The Best American Poetry

Richard Deming on "A Touch of Evil" as BFI Film Classics Return

BFI Film Classics – books commissioned by the British Film Institute, published by Bloomsbury in the United States -- make a welcome return with Richard Deming’s excellent study of A Touch of Evil. Orson Welles’s 1958 noir is justly celebrated by film aficionados, though its meandering plot has puzzled many viewers. Deming's book is a fine guide for the perplexed.

Set in a town near the US-Mexican border, the movie fuses sex and violence in a boiling cauldron. It begins with an explosion that interrupts an embrace and ends with two shooting deaths in an oilfield.

As Deming points out, one remarkable thing about the film is the extent to which the plot is subordinate to the technique. Welles uses cinematic means to explore questions of justice, motivation and “a complex, perpetually equivocating moral world,” in the author's phrase. If the causality and chronology of events are enshrouded in a swamp-like fog, it’s because Welles achieves his effects by cinematic rather than literary means. Deming’s analysis of the famous tracking shot that opens the movie is right on the money. 

Deming strikes a personal note in his preface by way of ushering us into the darkness of Welles’s vision. In chapter one he presents a valuable summary of noir, its meaning, its history. He argues that A Touch of Evil “is more than the apotheosis or apex of a genre or a style” – to his mind, it is the ultimate noir, and then some. The movie’s central thesis, he argues, is spoken by Charlton Heston, playing the Mexican policeman Vargas, to Welles, playing the corrupt police chief Hank Quinlan, an obese bully, a bigot, and a slob: “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”

Janet Leigh, the blond Yankee spouse of the Mexican Vargas, is as beautiful and vulnerable as in Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate, and Marlene Dietrich as a fortune teller may have the best line in the movie. When Welles asks her to read his future, she has, “You haven't got any.” “Huh?'” “Your future's all used up.”

A Touch of Evil takes the romance out of noir, and leaves only the criminality, the hostility, the spite, and the evil that men do that lives after them. It is a deliberately ugly movie, refusing to treat sin and crime, the stuff of noir, with the romantic sheen and sensual promise that usually comes with the turf. (Think of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past.) Welles, possessor of a “distinctive smoothly textured baritone with its ability to slide across tonalities with both insolence and nobility,” is willing to sacrifice even this most valuable of assets; he slurs his words, mumbles, steps on other characters’ lines.

“Who’s the boss – the cop or the law?” Vargas asks. That’s the thematic crux of A Touch of Evil. the movie. But the experience of the movie is far more unsettling than any such formulation, and Richard Deming's discussion of the film makes it an object lesson in understanding the meaning of a narrative in cinematic images rather than in literary terms.

The BFI has seized the opportunity to reissue of other books on the backlist. I enjoyed Greil Marcus’s take on The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer), for example. Marcus, who writes with swagger and is never less than interesting, regards the picture as the “most exciting movie” from Citizen Kane to The Godfather, an overstatement but an arresting one.

The Manchurian Candidate is Frankheimer's best movie To make his point about the originality and brilliance of the brainwashing sequence that opens the movie, Marcus argues that by comparison the Hitchcock / Dali dream collaboration in Spellbound is “visually florid and intellectually dead.” I maintain that Spellbound, Hitch’s most Freudian effort, is underrated, but perhaps the larger point is that Gregory Peck's dream in Spellbound has a very different function from the collective hypnosis of the American POWs in The Manchurian Candidate. To exalt the latter it is not necessary to deprecate the former. Criticism is not a zero sum game.

Again, to substantiate his feeling that Sinatra’s performance in The Manchurian Candidate is the best in his Hollywood career, with which I would concur, Marcus says that Sinatra in From Here to Eternity gave "a one-note performance" and that Ernest Borgnine's in the same film was "better." Come on. 

Agree or disagree, Marcus is a compelling writer, and he hits the nail on the head when he talks of “the Iron Maiden of repression,” which sums up Laurence Harvey's acting in The Manchurian Candidate -- and explains why Al Pacino’s work in The Godfather movies was the best of his career.

Other books in the BFI series include Camille Paglia’s characteristically provocative and engrossing study of The Birds. Paglia contends that Tippi Hedren is “the ultimate Hitchcock heroine” (not a consensus view) and analyzes her, what she says, what she wears, with the meticulousness of an exceptionally astute apostle of Freud. It is always stimulating to spend a few hours listening to Camille Paglia, though I do wish she would overcome her aversion to Doris Day, among the best of all the big band singers, and Deborah Reynolds, whose contributions to Singing in the Rain and The Tender Trap are not to be underrated.

-- DL

Reading Poetry to Ward off the Covid Blues [by Nin Andrews]

It’s another day and soon it will be another month in this miserable COVID summer. The sunlight is streaming through my window, and outside, the goldfinches are swooping through the meadow that is so thick with black-eyed susans, it looks like an Impressionist painting. In the distance, I can see the cows in the pasture, calves running behind them, a newborn trying to stand up on wobbly legs. Most years I’d feel a sense of joy at all this pastoral beauty. But this year, I wake each day to a strange ache in my heart, almost as if I have lost a loved one. I try to write but usually find myself just staring at the page. Maybe poetry is the loved one I have lost, I think. A friend tells me I am suffering from the COVID blues. She says lots of folks are, including herself. She’s been riding her motorcycle after dark to escape the loneliness. “You need something powerful between your legs,” she jokes. Like me, she says writing poetry usually gives her a thrill, a sense of romance and escape from the humdrum of daily life.  

I am reminded of the Bruce Bond’s first paragraph of the preface for the most recent PLUME anthology, Plume 8:

“All good poems are love poems. They have something to lose. No less so in the aftermath of loss, or the thick of peril, in the crisis of the here and now that summons language as public and private, all at once. Relational, historical, psychological, poems recover, in light and in spite of human difficulty, a sense of their vocation. They ask us, as they ask themselves, why now. Why a poem. And more challenging still, why beauty.”   

