The Best American Poetry

“Grand Illusion”: Why and How it Matters [by Bruce Kawin]

Ed note: The last time I taught a graduate literature seminar, only two of fifteen students had seen Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, one of the most celebrated of all American movies. To help remedy this unfortunate situation, I am hoping to run columns on the blog about some of the greatest old movies that college students owe it to themselves to see. I asked Bruce Kawin, longtime professor of English and film studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, to write about Grand Illusion, the great movie set in a World War I prisoner-of-war camp. The stars include Jean Gabin, Marcel Dalio, Pierre Fresnay, and Erich von Stroheim. Grand Illusion establishes the conventions – such as the attempted escapes, the complicated relation of captor to captive, the home-spun varsity show put on by the prisoners -- that animate many subsequent POW movies, from Stalag 17 to The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape. -- DL

See It for the Way It Matters

In the title of Jean Renoir’s 1937 movie Grand Illusion (La Grande illusion), “grande” can mean “great” or “big.”  The illusion is huge and has aspects of nobility, the old ways, the high walls that kept commoners out, the train that ran on the rails of history and tradition, the Rolls that rolled over you. People kill each other over the illusion, set up systems as large as governments by it, cover the ground with it.  The illusion is great or grand in that it involves social and economic classes, national boundaries and identities, control and surveillance -- the whole gamut of experience.  

But whether it’s big like a fence or great like a tower, and whether or not it’s noble, what is it?  What illusion is so comprehensive that individuals and countries can (or must) live by it?  In Renoir’s movie, we encounter multiple mirages: the illusion of class, the illusion that war is grand, the illusion that the earth is divided into political units. That war is of value. That an international nobility has not vanished along with its values and value.  Class, war, and the artificial divisions that estrange us to the point of murder:  these are the falsehoods we elevate into principles and masks. 

Once it has established all this, Grand Illusion is about removing those masks.  Circumstances force or allow the characters to unmask, to act the way they finally are. The characters are divided by World War I, for they fight on opposing sides, but it is also the war that brings them together. Most of the action takes place in German prison camps.  The soldiers, the guards, and the commanding officers are divided by language, and they speak in many languages.  They are divided by class, so that the "high" plot concerns two officers from the upper classes, one French (Pierre Fresnay) and one German (Erich von Stroheim as the prison commander), while the "low" plot concerns a working-class Catholic (Jean Gabin) and a rich Jew (Marcel Dalio), who also are officers but of lower rank. 

The two higher-ranking officers see each other as equals and come from much the same social place. The major characters cross these dividers, reach across them to each other, proving as deep as real people and far more complicated than the single-motivation figures often found in run-of-the-mill movies.  As a viewer, you can’t take anything for granted in this picture.  The aristocratic opponents become friends—until the ancient code that unites them butts against the prisoner’s code of working together to escape. When the highborn French officer follows the code of the soldier, the prison commander, following the code of the officer, is forced to shoot him—a defining example of tragedy. 

And when the fugitive soldiers, the working-class Catholic and the Jew with a rich family, begin to fight on the road, they become more nearly complete as individuals and as members of social groups, as inseparable and yet as different as the two noble officers.  When the escapees meet a German mother and her daughter, who house them for a time, Protestants join the Catholic and the Jew.  And a mature woman (Dita Parlo) joins the tale.  A genuinely moving international love story ensues.

This is a movie that treats important issues with intelligence, honesty, range, and care.  It was one of the films that convinced many people that movies could be serious, significant, and artistic—with as much to say, to reveal, as some books or paintings. And it did all this by being a movie:  the camera that moves down the tables and groups, the soundtrack that crashes together “foreign” languages, the design of the dark stone prison and the single geranium, and most definitively the final scene’s image of a snow-covered mountain on which no political borderline can be seen, but which the two escaping soldiers cross into freedom—crossing a line that is an illusion.  The line is there in the political sense, a reality, but it is also an abstraction, a line that to all appearances isn’t there.  The camera sees the snow.

-- Bruce Kawin

Charlotte Boulay: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

Pallikoodam

 

When it rained, even our shoes

turned green. The fan whirred

except when the power was out,

then we read by candlelight under

the mosquito net, or didn’t:

I feared it going up

around us, a fuzz of flame.

We lived with animals: small lizards

darting up the walls, lines of tiny,

imperious ants. Every night

we tried to trap the rat

in the rafters, baiting him with banana

until finally we awoke to a

snap. We had a small television

and we watched old sitcoms, new

pop videos, the twin towers falling

again and again. They said over

and over that nothing would be

the same after that, and for once

they were right. We ate chocolate bars

for their sweet familiarity, and we lined

books neatly on the shelves. We slept

holding each other and woke in the mornings

to hear someone singing, softly,

as she swept the yard clean.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Charlotte Boulay’s first book of poems, Foxes on the Trampoline, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2014. She earned her MFA from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, The Boston Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Pinch, and Crazyhorse, among other journals. She lives in Philadelphia and works at The Miquon School as both a fundraiser and COVID prevention specialist.

*note: The word pallikoodam means “school” in Malayalam, the language of Kerala, India.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                      Ernst Stuckelberg, The Girl with the Lizard, oil on canvas, 2019

"A Song to a Child at Night-time" [Poem by Dylan Thomas, an @Ednaschoice Selection]

For your Sunday night insomnia: 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sinatra at the Sands, January 1966 [by David Lehman]

Ed. note: Jack Daniel's produced a limited-batch sour-mash whiskey called "Sinatra Century" to mark the singer's 100th birthday, December 12, 2015. Lehman's book Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World was published by HarperCollins at the same time. An editor at The Wall Street Journal noted the coincidence and commissioned Lehman, who likes good bourbon, to review the new whiskey, which came in a gift box including a thumb drive containing the recording of a Sinatra show at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in January 1966.

1. The Background

Frank Sinatra discovered Jack Daniel’s one sleepless night in the early 1940s. “It’s been the oil to my engine ever since,” he later said. He famously praised “anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or Jack Daniel’s.” Frank always kept a bottle nearby, offstage, and he was buried with a flask of JD in his casket.

In her autobiography, Judith Campbell Exner —the moll who was mistress to both John F. Kennedy and the head of the Chicago mob—recalled a day spent with Sinatra. He “acknowledged the comings and goings of an endless string of visitors, growled at flunkies, drank martinis, ate lunch, drank Jack Daniel’s, ate hors d’oeuvres, drank Jack Daniel’s, ate dinner, and drank more Jack Daniel’s.”

By the mid-1960s, Sinatra could drink a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and still go on stage.

2) The Anticipation

Like any respectable Sinatra aficionado, I have imbibed my share of Tennessee’s trademark sour mash whiskey. And as the author of a new book on Sinatra, I had an extra incentive to try the latest ultra-premium Jack Daniel’s bottle sent to me by my editor at The Wall Street Journal: a limited-edition 100-proof whiskey aged in 100 “alligator-charred” oak barrels (so called for the scaly interior surface left by the fire, the deepest of all the chars whiskey producers use to impart flavor and color to the liquor). It hit shelves in October—in plenty of time for toasts to Frank Sinatra on his 100^th birthday, December 12, 2015.

