The Best American Poetry

Kaveh Akbar Gets an Ace [by Ace Boggess]

A SENSE OF CONNECTION TO THE FAMILIAR (BUT STRANGE TO OTHERS)

“Portrait of the Alcoholic, with Craving” by Kaveh Akbar

http://bostonreview.net/poetry/NPM-2016-kaveh-akbar-portrait-alcoholic-craving 

We can’t all be doctors, lawyers, convicts, or carnies. But some of us can be those things. We have our own stories, and when they overlap with the stories of others in verse, a strong bond develops. There are many of us who can relate to addiction. Kaveh Akbar’s poem “Portrait of the Alcoholic, with Craving” makes that connection for me from the opening line: “I’ve lost the unspendable coin I wore around / my neck.” It places me, as a recovering addict, immediately in the world of 12-step meetings and relapses in the same way poems from Reginald Betts’ book Felon leave me meditating on my post-prison life. Not every poem connects with such intimacy and immediacy. Those that do are the poems we, as writers also, wish we had written.

"May Day" [by Nicholas Christopher]

The demented song of a woman
on the street the day one hundred
forty four people in this city
die of the same disease

Her voice rises and falls
between two notes
up and down the scale
two words unintelligible at first

She is unseen invisible out of sight
maybe no more out of her mind
than anyone else
except that she has taken herself

to a dark corner crying out
not for help
not for the sick and suffering
not for those who embrace or reject death

not for the healers
but for no one:
the two words — clear now —
that she's been wailing to everyone.

Nicholas Christopher is the author of nine books of poems, most recently Crossing the Equator and On Jupiter Place, seven novels, and a book about film noir, Somewhere in the Night.  He lives in New York City.

The poem will appear in TOGETHER IN A SUDDEN STRANGENESS: AMERICA’S POETS RESPOND TO THE PANDEMIC edited by Alice Quinn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020). 

Nic says he wrote this poem on a day when a woman was "wailing on a street corner I could not see from my window.  She went on for hours while I was at my desk, and at some point I pushed aside the work I was involved in and wrote the poem on a lined pad with my fountain pen." 
Photo credit: Constance Christopher.

 

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Sheila Maldonado

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copy rong, a video poem by Sheila Maldonado

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Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collections one-bedroom solo (A Gathering of the Tribes / Fly by Night Press, 2011) and that's what you get (Brooklyn Arts Press, forthcoming, 2020). She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She has served as an artist-in-residence on Governors Island, New York, for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a Cultural Envoy to Honduras for the U.S. State Department. She teaches English for The City University of New York. She was born in Brooklyn, raised in Coney Island, the daughter of Armando and Vilma of El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras. She lives in El Alto Manhattan. This video poem first appeared in House Party #14, a digital publication and performance series of The Poetry Project.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Epitaph for a Genre: On Kubrick's "The Killing" [by David Lehman]

Adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson from the pulp novel by Lionel White, The Killing is classic noir. The plot is about an expertly planned racetrack heist that goes spectacularly wrong because the weak link in the chain of confederates is married to a two-timing frail. A cast of noir stalwarts under Kubrick’s direction brings this story to life. Later Kubrick movies such as 2001 and A Clockwork Orange are more ambitious undertakings, but many of us with noir in our bones have a special affection for The Killing, a taut, black-and-white depiction of futility and failure.

Just out of prison, Johnny Clay is tall, tough, taciturn, and as decent a guy as you could want in a thief—a role Sterling Hayden was born to play. He has planned the robbery with a chess player’s precision. An inside job, it requires the contributions of a pay-window cashier named George (Elisha Cook Jr.) and a track bartender. Johnny has also recruited Randy (Ted de Corsia), a crooked cop, who drives solo in his prowl car; Nikki, a sharpshooter (played with great nastiness by Timothy Carey); and Maurice, a muscle man (Kola Kwariani, a Georgian wrestler with whom Kubrick played chess).

Nikki must shoot Black Lightning, the favorite in the high-stakes race of the day, just before the colt reaches the backstretch of the track. At the same time, Maurice will pick a fight at the bar. You need 10 men to hold Maurice down, and so, amid the chaos, no one notices the cashier when he unlocks the door marked “NO ADMITTANCE,” behind which men count and stash the day’s take. The diversions give Johnny time enough to walk in, don a mask, brandish a submachine gun, and collect the dough in a duffel bag, which he then tosses out the window … for Randy to pick up and drive away in his cop car. A perfect crime.

Kubrick starts and restarts the story, shifting points of view, reverting each time to the track announcer’s call of the $100,000-added Lansdowne Stakes. The marksman’s story features a chilling scene between Nikki and a black racetrack employee played by James Edwards. The narrative throughout is advanced by voiceover, a matter-of-fact male voice of authority, accentuating the suspense.

The novel’s original title was Clean Break. Elisha Cook, Jr., so memorable as the humiliated gunsel in The Maltese Falcon and as brave, lovesick Harry Jones in The Big Sleep, is outstanding as George the cashier, a man who, in Lionel White’s novel, is said to be “crazy about his wife” but “not completely blind to her character.” He knows, too, that “he himself had failed as a husband and failed as a man.”

In short, he is the archetypal noir loser, married to Sherry (Marie Windsor), who is discontented, fickle, frustrated, and doomed. When George confides that in the next few days he will have a lot of money, she says, with practiced cruelty, “Did you put the right address on the envelope when you sent it to the North Pole?” Sherry gets George to reveal the gang’s plan.

