The Best American Poetry

Twice Told (a poem) and Bonjour Precipice (a picture) [by Geoff Young]

I was there, I’m sure of it, at the San Francisco
Art Institute to hear the Sun Ra Arkestra play in the
Courtyard, late 70s, just as I was in New York
City, at Slug's Saloon, on a Monday night in ‘67,

Having dropped a quarter tab of Owsley acid
Before entering the bar and the music
At Slugs was four hours of traveling
The spaceways with John Gillmore, Marshall

Allen, and Pat Patrick, et. al., the Sun perched
Stage left at the keys, burning bright. Took two sips
Of a beer that sat by itself on a table, or just one.

Music over, guys packing up, I pass the leader
Standing back at the bar and all I can say to him
Is "Sun.” And Ra looks me in the eye & says, “Dig.”

Every Dog Has His Day, and Today. . .

Our dog Johnny said

“I always liked it when you said

‘You’re an excellent fellow’

Or asked me to keep you company

While brewing a pot of coffee

Or watching the raging bulls

On CNBC.”

It was surprising to hear him speak

But a pleasure to learn

How happy he was

Living in our household

As a member of the family.

-- David Lehman

How to Make Love, Write Poetry, & Believe in God (by Nin Andrews)

A few weeks ago, I was part of a Hamilton-Kirkland College alumnae poetry reading, and after the reading a woman asked a simple question: “How do you write a poem?” I didn’t have an answer so I suggested a few books by poets like John Hollander, Mary Oliver, and Billy Collins. The woman said she had read books like that, but they didn’t help. She wanted something else, like a genuine operating manual—a step by step explanation. 

I, too, love instruction manuals, especially those manuals on how to perform magic: write a poem or know God or make love, if only love were something that could be made. Manuals offer such promise. Yes, you, too, can enter the bee-loud glade and the Promised Land and have an orgasm. 

I love the idea that my mind could be programmed like a computer to spit out poems on demand—poems with just the right number of lines, syllables, metaphors, meanings, similes, images . . . And with no clichés, no matter how much I love those Tom, Dick and Harry’s with their lovely wives, as fresh as daisies. I can set them in any novel or town in America, and they will have sex twice a week, always before ten at night, never at the eleventh hour, and it will not take long,time being of the essence. 

I love sex manuals, too: those books that suggest our bodies are like cars. If only we could learn to drive
them properly, bliss would be a simple matter of inserting a key, mastering the steering wheel, signaling our next moves, knowing the difference between the brakes and the gas pedal, and of course, following the speed limit. 

A depressive person by nature, I am also a fan of how-to books on God, faith, happiness, the soul, books that suggest a divine presence is always here. I just need to find it, or wake up to it, or turn off my doubting brain. That even now, my soul is like a bird in a cage. If I could sit still long enough and listen closely, it might rest on my open palm and sing me a song. 

God, poetry, sex, they offer brief moments of bliss, glimpses of the ineffable, and occasional insights into that which does not translate easily into daily experience, or loses its magic when explained.

In college, I took classes in religion, philosophy and poetry, and I studied sex in my spare time—my first roommate and I staying up late, pondering the pages of The Joy of Sex. As a freshman, I auditioned my way into an advanced poetry writing class by composing the single decent poem I wrote in my college years. The poem, an ode to cottage cheese, came to me in a flash as a vision nestled on a crisp bed of iceberg lettuce. Does cottage cheese nestle? I don’t know, but the professor kept admiring that poem. He said all my other poems paled by comparison.

This was in the era of the sexual revolution,long before political correctness and the Me-Too movement. My roommate, obsessed with getting laid, said we women should have been given a compass to navigate the sexual landscape. She liked to complain that she’d had only one orgasm in her entire life, and she wanted another. “What if I am a one-orgasm wonder?” she worried. The subject of orgasms kept us awake, night after night. 

In religion class, my professor told the famous story about Blaise Pascal who had a vision of God that was so profound, his life seemed dull and meaningless forever afterwards. He never had another vision. But he had sewn into his jacket an incoherent note to remind him of the singular luminous experience.

The next day in religion class, a student stood up and announced that the professor was wrong—about Pascal, God, everything. The student knew this because he was God’s friend. He even knew His first name, and what God was thinking. The professor smiled sadly, put his arm around the student, and led him out of the classroom, down the steps and into the counselor’s office. When the professor returned, he warned us that if we ever thought we knew God, we should check ourselves into a mental institution. Lots of insane people know God intimately.

But, I wondered, what would God (or the transcendent—or whatever word you might choose for it: the muse, love, the orgasm, the soul, the higher self) think of us?
For example, what would a muse think of a writer trying, begging, praying to enter the creative flow? All writers know it—that moment when inspiration happens. The incredible high. And the opposite, when words cling to the wall of the mind like sticky notes but never make it onto your tongue or the page.

