The Best American Poetry

Some other time. . .

 

 

Michael O’Keefe: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Put Up Your Dukes

 

The last time my father beat me

I was fifteen years old.

After instructing me to “mow the fucking lawn,”

to which I wittily replied, “No fucking way,”

he pinned me against the Chippendale wall

of the library in our new semi-colonial mansion

(Did I mention he was doing quite well since he quit drinking?)

and began working on me like

Sugar Ray Robinson worked on Jake La Motta

but with a distinct difference:

I didn’t fight back.

You don’t hit your father, I thought.

 

Earlier that year I’d acted the part of Peter Pan.

Capitalizing on my androgynous appearance,

and the deeper knowledge

that all the cute girls were into theater,

I landed my first leading role.

The night before we opened my brother made the mistake

of changing channels on the TV without asking my permission.

I beat him mercilessly.

His cries and screams only made me beat him more

because he simply wanted to see what else was on. 

The next night, as one of the Lost Boys, he couldn’t be heard.

I stood in the wings waiting to enter knowing

he would never trust me again.  He never has.

 

So, when Pop began the beating I didn’t fight back

and would never fight back again, at least not

with my hands and teeth, the way I used to.

 

That’s the way peace begins: one beating at a time.     

_________________________________________________________________________

As an actor, Michael O'Keefe has garnered both Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations. He's appeared in the films Eye In the Sky, Michael Clayton, Frozen River, The Pledge, Ironweed,  Instant Family, The Great Santini, and Caddyshack.  Television audiences will recognize him as CIA Agent John Redmond on Homeland and remember him as "Fred" on Roseanne.  Other TV appearances also include The West Wing, Blue Bloods, Sleepy Hollow, Law and Order, House M.D., The Closer, Brothers and Sisters, and City on a Hill. He's appeared on Broadway in Reckless, Side Man, The Fifth of July, and Mass Appeal, for which he received a Theater World Award.  As a writer, his lyrics were in the Grammy-winning song, “Longing in their Hearts,” which was composed and sung by Bonnie Raitt.  He's also written with Irish singer-songwriter Paul Brady and numerous other composers, including Suzzy Roche.  His writing has appeared  in magazines such as BOMB, Mindful, Lake Affect, and Chaparral. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College.  His collection of poems, Swimming from Under My Father, came out in 2009. He has been a Zen practitioner for almost thirty years, and is a Dharma Holder in the Zen Peacemaker Order.

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                                            George Bellows. Dempsey and Firpo, 1924. Oil on canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sir Larry: an astrological profile [by David Lehman]

On this day in 1989, Sir Laurence Olivier breathed his last. The great actor was eighty-two when he shuffled off this mortal coil. He was a master of accents and disguises. As a young man he played the romantic (Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights," "Hamlet," "Henry V," the dashing leading man in "Rebecca," Darcy in "Pride and Prejudice"). In middle age he brought Othello to life, played opposite Marilyn Monroe in one of moviedom's weirdest pairings, was the Roman boss in "Spartacus," embodied the seedy over-the-hill "entertainer," and had enough left in the tank to play the good guy Nazi hunter opposite Gregory Peck in "The Boys from Brazil," on the one hand, and the odious Nazi dentist in "Marathon Man," the best movie about dentistry ever made, which begins with a brilliant car chase (or race) pitting a Holocaust survivor versus an unrepentant Nazi and features a very menacing Olivier, suave Roy Scheider as a spook in Paris, and the earnest Dustin Hoffman as Scheider's younger brother running around the Central Park reservoir. [Ed.: That was quite a mouthful, DL, Split sentence in two?] Olivier and Gielgud play two important Dads in "Brideshead Revisited," which was the hottest thing in highbrow TV in 1982 and '83.

Laurence Olivier was born in Dorking on May 22, 1907, sneaking into Gemini but with as much Taurus trailing him as the clouds that trail the blessed babe in Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode." Olivier was grandiloquent. The risk of overstatement was always at hand. He had his Academy Award speech memorized and delivered it like a Roman emperor. Luckily it was not he but others who wrote the scripts of his movies. His best writers were Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, and Shaw. At the moment of his birth, Jupiter was approximately 180 seconds away from an exact conjunction with Neptune. The association with romantic characters of passion, melancholy, and excellent elocution  -- Hamlet, Henry V, Heathcliff, the master of Manderley, and Mr. Darcy -- is implicit.

The dialogue among the earth (Taurus, Capricorn) and air signs (Gemini) accounts not only for the temperament but also for the ability to make the practical adjustments needed as middle age succeeds youth and makes way in turn for elder statesman status. Olivier shone in all three periods of productive adulthood. There is more yin than yang in his chart and his bisexuality was well-known but no big deal. He was crazy about Danny Kaye, and look at the lascivious looks he, the imperial Roman, gives to slave Tony Curtis in "Spartacus."