The whiskey is called Sinatra Century. By serendipitous coincidence, my new book is called “Sinatra’s Century.” I wrote it, quite simply, because I have loved the singer’s voice, his musical savvy, his definitive versions of great standards ever since I heard “All the Way” and “Witchcraft” on the radio when I was eight or nine and grasped the essence of swing from Sinatra albums a few years later. Timing it to coincide with the centennial, I wrote the book in 100 parts, because Sinatra’s career exists in exquisite counterpoint with what Henry Luce called the “American century” and because the century is the perfect form for a subject with so many facets.

Jack Daniel’s already has a top-shelf whiskey with Sinatra’s name on it – 90 proof Sinatra Select, which is selling well, at twice the price of single-barrel bourbons that are just as good. So there was a part of me that wondered whether the same would be true with “Sinatra Century” – whether JD is selling a name, an event, and a future souvenir rather than a whiskey that can go head to head with A. H. Hirsch Reserve or the best of Buffalo Trace’s Antique Collection.

3) The Presentation

The presentation of Sinatra Century is as lavish as it should be, priced at $379 or more per one-liter bottle. It arrives in a deep blue-indigo lacquered carrying case with an engraved brass handle on top. Pop open the case, and the bottle sits in a custom groove, like a dark liquid jewel set against black velvet. Each bottle is numbered—mine is FAS 23095, the initials standing for Francis Albert Sinatra. Also in their own made-to-size grooves are a hardbound booklet devoted to Sinatra’s relationship with Jack Daniel’s and a tie clip that doubles as a thumb drive.

That last item comes loaded with a previously unreleased album of a live Sinatra performance: thirteen songs, two monologues and a coda, all recorded at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in January 1966. Frank had just turned fifty and was teaming up with the brilliant arranger Quincy Jones backed by the Count Basie Orchestra, and what better way to return to that evening than with a rocks glass in hand?

4) The Proof

           Isn’t “proof” a lovely word? It stands in one context for the potency of a potable, and in another it means verification: a geometrical proof, say, or the proof of the pudding. Both senses come into play here. Would Sinatra Century prove potent enough to provide the perfect accompaniment to belters like “Luck Be a Lady” and “Fly Me to the Moon”? At 100 proof, it had better. (The standard “Old No. 7” Jack Daniel’s bottle clocks in at a mere 80.)

As to color, I said amber, my wife said topaz. I said tongue of flame, my wife said Stradivarius. She described the taste as “warm orange afterglow.” I took another sip and said, “Cognac.” She sipped and said, “The Cognac of bourbons.” Goes well with dark chocolate. Warms the soul “in a drear-nighted December” (to quote Keats).

The whiskey is the best I’ve ever had from Jack Daniel’s.

How to drink it? Neat or with a few ice cubes. We stuck to Sinatra’s own recipe: “three rocks, two fingers, and a splash”–a Sinatra haiku, when you think about it. We omitted the splash.

5. The Playlist

Sinatra Century promises not merely a whiskey but an experience. So you’re sitting in your favorite reclining armchair sipping and playing the recording of that Sands appearance of January 1966. It opens with a trusty icebreaker, “Come Fly with Me,” then turns to a ballad he’s sung since his crooner days, the Gershwins’ “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” Self-consciousness spoils the verse intro. The skinny singer can scarcely keep a straight face when obliged to sing “I’m your big and brave and handsome Romeo.”

He’s on safer ground with Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Perhaps the most celebrated of all Sinatra’s up-tempo finger-snappers, it brings out his swinging best. In adapting Nelson Riddle’s 1956 arrangement, Quincy Jones makes miraculous use of reeds and muted horns to compensate for the lack of a string section.

Sinatra always maintained he was at heart a saloon singer and he proves it anew in “Street of Dreams” and Matt Dennis’s great, haunting “Angel Eyes.” As you savor another swallow, the pace changes with “Fly Me to the Moon,” a highlight of the night. Sinatra reinvented Bart Howard’s 1954 song: It wasn’t a sad wistful plea, after all, but an assertive proclamation of love. It was also a nod to NASA’s great decade, the conquest of space as a seduction song. Killer arrangement. Love that flute.

The timeless “You Make Me Feel So Young” shows Sinatra at his most buoyant, and then he turns up the warmth in Johnny Mandel’s Oscar-winning “Shadow of Your Smile.” Sinatra is dating Mia Farrow and Mia likes the song.

Frank Loesser’s “Luck Be a Lady” comes from the musical “Guys and Dolls.” In the movie version, Sinatra played Nathan Detroit, but it was Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson who got to sing this ode to gambling that marks the show’s heroic climax. Now, to correct the injustice, Sinatra demonstrates how the song should be sung. One of Sinatra’s anthems in the 1960s, a hymn to Las Vegas, here it’s as electric as “Fly Me to the Moon,” with a tail like that of “My Kind of Town.”

Time for another round.

The audience is hushed when Frank sings “It Was a Very Good Year,” where again the reeds do the work of strings, and then the Rodgers and Hart standard “Where or When,” not only a marvelous love song but also the greatest ever on the subject of déjà vu: “Some things that happen for the first time / Seem to be happening again.”

The nightclub act ends with a song Sinatra owns: “My Kind of Town,” the terrific tribute to Chicago that Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen wrote for their boss to sing in “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” his last movie musical.

By now you’ve made a dent in the bottle and you’re robustly singing along.

-- from  "Author David Lehman Takes On Jack Daniel's Sinatra Century," in The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2016

"Dream of the Atlas Moth" [by Aspen Matis]

October. And the air earthy

as the forearms of a folk hero.

 

Atlas moths cling to the window

screen, freeze their wings

into sleep

unknowable

as the mind

of an opponent soldier —

opaque as any other creature,

winged or

only terrestrial.

 

Imagine that these Atlas

moths don’t see us anymore,

their minds exploring a war

still undefeated, undefined — unspoken —

knowing only the wreckage

of the future, distant

glacial lakes draped

with a green-blue blanket

of algae — ice sheet gone — 

 

and the stars,

how rare

they are in the darkness,

how hard and bright and white,

precise as the modern red-brown-orange

painting of a moth’s wings

designed by no one

we know.

Ballet for Your Weekend [by Stacey Harwood Lehman]

Cynthia Gregory was one of the great prima ballerinas of the last century. I'd seen her American Ballet Theater performances countless times and the "after image" of her Odette-Odile in Swan Lake is indelible. She was memorable for her long expressive line, her subtle acting, the intelligence that always seemed to find something new in classic roles. She was the epitome of elegance.

Shortly after I moved to New York City in the late '70s, I went to a movie at a theater near Lincoln Center. I don't recall the feature, but before it began, this short film of Gregory dancing with Ivan Nagy rolled. It has haunted me ever since, and based on the comments below the YouTube video, which surfaced recently, others had a similar reaction. What do you think?

During those years, my sister Amy and I often attended the summer weekend matinees at Lincoln Center. One afternoon, moments before the first curtain, we grabbed a couple of empty orchestra seats we had spied from our perch in the balcony. Just as the conductor tapped his baton,a voice came over the loudspeaker to announce that Ms. Gregory would not be dancing. "Damn," I said. "You can't plan on anything these days." "Sometimes we have injuries," said the woman seated to my right. I turned. It was Cynthia Gregory, and her ankle was bandaged. I hadn't recognized her in street clothes and without stage makeup.

On another occasion, my sister and I had a post-performance snack at O'Neal's Balloon, a casual restaurant that faced the State Theater dressing room exit. Just as our drinks arrived, Cynthia Gregory stepped onto the street and into a cab. Her arms were filled with bouquets of lilies. She was wearing a white silky summer dress and a white straw hat with an enormous brim. Was she a vision or a waking dream?

