The Best American Poetry

Seven Splendid Anthologies [by David Lehman]

* Louis Untermeyer, A Concise Treasure of American Poetry (Pocket Books). A peerless one-volume introduction to American poetry. Untermeyer's biographical notes and comments are exemplary. See the note on William Cullen Bryant.

* The New American Poetry edited by Donald Allen (Grove Press). In the 1960s battle of the anthologies, Allen’s -- which represented the counter-cultural, adversarial, and avant-garde alternatives to the academic poetry of the time -- won readers’ hearts and minds and gained legitimacy for the Beats, Black Mountain poets, and the New York School.

* The Viking Portable Poets of the English Language, edited by W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson. This attractive but sadly out-of-print five-volume set is a nostalgic lit major’s dream, covering English poetry from the Medieval and Renaissance periods through the Romantics, Victorians, and Edwardians. Alice Quinn, former poetry editor of The New Yorker, and I compared notes and discovered that both of us go to book sales and snap up a copy of any volume to give as presents.

* Dwight Macdonald's Parodies (Da Capo). This superbly entertaining book contains monuments of merriment by Max Beerbohm, Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, and Lewis Carroll -- as well as an inadvertent self-parody by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Da Capo Press reissued the book with an introduction by Veronica Geng in 1985: “If Parodies were a man, I’d marry it (him, them).”

* Reading Lyrics, ed Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball (Pantheon). Whether you consider them as poems or as occupying a field of their own, the best lyrics of Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Dorothy Fields, Oscar Hammerstein, Gus Kahn, Leo Robin, and many others amount to an American cultural glory full of wit and romance and charm. This is an indispensable book.

* Harvey Shapiro, Poets of World War II (Library of America). The scariest war of the twentieth century produced memorable poems, some well-known (Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"), some little known or under-appreciated, including works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lincoln Kirstein, Kenneth Koch, and Yvor Winters. This is a very smart anthology edited by the late poet (and former editor of the New York Times Book Review) who flew 35 missions as an Air Force radio gunner in Europe during the war.

* The Oxford Book of American Verse edited by F. O. Matthiessen. Professor Matthiessen's brilliant introduction and sagacious choices made this the American anthology of record in midcentury, and it still holds up. It served me as a constant resource when I edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry in 2006.

 

Ed. note: A version of this piece appeared in The Week in April 2007.

Myra Sklarew: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________

Birdland

                        for Sterling Brown

So I take my seven bucks

to buy a railroad ticket.

 

And with a little luck

hitchhike to the station.

 

The money comes from playing

in a dance band with Vinny Gallo

 

braying on his tenor sax

and Charley Panzner—

 

I forget the others—

and me on the piano.

 

When no one is looking I play

solo piano in taverns after hours

 

up and down Long Island’s South Shore,

singing Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life.

 

I don’t tell my folks when I hop

on a train at age 14 and head

 

to Birdland where I sit

in the Peanut Gallery for nothing

 

and drink in Miles Davis,

John Coltrane, Count Basie

 

and Oscar Peterson. And not far away

you could go to the Embers

 

and hear Red Norvo on the vibraphone

play the Blues in E Flat.

 

And Stan Getz whose tunes I’d been trying

to play all year and ever since.

 

Sterling, this was before I met you.

Were you there too, singing your poems:

saying “Slim in Atlanta” and “After Winter”

and “Sister Lou.”  Or listening to “Ma Rainey”:

 

O Ma Rainey,

Sing yo’ song:

Now you’s back

Whah you belong,

Git way inside us,

Keep us strong…

O Ma Rainey,

Li’l and low…*

 

Sterling, you made us stand up

in your living room while you played jazz

 

on your phonograph and wouldn’t let us

sit down till we could name who was playing.

 

Sometimes we stood a long, long time.

It was Erroll Garner and Lester Young.

 

Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie.

And there was Satchmo who we loved.

 

I never told my folks where I’d been, pretended

to spend the night at a friend’s.

 

But I wouldn’t trade that smokey room

and that gorgeous music that filled us up

 

to the top until it was time to sneak out

of the house and head uptown to Birdland

 

once more. And years later, Sterling, to stand

in your living room, under the alms

 

of a great poet having us listen

to the music you loved and to the words

 

you wrote. Sterling, we could have stayed

there the rest of our lives.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Myra Sklarew, professor emerita American University, founder of the MFA Program, former president of the Yaddo Artist’s Community, studied biology at Tufts, bacterial viruses at Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory, and did research at Yale Medical School in memory and the prefrontal cortex. She has an  M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. Her twelve poetry collections include Lithuania: New and Selected Poems; Prose: Like a Field Riddled by Ants, Over the Rooftops of Time, An Invitation to a Country called Aging (with Patricia Garfinkel), and A Survivor Named Trauma: Holocaust Memory in Lithuania.  A new collection of essays on science and medicine, Lie Perfectly Still, is near completion. In 2011, Sklarew helped launch "A Splendid Wake"—a project to document poets, poetry movements, and literary organizations in the Washington, D.C. area from 1900 to the present, sponsored by the Special Collections Research Center at the Gelman Library, GWU, organized by local poets.  [For more on Sterling Brown, click here.]

(*from Beyond the Blues by Rosey E. Pool, The Hand and Flower Press, 1962, England.)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Frank, Fred, and Elvis

 

ELVIS PRESLEY, FRANK SINATRA and FRED ASTAIRE at Nancy Sinatra's opening night party, which was also celebrating the closing night for Elvis, at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, in 1969. Elvis's bodyguard, Joe Esposito, is in the background. "Elvis was a prince," says Mr. Abolafia. "He would give you the shirt off his back."

Photograph by Oscar Abolafia

from "A Photographer's Files" / Sidebar to "In an Era of Glitz, a Witness With Panache" by Lily Koppel

New York Times, February 10, 2008

The Poet Who Never Was: Ern Malley [by David Lehman]

THE GREATEST literary hoax of the 20th century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943. The uniformed noncombatants, Lt. James McAuley and Corp. Harold Stewart, were a pair of Sydney poets with a shared animus toward modern poetry in general and a particular hatred of the surrealist stuff championed by Adelaide wunderkind Max Harris, the 22-year-old editor of Angry Penguins, a well-heeled journal devoted to the spread of modernism down under.

In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised ("not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others"), they rapidly wrote the 16 poems that constitute Ern Malley's "tragic lifework." They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped "confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning" in place of coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French can mean bad. He was Ernest because they were not.

Later, the hoaxers added a high-sounding "preface and statement," outfitted Malley with a tear-jerking biography, and created his suburban sister Ethel. The invention of Ethel was a masterstroke. It was she who sent Malley's posthumous opus, "The Darkening Ecliptic," to Max Harris along with a cover letter tinged with her disapproval of her brother's bohemian ways and proclaiming her own ignorance of poetry. Artless Ethel, the bourgeois philistine, had the effect of authenticating Ern's poignant existence.

Ern Malley was hard to resist. His poems were charged with the premonition of an early death and the conviction that poetic greatness would be his if he could but live five more winters. "Now in your honour Keats, I spin / The loaded Zodiac with my left hand / As the man at the fair revolves / His coloured deceitful board," Malley wrote in "Colloquy with John Keats." McAuley and Stewart saw to it that Malley had, like Keats, died at the age of 25. They put a lot of Keatsian yearning into his poems. They also gave him a prophetic voice and a grave historical vision: "But where I have lived / Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray / Guernica is the ticking of a clock / The nightmare has become real, not as belief / But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo."

Harris fell for Malley, hook, line and sinker. So did his patrons and chums, including the painter Sidney Nolan. They devoted the next issue of Angry Penguins to their excited discovery -- and were promptly ambushed by the hoax's exposure in the press in June 1944. Although this was scarcely a slow news summer -- the Normandy invasion took place in June, the liberation of France in August -- the story spread rapidly to England and America, and everywhere the reaction was the same: high hilarity at the expense of the Angry Penguins, the humiliation of Max Harris, a colossal setback for modernism in Australia. The hoax was, as Michael Heyward points out in his lucid and informative book, a decisive act of literary criticism, brilliant parody at the service of fierce polemic. If, as McAuley and Stewart insisted, the poems had no merit, then Malley's champions had convicted themselves of unsound judgment and corrupt taste.

