The Best American Poetry

Performer Simon Tanguy does words well [by Tracy Danison]

Simon Tanguy performing “Inging”. Photo©Elian Bachini

Although she disdained mostly everybody but her two sisters and her boon girlfriend Dottie, my mother was much involved in good works. Ma mastered the trick of feeding the hungry, comforting the sick and clothing the naked while quite literally holding her nose. Also, she had a natural talent for mimicry. To show her disgust of talkative people, for instance, she would open her mouth wide, wetly blubber “blahblahblah” and roll her hands from her face outward and toward the floor, simulating the trajectory of spurting word-vomit.

I bring the matter up because of performer Simon Tanguy’s deft insertion of a similarly excellent wet blabber at exactly the right moment with exactly the right gesture during his performance based on choreographer Jeanine Durning’s Inging at Regard du Cygne the other day. Ma was a fine natural mimic, but Simon Tanguy, having studied matters a bit, is much better, if, perhaps, less terrifying for children.

The title “Inging” is a reference to certain signifying qualities of the “progressive and continuous” ing suffix. In Tanguy’s take on “Inging” he suggests that the enemy is not a signifying quality or even a chatty neighbor but words themselves: De do do do de da da da …

Tanguy’s performance also suggests that the danger of too many words is not, as it probably was for my mother, intimacy, but exhaustion that leaves you vulnerable. The logic of ‘em, Sting sings, ties you up and rapes you, sure, but Tanguy’s performance suggests to me that the trauma and exhaustion leave you lost to yourself in the fake reality of the The Word. That’s worse: Mirabile dictu! That wine is truly blood; Don’t peek, there’s nobody behind the curtain; Nothing to see here; Donald Trump is the Messiah; Jew Zelensky is a Nazi; Those bombs on Kharkov are good bombs! And so forth, go those lost in The Word.

Tanguy’s performance makes of words a broad, impossibly damp, burlap sack. The sack has once carried some putrid, vaguely foreign, vegetable. After a little tickling flattery (using shared references) to let us know we are the right sort of people and a set up that teaches spectators to twist and turn in our seats to follow him with eyes and bodies, in a mere 45 minutes Tanguy gently has descended that sack, drowned the spirit in damp and scratchy discomfort.

Two details of Tanguy’s set, both somehow as absurd as sinister, stick in my mind, seem to me to demonstrate how his Inging works through a subtle destabilization of perception and sense. A little camera, just on the verge of audience awareness, apparently films Tanguy as he blahblahblahs at his desk. But the image is nowhere projected, ‘though, on the wall to the right, also just on the verge of awareness, are three silent earnest looping, looping, looping, talking, talking, talking heads talking with easy passion. Can Tanguy be filming himself just for filming? Can he be doing it for some secret reason? What’s the sense in it? Why is it not quite out of sight? As for the silently earnest looping talking heads, I come eventually to understand these are historical, perhaps, deep, Tanguys not Tanguys live. What’s the sense in it? Is it weird vanity. A marker for something else? Why is it just about unreadable?

Once, I notice “Ing Projection” flash beneath the earnest talking Tanguys. I laugh to myself because that seems so, what? Corporate, – marketing? Now, – selfie-ing? It comes into my mind that the absurdity of commercial manipulation and personal narcissism likely hides the sinister fact that my attention is continuously being engaged by this video stuff –  exhausting my ability to engage, exhausting me.

So. Tanguy’s Inging is more like participating in Kundalini dancing than vegging out with West Side Story. Tanguy’s showing and not telling; he’s full of sensibility but leaving me to feel.

It is no fun – it is not That’s Entertainment! – it’s not edifying – it is no TED Talk. But it sure is interesting.

It’s interesting because taken all together Tanguy’s performance leaves room enough for my own and his experience.  There’s a place for my strong personal guilt and embarrassment for de-do-do-do-ing my students that very day. There’s place for my appreciation for Tanguy’s insight, performance talent and stagecraft and room enough for the unique experience of the performance itself: I’m sitting here several days later imagining still a world with less of The Word in it.

Simon Tanguy’s production of Inging was presented 18 March 2022 at Studio Le Regard du Cygne as part of the studio’s annual Signes de Printemps program. Simon Tanguy, originally trained as a clown, has performed with a wide variety of choreographers, including Boris Charmatz and Maud Le Plaudec. He has his own troupe, cie Propagande C. Choreographer Jeanine Durning is currently active in the U.S.; in addition to inging, Durning’s pieces include: Dark Matters; This Shape, We Are In; and To Being.

"Poem for Basho" [by Ed Ochester]

If I am timorous and
hesitant to intrude
on your privacy,

forgive me, for though
every poet in New York
has written a poem to you

it is different here
where one farm does not wish
to violate another

farm's solitude, but
if after 300 years you
were in this valley

perhaps you would write
about the mouse who
every night travels out

to eat at the dog's dish.
And I think you would like
the wind stunted spruce

and the way the drip, drip
of the sink gathers
the night around it.

Basho, here is my yellow glass.
I am alone, but happy because
I do not have to be alone.

You understood that, surely?
How one of the pleasures
of silence is finally

returning to your friends.
Even though, no doubt, they thought
you slightly peculiar.

What are the colors of flowers
at night? And Basho, will you
have another glass of rice wine

or whiskey? Basho, may
I show you a poem I've just written?
Basho, what are 300 years?

-- Ed Ochester

From Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New by Ed Ochester (Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press, 2007)

from the archive; first posted November 05, 2008

"Imperial Adam" by A.D. Hope [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

When A.D. Hope published his first collection of poetry, The Wandering Islands, at the age of 48, he was already regarded as the leading Australian poet of his day. The book’s belated publication in 1955 was due in large part to Australia’s prudish censorship laws, and there was much in The Wandering Islands to rankle the censors. Hope’s poetry was often explicit in its sexual details, but this candidness was matched by a mastery of form and authority of diction that verged on the virtuosic and the pompous respectively. As Clive James writes “[Hope] spoke from on high. His vocabulary was of the present, but it had the past in it, transparent a long way down. And it was all sent forward like a wave by his magisterial sense of rhythm.”

Hope’s strict adherence to formal verse and his oracular voice can at times inhibit the erotic he audaciously explores, so that restraint (a crucial element of seduction) can calcify into incapacity, as if both partners have handcuffed themselves to the bed, beyond each other's reach. Hope's is also a singularly mascuiline eroticism. 

