The Best American Poetry

Johnny grinning on an afternoon in August

On Looking Up By Chance at the Constellations [by Robert Frost]

You'll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
It is true the longest drought will end in rain,
The longest peace in China will end in strife.
Still it wouldn't reward the watcher to stay awake
In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break
On his particular time and personal sight.
That calm seems certainly safe to last to-night.

My Love Is a Mirror Neuron [by Elizabeth Willis]

Come in, you say
while I’m alive, you say
my hankering love
my hunkered down love
in the headlights of the future
my love of the garbled soliloquy
in the wary fever of my love
with all its modernist ardor
offering to drive
the leaf from the pedicel
the pedicel from the smallest branch
the branch from the trunk
the trunk from the ground
my love growling
like a machine in the yard
my love a yard
of fabric on the line
accepting the clumsiness
of a pulley, my love touching
everything as water
suspected in the summer air
my love coming and going
through the same door
my love killing it in the kitchen
then losing it at the mall
my love diagnosing the room
the very tip of my love
arguing with itself for hours
my love refusing to hide
its suspicious past, my love
staking out the street for days
my love in fear of the doctor
which is really the fear of death
my love relentlessly in the third case
my phatic love in a Canadian bar
my irreligious, abstemious love
mishearing the song of my failed love
my love losing its wallet
and refusing to answer the phone
my love voting its heart out
for this disaster of a country
my unfenceable Augustinian love
my passerine love
heavy in my rough hand
my love with no room in its mailbox
my love loving the texture
of a rented thing
my love refusing the symbolism
of a corporate heart
my love’s malingering dislike
of a stranger’s Impala
my love undone by my heartless
actuarial, my derelict love
dropped like a suitcase at the door
like a needle, like a bridge
my love eclipsed
by the smallest cloud
or lovingly distracted by a bird
the starving love of my unarmored
heart, my love bound with grass
my uniformed carrier
of love on the traceable arc
of its retrograde planet
my hovering love
my local vegetable love
my imitative genius of love
my handwritten, rotting
compostable love, my dying
everyday love, my un
punctuated love, my love sentenced
to this one imperfection
that it forgets my love
my love tapped out on the roof
my unforgiveable
inhospitably leatherette love
my incomprehensibly
woolen love, my densest
cabinet of a many-shelved love
my odiferous cartoon love
out on a limb with a chainsaw
my love thrown from a horse
my love sweeping the floor
of my love and refusing
to go home, my most
indicative, untimely
irreparable love

From the excellent new issue of Bennington Review (# 8), which also has poems by Troy Jollimore, David Kirby, David Lehman, Erika Meitner, Emily Petitt, many others. 

Idea for a Short Documentary Film [by Lydia Davis]

Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.

                    from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (FSG 2009)

from the archive; posted March  12, 2013

"Witchy Ghazal" [by Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade]

Samantha could make Darrin’s sandwich
without using her hands. A skilled witch

can wiggle her nose without touching it,
snap her fingers to teleport to the Salem Witch

Trials where her glorious foremothers 
were once burned for black magic. Switch

the channel, and The Wizard of Oz 
shows witches pitted against witches.

Victor Fleming, known as a “man’s director,”
brought high-femme Glinda the Good Witch

to outsmart the Wicked Witch of the West.
Where had all the warlocks gone? Switch 

the lights on and off fast, and Hocus Pocus 
loses Disney 16 million on three single witches,

each unapologetically wicked. Then Sabrina,
cat, and aunts cast small-screen spells, which

out Jerry Springer as a witch himself. Who knew
the Spellmans would uncover Reality TV’s Man-Witch?

Miss Evangeline Price helped defeat the Nazis,
emboldened by a correspondence course in witch-

war tactics and a magic bed. Even the Olsen twins 
brought double trouble to a boil as PG witchlings.

Roseanne Barr flew over Madison Square Garden
before melting at the hands of a ginghamed non-witch.

