The Best American Poetry

Near Wuhan [by David Shapiro]

I wandered lonely as a map
I had to return to the poisonous, little town of Wuhan
I played with my father’s ancient microscope
And I played with my mother’s telescope
And I met my sister’s metronome
And I walked to the line, the laser line
And I met and I sang
On my way through the buddhafields
On my way through each snowy peak
And I wandered through each snowy jag
I wandered, and that was that
And that was that
I wandered lonely as a map
Showy words and every word
And that was that
Near the poisonous little town of Wuhan
And that was that

--David Shapiro
10 / 25 / 20

From the archive; first posted October 30, 2020

Ed Ochester Retires as Pittsburgh's Poetry Point Person

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A toast to Ed Ochester, to whose retirement we raise our glasses in celebration of his editorial achievement (and poeitc prowess). As director of Pitt Poetry, Ed Ochester has published some of our most consequential poets displaying an ecumenicism of taste sharpened by high intellect, wit, and an ear for the language as spoken. The University of Pittsburgh has released the statement abridged here:

We are at once happy and sad to announce the retirement of our beloved poetry editor, Ed Ochester. Ochester has been the series editor and creative force behind the Pitt Poetry Series of the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1978 and published hundreds of collections by established and rising poets.

Ochester became a driving force of American poetry, working with such poets as Billy Collins, Etheridge Knight, Toi Derricotte, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Tomas Transtomer, Gregory Orr, J. Allyn Rosser, David Wojahn, Kate Daniels, Alicia Ostriker, Jim Daniels, Andrei Codrescu, Adrienne Su, Dean Young, and David Lehman. 

In addition to Ochester’s work selecting and editing collections for the Pitt Poetry Series, he established the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize in 1981, one of the premier prizes for a first full-length book of poems. He was also the editor for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for many years.

Ochester is professor emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is on the faculty of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars. In 2001, Ochester received Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Creative Achievement Award. Ochester has twice served as president of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, where he received the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature in 2006. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Sugar Run Road, Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New, and The Republic of Lies, and was editor of American Poetry Now.

The University of Pittsburgh Press is actively seeking Ochester’s successor. You can read more about the Pitt Poetry Series here.
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Hailey Leithauser: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hailey Leithauser. Photo by Sandra Beasley.

__________________________________________________

Zen Heaven

 

No melon, no lemon, no scone, no crumb,

no tuns of gin or barrels of bourbon,

no chocolate chiffon, no filet mignon.

 

No bumped shins, no bunions, no rain-ached bones,

no lesions or abrasions, no spasms,

nothing swollen, fallen, rotten, or numb.

 

No courtesans or virgins, no woman

or man. No estrogen, progesterone,

not one lone hormone to scorn or condone.

 

No vision, or mission, or chosen son,

no inaction or action, no outcome

of passion, no function, done or undone.

 

No lesson at the end, no dead dial tone.

No one in the tomb, no tomb, no tombstone.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Hailey Leithauser is the author of Swoop, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award, and Saint Worm. Her work appears regularly in journals such as 32 Poems, Agni, Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, and The Yale Review.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Relief panel from Borobudur, the Buddhist temple built in the 9th century A.D. in Java, Indonesia.

Sonnet [by Alexander Lazarus Wolff]

The sun hangs among tatters of clouds;
amber light slides through the interwoven boughs
of the tree beside my window. The day decays,
and a darkness pours into the room like a pool
of black liqueur. Who holds me in mind at this hour?
The question echoes like a knell hung from a tower.
Birds dart toward the darkening sky. The cool
touch of night is all this moment gives.
Lamps drop their light on streets stripped of life,
a quietude replaces the former bustle.
A passerby, laughing on her phone
and walking her dog, wades through the night,
oblivious to this speck of light. She carries on,
leaving me with this quiet room.

Alexander Lazarus Wolff, a student at the College of William & Mary, was born in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1998. He lives in Williamsburg, VA. His work has been published or is forthcoming in  South Florida Poetry Journal, Main Street Rag, Serotonin, The Citron Review, The Plentitudes, and Remington Review. You can find him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/wolffalex108/ and on Instagram @wolffalex108

Tonight at 7 PM (East Coast time): Michael Caine and Poets (including Lally and Lehman)

Organized by Suzanne Lummis: << You won't want to miss this All-Star Line-up. It's a ZOOM event. Click event for link. Please join us! >>

In memoriam Dennis O’Toole (1946--51) [Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dennis O'Toole, Bridie (Flynn) Winch, Terence Winch. Rockaway Beach, NY, August 1948.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When I was five I was involved in an accident that has affected me deeply for the last 70 years. My best friend was a boy named Dennis O'Toole, who lived in the building next to mine on Daly Avenue in the Bronx. One summer day in 1951 the two of us filled up our water guns in my family's apartment & headed out to play. I remember that my mother was ironing & cautioned us to be careful as we ran out of the house.

But we weren't careful. I was about a foot in front of Dennis as we tore across the street, shooting our guns in the air & laughing. Then, suddenly, I sensed something had changed.

When I turned around, I saw that Dennis had been knocked back to the other side of the street, where he was propped up against the tire of a parked car. It was a ghastly scene. There was vomit coming from his mouth and his forehead appeared to be missing. To my left was a black truck. Clearly, I had very narrowly escaped my friend's fate. My memory of all this has always played in my mind without any sound, a silent movie. I think I was in shock. 

Since that terrible black truck ran into my interior life, not a day has gone by when I haven't re-lived this experience. Part of me has always felt that one of my assignments was to live life for both of us. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Survivor

 

I imagine you are just now settling down

for the night, your bed as white as mayonnaise,

which some people apparently prefer to ketchup

or even mustard. I don’t know what you would

have liked, but I pretend that you are exactly like me,

that you have lived on inside my body, my psyche

and have done so since that day you died.

 

I see you as you start to drift off, up there

amid the clouds shaped like clusters of forbidden

fruit, dressed in your flour-white communion suit

and short pants, never to be seen again, never

to attend the Friday night dance at St. Helena’s,

never to get drunk with me on blackberry brandy

in the boys’ bathroom, your absence looming

over the history of the world as I’ve known it.

 

It couldn’t be prevented. The sudden rip

that took you on your trip to the beyond,

while I stayed right here, forever wondering

what hit you on the street that summer day

but failed to take me away as well. I am bereft

of you. I am all now that is left of you.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________                    

                         Terence Winch, James (Jesse) Winch, Dennis O'Toole. Rockaway, NYC. August 1948.

 

Two Poems [by Mitch Sisskind]

The Crow

The crow died and we buried

It with extra earth as in the Iliad

Where stones were fitted tightly

Together against the day when

Spring rains would surely come.

As often happens, there had been

A sudden burst of frantic activity,

A final fluttering one might say

And then transformation into the

Work of art entitled dead crow

Forever unforgotten with clarity

Of future recollection in Nabokov's

Elegant phrasing but not knowing

Or even not knowing how to know

Whether it was male or female.

