The Best American Poetry

Ron Padgett: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ron Padgett by Siobhán Padgett, 2020

________________________________________________________________________

Morning

 

Who is here with me?

My mother and an Indian man.

(I am writing this in the past.)

The Indian man is not a man,

but a wooden statue just outside

the limits of wood. My mother

is made of mother. She touches

the wood with her eyes and the eyes

of the statue turn to hers, that is,

become hers. (I am not dreaming.

I haven’t even been born yet.)

There is a cloud in the sky.

My father is inside the cloud,

asleep. When he wakes up, he

will want coffee and a smoke.

My mother will set fire

to the Indian and from deep inside

her body I will tell her

to start the coffee, for even now

I hear my father’s breathing change.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Ron Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His translations include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems. Padgett has collaborated with artists Joe Brainard, Jim Dine, Alex Katz, George Schneeman, and Trevor Winkfield. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film, Paterson. His most recent collection is Big Cabin (Coffee House Press). ["Morning," from Collected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013), is used by permission; © 2013 by Ron Padgett.]

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 (L-R) Jim Jarmusch, Ron Padgett, and Adam Driver attend the New York Special Screening of Amazon Studios and Bleecker Street's "Paterson" at Landmark Sunshine Theater on December 15, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Paul Bruinooge/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

 

Your Assignments for Next Week [by Mindy Aloff]

In Ezra Pound’s 1934 ABC of Reading, Pound cautions: “Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.” In a posting on Twitter, analyze why the poet didn’t take his own advice when it came to The Cantos.

When George Balanchine was the company choreographer for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, in the mid-1940s, he told Frederic Franklin—the dancer on whom Mr. B. built the part of The Poet in his Ballet Russe work The Night Shadow—that Franklin should do two things: “Read War and Peace and The Sermon on the Mount.” In an Op-Ed article for The New York Times, explain why this advice might come in handy for the Secretary of the Treasury, a disgraced ex-journalist, the manager of the New York Mets, and Susan Stroman.

The phrase “Black Swan” has been applied to:

a) the character Odile, the evil enchanter’s daughter in the ballet Swan Lake;

b) the pas de deux that Odile dances with clueless Siegfried in Swan Lake’s third act;

or used as

c) a commonly implied element in philosophical discussions on the fallibility of inductive inferences, as in the comparison of the statements “All ravens are black” with “All swans are white”;

d) the metaphor in “the black swan theory,” advanced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, to explain why the largest, most unpredictable, and most powerful events in history, economics, and just about everything else always wing in from left field just when we thought it was safe to go back in the water;

e) the exquisite and mysterious title poem in an early collection by James Merrill;

f) a much-lauded and Oscar-nominated 2010 feature film, by Darren Aronofsky, about a ballerina going berserk, which will be remembered by ballerinas not only for the special effect that put the head of the actress Natalie Portman onto the dancing body of American Ballet Theatre soloist Sarah Lane but also, even more so, for the fact that the director didn’t mention the effect or Lane’s name in public until after the Oscars were decided;

g) the Cygnus Atratus, native to Australia, and, prior to the 17^th century, believed by Europeans to be imaginary. Write a Ghazal that incorporates all these references for a readership who, to understand the poem, requires no more than a sixth-grade education and will be reading it while texting the Molly Bloom chapter of Ulysses.

from the archive; first posted on June 2, 2014.

It's Roy Eldridge Day [by Sean Singer]

Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill, Minton's Playhouse, New York, N.Y., c. Sept. 1947

    January 30th is Roy Eldridge Day. Eldridge was a major innovator in jazz trumpet, and his concept shows how jazz developed. He was born in 1911 in Pittsburgh, an industrial city with an important jazz history, into a middle-class / upper-middle-class African-American family, and he was the key figure in the development of jazz trumpet between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. He died at 78 in 1989.
        Notoriously competitive, and ferocious on his chosen instrument, Eldridge was nicknamed by Ellington’s saxophonist Otto Hardwick (pronounced with a long O sound)— “Little Jazz” because of the juxtaposition of his ferocity and size. Because he was a major Swing Era figure, who nonetheless was a stylistic precursor to BeBop, Eldridge is sometimes thought of as a transitional figure between stylistic eras (not unlike the transition between Romanticism and Modernism in poetry); however, he was his own thing.
         Eldridge was a child prodigy, beginning as a six year-old on drums (who buys a six year old a set of drums?) and though he dropped out of high school, practiced trumpet as a teenager between eight and nine hours a day, and was playing professionally from 16. He moved to New York in 1930 and played in many Harlem dance bands. His rhythmic power and virtuosity in the upper register of the trumpet made him a star. In the 1930s he joined the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, and recorded, with the tenor saxophone specialist Chu Berry “Christopher Columbus”
        He made some important recordings in 1935 with Billie Holiday and the pianist Teddy Wilson such as “Miss Brown to You”, also a glorious example of Holiday at her peak powers or “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”.