What would an orgasm think of all the people seeking it so fervently yet considering it dirty, embarrassing, unmentionable? And then lying about it. “Did you have one?” a man might ask. “Yes,” his lover nods. But every orgasm knows it cannot be had. Or possessed. Or sewn into the lining of a coat. No one “has” an orgasm. At least not for long. 

What did God think of Martin Luther, calling out to him in terror when a lightning bolt struck near his horse, “Help! I’ll become a monk!” And later, when he sought relief from his chronic constipation and gave birth to the Protestant Reformation on the lavatory—a lavatory you can visit today in Wittenberg, Germany.

I don’t want to evaluate Luther’s source of inspiration. But I do want to ponder the question: How do you write a poem? Is there a way to begin?

I think John Ashbery gave away one secret in his poem, “The Instruction Manual:” that it begins with daydreaming. Imagination. And the revelation that the mind contains its own magical city, its own Guadalajara, complete with a public square and bands and parading couples that you can visit this enchanted town for a limited time before you must turn your gaze back to the humdrum world.  

But a student of Ashbery’s might cringe at the suggestion that poetry is merely an act of the imagination. In order to master the dance, one must know the steps. And Ashbery was a master. So many of his poems follow a kind of Hegelian progression, traveling from the concrete to the abstract to the absolute. Or what Fichte described as a dialectical movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. Fichte also wrote that consciousness itself has no basis in reality. I wonder if Ashbery would have agreed.

In college I wrote an inane paper, comparing Ashbery’s poetry to a form of philosophical gardening in which the poet arranges the concrete, meaning the plants or words, in such an appealing order that they create the abstract, or the beauty, desired. Thus, the reader experiences the absolute, or a sense of wonder at the creation as the whole thing sways in the wind of her mind. 

Is there a basis in reality for wonder? Or poetry? I asked. Or are we only admiring illusions, the beautiful illusions the poet has created?  How I loved questions like that. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Fichte and Hegel and Ashbery and write mystical and incomprehensible books. I complained to my mother that no matter how hard I tried, I could not compose an actual poem or philosophical treatise—I was trying to write treatises, too. “That’s good,” she said. “Poets and philosophers are too much in their heads, and not enough in the world.” 

I didn’t argue with her and tell her that not all poets are like Emily Dickinson. Or say that Socrates was put to death for being too much in the world, for angering the public with his Socratic method of challenging social mores, and earning himself the title, “the gadfly of Athens.”  

Instead, I thought, That’s it! If I want to be a poet, I just need to separate my head from the world. Or at least turn off the noise of the world. And seek solitude, as Wordsworth suggested, in order to recollect in tranquility. I imagined myself going on a retreat or living in a cave, studying the shadows on the wall. Letting them speak to me or seduce me or dance with me. 

The shadows, I discovered, are not nice guests. Sometimes they kept me awake all night, talking loudly, making rude comments, using all the words I never said aloud. “Hush,” I told them. “No one wants to hear that.” Sometimes they took on the voices of the dead and complained I hadn’t told their stories yet or right. Sometimes they sulked and bossed me about like a maid, asking for a cup of tea, a biscuit, a little brandy, a nap. One nap was never enough. When I obeyed and closed my eyes, they recited the poems I wanted to write down. “You can’t open your eyes until we’re done,” they said, as if poetry were a game of memory, or hide and seek in the mind. Other times they wandered away and down the dirt road of my past, or lay down in the orchard and counted the peaches overhead. Whatever they did or said, I watched and listened.

That’s how I began writing my first real poems. I knew not to disobey the shadows. I knew not toturn my back on them and look towards the light as Plato suggested—Plato who wanted to banish the poets and poetry from his Republic.I knew to not answer the door if the man from Porlock came knocking.

To this day I am grateful for the darkness. For the shadows it creates in my mind. It is thanks to them I have written another book, The Last Orgasm, a book whose title might make people cringe. But isn’t that what shadows do? And much of poetry, too? Dwell on topics we are afraid to look at in the light?

Mark Bibbins and Nicole Santalucia at the New School, Sept. 30

Poetry Forum: Mark Bibbins and Nicole Santalucia Zoom:  Wednesday, September 30, 6:00PM (EDT)   Mark Bibbins (MFA in Poetry 1998), a member of the faculty in Creative Writing, is the author of the 2019 poetry collection 13th Balloon. He received a Lambda Literary Award for his first collection of poems, Sky Lounge (Graywolf Press, 2003). The Dance of No Hard Feelings and They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full were published by Copper Canyon Press, and the latter was named one of the best poetry books of 2014 by Publishers Weekly. He co-founded LIT, the journal of The New School’s graduate writing program, and received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, Boston Review, and four volumes of The Best American Poetry. From 2009 to 2018 he edited the poetry section of The Awl. Nicole Santalucia (MFA in poetry 2008), is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press) and Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. work has appeared in publications such as The Best American Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, TINGE, The Florida Review, The Seventh Wave, Gertrude, Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Santalucia teaches at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and has taught poetry workshops in the Cumberland County Prison, Shippensburg Public Library, Boys & Girls Clubs, and nursing homes. Moderated by Laura Cronk Presented by the Creative Writing Program at the Schools of Public Engagement.