'I won't throw dirt in that dog's face.'

It's funny, not haha funny but funny

Like when something stays in your

Mind over many years or even for

Your whole life while other things

That would seem to be of greater

Importance deliquesce like when

Frosty the Snowman melted away.

'I won't throw dirt in that dog's face'

Is what I heard a man say in 1975 so

Without going into any detail I'll just

Mention how there are days when

'I won't throw dirt in that dog's face'

Is my first thought in the morning and

Might be my last one when I croak.

The Lehman Trilogy [by David Lehman]

Stacey and I saw "The Lehman Trilogy," the much-heralded three-part, three-actor play, and we didn't have to pay the $2,000 per ticket that scalpers were demanding. Peter Marks of the Washington Post calls it "a sublime 3½-hour dash through the history of American capitalism." The director is Sam Mendes, the actors are Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester, the author is the Italian playwright Stefano Massini, and Ben Power did the adaptation. The play has received rave reviews. The Post reviewer considers it an "indictment of the unregulated capitalism the Lehmans and others practiced over the years — a catalyst for both the stock market crash of 1929 and the 2008 debacle that sank Lehman Bros."

The opening acts, about the emigration to the United States of the three Lehman brothers who founded the dynasty that evolved into the titanic Wall Street firm, are compelling, but as the lengthy play enters the twentieth century it loses more and more credibility. It is important to note that the Brothers and their progeny had shed their ownership and control of the company long before its colossal failure in 2008, so the effort to represent the history of the Lehmans as a parable of capitalism culminating in the fiasco of September 2008 requires an obscuring of facts, which as Michael Dukakis says "are stubborn things."

In brief, the author knows very little, if anything, about the modern history of my family.*

The play underestimates the major New Deal contributions of Herbert Lehman, the Williams College graduate who served both as New York State's governor for ten years and as the state's U. S. Senator from 1949 to 1956. When FDR was governor of  New York, Lehman was his lieutenant governor, and Roosevelt called him "that splendid right hand of mine.” High schools and colleges are named after him. Herbert's older brother Irving's distinguished career as a jurist hardly rates a mention, though the Columbia alumnus served for fourteen years on the New York Supreme Court. He married the daughter of Macy's and Abraham and Straus. Completely overlooked are Herbert's son Peter Lehman, an ace "Thunderbolt" pilot (in the 366th Fighter Squadron, 4th Fighter Group) based in Britain, and Orin Lehman, also a pilot, also decorated with a Distinguished Flying Cross (and in his case a Purple Heart) who was seriously injured at the Battle of the Bulge but survived and went on to produce a Pulitzer Prize-winning off-Broadway play on the one hand and to succeed Robert Moses as commissioner of New York's Office of Parks and Recreation on the other.

Robert Lehman (left), the financier and philanthropist, who donated an entire wing of great art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is treated with unwarranted condescension. Bobby, as he was known, guided the firm successfully through the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression. He made a brilliant bet on Pan Am airlines. In his spare time he played polo and owned race horses, five of whom ran in the Kentucky Derby, and perhaps in consequence the play lampoons him as a playboy millionaire. More importantly, he collected paintings and was especially proud of his Botticelli, Bellini, Velazquez, and two El Grecos. The gift to the Met contained 3,000 works of art, including paintings I love by Matisse, Goya, and Ingres. The Robert Lehman Foundation sponsors lectureships in art history and other worthy activities.

When Robert Lehman died in 1969, after forty-four years at the helm, no Lehman was active in the running of the venerable firm.

The following years were somewhat chaotic, and the firm was sold to the Shearson division of American Express in 1984. The new company merged with E. F. Hutton four years later. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the latter had mounted a brilliant ad campaign with the tag line "When E. F. Hutton speaks, everybody listens." But Hutton was riddled with scandals in the 1980s and the firm died -- only to be revived in 2021 by owners who have absoluterly nothing in common with those who drove the firm into its grave. 

By 1990, my own brothers and brother-in-law held only some small legacy investments in the closed-end mutual fund bearing the Lehman name. We received quarterly and annual reports but only from afar could we monitor the ill-fated outfit under the direction of CEO Dick Fuld. 

So viewer beware. What you're seeing is a play that is certainly at a higher level of intellectual content than most but deviates from historical fact and biographical truth in order to push a thesis regarding Wall Street practices and the dynamics of capitalism.

* Department of clarification: Although I am only distantly related to the Lehmans who distinguished themselves as investment bankers, public servants, and philanthropists, and I undertook this piece as an exercise in plausible invention, all the facts are valid with the exception of the statement that in 1990 "my own brothers and brother-in-law held only some small legacy investments in the closed-end mutual fund bearing the Lehman name." I have no brothers, and my investment in the Lehman Brothers mutual fund cost me its market price on the day I bought it as a young man. As I wrote in my book One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, "It has happened that people meeting me have assumed that I belong to the great Lehman family that has been notable in public service and philanthropy. It is possible that the frequency of this and similar errors were sources of invention when I went to the computer and wrote my five hundred words of the day."-- DL

Hot off the Press: The Most Valuable Franchise Names

Please note that past performance does not guarantee future returns; consult your financial adviser before making a significant moves; consider an index fund, as Buffett recoimmends; do not make drastic decisions under the influence of a sedative or immediately after undergoing surgery; do not sell all your shares on the day the market tanks; do not drive while intoxicated; consider the value of dolar cost averaging.

Micadanses: Try some of this Surprise. Tastes like Imagination

Toward a more perfect education: Carole Bordes, “Danser Mattox”, a dancing talk, Bien Fait! 2021, at Regard du Cygne

Before the lock downs of the past year and more, I liked participating in Micadanses-inspired performances. I say “participating” because the pieces usually presented work all along the line as what I call a happening-feeling-encountering that gets a body participating in the act of Imagination.

Imagination’s what the art of movement fosters chez the human and that’s why, as Mr. Darcy justly observes, every savage can dance. If we humans had a mite more Imagination to hand, we wouldn’t still be living in a civilization based on fire-powered wheeled carts.

Also, there may be other factors.

The Micadanses establishment is near Le Louis Philippe – named for the last “King of the French”, a weirdly nostalgic revolutionary notion –  a restaurant which now charms me with its un-plumbable air of the 60s, introduced to me by Karine, my significante, who went to school nearby. Why, one expects a couple of existentialists to roll up front of the place in a tin-pot 2-chevaux.

Karine says Le Louis Philippe has been its current, somehow cramped, self since she was just another snotty 16-year old. She means that in 50 years there has been no essential alteration to the place or the ambiance breathed through its marble-iron-glass sun-porch style w/ narrow garden half-heartedly plumped up by ornamental bushes deftly strangled up in chicken wire and basted in the ceaseless traffic noise from the quay. That’s why she brought me there in the first place, Karine says: she can be 16, 66, snotty and together with me, with room for her memories, too.