        In April 1941, though he received many offers from white big bands, Eldridge joined Gene Krupa’s Orchestra and made some recordings with the vocalist Anita O’Day. They can be seen in a short film known as a “soundie” singing their infectious, novelty duet, “Let Me Off Uptown,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8yaW6BluwY) perhaps their most well-known effort.
Although he was the featured soloist in these big bands, the racial segregation in the apartheid South created many terrible racial incidents that affected him. Artie Shaw, for example, said: “Droves of people would ask him for his autograph at the end of the night, but later, on the bus, he wouldn't be able to get off and buy a hamburger with the guys in the band.”
        After Krupa was arrested for marijuana possession in 1943, Eldridge tried, albeit unsuccessfully to form his own big band where he recorded “Heckler’s Hop” which shows how he influenced the development of BeBop. In the post-war years he joined Norman Granz’s tours of the Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts, toured France with Benny Goodman, and led a band at Birdland in New York City.
        In 1960 he joined the Jazz Artist’s Guild, a group that briefly existed in Newport, Rhode Island, and was formed by the business and musical partners Charles Mingus and Max Roach, and they recorded “Mysterious Blues” with the Newport Jazz Rebels. In the 1970s he performed regularly at Jimmy Ryan’s club on West 54th Street, but after a heart attack in 1980, he stopped played altogether.
        Roy Eldridge’s competitiveness and sticktoitiveness made him more than just a precursor to Dizzy Gillespie, and the revolution known as BeBop; he was an effective transmitter of his own style and personality during a the Swing Era, the time when jazz music was the most popular form of entertainment in the United States.
    In terms of poetry, the question of how to get one’s own voice across, particularly when emotional intensity and technical skill are valued, is especially anxiety-producing. In other words, how can you be more like yourself, and less like everybody else? Maybe some close listening to this music can steer us in the right direction.

Starting tonight at midnight and continuing all day tomorrow, Jan. 30th, for 24 hrs. it's the Roy Eldridge birthday broadcast on WKCR.

Sean Singer is the author of Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; and Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015)

Two Poems [by Mitch Sisskind]

Schmegeges

Schmegeges everywhere. Look over yonder
Where schmegeges march down the street,
See how the schmegeges cavort themselves
Day and night, how new schmegege variations
Appear, marching, marching, tailgating me,
Telephoning me, telling me what they think,
Singing schmegege roundelays, drinking,
Dancing, eating what the schmegeges eat,
Dressing like schmegeges, raising children
As schmegeges, questioning how schmegege
Has traditionally been understood, redefining
Schmegege, and always marching, marching,
Marching, I did not think there were so many
Schmegeges and now I too begin to march.

Mister Yes and No

I called him Mister Yes and No because

When you asked him a question he always

Said yes and no. For example, if you asked

Him if today is Friday he said yes and no or

Even if you asked him if one plus one is two

He said yes and no to my great puzzlement.

Much later it dawned on me that maybe

He was making a distinction between a

Literal interpretation of the matter at hand

And a metaphorical perspective like when

John Ashbery wrote it had been raining

But it had not been raining, in 1956.

Or maybe John Ashbery was making

A distinction between objective and

Subjective realities like it was raining

Outside when he wrote his poem but

But it was a clear day in the subjective

Landscape of his poem, entitled "A Boy."

When I ran this by Mister Yes and No

He said, 'Well, maybe" which had me

Flummoxed coming from the man who

Only said yes and no and seeing my look

Of incredulity he added, 'Or maybe not.'

Haha in life there is always more to learn!

As January Bites the Dust of Snow [Lehman & Shapiro haiku exchange, 2003]

 

An Old Dispute; I agree (and disagree)
Date:    1/27/2003 8:25:35 PM Eastern Standard Time   
   
Well, David Lehman,
it's an old dispute between
Li Po -- Tu Fu--  Scene:

O Tu Fu says Li
you're suffering poetry--
My kind just flies high--

Ben Jonson wanted Bard
to blot more. Now you know I'm
not hair on his beard--

Dave, I'm just playing...
Some think it close to praying.
It's all just saying...

No one hates typos
More than I do, but we'll clean
Them later (and schmooze).

--  [DS, 1 / 27 / 03]

 

I muse and am dis
-abused but now I'm back from
Detroit, Michigan.

Detroit's a riot --
or was in '67.
What were you doing?

I was waking at
six and carrying mail in
Harlem and the Heights.

Days of ‘67.
What changed was the rate of change.
You said: read Rimbaud.

I joined the Poem
Team. You were on it, as were
Mitch, Les, Chuck, Hilton.

We gave readings at
women's colleges such as
Sadie Lou and Vassar.

