The Best American Poetry

"When I Heard the Learn'd Urologist" [by Mitch Sisskind]

Where were you when televisions
Multiplied in American homes
And pastel-colored cars had fins
On which at least once a boy
Chasing a ball stabbed himself
And the fins, like kings, died out?

I lived when Eisenhower’s golfing
And mumbled press conferences
Affronted the intelligentsia whose
Worship of Stevenson blossomed
Into the miracle of Jack Kennedy’s
Televised White House cello recitals.

In the doghouse was an expression
Extremely common in those days.
You might hear a man who forgot
The anniversary of his marriage
Forty years ago refer to himself
As in the doghouse, for example.

People said, On the warpath.
They said, You’re cooking with gas.
They said, Fish out of water --
Jump on the bandwagon – A fly in
The ointment – The jury is still out --
He’s always blowing his own horn --

Or how about this? Eke lullaby,
My loving boy, thy lusts relent --
Four hundred and fifty years ago
A man wrote that poem to his penis.
Can you imagine it happening today?
I can. I’m a board certified urologist.

-- from the archive; first posted September 2014

"Smoking in Heaven" [by Robert Hass]

Watching young poets in the early evening
Smoking on the terrace outside the poetry reading,
I wondered if there would be a smoking terrace
In heaven. I have a friend, dead now,
A Catholic who was unimpressed by the prospect of paradise
Until he discovered a group of medieval theologians
Who had proposed that there was a special kind of time
In eternity. They gave it a Latin name.
Like my friend, they couldn’t conceive of a God
Who would force them to live forever
Without sunrise and sunset. His wife, a skeptic,
Called it decaffeinated time, at which he shrugged wryly.
This idea of life after death made him very happy,
Which was, as far as he was concerned, the point.
He’s been dead now for almost a decade,
So I suppose he knows one way or another
Whether there is nothing after death and no one there
To know it or not. The smoking terrace would, of course, be out of doors,
So it wouldn’t be as depressing as those smoking rooms in airports
Where people with grey skin submit to their addiction
With religious humility. You could light up and walk to the edge of the clouds
And watch the fragrant smoke you were expelling
Drift into the decaffeinated sunset. It made me wonder
If there were coffee in heaven. Or sex. I knew a woman
Who said that the main reason for sex,
As far as she was concerned,
Was the cigarette afterward. And if there were sex
In heaven, why would there be anything else? Probably
So that you could also watch Canada geese settle on a lake
Just as the moon was twilighting the surface of the water
In luminous little scallops. The young poets
Should read Allen Ginsberg who said that poets should set an example
By not submitting to what he called “the nicotine haze
Of capitalism.” Probably in the heaven without tobacco
The couples are walking by the sea, having already made love,
And the moon, almost unnaturally large,  is just coming up,
And the color of the moon on the water is just like what
Their bodies are feeling, contented but still tingling,
And in the moonlight they can see a pack of feral goats
With their beards and inhuman eyes grazing on the hillside, also contentedly,
As if time and eternity were the wrong ideas altogether,
And the women would have come in with their Greek masks on
To walk the shoreline and dance what fate is.

From Summer Snow by Robert Hass (Ecco, 2020), an extraordinary new book by the poet, author of The Apple Trees at Olema and Twentieth Century Pleasures, editor of Poet's Choice, and guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2001. Kudos, Bob. -- DL

Happy Birthday Jacques d'Amboise [by Alastair Macaulay]

Jacques d'Amboise, during an interview with former New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay, 2016. Find the interview on YouTube here.

July 28, 2020 - The happiest of birthdays to wonderful Jacques d’Amboise, eighty-six today, a constant source of charm, enthusiasm, and communicative glee. When I took the “New York Times” job in 2007, Jacques - director of the National Dance Institute - was one of the many leading figures in dance I tried not to mix with.

I didn’t stand a chance. At the first NDI performance I attended in 2007, I snuck in furtively, and sat where I thought nobody would find me. Jacques, however, knew I was there somewhere, and despite having painful knees came charging down a flight of stairs saying “Where’s Mr England? I have to tell him about Freddie Ashton!”

And we were off, with me losing my heart immediately to this man whom Ashton had singled out at age seventeen (yes, 17!) to partner Diana Adams in the leading roles of his new ballet, “Picnic at Tintagel” (1952) before I was born and before Balanchine or anybody else had created a role for him. Over the next twelve years, I met Jacques for the occasional lunch: he would tell me about how badly Balanchine behaved to Ashton, how he, Jacques, always visited Ashton in London in subsequent years, about having been slated to dance the original cast of Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun” (1953) (“Jerry took so long to make a ballet, and I was a young man in a hurry - I went to Mr Balanchine to let me change the rehearsal schedule”), about the revelation of how Balanchine spoke of the role of Apollo as with no role he created for Jacques, and much more. I’m especially proud that I brought him to speak at the filmed 2018 New York Public Library seminar on “Apollo”, where, with marvellous generosity over two afternoons, he interacted with Edward Villella and Ib Andersen (two of Balanchine’s later Apollos), Suki Schorer, Kay Mazzo, Kyra Nichols, and other Balanchine alumni.