Bond goes on to talk about the many beautiful poems in the anthology, and he’s right. Plume Poetry 8 is a stunning collection, featuring  many of my favorite poets including Lynn Emanuel,  Major Jackson, Albert Rios, Lisa Russ Spaar, Jeffrey Friedman, and Elizabeth A.I. Powell. Reading it does alleviate some of the misery of this peculiar time.  While it would be impossible to pick just one poem to admire, there is a poem by Cynthia Cruz that synchronizes with my current mood:  

The Music

Constellations of evening,

Sweet, the smell of fire
and filth of pines.

Racing through the woods
on silver shining

motorcycle.
What is the sound

of driving back
through black

magnetic fields of night.
Play the record back.

Unpack the accident
down to its haunting.

Its smaller rooms,
its trash and crackle.

This morning
the good voice
spoke to me.

A ghost
entering the body.

Then the sound
of a violin playing.

What I was
is gone.

Now just the din
of smaller sounds

of wayward and crawl.

And then, there is this oddly timely poem by Stephanie Burt, with an epigraph in ancient Greek (which I can’t type out on my ancient IBM Thinkpad, alas). Reading the poem I am reminded of the Molly Arden, whose work and translations of Catullus have appeared here as well as in various literary reviews.

After Callimachus (Hecale, 298)

The gods who made us made us such
          that whenever you or anybody laughs,
someone is probably crying; someone got hurt.
          If the foreground is joy, the background is always sad.
I admit it’s not much
          but it’s something to say, on that poor god’s behalf:
look what he had
          to work with. Look what we came from: water and dirt.

Another anthology that I’ve enjoyed reading in this time of COVID blues is Best Microfiction 2020, edited by Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke and Michael Martone. I turn to microfiction when I want to be surprised, and this anthology doesn’t disappoint. While I don’t know many of the names of the authors represented, I am delighted to discover them. And to remember how sometimes a very simple piece of prose delights for reasons I cannot and do not want to explain, though a falling club, as described in the following story by Trent England, might be just what I need these days.  

A Quick Word about My Life

Ever since they opened up a falling club in our town, there’s little else that Theresa will do. After her daily shift at the ball bearing plant, she drives to the large, lime-stained building that used to be a Toys “R” Us, where she falls into foam pits, backwards, as though she’s a concertgoer in a mosh pit or a toppled statue of a despot. Like a gym, it has its members and regulars and Theresa remembers everyone’s names. Over dinner, she tells me about Dan who falls because he has a stressful job as a 911 operator or Janet who has three children to feed and thinks that any day her husband will get fired. I hear about Becki who sleeps with night terrors and Greg who can’t sleep at all. And while she’s telling me that if she falls enough she will one day earn a spot in the platinum level, which is the old stock room, and get to step off backwards from an even greater height, I wonder what she tells Dan and Janet and Becki and Greg about her own life or about me, or why, for example, when she leaves for work to drive to the falling club, she passes our house without stopping, without looking up at the window to see her husband standing there.

And now that I am mentioning examples of prose and poetry that have uplifted me, I’d like to close with a link to Dante di Stefano’s stunning COVID poem from last spring, and to the wonderful essays on becoming a poet on the Marsh Hawk Press Website, including essays by Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, Stephanie Strickland, and Amy Gerstler. The most recent essay, by Julie Marie Wade, begins: Since I first began writing as a child, a small door inside my head has been propped open, perpetually. In the beginning, I didn’t know it was there, but now I’m sure I couldn’t close it, even if I tried—that essential parenthesis—that necessary gap between the frame and the wall where the first light and the last light stream through.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

we the dancing millions
by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

(after Omar Sakr’s Where I am Not)

I ask the driver if he likes New York.

            we have not yet established I speak his mother

tongue. he laments against loneliness, a season

            here depressed, a season back on the island, in revelry. a season

here. a season there. season season season season

            he finds with every return that people here do not speak

with each other, the rushingrushing an anvil on relation.

            so many unspokens. better to be with family, to go where

you are loved. I try to love him for the length of the ride,

            brown bodies we are in the loneliest world      so

I smile, a secret gesture of union. he says through the rearview,

            it is a beautiful day isn’t it? I look out the window, he taps

the steering wheel of his car, the hum of diaspora a child we’ve made

            between us, ready to live the twelve minutes to my destination. hermosa,

pero, hermosa. his whole face beams the sun, the winter in him dies—

            ¿hablas español?! we feast on language

the New York kind of lonesome we know

            our bridge & tunnel lovechild nobody wants

to love. but we learn to love her too. when he isn’t driving

            all of Brooklyn through their silence, he—José—(with the name

of my grandfather) dances home to his country of brothers,

            their stifled exuberance riving imperialism’s calendar. an abundance

of rice unworried for time: there is no word for late in the island’s mouth.

            what a world                where you can linger into the hours of dusk,

live off the horizon by touching its mornings. I wonder

            what it would take to be the bambuco itself, the waltz

of lovers never-quite-touching in want. even my dreams

            of music play the asymptote of solitudes. I am not sure who to blame,

though it is capitalism & poetry often enough to which I turn my back.

            this was never a commercial for anything, but capitalism & poetry

make it possible: José’s hands clapping back at colonialism in the bomba

            rhythm making a lover of the drum; my wrecked body carrying the fevers

of memory down from the mountains. how language spreads us over

            each other, our histories necking in the rain of it all. too many hearts to name,

& we are pulling up, anyway, to my door of seven years pretending to be home.

            our child is over now, the together-ride through a city that maybe ought

to sometimes sleep if only to remember what it is to really dream, to remember

            the grammar of closeness. our twelve minute love affair & its offspring

clinging to the window, heir to the ache of seasons. is that a marvel

            or a mess? can we tell the difference? cuidate, I close the door—parting,

after all, is the first sorrow we know. birth, a distance in the giving of light.