Shakespeare’s Hecate, leader of her coven, 
sent Endora forward in time, bejeweled and bewitching,

the mother-in-law who knew Samantha married down.
Life on Morning Glory Circle could make anyone twitch—

that humdrum green carpet and yellow ashtray,
that husband who couldn’t even make his own sandwich.

Ed. note: Pictured above is Elizabeth Montgomery, who played Samantha in the TV series Bewitched.

Meat Loaf [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

He had been watching Meat Loaf videos

Or rather he watched the same video 

Again and again, the performance of

Paradise by the Dashboard Light from 

1979 or 1980 which was Meat Loaf's 

Masterpiece and had received over

Forty-five million YouTube views and 

Eleven thousand admiring comments 

Since it first appeared on YouTube

Four years earlier. The very existence

Of the millions of Meat Loaf admirers 

Reassured him like a quote from Seneca:

'Whatever time has passed is owned

'By death. Most of death is already gone.'

Frost and "the nothing that is" [by David Lehman]

I have long discerned connections between "The Snow Man" and the work of Robert Frost [pictured left receiving a medal of honor from President John F. Kennedy in 1962], an association that Frost's surname handily suggests. It is incontrovertible that the teaching of Wallace Stevens's great poem "The Snow Man" benefits by concurrent analysis of two of Frost's poems, "Stopping By Woods on a Snow Evening" and "Desert Places." 

We associate "the nothing that is" with Stevens; it is the final phrase in "The Snow Man." Here is a line from Frost's long poem "New Hampshire":  "Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred." Is the "nothing" here a word that requires the definite article? Consider the double negative.  The line paraphrased is "Nothing [with exceptions] is sacred." As "nothing is sacred" is itself a well-worn expression that Frost would not use without a degree of irony, I wonder whether the "Nothing" that opens the line does not denote the absence of everything.

Comments and suggestions from readers are most welcome.-- DL

PFC Hyman Ruby Horowitz

My dad, who served honorably in the US Army during WWII. 

-- Stacey Lehman

Veteran's Day (a poem for Mitch Sisskind) [by David Lehman]

On Veterans' Day let us remember the fallen, and honor them.
It used to be Armistice Day.
Now it is a three-day weekend, if that.
As King David would have said: How the mighty have fallen.

But some things don't change even as all the fashions do
so the old feel older in an orgy of planned obsolescence.
I wondered: Who will inspire them to do the great things
the Alte Kockers of the past revealed in prophecies?

So I went to Mitch, my old friend, thinking: if anyone knows,
he does, and he told me a very simple solution he had
for the problem of inspiration, which Freud would have called
the problem of anxiety. "When you need inspiration,"

Mitch said, "there's no need to look any further than
Orson Welles' classic commercials for Paul Masson wine.
Many of them can be seen on You-Tube. I saw a nice one
the other day. I just wish it went on longer."

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. . .

Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, ended the first world war, leaving everyone relieved and no one the happier. The illusion of peace, and the reality of disillusion, lasted nearly twenty-one years. The United States entered the second global conflict on a day that shall live in infamy, the seventh day of December 1941.
This post is for all who, like Stacey's father, were awarded the purple heart for their service in World War II.

"Separate Them" [by Thomas Moody]

Separate Them

                            after Baudelaire's "Semper Eadem"

The deviant disses you, sells strange tickets
Online, immersed in nouveau Black Metal.
Not to interfere with the dance of vengeance
We avoid the mall. There is a secret canoe,

A dealer with good looks who holds no mystery,
And in the voice jar, a plant or two.
Shush the donkey, ring the bell of curiosity!
Being the vote getter, doubt will taser you!

Ignorance will taser you! Aim is a certain ravine!
Push the rear to the front, add to the core cleverly.
The savant sees no more tenets through the subtle lens.