But the story doesn't end there. Stranger turns were to follow. The South Australian police impounded the issue of Angry Penguins devoted to "The Darkening Ecliptic" on the grounds that Malley's poems were obscene, though in fact their erotic content was negligible when compared with, say, Tropic of Cancer or Ulysses. The court case that September featured some inadvertently hilarious testimony from a dunderhead police detective who didn't know the meaning of the words he thought were indecent.

The wondrous twist in the story was the surprising, and actually quite heroic, intransigence of Max Harris and his cohorts, who maintained in the face of all ridicule their belief in Malley's genius. "The myth is sometimes greater than its creator," said Harris. Sir Herbert Read, a tireless proponent of vanguard art, wired his support from England. It seemed to him that the hoaxers had been "hoisted on their own petard." It was, Read reasoned, possible to arrive at genuine art by spurious means -- even if the motive of the writer was to perpetrate a travesty.

Later to emerge among Malley's most persuasive advocates were two pillars of the New York School of poetry. In 1961 Kenneth Koch printed two Malley poems, "Boult to Marina" and "Sybilline," in the "collaborations" issue of Locus Solus, the avant-grade literary magazine. In 1976 John Ashbery asked his MFA students at Brooklyn College to compare Malley's "Sweet William" to an early poem by Geoffrey Hill. Which did they think was the genuine article? (The students were divided.) Ashbery's point is that intentions may be irrelevant to results, that genuineness in literature may not depend on authorial sincerity, and that our ideas about good and bad, real and fake, are, or ought to be, in flux.

The best thing about The Ern Malley Affair by Michael Heyward is that it reprints Malley's 16 poems, though I wish Heyward had included the prose "Preface and Statement." He gives us plenty of information, probably far more information than any of us wants or needs. He makes some errors. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, not two days later. "Annie Get Your Gun" is not a song in the musical "Oklahoma!." And what Keats actually wrote was "Beauty is Truth."

My chief disappointment is that Heyward fails to mount a strong enough literary defense of Ern Malley's poetry. The Ern Malley affair was the century's greatest literary hoax not because it completely hookwinked Harris and not because it triggered off a story so rich in ironies and reversals. It was the greatest hoax because the creation of Ern Malley escaped the control of his creators and enjoyed an autonomous existence beyond, and at odds with, the critical and satirical intentions of McAuley and Stewart. They succeeded better than they had known, or wished. Malley's poems hold up to this day, eclipsing anything produced by any of the story's main protagonists in propria persona.

Crazy as it seems, the Malley poems do have merit. In a poem written during the Second World War, the French poet Robert Desnos pictures himself as "the shadow among shadows" poised to "enter and reenter your sunny life." This is Malley's self-conception, too. His gallows humor, self-lacerating irony, and odd, arresting juxtapositions contribute to an effect that other poets of the period strove for but few attained so unerringly as this speaker of "No-Man's-language appropriate/Only to No-Man's-Land." "Petit Testament," Malley's last poem, concludes with these lines: "I / Who have lived in the shadow that each act / Casts on the next act now emerge / As loyal as the thistle that in session / Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air. / I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything." A misprint in the first edition changed infinitive to infinite in the last line. I would be very curious to know which version of the line admirers of Ern Malley -- and readers of this post -- prefer.

from the Washington Post, March 6, 1994. See also this special issue of Jacket edited by John Tranter:
http://jacketmagazine.com/17/index.shtml
http://jacketmagazine.com/17/ern-poems.html
http://jacketmagazine.com/17/ern-lehm-stew.html

Interview with Tzimon Barto: Languages, Poetry and Education [by Lera Auerbach]

 I am always fascinated by people who are masters of more than one profession.  I interviewed Tzimon Barto for the Best American Poetry blog. His passions and knowledge run deep. Tzimon Barto speaks seven languages fluently, reads ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; his love of poetry is contagious, his ideas about education are inspiring.

      

For a taste of Barto's music-making here he is performing Mozart's Rondo for Piano and Orchestra in A major with the SWR Symphonieorchester and Christoph Eschenbach.

 

Every Day Something Different Disappears [by Mitch Sisskind]

Notice fence made of plumbing pipes around the grass. 
This has also disappeared.

furniture mart disappears harris school

disappears pittsfield building disappears

prudential building disappears buckingham

fountain disappears temple sholom disappears

152 bus disappears 151 bus disappears

36 bus disappears wilson avenue el station

disappears howard street el station disappears

immaculata high school disappears wendella

boat ride disappears elks memorial disappears

ashkenaz deli disappears pinners disappears

22 bus disappears barbara's book store

disappears senn high school disappears

lakeview high school disappears lane

tech high school disappears melrose

restaurant disappears north shore day camp

disappears baha'i temple disappears

mrs wall disappears miss bailey disappears

mrs samelius disappears mr peart disappears

irv kupcinet disappears lyle’s drug store

disappears richter's butcher shop disappears

lake shore theater disappears parkway

theater disappears commonwealth hotel

disappears belmont hotel disappears

rosehill cemetery disappears 400 theater

disappears palmolive building disappears

abc toyland disappears bowlium disappears

playdium disappears webster hotel

disappears diversey arms hotel disappears

turtle wax building disappears corned

beef center disappears meigs field disappears

goose island disappears thillens stadium

disappears covent theater disappears

uptown theater disappears ivan bunny

disappears 442 wellington avenue disappears

432 belmont avenue disappears eli’s place

for steak disappears chez paree disappears

london house disappears 2350 club

disappears germania club disappears

town hall police station disappears .