            the harshness of winter returns, a jealous lover at my cheek. but a music trails,

a heat, a season of side by side. how I’ve seen the party linger, every cumbia

            stomping the eye of Columbus. how we sing of home in the argot of the ruined,

the ruck of us, a cortege of seclusions. we leap toward each other, a whole continent of strangers

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, Colombian/Latinx, poet, artist, scholar, and activist. Her poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) was selected by Ada Limón for the 2018 Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. The collection is a meditation on themes of inter-generational and collective inheritances of historical memory and post-colonial trauma, the responses they elicit, the forms of refusal, life, and love, that emerge in their wake. A 2019 CantoMundo Fellow, and 2018 VONA alum, her poetry has been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock’s Quarry, Nat.Brut, Feminist Studies, and Huizache, among other places. 

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

Fashion and Beauty with Poetess Vinny: Non-Binary is the New-Black [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This year’s Pride didn’t have the razzle-dazzle of years past. It didn’t have a parade or concerts or nights in gay and lesbian bars, no access to that one time of year when we’re surrounded by people who get it, who are queer or questioning or different, just like us. Instead, there was fear of illness and protests for change, neither of which are foreign to the queer community. The sparkle and studded leather remained in doors this year, but the message rang true just the same:

People want to exist in the world feeling safe in it, and to be comfortable in their own skin.

Writers have always been a little different.

And it’s no secret that queer people have flocked to the artist’s way in order to truly be themselves. From Lord Byron’s flowing scarves and earth tones to Elizabeth Bishop’s baggy button-downs and boyish slacks, the idea of challenging gender has been in the writer’s fashion lexicon for centuries.

The term "non-binary" is used first and foremost as a gender identity for individuals who do not identify as exclusively male or female. This identity, along with the gender non-conforming fashion choices that surround it, is about breaking down the assumptions we have around femininity and masculinity and providing options for personal expression that were previously inaccessible--and in some cases illegal--both in the fashion world and in real life. It’s about comfort, confidence, and dressing in a way that frees you from other people’s expectations of who you are, how you should dress, or what you are capable of, and it is in that spirit that I offer you the following tips.

 

1. Start with neutral colors.

Our culture has done a good job at telling us which colors are “masculine” and which are “feminine,” which is why wearing mostly neutral colors like beige, brown, black, white, gray, soft earthy tones, and cotton and denim textiles, work so well for a gender non-conforming approach to your outfit.

 

2. Try loose-fitting clothing and cool shoes.

Gender non-conforming fashion is unique in that it’s focus is physical and emotional comfort. One of the ways this is achieved is by taking attention off of the parts of the body that indicate sexuality and gender, such as the chest, waist and hips, and to instead accentuate parts that are more neutral, like the shoulders, neck and feet.

Tops include: t-shirts, button-downs, blazers, vests. Bottoms: relaxed-fit jeans, slacks, knee-length skirts. Shoes: loafers, boots, sneakers, sandals. Accessories: ties, bowties, scarves, suspenders, watches, glasses, backpacks, leather cross-body bags, necklaces and rings.

 

3. Make it pop!

Like Djuna Barnes in her dramatic polka dot turtle neck and dark fedora or Oscar Wilde in his velvet suit and ruffles, gender non-conforming clothing welcomes experimentation, color, and flare. Try a pattern or unconventional color or texture, and definitely expand your shopping trip to check out men’s, women’s, and unisex clothing sections. The only real difference between them is the way the clothing is cut, and sometimes our bodies look and feel better in clothing that was marketed to someone else.

Pro tip: fold your shirt cuffs over twice for a subtle detail on the arms.

 

4. Make it matter.

Gender non-conforming fashion, as well as the trans and non-binary individuals who pioneered it, challenges assumptions about how we each relate to our gender, not only with our clothes, but with our identities. If women’s access to a pair of pants allowed them into the factories to work, it follows that fashion can change the way we exist in the world. What would happen on the day we weren't men, women, trans, queer, or non-binary, but just people?

Furthermore, it is important to think about how fashion has previously been used in order to suppress self-expression, especially when that being expressed deviates from the accepted norm. Both men and women have been given a script to follow and a wardrobe to perform it in, but not once has the individual been asked what part they wanted to play, if any. The beauty of the non-binary gender identity is that it demands the right to not only choose the part, but to write the story and the characters yourself, to look in the dressing-room mirror and see you.

 

 

5. Make a change.

Many a conversation for social change has started with the topic of fashion, not just how you dress, but how you shop and where you place your influence. Spending your money at shops owned and operated by members of the queer community such as Rebirth Garments, Radimo L.A., and The Phluid Project will help them to continue funding programs that support queer and trans communities, to help activists organize and to force change, and most importantly, to provide people (and especially young people) with the tools they need to celebrate inclusion, expression, and diversity.

Writers and activists like Leslie Feinberg (novelist: Stone Butch Blues) and the Wachovski sisters (filmmakers: The Matrix, Cloud Atlas) have given us a deeper understanding of what it is that people who live outside of the gender binary are fighting against in our culture, by using their craft (and their fashion) to express their stories.

One can only marvel at what will be created once we no longer look at the world in black and white, but as a rainbow, whose colors dance fluidly in the spaces between water and air.

 

 

Got a fashion question? Comment below! And for more from Poetess Vinny, you can follow her blog, Vinny the Snail.