Mitch Sisskind read "A
Mean Teacher" and re-met his
wife of the future.

Enough of those days.
I wish not for the snows of
yesterday but now.

The snow is coming
fast and white, covering the
balsams and cedars.  

-- DL, 1 / 27 / 03

and furthermore I muse and ignore the news but can’t elude the weather

Maybe all teachers
are mean, I thought, but now you
know I snow so slow.

Just one thing is real.
Snow. The sooner you know this,
The easier life.

And by snow I mean
snow. So much pain in your mind
or mine: we need snow.

Ah, my friend, may this
day bring you an hour of clear
vision and no thought. 

–- DL, 1 / 29 / 03

    Each month a fatal new form? Thanks, etc. Thanks

DS to DL
Date:    1/29/2003 5:20:44 PM Eastern Standard Time

My best lecture was
"Snow in Art and Litera-
ture" post real snow-storm!

Maybe we should write
each month in new forms: couplets
for Feb in droplets!

ahorisms: March
villanelle for long April
May is all prose (lit)

June for happy songs;
letters during summer's wrongs;
and for spoon and tongs?

all Fall prose Rimbauds;
while some desire more "Sri Lankas"*          *new form where you ferment nouns in names
we’d return from maps                                   

of three continents
with tankas (haiku plus two
seven-syllables lines.)

Christmas ices streams –
(sweet permissive month of dreams--)
we'll do ANYTHING!    

-- DS, 1 / 29 / 03

Silent Music [by Lera Auerbach]

Leitmotifs Photo by Lera Auerbach

 

 

At the Marlboro Music Festival, returning home at night –
my door was covered by moths. I opened the door quickly
as not to let them in, but at least twenty managed to fly in –
into the light of the dining room's lamp.

 

Today I found them dead all around the entrance,

dried angels, almost transparent in their fragile death

with the powder – angel's dust – still on their wings.

 

I think of them while listening to Chopin's mazurkas –

so fragile, so transparent, immortal in their captured beauty.

I gently lift the dead bodies of white&gray moths
from the floor – sliding them into an old glass jar.

 

There they shall rest. They look alive.

Most have their wings open, as if in flight.

My fingers are covered with the powder from the wings.

Their silence is music too.

 

When I wake up tomorrow morning

– they shall still be here, under the glass,

frozen in their death, as in a dream

hearing the music only they can hear.

An Interview with Terence Winch [by Aspen Matis]

January 21, 2021

You are the author of eight poetry collections, a short story collection, and a collection of non-fiction stories, and your first novel, Seeing-Eye Boy, was published in October of 2020. What inspired your transition from poet to novelist and the creation of this first book-length work?

I got interested in YA fiction when my son Michael was approaching adolescence; it was at that point that I started getting him YA books, sometimes even reading them to him. That's when I realized that there was a lot of good writing and storytelling going on in that arena. The next step was to try my own hand at it.

How has Irish music influenced you and your development as an artist?

Irish music goes back further and deeper in my life than any other form of expression. I have a storehouse of songs and tunes in my head that I think help shape, most often in ways I’m not really conscious of, much of my writing.   

Where do poetry and music intersect? And where do they diverge?

There’s a close relationship between poetry and song, which in humanity’s past often meant the same thing. Good poems have a deep musicality coded into them, just as great song lyrics often show an attention to the metaphoric concision of the best kind of poetic language. Obviously, not every poem makes a good song, and not every set of lyrics can stand alone as a poem. But Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and that made perfect sense to me.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

I never think in terms of themes and inquiries. But sex and death, those twin pillars of poetic obsession, have not escaped my attention.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

When you have found the answers to those questions, please let me know.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

When I was a student, a long time ago, I loved the work, and the workings of the mind, of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I still think, along with many others, that “Kubla Khan” is the best poem ever written in English. I also read and loved his prose, including his great classic, Biographia Literaria: Or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. In the Biographia he writes, "With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE" [caps his]. I think that’s still good advice.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

I'm finishing up work on a new manuscript of poems. I like writing poems. Writing something you’re happy with produces a very pleasant high that you can’t get any other way. It's a benign addiction. Songs and instrumental compositions come less frequently, but are also a kick. 

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Terrance Hayes

A Small Novel

The protagonist spends the first twenty pages
crossing a bridge wearing nothing but red
swimming trunks and sneakers with no socks.