The fact that Larry's Venus is in Aries (fire) while Vivien Leigh's Venus is in Libra (air) may help to explain the legendary heat and intensity of their initial attraction in 1937. Two years later, when she played Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind" while he lurked in the moors in "Wuthering Heights," they were just about the most glamorous couple in Hollywood (and the competition included Clark Gable and Carole Lombard). Leigh was magnificent but her nervous disposition exacerbated by two miscarriages (1945, 1955), a diagnosis of tuberculosis in her left lung (1944) and the natural decay of the aging process led her to extremes of depression. The marriage lasted twenty years. He saw her loss of physical beauty as an accusation made by nature or the fates, and the ungallant remarks he made after her death testified to their brutal lovers' spats (see Holly Greil, "The Times") and his arrogant self-satisfaction (according to Max McGlow, "The Guardian"). The aging of Scarlett O'Hara's gorgeous face made Leigh's role in "Ship of Fools," where she plays a "mature" woman, so poignant.

After the divorce Olivier married actress Joan Plowright and spent his late eighteen years with this sensible and intelligent woman. No one remembers the name of his first wife, however. If you know to whom he was married (for ten full years) prior to Viv, you could win big. Hint: her name was Jill Esmond. But who was she?

Larry became Sir Laurence in 1948. Not until many years later did people learn that Olivier in Hollywood in the early 1940s was a foreign agent operating in behalf of the British government to try to recruit the US into the war. This could have been foreseen if one had factored in that Gemini was his rising sign -- and his moon was in Virgo! (Source: David Niven.)

Sir Laurence (later Lord Olivier) and Marlon Brando were the exact same height (5'10) but otherwise had little in common. (The same goes for Mick Jagger and Victor Hugo.) Other Geminis born on May 22 include Richard Wagner and Arthur Conan Doyle, which pretty much explains the dynamic of eccentric British empiricism and high German myth-making that encircles the Brunhilde of virginity with the three rings of masterly artistic flame over which the hero must leap in the dramatic depiction of Sir LO's life.

Sir Larry won the best actor Oscar in 1948 and founded the National Theatre in London in 1962.

Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on cheekily on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.

-- DL

"In Shakespeare" [by James Richardson]

In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect.   People confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
because they panic and can=t feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, and die -- yes, finally -- in glad pain.

You marry a woman you've never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy. 
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice.  Your children are lost, 
they come back, you don't remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life.   O god, it's all so realistic
I can't stand it.   Whereat I weep and sing.

Such a relief to burst from the theater
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who's who and what's what,
and command with Metrocards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor,
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.

-- James Richardson

Perne in a Gyre [by Mitch Sisskind]

1.
Think about it for a minute and you'll see
How nothing is further in the past than 
Anything else. Either it's in the past or
It's not. Boom, bang. Case closed.

You may think the pyramids are far 

In the past but there's no such thing
As far in the past or close in the past,
There's only the past plain and simple
With no far or near so if somebody
Dies they get grandma on one side
And King Tut on the other side, 
All in the same boat so don't make it
More complicated than it has to be

Like a lot of people tend to do.

 

2.
What about the future? The future is

Like a swirling maelstrom or vortex
Of water where many outcomes are
Possible whereas the past is like
When the water has turned into ice
And you're stuck with it indefinitely.
Unlike the past some things are
Further in the future than others
But I admit I don't know exactly
How it works. Maybe the ice melts
And the past turns into the future 
Again so you can get another 
Chance at it like in karma or in
The movie "Groundhog Day." 

3.
I am not the smartest person 
In the world and anyway who is
The smartest person in the world?
I asked my mother that question 
In 1952 and she said Albert Einstein

Which might have been correct in  

1952 but everything is always in flux.
That is what A.N. Whitehead meant  

By process and reality or how when  

W.B. Yeats wrote perne in a gyre 
Nobody knew what he meant and 
We still don't know so its meaning
Is always in flux. Or what if we're all 

Inside some big computer game?

 

"Perhaps a Sentence": The Rationale for Creative Writing [by Irwin Shaw]

<<<
It is generally believed in literary cricles that everybody has at least one novel in him. I doubt that. I have found a few men and women who do have one novel in them, but the greatest number of people I have met have perhaps a sentence in them or at the very most a short story.
>>>

<<<
He'd written a very good review of a picture of yours, and you said, "That man writes so badly I get angry at him even when he gives me a rave."
>>>

<<<
How easy it was to make someone hate you for life. With one sentence.
>>>

from Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw -- DL

Molly Arden writes a poem [by Molly Arden]

I started writing this poem some years ago when I spent a semester at Magdalen College in Oxford. It turned up today when I took out my Magdalen College folder and remembered having lunch with David and Stacey when they visited Oxford that November. It was the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the new century and there was a convention of poets and critics from different countries discussing the influence of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and other so-called World War I poets. (David gave a paper on "Prufrock" as an anti-war poem.) I came across the poem today, which had nothing to do with the conference but with a tendency in literary criticism. Although I like what I wrote, it sems incomplete. My working title is "The Critic," but I'm not wedded to it. I invite readers of the BAP blog to submit possible 6-line endings. My thanks to David Lehman for being such a dapper sport and for pointing out that the poem needs six more lines. -- MA, 15  May 2021

<<<
The Critic

Gives offense; is seen as a truthteller
is an age of compulsory bullshit; but, hell,
this guy’s a fake, and it’s irritating
that he is so goddamn calculating. 
I don't believe a word he says.
The more he insults the more praise
he covets and seems to get
from the poetry-hating propeller set.
>>>

Out of Reach [by Lera Auerbach]

Ink on Music Paper © Lera Auerbach

 

When something is out of reach – sometimes it is just out of reach by a tiny bit, not close enough to grasp, but almost there. At other times, it is so enormously out of reach that reaching for it is altogether unthinkable. 