From Portugal: Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho's new anthology

Afagando a Face de Lorca. Uma Antologia
Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho
Selecção e tradução de Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho
Prefácio de Manuel Portela

Francisco José Craveiro de Carvalho antologia 22 poetas contemporâneos (da Ucrânia à China). É um exercício que nos dá a ver em português as diferentes vozes dos poetas antologiados mas igualmente a própria voz do poeta-tradutor: Craveiro de Carvalho tem-se dedicado nos últimos anos, a par da sua produção poética, a oferecer-nos versões de grande parte dos poetas agora reunidos sob o título Afagando a Face de Lorca (paráfrase de um verso do neozelandês Mark Young).

Os poetas antologiados: Adam Zagajewski (1945, Lviv, Ucrânia), Amalia Bautista (1962, Madrid, Espanha), Aram Saroyan (1943, Nova Iorque, EUA), Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (1947, Lahore, Paquistão), Billy Collins (1941, Nova Iorque, EUA), Charles Simic (1938, Belgrado, Jugoslávia), David Lehman (1948, Nova Iorque, EUA), Eunice de Souza (1940, Pune, Índia. Faleceu em 2017), Howie Good (1951, Nova Iorque, EUA), J. R. Solonche (1946, Nova Iorque, EUA), Jane Hirshfield (1953, Nova Iorque. EUA), Jennifer Clement (1960, Greenwich, Connecticut, EUA), José Luis García Martín (1950, Aldeanueva del Camino, Cáceres, Espanha), Luis Alberto de Cuenca (1950, Madrid, Espanha), Mark Young (1941, Hokitika, Nova Zelândia), Michael Dylan Welch (1962, Watford, Inglaterra), Nathalie Handal (1969, Haiti), Neil Curry (1937, Newcastle on Tyne, Inglaterra), Owen Bullock (1967, Cornualha, Inglaterra), Pat Boran (1963, Portlaoise, Irlanda), Roger Wolfe (1962, Westerham, Kent, Inglaterra), Steve Klepetar (1949, Xangai, China).

Poemas originais (em inglês e castelhano) e em português.

Nas Livrarias: primeira semana de Julho de 2020.

Oferta especial de PRÉ-VENDA (de 1 a 30 de Junho): 13,60 € (desconto de 20% sobre o preço de livraria: 17 €). Portes gratuitos

Pedidos para: [email protected]

"Decompose and" [by Bruce Kawin]

Decompose and
you might get to
be a peach

then be part of the shit
of the living thing
that eats you

plop back to earth
to feed
some tree

become part of
some flower

be honey

When I walked on the earth
before I was under it
I had a few fertile parts

Now it’s the whole show

"Monroeville, PA" [by Ed Ochester]

One day a kid yelled

"Hey Asshole!"

and everybody on the street

turned around

 

from Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New by Ed Ochester (Autumn House, 2007).

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Grisel Y. Acosta

 

Ways of Seeing My Brothers
by Grisel Y. Acosta

1. You are precise artisans, designing aircrafts meant to soar above the altocumulus, or pumping air 
pulsating through twists of brass trumpet, pressing fingers down on valves to scream higher than a jet.

2. Smirking boys in a 70s photograph, unaware of the holes in your socks.

3. Fearless little men, walking into classrooms filled with children who will only think to ask,
“Are you a spic?”

4.        I do not see you in jail the night you totaled Mami’s car
           I do not see you stoned or geeked out, lonely and alienated in the college dorm
           I do not see you terrified when you see no options in the want ads
           I do not see you when you cry alone when your best friend fell in a rain of bullets
           I only see the miraculous feat of survival, how you managed the impossible:
           staying alive when the world told you every day you did not exist

5. I remember the day your daughter was born, dear brother, and you had to fill out a form, choose
Black or White. Your oblivious white wife saw the X by the word Black and asked you why and you said,
“Well I sure as hell ain’t white,” and all of a sudden you gave your own kind of birth.

6. I wore your clothes, walked like what we call a boy, talked knucklehead talk, became what you were.

7. The only time I met Tio Segundo en Cuba, who built his home with black market wood, his dirty
workman jeans the same as the ones I saw on you, brother, after a day of roofing, and my heart hurt
because I knew the two of you needed each other, drank yourselves into oblivion because you longed 
for each other, yet you would never meet.

8.                   I listened at your doors                            Devo              bang bang bang

                                                           Santana                      Black magic

                             sat for hours          

                                                                       wondered in AC/DC electric

            curiosity fizzling like

                                                                                   guitar feedback

                                                                                                                        waited for you

                             to open the passageway

9.

                                                are you safe, dear brothers?
                                                I cannot protect you from this
                                                obsession with your demise
                                                all I can offer is what I have seen
                                                remember, what I see is beauty

 

Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta is an associate professor at the City University of New York-Bronx Community College. Her first book of poetry, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, is an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist and it is forthcoming from Get Fresh Books in 2021. Recent work can be found in The Baffler, Acentos Journal, Kweli Journal, Red Fez, Short Plays on Reproductive Freedom, and Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood: The Lauryn Hill Reader. She is a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet, a Macondo Fellow, and the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity, an anthology that features over Latinx 30 contributors and subjects. Her work focuses on her Afro-Latinx and indigenous ancestry, queer identity, the punk and house music subcultures, her birthplace of Chicago, and the destruction of post-colonial neoliberalism.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

"On Nature" [by Lawrence Joseph]

        And the puzzles surrounding the cosmological constant,
        spacetime imploded into existence. Ten to fifty years
        between asbestos breathed and mesothelioma
        discovered, a rare form of cancer in the lungs
        or heart, or, if in the stomach, spreading
        quickly to the liver or spleen. Uploaded
        onto one of a half-a-billion or so blogs: “The human
        imagination? A relatively paltry thing, a subproduct,
        merely, of the neural activity of a species
        of terrestrial primate”; and in another, that other
        dimension, the Hudson River, black and still,
        the day about to open at the Narrows’ edge.
        Light on a mountain ash bough, a fresh chill’s
        blue sensation in the eyes. One week buds, then
        the temperature’s up and the landscape turns yellow,
        in a few days the wind scratches the blossoms,
        in a few weeks the sun scorches the leaves.