“A wild boy made civilised by art” is how Balanchine told Jacques he saw the title role of “Apollo”; Jacques - who always felt that was his own autobiography - has never ceased to be grateful to the choreographer who changed his life and introduced him to the civilising power of art.

 

Jacques d'Amboise as El Capitán in George Balanchine's "Stars & Strips"

I was privileged that, in 2016 and subsequent years, Jacques asked me to interview him for the Balanchine Foundation about four or more of his roles - Apollo, El Capitán in “Stars and Stripes”, the “Tschaikovsky pas de deux”, and “Who Cares?” A great treat for me. The photograph above is from our “Who Cares?” Interview, which I happily watched for the first time today. The “Apollo” one is yet better. All on YouTube!

 

Alastair Macaulay interviews d'Amboise about his role in Balanchine's "Apollo"

 

(Ed note: Alastair Macaulay is a critic and historian of the performing arts. He was the chief dance critic of The New York Times from 2007 until 2018. He was previously the chief theater critic of The Financial Times in London (1994-2007) and the chief dance critic for The Times Literary Supplement (1996-2006), founding editor (1983-88) of the British quarterly Dance Theater Journal, and a guest dance critic for The New Yorker (1988 and 1992). This post is reprinted, with the author's permission, from a post on Instagram. Alastair Macauley's feed is rich with dance commentary and history, and great photos. Follow him in Instagram here. sdl)

Poem Beginning with a Line after Yehuda Amichai [by Didi Jackson]

Past the window in the room where we make love
waves follow one another like lines of laundry
as the cliffs unfold, spilling like bolts of cloth into the bay,
and it is the anise, they say, the snails
are after, defining the roads of Serifos
like small-change coins, curled and climbing fierce
as soldiers up each stalk in numbers so thick
they could be plucked like white berries ripe
with June, and they too would taste of licorice
succulent in a time of honey and nettles.

from Moon Jar by Didi Jackson. Red Hen Press, 2020.

Archie Ammons and friends at the launch reading of BAP 1994

from left to right, A. R. Ammons, James McManus, James Cummins, A. E. Stallings, Angela Shaw. The reading was sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, William Wadsworth executive director. The Academy sponsored the BAP launch reading from 1992 through 1995. For digging up the photo, we're indebted to Jim McManus.

Happy Birthday, John Ashbery (with a collage and a poem from the maestro, 1927-2017)

Wet Casements

    When Edward Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open doorway, he saw that it was raining. 
It was not raining much.
                       KAKFA, Wedding Preparations in the Country
	
	The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected
	In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through
	Their own eyes.  A digest of their correct impressions of
	Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your
	Ghostly transparent face.  You in falbalas
	Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics,
	The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you
	Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter)
	Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached,
	Never pierced through into timeless energy of a present
	Which would have its own opinions on these matters,
	Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes
	That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail
	Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)
	Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet
	For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in
	And out of it.  I want that information very much today,

	Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.
	I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that
	Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling
	Of dancing on a bridge.  I shall at last see my complete face
	Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.

	I shall keep to myself.
	I shall not repeat others’ comments about me.

The poem is from Houseboat Days (1977). 

"In Progress" [by Tony Towle]

We adjust the background
so that I am still in a forest,
but the traditional kind,
not one made of cement and glass,
but composed primarily of wood
and auxiliary vegetal matter,
aerated with avian sonorities,
and partially veiled by “air products”:
innocuous mist or fog,
for there is such a generous
spacing between predators
that it would make our Paleolithic relatives,
wherever they might be watching from,
think that living in our world
would be a safe and wonderful thing.

I pause in the mist or fog, because
it is a good place for retrieving erstwhile data
to supplement the present with;
that is, what’s left of the present
after the morning news
finishes most of it off —

and here is something: When Phil Niekro
retired from the Atlanta Braves
there was no longer anyone
playing in major league baseball
older than I was. He achieved
this distinction in 1987         
and will never relinquish it.

What has happened since then?

Honestly, I don’t keep track of him.
Oh, you mean to me? Well, lots of things,
really, but I’ll get to them later,
since I’ve often admonished myself
for living in the past, although
that was when I lived in the past. 

The Phil Niekro discovery
came through one of the newspapers
I perused during the eons of down time
consequent to proofreading at Forbes,
where in two years my only noteworthy
“catch” was pointing out that Luxemburg
was not a principality — as written, a synonym
for minuscule polities — but a grand duchy.
In the following week, while
resting comfortably on my laurels,
I missed a typo so egregious that my luster
was tarnished beyond reclamation.

So back to the present, or what’s
left of the present after the evening news
has finished chewing on it —
and there was no word
about the Somali pirates
who attempted to seize my poems
and hold them hostage.

What were your poems doing
in the Strait of Hormuz?

You mean the Gulf of Aden.
You may well ask.
I wish I were at liberty to say.