I can remember standing naked
outside my neighbor’s window at fourteen
when I read the paragraph about the placard of night

held up by pine trees.
Where ever there is a mention of solitude or desire
I think, without wanting to, of Race. Race

when the protagonist spends a page long sentence
trying to work free a knot of shoe string
in his basketball sneaker. Race

when he spends the hot seasons of his twenties
like a beggar with no mouth. Race
when he tells his wife: “There are no Open Houses

on Easter.” Late in the book he feels himself
becoming a shadow. On page 113 just as I reach
the final sentence about traffic like the sound of wind

like the sound of water, a horn yelps somewhere.
“It was all he’d ever known of rivers…”
I pencil L.H. in the margin. I think, without wanting to,

That they will find this book someday
and turn its muddy bosom all golden in the sunset.
On its blank last page I write the poem

“The Blue Langston” which begins:
“O Blood of the River songs, O songs of the River of Blood,”
and ends: “There was nothing I could do about Race.”

-- Terrance Hayes

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2004, v. 62, no.
and Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006)

_________________

Note by Judith Hall

         The poem amalgamates so elegantly the fictive and the lyric; and by “elegant,” I mean, etymologically, legible and then graceful.  It clearly, gracefully shows the act of reading as a defining act -- one capable of altering despondency into a poem about despondency.
          Hayes’ tone here is not entirely unlike Mark Strand’s comic angst in “Chekhov: A Sestina” -- another poem wherein a character contemplates what a characteristic act might be in both an unsympathetic world and a contestable form.
          Langston Hughes, though, is the key predecessor, the Hughes of The Big Sea (1940) and The Weary Blues (1926) and the Hughes who wrote, “The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh.”  Let a young man’s “novel” leave the hard laughs to elders, if it shines by despondency alone. Yes?

from the archive; first posted November 23, 2008

"Platonic Love" [by Curt Anderson]

We dine at Adorno and return to my Beauvoir.
She compliments me on my Bachelard pad.
I pop in a Santayana CD and Saussure back to the couch.
On my way, I pull out two fine Kristeva wine glasses.
I pour some Merleau-Ponty and return the Aristotle to Descartes.
After pausing an Unamuno, I wrap my arm around her Hegel.
Her hair smells of wild Lukacs and Labriola.
Our small talk expands to include Dewey, Moore and Kant.
I confess to her what’s in my Eckhart. We Locke.
By this point, we’re totally Blavatsky.
We stretch out on the Schopenhauer.
She slips out of her Lyotard and I fumble with my Levi-Strauss.
She unhooks her Buber and I pull off my Spinoza.
I run my finger along her Heraclitus as she fondles my Bacon.
She stops to ask me if I brought any Kierkegaard. I nod.
We Foucault.
She lights a cigarette and compares Foucault to Lacan.
I roll over and Derrida.

-- 2006

from the archive; posted on Sept. 25, 2018.

Shema [poem by Primo Levi]

Shema

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

--- from If This Is a Man (tr. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swan)

Today is Holocaust remembrance day. Primo Levi was an Italian-Jewish chemist who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp. The poem "Shema" is named after the first Hebrew word of the prayer, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”

-- sdl

Dispatch From A Distance - Hunting Season [by Cara Benson]

Look closely

“Rifle’s done.” This from a neighbor I crossed paths with when I was out for a walk and he to shovel out his mailbox. We spoke from opposite sides of the road, occasionally pausing for the wind to die down in order to be heard. Our first big snow had fallen on the hill but “regular season” had only just ended. “Still got a few days of bow, though.” It’s the hot topic this time of year up here, whether one is gunning for meat or aiming to be missed, and I am definitively the latter.

Mostly I avoid my beloved woods walks during rifle season. Hunting stands and abandoned camo tents from previous years tucked into the landscape remind a girl that come a certain Saturday in November through a certain Sunday in December heading out is no casual act. It’s unnerving to see those ladders up into platforms at a height – like a tree house, only deadly. Even walking the roads I wear my safety-orange Carhartt hat. I am, after all, moving flesh.

During some of the shoulder periods that are less populated by hunters I’ve been known to slip further into the trees. Bow hunting is less a risk as an arrow’s reach is shorter than a bullet’s. Nevertheless, I whistle as I go, sharp piercing bursts with my fingers in my mouth like I’m cheering for my team. With the shorter days I’m often caught out and coming back through the woods in dusk, staving off the use of my headlamp to stretch how long I can go in natural, if fading, light. I like that time of day into night, the way the last hurrah of the sun slices the tops of the forests with gold. Apparently, that’s prime hunting time.

FWEET! FWEET! Nothing to see here! Just little ole me, human, walking innocentishly home! My travels often flush the deer. I’ve seen those beauties bound up from bedding in meadows or from under sagging pine boughs on my approach. It’s always a delight. Excruciating to think of a bullet or arrow through their heart, though I might as well say right now that I do eat some meat (I haven’t always). I’m fairly certain that I could never be the one to do the deed. It probably wouldn’t be smart to count on me as gatherer or farmer, either, but fortunately every tribe needs its scribblers.