       I, too, see God adumbrations, I, too, write
       a book on love. Who, here, appears, to touch the skin.
       Hundreds of thousands of square miles of lost
       Arctic sea ice, bits of bone on killing grounds,
       electromagnetic air. Atrocious and bottomless
       states of mind, natural as air.

from So Where Are We? by Lawrence Joseph (2017). Reprinted in A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems  by Lawrence Joseph (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020).

Met Percent: Week Twenty-one [by Alec Bernstein]

POV . . . LOP

Enlarged detail and inset painting: Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d'Ognes, Marie Denise Villers, 1801, gallery 629.

In my corporate days, I lived with many a LOP, a list of open points. This fine work, always considered exceptional, has one serious LOP.

1. Artist: First attributed to Jacques-Louis David, it was then assigned to Marie Denise Villers, Constance Marie Charpentier, Marie du Val d’Ognes (self-portrait of the sitter), or even her sister.
2. Scene: Whoever made the portrait depicts a woman in one of the studios available in the Louvre to qualified artists. Professional women . . . with private lives . . . in radical outfits? Much is proposed, little is certain.
3. Details: The broken window pane can be read as a subtle reference to the chaos and violence of the French revolution. The pink of her ribbon was “the color” of 1801.
4. Technique: “Perspective is represented by sight lines that cross through matter. Is this why the pane of glass is broken in the Met portrait? Are perspective rays powerful enough to break glass?” - Anne Higonnet “Through a Louvre Window,” Journal18, 2016.

But Montaigne would say, “The soul which has no established viewpoint gets lost; for, as they say, he who is everywhere, is nowhere.”

 

Three Knaves and a Diversion

Top:The Fortune-Teller, Georges de La Tour, 1630s, gallery 634.
Bottom left: The Cardsharps, Caravaggio, 1595, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.     
Bottom right: The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs, Georges de La Tour, 1630s, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.    

Quatremère de Quincy coined the term petit genre in 1792 . . . and ranked landscape painting at the bottom, because observation from nature supposedly required little imagination. At the top were grande genre (history paintings), because history required a great deal of imagination. Petit genre (ordinary people in common activities) was in the middle, requiring only some imagination. And of course they were priced and sized for the new bourgeois collectors.

The card playing scenes are a mix of diversion and isolation. Modern criticism sees the minimal eye contact of the subjects “as aloneness”. Other readings are possible. 

The Caravaggio could be titled Maesh, Louie and Babe, after my great uncles. Once, after taking my 10-year-old cousins’ allowance money in crazy eights, Uncle Maesh (a Chicago mob lawyer in the 1920s-30s) advised, “don't bet more than you can afford to lose, and never play cards with strangers”. I asked Uncle Babe (day manager at Caesar’s Palace) why they had Evil Knievel jump the casino fountain. “There will be an extra million dollars of private bets - how many bones he will break, will his bike catch on fire . . . and half of those betting will be ‘ahead’ at our door. That money will not leave the property.” Uncle Louie (a bail bondsman and pawn shop owner) had a standard greeting: “You got two tens for a five and I’ll owe you five?”

These petit genre paintings feel like a reunion . . . familial slights of hand. I am retroactively surprised that Aunt Edna, who re-knitted my favorite sweater out of the same yarn each year as I grew, did not take up fortune telling. She would have been great. My favorite detail is the glove, “the fingertips exposed, the better to feel marked cards” (MetText) which I'm sure Edna would have re-sized as needed.

 

Madonna of the Plaga Magna

Top: Madonna and Child with Saints, Giovanni Bellini, c. 1510, not on view.
Bottom left: Madonna della Misericordia, Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, 1308-10, Pinacoteca, Siena.  
Bottom center: Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and Clare, Cima da Conegliano, 1510, not on view.  
Bottom right: Madonna della Misericordia, Piero della Francesca, 1460–1462, Pinacoteca Comunale, Sansepolcro.

Of all the Madonna taxonomies, and there a lot, I only knew a few, like Our Lady of the Flowers and the Madonna of the Rocks. There are many categories, such as religious purpose (humility, misery, childbirth) and place (garden, stairs), but my favorite remains “of the___” (quail, cherries, harpies). 

I found no compositional categories. Both the Bellini and the Cima (and many others) have these wonderful centered stripes. They are found in the purpose category of “sacred conversations” (Mary “interacting” with assorted saints). Why not call it what it is?

The big stripe behind the Madonna is a cloth of honor, derived from the Baldachin (a pattern from Bagdad), resembling the thrones which were common in sacred conversations. The cloth creates a boundary line between the sacred space and the profane landscape. Its Byzantine effect takes a path away from Florentine perspective toward a very abstract spacial plane. 

If I could add a category it would be the Madonna of the Plaga Magna - L. Big Stripe. It would include the Misericordia Madonnas, in which an oversized Mary not only defines the sacred space, but she herself is the big stripe.

Catchlights and Cropped Skulls

Top left: Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. Top right: detail, Albrecht Dürer, 1519, gallery 640.  
Center right: Merle Oberon in Hitchcock’s The Lodger, 1944.  
Bottom right: Carpenter, Vincent van Gogh, 1880, Rijksmuseum KrollerMuller, Otterio.  
Bottom center: Cropped skull drawing lessons, Betty Edwards, The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, 1999.  
Bottom left: Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, A Place in the Sun, 1951.

The catchlight used in film/photography goes way back; we see it as early as Dürer. Those tiny reflections that bring life to the eye. “Saint Anne’s eyes show Dürer’s typical placement of catchlights opposite a minute, crisp reflection along the inner rim of the iris.” - MetText. After Merle Oberon’s car accident, cinematographer Lucian Ballard hid his wife’s scars by slightly washing them out with a small lamp - dubbed an “Obie” after Oberon. The lamp, so close to the axis of the lens, created a catchlight in Oberon’s eyes. 