                        *

So that’s as far as I got with the first draft on my laptop,
while sitting unnoticed for an hour in the shoe store
except by the guy in the chair on the other side of the aisle,
who was keeping an eye on me until my contact showed up —
2 o’clock was that approaching hour — and then he abruptly left
a minute before she, the no-nonsense-taking Mrs. Blackstone,
walked in from a long-past-due assignment,
and when I mentioned the departed observer, she said
that he wasn’t one of hers; and I looked down at my watch
to evade the stare that italicized my blunder,
and saw that it was quarter to three — I had just lost 45 minutes!
but in fact it was 55 years that I needed to go back and fix.
Those alterations will never fit in the space at the end of the file,
but they set off reflection enough to beguile the obfuscating eye.

from The Brooklyn Rail (April 2020)

Sonnet 7/26/2020 (by Mitch Sisskind)

When you really need a wimpy
You get one. It was our mantra
Those many nights awaiting
Delivery of the Racing Form
To the newsstand on Diversey 
Even as we called a longshot
Like Greystone Park a whale 
Or how a consistent winner like
Doctor Morrie Weiss was called
A woolly mammoth with payoffs
That could feed an entire village
Albeit at even money or less.
But a wimpy? You will get one
When you need one. Period.

                      *

Very pleased that my Collected Poems
is now available on Amazon >> 

"Thinking" at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria (Summer 2006)

Two poems at Civitella Ranieri, July 2006

Thinking

                        You see a man / trying to think. -- Adrienne Rich

Here an orange and black-spotted butterfly
tests the lavender. There a bee sips
the yellow and deep red interior
of a red zinnia in full bloom.
The man needs to be alone.

The butterfly shies away.

You see a man trying to think,
but first he must clear his head
and throat.

The man coughs.
The butterfly leaps from a lush pink to
a bright orange zinnia. The man is thinking.
Give him room. Figs grow plump and green
on the trees while he does his thinking.
The pomegranates in the bushes
are pregnant with seeds.
The orange butterfly has white spots
on a black border.
It is not the same butterfly as before.

Thunder in Umbria

How odd. Blue skies, white clouds, hardly any gray,
the sun a flaming disc, and warm,
and yet big drops of rain are coming down.
cooling my head for the sun to dry it out,
and now two hours have gone by, it’s still sunny
and yet there’s thunder in bursts and rumbles
as evening’s breeze blows the clothes
I hung out to dry on the line: burgundy t-shirt,
navy t-shirt, boxer shorts, khaki trousers, socks.
Real things. Well, more or less. There it is again,
that ominous rumble like the sound
of the elevated train in your bedroom if you lived
on 125th Street and Broadway, where I am not.
I am in a hammock in Umbria, and I’ve decided
that every day I spend some time in the hammock
is a victory for the human race. Behind my clothes
there are grasses, green and yellow, fields
of wheat and corn, a diagonal line of cypresses
climbing the hill. It is, for the first and last time,
six thirty on the twenty-sixth of July, 2006.
I wonder whether it will rain.

Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Summer 2006.

 

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Maryam Ivette Parhizkar

A memory of freedom forgotten

by Maryam Ivette Parhizkar
 

It comes seeking the legitimacy of history but
even that feels like a violence—that is: history
is narrative. The need to break the plot
of itself. The field, something like a field
is a plot. A plot is a demarcation. I was running
some place like a field & there she was, her hand
at her waist. We were before language, language
was & was not history, she did not hold the memory
of beating before or after, body at ease, arms not
akimbo but almost in a holding. We were all there,
golden, maybe insects in the grass. You were running
into open space, even the sky was different than
what I remembered. Language already happened but
we were before language. Our smells did not matter
except they told each other who was there. (Scarcity—
who invented  that name.) Enclosure before history
of enclosure.

                                                            For Phoebe Glick and Sara Jane Stoner 
                                                            after language from Ruth Wilson Gilmore

 

Maryam Ivette Parhizkar was born and raised by a Salvadoran and Iranian family in southwest Houston, Texas. Her chapbooks include Somewhere Else the Sun is Falling into Someone's Eyes (Belladonna*, 2019), As for the future (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2016), and Pull: a ballad (The Operating System, 2014). She is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University and a CantoMundo fellow. She lives in Jersey City, on the periphery of the Hackensack Meadowlands. 

 

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.

Bernard Welt: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

photo by Arthur Gary

___________________________________________________________________________

Sabbatical

for Doug Lang

 

We hear tales of a wonderful country called Wales

Only Wales is wholly imaginary, like Middle Earth

Or the Starfleet Academy

There is no holiday called Christmas

Children do not exist

 

Humans have as yet failed to discover

A reliable means of reproducing their kind

Except in elaborate fictions—a kind of imitation of life

Lana Turner has not collapsed, at least not yet

 

There was no ancient mariner

And he never stopped anybody

All the world is not a stage

Some people actually are islands

The world is not too much with us

 

All happy families are not alike

I know whether I am the hero of my own story

I think I am extremely likely to see

A poem lovely as a tree

I do not celebrate myself or sing myself

There is not much of me

And I don’t taste all that good

 