Everything goes right until the guys gather to split the proceeds. Sherry has spilled the beans to her handsome boyfriend Val (Vince Edwards). Val and a henchman barge in to steal the dough, and in the ensuing shootout all are killed except George, who is badly wounded but has enough vitality left to stumble home and shoot Sherry before he expires. “It isn’t fair,” she says, making the cinematic most of the moment. “I never had anyone but you, not a real husband, not even a man.”

Having transferred the loot to the biggest suitcase he could buy, Johnny Clay arrives at the scene 15 minutes too late. Seeing George stumble down the front stairs, Johnny puts two and two together and drives away with the sound of sirens in his ears. He and girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray) hightail it to the airport.

The Killing ends with the greatest money shot in the movies, its nearest competition being the shower of love bestowed on James Stewart on Christmas Eve at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. Johnny and Fay are at the airport about to board a flight to Boston and freedom. He doesn’t want to let go of the suitcase, but it is too big for the overhead compartment, so he reluctantly yields it. He and Fay watch the suitcase totter atop the checked luggage in the cart taking it from terminal to plane. When a spectator’s dog runs into the cart’s path, the driver swerves, and the suitcase falls off. It pops opens, and the money flies around like snow in a swirling wind.

The set-up has been executed perfectly and yet, because of a stray event, a tiny happenstance, all is for naught—all the blood spilled, all the careful calculation.

Johnny Clay does not survive in the novel. On the last page, two bullets from George’s gun make a “peculiar, plopping sound” as they enter Johnny’s stomach. Under his elbow is a folded newspaper, headlined “Race Track Bandit / Makes Clean Break / With Two Million.” The novel’s original title was Clean Break.

The movie’s ending is even better. Two million bucks in small bills go up in a whirlwind, and the bandit has not only lost the cash but has also unmasked himself as the culprit. Dazed, helpless, Johnny and Fay retreat and try to hail a taxi. They are standing by the airport’s front doors as two armed plainclothes cops walk menacingly toward them. The look on Sterling Hayden’s face is unforgettable.

Fay: “Johnny, you’ve got to run.”

Johnny: “Ah … what’s the difference?”

This exchange, which ends the movie, could stand as an epitaph for all of noir.

Written for and posted by The American Scholar. Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

"Emissary" [by Andrea Applebee]

After filling a heel of bread with stale anger

And tossing it off the ledge into rosemary, the rosemary

appeared on a plate of hot crust the next day

and the night moon over my shoulder

became a boiled egg shining dully

with salt from my fingers from the morning swim

and the fish I pulled spines from

later swam in the boat lights eating smaller fish eating smaller

men I’ve tried to love

songs, fears, conversations

exchanged in silence

and the money I’ve lost, guests hosted

glasses I’ve broken, refilled

bruises palmed as mulberries of varying bitterness

the flush of shame for existing at all painted 

back on, the blush of mischief

from a crushed cactus flower;

judgments remanded, hopes dismissed

never in measure, rarely in sequence

without any sense of propriety and not for long

though possibly for long enough, and only in this sense

they must come back in reverse

without themselves returning

as when I bite my cheek to suck the blood to speak

and the dead carry on as the dead though dead

or when I blessed you or you ever touched me or

the stars visit us again in sleep

as if for the last time though not

for the last time in the end

quick—take this—

I am crossing under a bridge

becoming arches of a sanctuary that isn’t mine

there’s a trio playing music like a spell

and I don’t know how to cross the sound

to reach you and say, even if it isn’t true yet

we are not lost, we are 

on our way. 

Andrea writes: "Emissary is a word I've always loved that seems to condense the purpose of poetry to me. It's also a tongue-in-cheek reference to an ongoing joke between friends here, inspired by an offhand comment from some artsy socialite at a dinner table a few summers ago, that I 'looked like a spy.' I said something like 'Yes, the famous blind spy of Athens,' but later I thought of a better comeback. Poets are spies of the soul.  I like it that emissary carries the connotation of both messenger and witness."

Lally on Winch

Plunging through my closeted archives, I came across copies of The Poetry Project Newsletter. A piece by Michael Lally on Terrence Winch caught my attention. A few hours later in real time (but 43 years in literary time) I came across Winch selecting Lally

At David Lehman's request, here's the Poetry Project piece:Previous Post

Connecticut Welcomes You!

David Lehman, Governor Ned Lamont's top economic-development official, weighs in on the lure of the nutmeg state to New Yorkers looking to exit the city. Some NY transplants are here just for the crisis, some are here to stay. "We are going to market ourselves more to those individuals as opposed to marketing ourselves to the company," said Lehman, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, who has lived in Greenwich, Ct., for more than a decade.

Musing Terpsichore at the Regard du Cygne: “Ma Robe” on the blood-red Recamier [by Tracy Danison]

Zoe Salmon performs “Ma Robe”, Regard du Cygne, Paris, 8 March 2020, Photo©Morena Compani

“If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it”.

                                                                                        - Isadora Duncan

The moment bizarre is not over, of course, until live performance starts up again and this here (now) fat boy loses the five pounds he put on during lockdown. Still, in all, what with the salutary correction in the Weltgeist and a change in direction in categorical imperatives, things do seem to be looking up.

As I have since mid-March I spend long periods on the blood-red Recamier, golden pillow under my head, hearing my heart throb and gazing at the ceiling. My own analyst. My own analysand.  As I lie gazing, my Persönlichergeist has often been full of Isadora Duncan, the (re)founder of dance in the modern world. Yes, she is.

Duncan’s autobiography and Jérôme Bel’s Portrait dansé of Isadora Duncan, wonderfully done up by the excellent Elisabeth Schwartz marked me in 2019 as did the performer Ruth Childs, dancing her first solo, fantasia, who gets mixed in with my reflections on the sense of “dance” sense.  