-- sdl

This is an update of a post that originally appeared in 2010. 

Winter, "with all its tits in the right bra cup" [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Have we considered that Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” was written for a winter’s day?  It depends what one calls lovely and what kind of temperament you woke up hoping for.  (For which you came up hoping.)  I’d like to have a responsive reading where every time I end my sentence with a preposition, the audience has to say the clause back to me, with all its tits in the right bra cup this time.  What are you waiting for now?  (For what now am I waiting?)   Sometimes the world arranges itself in Suessian piles, sometimes you have to help it along.  I can put up with anything but panic.  (Panic is what up with which is all you claim you cannot put.)  Clouds, calm down!!  Frozen nowhere is not just Superman’s lair of choice.  It is a privilege to be hiding in the end of January with you.  What do we weigh down today to keep from disappearing?  We weigh down the river today to keep from disappearing.  Do, I'd say.  He'd say, "Every fair from fair sometime declines, by chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed."  Because he knew how to talk to a ghostbuster of a girl like me.

from the archive; first posted January 28, 2009

Reading Milosz with Robert Hass [by Mindy Aloff]

“Reading Miłosz: The Short Course”

Six winter 2022 Thursdays to consider the poetry of Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004), Lithuanian-born poet, novelist, lawyer, diplomat, Berkeley professor of Slavic languages, and Nobelist.

Guide: Robert Hass, poet, teacher, Poet Laureate of the United States (1995-1997), and one of the translators of Miłosz’s poetry into English.

Host: Jesse Nathan, poet, Berkeley lecturer in English, and interlocutor for Robert Hass’s Paris Review interview (“The Art of Poetry” 108, Issue 233, Summer 2020).

 Class I: Thursday, 20 January

Nearly two hundred impressively well-read souls, from locations as far-flung as Taiwan, Oaxaca, and Australia, signed up to take this unusual online course: A survey of English translations for a single poet, the native Polish speaker Czesław Miłosz (one of the world’s most revered poets of the twentieth century) under the tutelage of Robert Hass, a Bay-Area neighbor and friend of Miłosz’s who eventually served his fellow poet as a translator. The Community of Writers developed the course and administers it

It was a coup to enlist  Bob Hass as the class's Virgil, because it was Bob, himself a brilliant poet, who may have done more than anyone else to make Milosz's poetry accessible to English-speaking readers. Working closely with Milosz, Hass translated the verse of the older poet despite his own lack of Polish beyond a battered copy of McLaughlin’s Polish-English dictionary, excursions into Google, and occasional Mayday calls to Polish-speaking colleagues. Periodically humbled by Miłosz’s ironclad preferences for a different approach, the American poet's ego had to muster its capacity for resilience.

Czesław Miłosz: New and Collected Poems 1931—2001 (Ecco) is the course's point of departure for extended reports of such disputes as over whether the narrating I is waiting “peacefully” or “quietly,” disputes that, in Bob’s accounts of them, sound as if they were never less than courteous yet also never less than everything. As Robert Pinsky, working on one of the translations with Bob, put it, the problem with the translation at hand was that, in English, “cabbage” and “grass” don’t rhyme.

Since most of the students would not be able to read the poems in the original Polish, the subjects of discussion are the poems of Czesław Miłosz as filtered through the voices of Hass, Pinsky, and other translators, as well as the English voice of Miłosz. Bob provides personal backstories and he and Jesse Nathan fill in aspects of Miłosz’s biography and of Polish history. Along the way, Bob drops hints as to the formal elements of the poems in Polish: Are the stanzas rhymed? Metered? Are the three-liners related to Dante’s terza rima? Apparently, Miłosz took a dim view of analyzing poetry for its inherited forms. As Bob puts it, “He says form in poetry is like refrigeration—meant to preserve bad meat.” I suppose the fact that a poet with this attitude toward form still managed to produce poetry that never sounds disorganized is part of the proof of his innate magic. And I suppose the fact that the odd Miłosz line can strike some as “Sexist!" just goes to show that even the steeds of Apollo can stumble sometimes. The line in question is the last of this stanza, from “Dedication,” a poem written in the winter of 1945.  The stanza is introduced by two of the most cherished lines in the Miłosz treasury, lines that elevated him on the Starlight Express directly to Olympus:

“What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.”

Before anyone gets hot under the collar about the sophomore girls, you might want to secure a hazmat suit to read the little cantata “The Song,” written in 1934, when Miłosz was barely twenty-three. “The Song” dramatizes humanity, represented by a figure called “Woman,” as remembering her lesbian “Nights of love” with the Earth, her “tranquil sister,” whose “burning touch” can still be felt, and from whose “greedy mouth” the Woman cries to God to “have mercy. . .deliver me, / cleanse me of her untrue songs.”

If you detect a religious note here (and I am among those who do), it might be helpful to know that, as Bob observed, both he and Miłosz were imbued from childhood with the catechism of the Catholic Church, in which they were reared. As a Jew, I probably miss a lot of nuance in their poetry; still, I associate the catechism with an adherent’s pursuit of spiritual perfection and, at times, a sense of great sadness, even, perhaps, guilt, when perfection cannot be found in one’s being. I feel the search—and the lament—quite strongly in the poems of Miłosz. Here, in “The Song,” it is an abstract quality: “Oh, if there were in me one seed without rust, / no more than one grain that could perdure / I could sleep in the cradle leaning by turns/ now into darkness, now into the break of day.”

In a poem from Warsaw, in 1943—when, as Bob related, Miłosz and his friends stood on a balcony, in a beautiful, sweet-scented night, when flowering plants made it feel good to be alive, yet when the air was rent and seared by the screams of thousands of Jews being slaughtered in the ghetto by the Nazis—the poet creates “a guardian mole [who] makes his way, / With a small red lamp fastened to his forehead.” He goes on to make an aristocratic inventory of the unnameable:

“He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on,
He distinguishes human ashes by their luminous vapor,
The ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum. . . .”

The poem concludes with a lament worthy of Jeremiah:

“What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament,
Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?
My broken body will deliver me to his sight
And he will count me among the helpers of death:
The uncircumcised.”

Miłosz liked to compare his upbringing among the landed gentry of a rural place to the characters in the novels of Thomas Hardy. I’m not familiar with any comparison he made between the melancholy, even desolation in those characters and the burden that history thrust into the poet’s being, eventuating in a tone of existential despair and a vision continually rippling with premonitions that frequently turned out to be accurate. Yet the search for a perfection, a holistic innocence, that can be found only in early childhood, seems to me to ghost these early poems and, in certain attitudes of reading, to render them sacred.  

*

The Community of Writers, a California institution that is based in a valley in the Sierras renowned for its skiing, brings like-minded individuals together to discuss the whys and wherefores of various genres of writing, among them the usual suspects (poetry, fiction, playwriting) and a few exotics (The Art of the Wild, Writing the Medical Experience). In a triumph of Nature worship at its most imaginative, the Community ordinarily puts on its annual omnium-gatherum of programs in this famous ice palace of the Wild during the summer.  In 2022, because of the pandemic, the wordsmiths were finally able to celebrate their somewhat delayed half century of bonding over baseball games, lakeside dips, and impassioned debate by going rogue, with a program that is, if you’ll excuse the expression in this context, literally virtual -- as well as virtuous.