“Imperial Adam” is Hope’s most anthologized erotic poem, and his best. Rejected by the publishers of Australian Poetry in 1954 because the editors feared it bordered on “intellectualized pornography”, the poem reimagines paradise and our species’s first sexual act. 

It is interesting to compare the poem to the canonical narratives on the fall of man. “Imperial Adam” does away with the parables of Genesis and the angels and theology of Milton's Paradise Lost to focus exclusively on the carnal. There is no serpent to tempt Adam, but Eve’s body, in particular, her pubic hairs: “The innocent sunlight showed the place of love; / The dew on its dark hairs winked crisp and fresh.” The other inhabitants of paradise watch on in awe as Adam and Eve have sex. Upon reaching her climax, Eve lets out a “terrible and triumphant female cry”. There is something to this act that the beasts recognise as new: it is more than sex for procreation, it is sex for pleasure, driven by desire, and brings with it a whole new world of possibilities: ecstasy, gratification, jealousy, envy, shame, and most devestatingly, precipitates man's fall away from god. The fall is not sealed by Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden, but rather by Eve giving birth to Cain, his “pygmy face” arriving to a fearful audience. The poem's shocking final line “And the first murderer lay upon the earth" links sex from its origins with violence and death, to make it antithetical with innocence and complicate god's first instruction to man: be fruitful and multiply.

 

Imperial Adam

 

Imperial Adam, naked in the dew,
Felt his brown flanks and found the rib was gone.
Puzzled he turned and saw where, two and two,
The mighty spoor of Yahweh marked the lawn.

Then he remembered through mysterious sleep
The surgeon fingers probing at the bone,
The voice so far away, so rich and deep:
"It is not good for him to live alone."

Turning once more he found Man's counterpart
In tender parody breathing at his side.
He knew her at first sight, he knew by heart
Her allegory of sense unsatisfied.

The pawpaw drooped its golden breasts above
Less generous than the honey of her flesh;
The innocent sunlight showed the place of love;
The dew on its dark hairs winked crisp and fresh.

This plump gourd severed from his virile root,
She promised on the turf of Paradise
Delicious pulp of the forbidden fruit;
Sly as the snake she loosed her sinuous thighs,

And waking, smiled up at him from the grass;
Her breasts rose softly and he heard her sigh --
From all the beasts whose pleasant task it was
In Eden to increase and multiply

Adam had learned the jolly deed of kind:
He took her in his arms and there and then,
Like the clean beasts, embracing from behind,
Began in joy to found the breed of men.

Then from the spurt of seed within her broke
Her terrible and triumphant female cry,
Split upward by the sexual lightning stroke.
It was the beasts now who stood watching by:

The gravid elephant, the calving hind,
The breeding bitch, the she-ape big with young
Were the first gentle midwives of mankind;
The teeming lioness rasped her with her tongue;

The proud vicuna nuzzled her as she slept
Lax on the grass; and Adam watching too
Saw how her dumb breasts at their ripening wept,
The great pod of her belly swelled and grew,

And saw its water break, and saw, in fear,
It squaking muscles in the act of birth,
Between her legs a pigmy face appear,
And the first murderer lay upon the earth.

 

“On Becoming a Poet”: featuring Denise Duhamel, Geoffrey O'Brien, Phillip Lopate. . .

New from Marsh Hawk Press:

On Becoming a Poet: 25 Original Essays & Interviews

Edited by Susan Terris

Sandy McIntosh’s Chapter One Series presents 25 writers at their most candid and expansive about how they became who they are. The writers who talk about their education or self-education – in effect a Bildungsroman in miniature -- include Jane Hirshfield, Phillip Lopate, Arthur Sze, Tony Trigilio, Geoffrey O’Brien, Alfred Corn, and other redoubtable figures. To order the book, click here.

Here’s a brief excerpt from “Mr. Rogers and Me,” Denise Duhamel’s contribution to the volume, a memoir of her introduction to poetry. In this segment we read of the intoxicating influence of Dylan Thomas and what it was like to have Bill Knott as a teacher:

<<<< 

          I went to the University of Rhode Island, the big state school, voted “best party school” by Playboy in 1979, the year I was accepted.  I was terrified of frat parties after I saw a flaming couch being thrown out of a frat house window. I had a dorm roommate who blared Cheap Trick cassettes. She was fond of singing “I Want You To Want Me” off key into her hairbrush while doing dance moves. Because of the noise and the smoke from her joints, I spent a lot of time in the bookstore and library. It was there that I found Kathleen Spivack’s The Jane Poems, a series of very small poems under fifteen lines about an “every woman” named Jane. I had a poetry awakening, bringing me back to A Child's Garden of Verses. It was then that I started going through the poetry section of the university library, teaching myself what I could.  I fell in love with Dylan Thomas, especially the ending of “Fern Hill”— “Time held me green and dying/ Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

          Just as I was learning that poems didn’t have to rhyme, that they were alive with the now, my sister was in a terrible car accident.  I made it through just one year of the University of Rhode Island and went home, where my sister was now the one in the hospital.  It was only then that I started to have an understanding of what my parents had been through with me, driving to Providence every day for visits, rearranging their work schedules and so on. My sister was in a coma from which we were not sure she would return. She missed the end of her senior year of high school, where she was decidedly popular, slim, and an A student to boot. I remember the stitches all over her face, the dry shampoo the nurses used to try to get the blood out of her hair.  My parents and I spoke to her because the doctor said that it was possible that on some level she could hear us. I wrote terrible poems that I recited to her, realizing I didn’t ever want to go back to the University of Rhode Island. When she came out of her coma, my sister asked for ice cream.  When the doctor asked questions, she could tell him her name and recite our home phone number. She didn’t know what year it was, though she said she’d just turned six. The experience was terrifying in just about every way, but slowly her memory came back and she aged herself back to seventeen. 

          I moved back in with my parents and sister, resuming my high school job at a shoe store next door to the city’s library. I’d go there on my lunch break to the poetry stacks. It was on one such break that I saw a flyer about a study abroad program in Wales. I knew that was where Dylan Thomas was from and made my application. I left in January of 1981 to study in Trinity College in Carmarthen, Wales. It was the first time I’d been on an airplane, the first time I had a passport, the first time I had traveler’s checks pinned in my bra. My uncle had given me $800 to cover the costs not met by my shoe store savings and financial aid. Once in Wales, I took a class with Raymond Garlick, a poet in his own right, who taught a class in Welsh Studies. He was an expert on Dylan Thomas and we visited Thomas’s grave at St. Martin’s. I remember reading more than writing, as I’d lost the confidence and ease with which my ten-year-old self composed narratives. But read I did. I could recite Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” by heart. 