Betty Edwards found a systematic drawing error in her students; they consistently reduced the size of the forehead. Even when pointed out, they had difficulty “seeing” it. Van Gogh had the same issue in his early drawings. He was self-taught but observant enough to identify and correct the error. The perception that the forehead doesn't have enough information to be valuable somehow suggests the use of skull cropping in the close up. Remove the forehead if it’s a blank slate.

“. . . no one can do what he really wants in the beginning.” (January 1873). “I am trying now to exaggerate the essential, and purposely leave the obvious things vague.” (May 1888). - Vincent van Gogh.

The meaning of standing [by Tracy Danison]

Beach at Jaffa, Israel, during lockdown©Felice Ross 2020

Sacred.

Between earth and sky.

Connected.

Holding hands.

Reaching down.

Stretching up.

Eye and see.

You. In the middle.

A bird on a branch on a leaf on a tree.

A fish in water in a river to a sea.

Life and body.

Me. In the middle.

Breath, air.

Sickness, death.

Us. Between 

Sacred. 

Connected.

 

The Handbook of Sex Tips [by Molly Arden]

 I was on the S bus, staring out the window, wishing I didn’t have to write The Handbook of Sex Tips for Women of a Certain Age, a book which was to just another one of those awful instruction manuals one follows, promising a title, a plot, a heartbreaking conclusion. So far I had only written several entries I knew I could never print:

Dear Reader, let’s face the facts. Not all sex is created equal. Many orgasms are as forgettable as the faces passing by the bus window, each offering just another opportunity to forget a name, an address, a city, perhaps a marriage, that first one to your high school sweet heart who possessed neither sweetness nor heart but he did have a Rottweiller named Ludwig you adored and missed for years after, phoning once or twice a week to ask, May I speak to Ludwig?

Dear Reader, let’s face the facts. Catullus is right. A good Thallus is hard to find. 

Dear Reader, 

 Do you really believe this shit? 

Dear Reader,

I used to think the southern term, rode hard and put away wet, was kind of erotic. Turns out it means, it looks like you've had enough sex for one lifetime.  

Ed. note: The painting "Frenzy of Exultations" (1890) is by the Polish painter Władysław Podkowiński 

Squib 422: What a Swell Party it Was [by Alan Ziegler]

Any survey of the Top Parties of the 20th Century is bound to include Truman Capote's Black & White Ball ('66), Rothschild's Surrealist Ball ('72), Bianca Jagger's 30th Birthday at Studio 54 ('77), and Malcolm Forbes's 70th Birthday in Morocco ('89). But there was another event, on June 15, 1977, that would clearly have been in this company if not for the absence of one key celebrant. (Like any clickbait list, you will need to scroll to the end to reveal the key absentee.)

As you've no doubt guessed by now, I am referring to:

Founded in 1972 by Harry Greenberg, Binnie Klein, Larry Zirlin, and me, Some magazine/Release Press published 10 issues of the magazine, 15 books, and numerous postcards and broadsides, until 1983, when we decided to follow the dictum quit while you're breaking even. Although the media were barred from our 5th Anniversary party in 1977, several amateurish bootleg images have been making their way through the Shady Web (slightly easier to get to than the Dark Web). Best American Poetry has acquired exclusive rights to these blurry glimpses at literary history. (Best-faith effort has been made to identify subjects; please let me know of any errors.)

 

Pre-book Eileen Myles (then editing dodgems) gazes up at their bright future. Terry Stokes in background (more later). Magnetic bottle-opener went missing en route to the Smithsonian and subsequently spotted in a private collection (but provenance could not be definitively determined).

 

Pre-book poet and critic John Yau. In 1980 we published John's collection The Sleepless Night of Eugene Delacroix (the title piece was reprised in my Short anthology); 50 more books would follow.

During the party, a guest told me she'd just been in the kitchen and had a lovely chat with the building's super. Although I hadn't invited the super, I was delighted he was there. I went into the kitchen to welcome him, and instead found Paul Violi (center) having a lovely chat with another guest. (Oh Paul, I do miss you!). On the right is Nathan Whiting, who had recently published Running: Poems and Drawings. Nathan ran everywhere (including to this party) wearing plain old sneakers, and he would become an eminent ultra-marathoner.

 
On the left, Henry Korn, director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, who went on to head many cultural organizations and publish several books. On the right, Erika Rothenberg, the first woman art director at McCann-Erickson, before embarking on a stellar career as a multi-media artist of "provocative and satirical work about social and political issues."

Singer-songwriter Steve Lee (nine years later he played at my wedding). He is now a Clinical Psychologist and continues to sing & write.

 
Harry Miller (left) and Jerry Leichtling (right) who were—ever so briefly—noted scholars on the works of Release Press author Mercy Bona. A review of Bona's Sleeping Obsessions speculated that Bona was actually "three men from Brooklyn." This is not true; only two of us lived in Brooklyn. Harry redirected his scholarly prowess from imaginary poets to Buddhist meditation and is a teacher of Dharma study groups. Jerry went on to co-write Peggy Sue Got Married (the movie and the musical) and much more. Center is Harry Greenberg, Some/Release co-editor and one-third of Mercy Bona. (Bona had a thing for penguins.)

On the left would be me (another third of Mercy Bona), with poet John Eskow, who went on to write the movies Air America, The Mask of Zorro, and Pink Cadillac. Also pictured: Paul Violi's shoulder. 

Some/Release editors Binnie Klein and Larry Zirlin (the final third of Mercy Bona). Binnie hosts "A Miniature World" (a music and interview show on WPKN-FM) and published Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind. Larry spent many years as a master printer and is now a master birder.