Anyhow, since the pandemic, I’ve come to have a warm, even homey, feeling about the Micadanses studios which, from the exterior, are just another boxy, austere faux-what style public building. Also it’s just down the street from the Shoah memorial, overcrowded with sadnesses big and little.

I broke out in accrued homey feeling last February, when Valentine Nagata-Ramos invited me there for a “WIP” performance of her Be.Girls piece.The invite brought about a change of mental paradigm which the new feeling about Micadanses may have used to slide into my psycho-affective construct.

In the Februarys of the childhood experiences which make my paradigm, the folks used to yank us kids out of school for a spell of rough and chilly camping on Cape Hatteras. Big and small, we’d just disappear from school. Puff!, as gone as if beamed up by aliens, then reappear some weeks later, Poof!, beamed down in mid-stride, as it were.

My folks knew the true secret to doing as you please, thank you. Do it and shut up. As “Ma” – my mother figure – made us understand, this private school vacation caper was so she and “Dad” – my father symbol – could assure themselves that the world hadn’t really frozen into a hard, grey blob. On Hatteras, there were at least roiling clouds and boiling sea, like on Jupiter, which is their home planet.

By contrast to my previous paradigm experience, then, the near-evening of Nagata-Ramos’ performance was not just cold and intolerably grey, it was flattened and empty, as if life had left off business for lack of interest. Circulez! Nothing to see here!

But Karine and I felt no urge to move on and we were feeling so grateful for the invitation, so happy to get out of the apartment, and quite sure we could escape from the flattenedness of that moment in that place …

And so we did escape.  

 

Christian & François Ben Aïm, “Facéties” program Bien Fait! 2021, at Théatre de Chatillon

Inside the faux-what architecture of Micadanses, near the Shoah memorial, near a place where we were 16 and 66, we were able to be with for the first time in months. Believe me, I’ve rarely felt human touch so truly as when uncomfortably cuddled up there among a heteroclite bunch of adults and children in the warm and, apparently, subterranean and clearly ambiguous “May B” auditorium.

Then, as we lay there in the dark, Nagata-Ramos’ new break-dance troupe surprised our hearts, opened us up on the subtle and elegant originality that structures the young choreographer’s very contemporary au féminin break dance.

Call me Dorothy, though.

When all is said and done, the elements of my stronger affection for Micadances, like the ruby slippers, were there all along. It’s not place or paradigm shift, nor gratitude to and fondness for past and particular performance that has led me – us or anyone else – to new or deeper sentiments for Micadanses or anything else.

As pretty much stated at the beginning of this essay, what does the trick is Micadanses’ consistency in hosting and presenting really very diverse ranges of work that, like Be.Girls, generate surprise in the heart – the sudden sensibility to a subtle and elegant originality – and through that, a way to Imagination.

Micadanses’ annual Bien Fait! (“Well done!”)  program of new creation is a manifest example of this… What? … This capacity for ex pluribus surprisus unum.

 

Sylvère Lamotte, "Tout ce fracas". To see. Bien Fait! 2021, May B auditorium, Micadanses

The program is made up of the work that creators have at hand at the end of a residence, whether finished or not.

According to Micadanses director Christophe Martin, invitations to present for the program are based on the “feeling” the work generates. I am guessing that “feeling” means that a performance manages to produce the surprise that associates to the subtle and elegant originality I was brought to see in Nagata-Ramos’ Be.Girls on that February evening.

And whether Martin means this or something else, I rush to say, we do need a critical language that explains spectator experience as well as creator intention. I’m not alone to think so, either.

However it may be, mainly in its May B auditorium (but sometimes hosted in other venues in and around town) – for instance, Théâtre de Châtillon in the petite couronne suburb of Châtillon or at Regard du Cygne in the Belleville neighborhood – Bien Fait! offers two weeks or so of diverse dance-performance and performance-dance from mid- to the end of September. And, as a general thing, the diversity of the offer has the knack letting a spectator get to where Imagination is.

This year’s Bien Fait ! opened in the Micadanses courtyard with François Lamargot’s exceptionally finished hip-hop company moving forward on his, Lamargot’s, unfinished hip hop-inspired contemporary piece, Pulse.

The spirit of Pulse made me think also of the sense behind Carly Simon’s tune Attitude Dancing: you make ‘em, you use ‘em, they belong to you. Pulse trades “attitude” for “emotion” and says “you are ‘em.”

Lamargot focuses choreographically on emotion until the spectator is surprised to understand that emotion is body and body is motion – which might, later, at Le Louis Philippe, lead one to imagine that the emotion-body relationship might just be a body-motion or motion-body or ... Garçon!

Lamargot’s quantum hip-hop, if that’s what it is, is followed seamlessly by Erika Zueneli’s contemporary-style performance Para bellum (“Prepare for war”) – I must say, a fantastic erotic creation!

Zueneli’s choreography manages to suggest to me not just the generally-supposed “link” between violence and the erotic but also surprises me into remembering that these separate but joined identities are for me impossible to parse, maybe never have been parsed, maybe have just been dictated by Saint Augustine fifteen-hundred years ago. So, if “violence” and “erotic” are just different words for the same thing, does that say that weird nostalgia, à la weirdly nostalgic “King of the French”, might be in among our most revolutionary demands? … Anyhow, something wonderfully confusing is surely in it.

This is how the Bien Fait! program goes: surprise after surprise pushing apart the joining seams on some elegant turn-turn-about of reality from creators as contextually and creatively different among themselves as Zueneli and Lamargot.

Among the pieces I was able to see this year: Mathilde Rance doing her Ubuntu around the Luba word for identity (something like “I am belonging am”) which is also the name of the Linux operating system, manifest and accessorized with pots and pans and a strikingly photogenic costume;  Laura Simi & Maurizio Ravalico doing The Loud Atlas, a danced songbook slap-sticking on the mysterious-inclined “Cloud Atlas Symphony”;  Sylvère Lamotte, Tout ce fracas, performed results of a study on “corporal re-appropriation in hospital environments” – a little play about helping each other that brought tears to my eyes that is to see if you’re wondering about human difference; Julie Salgues & Myriam Gourfink, Là (“There-Here”) doing not-quite-a-Heidegger jig around the dancer’s profession …  My personal favorite, though, is Lotus Eddé Khouri. Her newest creation, Believe, features a man-woman couple (Christophe Macé is the man, Eddé Khouri the woman) where muscle twitches only as called, as couple, bathed by lapping tides of Purcell’s The Cold Song, becomes duet. Doesn’t sound likely but Eddé Khouri makes it work well, exposing an ongoing and raging boil of experience from almost imperceptible movement.

So, surprise yourself with a little Imagination when you finally come back to Paris. If you came in early Fall, look for Bien Fait! If not, make sure to mark these creators down in your bucket list for when you need a little elegant originality ...