Yom Kippur 1984 [poem by Adrienne Rich]

 

                    I drew solitude over me, on the long shore.
                                        —Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude”  

          For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be
          cut off from his people.
                                                                           —Leviticus 23:29

 

What is a Jew in solitude?

What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid

far from your own or those you have called your own?

What is a woman in solitude:   a queer woman or man?

In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert

what in this world as it is can solitude mean?

 

The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs

with its electric gate, its perfected privacy

is not what I mean

the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan Heights

is not what I mean

the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her attack dog suddenly risen

is not what I mean

 

Three thousand miles from what I once called home

I open a book searching for some lines I remember

about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the dooryard once

bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside,

something that bloomed and faded and was written down

in the poet’s book, forever:

Opening the poet’s book

I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: . . . the hateful-eyed

and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them

 

Robinson Jeffers, multitude

is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys

and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines

are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling its scrolls of surf,

and the separate persons, stooped

over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest

who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams

Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other

Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend

a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final solution, have I a choice?

 

To wander far from your own or those you have called your own

to hear strangeness calling you from far away

and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk

to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection nowhere on your mind

(the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew

the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street:   Make those be a woman’s footsteps; as if she could believe in a woman’s god)

 

Find someone like yourself.   Find others.

Agree you will never desert each other.

Understand that any rift among you

means power to those who want to do you in.

Close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger.

But I have a nightmare to tell:   I am trying to say

that to be with my people is my dearest wish

but that I also love strangers

that I crave separateness

I hear myself stuttering these words

to my worst friends and my best enemies

who watch for my mistakes in grammar

my mistakes in love.

This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me?

If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud.

 

To love the Stranger, to love solitude—am I writing merely about privilege

about drifting from the center, drawn to edges,

a privilege we can’t afford in the world that is,

who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy river, woman dragged from her stalled car

into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death

young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing availing his Blackness

Jew deluded that she’s escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion, the men too holy to touch her hand;   Jew who has turned her back

on midrash and mitzvah (yet wears the chai on a thong between her breasts) hiking alone

found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs (did she die as queer or as Jew?)

 

Solitude, O taboo, endangered species

on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend you

In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can’t have:

your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant’s hand outspread

her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true 

 

And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away?

have I traded off something I don’t name?

To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist?

What will I do to defend my want or anyone’s want to search for her spirit-vision

far from the protection of those she has called her own?

Will I find O solitude

your plumes, your breasts, your hair

against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird’s

singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song?

in the old places, anywhere?

 

What is a Jew in solitude?

What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man?

When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock, crumble the prophet’s headland, and the farms slide into the sea

when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger

when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities crushed together on which the world was founded

when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes

when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city

when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude

in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean?

 

1984-1985

Billy Collins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________________________

 

Afternoon with Irish Cows

 

There were a few dozen who occupied the field

across the road from where we lived,

stepping all day from tuft to tuft,

their big heads down in the soft grass,

though I would sometimes pass a window

and look out to see the field suddenly empty

as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.

 

Then later, I would open the blue front door,

and again the field would be full of their munching

or they would be lying down

on the black-and-white maps of their sides,

facing in all directions, waiting for rain.

How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded

they appear in the long quiet of the afternoon.

 

But every once in a while, one of them

would let out a sound so phenomenal

that I would put down the paper

or the knife I was cutting an apple with

and walk across the road to the stone wall

to see which one of them was being torched

or pierced through the side with a long spear.

 

Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see

the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,

her neck outstretched, her bellowing head

laboring upward as she gave voice

to the rising, full-bodied cry

that began in the darkness of her belly

and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.

 

Then I knew that she was only announcing

the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,

pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind

to all the green fields and the gray clouds,

to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,

while she regarded my head and shoulders

above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Billy Collins is a former US Poet Laureate. His latest collection is Whale Day (Random House, 2020.)

___________________________________________________________________________________

 Cows in county Cork, Ireland. Sept. 2020. Photo by Jennifer O'Riordan.