A friend who walks with me in these woods (she lives down a hill, then up a patch – I can bushwhack to her house from mine) and I wear bells this time of year. Her orange vest has pockets for bullets as members of her family do hunt. She, like I am, is conflicted about it. We process this as we walk. “They have a good life up here.” Better than factory farmed animals, to be sure. We meet by our usual stump then down to a favorite pond to catch the end of the day outside after being online for waaaaay too much time. The two of us walking and talking, bells jangling, are a safer bet than when we part ways to solo it home. That’s when I begin my blasts. FWEET! FWEET! Every 20 feet or so. I know where the one hunting stand is planted between where we split off and the safety of reaching my door. I don’t know if anyone’s on foot, waiting. Watching for anything that moves through a site. It is because I am walking that I am at risk.

Which means I have the experience of feeling like a target. I’m reminded of the Gary Larson Far Side cartoon where one deer is talking to another deer who had a bullseye on his chest. The first deer says, “Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.” More seriously, I think about being a concertgoer (back when we did such things). A churchgoer. To be a target based on who one loves, the color of one's skin, or what route one happens to take on a particular day. To walk through the world knowing there are those who carry lethal weaponry for the purpose of training them on other humans is stretching my capacity for empathy beyond its limit.

Hunting for food is a different story. Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking that hunting in the United States is typically done by rural poor or Indigenous people to feed themselves and that this is admirable or at least preferable to the UK where hunting is an elitist sport. In fact, access to the majority of land in England came to be denied to the underclasses as a result. Strict poaching and trespassing laws were enacted so these tracts would remain stocked for the few weeks per year that rich landowners took their sporting holidays. Where I live the woods are beginning to feel like something of a commons to me. This could be projection on my part, but the longer I’m here the more I have witnessed the overt and tacit agreements between inhabitants. Creatures pay no heed to posted signs, of course, so living with wildlife (and watersheds and air and airborne viruses and...) isn’t an individual endeavor, even as it is approached in varying manners. And by all accounts it is true that hunters on the hill will eat what that kill. Those lovely creatures sweetly nosing the forest floor for acorns.

FWEET! FWEET!

My neighbor's house

Despite my plan to steer well clear of the woods until after rifle season, I did wind up sidling in – on opening day of all things! I started off smartly enough, intending to walk only roads. I could hear the pap pap pows flaring up like fatal popcorn crackling in the landscape all morning. Plus, there were those ominous vehicles roadside with nary a home in sight. Bordering my small patch is a 200 acre wooded parcel with an abandoned, now dilapidated house. The former patriarch is deceased, and his offspring apparently never agreed on what to do with the property. Relatively young forest is growing up in what had been cleared for subsistence farming long ago. (Of course I love this – both the trees and the fallen-in bones of the structure.) I could see a jeep parked from early light into the afternoon in front of the old battered home. The Pastor from whom I bought the church I live in told me they’re never up on that land except occasionally to hunt. 

So I donned my Carhartt hat and headed out on the road. I was partway along a down and back when I ran into a few neighbors getting ready for their walk. Our party grew to four and somehow it was decided that we’d head into the woods behind their house. There’s a centuries old cemetery behind them and multiple acres of land with former lumbering roads to traverse. At some point, though, we crossed over to where their land joins with others. It’s all currently undeveloped in there, though signs of structures from years past can be read in the landscape. We came upon a guy in a camo tent, staked out to catch the deer movement at dusk. Through the course of conversation first names were thrown around, someone’s cousin, and our walking party moved on. Eventually we came out onto a road we could trudge back to our homes. They were about to point out another path that locals take when out of that very opening came a woman in a bright orange vest, rifle resting in the crook of her arm. It was nearly dark at this point, so she’d called it for the day. “But if you’re going to be flushing them this way I might go back in and give it another try.” (Way to go, Benson. Sending does to their demise.)

At one point, one of my neighbors had asked if she’d had any luck. Luck? I get it, and also ugh. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be obvious if she did? But of course she wouldn’t have hoisted the body up over her shoulders to bring it out on her own. There’s quite the procedure involved, in fact. I'll spare us both the recounting of the details of this process that I’ve become privy to. I will tell you that there is every indication of a healthy deer population on this side of the season. I see their tracks, the unmistakably ruffled forest floor, even heard tell of concerns that the herds would be too plentiful to survive the winter, but that seems not to be bearing out so far.

My first walk back behind my place after rifle ending was in glorious two foot snow. I’ll write more on snowshoeing in another post but will say here that it was a magical wonderland to me, the puffy white clumps clinging to evergreens and caressed by late day pink such a pure delight. I was plunking one foot then the other deep into perfect powder, when I heard a commotion just ahead. A buck! Not 20 yards from a snow-topped hunting stand. Looked like four points on his horns. He roused himself and dashed away through the trees in front of me. I’m so grateful to have been there to glimpse him. Both of us, lucky.