–Mindy Aloff

Cognition, perception & whatever works, works in painting, poetics and dance [by Tracy Danison]

Like Dance, capital “D”, Kiefer’s show is a “whole” in constant movement: everything around it is in it and everything within it can be found outside it. That includes Grand Palais Ephémère, an enormous technical construction that has been repurposed as a bubble of space in a sort of Empty Quarter behind the Eiffel Tower, on Place Joffre, facing a dilapidated building that may have been, in Joffre’s glory days, death registrations. View from the exhibition “Anselm Kiefer pour Paul Celan”, Grand Palais Ephémère©Georges Poncet-Réunion des musées nationaux, Grand Palais, 2021

Karine & I were delighted when we saw that the Grand Palais was holding an exposition called ”Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan”. A pandemic wet dream. Great visual art plus enough space to keep any virus concentrations in the air very low.

Kiefer honors the work of the remarkable German-language lyric poet by integrating his (Celan’s) words and lines and sense and sensibility into Kiefer’s own visual lyric.

We even came back to Paris a little earlier than usual to make sure to see it.

The experience of the show got me wondering all at once about the scope of dance creation. The logic of this wonder is of course complex. In part, I began wondering because I was struck with Anselm Kiefer’s, the show curators’ and Paul Celan’s intention and deliberation, with the venue’s place, placement and statement in its immediate environment. In part, I was struck with the show’s space, volume, size, light, shadow, with the editorial in the in the walls and ceilings, positions, with visual inventions, sculpted models and found objects, with tools, materials, material and immaterial effects… In part, I began wondering because of wider-world references in the show: Kiefer’s effect on Celan and Celan’s lyric world and on the sense of these effects Kiefer. Then there’s my own thinking on art structures in general and on dance structures in particular (see: Move that Cat, ‘Cleitus), thoughts on the indistinguishability of intention and accident (see: Machine de Cirque). And finally maybe a bit more in part than my other in-parts, the effects of a long chat I had with the dancer, choreographer, intellectual  Mylène Benoît on why she thinks dance is an essential human need.

Kiefer’s show is a “whole show” in constant movement: everything around it is in it and everything within it can be found outside it. The neighborhood where it was held was pandemic-appropriate: at the Grand Palais Ephémère, a temporary annex to the Palais, which is in renovation. Ephémère is an enormous technical construction that has been repurposed as a bubble of space in a sort of urban Empty Quarter behind the Eiffel Tower, on Place Joffre, facing a dilapidated building that we suspect – Karine and I spent our time in line theorizing – it may have been, in Joffre’s glory days, death registrations.

Altogether, the Ephémère space, seeming made-to-order for pandemic times, is also an excellent piece of psycho-esthetic engineering where Kiefer’s art was to best advantage.

But, though accommodating and integrated into the exhibition, Kiefer’s gigantic canvases, life-model jet plane and the blockhouses, its intention and arrangement stands alone, as much a work affecting its showcase as being affected by it. Wherever it travels, and I hope it does travel, it can master its environment.

As spectacle, as in everything else, ”Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan” works really well.

Kiefer, they say, had a large hand in laying out his homage to Celan.

He left behind a lot of tools, equipment, material and unused applications, back near the coffee shop. As if he meant to keep working, or might be called back for maintenance, he’d tidily sorted it all on shelving bearing up, as Atlas might, the Ephémère’s huge volume of tightly-operated light and shadow.

Kiefer’s a complete painter, an expert in producing line, color and texture as well as in the mechanics of perception. Celan is a complete poet, conjuring the texture & tone of a thought or an idea or of an unsayable image and make the surrounding air vibrate with them.

The first few lines of Death Fugue (Todesfuge), a poem that a great many young people in Germany learn in school, give an idea of Celan’s all-round grasp of poetics:

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends / Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown

wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts / we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night

wir trinken und trinken … / we drink it and drink it …

Lift a glass to the banality of evil.

Light and dark. Step to one side, you are puzzling symbols, step to another and those are recondite words, step away and a grey wall becomes a horizon, white scars change to plaques of chased silver… To enable the spectator become experiencer of the sensibility that the painter and poet, whatever works, works. View from the exhibition “Anselm Kiefer pour Paul Celan”, Grand Palais Ephémère © Georges Poncet-Réunion des musées nationaux, Grand Palais, 2021

This “Schwarze Milch” is surely the universal food and mutter of the self-poisoned, the Kluxer, the Bircher, the Q-Anon dope in his basement lounge, the ultra-violent screed of the Turner Diaries, the black-shirt murder-tech who shoots granny in the face because regulations suggest she might be too weak to work before, before … What was that bureaucratic euphemism for mass murder? … Also, it feels like stumbling on Jeff Davis’ autographed copy of Essai sur les inégalités humaines. Also it feels of a certain moment of warm-beer hilarity, also of the joyful anarchy of Chagall, also, also, also… and, and, and…

January 26 [by Thomas Moody]

January 26 is officially Australia Day, however, many Australians refer to the date as Invasion Day, which is, let’s face it, the far more compelling title, and in point of fact, the more accurate. On January 26, 1788, Admiral Arthur Phillip sailed into Sydney’s Botany Bay with the “First Fleet” to establish the penal colony of New South Wales, eighteen years after Captain James Cook had claimed the territory for Great Britain on the spurious grounds of Terra Nullius (no man’s land). It was not until January 1, 1901, that the then six British colonies came to unite as the federated nation of Australia.

If you were to ask Australians what they most valued about their country, I think a fair share would point to the landscape, to the red soils and pristine beaches, the trees that keep their leaves and shed their bark, the huge skies and brilliant light—all of which were very much present before Phillip arrived just over 230 years ago. Others might say that it was our laid-back, casual way of life which takes pride in giving everyone a “fair go,” qualities one does not readily associate with penal colonies or 18th century British maritime officers. Still others would maintain that it is our Indigenous peoples and their culture, which, as the oldest continuous culture on the planet, spans over 65,000 years, and for whom January 26, 1788, is most decidedly the worst day of all of them.

 

The Aboriginal Flag

It seems reasonable enough, then, that as the date is a cause of great pain and suffering for our First Nations peoples, it should be commemorated in a more somber and reflective manner, and our national day of celebration moved to another date. And while there is a growing movement to have Australia Day reassigned, there is also a vociferous slice of the population for whom this proposed change is an intolerable offence (ironically, while observing Australia Day, these celebrants often seem determined to forget what day it is entirely, with only their empty beer cans littering the rivers and beaches, public parks and nature reserves, to serve to remind them when they come to).

 

"Change the Date" protest

January 26 is a date that lurks deep in our national consciousness, and it is no surprise that it makes its way into the work of many of our poets. In Toby Fitch’s “January 26” the mindless celebrations at a local park come to represent the failings of a nation that is “struggling and still unsure / of learning how to start over again, how to walk this back, / uninvite ourselves from this hot, manicured parkland”. 

 

Lionel Fogarty

The poem I’d like to share today does not reference January 26 directly, however, the date seems imbued into its core. ‘What Saying Says’ from Lionel Fogarty’s Minyung Woolah Binnung is preoccupied with distinctions: the future is “black”, the playwriter is “Abo”. These distinctions could only come about, of course, because of January 26, 1788.