 

 

On George Gershwin's Birthday [by David Lehman]

On George Gershwin’s birthday
I keep expecting them to play
Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris,
the Cuban Overture,  the Concerto in F,
Porgy and Bess as played by Miles Davis,
but no, all day it’s been Dvorak, Grieg,
Rimsky-Korsakov, and other worthies
not born today, Elgar for heaven’s sake;
at least they could give us some Debussy,
as didn’t they (such a useful pronoun)
criticize him for imitating Debussy,
or Ravel, who declined to give George lessons
saying “Why become a second-rate Ravel
when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?”

-- DL

"Sprezzatura" [by Robert Hass]

Eugenio Montale asked me if there was an American word
for sprezzatura, particularly with respect to poetry.
In respetto di poesia, he said. And I said yes, in American
We call it ‘moose’ and mentioned several poets,
Frank O‘Hara among them, who were quite famous,
As fame goes in our sort of work, for their moose.
He wondered if there were an American expression
To convey the general concept of ‘Eugenio Montale.’
And I said, Yes, we call it ‘George Seferis.’ I also observed
—I was showing off, but how often  do you get to talk
to Eugenio Montale--that, in my view, the prose of  Seferis,
Especially his diaries from the last years of the war
And the slow waking to the depth of that devastation after,
Were even greater than his poems, though his poems 
At their best gave off pure light, like the glare
From the white walls on the cliffs above the harbor in Skios
Which could make the eyes ache. He canted his head
Politely and asked if among Americans the worship
Of the Virgin Mary was a custom. And I said that it was
And that in the cities of the Middle West and probably
The towns, it was especially intense among the mothers
Of children with grave illnesses who heaped flowers
In enormous quantities before her altar and he nodded.
And they light candles? he asked. And I said, Yes, candles.

from Summer Smoke, the brilliant new collection by Robert Hass (Ecco, 2020). Hass was the guest editor of the 2001 edition of The Best American Poetry. Photo credit: Miriam Berkley.

from "Grand & Ogden Auto Parts" 2 (by Mitch Sisskind)

The Secret Gas Cap

 

How strange and wonderful the left tail light

Of a '52 Cadillac was, how to fill the gas tank

One pushed a round reflecting button and 

The fixture elevated to reveal the pipe's cap.

Momentarily I was confused, frightened,

Because how do you put gas in the car --

And then came the revelation. Once, twice,

I operated the mechanism that seemed

Such a wonder to my callow self, witless

As I was of all the automobiles -- the '41 Ford,

For example -- whose gas caps were hidden

Or camouflaged no less cleverly than that

Of the '52 Cadillac ever since the first secret

Gas cap car rolled off the line in October 1908.

 

Briar Patch

Smialek -- he called himself Smialek --

He could take a car apart and put it

Back together again fifty times like

Walter Chrysler did in 1911. Smialek,

Why, the junkyard was his briar patch

Like Br'er Rabbit had his briar patch

But what exactly is a briar patch?

It's a place don't nobody want to go

Except Smialek and Br'er Rabbit

Who don't want to go no place else!

Go ahead, give them a plane ticket

To anywhere and they won't take it!

 

 

Yes and No

Will I do an engine replacement?

Yes and no. It depends on do I

Know you and if I don't know you

Who you are. If you are with the

Police department I more or less

Have to do it even though you will

Expect to pay little or nothing for

The job and I don't even know you.

On the other hand if I know you or

You know somebody who knows me

Then I may do it if I have the engine

Available or if I can get it somewhere

But nine times out of ten I will send

You to A&B Auto Repair on Elston Ave.

 

Published Today: Nin Andrews’s "The Last Orgasm"

Nin Andrews, a regular contributor to this blog, whose poems have appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry, has brilliantly extended the conceit she introduced in her Book of Orgasms, first published in 1994, reprinted since then, and characterized often as an international cult classic. In the new book there are poems that reflects Andrews's passionate engagement with the work of such poets as Walt Whitman, Henri Michaux, Robert Hass, Lydia Davis, Denise Duhamel, Frank O'Hara, Amy Gerstler, James Tate, Mark Strand, Robert Bly, Rilke, Vallejo, and the sculptor Bernini ("Ecstasy of Saint Teresa"). There is also a splendid reflection on John Ashbery's "Instruction Manual." Andrews dares to ask questions, such as "What is the postmodernist orgasm?" Interviewing many in her indefatigable quest to resolve the issue, Andrews gives us the standard Wikipedia definition ("An orgasm of questionable identity or origin") as well as the far more convincing definition provided by the new American feminist, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who says it is "a part of the all that women can't have."

The press release from Etruscan Press in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., begins with these paragraphs:

<<< 

Nin Andrews’s poetry collection, The Last Orgasm, a collection of wry and fantastical, spiritual, feminist meditations on sexuality, love, desire, and the end of desire, was released by Etruscan Press today.

The Last Orgasm continues the journey of Nin Andrew’s first collection, The Book of Orgasms, which became a cult classic that has been translated into Turkish, performed in Prague and has readers around the globe. In both books the orgasm is an ethereal presence, puzzled by humanity in general and the author in particular.  