The last venue I was at before the lockdown in mid-March this year was Regard du Cygne, a dance-performance theater space in the Belleville neighborhood, metro Télégraphe or Jourdain. Amy Swanson, the founder and guiding spirit of the place, like Elisabeth Schwartz, is a practitioner of dance in the Isadora Duncan tradition. One of the last things I saw performed at Regard du Cygne was Swanson’s piece Ma Robe (“my robe, my dress, my gown”). Robe’s wordless universal sense and personal sensibility in performance recall what I’ve been thinking Duncan is all about.

Blood-red Recamier with golden pillow

In her performance of the piece, Zoé Salmon enchants the audience by elegantly uprising her approximate six feet through about 30 yards of heavy gown fabric. She somehow gets across both complex senses of “becoming”: “right and lovely” and “evolving”. And, thereby, somehow, she opens up a vision of the becoming world for witness.

But really, the success of Ma Robe – the sense, it seems to me, to Duncan’s idea of dance – is its ability to appeal to a shared conviction that, “danced”, a robe-dress-gown points to the centrality of self – yours, mine, their – in our world.

Everybody – I, my companion, Karine, the little girls sitting behind and around me, their moms and dads, as well as the other adults in the audience, recognized and accepted that Salmon’s rising so personally, so elegantly, up through Ma Robe was (is), really-truly, the universe becoming.

Real  invitation. Photo: Ana Belén Cantero Paz

Terpsichore’s – and Duncan’s – art treat a level of complexity Aristotle and Thomas Carlyle just never imagined. What happens at “dance” (maybe at all live performance) resembles what Saint Augustine said could only be true at the Eucharist: the wine and bread are body and blood, the gown is the universe, the thing represented is the thing itself.

So, as at a Eucharist, Ma Robe’s audience’s shared conviction of witness is not dramatic, is not theatrical, has nothing to do with a “suspension of disbelief” to achieve catharsis, the necessary evacuation of the emotional toxins generated by a set of beliefs. Think of the psychic poison generated by the beliefs that underpin Oedipus the King! Motherfucker!

When we witness “dance” as Isadora Duncan meant it, on the other hand, we are connecting with our capacity (and responsibility) for the sets of belief that construct the world we live in. Think, “connection” and “identification”: kids playing house or a toddler echoing words, trying out a relation or a tool or just trying out the capacity to construct a reality.

So, here is a post-moment bizarre conclusion from the blood-red Recamier.

Before the moment bizarre, I would have said that Isadora Duncan understood my life is movement is dance. No more. I now say that Duncan took “dance” for granted as Emily Dickinson took “poetry” for granted, as Ralph Waldo Emerson took “personhood” for granted. As it never occurred to the (re)founders of poetry and spirituality that poetry might be a function of “language” or that a human being could be other than her own subject, it just never occurred to Duncan that “dance” was other than dance. Terpsichore’s name, after all, means “delight in dance”, and her iconography, sitting with a lyre held up as if a portal, invite her admirers beyond sight and sound to vision and feeling.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Joshua Escobar

 

Trade?-markers, pen, paper-2017-Joshua Escobar

everybody in general
by Joshua Escobar

let’s kiss
Frank as in Frankenstein

let’s kiss
people in cages

let’s kiss
nebulae double-crossed

let's kiss
straight people mauling whatever they love

let's kiss
the sexuality of other cities

let’s kiss
unused doctrines & volumes of knowledge

let’s kiss
lovers playing up the doom

let’s kiss
feathers vs. chasm

let’s kiss
chasm vs. feathers

let’s kiss
Saint Francisco of the Latin Exes

let’s kiss
agony to death

let’s kiss
R.A.'s BOMBNESS

let’s kiss
a baby queer's hoe streak

let’s kiss
another sexy guy’s disinterest

let’s kiss
the fruity aftertaste of Lucifer’s skull & bones soup

let’s kiss
youth drilled anew

even as it’s impossible to see each other
let’s kiss

 

 

Joshua Escobar is the author of the chapbooks Caljforkya Voltage and xxox fm, as well as the new full-length collection about being a deejay in a queer dystopia,  Bareback Nightfall (Noemi Press, 2020). He holds a Master's from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, as well as from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He is a regional chair (California) for CantoMundo, and the co-founder of the all-ages zine, Orange Mercury. He teaches at Santa Barbara City College, and reviews poetry collections in his free time.
IG: djashtrae17. "everybody in general" was previously published in the Brooklyn Rail.

 

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.

Michael Lally: Pick of the Week [ed. by Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Lally, ca. 2008

The Night John Lennon Died

___________________________________

One warm night, when I was a kid,
we were all playing ringalario in
the high school field at the bottom
of my street when Mrs. Murphy, known
mostly for the time her hair turned
purple when she tried to dye it, stuck
her head out the door and yelled across
the street to us, “Go on home now and be
quiet, Babe Ruth just died.” And we all
did go home where everything was somber
and serious and adult and strange,
worse than when one of the family died,
because then there were outbursts of
emotion as well as jokes and stories
and good drunken parties, but
the night Babe Ruth died, everyone
felt as sad as if it was a close close
friend or a sister or a brother,
but no one was really related so
there was no call for an actual Irish
wake or funeral party. I couldn’t help
remembering that night again, the
night John Lennon died. Nobody
threw a wake or a party where we
could all get drunk and high and
have a good cry together. We all
went home and wandered around our
rooms and heads looking for answers,
unable to sleep or forget or accept
or understand what had happened.
It had to be a mistake and it was,
a fucking senseless, horrible,
deadening mistake.
                        It’s hard to
recognize even the most familiar
things. I don’t know where I am
half the time, the other half I’m
flashing on some song or line or look
or attitude so close to my own
personal history I thought it was
mine. But it ain’t, cause it’s gone
with John and I feel like I got to
go do something now to spread a
little joy and loving and honest
fucking answers and questions about
the world I live in and the only times
we ever have, our own. I hope I’m
not alone.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A former jazz musician, Hollywood actor, and radical organizer, New Jersey-born Michael Lally is first and foremost a poet. The author of more than thirty books of soulful, outspoken poems that have inspired many other artists, Lally writes with wry humor and the simple grace that is the mark of deep thought and conviction. He is the recipient of an American Book Award, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and other honors. Commenting on Lally’s landmark selected poems,  Another Way to Play: Poems 1960-2017 (7 Stories Press, 2018), Charles Bernstein wrote:  “Michael Lally’s risky, talky, autobiographic, ethnic, disarming, poignant, desperate, consoling, elegiac, wily, vernacular lyrics have been challenging the poetry world for half a century.” 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"Homage" [by Tony Towle]