 

In Memory of John Hollander (1929-2013) [by David Lehman]

Today (10/28) is John Hollander's birthday, a fit occasion to re-post this notice from 2013:

John Hollander died two months shy of his 84th birthday. He had been in poor health. We join the many who mourn him. He was the eleventh guest editor in the history of the Best American Poetry series, an obvious choice to take the helm of the 1998 edition. John, who taught at Yale, did so many things, all of them well. He was a poet of exquisite wit and formal prowess; a tireless scholar and critic of rare acumen; a distinguished editor and anthologist, with an extraordinary range that included the whole of American poetry, modern fiction, light verse, satire, and the great flowering of poetry criticism that marked the first two thirds of the twentieth century. (See, for example, Modern Poetry: Essays in Criticism, which John edited for Oxford University Press in 1968.) He was a born teacher; Chaucer had him in mind when he wrote, "And gladly wold he lerne, and gladly teche." He is an inspiration and his influence is something we are badly in need of today.

Among his books I have a special fondness for Rhyme's Reason, an indispensable "guide to English verse," in which the poet exemplifies each form or metrical arrangement he defines. Reflections on Espionage, a book-length poem, uses the apparatus of spydom to demarcate the territory of American poetry. Everyone has a code name: Auden is Steampump, Frost is Morose (because it sounds like the Russian word for "frost"), Lake is Elizabeth Bishop ("Lakey" in Mary McCarthy's The Group), Lac is Robert Lowell ("Cal" backwards), Image is James Merrill, and Hollander himself is Cupcake. If spies are poets, each needs a cover -- just as each poet needs to make a living or figure out some other way to subsidize the true work he or she does.

Powers of Thirteen, a stellar sequence of thirteen-line poems, may be my favorite of all of John's poetry collections. I reviewed it in Newsweek (January 23, 1984):

<<<
No one has ever doubted John Hollander's poetic virtuosity. As early as his first volume, "A Crackling of Thorns" (1968), his technical mastery and ingenious wordplay were in abundant evidence. There are, however, those who charge that Hollander lets his sheer talent get the better of him; they find him too allusive and elusive, too self-delighting in his poetic conceits. "Powers of Thirteen" doesn't so much vindicate Hollander as show such complaints to be largely beside the point. An audaciously original sonnet sequence that in effect reinvents the rules of the game, "Powers of Thirteen" prove that it's sometimes wise for a poet to exaggerate the very traits in his work that some critics most loudly deplore.

"Ecstasy affords the occasion and expediency determineds the form," wrote Marianne Moore of the genesis of a poem. In Hollander's case, it would be nearer the mark to say that all the occasions of poetry, be they ecstatic or ruminative, public or esoteric, follow from his choice of forms. Here Hollander has fashioned a form remarkable for its rigor -- or, rather, its supple responsiveness to his touch. There are 169 poems in the sequence: exactly 13 to the second power. Verging upon but veering from traditional sonnet structure, each poem contains 13 lines; each line, 13 syllables. These constraints liberate rather than inhibit Hoillander's imagination. The poems' formal design gives the sequence its unity, leaving this most protean of poets free to vary his delivery, his tone, his subject matter -- even his personality.

A flea bite, in a famous poem by John Donne, develops into the occasion for a sexual invitation. In "Powers of Thirteen," poetic logic similarly links apparently disparate phenomena. Among the most engaging poems in the sequence are the 13 that deplore that curious number and everything that it calls to mind, from "triskaidekaphobia" (fear of the number 13) to the "thirteen-tone scale / Of falsifications" and the 13 stripes on Old Glory. One of these poems delineates the flag; the terminal rhymes ring changes on "red" and "white," while stitched into the upper left corner of the poems are six "blue" rhymes, marking off the flag's "changing crew of constellations." In the preceding poem, the fact that there are 13 cards in a suit and as many weeks in a season gives rise to this fusion of metaphors: "Winter wields only the spades, Summer brandishes / Hot, black clubs, Spring showers hearts about and Autumn shows / A fall of diamonds in our climate of extremes." The conceit is anything but gratuitous; it widens into a meditation on paradise lost. In contrast to "our parents in Eden," who were "dealt / The perfect year's full hand of intermingled weeks," we do not enjoy "continual spring and fall." A last pun clinches the case: "Death deals, and cheats with the false promise of final trumps."

Writing in serial form enables Hollander to conceive his work as "a perpetual calendar." Along the way we pause to ponder the anomalies of "May-day," an "inglorious" Fourth of July and Labor Day ("when shirking hardly looks like working / Yet sounds far too much like it"). Investigating the sources of his inspiration, Hollander invokes an all-purpose "you," who stands for any number of "bemused" muses. The subjects treated to these I-thou dialogues range from philosophy to public statuary, from the seasons to erotic desire. Above all else, "Powers of Thirteen" celebrates linguistic possibility, "The power of 'might' that makes us write" -- and the multiplication of metaphors that ensue.
>>>

We ran the piece under the heading "Triskaidekaphhilia." -- DL

From the archive; first published in 2013

On Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) [by Jamie Katz]

Nine years ago, on October 26, 2012, we received a few comments in response to David's post about Jacques Barzun,  the great Columbia professor, who once graced the cover of Time magazine. Jacques died on October 25th at the age of 104. 

Suggesting that we re-post the piece, David recalls meeting Barzun in 1974, at the suggestion of Lionel Trilling, whose research assistant David was. "I approached him on the subject of the prose poem, which I had chosen as the subject of my PhD thesis. This cordial, cool, elegant man of letters, in his impressive office at Low Memorial Library, amazed me with his eruditon -- he was speaking off the top of his head, in which many ideas and facts were active, but it was as though he had just that week made a preliminary study of the precursors of Baudelaire's prose poems. Years later, when I embarked on writing a book about murder mysteries, and approached Jacques for advice. He wrote me a two-page, single-spaced letter that I still consider the best such memorandum that I have ever received. I love Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence, a magisterial work, and his Catalogue of Crime, an annotated catalogue of his and his collaborator Wendell Hertig Taylor's immense reading in the literature of crime, detection, and espionage.

"Trilling and Barzun were professors of the old, nearly obsolete kind. They really knew their stuff, took ideas strongly, understood the social ramifications of art and the humanities, and could converse on important books from Plato to Freud with wit and charm as alums can attest who took the Colloquium on Important Books that Trilling and Barzun taught jointly for many years at Columbia."

Here's a piece by our friend Jamie Katz, who had the honor of toasting Barzun on the occasion of his 100th birthday. 

The Barzun Touch

On the day we learned Lionel Trilling [right] had died, in 1975, I was the very young editor of the alumni magazine Columbia College Today, and we were right on deadline. Obviously, we wanted to include a piece worthy of such a distinguished Columbia figure, but we needed it overnight. “I’ll call Jacques,” offered our formidable and almost-as-young college dean, Peter Pouncey. It seemed like a moon shot to me. But when I arrived at Hamilton Hall the next morning, I found a brown inter-office envelope bearing a beautifully crafted essay on Trilling, at precisely the specified length, initialed JB.