Jan Beatty, (Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) says, “Of course, I would praise The Last Orgasm. And the first, second, middle, next, next to last. For the sake of everything true and holy (although Andrews would say there is nothing holy) please read this outrageous book! In these smart, raucous poems of one orgasm after another, Andrews climaxes at the pinnacle of social commentary—the G-spot of social change: the change being, give us more orgasms/the orgasm is dead. Indicting the writer, the book, the poetry mafia, and, of course, the orgasm, Andrews writes: ‘When I was sixteen, I woke one night and saw Our Lady of the Orgasm singing.’ Read this book if you want to sing again.”
>>> 

"A Manly Response to Disease": Susan Gubar on "One Hundred Autobiographies"

photo © Stacey Lehman

<<<
While learning this spring that the coronavirus was taking a disproportionate toll on men, I was reading David Lehman’s account of his bladder cancer, a disease that also disproportionately afflicts men. His brilliantly circumspect 2019 memoir, “One Hundred Autobiographies,” reminded me that a conventional model of masculinity inhibits some men from expressing their emotional responses to assaults on the body.

© Cornell University Press

An accomplished poet, editor and scholar, Mr. Lehman exhibits grace under the pressure exerted by disabling treatments. He thereby provides insight into the benefits and liabilities of masculine reticence about disease. Like him, quite a few men may judge it unmanly to discuss medical procedures that can unman them. Is this stoicism empowering or disabling?

*

In “One Hundred Autobiographies,” Mr. Lehman informs us that he is telling and not telling his cancer story. After he discovered blood in his urine, he produced 100 vignettes to recount his life. The brief sketches were composed while he underwent several cystoscopies, a succession of transurethral resections of bladder tumors (TURBTs), eight weeks of an immunotherapy regimen, four months of chemotherapy for metastatic disease and a five-hour surgery, “in which they remove your bladder, some lymph nodes, and choice other parts of you and reorganize your insides,” along with a slew of side effects: a “heart stop,” neuropathy, infection, weight loss, digestive complaints. “And mostly I kept my cool. Mostly.”

Mr. Lehman explains in the book that he does not want to “make cancer the sun around which the rest of the planets revolve”: “I don’t want to talk about it, think about it, do anything about it except show up on time for every last appointment and try not to complain.”

While the downside of this approach means we don’t learn much about bladder cancer, the upside means we learn a good deal about Mr. Lehman: about his immigrant parents, who met in New York City after fleeing the Nazis; his observant upbringing in the Inwood section of Manhattan; his education at Columbia University; his famous mentors and friends — Lionel Trilling, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said — as well as his favorite travels, songs, jokes, movies, authors and sports teams. It is intriguing to get acquainted with an artist-critic who has shaped the contemporary poetry scene since 1988 as the founder and series editor of the annual anthology The Best American Poetry.

from "A Manly Response to Disease" by Susan Gubar in The New York Times, September 24, 2020. 
For the full article, click here.

Poem in the Manner of the 1960s [by David Lehman]

Poem in the Manner of the 1960s

Naked women are the best
You meet them in corn fields and meadows
They are naked and the moon is silver
and it is summer with a bounty of apricots and plums
and then it is autumn and you meet them in the city

You meet the naked women in cafes
at parties or bars or art openings
Sometimes they wear sunglasses
Often they are smoking a cigarette and holding a cocktail
and there is a single ice cube in that cocktail

The naked women wear their hair in beehives
They like all-purpose black dresses
They take pride in how good they smell
And even when they are wearing their sleek black dress
and clutching their chic black pocketbook
you know they are the naked women you have dreamed of
since you were fourteen years old

-- David Lehman [9/ 9 / 11]

[Virginia Quarterly Review]

Ed. note: All BAP blog posts by David Lehman are copyright c David Lehman. All rights reserved.

"Don't Ask Me About My Business. . ." [by Mitch Sisskind]

A dream project of mine is to write a literary biography of Mario Puzo. I admire him as a great writer in a very special category that includes Dumas (in both his life and his work,) Cervantes (life and work,) Hemingway (life,) Johnson (life,) and of course Shakespeare (work.)

Puzo succeeded in objectifying a world and its people that somehow had already existed in the collective mind in an unformed state -- as if waiting for someone to give it form.

Shakespeare did this many times, with Falstaff for example. Dumas did it with the Three Musketeers. And Puzo did it with Don Corleone, albeit with the collaboration of Marlon Brando and others, for the film is the highest realization of the story.