This not the saddest story I have ever heard

I am not a parcel of vain strivings tied

By a chance bond together

Although I admit it must look that way sometimes

I did not place that jar in Tennessee

I didn’t eat the plums

 

In the beginning God did not create anything

This is not Illyria, lady

The answer is not blowing in the wind

You are not my funny valentine

Fish do not gotta swim, birds do not gotta fly

 

‘Twas not brillig

Lafayette, we are not here

I do not want you green

 

I do not wander lonely as a cloud

If clouds really are all that lonely

I took the road everybody else takes

And it hasn’t made any difference at all

A thing of beauty is not a joy forever

I don’t have to go down to the sea again

The sea is not calm tonight

I don’t remember

 ________________________________________________________________________________________________

Bernard Welt is the author of Serenade (Z Press), and poetry in journals including The Antioch Review, Sun & Moon, Little Caesar, and Z, as well as of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art (Art issues Press). His poem, “I stopped writing poetry . . .” appeared in The Best American Poetry 2001 (Robert Hass, ed., New York: Scribner, 2001).

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Keegan Lester Draws an Ace [by Ace Boggess]

HIGH ENERGY AND MOVEMENT

“a river chipped with stars,

night continues on without me.” by Keegan Lester

http://www.poolpoetry.com/poet-keegan-lester.html

What first drew me to David Lehman’s daily poems twenty years ago, and more recently the books of Matthew Lippman, is the pure kinetic energy of them. These poems travel great distances in just a page or two. They are like taking a trip from New York to Florida but winding up in California, while depicting all the stops along the way. Keegan Lester’s poem “a river chipped with stars, / night continues on without me.” does this (as do so many of his poems). This poem spins, spirals, sidesteps, dances. It dovetails a bit, yet leaves the reader in a new and unfamiliar place by the end.

Crediting Saul Bass [by Stefanie Green]

The credit sequences that open a movie constitute an under-appreciated art form, as you will conclude if you watch an hour of Saul Bass’s film title sequences on youtube.com [https://youtu.be/qqM3McG4-LE ]. Distinctive and recognizable, Bass’s style relies on all manner of graphic images: cut paper, printed ephemera, close-ups of objects, signs and symbols. Some of the most notable directors of the 1950s up through the ‘90s chose Saul Bass to do the credits for their films, and his creative output tells you why.

Bass, who was born in 1920, was of the same generation as Milton Glaser and Herb Lubalin: a trio of tremendously talented Jewish boys from New York City. At Brooklyn College, Bass studied with Gyorgy Kepes, the influential Hungarian emigré designer and film maker, and was influenced by the Bauhaus and its American version, the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Running through his work, as through that of Glaser and Lubalin, is the idea of combining word and image, and presenting it boldly, either with color or strong direction, or jagged type, or any other number of graphic techniques.  

Of the three designers, Bass's work has the most immediacy. It is as if he ripped the lettering right out of paper. (In fact, the title sequence for Bunny Lake is Missing shows a hand ripping paper.)  In contrast, Glaser and Lubalin seem to me to have a more literary and historical style, although both were immensely innovative in their use of color, imagery, and typography. Bass’s work, both his animation and graphic design, feels much more raw.

Bass was a master of logo design as well as animation. The sales pitch film for his ATT logo redesign in the mid 60s  [https://youtu.be/xKu2de0yCJI ] is a beautiful example of the post-war ideal of mass communication. I noticed, also, that his ATT bell logo is used in the titles of Ocean’s 11 (Sinatra version). The bell shows up as one of the slot machine figures.

In what follows, links are embedded in the movies' titles.

The Man with the Golden Arm

            Bass loved using the human body in abstract form. In this case, he was lucky that the film’s title included “Golden Arm.” The arm and hand in the poster are jagged, and with the rectangles that surround the actors’ photos, that edginess expresses the drug-induced state and its withdrawal. The mock handwriting typeface also has that jagged quality.

Vertigo

            A closeup of a woman’s lips, then her eyes. The music has a clock-like beat, and suggests hypnosis. The image then dissolves into a turning eye, and then a spiral getting larger and smaller. The optics prepare the viewer for the feeling of vertigo to which James Stewart is susceptible.

Anatomy of a Murder

            The movie’s score was written and performed by Duke Ellington and his orchestra. The film itself is a courtroom drama, but the music signs that you’re in for something unexpected. The case involves not only a murder but also a rape, and the couple involved, as played by Lee Remick and Ben Gazzara, are not quite believable. The score, along with Jimmy Stewart’s jazz piano hobby, set you up for a cool noir story. In the title sequence -- and in the poster -- Bass returns to the graphic of body parts made from ripped paper. As strong as the graphic is, it misses the mark for me, because the story doesn’t analyze the murder so much as the emotions that lead to it. Still, it’s one of his most memorable images. I remember it from the time the movie first opened.