It was not the cup of hypnoerotic tea
but the calculation in her memoirs
that stirred the secret possum
hiding in the crowd
to dream of thermal compatibility.

As I was explicating these lines
to an immense golden hawk,
in language that I hoped it would understand,
and the leaf people jostled for position overhead
on the twigs of the sacred grove,
I heard the voice of a poet:
“Would you like me to help you cross the street?”
Or maybe it was “across the street”
but it was a real street I had to cross,
and a real poet, a poet who wanted to ensure
that I made it to my next poem,
the one where he would help me to cross a street
so I could safely attend his reading.

from Noir (Hanging Loose Press, 2017)

Kenzie Allen Draws an Ace [by Ace Boggess]

Ace Boggess launches this, the first of five mini-reviews, with this prefatory note: 

<<
When David Lehman asked me to do a handful of mini-reviews of poems that have stuck with me, I realized that I’ve read far too much poetry, so much that I remember little of it. Even poems I immediately love or believe to be brilliant fade from my thoughts like weather forecasts from last week. What is it, I wondered, that makes a poem linger like a favorite song in my memory? Here is the first of five poems that I will post on the BAP blog followed by thoughts on what it is that I find so compelling — the same things I always look for in the poems I consider great, or more to the point, those I reread and remember.

A Sense of Connection to the Strange

“Dress Like Pocahontas, Then Let’s Make Love” by Kenzie Allen

https://dialogist.org/v2i4-kenzie-allen

We can’t all be doctors, lawyers, convicts, or carnies. We come from different backgrounds, cultures, races, religious beliefs. We have our own stories. My favorite poems are those that convey the poet’s (or narrator’s) story in a way that allows me to connect with it and understand it at least somewhat as if I’ve lived it. Kenzie Allen’s poem “Dress Like Pocahontas, Then Let’s Make Love” has this effect on me. I’ve reread the poem a dozen times and always find some new way to relate to it, although it belongs to an identity foreign to me. It’s a similar effect to reading Terrence Hayes’s “Talk” (BAP 2006), another poem filled with the powerful dissonance between cultural identity and the desire to fit in. This sense of connection to the strange allows me, as reader, to empathize, learn, and in a sense, become.

Dress Like Pocahontas, Then Let’s Make Love

Tell him, you have not previously undressed
this notion. Your mother would say
“how cute,” perhaps “the older guy?”
or “now remember to call it regalia—
they yell at me when I say costume.”
You didn’t object to Indian Girl for the
fourth grade costume ball, a Hobby-Lobby
approximation, hair in braids, be-feathered.
Did you see the new carpet, black-veined
marble and baked haddock in the casino
buffet? Did you hear Barbara in HR
finally wrote up Gene? Wolf clan can’t eat
wolf meat, and if we ever got hold of turtle,
you must apologize, leave that portion
and take extra of bear. No beadwork
would mention this; no fancy shawl captures
what cannot be claimed. The tribe pays
for your birth control. The tribe offers a flu shot
every time you visit; you are mayor of Oneida,
hash-tag native. Namegiver she loved me, she took
my hand, smudged sage like oil drops straight
to the ceiling. You are trying to say your own name,
but can’t pronounce it; you are afraid your skin is turning
translucent. Wear bronzer. Go on and braid your hair.
You are not enrolled, and it is only a costume.

-- Kenzie Allen

Kenzie Allen is a Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and is a descendant of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin.

In Monet's Dining Room: Remembering Milton Glaser (1929-2020) [by Rozanne Gold]

 

"Milton’s designs were sumptuous, color-drenched, vivid, expressive and…mouthwatering."

The art world, to be sure, is mourning the loss of one its greatest graphic designers and typography innovators of all time. Milton Glaser’s evocative images are emblazoned in our collective conscience as a narrative that accompanied more than sixty years of American culture. Milton touched the lives of millions of art and pop-culture lovers, but more specifically, as a teacher-of-eminent-status at the School of Visual Arts, where he inspired generations of young designers.

 Less known are the remarkable contributions Milton made to the culinary landscape – in fact, he was an amuse-bouche of the meal that would become America’s first food revolution in the 1970s.  From restaurants to products to supermarkets and cookbooks, Milton’s designs were sumptuous, color-drenched, vivid, expressive and…mouthwatering.  Whereas Milton’s brushstrokes stoked so many worlds – music, poetry, book design, fashion, to name a few -- it is the world of food, supermarkets, packaged goods, and restaurants that brought us together.

Rozanne (left) and Nicky in the Gracie Mansion kitchen. The fern wallpaper was chosen by Mary Beame, wife of Abe, the 104th mayor of NYC.