Jessye Norman was giving a masterclass at the Juilliard School. A student singer had difficulty reaching the highest note; it kept sounding flat and unrefined. The harder she tried, the worse it sounded. Norman stopped the student. She whispered to her, "The note is already there. All you have to do is let it sound. Just like that." And Norman sang a perfectly executed passage without any preparation.

 

"On the Day of Atonement" [poem by Yehuda Amichai]

On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I put on
my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City of
    Jerusalem.
For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop,
not far from the Damascus Gate, a shop with
buttons and zippers and spools of thread
in every color and snaps and buckles.
A rare light and many colors, like an open Ark.

I told him in my heart that my father too
had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.
I explained to him in my heart about all the decades
and the causes and the events, why I am now here
and my father’s shop was burned there and he is buried here.

When I finished, it was time for the Closing of the Gates.
He too lowered the shutters and locked the gate
and I returned, with all the worshippers, home.

                translation by Stephen Mitchell

-- sdl

 

The New York School Diaspora, Part One (Denise Duhamel) [by Angela Ball]

DEAR AMERICAN AMNESIA,

I know you are only trying to make

white people feel better—

and some of us might even appreciate it,

but maybe it’s good you sometimes let us remember

certain things, like the origin of gratuities.

Racist restaurant owners “hired” newly freed

slaves who they didn’t have to pay

and passed on the expense to diners

who had the choice of tipping

or not. Any American waitstaff or stripper  

today knows how temperamental

a customer can be—how grabby, how angry,

or sullen. How cheap. By 1938,

America established a minimum

wage, but not for hospitality

workers who were expected to live

off tips. (Translation: Ladies,

shake those tits.) The Great Depression

and Great Recession seem quaint and faraway

because you prefer we deep-six the fact

Wall Street hasn’t changed. But, Amnesia,

sometimes even you can’t repress

everything in us—consider our American paranoia

and guilt. Chomsky says zombies

are just the latest manifestation of our need

to be punished for what we’ve done

to the Indians and slaves. How easy it is

to make white Americans afraid. Afraid we’ll be

treated the way we’ve treated others. Jen Hofer asks,

through which holes does history break into our day?

Who built the White House?

Why are corporate cubicles shaped

like swastikas? Why are there so few

Asian leading men? When the 60’s           

revolution happened, women turned

to vintage clothing so fashion magazines had to

do something to control them, get them back.

Enter diet pills and the term cellulite. Rubens

celebrated those bumps in his 17^th century paintings,

but a 1968 issue of Vogue decried them  

as a disease the most focused of women could cure

through exercise, diet, and rubbing their legs

with special rolling pins. Now the wage gap   

is replaced by the thigh gap,

as we try to squelch

that persistent subcutaneous fat,

bubbling up like everything, Amnesia,

you’d rather we forget.

I wrote “Dear American Amnesia” after reading Rachel E. Greenspan’s article “’It's the Legacy of Slavery’: Here's the Troubling History Behind Tipping Practices in the U.S.” (Time, October 15, 2018).  I remembered all my waitressing jobs, the lousy shifts, the fussy customers, and my smiling incessantly even when I wanted to pour coffee over the head of a customer who grabbed me as I walked by his table. The poem started down that path but suddenly veered into bigger questions of who America values in society, who we pay well, who we pay poorly, and why.

--Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She served as the guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013. She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

The New York School Diaspora Part One: Denise Duhamel

I have long believed that the poets of the New York School, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler, have exercised a lingering and salutary influence on American poetry. This conviction led to a 2014 Symposium at the University of Southern Mississippi, “ The New York School of Poetry and the South,” featuring Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, and David Lehman, and a special issue of Valley Voices, a literary journal based at Mississippi Valley State University. In this blog post and others to follow I will showcase what I term the New York School diaspora, a concept that I hope to make clear with poems by writers who honor the virtues of play, wit, the chaos of reality and the belief that, to paraphrase Frank O’Hara, life is too important to strangle with seriousness

“Dear American Amnesia,” part of Denise Duhamel’s topical and captivating new book of poems, Second Story, owes something to Kenneth Koch’s ground-breaking reformulation of the apostrophe: a poem addressed to an abstract entity or quality. Koch’s progenitor here is, of course, one of his first poetic saints, Percy Bysshe Shelly. Koch’s departure from his source resides in the degree of intimacy he assumes, an easy colloquialism both humorous and poignant. Koch perfects this technique in his 2000 volume, New Addresses, with poems like “To World War Two,” that begins with “Early on you introduced me to young women in bars,” progresses to “As machines make ice / we made dead enemy soldiers . . .” and ends, “You died of a bomb blast in Nagasaki, and there were parades.” Koch had never before written a poem about his WWII experiences, but the impersonally personal nature of his new address created an expansive context that made it possible. By addressing abstraction in “Dear American Amnesia,” Duhamel isolates the obliviousness of our dominant culture, defining it by what it chooses to ignore. 