North by Northwest

            The opening credits, with Bernard Hermann’s pulsing, atonal score, is all angles and lines going in vertical and diagonal directions. Again, the typeface is a bold sans serif---not Helvetica, the European typeface, but something resembling Franklin Gothic Condensed, which US newspapers used before Helvetica became the symbol of modern design. “Bass had experimented with graphic animation techniques as far back as The Seven Year Itch in 1955, but the title cards themselves had always remained static. North by Northwest is often credited as being the first sequence to use kinetic type — or simply, type in motion.” (www.artofthetitle.com/title/north-by-northwest/) The credits beautifully convey the movie’s urbane finish and comic undertow as we move from animation to street scenes, crowds walking, people descending subway stairs, and the city bus slamming its door in Alfred Hitchcock’s face, arguably Hitch’s greatest cameo.

Psycho

            As in Vertigo, Bernard Hermann’s score and Bass’s animation work together beautifully. This time the lines are vertical and horizontal, moving in and out of the frame with the same pulsing movement in the ear and the eye. There are several different versions of the print poster but they all use the same lettering for the title: the word “psycho” --- all caps and split through the middle.

Spartacus

            The sequence opens with hands bound, dissolving into ancient artifacts, more hands from statues, busts of Roman generals and leaders, then close-up images of Roman inscriptions. All these images fill the screen and move in and out of each other. The images are simple but multiple and immediately recognizable as ancient. It’s like a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Exodus

A burning flame suggests the memory of the Holocaust and the struggle for Israel’s independence. Ernest Gold’s soundtrack is sweeping and heroic. The poster incorporates a hand raised, holding a rifle. The addition of that graphic creates movement and a powerful emotional response in the viewer.

Ocean's 11

Digital numbers, one to eleven, fill the screen like a Times Square flashing headline. Then playing cards, slot machines, dice. Wow.

West Side Story

Here the end credits are amazing: graffiti on city walls. The soft background music from Leonard Bernstein’s score contrasts sharply with the rawness of the scrawled lettering.

Cape Fear, Casino, The Age of Innocence

These three Martin Scorcese films have beautifully-crafted title sequences. Cape Fear opens with a screen full of dark, gently rippling water from which a pair of dark menacing eyes appears. The Casino titles are a shocking surprise, and the background music of the Saint Matthew Passion by Bach, plus the floating body in flames, really set you up for an epic story. Finally, The Age of Innocence sequence is a lush time-lapse of sensuous flowers opening in slow motion. It’s a perfect use of imagery. You can tell Scorcese must have worked closely on the design of the titles. It’s a perfect collaboration.

-- Stefanie Green was the art director of Cornell Alumni Magazine and Weill Cornell Medicine from 1987 to 2015.

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

Still Life With . . .

Left: Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, Henri Fantin-Latour, 1866, gallery 824.
Top right: Still Life with a Glass and Oysters, Jan Davidsz de Heem, 1640, gallery 964.
Center right: Still Life: Fish, William Merritt Chase, 1908, gallery 774.  
Bottom right: Still Life with an Apple, Alberto Giacometti, 1937, not on view.

Inclined to try an “on-line tour”? Search the Met for “Still life” (https://www.metmuseum.org/search-results#!/search?q=Still%20life).  You will find 2,453  results, all relevant, with the exception of the painter Clyfford Still. A few to start:

Fantin-Latour always appealed, even in my anti-academic periods. Which is why it seems amusing that the Paris Academy was not a fan . . . and sad that Fantin-Latour himself loathed his own flowers. The Academy considered still lifes the lowest genre of painting, “even allowing woman to exhibit them”. Fantin-Latour said of his flowers, “Never have I had more ideas about Art in my head, and yet I am forced to do flowers. While painting them—standing before the peonies and roses—I think of Michelangelo. This cannot go on.” But many were captivated: Monet, Manet, Sergeant, Whistler, and over 150 years of collectors.

Part of the Met’s Founding Purchase of 1871, the de Heem is of the vanitas  sub-genre pronkstilleven. (Dutch for “ostentatious still life”), commenting on the “unrelenting lure of earthly pleasures and the sinful nature of humankind.” - MetText. Vanitas  usually has death images combined with luxury items but not these. These are filled with known symbols of opulence: lemon peels, oysters, and Roemer glasses (German crystal for white wine). Some art school should claim the motto “Lux et Vanitas”. Ja, natuurlijk!

Worried that he would be known to future generations only as “a painter of fish”, yet pleased by his success, Chase considered his fish paintings, "an uninteresting subject so inviting and entertaining by means of fine technique that people will be charmed at the way you've done it." His students wrote about his speed: “He went to the fish market, bought the fish, he painted it, and returned the fish before it went bad". Chase said, “It takes two to paint. One to paint, the other to stand by with an axe to kill him before he spoils it.”

Giacometti’s mature style evolved through his early struggle with scale. Until 1945, none of his figure sculptures were more than 2.5” high. “Often they became so tiny that with one touch of my knife they disappeared into dust.” His still lifes were no exception — “I was in [father’s] studio drawing some pears on a table, at the normal distance for a still life. And the pears kept getting tiny. I'd begin again, and they'd always go back to exactly the same size. My father got irritated and said, 'But just do them as they are, as you see them!' And he corrected them. I tried to do them as he wanted but I couldn't stop myself. . . . Half an hour later they were exactly the same size to the millimeter as the first ones."