          After I returned home, I transferred to Emerson College in Boston where there was an actual major in Creative Writing.  In my first Emerson class, I felt like I was with my people, the misfits, the outliers, the weirdoes who, like me, were trying to figure it all out.  I was especially excited to meet Bill Knott, whose work reminded me of Thomas’s in its unapologetic passion and strange juxtapositions.  The first time I met Bill was at a poetry reading at a Boston bookstore.  I got to the bookstore early and recognized Bill from his author’s photo though I’d yet to take a class with him.  I approached to ask if he was Bill Knott and he said, “I am most definitely NOT Bill Knott” and walked away fidgeting. After the reading, I waited in line to get my book signed and said, “You ARE Bill Knott.” He proceeded to cross out whole poems in a purple pen and complained I’d bought his weakest book to date. 

          At Emerson, Knott’s office door was papered with rejection letters. His briefcase was a brown paper bag from a grocery store. He was an outlier in the best sense of the word—not part of any poetry school, not wanting to be part of any school. He was generous to a fault and when my first book came out, he bought twenty copies full price and passed them out to his students as gifts. He told his undergraduate student that we should be sending out our poems. And one of his assignments was to produce a rejection letter…or an acceptance…from a literary magazine by the end of the semester. Over the years we kept in touch and he’d often send chapbooks he’d made himself with a rubber band as a makeshift spine.

-- Denise Duhamel
>>>> 

Headline of the Week: Oscar Wilde, Back in the News

<< New York Post

Metro Edition

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

OSCAR WILD

What you didn't see on TV after Awards' slap snap

Sources describe a backstage scene of chaos Sunday night after Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock, as everyone realized it wasn't a joke. The Academy says it's conducting a review and may punish Smith for his assault.

>>>

Dodger fans were relieved to hear that Will Smith, their outstanding young catcher, was not the fellow responsible for the bitch-slap that was all anyone could talk about after the Oscar awards ceremony on Sunday night.

Oscar Wilde commented: "True friends stab you in the front." While the line implied that Will Smith, the actor, was acting as Chris Rock's "true friend," Wilde complicated the message by adding that he favored "Everything in moderation, including moderation."

Today's back page of The New York Post offers this:

JUDGE ADVOCATES

<< Yanks teammates lobby for Aaron to get his long-term deal before opening day. >>

It reminds me of the day a British royal got married: "Windsor Ties Knot." Tabloid journalism at its cleverest. -- DL

"Tea Lay" [by Sharon Dolin]

Tea Lay
          after John Clare

A missed tea, that piece of, to say, Off, grief.
We all come, by turns meretricious, to someone's wry relief.
Tangled wit, the ought of risible Tea Lay,
Aspiring to forswear, regretful knees sway.
I blanket or regret, fall to knees (that oldest knot):
To see—and to have been seen—and then seen not.
Eyeing behooves, else glower sense, he vents
At me for rejoining in jaws, summer prying.
Ear-moist, diving highest, I ease a taller thicket,
Announce Time's sick of us, foam in its spigot.
Handmaids mate in teal water (know they're not);
Handsome sires rush thither, upbraid, forged knot.
Cool delay, seeing anhedonian repast,
Too they, at fault, and die; lie calm, moon madder atlas.

-- Sharon Dolin

from The Best American Poetry 2007, ed. Heather McHugh

from the archive; first posted on March 09, 2009

A Conversation with Australian Prose Poet, Cassandra Atherton (by Nin Andrews)

NA: Why prose poetry?

CA: I love prose poetry’s compression and the allied sense of breathlessness it so often conveys. Where lineated poems tease the right margin, the prose poem embraces it. I also adore prose poetry’s celebration of the quotidian—those daily engagements at the heart of so much experience. It’s a form of poetry that always looks so approachable, largely because it’s composed of sentences and paragraphs, and it is able to exploit the illusion that that a reader may be about to encounter prose fiction or nonfiction rather than a piece of writing focused on the figurative possibilities of language. I like to think that once you have started reading a prose poem, you are compelled to finish it because you are inside a block of text that just keeps going—until the final full stop. It’s hard to resist the beguilements of a rectangular block of poetic text that floats beautifully in the space of the page or on the screen.

NA: You co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction. In writing it, did you come away with a new appreciation for the form? Were there any surprises?

CA: Prose poetry always surprises me. Its protean nature is the reason I never tire of it. Co-writing Prose Poetry: An Introduction was such a joy because I lived in a prose poetry world for three years—and in that world, almost all I did was think, write, eat, and breathe prose poetry. I have a wonderful collection of contemporary prose poetry, too. I especially enjoy some contemporary prose poetry that plays with a kind of ghosting of lineation. Some prose poets use slashes or spaces between words or phrases in the prose poem, and others use different forms of punctuation—such writing can be extraordinarily suggestive and playful.

NA: You are also working on an anthology of Australian prose poets. Is there a difference between American and Australian prose poetry? 

CA: American prose poetry is part of a longer tradition than Australian prose poetry, which has only begun to flourish in the last three decades or so. Where American prose poetry has a wonderful relationship with neo-surrealism, Australian prose poetry is often connected to its colonial history and to re-imaginings of the suburban. However, the American and Australian traditions are often connected via their humor, which is often dark and uncanny, invoking aspects of the enigmatic or mysterious.

NA: How about between male and female prose poetry? Do you think women are doing anything unique with the form?

CA: Both women and men are writing powerful prose poetry in the twenty-first century. Women are at the forefront of some of the current developments and innovations in the form. For example, I’ve always adored Holly Iglesias’s book, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry, which asks pertinent questions about the prose poetry form and its traditions. In the various prose poetry projects in which I’ve been involved, I have always given priority to exploring the way women are able to politicize the rectangular prose poetry box. They often do this by playing with the prose poem’s use of the conflicting tropes of confinement and freedom. Words are squeezed vice-like inside the block of prose poetry until they explode into the space around it.

NA: What are you currently working on?

CA: I like to keep busy, so I have lots of projects. I was thrilled when Peter Johnson asked me to co-edit an anthology of US, English and Australian prose poetry with him. The prose poetry anthology is all new work and it’s electrifying! It’s coming out later in the year with MatHat Press. I’m also working on a collection of prose poetry, Saving Face, which is about the Hiroshima Maidens. They were Japanese women disfigured by the atomic bomb dropped and were taken to New York for plastic surgery. I’m very fortunate to have received an Australia Council grant to fund this project.