Duhamel’s poem addresses the gap between the way things are and the way they ought to be: a gap obscured by miasmas of amnesia. Not only does this approach produce humor—“(Translation: Ladies, /shake those tits.)”—but frees the poem from the tediousness of assigning blame to particular people. We are both victims and enablers of such notions as “the thigh gap.” 

In pointing out some of the affinities of “Dear American Amnesia” with The New York School of Poets, I don’t mean to suggest that the poem is derivative. Duhamel’s letter poem joins what Wallace Stevens called “the long conversation between poets” bearing its own inimitable stamp.

--Angela Ball

Angela Ball, Guest Author

Today we welcome Angela Ball as a guest author. Angela teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. The author of six volumes of poetry, most recently Talking Pillow (University of Pittsburgh Press), she splits her time between Hattiesburg, MS and Covington, LA with her two dogs, Miss Bishop and Scarlet. Welcome, Angela.  --sdl

 

Angela will be writing about what she terms "the New York School Diaspora": poets who, though they may live in Florida or California, Chicago or Boston, have absorbed the influence of New York School poets (Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara, and Schuyler) and done noteworthy things with it. Welcome, Angela. -- DL 

Great Songs of Cinema [by Elizabeth Samet]

What do you think of first? “Over the Rainbow,” “As Time Goes By,” “Singin’ in the Rain”? Win, place, and show on the AFI’s “Top Movie Songs of All Time” list. My pick, Judy Garland’s devastating “The Man That Got Away,” from A Star is Born, comes in at #11. It was another Garland song, “Get Happy,” the triumphant final number in Summer Stock, that launched what became a feature in my film class this semester: “Movie Song of the Day.” This innovation was inspired by some extremely music-savvy students in the class—astonishingly well versed in everything from Alternative Country to Tin Pan Alley, nearly impossible to stump, able to hum obscure covers of obscurer originals. Lately, owing to their tutelage, I find myself with a rather eclectic mix on the iPod.... It is one wild ride to work in the morning. After Garland, I brought in everything from Fred Astaire’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (Blue Skies) to The Rolling Stones’ “Monkey Man,” one of the many songs featured in that magnificent montage toward the end of Goodfellas. One morning I played The Doors’ “Peace Frog,” featured in, of all movies, The Waterboy—a fact one member of the class announced even before Morrison had time to warm up. My students also began to bring in their favorites: Bobby Bare’s cover of Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s alkin’” (Midnight Cowboy), Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy” (Nashville), Citizen Cope’s “Bullet and a Target” (Alpha Dog).

from the archive; first posted Novdmber 22, 2014

Harryette Mullen: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo of Harryette Mullen by Hank Lazer, Venice, CA, 2007

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We Are Not Responsible

We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives.

We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions.

We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts.

We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.

 

Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations.

In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on.

Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments.

 

If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way.

In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself.

Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle

your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we

are unable to find the key to your legal case.

 

You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile.

You are not presumed to be innocent if the police

have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet.

It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color.

 It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.

 

Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude.

You have no rights that we are bound to respect.

Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible

for what happens to you.

________________________________________________________________________________

Harryette Mullen’s books include Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006), winner of a PEN

Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California,

2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and

Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of essays and interviews, The Cracks

Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be, was published in 2012 by

University of Alabama. Graywolf published Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka

Diary in 2013. She teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature,

and creative writing at UCLA. [See this link for more poems and information.]

________________________________________________________________________________

         Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Club Scene), 2013; acrylic and glitter on unstretched canvas.

"Why 'Nixonland' Matters" [by Joe Lehman]

When I was twenty-five, backpacking through Australia, I carried with me my hardcover copy of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. It absorbed me for all seven months of my journey. I took flight to the land of Oz in late October 2008. Nixonland hit the stores in May of that fateful year of financial crisis. Having recently taken it off my bookshelf, I can report that the book holds up well and has a special relevance for us today. It is that rare thing, a thick history book suitable for a college class that is a most pleasurable page-turner.

For those of us born after the end of the ‘60s (I was born in 1983), we have long been used to the romanticized mythology of the era. We conjure up an image of bell-bottom-wearing long-haired hippies, driving around in psychedelic-painted VW buses, getting high on LSD and marijuana, protesting the war in Vietnam, and practicing free love.

Written from a left-of-center perspective, Nixonland has no illusions about the title figure and his presidential predecessor, yet rips the mask off the pastoral vision of acid-tripping dropouts and collegiate idealists to reveal a less pretty picture of moral anarchy, ruined lives, and gun violence. Read this book and your views of that era will lose their rosy hue. Perlstein paints a radical picture of a country gone insane with political brutality, cultural discord, and social decay. Flower people were not always loveable innocents:

           <<<< Love was in the eye of the beholder. At first downtown merchants welcomed the hippie district that sprang up on Plumb Street in Detroit; it was attracting people to their stores. Then they realized that the hippies liked their stores so much because they could panhandle from paying customers (“I wish we could have had the hippies without the dope,” said one merchant, after the forty-three shops on Plumb Street had shrunk down to six.) (185)  >>>>

Nixonland reads like one big Roman chariot race through hell. Stories of race riots, assassinations, bombings, a divisive war in Vietnam, infighting between (and within) left and right, and the reign of a Machiavellian president occupy every page.