When I was 24 and the chef to New York Mayor Ed Koch, Milton asked me to help him rebrand the Grand Union supermarket chain. The prototype was their flagship store on the Upper East Side near  Gracie Mansion where I was living. I had just returned from Italy where I studied with cookbook author Giuliano Bugialli. Milton was keenly interested in freshly-made pasta, pesto and mozzarella di bufala, all-things Italian, but also obscure in the late 1970s. We tasted jarred goods, canned foods, and everything from the deli cases and hatched a plan to not only redesign the stores but everything edible, too. What a stunning education to be in his orbit, and to watch his beautiful hand translate ideas into design.  

The Gold and Glaser design for the Grand Union supermarket chain. "We hatched a plan to not only redesign the stores but everything edible, too."

Milton wrote “The Underground Gourmet” (for the New York Herald Tribune and later for New York Magazine), but his sophistication about food and dining spread widely above ground as well. In addition to our mutual reverence for Italian food, we celebrated our ancestral roots with a love of Hungarian cooking, and were suckers for the cabbage strudel from Mrs. Herbst, whose bakery was not far from Grand Union. By the early 1980s, nouvelle cuisine was emerging and the focus of our city’s gastronomes shifted to everything French. Milton introduced me to the decidedly non-nouvelle work of Mireille Johnston, the author of “Cuisine of the Sun” (classical dishes from Nice and France, 1976) and “Cuisine of the Rose” (the food of Burgundy), whose wonderful cookbooks he designed.  

For the next many decades we worked together on other projects: We created American Spoon Foods (a company specializing in regional food products), and collaborated on all the menus for Aurora, the Rainbow Room, and Windows on the World (above, all three-star restaurants) when I was chef/director of Baum +Whiteman, the consulting group responsible for the creation and operation of all these places.

But the project closest to our hearts never got built: Monet’s Dining Room, to be located in the Barbizon Hotel on East 63rd Street in Manhattan. Monet was Milton’s muse (I’m certain he had many), and the restaurant’s interiors were designed to look like Monet’s house in Giverny, France – complete with its daffodil yellow dining room and powder blue kitchen. Milton hired me to be the Director of Restaurants and sent me on a two-week trip to France to eat in dozens of two- and three-star restaurants with master chef Richard Burns who was to become the restaurant’s executive chef. It was a joy of a lifetime – to dine and meet the world’s most important chefs – Paul Bocuse, Alain Senderens, the Troigros brothers, Alain Chapel – and to walk around the lush gardens of Monet’s home in Giverny. 

Claude Monet's La salle a manger, an inspiration for "Monet’s Dining Room" to be designed by Glaser and located in the Barbizon Hotel on East 63rd Street in Manhattan."After a year the project was halted and simply remained a dream." photo © The Claude Monet foundation.

Today, sitting at my dining room table, I longingly flip through the pages of a paper I wrote after that remarkable research trip.  “A Gastronomic Trip to France: A Critical Evaluation/September 1982” – which included dozens of restaurant critiques and an interview with Claire and Jean-Marie Toulgonat, nephew of Claude Monet (and a distant relative of then VP, George Bush). I learned that Monet loved cepes more than anything in the world; that he adored duck wings grilled with nutmeg; that Monet’s cook was a woman; and that a typical formal dinner at his home would include a soup of truffles (from Perigord only), foie gras, a fish course, game course (another favorite was woodcock), and a roasted meat (such as roasted turkey with marrow).  Milton was, of course, delighted with such details and very happy to hear that the Troisgros’ chefs requested an invitation to the opening of “Monet’s Dining Room.”  It had been nothing short of a thrill to see Milton’s concept spring to visual life in his inimitable drawings. But after a year, the project was halted and simply remained a dream.  

Milton had big appetites and understood at his core that both art and food induce hunger, longing and desire, and that by sharpening and stimulating our senses – through the manipulation of materials, design, ingredients – we were all performers in life’s huge canvas.  I was consumed with his teachings. 


Rozanne Gold, is one of the most prominent women in the food world. As an award-winning chef, author, journalist and restaurant consultant she helped shape America’s culinary landscape as a pioneer in the food revolution that began in the 1970’s. A four-time winner of the James Beard Award and recipient of the Julia Child/IACP award, she began her remarkable career at the age of 23 as first chef to New York Mayor Ed Koch and later became the youngest female executive chef in the country for Lord & Taylor’s thirty-eight restaurants. As Chef-Director of the renowned hospitality group, Baum + Whiteman, Ms. Gold helped create New York’s magical Rainbow atop Rockefeller Center (where she was co-owner and consulting chef for 15 years), Windows on the World, and three of New York’s three-star restaurants, including the Hudson River Club in 1987 where she helped launch today’s locavore movement.
Rozanne is a graduate of the New School with an MFA in poetry, where she teaches "The Language of Food," exploring the intersection of cuisine and commerce, poetry and prose. Ms. Gold hosts and curates a series of literary events at the Garrison Institute, and was recently named a Board Director of "Brooklyn Poets." Her new podcast, "One Woman Kitchen" (produced by MouthMedia Network), features the inspiring stories of the food world's most remarkable women.

Pick of the Week (from "Urban Renewal: xxvi. Washington Square") [by Major Jackson]

When all that cautions the eyes toward the imminent
slide of autumn to arctic winds, the canopy of English elm
and sycamore leaves like colored coins fall and widen
a hole letting more light spill in, heaven’s alms
to earth whose ashen gray and white will soon be all the rage,
our guilty secret is the baby grand playing Glass’s Orphée
Suite for Piano. Nearby Butoh dancers writhe & almost upstage
with white-painted faces of horror (portraits of Nagasaki?),
and past the fountain’s water plumes, a drug-riddled couple
shares the smoldering remains of an American Spirit,
their grizzled dog roped to a shopping cart and frayed duffel
bag, this city’s updated version of American Gothic.
Our reddish-haired pianist lets the melancholic notes
float to high-rises on Fifth above its triumphal arch,
like a film in reverse where the golden foliage is read by a poet
as autumn’s light pours in. “Don’t Get Around Much
Anymore,” The Ink Spots’ Decca cover spins on a phonograph,
an era spiraling soft then held by his gentle pen.

from The Absurd Man by Major Jackson (NY: Norton, 2020). 