While always dealing with the spectre of Australia's history, Fogarty’s poetry also seems to be relentlessly forward looking. His use of the English language is so entirely unique, it is as if he is creating a language on the page as he goes: “race as taken us / ace as lag us / pace as sagged us”. And this is, perhaps, the greatest distinction: to write poetry in the English language that is not like English language poetry at all.

 

What Saying Says

 

What saying says

          same as laying bout

 

race as taken us

ace as lag us

pace as sagged us

 

The still distillery owned

          Reliving our black future

          is of most greatest to a eye

 

But the Abo playwriter said

          he bro’s you not listens

          to noboby not even your

          own kind

 

The sun shone at a cold night’s air

          The half moan came over the

                   body is laying on the frosted

           grassed plains

 

Now the laughter at hate

           Laughter at TV crap

                    Laugh at my world reefed for

           a leaving sign 

Talking Pictures: On "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) [by David Lehman]

On The Manchurian Candidate (1962): " John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece remains supreme in the field of conspiracy-theory celluloid."

<<< When The Manchurian Candidate, based on the novel by Richard Condon, was released in 1962, Pauline Kael called it “the most sophisticated political satire ever to come out of Hollywood.” Six decades on, the judgment holds, and I’ll go further. With its mind-bending plot, its celebrated brainwashing sequence, and stellar performances from a cast led by Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey, and Janet Leigh, director John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece remains supreme in the field of conspiracy-theory celluloid.

An honorable but inevitably lesser effort, Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, lacks the air of Cold War menace, not to mention the queen of diamonds in a game of solitaire as the trigger for a sleeper agent. Also lost is the cinematic magic of the original. Frankenheimer makes exemplary use of montage dissolve techniques to convey altered states of consciousness and depict the experience of hypnotic mind control. And, in retrospect, his 1962 movie seems almost to have anticipated either the earth-shaking events of November 22, 1963, or their interpretation.

Political scientists used to define politics as the art of the possible. If it has morphed into the craft of manipulative paranoia, the change dates back to the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission’s report satisfied few skeptics, journalists, or serious historians, and the credibility of politicians (who used to be called “statesmen”) keeps ebbing.

The Manchurian Candidate, which presaged the change, presents a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate by long-range rifle during his party’s nominating convention in Madison Square Garden. The movie’s conceit was so scary that studio executives at United Artists felt the project had to be cleared with the White House. Frank Sinatra dutifully called JFK, who greenlit the film, which Sinatra believed in so strongly that he volunteered the use of his private plane for an early scene in the movie.
>>>

for the rest of this "Talking Pictures" column written for The American Scholar and posted January 22, 2022 please click here.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Two): Jianqing Zheng [by Angela Ball]

Birds of Passage

We roll out of bed before sunrise, put the two pull bags in the trunk, crank up the engine, and back the car out of the driveway; we have a two-hour drive to the airport in Memphis to catch the flight to Japan. We cross the Yazoo River Bridge, pass Baptist Town where the bluesman Robert Johnson died of poison, turn left onto Route 7. We cross another bridge in a few minutes, pass the cypress bayou that looks eerie with thin mist floating above the water, and then pass Avalon where the blues marker for Mississippi John Hurt looms above the roadside high weeds. Now a thin line of dawnlight is shimmering in the low sky, and I start to speed up, but right after a curve I must slow down to catch this gorgeous flight:

crack of dawn
thousands of snow geese
honk off the fields

--Jianqing Zheng

We were afraid we would be late for our flight to Japan so I began to speed after I drove out of Greenwood, but seeing the snow geese really was a sign to slow down. Upon returning, I wrote several haibun about Japan, and when I wrote "Birds of Passage," I thought of borrowing O'Hara's way of telling about doing small things before approaching the end for the death of Holiday. I published 'Moonlight'--my first haibun—in 2003 and returned to haibun writing in 2010. A big challenge as the prose part and haiku have to complement each other or juxtapose each other. Now I seem to write more of it than free verse.
--Jianqing Zheng

Jianqing Zheng is the author of A Way of Looking and Enforced Rustication, editor of Conversations with Dana Gioia and four other scholarly books, and recipient of grants from the NEH, Fulbright Programs, and Mississippi Arts Commission. His forthcoming book of poetry is The Dog Years of Reeducation from Madville Publishing, 2023.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Two): Jianqing Zheng

Jianqing Zheng’s “Birds of Passage” is a masterful example of haibun: a form invented by seventeen-century haiku master Basho that pairs the levelness of prose with the levitation of haiku.

The poem’s drive toward Memphis calls out places sacred to the blues and encompasses a succession of flights: the poet’s flight from his home to Memphis Airport, his imminent flight to Japan (home of Basho), the bluesmen’s flight into legend, and the snow geese’s (sonically linked to the car’s horn) timely but timeless migration, that becomes, in the closing haiku, the flight which the poet must “slow down to catch.”

Zheng’s polyvalent treatment of space in “Birds of Passage” recalls Frank O’Hara’s navigation of NYC streets in “The Day Lady Died,” in which landmarks (“the bank,” “PARK LANE liquor store,” “Ziegfeld Theatre”) compose a poetic map. “Birds of Passage” travels faster, by car, (“rolling out of bed” prefiguring its wheels); crosses “Yazoo River Bridge”; passes Baptist Town “where the bluesman Robert Johnson died of poison”; crosses another bridge; passes the “cypress bayou” “eerie with thin mist floating”; passes “Avalon [in legend, the “earthly paradise” King Arthur was carried to after death] where the blues marker for Mississippi John Hurt looms above the roadside high weeds.” Zheng’s “thin line of dawnlight” “shimmering in the low sky” recalls the charged horizontality in O’Hara’s poem as Lady Day “whispers a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron.”

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “Snow Geese are possibly the noisiest of all waterfowl. Their main call, made by both males and females, is a nasal, one-syllable honk given at any hour of the day or night, at any time of year, in the air or on the ground. Distant calling flocks are reminiscent of a pack of baying hounds.”

The cacophony of geese both drowns the car’s hurry and “honks off” the tragic history witnessed by land that produced that earthiest art form, the blues—music that consumes its own impetus, as Lachey Doley avers in his song, “The Only Cure for the Blues is the Blues.” Jianqing Zheng’s “Birds of Passage” ends in bluesy glory and stunning uplift as, through opening daylight, a flock of geese sounds.

--Angela Ball

"Other News on Page 234" [by Herbert Gold]

Someone famous will die that day,
My day,
And the newspaper will report:
“More obituaries on page 24.”

For the curiosity of some,
the regret of several,
and the grief of a few.

Those few, they matter,
So they have a nice walk
in the Marin headlands
Shadowed by a weary and worn mountain
(still green! still fragrant!
with pine and transplanted eucalyptus,
and most important: Still there!),
where I’m proud that the few gather trash,
But drop my ashes downwind,
And remember as I fly away.

— Herbert Gold

This is one of the poems by novelist Herbert Gold, now 97, that Tablet magazine ran in this  article about the verse correspondence between the writer and his two sons: "We See Exits and Entrances: A poetry correspondence between the acclaimed novelist Herbert Gold and his sons" by Ari Gold, Herbert Gold, and Ethan Gold
in Tablet  January 24, 2022
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/we-see-exits-entrances

From “The hounding of author Kate Clanchy. . ." [by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian, Jan. 23, 2022]

From “The hounding of author Kate Clanchy has been a witch-hunt without mercy” by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian (January 23, 2022)

A few years ago, when I was still getting to grips with the vagaries of Twitter, I inadvertently took part in a social media pile-on. Someone well known said something stupid and I enjoyed tweeting to that effect. But when she shared how upsetting she found the onslaught, I was forced to confront my unwitting bit-part in a collective act of bullying. There was nothing wrong with my tweet by itself, but hundreds of people shouting at you feels like abuse in a way that a single critique does not and the virtual nature of social media makes it harder to know when you are complicit in a form of mob justice.