 

Sisters on the Bridge Blues

Left: Nuns at Work, Follower of Alessandro Magnasco, 17th c. Gallery 539 (Jack and Belle Linsky Collection).
Right: Bacchanale,  Alessandro Magnasco, detail, 1720–1730, J. Paul Getty Museum.

When I saw Magnasco’s Nuns at Work, the palette grabbed me: dark monochromes, usually earth-tones with blue accents. His unusual subjects also intrigued: synagogue services, Quaker meetings, grave robbers' gatherings, catastrophes, and interrogations by the Inquisition. One blog added, “His sentiments regarding these subjects are generally unclear”. 

I was thrown back to my “generally unclear” student days, working as a parking lot guard in a Catholic hospital . . . in Baltimore in hard times (my own and city wide). 

“Unit 5, Unit 5, Sisters on the Bridge” . . . Apparently, I was Unit 5. My walkie-talkie instructed me to drive my golf cart to the bridge on level 4 and help the nuns. What exactly their fears were went without saying. I drove 20 feet behind them very slowly as they walked to their cars and followed them safely off the grounds. We never spoke. 

The only color to be seen in all 16 floors of exhaust-covered concrete and nuns’ habits was my blue J&L Parking Co. shirt and hat. The same blues, the same browns Magnasco used.

Years later, a friend sent me a news clipping of my old lot being demolished by explosives. All 16 levels dropped in a pile of rubble. That image fit well with Magnasco’s gothic visions of embattled nuns or grave robbers barricaded in institutional ruins. Would have been perfect for him. 

 

Naturalism (Hybrid and Faux)

The Organ Rehearsal, Henry Lerolle, 1885, gallery 684. 
Inset left, detail: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat 1884-86, Art Institute of Chicago. 
Inset right: The Organ Rehearsal, Henry Lerolle, 1885, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Both The Organ Rehearsal and Sunday on La Grande Jatte were painted and exhibited between 1884-86 in the same town. They are in opposing camps - Lerolle a naturalist and Seurat an impressionist/pointillist. The woman model with the red flower in her hat may have received two fees for one sitting.

The Swedes purchased a second version of the Lerolle to honor Naturalism - not Impressionism - as the major influence on Swedish art.  

Édouard Manet evolved from the naturalists but became the adopted father of the impressionists. He described his relationship with nature, “. . . And then you must cultivate your memory, because Nature will only provide you with references. Nature is like a warden in a lunatic asylum. It stops you from becoming banal.”

Joan of Arc, and detail, Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879, gallery 800.

For a time, the Bastien-Lepage seemed to combine attributes of naturalism and impressionism. Naturalists demanded realistic subjects from daily life. Impressionists could admire the loose brush work. Instead, a barrage of criticism followed. Émile Zola felt that Bastien-Lepage had vilified his own work by including the three floating saints and abandoned his previous support. Joris-Karl Huysmans accused the artist of "false naturalism". Gustave Courbet added, “Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one”. 

Decades later, critics remained irked. One argued that the dreamy expression of the model was rendered "only by the aid of hypnotism", which fits, as long as hypnotism is accepted as an activity of daily life.

 

Hands-On

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1653, gallery 964.

“Aristotle compares two sets of values: on the one hand, everything that he admired in Homer—gravity, humility, unequalled diction and thought—and, on the other, wealth and worldly honor, as embodied by the gold chain and medallion bearing an image of Aristotle's royal pupil, Alexander the Great.” - MetText

All three characters in the painting appear in Montaigne’s essay, “Of the Most Outstanding Men”. Homer is the best of all, Alexander the Great just under Christ, and Aristotle is there, but with very mixed reviews. Montaigne greatly preferred Socrates the “know-thyself” “master of masters . . . who surpassed even Alexander the Great”.

I remember my favorite Greek professor’s lesson on a particularly difficult use of the men/de (point/counterpoint set) construction in a Socratic speech in Plato. A long phrase is introduced with O’men (on the one hand). At the very end of this tome was only O’de (on the other hand). That meant, “go back and re-read the phrase, reversing each positive with a negative, and each negative with a positive.” Very efficient, but not an easy read. On each end of his desk, he kept a little flag, one with O’men, the other O’de.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Edwin Torres

Subordinate Volca  (after the eighth elegy)