st rita high school disappears north austin

boys club disappears walnut room

disappears gyp joint disappears olson

rug company disappears standard club

disappears covenant club disappears

imperial house disappears mr kelly’s

disappears king fat disappears bob spoo

disappears howard king disappears marty

faye disappears queen of angels disappears

devil’s hill disappears fritzl’s disappears

berghof disappears billy goat disappears

sherman lollar disappears michael reese

hospital disappears frankenstein

memorial center disappears richard’s

drive in carfeteria disappears lincoln

park disappears chess pavillion

disappears como inn disappears

museum of science and industry

disappears halsted street disappears

vaughn’s seed store disappears

planetarium disappears shangri-la

disappears ann sather’s disappears

chicago stadium disappears merchandise

mart disappears maxwell street disappears

florence ladies’ sportsware disappears

midway plaisance disappears rainbow arena

disappears westlawn cemetery disappears

dr paul hurwitz disappears republic steel

disappears gripe and groan tavern disappears

don the beachcomber disappears midway

airport disappears roosevelt university

disappears peterson avenue disappears

gate of horn disappears lawson YMCA

disappears playboy club disappears moose

cholak disappears kukla fran & ollie

disappear polk brothers disappears binyon’s

disappears american blower corporation

disappears smolarek disappears slobodnik

disappears rabbi samuel schwartz

disappears cafe bonaparte disappears

camellia house disappears green oaks

kiddyland disappears affy tapple

disappears mandel brothers department

store disappears wieboldt’s disappears

mrs hering’s chicken pot pie disappears

jack schatz and donjo meddlevine

disappear bounce land trampoline

park disappears fortnightly club

disappears potter palmer mansion

disappears children’s building disappears

ferris wheel park disappears general motors

powerama disappears yukon eric disappears

fraser thomas disappears doctor zipper

disappears washtenaw avenue disappears

zum deutchen eck disappears board of

trade disappears cloud room disappears

timber lanes bowling disappear satellite

papa disappears big bill hill disappears

jack eigen disappears red top cab disappears

chicken vesuvio disappears corsetorium

disappears 7313 men’s club disappears

fritz screw machine company disappears

gilby the watchmaker disappears corset

and underwear review disappears hill and

hill beauty and barber shop disappears

francheezie disappears augenblick

disappears johnnie’s lounge disappears

harriet’s dress shop disappears libby’s

majestic grill disappears gym shoe

sandwich disappears schulien’s disappears

jack decker beer distributor disappears

dr john bodzinski disappears bunge

brothers coal company disappears

italian beef disappears uptown stamp

and book mart disappears tinker toys

disappears up to date hat shop disappears

windy city inn disappears skorski homemade

sausage shop disappears waifs take-a-bath

disappears marshall field’s disappears nate

gross disappears dave condon disappears

wally behrns disappears niagara falls smelting

disappears purple palace disappears norman

tallow and soap company disappears tivoli

theater disappears mike’s market disappears

ray rayner disappears temple anshe emet

disappears lanyon undertakers disappears

the ivanhoe disappears johnson awnings

disappears miss cora hebron disappears

club lucky disappears hebrew matrimonial

agency disappears whistler’s restaurant

disappears lima locomotive works disappears

pure oil building disappears american people’s

encyclopedia disappears black angus 7127

western avenue disappears buffalo ice cream

disappears s kaplan junk disappears kling

vocal studio disappears mink air conditioning

disappears warren g wadsworth disappears

nathaniel stowers french disappears leschen

and sons rope company disappears american

hospital disappears kerrigan billiards disappears

hipple and company disappears seymour hull

and associates disappears wing hoe restaurant

disappears milton katz children’s wear

disappears cermak shopping center disappears

mirabell restaurant and lounge disappears

lang and richman furs disappears golden

youth cosmetics disappears bushman the

gorilla disappears villa sweden disappears

citywide auto sales disappears chicago

sunday evening club disappears droke

incorporated general merchandise disappears

miller’s pub disappears grizzly’s lounge

disappears flexible excavating company

disappears hamilton’s pub disappears

deutsch needlework supplies disappears

blackhawk restaurant disappears irma

burns cleaners disappears southwest inn

4501 south cicero avenue disappears

albert bivens trousers disappears cy’s

crab house disappears holy name

cathedral disappears davis school

of public speaking and script writing

disappears herta’s tots and teens

disappears bullpen sports bar disappears

elevator supply company disappears

hyde park jazz society disappears club

505 disappears guinn’s cigar store

disappears stouffer’s top of the rock

disappears grand crossing hotel

disappears ella’s sweet shop disappears

bohica bar and grill disappears globe

air compressors disappears joe fusco

the barber disappears rudy and ann’s

polka club disappears kid craft matresses

disappears joe’s men’s wear disappears

livestock national bank disappears

evelyn kelly rooms disappears milton’s

snack bar disappears klingberg children’s

home disappears smitty’s radiators

disappears abe lily fast freight disappears

nelson’s bakery disappears palenik

cleaners disappears reichert oil burners

disappears amelia levine furnished rooms

disappears ernest korinka tuckpointing

henry holtz chiropodist disappears arthur

francis multigraphing disappears mugs

bunny disappears home hand laundry

disappears austin high school disappears

warren featherstone company disappears

miss sitterly disappears gardner portrait

studio disappears koluska meats disappears

ballast point pub disappears fantasy of

jewels disappears santorini restaurant

disappears garbanz tavern disappears

taco and burrito palace disappears

garber wholesale furrier disappears

fiori’s deli disappears hesselberg

locksmith disappears gino’s east

disappears hymowitz market disappears

dark horse tap disappears j and j pain

and odor free foot products disappears

bert and elmer christensen vending

And pinball machines disappears

dante’s tavern disappears novakowski

confetti disappears morton’s the

steakhouse disappears lakeview

poultry disappears holy trinity

high school disappears danny’s

tavern disappears brott gummed

paper disappears coffee cheese

and egg salesmen’s union disappears

band of bohemia disappears greisch

beauty parlor disappears coffman

manufacturing company disappears

northside bar and grill disappears

maude’s liquor bar disappears eva’s

rlectrolysis shop disappears lawry’s

prime rib disappears forward oar

company disappears schoolyard

tavern disappears harold’s chicken

disappears fox furnished apartments

disappears tye gutta percha paint store

disappears guthrie’s tavern disappears

walk right shoe company disappears

chubby wieners disappears vitality

poultry store disappears bite cafe

disappears ideal toy company

disappears big and little’s disappears

craftmaster’s studios disappears

clipper lounge disappears mindy’s

hot chocolate disappears jeri’s grill

disappears addressograph company

disappears crown liquors disappears

fantozzi insurance company disappears

helen gould rest home disappears

chicago ladies hats barngrove food

machinery disappears globe trailer

parts disappears klink furs disappears

granada theater disappears free sons

of israel disappears effmeyer house

movers disappears cake ornaments

incorporated disappears dr raymond

friss disappears harry larson machinery

disappears come back inn disappears

neuberg sprinklers disappears eastern

airlines disappears harrison wholesale

disappears polk brothers disappears

eagle soda fountain exchange disappears

courtesy motors disappears hess gold

stamping disappears temple beth el

disappears bernhard moos elementary

school disappears cake ornaments

incorporated disappears maurice

tannenbaum pianos disappears lauren

warzek dds disappears york model

toys disappears zaslavsky accordion

school disappears six o’clock club

disappears sisters of mercy infirmary

disappears gladieu floor refinishing

disappears waiters and cooks union

disappears hastings tea room disappears

bel-pine apartments disappears casey

furniture company disappears dwyer’s

food shop disappears perfecto garcia

cigars disappears behr and weinstein

iron and metal junk disappears bellfuss

pharmacy disappears catholic art studio

disappears dwortz and son roofing

disappears dust maid products disappears

giordano and arnold exterminators

disappears kahr wholesale bananas

disappears lang’s deluxe bar-b-q disappears

barney malworm accountant disappears

murray’s superior products disappears

purple heart military order of illinois

disappears pyroferric used radio parts

disappears helen stribblen dramatic

arts disappears peterbaugh rooms

disappears oblack transfer company

disappears pond river meat disappears

root brothers clowns and entertainment

disappears pollack original slack house

disappears mukser food mart disappears

hi-lo tavern disappears locallo printing

disappears fenton’s drugstore disappears

kretchmer garage disappears lask boiler

company disappears beer frame bowling

disappears kee washing machine sales and

service disappears fred johnson window

cleaning disappears barry sandwich shop

disappears fifth avenue beauty salon

disappears egyptian lacquer manufacturing

disappears eggers safe experts disappears

davidson’s bakery disappears gus goldman

woolens disappears fritz food and drink

disappears eight ball club tavern disappears

jerome lewis lamp shades disappears hench

income tax specialists disappears gugelman

artificial eyes disappears benno epstein cpa

disappears forslev delicatessen disappears

every day something different disappears

Two Poems by S. K. Kelen [introduced by Thomas Moody]

Last week, the UK’s Channel 5 television network announced that they were dropping the long-running Australian soap-opera Neighbours, putting the show’s future production in jeopardy. The program has been on the air for thirty-six years, and is an Australian institution—it seems every Australian actor has passed through Neighbours at some point, either on their way to international stardom (Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce, Margot Robbie) or onto the conveyor belt of domestic television obscurity.

The news prompted a number of hyperbolic reactions in the Australian and UK press, citing the desertion of our national soap-opera by the British as a metaphor for the deeper decay in Australia’s international appeal. Writing in London’s Sunday Times, columnist Caitlin Moran claimed that Australia as a destination was not “aspirational anymore,” and that for Britain’s Generation Z, the country has become “that place with all the dead reefs and offshore refugee internment camps, where the entire country often turns into one big barbecue.” 