It was the first of many instances of Professor Barzun’s loyalty and just-right helpfulness I would experience over the years. He encouraged our project of making the magazine more than just a house organ; he contributed essays and talks for publication; he kindly and patiently shot down every one of my ill-considered editorial suggestions. Through all, he projected a degree of consideration and decency that glows warmly as I continue to learn from him — most recently by reading From Dawn to Decadence. I’m halfway there, strolling a few enlightening pages a day. It is a fine thing to be taught by Jacques Barzun.

In his work I am struck, not just by his erudition and elegant prose, but by his acknowledgement of fluidity, chance and human agency in culture and history. It is a liberating conception, giving weight to both daring leaps of individual genius and the smaller gestures and habits that form the tissue of society. He gives respect to our innermost selves, too. Speaking of Descartes and the split between rationalism on one side and impulse and intuition on the other, Barzun refuses to take sides: “The more science proves its worth, the harder it is for ‘nature’ or ‘the heart’ to feel free. Reason should guide — all moralists agree — but, as others point out, mind is not separate from heart. The astute Chinese have a character for heart-and-mind. They perceived that the urge to reason is itself a drive from the heart, which explains why rationalists are often fanatics.”

There is a keen sense of proportion, a dancer’s grace, in Barzun’s thought and action. Some have mistaken this for aristocratic haughtiness. I see it as poise. I had a piano teacher long ago who would occasionally lean hard on my forearms as I played for her. The point was for me to develop a finer touch — a Barzun touch, you might say — by balancing downward force with upward lift, so the hands could float comfortably above the keyboard.

One day in the late ’80s, Professor Barzun was invited to a luncheon gathering the editors of the various alumni publications on campus, from Columbia College, the law school, the medical school and so forth. My colleagues were thrilled to have such an eminent authority on writing, editing and publishing in our midst, and they peppered him with questions about gender-neutral pronouns, serial commas and other inside-baseball stuff. I then sought his perspective — as former university provost, dean of faculties and alumnus-of-more-than-one-division — on a suggestion then current in the university’s councils, namely, that the various Columbia periodicals be somehow organized to “speak with one voice.” He shook his head. “I don’t believe it’s possible for an individual to speak with one voice, let alone a university,” he said. “What we should aim for is a polyphonic effect.”

At that moment, I detected a trace of a grin — not a smirk, but the twinkle-in-the-eye of a man who knows he has found the mot juste.

Cent’ anni, Jacques!

Jamie Katz, editor-at-large, Smithsonian Magazine
More on Jacques Barzun by Jamie Katz

"International Experts" by Pamela Brown [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

With the recent announcement to open Australia's international borders next month (or as the Prime Minister Scott Morrison calls it on his official website, "taking steps to reopen to the world", which sounds more like a chapter from a self-help manual than government policy), I thought it would be a good moment to share Pam Brown's "International Experts".

Brown is a central figure in the formative period of contemporary Australian poetry which took place in 1970s Sydney. With Anna Couani, Ken Bolton and Sal Brererton, she helped put together the iconic Magic Sam magazine, which published some of Australia's most important poets. Brown has published more than twenty books of her own poetry and prose, including Dear Deliria: New and Selected Poems, which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 2004. She has also served as the poetry editor for Overland and an associate editor of the brilliant and too-short lived Jacket magazine.

 

 

"International Experts" cleverly appraises the appeal of a place with its current cultural output. Both London and Paris have "had it", while "the americans / are doing / all the writing / these days". The speaker settles for a trip within Australia, and, based on her criteria for choosing a destination, why not? With Brown and her coterie, Australia just might be the most appealing destination of the lot.

 

 

International Experts

                                                        
when we get restless
we talk about
where we could go

we decide
london has had it
except for music.
madness.
marianne faithfull.
the selecter.
paris has had it
except for a few memorable spots.
paul eluard.
gertrude stein.
statre. semiology
and plastic bertrand
from belgium.

of course
we mention 
new york.
the americans
are doing 
all the writing
these days.

asia and india
are out of the question.
no package deal ashrams.
although japan
is interesting
comics and posters.

really though 
berlin
is the place to go.
fassbinder. brecht.
a politically 
complex past.

experts.
micky met
sumo wrestlers
in japan
before america
and europe.
jill saw paris
and london 
last year.

down in sydney
the air goes bad
and I fill up with gases,
go to the movies,
by books, a record
and a train ticket
to queensland.

 

Kierkegaard on systems

<<
In relation to their systems most systematizers are like a man who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack close by.
>> 

Elsewhere Kierkegaard says that people correspond to parts of speech. "How many people are merely adjectives, interjections, adverbs; and how few are substantives, verbs, etc. . . .There are people whose position in life is that of the interjection, without influence in the sentence." Think about it.

From the archive. Posted on The Best American Poetry on July 02, 2011.

 

Elsewhere Kierkegaard says that people correspond to parts of speech. "How many people are merely adjectives, interjections, adverbs; and how few are substantives, verbs, etc. . . .There are people whose position in life is that of the interjection, without influence in the sentence." Think about it.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventeen): Hannah Dow [by Angela Ball]

Another Summer Without Classical Music

I haven’t lived in Southern California
very long but every summer that I do
it occurs to me
only after the summer has ended
that I should go see “Mozart
Under the Stars” or some other
classical music concert at the Hollywood Bowl
because I should get out more
I should get more culture
at least that is what my lover tells me
and it occurs to me that culture
is not a bowl of spaghetti
or anything that can be twirled on a fork
and wiped up with a hunk of bread
then abandoned for days in the fridge
like most of the new plans I make—
cancelled, because—as the actor
in my poetry workshop used to say:
we have a new realization every one to two seconds
and I’ll believe just about anything
if it sounds interesting enough
which is why the only ghost I believe in
is that of a 1930s Hollywood actress
who jumped from the sign’s H
and is sometimes seen wandering
below and maybe I believe this
because H is the letter I would choose
or because I don’t believe the explanation
given for her death (learning
that her role in her first film
had been cut to four minutes)
because Thirteen Women is a film about manipulating
women into killing themselves or one another
and I believe this too-easy coincidence
this culture I cannot digest
is proof that men have always wanted women
to hate one another and ourselves
so we will love them more

--Hannah Dow

Hannah Dow is the author of ROSARIUM (Acre Books, 2018). Her poems have recently appeared in Shenandoah, Image, and The Southern Review, among others. She received the Cream City Review Summer Prize in Poetry, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and has received awards and scholarships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and Bread Loaf Orion. Hannah is the editor-in-chief of Tinderbox Poetry Journal and an Assistant Professor of English at Missouri Southern State University.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventeen): Hannah Dow [by Angela Ball]

In its casual self-criticism, Hannah Dow’s “Another Summer Without Classical Music” has something in common with James Schuyler’s rueful attitude toward the self; in its fascination with Hollywood, something in common with Frank O’Hara. Dow engages with “Hollywood” culture via the 1932 horror film Thirteen Women and its cast member, brand-new film actress Peg Entwistle, who jumped from the famous sign’s letter “H,” possibly in response to her supporting role being edited down to a bit part. Entwistle divorces herself from “Hollywood” both actually and symbolically in the most graphic way possible. Entanglement between art and life is at the heart of this deft poem.