One month before my departure to Australia the U.S. economy had come to the brink of collapse, and the Great Recession was in its early stages. On the first Tuesday in November, just over a week after I landed down under, America ushered in the election of the first African-American president. It was, despite the financial calamity, a hopeful moment. In the time since, however, the country has suffered riots, protests, mass shootings, a polarized populace, and a coronavirus sweeping through like a medieval plague. And as I leaf through my worn copy of Nixonland once more, I realize that I am no longer standing apart from the happenings of a chaotic world. The outbreak of COVID-19 did nothing to unify a polarized society. If anything the crisis in civility and the rise of discord have worsened. On Facebook, friendships terminate because of petty political disagreements, and the general tone of debate demonstrates that virtual bullying is as brutal as the physical kind. The Roman Chariot race through Hell that is described in Nixonland seems far more pressing today than it did upon its hardcover publication in 2008.

A history of America from 1964 to 1972, Nixonland goes from “all the way with LBJ” in 1964 to “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” in 1968; and from there to the resurrection of Richard Nixon and his reelection for years later despite a third-rate burglary on the offices of the political opposition at a previously obscure apartment complex called Watergate. In these eight years America went through what Perlstein bluntly calls a “second civil war.” Just as now, factions of left and right were continually feuding. Vietnam cut the population into two opposing camps. Young people declared war on people over thirty, and the reaction came swiftly enough from folks who pledged allegiance to Bob Hope, “God Bless America,” and Sousa marches on July 4th. “Nixon acted not despite the Silent Majority he described as so pure and decent, but in a sense on their behalf, and even at their request,” Perlstein writes. “His paranoia and dread were their own. Across the state of mind known as Middle America, a subterranean viciousness was bubbling ever closer to the surface.” (519)

Perlstein traces Nixon’s ascent to the presidency from the “wilderness” period when, after being prematurely written off, he scraped together the allegiances and alliances that gained him the 1968 Republican nomination for president. During his first term, he aspired to wind down the Vietnam War, engage in détente with the Soviet Union, and open relations with Red China. In two of those aims he may be said to have succeeded; Nixon was a canny politician and had the benefit of an extraordinary secretary of state. Peace “with honor” proved elusive. The ugly war dragged on. It is likely that on his own Nixon would never have committed half a million soldiers to an unwinnable war in Southeast Asia, as Johnson, McNamara, Rusk, and the Bundy brothers did. But how to end it?

The foreign policy successes did not lessen the amount of civil unrest in the nation. Perlstein juxtaposes the narrative of Nixon’s rise, his wielding of power, and his overwhelming defeat of Senator George McGovern in 1972, with descriptions of horrific crimes committed during the same period. These include massacres committed by the Manson Family in 1969 and Richard Speck’s slaughter of eight student nurses three years earlier. Perlstein also notes the shift in the civil rights and antiwar movements from nonviolence to militancy. “This was,” according to Perlstein “something Richard Nixon, with his gift for looking below social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath, understood: the future belonged to the politician who could tap the ambivalence–the nameless dread, the urge to make it all go away; to make the world placid again, not a cacophonous mess.” As for the personality of Richard Nixon, here was a man who could wake up the day after winning forty-nine of the nation’s fifty states and feel depressed.

Perlstein charts the period through an inspection of changes in pop culture. For example, he contrasts the reactions of liberals and conservatives to movies with polar opposite themes. In 1967, the right flocked to see John Wayne sound the fighting charge in the jingoistic Vietnam film The Green Berets. The New York Times critic panned the movie. Perlstein quotes the arch-segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond:

“I have not yet had the opportunity to see this movie,” he drawled. But “I have become convinced that this must be one of the most admirable movies of our generation, after reading the review which appeared last week in the New York Times. . . That set me to wondering what on earth the standards of criticism are that are current in the New York Times for a film that is patriotic and pro-American.” (278)

Meanwhile, the left was infatuated with images of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway blowing away civilians and officers of the law until they meet their own gruesome fate in Bonnie & Clyde. Perlstein defines the reasoning of the movie’s instant fans: “They weren’t bad folks, went the movie’s moral logic, until an evil system forced them to extremity: robbing banks that repossessed farms, killing only when the System was closing in all around them… Bonnie and Clyde made those around them feel alive – all except the squares who were chasing them, who were already more or less dead anyway, with their sucker obsession with honest toil.” (209)

Apparently cinema is the mirror reflecting both sides’ sense of values.

Perlstein describes the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the attempt on George Wallace, and the bitterness that ensued. There were other eye-opening events that presage a scary future. In the “planned riot” in Cleveland in 1968, snipers from the “Black Nationalists of New Libya” executed several police officers; in 1971, during the Attica prison uprising in upstate New York, both convicts and guard-hostages were killed in an assault by state troopers. Perlstein illustrates, too, how the chaos in America dovetailed with violence abroad, such as the 1972 massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, Germany, at the hand of Palestinian terrorists. His reportage covers both the liberal and reactionary responses of ordinary citizens. A perfect example of an out-of-touch media occurred during the siege of Attica, when New York Times reporter Tom Wicker addressed a group of relatives of the captive prison guards. Wicker launched into an impassioned speech about the hostage-takers’ solidarity over their brutal treatment by the corrections authorities. The relatives responded by hurling insults and epithets at Wicker, protesting his obvious sympathy for the convicts.