They say the concurring senator didn't get the message
Taking down the whole affair, a dance of strange beauty—
The longtime sommelier befriends the decimal

"The Minister of Culture" & ruminations on the prose poem [by Mark Strand]

 

Ed note: I propose a toast to Mark Strand, who, was, in addition to all else, a master of the prose poem. (The photo was taken by Stacey Lehman at a Civitella Ranieri party in, I think, 2009). He had written a number of them but in 2012 he broke new ground in Almost Invisible, his collection of prose poems (or "prose pieces," as he preferred to think of them), such as "The Minister of Culture" (below). In "The Minister of Culture," the key word is "nothing," and it is tempting to identify the title character as a type of the poet, a hardworking chap who falls asleep into the "nothing," the oblivion which "in its absent way" is welcoming him at the end of the day -- or at life's end. 

For Strand's poem "Fire" and an editor's note on the poet and the poem, click here.

Strand told Nathalie Handal (who interviewed him for Guernica) that he wrote Almost Invisible in eight months. On the subject of the prose poem he said, 

<<<
I thought I knew what prose poetry was for years and years. It was simply prose that had the integrity of poems, that is they seem to hold together. They were short pieces of prose. Each word had a different and specific gravity than words have in just pure prose. They have the weight somehow of poems. And that’s true of prose that some people call prose poetry. I was just trying to define something for myself. I don’t feel in my new prose pieces that words have that kind of weight. I think the book is essentially a light book.

You don’t feel the pressure in those prose pieces that you would in a poem. You don’t feel so much hinges on an individual word. I think you can feel their writtenness but they don’t have the compactness or the weight of a poem. And when I said escaping poetry, I meant the concerns that a poet has over lineation, the adjustments one makes for measure if one if using meter or rhyme or the syntactical consideration that you experience when writing poetry. In prose, you are essentially writing sentences, that’s what I’m doing. Each of my prose pieces is a paragraph. I am not writing stanzas. I’m not saying should this twenty-four line poem be in six four lines stanzas or four six line stanzas. I’m not worrying about the same things. And I’m free to be funny.
>>>

The Minister of Culture

The Minister of Culture goes home after a grueling day at the office. He lies on his bed and tries to think of nothing, but nothing happens or, more precisely, does not happen. Nothing is elsewhere doing what nothing does, which is to expand the dark. But the minister is patient, and slowly things slip away—the walls of his house, the park across the street, his friends in the next town. He believes that nothing has finally come to him and, in its absent way, is saying, "Darling, you know how much I have always wanted to please you, and now I have come. And what is more, I have come to stay."

“Fire” [by Mark Strand]

Sometimes there would be a fire and I would walk into it

and come out unharmed and continue on my way,

and for me it was just another thing to have done.

As for putting out the fire, I left that to others

who would rush into the billowing smoke with brooms

and blankets to smother the flames.  When they were through

they would huddle together to talk of what they had seen --

how lucky they were to have witnessed the lusters of heat,

the hushing effect of ashes, but even more to have known the fragrance

of burning paper, the sound of words breathing their last.

from Man and Camel (2006). 

Ed. note: Mark Strand was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1991 -- which meant that we worked on the book, trading poems and recommendations, all through 1990; sometimes in person, often on the phone. It was a great experience working with Mark and finding out, when we got together, that we liked many of the same things: art galleries and bookstores, the wine and spirits shop on Astor Place, Paul Stuart and other clothing emporia, parties and celebrations. Our first meeting was at the Union Square Cafe, where the owner Danny Meyer came over and greeted Mark by name. Mark was a pure aesthete, by which I mean that he saw things in an artistic light, as if life, his life, were a "continuous" poem, to use the adjective in the title of one his best collections, The Continuous Life (1990). If you read "Fire" identifying "I" as "the Poet," we see him continuing on his way after enduring a blaze, a recurrent event that leaves him unharmed and leaves others with the task of extinguishing the fire and reaping the ironic reward, the fragrance of burning paper. The poet has done his part by walking into and out of the flames --- and reporting on what ensued in his absence.

For Strand's prose poem "The Minister of Culture" and his thoughts on the prose poem, click here.

-- DL

Leonard Bernstein conducting Brahms's "Academic Festival Overture.