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance, Enter Geese, Whose Woods, and Roads And Seeds, A Trace. 

A Fashion Line Based on Joe Brainard's Work

Ron Padgett sent out this announcement:

1/25/21

The Madrid-based fashion house of Loewe has a young designer named Jonathan Anderson who is so crazy about Joe's work that he has based an entire line on Joe's work—a profusion of shirts, tee shirts, pants, dresses, coats, sneakers, tote bags, handbags, throw pillows, etc.—with advance publicity in the form of a luxurious book and four videos (one by Anderson himself, one with Paul Auster and Jim Jarmusch, one with Constance Lewallen and Anne Waldman, and one with Joe's brother John and me). The clothing line will be in Loewe's stores in June.

 

If you want to plunge into this extravaganza, here are some links:

 

https://www.wallpaper.com/fashion/loewe-joe-brainard-menswear-aw21

 

https://www.youtube.com/user/Loewe1846

 

https://www.loewe.com/usa/en/stories-collection/fw21-men-runway.html?ione_extid=D-01744603&j=10133210&jb=482&l=926_HTML&mid=100008228&sfmc_sub=434346089&u=239233257&utm_campaign=W03_ShowInABook_F_usa-en_NO%20SHOPPING_Prospect_Webform&utm_content=Hero_image&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=SFMC&utm_term=10133210

 

https://www.vogue.com/article/loewe-show-in-a-book-mens-fall-2021

 

---

Twice -- in 1988 and 2015 -- a Joe Brainard graced the cover of a volume in the "Best American Poetry" series.

 

"Days of 1896" [by C. P. Cavafy]

Days of 1896

He became completely degraded. His erotic tendency,
condemned and strictly forbidden
(but innate for all that), was the cause of it:
society was totally prudish.
He gradually lost what little money he had,
then his social standing, then his reputation. --
Nearly thirty, he had never worked a full year --
at least not at a legitimate job.
Sometimes he earned enough to get by
acting the go-between in deals considered shameful.
He ended up the type likely to compromise you thoroughly
if you were seen around with him often.

But this isn’t the whole story – that would not be fair.
The memory of his beauty deserves better.
There is another angle; seen from that
he appears attractive, appears
a simple, genuine child of love,
without hesitation putting,
above his honor and reputation,
the pure sensuality of his pure flesh.

Above his reputation? But society,
prudish and stupid, had it wrong.

[Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard]

Sestina for Harry (Mathews) [by Joseph McElroy, with notes]

SESTINA for HARRY 

           And for Marie

Not sure you’re here or where in solitary
Splendor. Truth, our life and letters not a wreck 
Waiting to happen quite yet, your absence less raw
Than real -- dark, stormy, bright as the keys
Of your Florida piano, the constraint
Like your upright performing a wheel

In a wheel on a roll like Earth less than we’ll
Know who turning every which way recall some solitary  
Hope you understood of ours where the constraint                                                                       
Was to live all you can if today you’re a wreck
Tomorrow discovering what? -- the keys
In pocket where you left them, all the raw

Material – your double espresso thermos’d against a raw
Wind whipping home plate dust at Shea, or a wheel
Of Brie less needed in my then raw downtown space of chi’s
Aflow            with life force than, of my solitary              
Stove, it seemed, third-hand Magic Chef, or my wreck-
ing bar, clarified butter you asked for, arriving. Constraint   

Making do with the years, what stranded constraint
Alive on an island we thought up, my job raw           
Fish to spear, Bill Gass record-keeper, our very shipwreck
Driftwood  for Harry to cook on, spar, mast, even wheel,
Survival mysterious -- no solitary,
Chenetier, our fourth, but his job? Keys

To the island? the salt? a future? a life? -- words keys
Only sometimes, say Paris, Tlooth, silence, constraint.
In Siena one night when Calvino lay gone, solitary
the hours till dawn of your wake for him raw- 
boned American friend, life’s own fame of itself will
Spin into, then out of control this mute req

we embody, for you, Schubert, Perec,
say, brothering posthumous keys
To us many and one our wheel                                                  
spinning eye to e- absence constraint
to twin fullness by you. Writer at risk in the raw
You knew in us and you solitary  

What? Raw rookie’s post-season constraint?
Keys left to our reckoning hopes?
The wheel to windward, solitary west by east.

Ed. note: Harry Mathews, 1930 --2017, died on this day three years ago. For David Lehman's obituary essay, which we published on February 4, 2017, click here. For Ed Park's lively and well-informed Bookforum piece on Mathews ("Antics Roadshow"; April / May 2018), click here.