Perlstein is able to draw an indissoluble connection between the events on the ground and the complex personality of Richard Nixon, with his uncanny ability to tap into the passions and political desires of the “Silent Majority” of Americans, who yearned for law and order amid the turmoil. These included the northern “hardhats” and the southern “rednecks.” Perlstein argues that Nixon saw the world in terms of the conflict between two student groups from his university days: the Franklins and the Orthogonians. The former consisted of the rich kids, polished and well-bred, who seemed to have the path to success paved for them. The latter group consisted of outsiders and striving underdogs from the lower-middle and working classes. Nixon himself was an Orthogonian; he rose from a hardscrabble background as the son of a California grocer. John F. Kennedy, his arch political rival, was the epitome of a Franklin; a millionaire’s son with matinee idol looks, a good war record, and the habits of a playboy.  According to Perlstein, for Nixon this dichotomy extends to every group of people. Perhaps surprisingly, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein qualify as the Orthogonians of the newsroom. They are plucky questers, piecing together the facts of the Watergate scandal, with shoe-leather reporting, whereas the Franklins of the newsroom are the well-heeled veteran White House correspondents.

Nixonland is the second entry in Rick Perlstein’s quartet of books covering the emergence of the New Right. Before the Storm (2001) chronicled Barry Goldwater’s doomed GOP Presidential campaign of 1964; The Invisible Bridge (2014) follows Nixon's resignation through Ronald Reagan’s challenge to incumbent President Gerald Ford in 1976. Most recently, Reaganland tells the tale of the much-maligned Jimmy Carter presidency and Reagan’s emergence in 1980.

What struck me about Nixonland in 2008 and continues to resonate in 2021 is the way Perlstein captures the idealistic cluelessness of the liberal side versus the cold Machiavellianism of the right. Just as Tom Wicker was blindsided by the reaction of his audience at Attica, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate Senator George McGovern was blindsided by the reactions he faced from the voting public. In one campaign stop, McGovern played a reel of gory photographs of wounded civilians in Vietnam, hoping perhaps to guilt-trip Americans into voting for him as the peace candidate. This was a misfire if only because the vast number of Americans are motivated not by sentimental appeals to their consciences but by practical self-interest. Richard Nixon clearly understood this, as he promised to pull out from the war “with honor” and appealed to patriotic and sometimes nationalistic impulses in the voters’ minds. Meanwhile the Democrats were busy shooting themselves in the foot, nominating Senator Thomas Eagleton for vice president, then ditching him post-convention when it turned out that he was a depressive who had seen shrinks and gone through shock therapy. Yet even in landslide victory, Nixon noted that his congressional coattails were shorter than he had hoped for, and he obsessed about his foes. Foes he certainly had. Nixon’s whole political career demonstrates the saying that even paranoids have enemies.

Today the insurgent progressive left of the Democratic Party seems to have perfected political guilt-tripping almost to a science. As a result, its losses are catastrophic (2016) and its wins often pyrrhic (2020). During the early years of the Obama presidency, I observed that Obama would have fewer problems if he learned the lessons of Nixonland. One lesson is that when facts are overtaken by narrative, it is difficult to overcome the narrative. For McGovern, it was impossible to defeat the label of being the candidate of “Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion.” Whether Obama’s Democratic successor Biden has ever taken the time to read Nixonland or not, I do not know. He should. It just may improve his chances for a successful presidency.

Click here to read Joe Lehman on "The Return of Martin Guerre."

A Lie [by Lera Auerbach]

Finek

My dog
whimpered
quietly
in his sleep.
His legs
were twitching –
he had a nightmare.

I woke him up
gently
with a lie:
“It’s all right,
I will never
leave you
alone.”

 

 

"Five One-Minute Eggs" [by Andrei Codrescu]

1. THE ECONOMY

We used to make things we didn’t understand (Marx), consumed by people who didn’t understand us, and now we don’t even understand the people who are making them, that is us. Our misunderstandings progress.

We consume things that are familiar, and the more familiar they get, the less we know or sympathize with ourselves, the people who make them. We are not familiar with the parts of these things that other people make, but we love to use them. Technology is familiar, people are not. The people who make TVs know us from TV better than we know them or ourselves. When we are not on TV, we are waiting to slit our (their) throats. The German economy thrives because Germans make “the thing that goes inside the thing that goes inside the thing.” 

Can you love people you don’t understand? With a blender and a mixer and an iPhone.
The Jesuits would be pleased.
Why would God need to choose a people when there are all these machines around.
What else would He do with the Salvation Army warehouses?