The tissue-thin plot of the hour-long Thirteen Women involves a “half-caste” mesmerist played by Myrna Loy who plots revenge on the alumnae of a fancy finishing school who excluded her from their sorority. She has the unwitting participation of her associate, a “swami” who has promised to send horoscopes to all the women of the group. Loy’s character forges replacement horoscopes predicting death and mayhem. The film begins with a statement (endorsed by two prominent professors of psychology) that the human mind is vulnerable to suggestion. Indeed, the scenario consists of one instance after another of suggestion inciting action and/or accident to produce death, each marked by a ‘special effect’ that resembles an exploding star as drawn by a novice artist. In a sense, Entwistle’s suicide functions to extend or complete the movie as it simultaneously culminates her life. On one level, her death is pathetic. But on another, it is tragic. Her suicide note pleads cowardice. There was certainly plenty to fear in Hollywood—not from “half-caste women” but from men--priapic studio execs, rapacious agents, and actors skilled in date rape (a concept yet unknown). The penalty for non-participation was often exclusion. Suicide pre-emptively excludes the world, and its invocation marks an increase in the poem’s complexity:

     as the actor

     in my poetry workshop used to say:

     we have a new realization every one to two seconds

     and I’ll believe just about anything

     if it sounds interesting enough

     which is why the only ghost I believe in

     is that of a 1930s Hollywood actress

     who jumped from the sign’s H

     and is sometimes seen wandering below . . .

Hannah Dow’s engaging and disturbing “Another Summer Without Classical Music” is a poem about the difficulty of making sense of culture, Hollywood or otherwise, and of finding a coherent place within it—more particularly, the continuing difficulty for women who want to “digest” culture rather than be digested by it. In other words, a problem of agency. The explanation proposed at the end of the poem,

     . . . Thirteen Women is a film about manipulating

     women into killing themselves or one another

     and I believe this too-easy coincidence 

     this culture I cannot digest

     is proof that men have always wanted women

     to hate one another and ourselves

     so we will love them more

is provisional at best, asserted as belief by a speaker who earlier says, “I’ll believe just about anything / if it sounds interesting enough.” The poem’s missing period indicates that the speaker’s stabs at belief, along with our own, will continue, as unquiet as the ghost who frequents the sign, shadowed by its thirteen fifty-foot high letters.

--Angela Ball

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reginald Dwayne Betts. Photo by Mamadi Doumbouya

______________________________________________________________

Blood History

 

The things that abandon you get remembered different.

As precise as the English language can be, with words

like penultimate and perseverate, there is not a combination

of sounds that describe only that leaving. Once,

drinking and smoking with buddies, a friend asked if

I’d longed for a father. Had he said wanted, I would have

dismissed him in the way that youngins dismiss it all:

a shrug, sarcasm, a sharp jab to stomach, laughter.

But he said longing. & in a different place, I might

have wept. Said, once, my father lived with us & then he

didn’t and it fucked me up so much I didn’t think about

his leaving until I held my own son in my arms & only

now speak on it. A man who drank Boone’s Farm and Mad

Dog like water once told me & some friends that there is no

word for father where he comes from, not like we know it.

There the word father is the same as the word for listen.

The blunts we passed around let us to abandon the English

language. Not that much though. But what if the old

        head knew something? & if you have no father, you can’t

hear straight. Years later, that same friend asked about

longing, wondered why I named my son after my father.

       You know that’s the kind of shit turns the rest of your life

into a prayer no dead man will answer.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Reginald Dwayne Betts is the founder and director of the Freedom Reads. A poet and lawyer, he is the author of four books. His latest collection of poetry, Felon, was awarded the American Book Award and an NAACP Image Award. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and a Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. [For more about Reginald Dwayne Betts, click here.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                     William H. Johnson. Man in Vest. Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

"Stick" [by James Cummins]

It was intra-squad, not a real game,
But teenage boys don’t know the difference;
And to the pitcher who’d just thrown
An adrenaline-powered fastball at my head,
I was a pretender he could intimidate.
When the next pitch nearly took off
The top of my left knee, I knew,
With all the force of a mystical vision,
This talented boy, this ace of the staff,
A senior expected to bloom after showing
Such promise last year, such grit, such
Competitive fire, would fail.  I saw it
In his eyes when I got back up; I saw
The momentary hesitation, the confusion.
I knew the next pitch would be right
Down the middle of the plate, and as fast
As all the pride in his body could muster.
And he knew I knew; that was the key.
He didn’t know how, but he knew;
And it scared him, this giant of a boy,
That a stick of a kid he could break
In half in study hall, or a parking lot,
Would stare back at him as I stared back.
You never know who’ll relish the arena;
Who won’t care what he looks like,
As he approaches the game from his side,
Watching you watching him as he steps up.
The pitch was pretty, a beauty of a pitch,
But it depended on my believing what
Had transpired between us the last two.
His arrogance became my coldness;
I’d done this before, and he hadn’t.
The pitch was pretty, a beauty of a pitch,
And a few seconds later it hit a limb
Of a sycamore behind the left field fence.
“You’re going to have a bad year,” I yelled
As I trotted down the first base line,
Even then disliking myself for shouting it;
But something will rip out of you
In those moments, both you and not you;
It's not just triumph.  Bullies, sociopaths,
Narcissists—you have to demarcate—
You have to spell out a moment’s meaning
For them, in words they can’t mistake,
Because to them others have no outlines—
Other people are just blurry shapes
At the edges of their self-absorption.
And facts aren’t facts; you have to replace
The voice in their heads with a new voice:
I glued that home run to a voice
That jeered like the voice of his father,
Perhaps, or his mother, or a brother;
A voice that said this is your stupid soul
Flying over the fence after being struck
By the oldest weapon in the world,
A wooden stick.

From Recalcitrant Actors (2021, Dos Madres Press) by James Cummins,

Three Poems [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

Hold Onto Your Hat

 

We learned how if the ship goes down you

Can make a life-preserver of your shirt

By taking it off and slamming it down onto

The water with the air inside so the shirt

Bubbles up and then you can hold onto it.

 

If you don't have a shirt you can do

The same thing with your pants by

Taking your pants off and then you

Trap the air in your pants as described

Above to form the pants life-preserver.