NA: I’d like to close with one of your prose poems:

Hiroshima is for Lovers

You must forget that I kissed you in Hiroshima. Leave behind our hot silences and the way your shoulder pressed against mine on the blue streetcar circling the city. It is all a cliché. It has happened many times before. Remember that your body is marked by others’ narratives and their stories don’t belong on my lips. Nothing happened. Your wife is waiting at the hotel bar with a bottle of cold, white wine and an empty glass. Everything happened. In your hotel room, you stretched my arms above my head and placed my palms on the window. From behind, you pressed me against the glass, like a specimen. I saw the steel skeleton of the A-bomb dome against the blue sky. I tried to speak but my words slipped down the Ōta River and into the Seto Inland Sea. We stand on the Aioi bridge and I imagine its T shape is a ventricle, and you are its beating heart.

Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised and award-winning prose poet and scholar of prose poetry. Her prose poems have been translated into Japanese, Korean.  Cassandra co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP, 2020) and co-edited the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne UP, 2020) with Paul Hetherington. She is a commissioning editor for Westerly magazine, senior editor at Spineless Wonders and associate editor for MadHat Press. Cassandra is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia.

 

Maya C. Popa: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________

Is This Your Bag Please Would You Open It

 

The moment you know they are about to find something

pushing aside the mini marmalades

withdrawing the curler           with latex fingers

folding a flap           folding back                       another flap

your underwear grinning              not getting the situation

placed inside a box            PROPERTY OF HEATHROW;

it isn’t personal                      though it sure feels

like it’s personal                      when a man asks you

how long you spent in Romania             when moments ago

you said you were in London              and packed your own

bag                             who else would pack your fucking bag

 

but he thinks it’s charming

to get things wrong                             or maybe professional

to run on a hunch                                  he swipes the straps

for a bomb test                                           banters while your bras

feel badly for you       they never wanted this               in spite

of their lace    finally he finds the toiletries case          delays

the pleasure of admonishing you          for Alice-sized lotions

stolen from hotels                    into another box they go

it’s a job            remember            you can’t take it personally

            if he hands you his number on a food court receipt

                                                prettiest terrorist I’ve seen all day

is this your privacy                                          and can he . . .

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Maya C. Popa is the author of Wound Is the Origin of Wonder (Norton, 2022) and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019). She is the Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly and a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, writing on the role of wonder in poetry. 

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Francesca Woodman, Untitled, from the series Space2, Providence, Rhode Island,1976.

"Balance" [by Bruce Kawin]

we all have a

center of

gravity

 

so where is our

center of

levity?

"Terminus" [by Nicholas Christopher]

Terminus

Here is a piece of required reading
at the end of our century
the end of a millennium that began with the crusades
The transcript of an interview
between a Red Cross doctor
and a Muslim girl in Bosnia
twelve years old
who described her rape by men
calling themselves soldiers
different men every night one after the other
six seven eight of them
for a week
while she was chained by the neck
to a bed in her former schoolhouse
where she saw her parents and her brothers
have their throats slit and tongues cut out
where her sister-in-law
nineteen years old and nursing her baby
was also raped night after night
until she dared to beg for water
because her milk had run dry
at which point one of the men
tore the child from her arms
and as if he were “cutting an ear of corn”
(the girl’s words)
lopped off the child’s head
with a hunting knife
tossed it into the mother’s lap
and raped the girl again
slapping her face
smearing it with her nephew’s blood
and then shot the mother
who had begun to shriek
with the head wide-eyed in her lap
shoving the gun into her mouth
and firing twice
All of this recounted to the doctor
in a monotone
a near whisper in a  tent
beside an icy river
where the girl had turned up frostbitten
wearing only a soiled slip
her hair yanked out
her teeth broken

All the history you’ve ever read
tells you this is what men do
this is only a sliver of the reflection
of the beast
who is a fixture of human history
and the places you heard of as a boy
that were his latest stalking grounds
Auschwitz Dachau Treblinka
and the names of their dead
and their numberless dead whose names have vanished
each day now find their rolls swelled
with kindred souls
new names new numbers
from towns and villages
that have been scorched from the map

1993 may as well be 1943
and it should be clear now
that the beast in his many guises
the flags and vestments
in which he wraps himself
and the elaborate titles he assumes
can never be outrun

As that girl with the broken teeth
loaded into an ambulance
strapped down on a stretcher
so she wouldn’t claw her own face
will never outrun him
no matter where she goes
solitary or lost in a crowd
the line she follows
however straight or crooked
will always lead her back to that room
like the chamber at the bottom
of Hell in the Koran
where the Zaqqûm tree grows
watered by scalding rains
“bearing fruit like devils’ heads”

In not giving her name
someone has noted at the end
of the transcript that the girl herself
could not or would not recall it
and then describes her as a survivor

Which of course is from the Latin
meaning to live on
to outlive others

I would not have used that word

-- Nicholas Christopher.

Christopher is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently On Jupiter Place; seven novels, including Veronica and A Trip to the Stars; and a book about film noir and the American city, Somewhere in the Night.  He lives in New York City.

Of "Terminus," he writes, "I wrote 'Terminus' at the time of the Siege of Sarajevo; it was published in the Paris Review and then in my book “5˚” (Penguin).  It has been anthologized many times since, most recently in 2021, in Edward Hirsch’s anthology, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart.  Twenty years ago, when the former leaders of Serbia were being prosecuted for war crimes at the International Criminal Court at the The Hague, one of the prosecutors wrote that the poem was posted on the wall in their offices. That meant a great deal to me."

Ed. note: The poem was also featured recently on Salon. The war crimes perpetrated by Putin's Russia in the Uklraine renew the poem's timeliness. 