Leonard Bernstein conducting Brahms's "Academic Festival Overture." He is one of the instruments -- just watch him. Like a method actor, in a way. He dances with the baton. And the music ends with history's greatest rendition of Gaudeamus Igitur.

 

Ahmos Zu-Bolton: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ravis

 

My brother turns his life insideout,

from a jail in Leesville,

from a half-way house in Lake Charles,

from a slave-quarter in DeRidder.

He is prisoner of his own rage,

trapped behind the swollen bars

of some lingering chains

and some sudden cage.

 

I speak to him from miles away,

from the cell next door and

lightyears away,

from motherlands and the fertile earth

our Mississippi father plowed:

 

I am trying to be the lawyer he needs,

the father who died fighting for his son,

the big brother with muscles in his miles,

the preacher with his pitiful prayers,

 

I am trying to give him

the key to the cage, the hammer

to break the chains, the plot

the escape, the magic, the ju-ju

the tunnel under the demon walls,

the North Star to follow,

 

I climb inside all his sins,

find them in the flesh of this poem,

do bloody battle with them,

rip them apart like a white man's curse,

become their bitter judge,

their merciful jury,

their solemn executioner,

 

I leave them on the open floor

of his cell, spread out like the pages

of a testament, shadowboxing him

like a mirror,

 

I can forgive them

those far-away long-ago sins,

but I can't erase them,

for they have their own afterlife,

their own ghost pulsating

on the hot breath where

my brother's frustrated bloodline boils...

 

yet no loving offering

from my elderly black hand

can reverse his youthful middle passage

as he sits

on the frontporch of his betrayed generation,

sent to his silent room

like a spoiled boychild,

where he conjures secret maps

for whatever freedoms

he chose to rock his dusty soul with.

________________________________________________________________________________________

I remember Ahmos Zu-Bolton II as a charismatic and gifted poet. He occasionally took part in the Mass Transit readings in Washington DC's Dupont Circle in the early 1970s, which was when I met him. A poet, playwright, Vietnam War veteran, and tireless promoter of African-American writers, Zu-Bolton was born on 21 October 1935 in Mississippi and grew up in Louisiana. He founded Hoo-Doo, a magazine devoted to African-American activism and arts, and, with E. Ethelbert Miller, edited the 1975 anthology Synergy D.C. His poetry collections include A Niggered Amen (1975), Ain’t No Spring Chicken (1998), and 1946 (2002). He died  at age 69 on 8 March 2005, at Howard University Medical Center in Washington, D.C.  See Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s excellent post on Zu-Bolton; Doug Lang’s 2007 blog on Zu-Bolton offers links to more information, plus brief remembrances by Michael Lally and Beth Joselow; see also Grace Cavalieri’s perceptive essay on Zu-Bolton’s work in Beltway Poetry Quarterly.  

______________________________________________________________________________________

This Day in History: November 8 [by David Lehman]

Today  in 1957 Pan Am flight 7 went down
in the Pacific Ocean 
Three years later Kennedy was elected president
The Viet Cong ambushed the 173rd Airborne
in Operation Hump,1965, which should have made
McNamara rethink the whole thing
In 2004 the troops descended on Fallujah
and in 2016 Trump was elected president

Adrienne Su recommends "Poems in the Manner Of…"

2020 has not brought a windfall of reading time for me, never mind writing time. I read plenty, but it’s mostly news: I can’t stop checking to see which part of what sky is falling. My summer reading was pedagogy: how to move in-person teaching to Zoom and still do it reasonably well. These forms of reading have been essential, but neither feeds the spirit. Absorption in works designed to outlive their moment, the kind of reading I did when print was the only medium and newspapers weren’t refreshed by the minute, is one of the few sources of comfort, even hope, I’ve been able to access in this extra-horrible annus horribilis. But with the ongoing sense of daily emergency, I have to be led there, the way an exhausted, wailing child has to be persuaded to let go and sleep.