2. POUND IN THE OZARKS

5 time grimace:
pro patria
pro domo
pro usura
pro forma
pro pane

3. EXPANSIVE SONG

Space is my Baby
Time is my Bitch

(with Vince Cellucci)

 4. I BROKER

“in this army you break down your body like a gun ascertain its needs and reassemble it for action when they’ve been met”
The Manual

splitting hairs for commodities
the centrifugal force that dismembers matter into sellable minis

the broker broke down his body and ordered its needs from a catalogue
everything arrived by mail overnight and the broker reassembled hermself
by the time the market opened
herm hoped to make enough to post a profit
pn the increasing needs of herm body
“every day you don’t sell you buy”
herm ever-expanding ever-needy body
was an expense that had to be covered by greater profit
so when herm body incorporated the city the country and the globe
it had to be broken down and fed
by myriads of catalogues from outer space
whence the profits had to also eventually come
today herm franchised copper on mars and sold
the green algae noon meal of the cloned venus from last night

i went to sleep without a shower and woke up malcontent
but my daughters brought me time for breakfast
i was happy with the design
some retro some yet to be duplicated
what counts is attitude

5. SAN MICHELE

it’s got to be raining in Venice

to write like Henry James
was never your wish in even
the most twisted version of yourself

from The Best American Poetry 2013 edited by Denise Duhamel

Poets, Law and Order, and Criminal Intent

An interoffice exchange from July 2009

WTF!!?!

L&OCI Hey, what does Law and Order Criminal Intent have against poets? In last night's episode, "Passion," an arrogant poet/editor pimps out his young attractive assistants to potential financial backers.  During tonight's episode, "Folie a Deux," a poet who is likely involved in the caper (I'm writing this mid-show) is a plagiarist. Why so many poet-criminals?

Maybe one of the show's writers is an aspiring poet. I think they're playing with loaded dice. What do you think?

                                                                          -- sdh (7/ 13/ 09)

 

 

 

7/ 14/ 09

Me, I think it's a crap shoot. Tonight, for the second time in the last two days, "Jacob Garrity," the bard of Queens College (as opposed to the queen of Bard College), has  been murdered by his ex-girlfriend, who is handy with a knife and goes around quoting Yeats ("That is no country for old men"). After finding out how rotten the poets are to one another, one of the detectives (Jeff Goldblum's partner) says that if her daughter ever got interested in poetry, she'd urge her to go into the Mafia instead. "Nicer people."

-- dl

Love Most of You Too by Dustin Brookshire [by Nin Andrews]

I have a particular weakness for what I call gossip poems--poems that make me feel as if I’m eavesdropping on a juicy conversation. They remind me of my father, a talented gossip, though he preferred to call himself a raconteur. He gave me lessons in storytelling when I was a girl, asking how my school day was in the evenings. If I said it was fine, that everyone was nice, he would sigh, “If you have something ‘nice’ or ‘fine’ to say, please don’t bore me.” He wasn’t asking me to say mean things. He wanted to know what I was secretly mulling in my mind. And to shorten the distance between what I said and what I thought. 

Dustin Brookshire, whose second chapbook, Love Most Of You Too  is due out from Harbor Editions today, is a master at the gossip poem. The man, I think, really could write soap operas. Witty, smart, entertaining, he knows exactly how our thoughts twist and turn between reality and fantasy, and on and off-topic, as well as in and out of the present moment. His poems create a sense of intimacy and personal drama in a blink. Reading his poem, “I Should Write Soap Operas,” I feel as if he’s confiding in me, only me, that I am his new best friend. How can I resist? How can I not laugh out loud? I especially love his ending, “I’m only saying/ it’s OK not to accept what’s in front of you at face value.” 

I Should Write Soap Operas

My neighbor, well technically she isn’t my neighbor
since she lives on the other side of the building, two floors below,
appeared with a baby a few weeks ago.
I’ve been meaning to tell Paul about the baby
but the daily hum drum of life — work, rest, write —
has blocked my thoughts, but today,
we were walking Daisy and turned a corner
and there she was — baby strapped to chest
with its legs swinging. I think it might be a boy,
but I’m not sure. All the other times I’ve seen it,
it has been covered in a red blanket, which is no help
since red is like yellow when babies are concerned.
Anyway, I’m losing track of my point.
I think the baby is stolen. Paul tells me she is probably babysitting.
I say, She probably stole it. Then add,
But not from another country, as if this legitimizes
my comment. Paul rolls his eyes and tells me she can steal
the baby in one of my poems, but this is not
why I am writing this poem. I’ll admit
I’m the kind of guy who enjoys a giggle
when I hear of someone objecting at a wedding.
I’ll admit I’ve watched Soap Operas since I was eight
and rooted for the villain most of the time.
I adored Vivian and Sami on Days of Our Lives.
My mother threatened to quit taping episodes
when I would cheer for them. You might not know,
Sami stole her baby sister. Well, she stole her half baby sister,
but only she and her cheating mother Marlena
knew about the half part. I’m not saying this is the case
with the mystery baby in my building. I’m only saying
it’s OK not to accept what’s in front of you at face value.

About Love Most Of You Too, Beth Gylys writes: “His poems explore the vicissitudes, limitations and foibles of life and love, sometimes hilariously, sometimes subtly, sometimes with the force of a razor blade to a wrist. The book both pays tribute to his poetic idol, Denise Duhamel, and solidly establishes Brookshire’s singularly sassy, incisive confessional voice. From the more serious poems that address homophobia to the politically charged poems to the hilarious “Rule #3 of Sexual Relations” (a delightful romp, impossible to summarize), emotional acuity, ferocity, and facility with form are on full display in this page-turning gem.”