Things have got worse since then and I find myself returning to this idea of proportionality often, most recently in the case of the author Kate Clanchy. Last week, it was announced that she and her publisher, Pan Macmillan, had parted company “by mutual consent” and that it will “revert the rights” and cease distribution of all her work.

The book that prompted this is Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, her memoir of a 30-year teaching career. Rave reviews and an Orwell prize gave way to mixed reactions from readers: some adored it, others thought she used racial and ableist stereotypes to describe her diverse students. Among the readers of colour I know, reactions were just as mixed: some found her descriptors offensive, others thought they were OK, especially in the context of her honesty about her own naivety and prejudices.

After apologies and safeguarding investigations had been demanded on their behalf, a group of Clanchy’s students wrote of her “unequivocal care and support for us… as poets and as people”, noting the book’s “flaws and imperfections”, but drawing attention to her “empowering methods of supporting and championing youth poetry... from disadvantaged backgrounds”. Supporting Clanchy, a former student railed against criticism of the author’s description of her “almond-shaped eyes” as offensive; another has written of the “unimaginable” positive impact Clanchy has had on her life.

It is true that Clanchy reacted badly to the criticism, denying the phrases in question were in her book. Defensiveness is a flawed but common response when being charged with something you abhor. But both she and Pan Macmillan issued apologies for the offence the book caused and her publisher announced she would rewrite it to address concerns. One might think that that would have drawn a line, enabling the industry to move on to issues about its lack of diversity, which Clanchy has done more than many of her critics to address.

It did not. Pan Macmillan was further berated for giving her the opportunity to make amends by rewriting. After her publisher, Picador imprint’s Philip Gwyn Jones, rightly reflected that he wished he had been clearer about its support for Clanchy and her rights, alongside condemning the online abuse and trolling by her critics, he issued an apology for causing further hurt that read like a hostage note: “I now understand I must use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness.”

Clanchy appears to have been cast beyond the pale, where there is no room for nuance. But it is evident from the testimony of those who know her that she has done a huge amount of good, championing young people whom society too often ignores. Her students have gone on to address the UN, been commissioned to write poetry for the BBC and had their poetry set to music by acclaimed composers.

Clanchy appears to have been cast beyond the pale, where there is no room for nuance. But it is evident from the testimony of those who know her that she has done a huge amount of good, championing young people whom society too often ignores. Her students have gone on to address the UN, been commissioned to write poetry for the BBC and had their poetry set to music by acclaimed composers.

How to make sense of her ostracism? Some people are desperate to see the world cast in black and white. Clanchy’s worst crime is not to fit this mould. Of course she doesn’t: none of us can rise above the imperfectly human. Look at her in the round and it’s obvious she’s done more good than most. This is why the strand of anti-racist thinking that is obsessed with the blame and shame all white people should bear for structural discrimination is so corrosive to common cause and understanding. White people who do nothing to challenge racism are terrible, but white people who trip up when trying to do something about it are even worse. The societal misogyny that infects this movement means it sees older white women as the very worst of all. Any expression of distress is the weaponisation of “white women’s tears”. The witch is not permitted to have feelings; they distract from her role as lightning rod for anger at all of society’s ills.

Publishing’s lack of diversity makes it vulnerable to witch-hunts. It is notoriously posh and white; when someone unfamiliar comes along saying that something is so offensive it should be expunged from the record, publishers assume they speak for all people of colour, as if we constitute a blob of uniform thought.

Pan Macmillan’s overreaction has caused huge collateral damage – it will no longer publish a new anthology of poems by Clanchy’s students – and is no substitute for working at becoming more diverse. “Sensitivity readers”, people who comb manuscripts looking for the potentially offensive, are a crass development: it outsources responsibility and plays on the idea that if a book has the potential to offend, it shouldn’t be published.

What has happened to Clanchy is a sad tale for our ages. No individual is to blame: it is the product of brittle and cowardly institutions, and the collective social media frenzy that prizes heads on a platter over change. But what I cannot understand is the lack of humanity at Pan Macmillan. One of its authors writes about feeling suicidal, as Clanchy has done recently, and, rather than offering her support, it walks away.

For all our differences of opinion, our eagerness to call out right and wrong, the one thing we must never let the digital age allow us to forget is the duty of care we owe each other as human beings.

See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/23/the-hounding-of-kate-clanchy-has-been-a-witch-hunt-without-mercy
Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist

Dan Gutstein: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

____________________________________

The Fox Who Loves Me + Other Developments in the Faunal and Floral Kingdoms

 

1. Deep, deep in the shrubberies: behold the beaver. Being human and smart-alecky, one ponders the paddle. We’re told that the paddle is for dam building, but that can’t be all. The beaver, for example, knows love. What doeth the paddle during the love-making of the beaver? People paddle each other, although the paddle is not—organically—attached to them. You might think “furry, cute little critter” but I think not. I see a varmint that can chew through a tree. Knowing not what might aggravate the beaver, I keep moving along.

2. This massive heron floats down to earth. It is equal parts dinosaur, goose, and 747. A comedian. Slender and plump. Where are the myths about this fine specimen? How come no Leda and the Great Blue? It is a stoic. Perhaps it thinks me a stoic, as well. The two of us, trudging along in the miserable murk that defines our lives. Me ‘n’ the heron, we complaineth not.

3. Thank you for inquiring about the Early Girl tomato plant. Given the absence of bees on the balcony, Dear Reader, I hand-pollinated every single flower. Lo, the plant begat many dozen tomatoes! We had a terrific affair. As for the fruits themselves, well, they were quite tasty, as it works out. This bit of gardening provided me with an essential activity as my skeleton reeled from an injury.

4. During my convalescence from said injury (which continues at present) I watched some reruns of Law & Order. I would like to say that Claire Kincaid, played by Jill Hennessey, is my favorite character. Dunno how the show continued on without her.

5. I got bitten! Not only that, but the venom (of whatever bit me) tried to slay me. But I endured.

6. Given the seriousness of the injury, I hadn’t seen my BFF from the faunal kingdom in several months. But one day, as part of my rehabilitation walk, I thought I saw the little ears sticking up, out of the sand trap. So I says, “Hey mate,” in my silly Australian accent. “Hey mate, you’re a good-looking fox.” This is how all the animals in my orbit know it’s me. The silly accent. She sits bolt upright, curling the big brush of the tail behind her. I think she even whined a little bit. That really broke me up!

7. The fox, stirring.

8. The fox, running. She looks hale and hearty. She’s a good-looking fox, mate.

   __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

   

   __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
   

   Dan Gutstein’s most recent collection of writing is Metacarpalism (poetry, Unsolicited Press, 2022). His poems and stories have appeared in more than a hundred journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, American Scholar, The Iowa Review, Best American Poetry, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. He is also co-director of documentary project Li’l Liza Jane: The Story of America Through the History of a Song and vocalist for NPR-featured punk band Joy on Fire

   __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

   
                                                    Winslow Homer, The Fox Hunt.