Eminences of the small press scene, from left to right: Charles Haseloff (Penumbra); Mark Weiss (who presided over the heyday of the poetry readings at the West End); perhaps Susan Haseloff; and Suzanne Zavrian (co-editor of Extensions).

We published John Love's (center) poetry collection, The Touch Code. At the New York Book Fair, John introduced me to his friend Philippe Petit, and took me to see Philippe do his street act on Bleecker St. and 6th Ave. First, Philippe had to evict an interloper with a dog act ("a dog act," Phillippe sneered). Phoebe Snow joined the crowd. John lived in a ginormous loft downtown, replete with a full-size badminton court that became the nexus of his ginormously-attended New Years Day parties. He went on to be president of New Vision Communications.

George Faust, original proprietor of The Print Center in Brooklyn (soon joined by Larry Zirlin, and later replaced by Robert Hershon), first located in a cramped space on State Street, where scores of little magazines and small presses were cloned. I saddle-stitched my first book there, even managing occasionally to avoid stapling my fingers.

 
On your left, Terry Stokes (we published his Intimate Apparel); Terry was one of the few of us with a major publisher (Knopf). On the right, Joachim Neugroschel, co-editor of Extensions and translator of more than 200 books. I ran into him on the street once and he asked if I would translate a German detective novel because he was too busy. I said I didn't know German, and he said it didn't matter I should do it anyway. I didn't. I wish I did.

With Harry Greenberg, late in the party it appears.

Here's the reveal: the party fell just short of immortality due to the absence of David Lehman. David was the first person I knew who referred to southern France as the South of France, and actually went there. 

"Hidden Bird" [by Joseph Ceravelo]

Song birds enter the morning
the pre-dawn before the fires,
you know, when the night floats away
like vapor on a lake,
or like kisses in the woods.
Songs that even creation
might not remember.

Continuous, threaded, as if
a cherry pit were stuck
in the throat
to produce the trumpet of the branches.
So varies, yet never, changing
through all the days, since
reptiles fell to earth.

I give up the reason for the sound
I give up the creature of sound
and the creator of the creatures
and of us and of dawn and
air and of vacuum
and human inhumanity.
I give up the song.
I give up the place.

From The Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo (ed. Rosemary Ceravolo and Parker Smathers; Wesleyan University Press, 2013). The poem was chosen from The Nation by Terrance Hayes for The Best American Poetry 2014. For more about Joseph Ceravolo's  Collected, click here.

I Sit and Sew [poem by Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)]

I sit and sew—a useless task it seems,

My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams—

The panoply of war, the martial tred of men,

Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken

Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death,

Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath—

But—I must sit and sew.

 

I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire—

That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire

On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things

Once men. My soul in pity flings

Appealing cries, yearning only to go

There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe—

But—I must sit and sew.

 

The little useless seam, the idle patch;

Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch,

When there they lie in sodden mud and rain,

Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain?

You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream

That beckons me—this pretty futile seam,

It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?

 

(Ed note: I've spent most of this day wrestling with an especially challenging sewing project and while doing so have been listening to the WQXR radio day-long celebration of Juneteenth, the commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. Sewing is a mostly solitary activity and since taking it up a couple of years ago, I've done a lot of thinking about how it connects me to my ancestors (both of my grandmothers were garment workers in sweatshops during the early part of the last century) and how domestic work that is necessary is also devalued especially when it is done primarily by women. This came into greater relief recently, when armies of home sewists and quilters stepped up to make masks, myself among them, for healthcare and other workers. It didn't take long for me to wonder if sewing had been an inspiration, or jumping off point, for poems and it was by following this train of thought that I discovered Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson's "I Sit and Sew." Sewing is an imperative for her--the patching and mending necessary to extend the life of clothing--but is doesn't constrain her imagination, which takes her to terrifying scenes of war, destruction, and despair. 

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson graduated from Straight University in 1892 and attended Cornell University. She was a poet, author of short stories and dramas, newspaper columnist, and editor of two anthologies.Dunbar-Nelson was an influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Find out more about her remarkable life here.)

 

-- Stacey Lehman

Michael Friedman, 1960-2020 [by Roger Gilbert]

Poet, novelist, editor, and lawyer Michael Friedman died of cancer on May 5 in Denver.  In the literary world Michael was best known as the editor and publisher of Shiny, which Ron Silliman in 2005 called “as good looking a poetry periodical as we now have,” and which featured the work of leading avant-garde poets from John Ashbery and John Wieners to Bernadette Mayer and Rae Armantrout alongside many emerging writers. 

Michael’s own writing, in verse and prose, was marked by joyful hedonism, deep whimsy, and a passion for pop culture.  His poetry appeared in several chapbooks and two full-length collections, Special Capacity (1992) and Species (2000), the latter made up of prose poems that riff on tropes and clichés from fiction (“Menelaus had been feeling edgy lately”) and hardboiled movie dialogue (“Listen, I was once a frog prince, it wasn’t pretty”).  For the last 15 years Michael produced a series of sparkling comic novellas, three of which were collected in a 2016 omnibus, Martian Dawn and Other Novels, that garnered praise from the likes of Ashbery, Harry Mathews, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Molly Young, who supplied a rapturous introduction (“he leaves me feeling invested in my own freakishness”). 

Michael is survived by his wife Dianne Perry, two sons, Joe and Henry Perry-Friedman, and his parents, Lester Friedman and Sally Long.  He was the nephew of painter and New York School collaborator Jane Freilicher.  For twenty-five years Michael worked for a Denver law firm, specializing in real estate “with a focus on affordable public housing,” as David Schwarz noted in an obituary for the Poetry Project. 