Once I get there, I wonder how I did without. David Lehman’s Poems in the Manner Of… takes me back to that youthful state of stumbling upon Kafka or Rilke or Lady Murasaki for the first time and hearing a singular voice beam across centuries, languages, oceans. The collection is an autobiography in reading, an extended love letter to literature, and a series of tributes by ostensible imitation, with translations in the mix. But these poems aren’t imitations; they are Lehman poems that not only embrace their influences, they take up residence in them and seize their own voice by harnessing another. Its elasticity is a kind of miracle. At moments I forget that I’m reading a “poem in the manner of” rather than the poet whose manner is being borrowed.

The poems can be hilarious (“Poem in the Manner of Bashō,” “Poem in the Manner of Wallace Stevens as Rewritten by Gertrude Stein”); they can also be poignant reminders that time moves in only one direction (“I Remember,” after Joe Brainard). The miracle is that what unfolds from the collection is double: brief introductions (and sometimes the poems themselves) bring you into Lehman’s life, with poets and writers as the soundtrack to each era, and while you join him on his journey, a parallel track in your head opens up your own story. You don’t have to be as voluminously well-read as Lehman to connect; the poems open the door to learning as well as memory, and they’re an affirmation—in a time when many writers can’t write—that reading can be a form of writing.

From The Common.

"Jan Brueghel the Elder's 'A Woodland Road with Travelers'" [by Robert Schultz]

Midway in their desperate journey they 
Find themselves in a dark wood. Women 
In skirts and domed hats carry heavy 
Jugs and stuffed baskets, all they now own. 

Men drive beasts, pigs on leashes, horses tethered 
To a wagon tipping, too full of nothing 
Terribly valuable. At least today the weather 
Clears at last. One woman quietly sings.     

About suffering we are always wrong 
These days. In Brueghel's painting we peer 
From the woods; the travelers' backs, strong 

But bent, are what we see as they steer 
Themselves toward a distant city. I am in that city 
And see them coming. Their faces don’t scare me.

from  Into the New World by Robert Schultz (SLANT Books)

 

"Virginity" [by Mitch Sisskind]

They called him Tight Pants Blair and he 
Favored an eccentric notion of time derived
From A.N. Whitehead's Process and Reality.
In a nutshell, Tight Pants Blair proposed that
The past does exist but with a certain flatness
So that nothing in the past is farther back or 
Deeper in the past than anything else. Thus, 
Our "distance" from the Egyptian pharaohs
Is the same as our "distance" from yesterday's
Hamburger or anything else in the past that
You care to name. For example, when did you 
Lose your virginity? Tight Pants Blair would
Argue that the meaningful question would be
Not when, but simply did you lose it or not? 

"Misunderstood Ghazal" [by Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade]

Simone de Beauvoir asked “What is a woman?” in The Second Sex,
and Sojourner Truth asked “Ain’t I a woman?” Before cybersex,

we had touchtone phone sex; before that, suggestive telegrams.
Before we said “gender,” discrimination was on the basis of “sex.”

Anne Fausto-Sterling wrote “The Fives Sexes” to show
that we should “celebrate our subtleties,” that the opposite sex

was seldom a “binary other”—humans points on a spectrum
of biology and desire. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sex-

ton wrote confessional poems of love, shame, and self-pleasure.
Both loved the free potato chips at the Ritz better than sex

with their husbands. Both surely hated condescension like
“Nice hobby” and “Good Girl.” The manual The Joy of Sex

illustrated “gourmet love making” but omitted homosexuality
and The Joy of Gay Sex was only for men who wanted to have sex

with other men. Whispery lore around sexless lesbians abounds--
bed death, snuggling with cats. Only phallocentric sex

gets much cultural airtime--hence, Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse
is still woefully misunderstood. Dworkin actually liked sex

and didn't believe all sex was rape; still, the violence implicit
in penetration has many of us questioning: what exactly is sex?

A karyotype? A stimulus package? 10 points' worth of Scrabble tiles?
A poem made of couplets? A poem made of sextets? Unisex

bathrooms, unisex clothes? A multi-valent orgy, where context
is everything. As Sexton said, The best way to ruin a relationship? Sex.

Editor's note: pictured above are, left to right, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.