Although he is far from a great stylist, I consider Puzo a very insightful writer. One of his themes is the idea that real love must culminate in betrayal. If it's real, love is so powerful that betrayal is the only means of survival. In Puzo's own life I believe this theme was acted out in his relationship to literary work. He began as a "serious" writer, had limited success, and then turned to commercial fiction. Ostensibly the reason was money but I believe there was also heartbreak involved and, in his own terms, betrayal on his part. For the rest of his life he was in a love/hate relationship with "respectable" literature. When Joseph Heller suggested inviting the novelist James Salter to join an informal breakfast club that included Puzo and Bruce Jay Friedman, Puzo hesitated and then rejected asking Salter. "He's too good a writer," Puzo said.

There's much more to say about Mario Puzo and his creations. As a boy he read Dostoyevsky and hoped to recreate The Brothers Karamazov -- which in a roundabout way he actually came very close to doing. This guy was the real thing, a man of respect. (Not sure if he ever wrote a poem, though!) -- Mitch Sisskind

from the archive; first posted September 5, 2008

SF and NY Duke it Out [by David Lehman]

          In Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum says he used to live in New York and Rhonda Fleming says she’s never been there and Mitchum says that if she goes there, she’ll know one reason why he’s in San Francisco.

          San Francisco, because of its natural beauty, its hills and bridges and bay, may be the most popular location for film noirs and crime dramas. Think of The Lady from Shanghai, Dark Passage, Woman on the Run, Vertigo, Bullitt, Dirty Harry. These movies feature some of the distinctive landmarks of the city – Chinatown’s Mandarin Theater, the Steinhardt Aquarium, and Playland-By-the-Beach in The Lady from Shanghai; the Golden Gate Bridge in Dark Passage; Fisherman’s Wharf and the Embarcadero in Woman on the Run; the Presidio, Coit Tower, and Muir Woods in Vertigo; the Dodgers’ Don Drysdale on the mound at Candlestick Park in Experiment in Terror; Kezar Stadium in Dirty Harry; the many steep streets on which Steve McQueen drives his green Mustang in Bullitt.

          Still, as a New York native, I must put in a plea for the city of my birth. Jules Dassin’s Naked City comes to mind because of the producer’s pioneering effort to shoot the film entirely on the streets and sidewalks of New York (photo right). In Don Siegel’s Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Clint Eastwood is a deputy sheriff from Arizona who flies into the big city to nab an escaped killer in Fort Tryon Park and leave for the airport from the heliport on top of the old Pan-Am Building, now named for Met Life. In The French Connection, Fernando Rey eludes Gene Hackman on the subway and dine on French cuisine at an elegant midtown restaurant while Hackman shivers in the cold holding a cardboard cup of coffee.  

         Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street gives us the subway and a shack on the waterfront where our hero resides; Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street treats us to art galleries and a desolate Central Park bench at dawn; John Farrow’s The Big Clock situates us in a magazine empire’s midtown skyscraper. In Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, the Manhattan Bridge in the background is a constant reminder of where we are.

           Among neo-noirs and technicolor crime films, New York is home to The Manchurian Candidate, which features Sinatra’s favorite bar, Jilly’s, and the Central Park lake. In part one of The Godfather, Michael and Kay go to Radio City Music Hall on Christmas Eve. To elude a possible tail, the driver of the car taking Michael and his antagonists to the Italian restaurant with the best veal in the city begins to cross the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, then makes an illegal u-turn to deliver the group to the Bronx.

          Die Hard with a Vengeance is a virtual tour of the town with stops in Harlem, Wall Street, the FDR Drive, Central Park, and Yankee Stadium. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are laugh lines in this 1995 movie that does its bit to combat racial prejudice by pairing the Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. And you get to hear the odious villain say he loves “this country,” his words belying his scorn for Americans, such suckers, so trusting.  Mind you, this is a movie you’re not supposed to like; you’re allowed to call it a triumph – of “blitzkrieg action,” perhaps – but only after first denouncing it as “bombastic mush.”

"Operation Smart Blonde" [by Molly Arden]

I have never told anyone about this--that for years I worked for the Secret Service. I was part of an elite force consisting solely of blonde women. Once, I had to travel to the Middle East as a spy, or rather, a kind of special envoy for the U.S government. In preparation I dyed my hair platinum and bought several slinky outfits.  I complained to my supervisor of clothing that I was too smart to be marketed in this way to which he responded, au contraire.  My job, to seduce a militant religious leader, whose name I can never confide. He was influential in politics, a renowned scholar of poetry and philosophy who had spent some time in jail, and Uncle Sam wanted access to his inner lair, his secret thoughts and habits. Wherever he went, men with ski hats and masks followed.  I can’t tell too many details, of course, this being a top-secret thing, but I imagined myself impressing him with my own knowledge of philosophy. I was very nervous. I felt as if my hair glowed like a light bulb in the limo in which the scholar and I were driving to an unknown destination. When I asked, where are we going, he answered, in his heavy accent, all destinations are unknown, and then poured me a glass of wine.  He wanted to know if I knew the truth—why I was there. Before I had taken a sip, I admitted that I had studied poetry and philosophy, and had once believed truth existed. It was the wrong thing to say because he immediately began asking questions. All I could recall of philosophy were details of how certain philosophers related to women or the bedroom. How Aristotle thought women were less interesting than shellfish, for example. I drank quickly in hopes it would give me inspiration. Before I knew it I was babbling hopelessly about Montaigne’s theory of sexual impotence, Kierkegaard’s fear and trembling, his wish never to get hitched.  My head was spinning. The last thing I remember, I was talking about Descartes, laughing, “I don’t think like a blonde, even though I am one, so forgive me.” That’s when he began to recite poetry, or I think it was poetry, and I compared poems to men—how just when the going gets good, there’s this blank space coming up the page. I felt like an airplane being swallowed by a cloud. Or was I the cloud swallowing the plane?