On Balanchine's Birthday (January 22,1904)

George Balanchine (1904-1983) is tremendously quotable – if only because so many of his bon mots are adapted from others. When he declared himself to be “not a man but a cloud in trousers,” for example, he lifted the line directly from one of Mayakovsky’s greatest poems. Usually, however, the matchless choreographer offered not a straight quotation but an unacknowledged paraphrase. Here’s a basket of Mr. B’s observations.

“God made men to sing the praises of women.”

“When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, ‘What do you mean?  What is your significance?’ Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful.  We're like flowers.  A flower doesn't tell you a story. It’s in itself a beautiful thing.”

In Balanchine’s view, Fred Astaire [pictured right with Cyd Charisse] was “the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times.”

“The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.”

“In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts. God made men to sing the praises of women. They are not equal to men: They are better.”

“Dance is music made visible.” (Also, “See the music, hear the dance.”)

“There are no mothers-in-law in ballet” (also known as Balanchine’s Law).

“We all live in the same time forever. There is no future and there is no past.”

“Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policemen don't have to look beautiful at the same time.”

“In fact I disagree with everybody and I don't want to argue about it.”

“The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.”

And when he received the Handel medallion, he said, “I can't Handel it. . .so I'll Haydn it.”

See Arlene Croce's “Balanchine Said” in The New Yorker (January 26, 2009): “In later years, [Balanchine] waged a personal campaign against the twentieth-century fetish of originality. . . . He saw no harm in appropriating; and he stole and was stolen from – that was the way of art.”

Above: George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell rehearsing Don Quixote in 1968.

"Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters" [new poems by Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung]

"At the start of the pandemic, I wrote nine lines (three tercets) and asked Laren to write a response in three tercets. This back and forth correspondence has continued as an improvisation throughout this strange time and perhaps the poetic dialogue has been led by the sway of language, the movement of two minds at play, and the nature of this unfolding moment. The excerpt here begins with my nine lines, and then Laren's, and so forth."   —Yusef Komunyakaa 

from Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters

I met Greg from north Louisiana, both of us
graduate students in Colorado, & one night
he said, I got something weird to show you.

We went to his small, spic & span apartment,
& he pulled from the closet iron shackles,
& said, This ugly thing’s from back home

at my plantation I’m turning into a tree farm.
He handed the shackles to me & said, Please
hold ‘em. It took me a night to get out of ‘em.

There’s irony in a man who drags shackles
around to remind him of sins of the past—
the ghost of Jacob Marley hauling chains,

condemned to eternally roam as penance.
Maybe shackles are a form of redemption
for one with a conscience who might think

a way to undo karma is to keep going back
in time, unearth a grave, & lock yourself
in the box, then strike ‘til the shackle drops.

When Robert Johnson went to Hazlehurst
he sought out an old guitarist named Ike
Zimmerman, & they’d go out at midnight

into the graveyard & play for long hours,
singing verses etched on stone by acid rain,
going inside, & coming out the backdoor,

smelling of moonshine. A lusty knot
tied when a hoodoo woman dared him
to clench his guitar with a seventh string.

Sometimes a hellhound on the trail can set
you back, or a woman’s dare dream you
two steps forward when you’re caught up

in syzygy of a great exchange. Sometimes
one occults while the third makes transit.
But, man, think of Johnson’s large hands

gliding on the neck of his Gibson, the devil
in the right fingerpicking with all digits & thumb.
Yeah, he slayed beauty ‘til it sung like two.

Brother John says, Good trouble. I hear you.
Yeah, another black Southerner who stood up,
squared his shoulders, & faced off scalawags,

die-hards, & a den of humbug, today,
we lay you to rest in Trueblood’s Atlanta.
Yes, springtime’s cut an unruly pathway.

Ah, life, I danced you up & down a windy road,
& wore out nine pairs of work boots, almost
there, my heart prodded up high stone steps.

Be cool,’Sef, & take high steps slow. Sarsens
at Stonehenge align with the Sun, like Temple
of Kukulcán. See, even three snowy pyramids

in the polar desert were mistaken for mountains.
We all yearn to build toward heaven or design
worlds that rise from a distance into clouds.

Colossal heads unearthed on Easter Island
reveal torsos, & below tombs. Or in the Sphinx
head, a labyrinth. Alien codes are writ in DNA.

Well, I’m not ready to see a crazy doctor’s jitterbug
behind the podium, talking about alien sperm, hoax,
& black magic. Just come back down slowly

to Earth. We have been in lockdown for over four
months, but you nor I have changed into a starry-eyed
siren, alien, or deadly hag-maiden in the fiery mirror.

Nor are we now Donne, Mary Shelley, & Percy,
creating ghosts & monsters, the sun hidden behind
volcanic ash, each day a candle-flicker all summer.

Flaming ash, & three hours of ground shaking
bones of the dead, sea turned stone in eighteen hundred
& froze to death, or Year of the Beggar

as Germans called it. Here locals lived on rats,
boiled nettles, raccoon & pigeon, or by sucking red clay.
But we’re lucky—skies so clear we study star

for clues, even in the halo of city lights, no smog
blows in this shutdown. We’ve grown fat here,
yet there’s phantom taste of hunger in plumes of ash.

I doubt it, yet there are children fending off hunger
in overfed America, while parents drink & gamble
in high rises & basement hovels with barb-tail devils,

sitting in director chairs, behind their Saks Fifth
skeleton masks. Yes, our phantoms are twelve feet,
& each has mastered the freeway’s chase scene.

But Shelley’s Frankenstein was pieced together
slow as a Gees Bend quilt, saying, Please love me,
or you’re responsible for the bad I think, say, & do.

Seamstresses wove tenderness into fine scraps
of kaleidoscopic praise, freedom quilts
reviving a world from pain, birthed by divine

Shakti in women’s hands, not by obsession
of a doctor who comes tragically aware, saying:
I tortured a living animal to animate lifeless clay.

My first loves were monsters, shadowy figures
hocussing in doorways, vampires stalking halls
of sleep, but before the fateful bite, I’d beg, Wait.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Emperor of Water Clocks, and Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth (FSG). His most recent honors in 2021 include the Griffin Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. His plays, performance art and libretti have been performed internationally and include Saturnalia, Wakonda’s Dream, Testimony, and Gilgamesh. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2003.

 

Laren McClung is the author of a collection of poems, Between Here and Monkey Mountain (Sheep Meadow Press), and editor of the anthology Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (W.W. Norton). Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Poetry, Yale Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She has held fellowships and residencies from Teachers & Writers Collaborative; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. She served as the 40th Poet Laureate of Bucks County and currently teaches at New York University.

The Portable Pussy [by Nin Andrews]

The Portable Pussy

Wherever I go, I carry a pussy with me.  How, you might ask, but I and the pussy are not one and the same being, so carry it I must.   Asleep or awake, depending on who else is in the room, the pussy talks.  Quietly of course, so as not to attract attention or disturb the peace.  And honestly, much too honestly, really.  I am so relieved when those who hear it pretend not to.  Or perhaps they imagine they are only hearing things.  On rare occasions the pussy gets carried away.   Then it sings off key or starts composing poetry.   Of course, most don’t suspect (or so I hope) that it’s the pussy and not I who sings, or how difficult it is to carry a pussy everywhere I go, much less listen to the running commentary when all I wish for is silence.  A little relief.  I’ve even sought medical advice, but the doctors insist the pussy is all in the mind.  I need only stop thinking about it, and the pussy will vanish forever.  So I have been thinking about not thinking about the pussy.  But I have fears.  If the pussy is in my mind, alongside my thoughts, what if the thoughts leave first?  If I have to pick between a pussy and a brain, which will it be? After all, who can choose between the player and his flute?  The sea below and the sky above?  How can I ignore the gullies for the torrents of the rain and the path of the thunderbolt? And who am I to command the waves thus far and no farther shall you come.

