as Andy did it. Finally, I couldn't resist putting up the episode of The Jack Benny Show with Bobby Darin as his guest (January 28, 1964). -- DL

Squibs 419-421 [by Alan Ziegler]

419: I walk the late afternoon streets. A cop enters a coffee shop to get something to-go, leaving his partner outside. The partner paces, lonely, wondering what’s taking so long. The faint moon is lonely in the blue sky, arms-length and 238,000 miles from a passing plane.


A woman in a pink dress walks a dog. The dog is lonely for other dogs and tugs whenever he sees one. This dog’s loneliness cannot be solved by the company of the woman in pink. The woman in pink is lonely. The companionship of the dog helps, but is not enough. A grocer stands behind his cash register, lonely for a customer who used to come in every day and now comes no more. A beggar posted at a subway exit gets lonely between trains. “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” wails from the window of a cheap hotel. The song makes the old man sitting on the steps feel even more lonely for his dead friends. A barber sits in one of his swivel chairs, lonely for the back of a head and a face in the mirror. The sun sets, and in rooms where lights do not go on, lonely people sit in the dark. The moon is covered by a single, lonely cloud; they will soon drift apart.


A couple walk, hand-in-hand; they smile, but underneath they are lonely for parents. I weave among them all, keeping my composure, not letting them know that I know. Not a damn thing I can do for any of us.

420: My watch died of complications.

421: Harry Greenberg and I loved Joe Franklin’s after-midnight talk show on Channel 9 in the 70s and 80s. You might get Tony Curtis, the New Kids on the Block (when they were kids), and a guy hypnotizing a chicken (we suspected it had something to do with his fingers around the chicken’s neck). We especially enjoyed how Joe lavished praise equally on the super-famous and the obscure; everybody was the best and they were all Joe's dear friends. The ultimate Joe-moment came after he mentioned never having met his next guest. When the best-ever-whoever emerged from the curtain, Joe extended his hand and said, “It’s been a long time.” After a beat, Joe recovered and added, “It’s been never.” Several decades later, Joe was fronting Joe Franklin's Comedy Club (nee Memory Lane) restaurant on 45^th Street and Eighth Avenue. Erin and I decided it was the perfect place to take Harry Greenberg for his birthday. While we waited for Harry and his wife, Rose, to arrive, I spotted Joe Franklin making the rounds, while his kinescope image interviewed Fred Astaire on the flat screens above. I knew what I had to do—or regret it forever—and I made a bee-line to Joe. In the middle of dinner, Harry was disappointed at the lack of a Joe-sighting. During dessert, Harry looked up to see Joe approaching him with outstretched hand. Joe said, “It’s been a long time,” and barely a beat later Harry replied, “It’s been never.”