 

This is a bit like blaming the box office failure of the latest incarnation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile not on cultural shifts in media consumption, movie-going especially, or the film’s impoverished script and diminished cast (when compared to the 1978 version starring Jane Birkin, Maggie Smith, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, David Nivin and the imperious Angela Lansbury), but rather on Brexit, the gutting of the National Health Service, and the punitive Nationality and Borders Bill. 

While Moran’s article speaks more to the quality of the Sunday Times than it does to the challenges facing Australian tourism after nearly two years of closed borders, it was a reminder of just how far away from much of the world Australia actually is, and how disorientating this remoteness can be (for people on both sides).

Two sonnets by S. K. Kelen from his latest collection A Happening in Hades capture the stupefaction in the moments precisely after this distance has been crossed. There is nothing quite like touching down in Australia after a 20+hr flight, it feels as if you have landed in a different world. In Kelen's poems, the speaker disembarks at Sydney airport where “People speak slightly differently” and “football players you’ve never heard of / headline the national team”. The dreaded flight is so long that during the journey the world has “tipped into a new Age”

S.K. Kelen is a former winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and has over ten collections of his poetry to his name since first being published in 1973.

 

Parallel Worlds (Earth No. 47)

                                                        

Sometimes slip into a parallel world,
then the one after that, it often happens flying.
It's a whole new universe when you land
and disembark. Sydney Airport Earth No. 47.
People speak slightly differently,
the airport's festooned with bright advertising
campaigns for brands and products that didn't exist
a week or so ago, football players you've never heard of
headline the national team. Everywhere a raw nervousness,
the talk gets giggly about a new war, the time to hate,
and who to hate, keep in mind the terrorist thrill,
sexy and mysterious. Join the fight to save Propaganda.
Make do in this tiger-free dimension—at least a while—
hotter here than the last world, things fall apart fast.

 

Parallel World Two (Earth No. 48)

                                                        

And disembark. Sydney Airport Earth No. 48.
I grew blasé, details were different, but each world's
Fundamentals were pretty much the same, a stasis of constant flux:
Humans mistreating Nature (and hoping to get away with it),
Love and entertainment, war an politics, eating, creating and destroying
So we can build, a race to top then the end we were too mesmerised
By reality stars' voluptuous flesh and eyes to see the forests die
And the oceans rise. Cataclysm made clear: from moment to moment 
The universe changes. The change started when I flew in
From God-knows-where and God-knows-when.
The world suddenly tipped over into a new Age, something different.
It was the day after tomorrow the collapse began, the structures
Built and evolved over aeons faded and the striving died, replaced by
Grey resignation and regret that spans the globe. And life is quiet.

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Four): Collin Callahan [by Angela Ball]

Deerfield Crossing

Sheet lightning pulses like blood
vessels in the sky above the post office.

It is Sunday empty. I caress the edges
of failed delivery in my pocket

and continue on the acid-
rain pocked sidewalk to the station.

Down the block, a dog fights his leash
toward the smell of angel hair

and meatballs
escaping from a kitchen window.

Television sets and crickets coalesce
with the steady hum of residential air

conditioning units. The syncopated eyes
of wind turbines blink red in the distance.

Families fold together
their fingers in prayer.

When the thunder claps

like an infomercial
the streetlamps come on

all at once.

                                               (originally published in Blue Earth Review)

--Collin Callahan                              

In the poem before this one in Thunderbird Inn, “Horizontal Tuxedo,” a woman left her address in wet hair on the shower wall. –Collin Callahan

Collin Callahan was born in Illinois. His first collection of poetry, Thunderbird Inn, is forthcoming with Conduit Books & Ephemera. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, SLICE, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2021 Bat City Review Editors’ Prize in poetry. You can find his work at collincallahanwrites.com.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Four): Collin Callahan

A poem of blended messages, beginning with lightning that strobes itself somatic, “Deerfield Crossing” intersects what Robert Frost called “inner and outer weather”: the limited scope of its interplay a despoiled landscape, a “Deerfield” without deer or fields, only crossings, a Levittown diaspora community far from the animation of Frank O’Hara’s NYC, but nonetheless a place with things to say, and with a poet willing to listen.

The first half line of stanza two, “It is Sunday empty,” may be the most economical, on-the-nose description ever provided for a day of the week. We see the speaker for the first and only time, automatically caressing a returned letter he has received, headed for “the station”—a still place, sieve for travel. We glimpse the ghost of T.S. Eliot, towering figure that the New York School of Poets dismissed, but that John Ashbery received via W.H. Auden.

Ashbery once characterized New York City as a large empty space perfect for poetry, and Deerfield Crossing possesses some of the same emptiness, one that enjoys defying itself, as in  

     Down the block, a dog fights his leash

     toward the smell of angel hair

     and meatballs

     escaping from a kitchen window.

Throughout, this poem is a model of what Paul Fussell calls “vigorous enjambment”: its line breaks faking closure, supplying surprise. In the lines above, we are half prepared for something celestial--and get, instead, “meatballs”—the dog’s eagerness vivid against flatness. Then, the stark loveliness of the post-natural,

     Television sets and crickets coalesce

     with the steady hum of residential air

     conditioning units. The syncopated eyes

     of wind turbines blink red in the distance.

in which nature is unnaturally included in the amalgam of  “Television sets and crickets” and the wind turbine’s robotic “syncopated eyes” that “blink red,” composing a kind of heartbeat “in the distance.”

There’s something prefab about the church services in which “Families fold together/their fingers in prayer.” The thunder near the close could not less resemble that of The Waste Land. Yet the response, as “streetlamps come on / all at once,” surely the result of automatic eyes, contains in its simultaneity an impulse of rightness, even joy. Then Collin Callahan’s abrupt and intriguing “Deerfield Crossing” leaves us to caress, alone, the whiteness of Sunday.

--Angela Ball

Mary Jo Salter Presents "The Death of Argos," a Sonnet Sequence by Nicholas Pierce (Day 1)

For the next two weeks, Monday through Friday, we will be publishing daily, piece by piece, the sonnet sequence “The Death of Argos” by Nicholas Pierce (Photo), presented below by Mary Jo Salter.

What new thing can be done with old forms like the sonnet?  One answer comes from a new poet.  In his first book, In Transit, Nicholas Pierce invents an especially devilish rhyme scheme for an eleven-sonnet sequence, “The Death of Argos.”  The sequence is also an elegant narrative, an affecting love story set in contemporary Greece, while calling up The Odyssey. Inspired by a blank verse sonnet sequence by the late Claudia Emerson, which unspools as two tercets, a central couplet, and two more tercets, Pierce goes Emerson one better by rhyming  aba, cbc, bb, dbd, ebe. Yes, that’s six b’s per fourteen lines. And a rhyming couplet “turn” in the dead center, another radical move.  -- MJS

Here's the first mysterious sonnet, in which the speaker assembles a memory of being attacked by dogs. We’ll be adding the second sonnet the next day, and so on, until the final day. 

1.

A few key seconds haven’t yet come back,
if they ever were recorded. Who can say
why the dogs didn’t, finally, attack,

much less what would’ve happened if they did?
On foot, defenseless, we were easy prey
to start with—then my cousin and I slid

into a ditch, scrambling to get away.
The footage skips ahead when I replay

this moment, picking back up with his leg
already broken and the dogs at bay—
or nowhere to be seen, at least. Less vague

is what came afterward: the brief but none-
too-gentle ambulance ride, the X-ray
revealing that the break was a clean one.

Nicholas Pierce is pursuing a Ph.D. in Poetry at the University of Utah. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, and Subtropics, among other journals. His first book, In Transit, won the 2021 New Criterion Poetry Prize. “The Death of Argos” appeared in that volume, published by Criterion Books.

Click here for the full poem as posted on March 4, 2022.
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2022/03/mary-jo-salter-presents-the-death-of-argos-a-sonnet-sequence-by-nicholas-pierce-day-10.html

Stepping through that door: "An Immigrant’s Story" by Wanjiru Kamuyu [by Tracy Danison]

Nelly Celerine signifying doubly in "An Immigrant's Story" by Wanjiru Kamyuyu. Photo©Anne Volery/ Palais de la Porte Dorée

I’ve never mentioned the very kind and excellent teachers I have had – especially including the SUNY-Buffalo teaching assistant who gave me Adrienne Rich’s 1962 Prospective Immigrants Please Note in 1976.