"Histoire," the most prominently  anthologized of Harry's poems, is in the form of a sestina.
What follows is Joseph McElroy's note on his own sestina, composed for delivery at a memorial for Harry Mathews. -- DL

<<<
Intro: Familiar faces here. The many ways we knew Harry and he us. Always the mystery of many and one. A trek up and down several canyons in New Mexico in search of the shrine of the Stone Lions. A fierce squash match at Beekman Place. Readings we gave including one Harry asked me to join him in for his friend Georges Perec, whom he had brought into my life.  Many copies of Harry’s books inscribed to me so encouraging as he constantly was. One in which he said I had taught him how to be a friend. An odd moment after a conversation between the two of us in front of a large audience in Brooklyn and I thought just maybe I might have rubbed him the wrong way introducing Oulipo with more emphasis than I myself give it in Harry’s writing and aesthetic. So much more to his work than that.  Blake says, “In opposition is true friendship.”  I think not of that so much as subtle differences, personal style, strength – Harry’s hilarious humor and elan and later on the courage of good manners when he was sometimes physically suffering. Wild, too, in his imaginings – an authority on sinking stadiums, an explosive all-over comic release if you recall his reference where the passenger-seat companion in a car careering onward pleads let me take the wheel and WC Fields hands it to him.  And here tonight remembering not only when I was there but when I wasn’t – which can be experience too. Even like the limit, the constraint Harry often called it, that a fixed form may impose on you yet yield strange, encouraging surprises as you work within it and yourself. Harry and I embarked on a series of poems, each answering the previous one. A series only embarked on, if that. Sestinas. Did Harry say to me, “Joe, it’s impossible to write a bad sestina” ? Yes, he did say that. He sent me at least once the six words – for me to use, arbitrary, as he felt they should be. I thought to read you my own six first of all tonight.  But let me not. You will hear them. Two are hardly arbitrary. One is in the title of his I believe final novel, The Solitary Twin, now posthumously to be published, poignant, I felt, disturbing, witty, secret, revealing. My title tonight, “Sestina for Harry”; the dedication at least as important, “And for Marie.” In my sestina the you is Harry but then it is us, and then at last Harry.
>>>

Anne Harding Woodworth: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________________

Looking Homeward

 

Bill Waldron spared my mother and father agony

by teaching me how to drive a stick in a cornfield.

 

Think of it as an H, he said of the lever that came

out of the steering shaft of his two-door Dodge,

 

which my mother called a coupay. We were on the two-rut road

around the field that the tractor took to get in and out

 

at planting and harvest. The grassy hump sometimes hit the underside

and Bill would say, Oh m'god, downshift, girl, easerup,

 

which wasn’t hard as long as I remembered to clutch—

or the car would stutter over itself

 

and on the passenger side, Bill would get thrown around

almost to bumping his nose on the dash.

 

He had a big nose, talked as if he had a cold,

and his eye was on my older sister, who dreamed of boys

 

and going to Africa. I felt pretty important as the vehicle

to her heart, though I knew Bill didn’t have a prayer.

 

My sister married a Rhodes Scholar and went to Uganda

for Uhuru. Bill married the daughter of the town monument maker

 

and took over the business

before he even had a chance to look away.

 

He marked my father’s, then my mother’s grave,

so they won't ever be forgotten in that town I drove out of.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Anne Harding Woodworth’s seventh book of poetry, Trouble (Turning Point, 2020), includes her persona cycle, “Hannah Alive,” which became a one-woman play in verse that was a finalist at the Adirondack Shakespeare Co. festival in Essex, New York. Harding Woodworth’s poetry, reviews, and essays appear in anthologies and journals, both in print and online, such as Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, Women & Language, Crannog, Gargoyle, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. She is a co-chair of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library and a member of the Board of Governors at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Poetry and the Movies: Daily Double [by Mindy Aloff]

Question: What is the greatest feature film ever made about a poet? Give the title of the film and the name of the poet who served as its subject.

Answer: The Color of Pomegranates (image, above), 1966, dir. by Georgian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, about the 18^th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova, who wrote exclusively in the Georgian language. (Paradjanov [1924-1990] employed an extravagantly imagistic and magical style of filmmaking, sometimes compared to Pasolini’s, which went against the official style of “Soviet Realism.” When he was sentenced to five years at hard labor in the gulag during the 1970s, leading filmmakers of France and Spain lent their voices to the worldwide outcry of protest. However, in a 1988 interview with Ron Holloway, Parajanov credited his early release to the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon and Aragon’s wife, Elsa Triolet; the novelist John Updike; and the English actor Herbert Marshall. “Sergei Parajanov Speaks Up,” Kinema: a journal for film and audiovisual media, 1995.)

Question: What is the second greatest feature film ever made about a poet?