by Edwin Torres                                                        

I dreamt I was holding a sea creature, tightly, in bed, the room was not mine, but a long darkened space with no walls, almost a bottom of the ocean with no water, it was mid-dawn or dead at night, we were under covers, in the dream, yet exposed, in the dream, engaged in what might be considered aggressive cuddling, up there, on the surface, social distance was law, humanity had ascended to avoidance for survival, in the dream, violence was carried out without leaving home, using language, crimes were committed in every sentence, isolation, no longer a mandate, but a guided meditation, under the rendered open, I was released in slippage, as the shadow keeping me warm, kept floating, and settling, back, on whatever it was I had become, the creature in my arms, was cocooned in translucent answers, hints of the binary defined our encounter, my masculine had nothing to do with our need, as if I were holding a giant bean bag, protected in a clear sack, we were viral tentacles, un-limbed by reciprocal touchlings, hovering over each other, the head was a protrusion where the neck should be, encased in hermetics, agoraphobic aurora, effable sock mask, secured by assyrian tendrils buckled on each side, with features pulled back, the face was a cross, between a pucker and the luminescent temporal within, conundrum of the sentient, what counted for something, remained there, a clear latex funnel appeared where the mouth should be, bright red lips at the base, in my barely contained appendages, with no trace of longing, I was holding this unformed plastic sack of flesh, while listening closely to words, spilling slowly, from the inverted triangular mouth funnel, I would in turn, open my mouth over the funnel, guiding droplets of silver to engorge themselves around the cochlea, organ finding organ, we were patient, catching what bits of frenetic arousal would conjure themselves, into each other's available orifi, we remained like this for years, in the dream, swaying to non-existent water, spilling the secret of poems, without fear of hierarchy, or promise.

 

Edwin Torres is the author of 10 poetry collections, including XoeteoX: the infinite word object (Wave Books), Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), The PoPedology of an Ambient Language (Atelos Books), and is editor of the inter-genre anthology, The Body In Language: An Anthology (Counterpath Press 2019). He has performed his multi-disciplinary bodylingo poetics worldwide. Fellowships include NYFA, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, and The DIA Arts Foundation. Anthologies include Fractured Ecologies, Who Will Speak For America, American Poets In The 21st Century: Poetics Of Social Engagement, Postmodern American Poetry Vol. 2, Kindergarde: Avant Garde Poems For Children, and Aloud: Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Café.

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.

"The Humble Crafter" (for Paul Violi) [by Michael Quattrone]

The Humble Crafter
for Paul Violi

I am thinking of you and the whimsical

grace with which you lived and taught; the humor

you enjoyed, imbued; the daily rumor

of your wit; life’s confusion, its musical

charm—a drunk, Irish priest on a bicycle

delivering the gospel of “do more

god than ham before you sniff the tomb,” or

veer sharply into the metaphysical

fish cart. What more wincing balm than laughter

coaxed from savage jaws of self-importance?

A ransom note haiku, published at birth:

the threat of beauty by a humble crafter,

demanding that we greet our happenstance

by marveling at what one life is worth.

Photo of Michael Quattrone (2020)/

"Of Self and Shadow" [by Molly Arden]

1.

Molly is the only woman 
she knows who talks about herself
in the third person. She used to like
people but now she's a misanthrope
who has read Moliere.
O, to be a famous recluse!

2.

Molly surprised a shadow
flitting in the mirror behind her this morning.
Every morning Molly’s beauty deepens.
This shadow, Molly tells herself,
is the future. The corpus of your beliefs
shaped by your gaze to be the state

of the art of melancholia modified by
a sublime narcissism – that’s what
she wants as she celebrates herself.
But the shadow wanders in the woods
and gazes at her face in the stream
where outgrown beliefs gather and flow.

3.

And yet among them is a long dismissed city
under the earth, inhabited by potters making 
rows and rows of likenesses of Molly accurate
to the mole on her inner thigh, an army of her 
waiting like Emperor Qinshihuang soldiers
to surface after an earthquake to possess all men.
There are no outgrown beliefs, Molly, look again. 

4. 

“Look again at this city of angels, this time
with the sound of a trumpet solo in your ears,”
she tells herself. The advice is easy to pass along,

but she only has eyes for the “you” of the song,
the you who took advantage of “me,” someone
exactly like you, and you get happy, 

and Molly has the right to sing the blues.

5.

The Nr.3 train wagon has fallen silent. The plague
is taking her elders. How old are you anyway, dear,
she asks herself. She’s never sure if she’s thirty
or seventy. They say the elders’ harvest has begun.
Are you leaving? Will she remain?  
She hears the rain outside and not a word is heard.

This must be the place I will forever report from.

Note: “Paul Violi, whose birthday was July 20, was my workshop teacher when I was starting out. I know this is his birthday because I wrote a poem about the failed attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, and Paul told me he was born on that very day. So I want to dedicate this poem to him and post it only on July 20." -- MA

Ed. note: The picture above is of Emperor Qin Shihuang.

On Paul Violi's Birthday: A Poem [by David Lehman]

Look for Remus in the index of a book
And you are bound to get “See Romulus”
Which is perfectly logical but makes me wonder
About indexes, or indices, and why I prefer the former
As the plural except in a financial context, and how
An index to a book that may not exist may imply
A whole biography, as my friend Paul Violi
Showed in his poem “Index.” My late friend
Paul Violi, whom I still see in the street
Sometimes, walking along at an unhurried pace
So if I walk fast I will catch up to him at the corner
Before the light turns green.

Ed. Note: Books by Paul Violi (July 20, 1944 – April 2, 2011) include Splurge, In Baltic Circles, and Selected Poems, 1970-2007. Check out his "Counterman," which guest editor Billy Collins selected for The Best American Poetry 2006. It was also chosen by Robert Pinsky for The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition.