 

If you have neither shirt nor pants

You can make a life-preserver out of

Your hat by slamming your hat onto

The water as described above to

Make yourself a hat life-preserver.

 

They said if you fuckers are going

To grab for your crotch we want you

To do it here and not when the ship

Is burning and actually a few fellows

Did end up grabbing for their crotches.

 

Feh! Feh! Feh!

 

Just as there are names we mustn't speak,

Questions to remain unasked, proscribed

Mentations, even downright hilarious jokes

That ought never be told whether at the

Water cooler or in a duck-hunting blind,

Yes, that's all well and good but when

You slip up (as you will) bite your tongue,

Spit three times over your shoulder and

With whatever heartfelt sincerity you can

Possibly muster say, "Feh! Feh! Feh!"

Is it a perfect solution? No. But at least

You'll not be cast into outer darkness.

 

 

Mitzi

We never missed You Bet Your Life,

Groucho's quiz show, my father and I

Awaiting the secret word no matter

How week after week that word was

Unspoken until at last the $100 duck

To spontaneous applause descended.

But enough of that. The strange part

Was one night riding with Groucho

In an elevator, he in a French beret

And accompanied by a much younger

Woman, how as Mitzi the dachshund

Approached him he was so frightened

With none of the sarcastic aplomb

We associated with him, Lou and I.

 

 

The Last Word on Napoleon [by David Lehman]

The last word on Napoleon has not been written. More than 600,000 books have been published about the military genius who crowned himself emperor of France in 1804 and united the rest of Europe in fear. Does the world really need another book on Napoleon? Yes, if only because our fascination with him endures.

As Alistair Horne points out in his cogent and highly readable account of “The Age of Napoleon” (Modern Library, 219 pages, $21.95), every era refashions Napoleon in the image of its own aspirations. But there are constants. For generations since he lost his final gamble at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon personified courage, leadership, ambition. Only heroism or madness can account for some of his gambits, and so he tends to be popular among professional soldiers and inmates of loony bins. The diplomacy assuring European peace for the ninety-nine years preceding World War I resulted directly from the British and continental reaction to Napoleon, whose image takes a body blow when authoritarian dictators bent on world conquest come to power.

On the other hand, Napoleon represented – not only in France but in all of Europe – the triumph of an idea made possible by the French Revolution but realized only in the meteoric career of the Corsican-born artillery captain who, at age twenty-four, saved the day for the French army at the Siege of Toulon in 1793. Two years later, he dispersed a Paris mob with a “whiff of grapeshot,” as historians have termed it, and thereafter rose irresistibly to power, replacing the anarchy of revolution with order and military ardor.

To Ralph Waldo Emerson, champion of American self-reliance, Napoleon was the model of a “self-made man.” To other illustrious observers it seemed that the spirit of Romanticism and Rousseau culminated in him. But he was as much a despot as a liberator, capable of cruelty, some of it gratuitous, and full of an overweening arrogance. Beethoven composed the Eroica symphony in Bonaparte’s honor but withdrew the dedication in disgust, ripping up the title page, on learning that the French republic had terminated in Napoleon’s imperial coronation.

Horne, the author of two previous books dealing with Napoleon’s military career, devotes this little tome to his social and cultural impact. “The Age of Napoleon” is rife with arcane details (that, for example, matches were invented in 1809) and ironic asides. The cemetery of Pere Lachaise was Napoleon’s monumental solution to “the urgent problem of creating space for the grateful dead of Paris.” If Josephine showed too much cleavage, Napoleon would tear off her dress and throw it into the fire or spill a bottle of ink on it. “She put up with a lot,” Horne comments.

To Josephine, the love of his life, Napoleon wrote hot passionate letters from whatever front he happened to be on. “Arriving home in three days,” he instructs her after the battle of Marengo. “Don’t bathe.” He loved Josephine hopelessly, despite her infidelities. “She had the prettiest little ----- imaginable,” he told a confidant. But that didn’t stop him from divorcing her in 1809. Needing a male heir, Napoleon married the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, the Grand-Duchess Marie-Therese, a nubile nineteen-year old said to have had a bovine expression, who dutifully bore him a son.

Legendarily capable of inspiring his troops to overcome bigger and better-equipped opponents, Napoleon inspires or haunts the heroes of great novels. The battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon’s greatest victory, figures in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Waterloo does the same in Stendhal’s “Charterhouse of Parma,” which opens with the declaration that the French army’s triumphal entry in Milan in 1796 “taught the world that after so many centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor.”

Not that the Napoleon complex is always or even usually benign. Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s other masterpiece, “The Red and the Black,” comes to a bad end following the Corsican’s star. Raskolnikov, in Dostoyevski’s “Crime and Punishment,” suffers under the delusion that he is a type of the Napoleonic man, who is exempt from all laws except those of his own making. As a result he murders two harmless old women.

Napoleon exalted glory higher than all else, and the glory he craved came at a steep cost. He was, said a contemporary, “the kind of general who needed a monthly income of ten thousand men.” In twenty years of warfare more than a million lives were lost in France alone. What should frighten us most about Napoleonic hero-worship is that he serves as the primary role-model not only for lunatics in asylums but for genocidal maniacs. It is possible to consider Adolf Hitler as precisely a perversion of the Napoleonic ideal. Like Napoleon, the Nazi dictator was expert at manipulating public opinion and ruthless in the exercise of power. Both aspired to world domination, and both tasted defeat at the hands of a Russian winter.

But the Fuhrer had none of the French Emperor’s saving virtues. No war criminal, Napoleon instituted major civil reforms and imposed, in the Napoleonic code, a coherent legal system on the whole of the continent. An early proponent of a Jewish homeland, he restored freedom of worship in post-revolutionary France. He began the reconstruction of Paris that turned it into the world’s most magnificent city.

Above all, Napoleon embodied – in his own example as much as in his edicts and decrees – the radical idea that careers should be based not on birth but on merit. He proved that a poor boy from a remote island could, through the sheer force of his personality, intelligence, energy, and will, vault higher than kings and popes and, in his words, “push back the boundaries of greatness.”

written for Bloomberg, 5 / 14 / 04

On Kenneth Koch, "Dr. Fun" [by Melanie Rehak]

"May I tell you how much I love your poems?" Frank O'Hara crowed in the first stanza of a tribute to his friend Kenneth Koch in 1953. "It's as if a great pipeline had been illicitly tapped/along which all personal characteristics/are making a hasty departure. Tuba? Gin?/...O Kenneth Koch!" Koch's memories of his writing methods at the time, which he described with typical exuberance in a poem of his own, confirm O'Hara's impression that he drew inspiration from nothing less than the entire world. "I'm excited I'm writing at my typewriter it doesn't make too much sense," he gushed, so thrilled to be putting words to paper he didn't even have a moment to spare for punctuation. Assuming his usual carefree poetic persona combined with just a dash of bemused self-mockery, Koch wrote about his creative process with the breathlessness of a man wholly in love with the universe.