Denise Duhamel’s "Kinky" turns 25! [by Stacey Lehman]

Barbie and Ken,1960

And Limp Wrist magazine is celebrating with a special two-part issue. I'm on board! I love Denise's Barbie inspired book of poems and if you haven't read it, you owe yourself that pleasure. For a taste, I give you these lines, from Sensational Barbie:

        When Barbie was under
anesthesia, her whole body
replaced with smooth plastic,
she swore she heard her doctors
telling smutty jokes.
When the surgeons sliced off her nipples
to put in the silicone implants
they decided to leave the milk-outlets off
because, after this, the nerve endings
would be dead and Barbie
wouldn't be able to feel
anything anyway....

            from Sensational Barbie, by Denise Duhamel

Here's an excerpt from Dustin Brookshire's editor's letter to Limp Wrist's readers along with two poems from this landmark issue, selected by Kinky's author Denise Duhamel:

Anyone that knows me knows I’m the super fan of two Ds—Dolly and Denise.  I discovered and fell in love with poetry through the work of Anne Sexton, but it is the poetry of Denise Duhamel that showed me I could write the type of poems that I wanted to write. While a few high school teachers encouraged me to write poems, they taught that pop culture references don’t have a place in poetry. Denise, a queen of pop culture references, taught me otherwise. . . 
Kinky is the book I recommend that shows poetry can be about anything.  It’s the book I pull from when people tell me that they don't like poetry. It’s the book that (actually!) taught me something about the “Dolly rumor mill”—thanks “Barbie in Therapy, Part II” for enlightening me about the rumor that Dolly is a lesbian.  It’s a book that I keep a backup copy of in case my original is damaged beyond use. Kinky is a book that I turn to again and again, and it never ceases to entertain and inspire me. . .
Kinky turns 25 today, and this milestone birthday has inspired this special issue of Limp Wrist.  When I realized that the publication date of Kinky and Barbie’s birthday are only separated by eight days, I knew the universe was signaling that this special issue had to be created.  I’ll be forever appreciative that Denise immediately agreed when I asked if she would co-edit this issue.

Here are two poems from the Limp Wrist Kinky issue, chosen by Denise Duhamel:

In Defense of My Mother Who Never Bought Me a Barbie Dreamhouse

            by Caridad Moro-Gronlier 

I was too young to understand
just how young my mother was
when she worked the nightshift
at TRW, building spacecrafts
with her hands, too young to know
how it felt to hand over the whole
of her check to my father
who gave her an allowance—
ten dollars after 40 hours,
ten dollars he’d drop into her palm
every pay day.

I understood Barbie called the shots.
That Dreamhouse was hers, Ken,
an accessory sans the authority
to tell her what to do.

I wrote thirty-one letters
to Santa that year,
but he wasn’t in charge.

My father was.

I thought I stood a chance
because Mami loved Barbie’s
mid-century mod A frame too,
how the chalet gleamed up at us
from the slick pages of the Sears catalog,
the wonder of real jalousie windows
and wall-to-wall carpets unfurled
on the kitchen table where she calculated
just how long she’d have
to lay that chalet away,
just how much she’d have to beg
to convince my father to pay.
I watched her turn the page,
no dogear to save her place.

I’d like to say I was happy
with the Barbie Dream Plane
she placed under the tree, but I blamed her.
It would take years to understand
she didn’t want me to dream of staying put,
she wanted me to dream of flying away.

Abused Barbie
            by Dorianne Laux

Always wears long sleeves, scarves
to disguise her long neck, leggings
even in summer.  She flinches
when anyone raises a posable arm,
shoves an opposable thumb
at the door and tells her
to get out.  She drives
to the ocean’s ragged edge
with the top down, parks
near the pilings, a seagull
perched on each, the chains
between them swinging,
singing in the sea breeze. 
Here she can breathe, bring
the clean salt-scrubbed air
into her hollow body, one
of the first ever made
before they went to solid
plastic to make the legs
and arms more bendable
so she could throw them up
to cover her face. 

You can read all of Limp Wrist's Kinky issue here.
Find out more about Denise Duhamel here. 
Read Denise's blog posts here. 

-- sdl

Update on Muhammad Hussein Yaqub: Terrorist or Traitor?

This is what the Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Yaqub said in 2009 on an Egyptian television station:

"If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them?
Of course not. We will never love them. . .
They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine.
They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing. . .
You must believe that we will fight, defeat and annihilate them
until not a single Jew remains on the face of the earth. . ."
<<<

Sheikh Yacoub entered the Cairo Tora Court complex as a witness and was about to leave as either a terrorist or a traitor to his fans. He chose the latter. “I don’t know anything about Salafism,” he said.

Mohamad Hussein Yaqoub, one of Egypt’s most influential and extremist Salafi sheikhs, who spread the Salafi word around the world with his sermons on cassette tapes and on TV, is currently being heard in court in the ISIS Imbaba case, in which 12 individuals stand accused of a series of terrorist attacks.

Sheikhs such as Yaqoub started to appear in the 1980s under the reign of former President Hosni Mubarak, who supported the Salafist movement with the aim of creating a rival, and perhaps an alternative, to the Muslim Brotherhood founded by Hassan al-Banna.

Under Mubarak, the number of sheikhs rapidly multiplied, each with an even more radical approach to religion. Yaqoub was arguably the most prominent, and the cruelest. He advocated the predominance of religion in virtually everything and called for the establishment of an Islamic state.

One day, a group was formed that carried out a bombing in downtown Cairo, targeted a bank in Giza, and participated in other terrorist operations. According to case papers “271 of 2021,” the group had pledged allegiance to ISIS and operated under the name “ISIS Imbaba Cell.”

“I Do Not Know Them.”

Following their arrest, the group members did not hide the source of their ideas. They said they were students of Sheikhs Muhammad Hassan and Muhammad Hussein Yaqoub. They had adopted their ideas after hearing them in fatwas and sermons performed by the two Salafi Sheikhs. The same sheikhs whose influence spread after appearing on the famous “Al-Nas” TV channel, who did not come to the rescue of the seven defendants who fell into the hands of the Egyptian security

Perhaps the defendants had hoped for the two sheikhs to storm into the courtroom and prove, with evidence from Qur’an and Sunnah, that the acts for which they stand trial were nothing but “orders from God” to reconstruct the universe and implement divine law on earth.

But none of that happened. Despite being summoned, Sheikh Muhammad Hassan missed the first court session and he submitted a medical report to excuse him from attending the second session.

Seated in a wheelchair, Sheikh Hussein Yaqoub entered the courtroom, only to take back most of the statements he’d made in the past, and renounce the accused and their ideas. He even proclaimed that he was not a scholar but merely a reader with “a teacher’s diploma.” In response to the defendants’ plea that they were his “disciples,” he said: “They are not my students and I do not know them.”

In other words, Sheikh Yaqoub decided to jump ship as soon as felt the heat, disavowing his followers, faith and Salafi ideas.

His “martyrdom” widely echoed in the religious circles that had witnessed his emergence and had listened to his cries and fatwas live on air to compel Muslims to abide, warning them of the torment of hell’s fire, the wrath of the snake, the horror of the hereafter …

He was the first to advocate and support the foundation of a religious state in Egypt. In one of the referendums after the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011, he appeared with his now famous slogan: “And the Voter’s Boxes Said to Religion: Yes.” 