Dustin Brookshire, a finalist for the 2021 Scotti Merrill Award, is the founder/editor of Limp Wrist and curator of the Wild & Precious Life Series, a Zoom-based poetry reading series. He is the author of the chapbooks Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012).  Dustin’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been published in or is forthcoming in Assaracus, Whiskey Island, Mollyhouse, The West Review, Oddball, Gulf Stream Magazine, Redheaded Stepchild, and other publications.  He has been anthologized in Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012) and The Queer South: LGBTQ Writes on the American South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Visit him online at www.dustinbrookshire.com. 

Paris: Waiting on (May &) June Events [by our Paris correspondent]

“People United”, Joanne Leighton. Photo: Patrick Berger 2021

Children, behave!/That’s what they say when we’re together!/ And watch how you play!/They don’t understand/ And so we’re runnin’ just as fast as we can/ holdin’ on to one another’s hand,/ tryin’ to get away into the night,/and then you put your arms around me and we tumble to the gound/and then you say, ‘I think we’re alone now!”/The beating of our hearts is the only sound…

Tommy James and the Shondells, 1967

Paris’ performance spaces are set to open on 19 May. After three lovely days of six performances at the Atelier de Paris’s audience limited and socially-distanced “platforme professionnel”, I want that. I really want it. I long for it.

I am not the only one longing, either. Since late March, like Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s Maine Auntie tying to wish up the telephone to call a quack on the mainland, my pal Huang has been willing the Avignon festival into renewed existence. However, the general tone is on-verra-bien, of battle-weary poilus. Everybody’s sick of everything, whether of the know-nothing yahoos on the right, woe-is-my-purse business types or the jumpy government, afraid things will bugger all at the last minute.

Tempted by tastes of pleasure like Atelier de Paris’ lovely plateforme professionel and longing just to get on with it, I still just don’t know if an opening really should happen this coming Wednesday.

My doubt is part partial observation, part gloomy signs and portents, part finicky rationality, part home truth. Some years back, it seems I inherited that little bird who used to shamelessly tittle-tattle my lies and evasions to my mom. This damnable volatile witters on in a voice pitched between feu-mon doux frère gasping his last prophecy and Cardi-B cheerfully praising her own twat.

“Trace,” croons the bird, “Six weeks on and this so-called world’s-second-greatest-market and super-power-in-its-own-right has vaccinated you once… Not the best of vaccine choices, neither. … And, this R -.75 notwithstanding, the overall data’s no thrill – look at those clusters on the cloud graph … Trace,” sneers my little bird, “Tracy. Is it any wonder that Avignon – then, as now, a dense honeycomb of tiny, airless rooms sweltering inside a stone labyrinth of narrow, humid passages – is most famous for a truly legendary losing bout with the Black Death? … And. Tracy,” the bird pauses for effect, “Listen… When all is said and done, doesn’t contemporary France, private and public, plexiglass, steel and concrete France, conserve, preserve and just still stink with a cheek-by-buttocks social architecture and social organization worthy of medieval Avignon? ”….

I’ve got my doubts indeed. But, finally, the Atelier de Paris’ excellence has shown me a better way. In fact, I’ve already said yes to the opening of the Printemps Arab festival on the day. Damn the torpedoes! And all that.

What made the Atelier so persuasive?

Programmers usually try to capture what’s in the air, what’s good, what’s hip. But, at least this time, the Atelier tried to do only sensibilities. The program was a dance that moves movement, a dance that carries the force of feeling, a dance that just dances, a performance that performs irony, a dance that calls up worlds, a performance that shows philosophy: Liz Santoro’s Mutual Information; Joanne Leighton’s People United; Françoise Tartinville’s Collage, Jeanne Brouaye’s Ce qu’il reste à faire et la où nous en sommes (“What we still need to do and where we’re at”?), Aina Alegre’s R-A-U-X-A , Madeleine Fournier’s La Chaleur (“Rut”?). Exploding math, meta-politics, dancing to dance, irony as truth, world creation, parody is as philosophy. All that beats my cobweb hands down.   

These performances were not just sparklers, either. One of them, at least, Joanne Leighton’s People United, came off as a dance performance, a nearly a perfect ballet, a nearly a perfect happening. Remmember, Mary Poppins, my spiritual auntie, says “nearly” does for “perfect” as we know it in the Vale of tears, here below.

Like Valentine Nagata-Ramos’, BE.GIRLS – also premiered for professionals, at Micadances earlier in the year –  People United, in its near perfection, seemed to me to mark a last milestone on the road to the paradigm shift, O! Devoutly wished. Both groundbreaking. Both gorgeous. Both, absorbing.

So. Not only was not a single one of the Atelier’s chosen plateforme professionnel premiers in any sense a disappointment. Each performance absolutely sparkled with conceptual refinement carried by writerly discipline, materialized by sober scenarists and done by well-practiced performers. I emphasize well-practiced now, in the light of Covidzeitefahrungen, because the besetting sin of France’s (live) performing arts is sloppy execution, which I too often forget to notice. So maybe the Covid emergency has done some good all around.

Keep the Atelier de Paris in mind when you’re next in Paris – the time is not far off.

At least, let’s hope it isn’t. 

Introducing Thomas Moody, Australian Bureau Chief

This week we welcome Thomas Moody as chief of our bureau in Australia. Thomas's poetry and prose have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Los Angeles Review, Hanging Loose, Lindsay Magazine and elsewhere. He is rarely caught with his pants down.

Welcome, Thomas. 

-- sdl