On the value of being there with: Dance, the “art” of movement [by Tracy Danison]

Noe Soulier’s “Passages” in movement at the Gothic forest of the Conciergerie. Photo Patrick Berger ©Atelier de Paris

I met Huang by chance… In the line, quite by chance, Huang was… By chance, I met Huang in the line… to see Noé Soulier’s Passages at the Conciergerie on the île de la Cité… Passages was part of the Atelier de Paris’ brave post-lockdown Indispensable ! performances program concentrate.

Huang had a good place in line, so, full of bluff and bonhomie (thus fobbing off challenges to my cutting the line), I slithered in next to him. While we, as always, talked excitedly about the performance, underneath I was actually excited by the prospect of going inside the Conciergerie.

Until the Passages performance, I had only been able to cast my eyes through high grimy windows onto the Conciergerie’s vast sunken hall. I thought that it surely is true Gothic. Spiritual, you know. Though I told Huang it was about primeval forests and barbarian cultural memory, not something so damned woolly. I wouldn’t want him getting the wrong idea about me.

Even through dirty windows, I have to say, the profane eye travels up the plain squat stone pillars, rides the surge of arcing groins into the shadow of vaults high above. The eye rests there, surprised, as if by sudden light, startled into mind. Indeed, before it became Marie Antoinette’s death cell and a tourist attraction, the Conciergerie had once been the throne room of Clovis I, King of All Franks, a German tribe that pretty much ran this corner of northern Europe at the time.

Spirituality and history. Rejecting the Arian god-man theory of Jesus’ divinity, Clovis I subscribed the three-spirits-same-flesh or Trinitarian theory, thus ensuring a 1000-year primacy for the misguided theories of language of Augustine of Hippo, doctor of Christianity. I blame Augustine and subsequent Christian poohbahs for sanctioning the cruel habit of making reality from words : De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da. Augustine, not that sweet old Romantic Goethe, is responsible for “Those-are-not-bombs,-honey” Goebbels.

I expected Noé Soulier’s Passages would in some way flesh out the history and architecture of the Conciergerie, illuminate my mind’s eye with some unbid aspect of the place. Instead of Clovis or Augustine or the Police, Yasmine Hugonnet came to mind.

As good in her way as Sting, Hugonnet is a dancer and choreographer whose work I’ll have the pleasure to see at Atelier de Paris in October, and have seen at Regard du Cygne and Lafayette Anticipations – very different contexts.

Hugonnet calls her performance troupe Arts Mouvementés, thinking of how, as her web site has it, “form, image and sensation intertwine, how the imagination, becomes …” and how “the process of incarnation and appropriation” works through and how to get these things into or out of choreography.

Beyond negotiating the twists and turns of choreographic culture and heritage to intertwine, incarnate and appropriate into a given performance, it seems to me that Hugonnet’s insight is that “dance” is definitively not, of course, about contextual bumping, grinding and flinging out the arms, however delicately, classically or expressively, but about movement. And in this, she – along with a lot of her sisters and brothers in dance – is going a bit farther than Isadora Duncan’s Dance-as-(sacred, human)-art, understanding it more as an access of universal primal force, quite beyond the first-take “shaking-up” sense of mouvementé to something more like prime mover, moving, moved, becoming, happening.

Those kids down on the corner, spinning on their hips, flipping over, fast as lightning, talking loud and completely unconscious that the nervous old white lady is calling the police on? They aren’t just having fun, they are doing truth in a quantum universe, a universe that exists because it moves. I hope the police don’t gas and whack ‘em too hard before the world changes cameras.

So, I think, as I wait on a bench in a medieval forest of stone pillars sculpted of yellow half-light, however Huang might experience the esthetics of Noé Soulier’s choreography or however I might myself experience watching this, being here with Huang and other dance-friends and strangers, all will, must, involve movement.