Prospective Immigrants is a manual of human physics, a starting perception for my long-long unfinished grapple toward self-liberation –

Either you will/go through this door/or you will not go through

If you go through/there is always the risk/of remembering your name.

–  … That would be my realization that when, back in 1959, Great Grandma Steinmetz pleaded with us to push away the 10-foot tall, one-ton oak armoire looming over the bed where she lay dying, she was neither imagining sad things nor whining unwomanly.  

The scene is literary, Sherwood-Anderson ghoulish and amusing. It seems doing a small thing in a great world to take a poor old dying lady's fears seriously, yes? All the same, thanks to Adrienne Rich, I know this perplexing dream-memory of a toddler is a primal step toward my self-liberation. I’ve even come to see that tolerance is fraud and only the sincerest pricks talk of charity. Nowadays, if you ask me to lift a dead rhinoceros off your back, I swear, I’ll try, I'll gladly heave hard as ever I can, gratis, no questions asked, no thanks necessary.

Things look at you doubly/and you must look back/and let them happen.

Imagine my pleasure to see my human physics manual made into – Almighty Christ! What else could it be made into, a serious poem like Prospective Immigrants? – a dance performance called An Immigrant’s Story.

Created and performed by the very thoughtful Kenyan & American Wanjiru Kamuyu, An Immigrant’s Story premiered at the newly inaugurated Musée de l’Immigration at Porte Dorée last year. It was then taken up by the annual Faits d’Hiver dance-performance festival. I saw it at Espace 1789, an excellent (and successful) multimedia venue in the near-Paris suburb of St. Ouen.

When I told Wanjiru Kamuyu about Rich’s poem during the meet-and-greet in the bar after the performance, she made it clear to me that her manual of human physics has developed independent of the dead Canadian poet. It's comforting to understand that Rich's lines exist without her, not only in my head, but in the ether I share with beautiful strangers. Kamuyu said she'd read it.

Thinking it over, I guess I shall take Wanjiru Kamuyu’s choreographic meter & foot as a sort of Large Hadron Collider for Truth & Beauty that proves with a new energy in a new rig what was before, for me, but the occasional and accidental symmetry of immortal hand and eye. I mean, An Immigrant's Story makes Prospective Immigrants be.

More than symmetry. Nelly Celerine, dance performer, left, on stage with choreographer Wanjiru Kamuyu. Photo© Anne Volery/ Palais de la Porte Dorée

Kamuyu was born in Kenya to an American mother who was there, no doubt, to aim toward self-liberation. When mother moved to Detroit, no doubt still aiming herself towards self-liberation, Wanjiru of course moved with her. She was a young teen.

Kamuyu now lives and works in France.

In Detroit, Kamuyu found a queerly-cracked looking glass to pair with the one she’d brought from Kenya, which certainly spurred Story’s development but, in my take, certainly did not finish it – like Rich’s work, there are many little expanding ideas swelling inside.

It was surprising and pleasant to find a savor of musical comedy in Kamuyu’s contemporary dance performance take on Rich’s rather disorienting precepts, precepts which I had for so long associated with the earnest flöt bread of an American poet’s circle circa 1980.

An Immigrant’s Story is a two-strong woman show: Kamuyu, projecting a strong friendly lucidity and intellectual gravity and Nelly Celerine, independent dancer, singer and teacher, a natural anchor and attracting presence.

Celerine and Kamuyu are not a duo. They are a double play.

Story opens with Kamuyu lightly stage left, Celerine stage right front. Ostensibly to interpret Kamuyu’s dance in sign (LSF), the moment she Celerine her expressing hands, her interpretation becomes a full-blown story – twin, with Kamyuyu’s. As the twin grows strong other stories and potential stories and possible stories emerge in me. This one, for instance, and the others I am keeping for my own.

Sounds that split into two twin rhythms parallel Kamuyu’s voyage from Africa to America. Celerine’s signing self-choreographs into an upper body or aerial energy that swings over and under her presence: imagine an atom with a single electron. Hydrogen? Primary, light, rich and explosive. Right?

As Kamuyu’s and Celerine’s movement shapes, it binds them together in a thickening band of energy. This energy resolves into an orbit; the orbit resolves into a slow-moving cyclone; the cyclone resolves into an eye; the eye resolves into a looking glass.

When I look into the looking-glass eye, I can hear fat drops of rain and the roll of thunder beside a buzzing of bees and a languor of mid-summer.

I was afraid to ask my neighbor what they heard.

But the important thing is that, as far as I can tell, Wanjiru Kamuyu’s dance proves, as Rich’s poetry posited, as my manual of human physics suggests, that, yes, in human physics, be is the finale of seem.

My Back Story [by Molly Arden]

 Molly enjoys writing poems while walking. She has led a peripatetic life -- at various times she has lived in each of the New England states plus Florida and Arizona. At 19 she was a junior finalist for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. As a sophomore in college she and three friends developed a brand of "Bircher muesli" cereal that blended the Swiss (Familia) type with American hippie granola. The scheme proved a success. And when she and her friends sold their shares to Kellogg's, she was able to live on the proceeds for five years in Cleveland where she learned Latin and began writing poetry.  She went to graduate school at Cornell for one year and translated Catullus. She has worked as a research librarian at two universities. In 2002 she served as associate editor on the "F-U" anthology David Lehman edited for Slope Editions. With Reb Livingston she founded No Tell Motel. She used to blog over at molly arden says so but that was before three children appeared on the scene. She plans to continue her "free translations" of Catullus thinking of them as the kind of mask Yeats liked to put on. She has had a kindergarten crush on Jim Cummins since reading his poem about violins and violence. There are days when looking out the window is enough for her. There's a sculpture of snow in the shape of trees, branches, bushes, boughs, and the floor of the earth is whiter than fresh laundered sheets.  

Michael Palmer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Palmer. Photo by Juno Gemes 

__________________________________________________

Falling Down in America

 

Every three seconds someone over sixty-five

falls down in America.

Our records show

that you are over sixty-five

and may therefore have already

fallen down in America

maybe more than once.

Perhaps upon entering your bath

you slipped

and cracked open your skull

and subsequently drowned

in a pool of blood.

If so, disregard this notice.

Perhaps while gazing at the sea

distractedly one day

your balance failed

and the waves carried you away

toward the irradiated swells

of Fukushima.

If so, never mind—

the flesh has already peeled

from your limbs

and your eyes

have melted in their sockets

in which case

you should disregard this notice.

We need hardly remind you

that many of your friends

and relatives, perhaps beloved uncles,

aunts, cousins, your seven brothers

and sisters, parents assuredly,

may have succumbed in some manner

to the fateful equation

of gravity and age.

In addition, it is likely

that your investments recently caved

and as a result, from the shock,

you fainted upon the cheap

Mexican tiles

of your dining room floor

and days later awoke

among impersonal professionals,

masked and clad in white,

and addressing you

as if you were a child.

If so, you now know

that you are utterly alone

in this life.