The referendum of course meant nothing more but a fight between two political factions, one of which supported the new constitution proposal, while the other rejected it. The political Islam faction, to which Yaqoub and his companions belong, was mobilizing to approve the new constitution, arguing it to be “halal,” while claiming that the old one would be considered “haram” (forbidden).

The religious forces at that time formulated multiple narratives revolving around the position that approving the constitution was a religious victory bringing Egypt closer to God, making it a state in which Sharia prevails. Rejecting it would make Egypt a hostage to the liberals, secularists and “the enemies of religion.”

“People said ‘yes’ to religion and ‘no’ to secularism,” said Sheikh Yaqoub. “This is our country, and whoever does not like it can emigrate.”

His words were a warning alerting everyone to the extremism of the Islamic movement, the Salafi sheikhs, and the path they embarked on in an attempt to turn Egypt into a religious state. Disregarding the country’s cultural and political history, their statements and fatwas piled up, until they became one of the main reasons for the Islamic trend to fail.

Incitement to Jihad

Most Salafi sheikhs in Egypt stay away from calling for jihad in public in order not to get involved in explicit accusations of terrorism, and it is not possible to find fatwas by Sheikh Yaqoub that incite terrorism or promote jihadist ideology, as he was always keen not to be caught the wrong way. 

However, some of his fatwas did declare that Coptic feasts are “taboo,” celebrating Valentine’s Day is a “sin,” working in banks is “cooperating with sin and aggression,” falling in love a “sin,” also, singing as “forbidden” and jihad “a calling and legitimate duty,” without clarifying exactly what he meant by jihad. 

In addition to the slander targeting many segments of Egyptian society, Sheikh Yacoub glorified the sheikhs and founders of terrorist organizations, as well as those carrying arms. >>>

Hani Mohamad, Egyptian Journalist, June 17, 2021 
https://daraj.com/en/74458/
for more, click here

Losing Farther, Losing Faster: Reading Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" While Trying to Save My Native Language [by Natalie Diaz]

At Fort Mojave, the reservation where I grew up and recently moved back to, I am not a poet—my work is in language revitalization. There are only three living Elder speakers of our Mojave language. My Elders and I work together—against history, against memory, and especially against silence—to document and record our language, to teach it to others, to make it live again.

Where does Elizabeth Bishop fit into this picture? Well, I carry her with me. She and I share at least one thing in common, our loss. And as she has said and re-said: The art of losing isn’t hard to master. This line is a small prayer that I push through my mouth’s machinery daily.

I come from a life shaped by winning—in my first season as a Lady Monarch basketball player at Old Dominion University, I won 34 games and only lost 2. When I played overseas, I received bonuses for winning games. But in this new chapter of my life, the work I do with my Elders to save our Mojave language has tested the values that made me one of the best athletes in the nation. Language revitalization is, in a sense, the art of losing. The fate of our language exists in the tongues of the three Elders who still speak it and in the hands of those of us working to preserve it. It was a hard lesson for me to learn and one that kept me from sleeping for almost two years: no matter how many hours I worked, no matter how hard I tried, I would not be able to save all of my language. I would lose some of it, a lot of it. There are words that once existed that I will never hear, that my Elders have forgotten. One of the saddest moments is when my Elder teacher cannot answer a question, when he looks at me and says, You are asking me because you don’t know the answer, but I also don’t know the answer, and there is nobody left for me to ask. When I began this work, I did not know that I had taken on a job of loss. In order not to be crushed by it, I have had to embrace it, to learn to exist within it and be successful at it, as successful as anyone can be at losing.

While Bishop and I have loss in common—don’t we all?—her loss and my loss are different—aren’t everyones’? For example, in the poem, Bishop loses a watch: I lost my mother’s watch. If I translated Bishop’s line into Mojave, I would say: Intay nyanya ‘achinaalym.

But our word ’anya means more than one thing—and since Mojaves never had watches, it only recently means “watch.” So while Bishop can be overcome by the singular loss of her mother’s watch, an object that means and means to her, that carried away memory and emotion and love with it—the loss for my language and people is even more devastating and vast than hers. What I mean is, in the Mojave language, the line Intay nyanya ‘achinaalym can also mean each of these things:           

        I lost my mother’s hour.
        I lost my mother’s sun.
        I lost my mother's light.
        I lost my mother’s day.
        I lost my mother’s time.

Or maybe Bishop and I have lost exactly the same thing—equally vast—we have lost our mothers, we have lost our pasts, the part of our lives when suns and days and time were not measurements of pains or failures. But whereas Bishop might have been stopped by her loss, I must keep going.

Loss doesn’t mean to me what it once did. What I cannot do doesn’t stop me anymore—it now shapes what I can do and helps me to appreciate what I do have. I choose not to stare into the void of loss, but instead I step inside it, stick my fingers into it, put my ear to it, try to find as many words for it as I can. This is no different from the way I build my poems. I don’t run from the disaster of what history has done to my people and our language, I chase it down. Sure, I will lose some things, I lose something—a thousand things—every day, but I know that I can be both farther and faster, and what I will gather and succeed at in my losing is ultimately what I can save of my language.

“Vanishing Languages,” a National Geographic article, opens with this fact: One language dies every 14 days. So, two weeks from now, there will be one less language spoken and heard on this planet. At Fort Mojave, we have decided that it will not be our Mojave language. 

Soon after earning my MFA, I was lucky enough to meet the poet Ted Kooser at a writing festival in Idyllwild, California, and we began exchanging small notes and postcards in the mail. Most often, we talked about my desert and his barn, the slow back roads we both drove, maybe about the owl that hooted through his night, and if so, then surely about what owls mean to my people. Most of his post cards were his own illustrations. On the back of one that hangs in my office, he wrote: It might be that the work you are doing for your tribe will be far more important that any poem you will write. Of course, he is right.  

Learn more about our Mojave language revitalization--click here to watch this PBS special on Fort Mojave language recovery efforts.