Odd Man Out: "the best thing James Mason has ever done, and the best film he’s ever been in”

British director Carol Reed turned out three masterpieces in the late 1940s. With an exemplary performance from Ralph Richardson, The Fallen Idol (1948) does justice to Graham Greene’s brilliant story “The Basement Room.” The Third Man (1949), the most celebrated of the three, has its unforgettable zither theme, its evocation of postwar Vienna, and its extraordinary script, including the speech Orson Welles improvised at the Prater amusement park. Fierce competition, but my vote for Reed’s best goes to Odd Man Out (1947), a modern passion play about a doomed man in the shadows and alleys of his last hours alive.

Odd Man Out foregrounds political and religious themes and differs thereby from most film noirs. Yet I wouldn’t hesitate to claim it for the category. The setting is Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the people take their Catholicism seriously, and the robbery that triggers the plot is committed not by your typical thieves but by an unnamed underground movement, presumably the IRA. Thanks to the inspired cinematography—the hero’s haunted profile, the desolate cityscape, the long narrow alleys—the Belfast we see is a dark and bleak war zone.

You may argue that the revolutionary cause is undermined in Odd Man Out, which establishes that the men who rob a mill for a cause are no nobler than those who rob banks for money. Nevertheless, the viewer’s sympathy is with rebel leader Johnny McQueen (James Mason), whom the children in the street emulate in their pretend games of cops and robbers. “It’s probably the best thing that Mason has ever done, and certainly the best film he’s ever been in,” actor Richard Burton observed.

from The American Scholar (July 9, 2020). For the rest of the article, click here.

"The Elevated Train" [by Edward Hirsch]

                                               Yesterday I climbed the stairs

                                               and took the “L”

                                               to 1965

                                               where I was stuck

                                               in the heart

                                               of downtown Chicago

                                               waiting for my grandmother

                                               to finish her shift

                                               in the coat department

                                               at Three Sisters

                                               so she could treat me

                                               to a luxurious dinner

                                               at Fritzel’s

                                               before she disappeared

                                               into the elevated train

                                               that carried her

                                               to a station

                                               near her studio apartment

                                               in a third-floor walk-up

                                               on Lawrence Avenue

                                               where she turned on the TV

                                               for company

                                               to drown out the noise

                                               rattling

                                               from the tracks.

from Stranger by Night by Edward Hirsch (Knopf, 2020). First published in Five Points.  

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Raina J. León

Art by Raffaele Monchiero León, age 23 months

suspect

by Raina J. León

in the isolation room, there are dirt spots on the floor.  in laboring, as the contraction waves rise to peak pain and then taper, i focus on dirt.  i am riding a wave above the soiling.  the child washes me over in hot spray.  my body sheens over in glow.  a nurse says, you are so strong and you are doing so well.  her affirmations are dumb; i do not trust them.  how can i when i cannot see her lips, her face, beneath the blue mask.  i, too, am masked.  it’s a dirty exchange.  i think in expletives.  i try to return to the wave.  i ask for a heating pad.  they will never bring it.  my touch is contagion, suspected contagion.  i am guilty until proven innocent.  a fever is pandemic. a black body is pandemic.  a fever is not a possible sign of labor, though i am laboring.  the child pushes blood through the gate, announces herself.  the body takes over.  the doctor says, “do whatever your body tells you.” as if i could stop her entrance on this human water, the fertile spark of me a path into an isolation filled with people.  i focus on the spots and their erasure.  mine.

 

photo credit: Matteo Monchiero

Raina J. León, PhD, is a Black, Afro-Boricua, native Philadelphian, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She is a fellow of Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006), the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Macondo, and CantoMundo and has been published in over 100 publications in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and academic scholarship. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the practice of humanizing education.

She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn and sombra: dis(locate) and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto and The Ruby in San Francisco. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, a journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She is a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there.

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.

"Late November Afternoon, Hazman’s Field" [by Karl Elder]

                “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”-- TS Eliot, "What the Thunder Said"

A man in gray overalls
steps out of the gray matter of the horizon.
Snow whirs above the stalks
like angels of locusts
Discerning his face
is like trying to make substance
of atoms that won’t adhere—
these flakes,
one of which, wafer-like
lights at your parted lips
like a hint of a name
partially quenching
the dry question of identity.
You freeze,
almost remembering;
something about another season,
person, and place.

-- 1977

Squibs 423-444: My Activism Lustrum [by Alan Ziegler]

 

423: In the early 60s, protesters march to “ban the bomb”; the bomb is banned (partially) with the 1963 Test Ban Treaty. Protesters march, sit-in, and are beaten in pursuit of equal rights; discrimination is banned (partially) with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These are baby steps, but we're two-for-two. The antiwar (Vietnam) movement is taking shape as I enter college in 1965; the (partial) winning streak is about to end. 

 

424: My freshman year at Union College, I attend an International Relations Club conference in Washington. I meet campus liberals and campus conservatives; the liberals are more fun. In the hotel lobby a long-haired kid sits at an unattended piano and improvises melodically; I ask if he's with the conference and he says no he's in a rock group called The Left Banke. I hang out with a kid from Afghanistan; he is proud that his country’s flag hangs first outside the State Department. We get a background-only briefing from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who says we have no plans to stay in Vietnam after we win. I ask him, “What’s to stop the Viet Cong from restarting the war as soon as you declare victory and leave?” The Secretary replies, “We can get back there faster than they can.” 