Please favor us with a reply

regarding our one-time offer

which will soon expire.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Palmer was born into an Italian-American family in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969.  He has taught at numerous universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and has published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian. He has been involved in joint projects with many visual artists and composers in the United States and elsewhere and has also served as an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for close to fifty years. His most recent poetry collection, Little Elegies for Sister Satan, from New Directions, was published in May of 2021.Early in 2022, Nightboat Books will bring out a new edition of a prose work, The Danish Notebook. [For more on Michael Palmer, see this link.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                                                                       Laurel and Hardy in Hats Off, 1927

"Jew You" in 2002 and today [by David Lehman]

Back in 2002, I wrote "Jew You." It appears in my book When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), and though it is not my favorite of the poems I wrote that spring, it does have one line that I continue to  like:

<<
Dear Jews: We liked you better as victims.
>>

I thought of it today when reading Jason Zinoman's article "Is It Funny for the Jews?" in the New York Times (Feb. 17, 2022), in which, considering such phenomena as the tendency to cast non-Jewish actors to play Jews in TV shows, he raises the possibility that what we are witnessing in the resurgence of anti-Semitism today is a reversion to the mean. And by "resurgence of anti-Semitism," I do not mean casting decisions but the appearance of swastikas on synagogue walls, murderous attacks in Jewish houses of worship, and hostility to Jews on campus, particularly those suspected of siding with Israel. (Click here for the Ha'Aaretz article about the "fuck Jews" graffiti on the outside of Miriam, a resturant on 74th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in NYC.) Here are a couple of thought-provoking paragraphs from Zinoman's piece: 

<<<<
. . .one reason some Jews don’t make a bigger fuss about discrimination, one reason they feel comfortable laughing at it, is that they — we — feel safe. It’s easier to laugh at antisemitism when it happens in an unthreatening place. The feeling is: There are worse problems in the world.

In her acclaimed book “People Love Dead Jews,” Dara Horn takes fierce aim at this blasé attitude, at the downplaying and rationalizations that Jewish Americans make, whether it’s the strained lengths intellectuals go to to argue that Shakespeare transcended bigotry in his portrayal of Shylock or to take comfort in the story of Anne Frank’s faith in the goodness of people (before bad people killed her).

Horn’s bracing argument is that there is a cost to denial, that the rise of antisemitic incidents and hate crimes against Jews — including the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh — is directly tied to the fading of the stigma of bigotry against Jews. Hatred of Jews is not unusual, she argues; it’s the years after the Holocaust when that was socially unacceptable that were the anomaly. “Historically speaking, the decades in which my parents and I had grown up simply hadn’t been normal,” writes Horn. Now, she writes, normal is back."

>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/arts/television/comedy-jewish-identity.html

"Myth(ologies) in the Making in Chicago" [by Stacey Harwood]

                                                  Photograph by Jennifer B. Hudson: http://www.jenniferhudsonfineart.com

From the Archives (November 8, 2012):

About a year ago, the Chicago based theater artist Erica Barnes approached David Lehman for permission to adapt his poem "Mythologies" for the stage as a dance performance piece. According to Erica, she was in the midst of a somewhat fallow period when on a whim she visited the Poetry Foundation website, clicked on the "Poem of the Day" and "fell in love." David's sequence of thirty sonnets "Mythologies," first published in the Paris Review issue 106 (1988) and awarded the Bernard F. Connors prize, was the Foundation's featured poem. Erica has this to say about David's poem:

We need new myths. Our old heroes are too unattainable, too perfect, too… heroic. David Lehman’s poem ‘Mythologies’ tells the story of a man struggling to construct new myths in the wake of the disintegration of his expectations. Blending the language of poetry with the ritual of theatre, ‘Mythologies’ searches for the answer to the age-old question --  what is it to be human?

David granted permission and over the next several months Erica dispatched periodic updates of her work- in-progress. She secured funding, hired a full cast and crew, found performance space, and held rehearsals. On November 1, "Mythologies" opened at the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater in Chicago.  "It was a success," writes Erica, and her excitement is palpable. She sent along a preview video, which makes us wish we could put the production on the road, and we would reproduce it here if we could.

Meanwhile, you can find out more about "Mythologies" in Chicago by visiting the dedicated website.  You will find Erica's interview with David here.

Congratulations Erica!

"Mythologies" will be included in David Lehman's forthcoming New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013).

-- sdh

"What's Happening": David Shapiro in memory of Kenneth Koch

What’s Happening

(“Write 19 lines under that heading and I’ll post it” – DL to DS)

1. Mostly decathected as they say in analysis: forget forget!
2.  I pause don’t dance don’t leap. "I rarely dance."
3.  I don't own the four volumes of Herzen just a sliced bio like his bio.
4. "Bankers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse"
5. What's better? Alain Delon and Monica Vitti loiter at stock exchange.
6. Someone dies, a minute of silence grows, then the beasts roar back.
7. I love stringing beads in a bead store in New Orleans. Beads in trees.
8. I wanted a random necklace to give to a random friend.
9. I was attacked for randomness. It was indeed too expected.
10. The critic's glasses are flying, and also a Mondrian flower torn apart.
11. "I am afraid of nothing. I have BEEN to Mexico."
12. Spinoza the lovable philosopher fried spiders and watched: what?
13. Don't overcome obstacles, find easiness. KK's motto from VL
14. What's happening? What am I thinking? "Do you actually think?"
15. Ron Padgett: you don't actually think I will read all this, do you?
16. Don't ever use the past tense in discussing physical beauty.
17. My friend said he was sinking into the white spaces between letters.
18. Whitman said "Leave the best unsaid----------------------------------
19. How do you end a poem? With the proper sense of endlessness.

in memory of KK

-- David Shapiro [March 31, 2009]

from the archive

"Elegy for Archie Ammons" [by Jim Cummins]

Last night I read “Part Ten”
Of Archie Ammons’s Garbage
Out loud, twice, in an empty room.
Then stopped in embarrassment
To hear if anyone was listening.

I’d bought the book so many years ago
And carried it with me to New York
The only time I’d ever meet him.
I’m not one for book signings, autographs;
I always thought if what I had left

At the end of life is a bunch
Of signatures, I’d be very sad,
So rely on my imperfect memory
That doesn’t kick in often enough
To recover what is lost;

Like what is lost from that evening:
Me, standing, sweating coldly, empty,
Waiting to read, the rictus grin
What those around me fled from,
Including Archie; and then he couldn’t

Stay after because his wife was ill,
So was gone before I could get up
Enough nerve to ask him
To sign my Garbage.  At the late
Dinner, I sat between two women

Who were interested in me
Up to a point, and then that point
Was reached; and I sat for a while longer,
Listening to some lunatic who later
Became a professional poker player,

Or perhaps already was one;
And then it was time to go.
I went back to the hotel alone—
I always do, the rictus, you know—
Thinking death is an interesting display,

And maybe I’m caught up in the grip
Of a final illusion—that the light
Reaching me on a given day is truly
The light of that day—and maybe
I still exist for now in an infinity

That will be revealed as an illusion
When the countdown to death begins,
When hope is reduced to a number,
The number of days.  So I walk out
Each morning under many different suns,

Some causing my shirt to stick
To my skin, some covering the park
In an antebellum light I often feel
In certain parts of Kentucky.  First,
Archie died, then that good man’s love,

Phyllis, and I was never known to him,
Nor he to me, except in “Part Ten”
Of Garbage; and in his face as he stood
On the stage and introduced me,
And I got up and pretended my poems

Were a reality as real as morning light,
Or the willfulness of dinner-speak,
Or the light a true poet’s face can have
As he stands in a spotlight looking
At his watch, wondering at the illusion

He has set in motion, but only
With a sidelong glance, as it were,
Because he’s gazing beyond it, helpless,
To the numbered days, and feels
The need to get home quickly, quickly.

Ed. note: Archie Ammons (1926-2001) was born on February 18. He is pictured above in his office at Cornell University..

Knott as a Stranger: "Why Can't I Just Write My Crummy Poems?"

            The late Bill Knott, born February 17, 1940, was a terrific poet who distinguished himself from nearly all other American poets by wanting to keep his poems from the public eye. For the late Thomas Lux's Paris Review appreciation of Bill, click here. Click here to read Robert P. Baird's "Remembering Bill Knott" from The New Yorker of March 17, 2014. If you can find a copy of Are You Ready, Mary Baker Eddy? the charming and sometimes hilarious book of poems Bill wrote collaboratively with James Tate, buy it. Lux (1946-2017) edited Bill's posthumous I Am Flying into Myself for Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2017).