At the time of all this rampant delight, Koch had just returned to New York City from a Fulbright year in Paris, joining O'Hara and their friends John Ashbery and James Schuyler in the merry band that would eventually be known as the New York School of poets. Though they were writers first and foremost, the four were also deeply immersed in the art world and entangled, both personally and professionally, with much of the emerging talent of the moment--painters like Jane Freilicher (who lived upstairs from Koch in the East Village), Larry Rivers and Willem de Kooning. Together they formed a little cosmos where intimacy and self-expression reigned. "We poets and painters hung around a lot together, showed each other our works, and were made by this camaraderie very (or more than otherwise) ambitious, envious, emulous, and, I think, lucky," Koch recalled, trying to capture the fertile, passionate bohemia of New York City in the 1950s. In a poem from the 1970s, he sounded a more sentimental note, making it clear those years had also been a time of great romance. "My friends...meant almost more than anything to me," he reflected. "Their names alone bring tears to my eyes."

Under the influence of Abstract Expressionism and basking in the possibilities of language, Koch and his poetic cohorts were determined to subvert the dominant New Criticism of the 1950s, of which, Koch wrote, "Eliot was the Great Dictator.... One hardly dared to wink / Or fool around in any way in poems." Koch, on the other hand, wanted to have fun (and was actually nicknamed Dr. Fun by Ashbery, whom he had befriended for life when both were undergraduates at Harvard), and he went about it with a seriousness of purpose tinged with hilarity. He had come home from France with the idea that poetry was a language unto itself, and that it needed to be indulged as such. As he explained in a preface to his first book, Sun Out -- the poems in which were written in the early 1950s but not published until after his death in 2002--he had been plunged into a happy and productive linguistic soup as he attempted to get by in French, "which I understood and misunderstood at the same time.... Words would have several meanings for me at once.... Once I began to hear them all together, [they] constituted a way of using the language that was very stirring to me and seemed to mean a lot. It gave me a strong sensation of speaking the truth."

Koch's attempts to render this multiplicity of meaning in straight English, and thereby get to the essential nature of human existence, yielded some rather odd products over the next few years. The opening lines of the title poem in Sun Out, for example, read like a burst of surrealist insanity: "Bananas, piers, limericks/I am postures / Over there, I, are/The lakes of delectation." What on earth is he talking about? "I wanted to keep my subject up in the air as long as possible," he explained in his preface--to which one can only respond, Job well done.

But even in his early work, there are amid the linguistic experiments flashes of pure, everyday ecstasy--that "delectation"--and in them one finds the heart of Koch's work, the immediacy that makes it irresistible. "The land is coughing, 'Joy!'" he wrote in a 1950s poem called "Highway Barns, the Children of the Road." "Hey, pavements, you charmers, / When are you going to bring me good news?" Koch was always looking for good news, and as a result he discovered it everywhere. How many other poets could write "A Poem of the Forty-Eight States" and find something to love in each and every one of them? Who else could have spun, much less thrilled to, the line: "Oh railroad stations, pennants, evenings, and lumberyards!"? His extravagant revels are infectious.

This palpable, ceaseless enthusiasm for both writing and life itself sets Koch apart from a pantheon of poets who too often forget the pleasure principle. Perhaps most important, he generously invited all of us into his neighborhood, even providing instructions for living there on occasion. "Making love must be everything," he advised in "The Art of Love." "A city, not a street; a country, not a city; the universe, the world--/Make yours so, make it even a galaxy." This bountiful tide crashes through Koch's Collected Poems, which comes in at more than 700 pages and is dense enough at times to be daunting to even the most dedicated reader. Still, when one considers how much Koch struggled to exclude, it's hard to hold a grudge against him. His life was a whirlwind of influences and reactions and actions and the mad rush to figure it all out. As he wrote in a long, marvelous poem called "Days and Nights":

There are very few poems
Compared to all the thought
And the activity and the sleeping and the falling in love
And out of love and the friendships
And all the talk and the doubts and the excitement
And the reputations and the philosophies
And the opinions about everything and the sensitivity
And the being alone a lot and having to be with others
A lot and the going to bed a lot and getting up a lot and seeing
Things all the time in relation to poetry

And just when you think you want to stop the ride and get off, Koch chimes in with a revelation so sweet and so calm that you stay on. "I want spring, I want to turn like a mobile/In a new fresh air!" he wrote in an early poem called "Desire for Spring." "O breeze, my lovely, come in, that I mayn't be stultified!"

Above all else, Koch was a poet of charm. He was so mesmerized by the world that no one can fail to be enchanted by his vision of it, not least because it rarely comes without a good dose of irony and appreciation for just how ridiculous the position of the "artist" can be if it goes to your head. While he took his practice very seriously, and spent many years teaching poetry and the value of artistic expression in venues from nursing homes to elementary schools, Koch never gave up on the idea that verse is based, ultimately, on life. In a tiny poem called "AESTHETICS OF BEING GLORIOUS," he argued, simply, for the pleasures of beginning from one's rightfully earthbound spot: "To be glorious, take off your wings / Before you fly." In a series of poems called "In Bed" that explore, with varying degrees of sobriety, the role of this central piece of furniture to human existence, he wrote first a one-liner called "BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN BED": "Why I am happy to be here." He followed it up with a singular, deeply comic contribution to the genre of worshiping one's lady love that reminds us how silly such flights of romantic fancy can be. Marvell has nothing on the jovial spoof "OTHER POETRY BED": "Shall I compare you to a summer's bed? / You are more beautiful."

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Koch was more than a poet of comic verse, a label that dogged him throughout his life. At its best, his work captures the deep pleasures of being alive and of being fully conscious of one's own luck. There is a gentleness to his joy that in no way diminishes its force, a rare combination that reverberates in anyone fortunate enough to be open to it in all its possibility. Here is Koch, in "To My Heart at the Close of Day":

At dusk light you come to bat
As Georg Trakl might put it. How are you doing
Aside from that, aside from the fact
That you are at bat? What balls are you going to hit
Into the outfield, what runs will you score,
And do you think you ever will, eventually
Bat one out of the park? That would be a thrill
To you and your contemporaries! Your mighty posture
Takes its stand in my chest and swing swing swing
You warm up, then you take a great step
Forward as the ball comes smashing toward you, home
Plate. And suddenly it is evening.

How mournful to lose such a wellspring of loving energy. O baseball! O balmy nights! O Kenneth Koch!

This article can be found on the web at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060123/rehak

Ed. note: "Doctor Fun" was Ashbery's jovial nickname for his friend. Kenneth didn't like it as I learned when I published an essay on him with that title in the American Poetry Review. He made me promise not to use it as the title for the chapter on "Vitamin K" in my book The Last Avant-Garde. But Melanie Rehak liked it, and it fits her tribute to KK. -- DL