-- Natalie Diaz (pictured bottom left)
from the archive; first posted March 24, 2014

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Six): Chad Foret [by Angela Ball]

We May Never Get Back Here

That soft yellow two-story place
in the Spanish style was a movie
       house, remember? Marilyn who
       pitied horses danced the desert

conscious while Clark watched.
       They don’t open doors in Niagara:
       too many bodies in the bell tower.
At the movie house, they exclusively
served expired snack cakes. Everyone

       should have to see a horse experience
a storm for the first time much like the way
it is a sin not to sneak into a movie house.
       When sad birds sleep, certain moths

       salivate, eat from eyes like a record
needle, music carving circles in a mirror,
like when you hear a sound or phrase so
       right you have to hum. Every once
       in a while, you notice you’re the only
animal at home & no one is waiting
to remember you & no, there’s not
       a person with a different perfume

in each individual eyelash waiting
to be squeezed like honeysuckle,
       someone you can turn to & say,
       I think you’re the talking I’ve
been with all day, someone

       to help you miss a movie house
       & a dog that lives to bite the air,
the right there. Again, I climbed
into a taxi with all your time.
       The dog you don’t even own
       yet hears your disc slip. Our

home is a lilac dropped at the feet
       like cigars or the afternoon, all those
       fortresses at the mercy of my breathing.
Driving by the movie house can turn you

       confident enough to make a noise, regret
       small things like owning one too many
clocks, the trouble of objects that give
you no trouble. One day, all at once,
       your neighbors realize they’re old
       & in the wrong room & I’ll just
wish I had been there the night

       you got your eyes. Who wouldn’t
       want their whole life to be a funeral
for a movie house, & who can afford
to live in a house with a person no one

       bothered to name? The mind is a generous
butcher. You’ve forgotten me like a child
spending his entire life in a water tower.
       At least I was always a laugh. Just one
       more film before they feed us vacation
footage. Perhaps it’s not a sad idea to stay

       children, a home without money, laughed
       human. What I mean is many families
moved, were moved in this house.
That’s all. What kind of families? Who cares.
       I was going underground until I touched you.
       Now I want to be old & realize the room I’m
in is not what I meant. When I watch movies,

       I often think about the time my teacher hugged
       his daughter like a haunted rocking chair. Had
I stepped into a play by Pinter? Was I a bird

       crying on pictures of more beautiful birds?
       I think of how the angel left Mary in Luke,
like my grandpa left Nilda with hell on her
hands, shrinking in some coffee shop. Stay

       for the morning, I’d say, my wings a torn
movie ticket. You’ll like getting born.

--Chad Foret

This began as a writing exercise after reading and watching Pinter's play The Homecoming. Around the same time, my wife and I drove past a building out in the country and she told me how it used to be a small movie theater. Each time we were in the area and I tried to point out the building, it was the wrong one, or it was in a different place than I remembered. It was like it was never there to begin with, or like all the buildings were a theater once. I drafted and revised with this experience in mind, and the allusions and mutations of memory and place all fused into this poem. --Chad Foret

Chad Foret is a freelance writer and editor from southeast Louisiana. His first book of poems, Scenes from a Rain Country, will be published with Lavender Ink in New Orleans. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, CutBank, Electric Literature, Prime Number Magazine, Bayou Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Flock, Barely South Review, New Rivers Press, and other journals and anthologies. More info can be found at chadforet.com.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Six): Chad Foret

Chad Foret’s fugue on a lost movie house begins with references to two films featuring Marilyn Monroe: The Misfits, her last completed film; and Niagara, her first film with star billing. A  movie exposes us as we watch,  sets us in juxtaposition. For Frank O’Hara of the New York School of Poets, the movies were education, with eager gunfire banging from horseback cowboys as hands, fingers slid toward new places; sexual discoveries juxtaposing the Little Tramp as he strolls his cockeyed sailor’s stroll away from  a scorned circus poster, a naked field. For Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits it was her being in a movie that her now-unloving husband had written when he loved her, so that the character she portrayed no longer existed, only her own boundless anxiety; for Clark Gable it was life beyond life, being a photogenic husk, concerned and leathery. The poem’s second movie, Niagara, carried this tagline:

“Marilyn Monroe and Niagara—a raging torrent of emotion that even nature can’t control”

Here, Monroe and a waterfall are one: amalgam of fluvial and sexual potency, their combined power overmastering the forces that produced them.

Foret’s poem displays a related power: the uniting of statement with a compelling impulse to search. Surrealism had film as an ally almost from its start, gathering vigor when movies were just beginning to talk, when Spain and South America were talking to North America through Federico Garcia Lorca, through Pablo Neruda. Its dream method, opposing the sober, fed the young New York School of Poets, especially Kenneth Koch. In an interview with David Kennedy recorded in 1993, Koch says:

I wrote poem when I was just eighteen, maybe on my birthday, called 'For My Eighteenth Birthday' or 'Poem For My Birthday' and it was influenced by French surrealism in so far as I understood it. I understood it mainly from a surrealist magazine called View. It was edited by Charles Henry Ford and André Breton had something to do with it too. Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things and I wrote this poem when I was eighteen beginning, I can only remember part of, "At eighteen I walk on the surface of things, I tread in my stocking feet in houses of soft love..." [Laughs] and other sort of surrealist lines.

Foret’s poem, I believe, walks in “stocking feet in houses of soft love”: “I’ll just / wish I had been there the night / / you got your eyes. Who wouldn’t / want their whole life to be a funeral / for a movie house . . . .”  In this declaration, soft love meets extravagance. A possible dictum of surrealism: Going too far is not enough.

Wherever they run, movies make night, though in them the sun may blister the plank sidewalks of a western town, challenge the lonely nubs of cacti; a fluid night where all is new and possible, nothing held back by usual identities or connections. “Had I stepped into a play by Pinter?” the poem asks. Though Harold Pinter was no surrealist, his plays remove conventional social cushioning to establish an associational atavism that captivates and disturbs. He was a writer of terrific screenplays, like the one he wrote for L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, in which Julie Christie in a gauzy dress becomes a scissoring butterfly in flagrante with Alan Bates.

Every house a movie—either in one, or containing one, or both. In home movies, we are most real and most illusory, always doing things that look like fun. In non-movie life, fun is hard to identify, our place in it elusive: “Now I want to be old & realize the room I’m / in is not what I meant.”

In Chad Foret’s vivid, cinematic poem, “We May Never Get Back Here,” we live in film’s sacred craziness, we fly—our wings “a torn movie ticket.” We absorb his lens’s feverish optimism, rewarded in the poem’s vivid close: “Stay for the morning,” it invites. “You’ll like getting born.”