            Poems by Bill had been chosen by Jorie Graham for The Best American Poetry 1990, by Paul Muldoon for The Best American Poetry 2005, and a third time as well – and for different reasons each time he declined to be included

            For The Best American Poetry 2007, Heather McHugh selected Bill’s poem “Another False Execution” from Tin House, whose poetry editor was Brenda Shaughnessy. Notified in due course by Mark Bibbins, then as now my right-hand man at BAP, Bill said no, I wrote back, and here’s the exchange.

            Reading it you’ll see, I hope, why it was hard not to love Bill no matter how ornery he was. And you'll have another reason to dig into his oeuvre.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: William Knott [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 3:01 PM
> To: Mark Bibbins
> Subject: RE: The Best American Poetry 2007

> Dear Mark Bibbins:

> No, I'm sorry, I can't. . .

> I don't like that poem anymore, I wish
> now I hadn't written it, and I was
> irritated when Brenda Shaughnessy
> took it for "Tin House" because
> she chose it over some better
> poems I included in the batch
> I sent her . . .

> and I'm sorry but I don't want to be
> in BAP, or Pushcart,
> my poetic career is over,

> I've retired. . .

> I'm too old for it, anyway. . .

> it's not worth the angst and all of it. . .

> I apologize, but I'm sure number 76 on
> your list will be happy to accept. . .

> sincerely,

> Bill Knott

> 

 -----Forwarded Message-----

> >From: David Lehman
> >Sent: Jan 4, 2007 8:51 PM
> >To: [email protected]
> >Cc: McHugh Heather

> >Subject: BAP 2007

> >Dear Bill,

> >Mark Bibbins sent along your note indicating that you would prefer not to have your poem "Another False Execution" appear in "The Best American Poetry 2007" on the grounds that the poem isn't good enough.

> >I'd like to take a moment to persuade you to change your mind. I think it's a damn good poem, and regardless of your present feelings about it, why not let the choice stand? After all, there are at least three of us now -- Heather McHugh, Brenda Shaughnessy (who published it in Tin House), and I -- who believe in this poem enough to want to publish it and stand behind it. Though diffidence may be admirable, there is also a case to be made that once a poem is in print it is public and readers have the right to read it and judge for themselves. That's what I think, and in any case I am quite sincere in saying that your poem will make a difference, and a positive one, to the volume in which it appears.

> >I am going to copy Heather McHugh on this letter, for she took her editorial duties very seriously and her choice of your poem for "Best American Poetry 2007" is not one that she made lightly.

> >Please think it over and let me know if you decide to change your mind.

> >David

_____Forwarded Message_____

>From: William Knott <[email protected]>
>Sent: Jan 4, 2007 9:50 PM
>To: David Lehman
>Subject: RE: BAP 2007

>No, I'm sorry, but I can't do it.

>It doesn't matter whether the poem is good or
>bad. Even if I thought it was good, I can't
>go through this agony anymore.
>I wouldn't want it in Pushcart either. In
>fact someone nominated another poem for
>Pushcart, but I won't let them do it
>if they ask me.

>I can't take it anymore,

>I'm too worn out by it.

>If I knew then what I know now, I
>would have never begun to write poetry.
>I'm 67 years old, can't I retire?

>Why do I have to suffer this cycle over
>and over, why can't I quit. Why can't
>I just write my crummy poems and post
>them on my blog; why do I have to
>present them for judgement?

>I'm sorry, but I can't stand it anymore.
>I can't do it. . . sending the poems
>out, getting them published or rejected,
>I don't care anymore.

>I used to care. For almost five decades
>I put them into the envelopes but this
>past year?? I can't explain it.

>It's partly the heart attack I had
>this past summer, but even before that
>I had reached the point of abandonment.

>I don't send my poems out anymore, I just
>post them on my blog where anyone can
>read them or not read them as they wish. . .

>I vowed when I began the blog this past
>April that I would never submit my
>poems to any magazine ever again, and
>so far I've stuck to it. I hope I will
>die before I change my mind about
>this. Hopefully I will die before that.> 

>Over the past year or so I've
>rejected book proposals from five or
>six publishers. Jonathan Galassi wanted
>to do a 240 page Selected, Iowa wanted
>to reprint a book, two local presses solicited
>me for book mss, and two others queried
>me. . .

>I would rather die than do another book
>(ironically another book I was blackmailed
>into doing has just been published
>to my shame and disgust). . .

>I wish to hell you hadn't bothered
>McHugh with this. It's nothing to
>do with her.

>And it's nothing to do with your anthology,
>either.  I've been critical at times
>of it but that has nothing to do with
>my refusal.

>I'm sorry for wasting your time with
>this nonsense.

>Sincerely,

>Bill Knott

from the archive; first posted February 17, 2018.

Jerome Sala Takes on the Tightwads! [by David Lehman]

Tonight I lift my glass to Jerome Sala whose new book The Cheapskates is just out from Lunar Chandelier Press. It is a handsomely produced volume and it is bursting with the mordant wit and adventurous spirit that mark this talented poet with the quiet exterior and the secret burning rage.

I sometimes read a book of poetry flipping through the pages at random, as if reading were a form of fortune-telling. Using this method I began with Sala's Alfred E. Neuman sequence. The avatar of Mad magazine ("What, me worry?") comes at us in a "Cubist Portrait," a "Surrealist Portrait," and a "Minimalist Portrait" consisting entirely of a single made-up word: "worryry." There is also "Political Portrait" and, best of all perhaps, a "Zen Portrait" in four lines divided into two two-line stanzas:

no me
no worry

what mind?
what mind?

The animating conceit of a Sala poem is characteristrically clever. His "Anniversary," a persona poem in the manner of a letter from a soldier to a spouse, and "Mother's Day," are flat in tone and oddly devastating in effect. After reading his "Hey Scorpio Mind," I felt a renewed determination to keep working on my own prose poems in the form of astrological profiles.

If Sala's humor and wit is what hits you first, there is no escaping the rage that informs such a poem as "National Security Crisis," which begins: "These days being a goon / no longer guarantees you a squad. / It's hard out there in the cudgel and tear gas business -- / even the job of your simple punch in the gut / has been overtaken by a new generation of rubber bullets!" We live in "the country of no country," he writes in another poem -- a country that resembles "an extravagant, steampunk renaissance fair." Not all here is affirmation; for all the laughter, the poems are a criticism of life, of the affluent society that needs to make "war on poverty," a phrase that can mean two opposite things.

The exclamatory utterances, the rapid changes of diction, the imaginative gambits, the fun -- all proclaim Sala to be an exemplary agent of the New York School in its current guise as a stealth activity practiced, as it happens, not only by New Yorkers like husband and wife Sala and Elaine Equi, but by those who may live in Florida, Mississippi, Alaska, California, and other places far from Bleecker Street or Chelsea. 

I believe a reliable guide to a new volume of poems is a quick look at the titles of individual poems: are they interesting enough in their own right to quicken a new poem into existence? Can you see yourself appropriating the title and running with it? The Cheapskates rewards this approach with "Now Playing at an Alphabet Near You," "Notes While Reading William Bronk," "Etymology of the 'Barn,'" "Policy Proposal," "Cross-Eyed Puzzle." I can imagine reading this book and writing a poem in response to half its contents. Jerome Sala lives in "the Republic of Wonder" and makes you feel that you are "lucky to be alive / in contemporary fantasia." -- DL

from the archive; first posted in 2014

RIP Jason Epstein, 1928-2022: Visionary Publisher [by David Lehman]

Jason Epstein, Columbia College '49, the visionary publisher and editor, died last week at the age of 93.  It was Jason who developed the idea of the trade paperback -- paperbound editions of great books that had previously been priced out of the range of college students. The Doubleday Anchor series he helmed published books by Stendhal, Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Edmund Wilson, and Lionel Trilling, and various others, some of whom he had encountered in Columbia’s famous senior-year Colloquium on Important Books, which, in Epstein's year, was team taught by Moises Hadas and Quentin Anderson.