I met Michael when we were grad students at Yale in 1982 and was instantly taken with his mischievous sense of humor, his love of James Bond and other retro icons, and his beguiling mix of urbanity and self-deprecation.  Michael memorialized our friendship in a poem, one of a series named after people to whom he was close:

<<<
ROGER GILBERT

Today I got a letter from my long-lost graduate school friend Roger Gilbert.  He was glad to hear (through Patti Boyer) that I hadn’t changed, and suggested that we revisit some of our old haunts in New Haven this summer (“CCH, Machine City, the Gypsy, etc.”) and “weep unashamedly” as the nostalgia overwhelms us!  The image of Roger weeping at our reunion hit home with me, as I’d always thought that, with his thin, unathletic frame and glasses, he bore a striking resemblance to Poindexter.  Or Ron Padgett.  Later I pictured Roger sobbing over my grave on a grey fall afternoon.  Then the two of us standing somberly at Ron Padgett’s grave.

I took a long walk with Roger in the summer of 1984 up Whitney Avenue to his house.  His dissertation was on “walking poems,” including Apollinaire’s “Zone.”  I suggested Padgett’s “Strawberries in Mexico” as another good example of the genre.  It was a sunny day, Roger wore a red sweater over a light blue shirt.
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I long ago forgave Michael for the reference to Poindexter, a nerdy character from Felix the Cat cartoons, which he offset with the much more flattering comparison to the poet Ron Padgett.  Though Padgett is still with us, the poem turned out to be sadly prescient.  I haven’t visited Michael’s grave yet, but if and when I do I expect to shed a tear.  But I’ll also smile at the memory of his generous, impish, scintillating spirit.

"Psalm 94" [by Laurance Wieder]

        Up, up, and show yourself
The judge of people doing what they want,
    Saying what they will and damn
The consequences. “Nothing follows, meaning’s
        Deader than the children
    Crushed beneath our jackboot heel.
        Let them whimper. God
Is not, is far away, and does not care.”

    Some never learn. Can one who planted
Ears of corn not hear the zephyr rustle
    In the stalks, who made the sun’s eye
Flare not see the shadow you cast here?
The scatterer of nations not disperse
Your atoms? Is the teacher unprepared?
        God knows how thought gets mangled.
So law was given Moses to untangle
Ignorance and impulse, love and fear
    Of what comes after, for a snare.

Had I not heard from life beyond my silence,
I’d have slipped into the crowd unseen
And died without desire comforted.
        Too neat, my Lord? You taught me
Safety in disorder, and the pleasure
    Of imagining that justice
Crushes glinting evil to gray powder.

-- from Words to God's Music: A New Book of Psalms by Laurance Wieder

"Bikini Waxes and Taxes" [by Beth Gylys]

You don’t want to head to Florida
with a Chewbacca crotch,
nor for Congress to pass
a tax cut for the rich.

Terrifying thoughts: tufts
weaseling out the edges
of your bathing suit, billionaires
with blond wives posing
behind placards of dollar bills.

There is need, and there is
need. You go see Rosa
from Brazil, whose art
involves nudity and pain,

who is unfazed by your
spread-legged shame,
who stares at your privates
like they’re a mission.

You suck in your breath
as she slathers the searing wax
on your nether regions,
the same day the Senate scrawls
numbers in the margins—
more zeroes than you can comprehend.

There is debt, and there is debt,
and you will not scream
as she coaches: breathe, breathe—
your hair yanked by the root,
follicles bleeding.

The rich, whose wardrobes cost more
than most families’ net worth,
say trickle and down—throw crumbs
to the plebes from the decks of their yachts.

The bald, nubile stinging pink will heal.
The poor will continue to be poorer.

from Body Braille by Beth Gylys (Iris Press, 2020). 

On Poetry Hoaxes [by Rebecca Warner]

<<<
"One of the two poems below is by a highly respected contemporary poet," wrote John Ashbery on an exam for MFA students at Brooklyn College. "The other is a hoax originally published to spoof the obscurity of much modern poetry. Which do you think is which?" The "real" poem turned out to be one of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns; the other, written under the name Ern Malley, was designed to ridicule Hill's modernist predecessors and the editors who published them. "Can obscurity ever benefit poetry?" Ashbery asked his students. "Do you think it possible that the intellectual spoof might turn out to be more valid as poetry than the 'serious' poem, and if so, why?"1

Poetry hoaxes raise a number of questions that test our notions of literary value, authenticity, and authorial intention. The Ern Malley poem on Ashbery's exam emerged from a long history of such hoaxes. In the early 1760s Scottish poet James MacPherson published Fingal: An Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, which he claimed was a translation of an ancient Gaelic manuscript by "Ossian," a legendary third century bard. Several critics, including Samuel Johnson, contested its authenticity and accused MacPherson of fakery. It remains unclear whether the poems were authored exclusively by MacPherson or derived from a combination of sources. A few years later, Thomas Chatterton of Bristol sent to Horace Walpole poems he'd been composing since the age of 12, in the voice of a 15th century monk named Thomas Rowley. Walpole was initially impressed but returned the poems once he discovered they were fake. In despair, Chatterton committed suicide at the age of 17 by swallowing arsenic. Like MacPherson, whose poems were intensely popular despite their spurious attribution, Chatterton appealed to the Romantic sensibilities of the time. Keats admired Chatterton, as did Wordsworth, who eulogized him as "The marvellous boy, / The sleepless soul that perished in his pride."2
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For more of Rebecca Warner's essay, "Imp of Verbal Darkness": Poetry Hoaxes & the Postmodern Politic," click here.

https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_chronicle_view/2398/imp_of_verbal_darkness_poetry_hoaxes_the_postmodern_politic

Vic Damone's Breakout Hit (Al Martino sings it at Connie's wedding)

Here's to you, Vito Farinola, on your birthday (June 12). "I Have But One Heart" was Vic Damone's breakout hit. Al Martino playing Johnny Fontaine sings it at Connie Corleone's wedding in The Godfather. Vic Damone had auditioned for the part. -- DL