 

425: Rich Balagur and I start an anti-war coalition at school, beginning with the lowest common belief: end the bombing of North Vietnam; 10% of the college community signs our petition.


President Johnson increases the bombing in response to the "Nervous Nellies"; escalation enters the antiwar argot. People may be dying because of the movement. I search for a silver lining in this cloud of horror, and find it when a local television station tapes an interview with me, which I watch in a dorm lounge. The me on the couch listens to the me on the screen say that even if the Vietnam War has too much momentum for us to end it, the antiwar movement will succeed in the long run: "If it starts happening again, people will say no before it is too late." The student sitting next to the me on the couch says to the me on the screen, “Good point.” I will turn out to be utterly wrong.

 

426: Our movement grows as we march, cajole, educate, and organize. The Committee Against Bombing becomes the Campus Action Committee, with an expanded portfolio including racism and economic oppression. And always I am doing the two-finger typewriter dance (Dylan may have gone electric, but we are still in the era of acoustic typewriters) for the college newspaper. (For more about my piece that was called "a slander of the whole College community," see: dangerous words.) My outlet is doubled when Rich Balagur and I concoct the Paper Highway, along with poet Carl Rosenstock and music critic Cliff Safane.

427: I receive hate mail in the form of marked-up newspaper clippings addressed to Allen Viegler. The first one (not available) is from the Daily News with the headline “Send me Protesters for Christmas,” a quote from a soldier in Vietnam who says he will “feed them to the Viet Cong.” The word protester is crossed out throughout the article, replaced by Viegler.

 

 

428:  Time again for a name-change and paradigm shift. The Campus Action Committee will now be The Community, with even broader concerns: sexism, educational reform, expansion of the arts. We need a participatory spectacle to kick it off, and the freshman beanie is the ideal prop. Beanies are issued to incoming freshmen, who are instructed to wear them outdoors until the football team wins its first game; very few in my class lasted more than two weeks, and succeeding classes even less. But the beanies still exist as a way to identify the underclass (who must eat and live together), and we call for a Beanie Burn to smoke out the class system and shed light on The Community. 

429: A group of high school students are suspended for publishing an underground newspaper called the Free Student. Balagur and I create a leaflet in support: “You have the power of numbers and the moral justification on this…You can’t discuss the issues raised by the Free Student if it isn’t published.” We show up before school starts and hand out the leaflets along with copies of Paper Highway, on the public (we thought) sidewalk. The assistant principal and the principal call in the police. Student journalist Scott Simons is on the scene and writes a piece called The Big Bust: "You with them? [the assistant principal says to me]. Well, I’ll warn you like I warned them. Get off school grounds or get arrested." Alan Ziegler starts asking what law says we have to get off school property. Cop says "The law is go!" The principal doesn’t want us to go. He points his finger at Ziegler and Balagur and says, "I want to proffer charges against these two." Ziegler replies that he wants to proffer charges of assault and battery against the assistant principal. The principal starts yelling, "I want them arrested." And indeed Balagur and I are arrested, driven downtown in a police car, and placed in adjoining cells, where we chant “Om” until we are bailed out with our rent money. Simons' account: Alan comes out first. Cop pulls out paper bag, hands Alan his belt, shoelaces, wallets, and an autographed copy of Alice’s Restaurant.

 

430: We become a big local story. “Principal Supported in Arrest of 2 Men” headlines The Schenectady Gazette, which identifies us by saying, “They told authorities they were students.” In subsequent articles, we learn that authorities say they will consult with the District Attorney to see whether “there is any involvement with pornography per se.” We are said to glorify “the use of language and thoughts reserved for amoral, indecent and morally corrupt individuals…” which would “easily shock the senses of all decent people.” We “contribute nothing of value” and law enforcement will “oppose this evil by all means available to us” to avoid “terrible consequences of the continued exposure…on the minds of our students.” I love the idea that we can be both amoral and morally corrupt.

431: Represented by an ACLU lawyer, we make our first court appearance before Judge Stroebel, who has a preceding proceeding: “George, you are charged with public drunkenness and falling down. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?” “Guilty, judge.” “Now George, I haven’t seen you here in a while. I thought you had a job. What happened? Now back to the same old thing?” “Judge, my wife left me again. She’s gone. But I want to get my life back again.” “Well, thirty days in the County Farm might at least get you cleaned up again.” County Farm? I imagine Rich and I goaded into violence by a mean warden (think David Landau in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang) and growing old breaking rocks and feeding chickens.

432: I am interviewed, live, on the local T.V. news. After the show, the weather girl says she can’t wait to go home and tell her teenage daughter that she met me. Police cars frequently park across the street from our apartment. As I am crossing a street, I am almost nicked by a car turning the corner; it’s the assistant principal. I ask a professor if he thinks our phone is tapped and he replies, "No need. They've probably bugged your apartment." I get involved in a fender-bender; the cop who arrives at the scene looks at my license and says, "Aren't you in enough trouble?"

433: At the trial, the assistant principal lies and says he never touched me, but the ACLU lawyer won’t let us testify because she wants to keep the case pure for appeal. We are convicted (by the judge), and the Albany Times Union describes me as sitting “poker faced” at the verdict. Our sentence is fifty dollars or five days. I’m tempted to take the five days but I feel a cold coming on. I am doing an independent study on Revolutionary Change in America, and my paper is egregiously late, but the professor says I won’t be penalized because I have been doing "field work."