Mass-market paperbacks had been the home of dime novels, pulp fiction, and the occasional noir masterpiece, but Epstein reasoned that, thanks in part to the GI Bill, a college education was becoming more the norm than the exception. If that was so, trade paperback editions of the classics -- and of such a notable work of scholarship as J. Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages -- were inevitable. He was right.

The trade paperback "revolution" was a brilliant example of literary commerce beneficial to reader, author, and publisher alike. It exemplified an enlightened attempt to broaden the American mind beyond the stereotypically anti-intellectual caricature of eggheads and masters of circumlocution who called a spade an implement for deep digging. Why shouldn't the children of lower-middle-class immigrants have access to the books that made a Columbia education an intellectual adventure of the first order? 

In 1958 Epstein left Doubleday for Random House, where in time he would occupy the corner office. In addition to the authors he edited (Auden, Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Jane Jacobs et al), he was a fountain of new ideas. With his wife, Barbara Epstein, a talented editor in her own right, and their friends Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, he founded the New York Review of Books as a silver lining of the ruinous newspaper strike of 1962 that deprived straphangers of their favorite tabloids and broadsides and caused the demise of four of the city's dailies. The Review sustained its success, Epstein maintained, as a highbrow alternative to the hopelessly medicore New York Times Book Review of the time.

In an early issue the new magazine, Epstein exemplified the book review as a form of literary demolition when he wrote about a new edition of Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "Aside from its faults -- and these include the binding, which is too flimsy for volumes this large," the new edition was likely the best we shall have (he wrote with a straight face) even though the publishers failed to replace Philip Guedella's introduction, "which was no good to begin with," and worse, the text is illustrated with engravings by Piranesi, admittedly brilliant, but wrong for the occasion, and besides, the engravings are printed "in a brown tone rather than Piranesi's own black."

Inspired by Edmund Wilson, Epstein did much of the spadework for the Library of America series of classics. In the 1980s, he foresaw the method of distribution that Jeff Bezos perfected in Amazon. If only there had been an Internet in 1987, Epstein's idea of a "reader's catalogue" would have had a chance to beat Bezos to the punch.

Jason was always sure he was right, whether the subject was American foreign policy or the proper way to make mayonnaise. About publishing he was never wrong. When he recommended something I usually tried it out, to my chagrin only once. When he wrote about esoteric Chinese dishes for The New Yorker, he referred to an obscure restaurant in Chinatown, where the dish of choice was not listed on the menu but had to be ordered specially. A friend and I went and ordered the dish despite the waiter's vehement attempts to discourage us. It was not a dish, to paraphrase the waiter's gesticulations, designed to appeal to the Western palette. The waiter was right.

I interviewed Epstein a few times when I wrote about books and publishing for Newsweek and other publications. For Columbia College Today in 1985, my profile of Jason ran under the heading “Jason Epstein, ’49: A Kingpin of the New York Literary Mob.” His demise reminds me of the time when the route from Columbia College to the publishing industry was direct: Alfred Harcourt, Donald Brace, Bennett Cerf, Richard Simon, Max Schuster, Robert Giroux, Jason Epstein, Robert Gottlieb are names that trip off the tongue. What I remember most about my conversations with Jason was the way his face brightened when he spoke of Morningside Heights in the postwar years. Life in New York City then, he said, "seemed to me the very height of glamour."  -- DL

https://archive.org/details/ldpd_12981092_028/page/104/mode/2up

"Old Heart" by Peter Ferry [premieres May 14 in Detroit]

UNBRIDLED BOOKS                                                                                      8 February 2022

For Immediate Release:

                        STAGE ADAPTATION OF PETER FERRY’S NOVEL

                                                                        OLD HEART PREMIERES MAY 14 AT

                                                                        DETROIT’S REDFORD THEATER

DETROIT- The stage adaptation of Old Heart (978-1-60953-117-1), Peter Ferry’s award-winning novel about an 85-year-old American World War II vet searching for the Jewish translator he fell in love with in the Netherlands opens May 14 at historic Redford Theater in Detroit.

Directed by Karl King, this acclaimed novel from Unbridled Books has garnered a steadily widening readership since its first appearance in 2015. Dave Eggers called the book “astonishing.” The Chicago Tribune says the novel “will stay with you for keeps.” And Publishers Weekly asserts the novel is “life-affirming.”

The stage adaptation of Old Heart is coproduced by Detroit's beloved Redford Theater, one of the Midwest’s most successful community nonprofit theaters.

The book and play tell the story of American GI Tom Johnson who joins forces with 24-year-old Sarah van Praag and the Dutch resistance to smuggle food and supplies from the liberated south across Nazi lines to starving cities in the northern Netherlands. Their brief love affair collapses at the war’s end, and sixty years later Johnson, about to be sent off to assisted living by his family, disappears on a flight to Amsterdam. While his children desperately try to locate him, Johnson is determined to track down Sarah.

“We are thrilled to feature a remarkable midwestern cast for the premiere,” says Roger Rapoport, who adapted Ferry’s novel for the stage. The play will travel in the United States as well as the Netherlands.

“Like so many readers, I was knocked about by Ferry’s novel,” adds director Karl King. “Old Heart is a wonderful story that illuminates the courage of two young people fighting to save lives in a divided country at the war’s end. It’s a privilege to bring it to Detroit audiences.”

Old Heart is being hailed as an honest, unsentimental celebration of the power of love. Tickets are available at https://ci.ovationtix.com/36213/production/1084745

See the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/590676645

PETER FERRY:

Peter Ferry is the author of the 2008 novel Travel Writing (Houghton Mifflin). His short stories have appeared in McSweeneys, Fiction, Story Quarterly, OR and Chicago Quarterly Review. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Short Fiction and is a frequent contributor to the travel pages of The Chicago Tribune. He lives in South Haven, Michigan and Indianapolis.

FROM THE READERS:

Chicago Writers Association Novel of the Year

“This is a novel of love and of loss and of self-determination. Old Heart moves through time and grabs your interest on every page and will stay with you for keeps.”

— The Chicago Tribune

“Old Heart mingles a bit of suspense with precise, unsparing reflection on personal histories against a backdrop of difficult events. In this the novel might be compared to Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety or Colm Tóibín’s The Master, and it is nearly as well written. It should appeal to readers of any age and might make a good gift for a friend in doubt about the possibilities for renewal late in life.”             — Chicago Book Review

“A life-affirming novel about love and second chances.”             — Publishers Weekly

“Old Heart manages to weave together an astonishing array of themes and layers—the perils and freedoms of old age, the complexity of family ties, the liberation of travel, and finally, Ferry presents and proves the bold and needed idea that it’s never too late to re-open the past to recast the present.”                                           — Dave Eggers

“Peter Ferry’s writing is wry and beautiful.”                                 — Elizabeth McKenzie

“Old Heart has the feel of an instant literary classic.”                    — Don De Grazia

ROGER RAPOPORT:

Roger Rapoport produced and cowrote the feature films Coming Up For Air and Pilot Error which have won nine best feature awards at festival around the world.  An investigative reporter, he is also the author of Grounded and Angle of Attack with Shem Malmquist, as well as of Citizen Moore and Hillsdale: Greek Tragedy in America’s Hertland.  He writes for many publications including STAT News, Wired, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Miami Herald and The Detroit Free Press. 

THE REDFORD THEATER:

Operating as a non-profit, the Redford has served Detroit audiences since 1928. This landmark theater famous for its classic Barton organ attracts loyal patrons from across the Midwest. Its blue-sky murals have been lovingly restored by a team of local volunteers. 

https://redfordtheatre.com/events/old-heart-world-premiere/

Contact: Roger Rapoport / IMDb page

Glenside Productions / 2441 Westwood St. / Muskegon, MI 49441

[email protected] / (231) 720-0930

Frederick Ramey / [email protected]prem-