What’s important to performance is not how or to what end but the fact of movement. Soulier’s very fine troupe chase around plain stone pillars, Clovis’ ghost clanks in the torch-yellowed light shadows, my eye roves for mystery.

As I come out of the Conciergerie into the suffocating evening heat of what used to be early Fall and offer to walk a little way with Huang, I understand that “movement” is the core value of “Dance”. So the “art of Dance” is also “art of movement”. The “art” being what I hope Hugonnet (and Isadora Duncan) will forgive me for rhetorically shaping as the act and representation of the “intertwining of form, image, sensation, imagination, incarnation and appropriation into and out of choreography”.

Ballet Dancers in Quarantine: Introducing Tiny Garage Show [by Stacey Lehman]

When New York City Ballet dancer Claire Kretzschmar returned to Winston-Salem, NC to quarantine, she kept up her ballet practice in the family garage. To her, she was just doing what she does, but her mother thought it might be a good idea to invite a few neighbors to watch. Thus the Tiny Garage Show series was born. Kretzschmar, together with pianist Mary Margaret Johnson, perform music and dance before a lucky audience of friends and neighbors, all seated at a safe distance from the makeshift stage and each other. I'm reminded of the "Let's put on a show!" spirit of neighborhood kids everywhere, though Kretzschmar and Johnson are anything but kids. They're mature and gifted performers, overflowing with talent and generosity. I've watched all of the performances. My favorite is the delightful "Quarantina" set to music by Franz Schubert with choreography that brings to mind Jerome Robbins' comic "The Concert." 

Find out more about Tiny Garage Show here. And stay tuned for October performances. 

-- sdl

Jiwon Choi: Pick of the Week (x2) [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________________________________

Memoir Mori

 

In Part One, I will introduce my mother, butcher-in-chief

feasting on her young, bones and gristle, sauté

and sizzle with toothsome glee. Day-old tabloid soup

moving you on to

Part Two where I make my escape to a liberal arts college

and become afflicted with a condition known as poetry-writing

where I Ouija-board Plath nightly for instruction on restitution

and virgin suicides.

In Part Three I seek solace in philosophy (I fuck

therefore I am) also known as impersonating Freudian slips:

you’re not a family until you’re a tragedy.

How to begin Part Four?

Cue the tall, blond Tourette’s syndrome, a foolish moth

trapped inside my self-loathing. I pull his wings right off.

Must I make meaning of my stint at the 7-Eleven roasting wieners

for pimply boys seeking nirvana in Hot Pockets and Ding Dongs?

If I leave salvation unwritten, will it come in?

_______________________________________________________________________________________

 

Let’s Go Out Tonight

 

Charging from one neck of the woods to another

the cab driver pushes our chariot from one pothole to another

over patches of pigeons while the radio bleeds the blues

“Is that Blind Lemon?” I ask

“Lightnin’ Hopkins,” he says

“But Blind Lemon liked Hopkins to play with him sometimes,” I add

“How come you know about that?” he turns to look at me

He is an older black man, forehead furrowed with Socrates’s worries

“I like the blues,” I reply

By the time we pull up to the curb John Lee Hooker is cajoling

“Let’s go out tonight!”

so I pay my fare and do just that.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Jiwon Choi is a poet, teacher, and urban gardener.  She teaches preschool at the Educational Alliance, a multi-generational non-profit located on the Lower East Side of NYC.  She is a long-time gardener and coordinator for the Pacific Street Brooklyn Bear’s Community Garden located near downtown Brooklyn. She is also a poetry editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine. Jiwon is the author of One Daughter is Worth Ten Sons, published by Hanging Loose Press. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.  

"G-D in a Cup" [by Loren Goodman]

The “o” in G-d
In “G-d in a Cup”
Is like the mouth
Of the universe
Into which G-d
Has from this world
Disappeared. This
Absence of the “o”
Is also like the coffee
That has been from
The cup faithfully sipped
The “u” in “cup” is like
The cup that holds the
Coffee while the “c”
Before the “u” is like
The handle you hold
Me with. The “p” at
The end is like the
Cup tipped to pour
Into you me. I went
Inside G-d in a Cup
Only once. It was
Empty and dark; the
Owner was as
Quiet and mysterious
As G-d and like the
Son of G-d, had long
Hair. Like G-d these
Days, he also looked
Sad. I didn’t go there
To drink coffee—
Just to cheer him up

from The Common (July 2020). Three other poems by Loren appear in this issue of The Common: "Dear Jeremy," "Due to the Light," "Dolphin Facts"

Loren Goodman was born in Kansas and studied in New York, Tucson, Buffalo and Kobe. He is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A professor of creative writing and English literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he chairs the department of comparative literature and culture and is creative writing director.

Available Now: The Best American Poetry 2020

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. The 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” according to the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

The Best American Poetry 2020 is available for pre-order here.

--sdl