 

 

434: I read Rollo May in my Humanistic Psychology class and am nervously excited at the reception following his campus lecture. I am trying to get up the courage to approach him with my many questions, when he walks straight to me and says, “So, you’re the radical around here,” and proceeds to pick my brain.

 

435: The snowy New Hampshire backroads of the McCarthy movement lead to the Memphis-motel and Los Angeles-hotel eradications of King and Kennedy, and the system-gone-berserk in Chicago. That long and winding road of hope, despair, and anger ends with Richard Nixon at the White House doorstep. I am asked to cover the antiwar Counter Inauguration for a makeshift network of small radio stations. I record each segment several times, inserting a local angle by attributing the same quote to a student from, say, Trinity College, Cornell, and Dartmouth. (Twenty years later, my broadcasting teammate, Richard Roth, will cover Tiananmen Square for CBS while I am writing and teaching poetry.)

 

436: I take notes as protesters chant “Up the ass of the ruling class” while some fling mud on the fur coats of guests arriving at a reception for Spiro Agnew at the Smithsonian; flee from a club-wielding cop on a horse after the cop decides I am among the mud-throwers; help a well-dressed elderly woman find her companions, and am pleased when they turn out to be on our team; and dance myself dizzy to a deafening rock band under strobe lights in a tent. I crash on a church floor among dozens of visiting dissidents, the air filled with incense and peace lullabies.

 

437: I wake up shuddering. We disarmed Johnson only to see Nixon loaded in his place. I have to talk to someone who can actually do something, and I remember Al Lowenstein. He was a leader of the Dump Johnson movement, and I met him a couple of times when he was running for Congress in my home district. Now he is my representative. I bee-line to his office, where he is hobnobbing with well-dressed constituents. I am wearing blue jeans and a cowboy hat. “Al,” I say, “I'm really bummed out about Nixon; I mean, it  just hit me that he's the fucking president.” Lowenstein takes me aside and assures me that the movement is still alive, now with people like him in Congress. He will be gerrymandered out of office in two years.

 

438: Along the Inauguration parade route—Nixon is not due for a half hour—I spot a figure in a tree. He looks about 16, wearing a baseball cap and T-shirt in the chill. And he has a rifle. I approach carefully, in case it isn't Nixon he is after. “Hey, whatcha doing up there?” I shout, counting on my long hair to entitle me to an answer. “Waiting for Nixon.” “Gonna shoot him?” “Nah, it’s plastic, see?” He taps the rifle against a branch and tosses it easily into the air. “They’ll arrest you. If they don’t shoot you first.” “For what? Playing with a toy? It’s political theater." “The Secret Service can’t tell actor from assassin.” The kid climbs down and takes a bow as I applaud. 

 

439: After Kent State, with classes shut down by a nationwide strike, Union students and faculty coalesce to form an alternative college. A philosophy professor and I teach a course on educational innovation, and I form the 
Committee for Educational Research and Experimentation (I love naming things.) One of my proposals is for an educational commune: the College would provide housing for a group of students next year, and the participants would get a course credit for group living and curricular experimentation. The unit would be a hub for faculty talks, arts projects, and whatever else students can devise given the time and space. The proposal is accepted, but I am  graduating and pass the torch to the next generation. 

 

440: As in high school, bells signal the start and end of classes, and they continue to toll during the strike. We tell the Dean the bells are paternalistic, Pavlovian, and unnecessary. The Dean promises there will be no more bells. Small victory. 

 

441: A friend is kicked out of the campus bookstore for being barefoot, and we decide to take ironic action, a mock cause to break the confrontational tension. Several of us return to the book store and ceremoniously remove our shoes and socks. We unfurl makeshift placards: Up With Freedom, Down With Socks; Free the Toes Ten; Don’t Tread On Me When I Tread Bare. The manager comes over and sprays the area with Right Guard: "more appropriate than tear gas." We all laugh. We’ve had our fun and leave, saying "We'll take this up with the Dean." I don't make the connection when the Dean asks to see me the next day. “We’d like to avoid confrontation and polarization, so we are prepared to offer a compromise: Students will be allowed to enter the bookstore with bare feet on hot days, except on weekends, when alumni visit.” I wait for him to burst out laughing, but he is serious, and a tad nervous. “Deal," I say, and we shake hands. Absurd Victory.

 

 

442: The night before graduation, I sit in one of the folding chairs laid out for the ceremony. A rent-a-cop approaches me warily and asks to see my student I.D. When I show it to him, he apologizes and says he’s been instructed to be on the lookout for subversives. I almost explain to him that if there were to be disruptions they would come from students like me, but I just assure him that no one is going to mess with graduation, and I walk to my off-campus apartment for the last time.

 

443: After the ceremony, my father points to the college president greeting parents and saying goodbye to students. "Does he know who you are? Is he aware that there's an Alan Ziegler here?" "Oh yes," I say, "he knows I've been here."

 

444: The following autumn, I return to campus to see how the experimental house is doing. A friend from last year's committee welcomes me, but most of the other faces are new. After a couple of days, I am thinking about staying for a while, but my friend takes me aside and says, "This is kind of awkward, but at yesterday's meeting they voted that only students should stay here, so you'll have to leave." 

"Don't Come In" [by Angela Ball]

Don’t Come In

         I prefer the sign “No Entry” to the one that says “No Exit.” - Stanislaus Lec

If for you, women are toy cars
whose wheels you strike
on the ground to make
them go; if for you, women
are tea towels at the feast; if you stand by
as women are swept from the path,
don’t approach. In our inviolate
land we fly ruddy gliders;
press oil from impossible fruit; derive power
from waves. At any moment
our silk turbans may become
volcanoes; our slippers,
submarines.

-- Angela Ball