--- Nin Andrews

On Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" [by David Lehman]

“Where Ignorance Is Bliss, Tis Folly To Be Wise” 
David Lehman on why Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” is an overlooked poetic masterpiece.
By David Lehman 

from Slate (January 22, 2013)

Portrait of Thomas Gray

Painted by John Giles Eccardt.

Favorite examples of poetic endings include the interrogatives of Shelley (“If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”) and Yeats (“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”), the declarative Milton (“They also serve who only stand and wait”), the ecstatic Coleridge (“For he on honeydew hath fed/ and drunk the milk of paradise”), the reiterated premonitions of Robert Frost (“And miles to go before I sleep”).

In this company belongs Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (written in 1742, published five years later), an overlooked masterpiece from the most underrated century of English verse. Gray’s ode ends, “Where ignorance is bliss,/ Tis folly to be wise,” an assertion that has attained the status of a proverb and can be discussed for many fruitful hours on its own or in relation to the Garden of Eden in Chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis.

In his Short History of English Literature, George Saintsbury says Gray was “probably the best-read man of letters of his time in Europe.” What he lacked in originality and inspiration he made up for in fastidious craftsmanship. His poetic output was small but choice. He subscribed to the idea, popular in the century of Alexander Pope, that excellence of expression trumped originality of concept. Gray felt, too, that true poetry was incompatible with the discourse of the tribe, and it is his artificial diction that earned him an attack from Wordsworth in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth quoted the whole of Gray's sonnet mourning the death of his friend Richard West saying that only five lines were worth keeping. Gray’s best-known poem remains his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” which even Samuel Johnson, no fan of the poet, praised: “The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

The “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” in its general contours, is a romantic poem of return, with some similarities to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”  In both poems the poet returns to a place after an interval of years; he feels the change as a loss; he recollects the past and looks to the future. Wordsworth’s poem travels from melancholy at the passing of youth to the compensations of maturity. But Gray’s poem is more radical, the poet less willing to talk himself out of his gloom.

I have read Gray’s “Ode” many times and it has never failed to astonish me. It begins conventionally enough with a description of Eton seen from afar. “Happy” are the hills, “pleasing” is the shade. We anticipate an idealized evocation of the life of boys on the playing fields of Eton (where, 70 years later, the Duke of Wellington would say that the battle of Waterloo was won). But even as Gray summons up the image of the boys at their games, we get hints that Eton remembered is what Frost called a “momentary stay against confusion.” The boys “snatch a fearful joy,” we learn in the fourth stanza. The fifth stanza states the enviable condition of youth: “the tear forgot as soon as shed.” But nothing prepares us for the change in intensity signaled by the opening of stanza six: “Alas, regardless of their doom,/ The little victims play.” At the sound of the words doom and victim, the reader is in the position of a batter who had expected a fast ball and looks in amazement and dismay as an off-speed pitch curves over the heart of the plate.

There follows an unrelenting list of pains, grievances, ailments, and sufferings—a catalogue without parallel in English lyric poetry. The vision of the life of man is grim, as grim as in Hobbes (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”), but the writing is so controlled and has such authority that one finds it delicious despite the dispiriting content. The balanced clauses reveal a subtlety of distinction—between, for example, the tender-hearted who feels “another’s pain” while “the unfeeling” is mired in his own.

Do we agree with Gray’s conclusion? Do we want to know the doctor’s bad news? Do we cherish our illusions rather than choose what Freud prescribes as “an education in reality”? Would Eve and Adam have been “wise” to reject the fruits of knowledge? These are different questions—not variants of the same question—and their urgency speaks to the epigrammatic power of what Gray wrote.

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear David Lehman read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

"Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College"

By Thomas Gray

Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy Shade;
And ye, that from the stately brow
Of Windsor's heights the expanse below
Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among
Wanders the hoary Thames along
His silver-winding way.

Ah happy hills, ah pleasing shade,
Ah fields beloved in vain,
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales, that from ye blow,
A momentary bliss bestow,
As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.

Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race
Disporting on thy margent green
The paths of pleasure trace,
Who foremost now delight to cleave
With pliant arm thy glassy wave?
The captive linnet which enthrall?
What idle progeny succeed
To chase the rolling circle's speed,
Or urge the flying ball?

While some on earnest business bent
Their murmuring labours ply
'Gainst graver hours, that bring constraint
To sweeten liberty:
Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry:
Still as they run they look behind,
They hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy.

Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed,
Less pleasing when possessed;
The tear forgot as soon as shed,
The sunshine of the breast:
Their buxom health of rosy hue,
Wild wit, invention ever-new,
And lively cheer of vigour born;
The thoughtless day, the easy night,
The spirits pure, the slumbers light,
That fly the approach of morn.

Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond today:
Yet see how all around 'em wait
The ministers of human fate,
And black Misfortune's baleful train!
Ah, show them where in ambush stand
To seize their prey the murtherous band!
Ah, tell them, they are men!

These shall the fury Passions tear,
The vultures of the mind,
Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear,And Shame that skulks behind;
Or pining Love shall waste their youth,
Or Jealousy with rankling tooth,
That inly gnaws the secret heart,
And Envy wan, and faded Care,
Grim-visaged comfortless Despair,
And Sorrow's piercing dart.

Ambition this shall tempt to rise,
Then whirl the wretch from high,
To bitter Scorn a sacrifice,
And grinning Infamy.
The stings of Falsehood those shall try,
And hard Unkindness' altered eye,
That mocks the tear it forced to flow;
And keen Remorse with blood defiled,
And moody Madness laughing wild
Amid severest woe.

Lo, in the vale of years beneath
A grisly troop are seen,
The painful family of Death,
More hideous than their Queen:
This racks the joints, this fires the veins,
That every labouring sinew strains,
Those in the deeper vitals rage:
Lo, Poverty, to fill the band,
That numbs the soul with icy hand,
And slow-consuming Age.

To each his sufferings: all are men,
Condemned alike to groan;
The tender for another's pain,
The unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/classic_poems/2013/01/david_lehman_on_why_thomas_gray_s_ode_on_a_distant_prospect_of_eton_college.html

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

Ozymandias:
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

Emily Dickinson
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/06/a-trip-to-tintern-abbey-by-david-lehman.html

To His Coy Mistress
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/08/seizing-the-moment-on-andrew-marvells-to-his-coy-mistress-by-david-lehman.html

Ben Jonson
https://marshhawkpress.org/commentary-by-david-lehman-ben-jonsons-my-picture-left-in-scotland/

or click on our "Great Poems" link here or on the left side of the page.   

Ogden Nash's Advice to Husbands

A Word to Husbands

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.

from Candy is Dandy by Ogden Nash (1962).
Did you know that rhymester Nash wrote the lyrics for Kurt Weill's beautiful love song "Speak Low"?