Answer: Bright Star, 2009, dir. and written by Jane Campion, about John Keats. (Campion’s screenplay was inspired by Andrew Motion’s 1999 Keats biography.)

from the archive; first posted June 2, 2014

The Great B-Sides [by David Lehman]

I just heard Bobby Darin sing "Beyond the Sea" -- wonderful song translated from the French of Charles Trenet -- followed by Sinatra's "Summer Wind." It seems worth pointing out that neither song was on the "A side" of its 45 rpm record. For 200 Monopoly dollars and the pleasure that goes with being absolutely right, identify the songs on the A sides of "Beyond the Sea" and "Summer Wind":

1) "Love Me Tender" and "Witchcraft"
2) "Splish-Splash" and "Hey Jealous Lover"
3) "Mack the Knife" and "Strangers in the Night"
4)  "Dream Lover" and "High Hopes"

from the archive; when first posted, on May 12, 2015, the correct answer was 3) "Mack the Knife" and "Strangers in the Night"

Charles Baudelaire's "Le Vin Des Amants" [translated by Sandra Simonds]

I Love Wine!

 

Today, omg, I’m just so spaced out and splendid,

           as I walk this earth without death, without an apron,

without being a wife and so my heart becomes the nostrils of a winter

        workhorse whose exhalation breaks through the iced, tulip sky.

 

Why does everyone want to torture me?

          All people care about are calendars, clocks, wallets

to time the flesh; Well, I can’t take it!  

 

So here ich bin, all balanced and delirious,

                tapping into some long forgotten intelligence—

 

Oh sister, let’s go to the Oregon coast

           and relax inside the boxed wine paradise of our dreams. 

 

—© 2014 Sandra Simonds

From the archive; We first posted this highly imaginative translation of Baudelaire's "Le Vin Des Amants" (*literally 'the wine of lovers') on January 17, 2014. Pictured above: Charles Baudelaire.

Haiku Exchange 1/22/03 [David Lehman and David Shapiro]

DL to DS
NY Unstuck Exchange (Hi, koo!)

Three drops of blood on
a hill of snow: signal for
rebellion to start.

Two snakes intertwined
around a tree: signal for
couple to have sex.

One touch of Venus
and I will marry the world
with my stiff penis.

I know you knew that
was coming. Of planets I
can’t resist Venus.

How about a new
school of poetics? OK,
but what to call it?

Do you suppose these
haikus will be published and
read on a glad day? [DL, 1 / 20 / 03]

DS to DL

I have one reader
in mind, but probably she
will be glad elsewhere!

this is my haiku
to the addressee slipped way
beyond the world's wake!

Call Poetry Mind
Call all else stupidity
Call squirrel there squirrel!

To pronounce squirrel squirrel
In last stanza change accents
Squirrel is still same squirrel!

Oh nominalist
Oh Zeno halfway there, let
her read us one day!

Here I am at school
In front of blue computer
Fairly serene Fool—         [DS, 1 / 21 / 03]

DL to DS
Monocle, Mon Oncle

Good afternoon, my
friend. Um, how would you define
nominalism?

To define the word
in one haiku seems a task
worthy of your skill.

What did Stevens mean
by writing the “clashed edges
of two words that kill”?

This is my haiku
to the world that never sent
one to Emily:

In January
I always think of David
Shapiro’s first book.   [DL, 1 / 21 / 03]

DS to DL
Haiku no explanation but a vision of Wally and the Liberty Dime (coldsnap)

Only the word lives
for the nominalist -- words
clash: no cold ideas!

Just two words breaking
in Stevens' cave, no fire --
just words -– fireflies -–

Thanks for the memries --
the buried 15 yr old
now lost in old years —

Near Plato's highway
Wallace walks with his wife, but
only words they say!

They go opposite
each other and are happy
Pigeons stay indoors!

That's what the Times sez!
Pigeons indoors! Spouses! Crimes!
Criminals! Ideas!

Well, David, this is
not the complete Clash or edge
just nominal fee --- !

I know that words kill
Because blind History taught
blind Homer they will----

But haikus could be
little consoled birds inside
warm ferries flying--!      [DS, 1 / 22 / 03]

DL to DS
Time for one more haiku

In my sleep I wrote
haiku of wonder but then
the bird flew away.

Nor raven nor crow
yet that blackbird made circles
in the sky and snow.

No nominalist,
That bird was lordly, a sir,
Yes: Sir Realist.

Stevens and wife walked
to end of street and he turned
left and she turned right.

Two swords that kill do
so with greater skill than two
words that kill, n'est-ce pas?    [DL, 1 / 22 / 03]

Photos: (1) top left David Lehman in Washington Square park / photo credit Brian Adams  (2) David Shapiro beside poem beginning "I have one reader."

Happy 233 Birthday Bad Boy Byron

I WANT a hero: an uncommon want,
  When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
  The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
  I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan--
We all have seen him, in the pantomime
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time,  

       -- Don Juan, Canto I

--sdl