Amy Pickworth: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________

The Ohio Poem

So even after all this time
when I see a dog that’s eager to bite
I think of my darling angry boys of southeastern Ohio
skinny kids on short chains
shortchanged and wary of the stranger’s hand
Their fury comes to them honest
as the mongrel great-great-grandsons
of unlauded Civil War heroes
who recklessly avoided death
so they could simply turn around and walk back home
shoeless and enraged over the mountains

Christ you poor dumb sweet lugs
now you’re cannon fodder
in countries they never showed us on the map
or working at Walmart or the basket factory
or maybe if you got lucky driving for UPS
You can shoot a deer and
leave its steaming organs in the snow
You’ve had pictures and words
tattooed on your necks
and will not regret it later
Sometimes it’s better when you just drink yourselves
into a great artificial calm

My beautiful sunburned farmhands of Appalachia
my first sweethearts you’ve all gone to seed
But you don’t need Mom to tell you you’re fat
You can see when you’ve gone soft lost your nerve
and your way as the heirs of all those pious Germans
who built modest houses and the furniture in them
checked their traps and stocked their cellars
with fat little apples from trees their fathers grafted
who knew the price by the pound as well as the cost
beat their wives and children into good behavior
and meted out their own pleasures with tweezers
or gorged on them in the dark
Whose boys served front line KP patrol any shit assignment
in Europe or the Pacific or Vietnam so that now as their grandsons
you can sleep on the couch in the waning light of the flat screen

O O O Ohio you were the Mother of Presidents
but now they’re always born someplace else
That industry has been outsourced
to where they make them prettier and cheaper and
no one has to worry about plowing and
salting the driveway

You, men of Ohio, were once my own
I grew tall in the light
of your refrigerators
I licked around the edges
of your ice cream sandwiches
I swayed in your arms at prom
I let a few of you lay me down
on the gold shag carpet
but not pull off my pants because
it wasn’t until after you enlisted
and I went to college that I put out
and then it was for boys
who weren’t from around here

So I’m sorry, Ohio
You were my home and
the home of my mother and her mother
and her mother’s mother before her
and the parking lot where I finally did lose my virginity
to a guitar player who’s now a banker in Tokyo
Your gentle hills once spectacular mountains
worn down over time by the monotony of glaciers
finally dismantled and cast aside for their paltry seams of coal
are still the setting for all my best plane-crash dreams
but in the end I betrayed your sons
          except that one who had the audacity
          to betray me first and for that of course
          I am doomed to love him forever

Sometimes I think I should’ve taken
one of those boys by the hand
          I could’ve found him in the dark by his calluses alone
and we could’ve lit out together

We had our opportunities, you know
“Goddamn it this movie sucks”
he whispered in the flickering light
“Let’s get out of here
Slap me hard across the face
scream ‘You’re an asshole’
run up the aisle
then I’ll come running after you”
God I remember our delight
at how we’d shock them all
But in the end we just stayed
in our seats obediently waiting
till it was over and
they turned the lights back on

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Amy Pickworth is the author of Bigfoot for Women (Orange Monkey Publishing, 2014). “The Ohio Poem” originally appeared in Smartish Pace issue 18.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

On Mayakovsky's Birthday [from "The Cloud in Trousers" / English version by David Lehman]

On a January night in 2019 at the Russian Samovar in New York City, these lines from Mayakovsky's "Cloud in Trousers" were read aloud. If Vlad had been there, this is how he would have looked. -- DL

Hey!
Gentlemen!
You who
next to me
are rank amateurs
in the realms
of sacrilege,
mischief,
and mayhem --
have you laid eyes on
the most terrifying thing
in the world –
my face
when I am totally calm,
cool and collected?

I fear
my ego
isn’t big enough
for the rest of me
which
is struggling
to emerge
as a full-born youth
from a Madonna’s womb.

*

Hello!
Who’s there?
Mama?
Mama!
Your son is sick, magnificently so.
Mama!
His heart’s on fire.
Tell his sweet sisters
in all of Russia there’s nowhere
he can take refuge.

The words he spits out,
the jokes he cracks,
flee from his scorching mouth
like naked women
jumping out the windows
of a burning brothel.

The stink of burnt flesh is in the air.

The fire brigade drives up
in a shiny new red truck,
the men with their helmets on.
But no hobnailed jackboots here.
Tell those guys to tread softly
when a heart’s on fire.
Look, I’ll show you what to do.
I’ll pump buckets of tears from my eyes.
I’ll save the one last survivor,
the thirteenth apostle,
who lives in my heart
and wants to leap to his freedom.

In vain.

You can’t leap out of your heart.

From the crack of the lips
on my smoldering face
the cinder of a kiss tries to escape.

Mama!
I can’t sing!
In the chapel of my heart the choir’s on fire!

Figurines the shape of letters and numbers
rush out of my skull
like kids bursting out of a schoolhouse in flames.

And as the blaze spreads
I command you to moan
into the centuries, if you will,
my final intimate yell: I’m on fire!

-- as rendered by David Lehman