--Angela Ball

Spring is Here [by Ella Fitzgerald and Rodgers & Hart]

 

 

Spring is here! Why doesn't my heart go dancing?
Spring is here! Why isn't the waltz entrancing?
No desire, no ambition leads me
Maybe it's because nobody needs me

Spring is here! Why doesn't the breeze delight me?
Stars appear, why doesn't the night invite me?
Maybe it's because nobody loves me
Spring is here I hear

-- Lorenz Hart

Psst! Are you listening, “New York Times” Letters page? Playwright Nathalie Béasse wins “Beyond Words Values” award. It’s a big deal [by Tracy Danison]

In a key of turbulence. "Ceux qui vont contre le vent", cie Nathalie Béasse. Photo © C. Raynaud de Lage

There are things that really should appear on the New York Times Letters page.

When a letter gets in the Times Letters page, why, it gets read by Letters page readers, those guys and girls who linger a bit over morning coffee before making the world.  

I once wrote a letter to the Letters page. I criticized Singapore’s then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yu’s hare-brained “Asian Values” campaign. The Times Letters page folks have the noos to know when a should-publish looks ‘em straight in the eye; events proved that my writing to them was the right thing.

Ye shall know them by their works, sayeth the prophet.

Stung by my words, the faux philosophe of Singapore thundered an unseemly and intemperate reply to the Times, also dispatching a copy of it to my student address at the University of Buffalo.

Are you listening, Times Letters page?

Here’s another should-publish.

Angers, France, -based playwright Nathalie Béasse has won the “Beyond Words Values” award “for cultivating insight into the dynamics of human perception and un-story in theater performance”. The “Beyond Words Values” award means that Nathalie Béasse is in the vanguard in shaping up a theatrical lineage to go along with a less Word-centered world.

It’s a big deal.

As a poet, I’ve always been suspicious of the Word – it is hard to work with, not accurate as to actual experience and is dangerously hypnotic for user and hearer alike. For instance, the flattening urban space in and outside of Kharkov, Ukraine, certainly suggests that material destruction and living misery go well beyond what can be said of them – the dangerous hypnotism that preceded it goes without saying. And, if nothing else, those burnt out Russian tanks from the sixth Battle of Kharkov show that humanity has got itself tangled into a pretty desperate story loop this past century and more.  

I welcome any creative endeavor that diminishes the power of the Word. It is not for nothing that Hell is described as the kingdom of noise: turning down the volume makes for instant relief.  Anything that even slightly lowers the buzz and pop of the Word exponentially increases the power of sympathy, sensibility and imagination.

Béasse’s approach to theater does that, vitiates the hectoring Word, increases the power of sympathy, sensibility and imagination. For me, her approach has a lot in common with “capital D” Dance: stressing feeling over narrative, mutual experience over moralizing or exegesis, respecting the physics of perception over imposing dramatics.

 

In a social key. "Ceux qui vont contre le vent", cie Nathalie Béasse. Photo © Jérôme Blin

So, as she might shape plastics and metals to open spectator perceptions onto the color, shade and texture of a thing, Béasse, who began her creative career as a visual/material artist, in her plays shapes relations among human beings into positions of entry onto an “un-story” (that is, into a visualized flow of feeling, emotion and mood) that she massages into a stage chronology (that simulates diverse logics among events and perceptions).

Laughter seems the most expressed audience reaction to Béasse’s theater; folks laugh as they first recognize and then identify into situations, then join themselves to the sensibilities stimulated and projected by the performers, then “participate” in the feeling, emotion and mood that is the un-story.

In a key of together. "Ceux qui vont contre le vent", cie Nathalie Béasse. Photo © Jérôme Blin

For instance, in Béasse’s most recent work, Ceux qui vont contre le vent (something like, “Moving against the wind”), stage chronology rolls out as, approximately, moving in a group, group sloshing around a table, person declaring, persons & groups evolving and settling into. These “ings”– moving, sloshing, declaring, evolving, settling into, call them “visualized riffs” – sound to me like, and works on the spectators like, the conceptual barebones of a choreography, pointing the shapes of feeling, emotion and mood within, acting as indicators of a wider, mutual experience of ‘moving against the wind’.

People laugh as the “ings” roll into focus and take their place in the chronology.

They become more sober as performers introduce different “keys” of relational tension within the ings. Rather than happen on a high-low scale, the keys range all over a flat map of spectator perception of the ings: the relational tensions of “win the lottery” is as possible, as “win at solitaire”, as “go to bed”, as “come out” or “lose an argument” or “learn product not in stock” or as “divorce”. The result is enriched spectator perception.

The accumulation of ings and, within them, the accumulation of a slew of possible keys of relational tensions shape into a concerto of personalizing experience: spectators become participants. Participants in the process become (as far as the physics of perception allow) experiencers. “Experiencers”, I mean, as in those engaged by Capital D Dance, as opposed to, say, audience members making a (an interior) commentary on,         or a (renewed or recreated or extension of) narrative about, or   having catharsis from, or observing the denouement of, or silently pointing towards a story.

An Experiencer in Béasse’s theater, is, as for the experiencer in Capital D Dance, the story, is what I call the un-story. To be the un-story, even for a second, is to be oneself the power to Imagine or not a new story or no story at all, the state where a person can snatch something new from the universal ether. In other words, in a state of un-story, you can get out of Kharkov narrative loop once and for all… or at least start recognizing that it could be different.

… Anyhow, Nathalie Béasse does a fascinating, entirely different kind of theater. Times Letter page readers should treat themselves to a live performance. Once they've done, they will come to dig, admire and imitate Béasse’s “Beyond Words Values” as I do.  

That's a big deal.

Dean Young: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

Archaic Torso of Me Too

 

There was the guy in the next room

screaming he wanted some goddamn sugar.

There was the lady who my first night

conscious tried to get me to pray while

a falcon-headed shade carried off

my biowaste, hexes welting the walls—

she was also a hallucination.  How

I was strapped to the face of a sundial,

names of drugs like archangels,

the breathing machine pulling in

an Army-Navy game and tolling

like Big Ben. Hovering beside me,

another me entirely free of pain

like the idea of a rainbow beside

a fading rainbow.  Huff of alcohol,

fentanyl, urine, red beets.  The one

I made leave because he couldn’t stop

acting triumphant.  It wasn’t only death

in costume.  But always there was my darling

who’d kiss me even though the pulse-spike

would bring nurses running.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, the very place that Coleridge and Southey were thinking of founding their commune.  Maybe.  He is also maybe currently living in Cincinnati where he is trying to fit a two-bedroom house into a loft apartment.  His, hopefully next book, completing his IT’S ALIVE!! Trilogy, Creature Feature is almost finished.  Then from there on in it’s all petal drop blast radius.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary bringing food for the inmates of a hospital. Oil painting by Adam Elsheimer, ca. 1598           

On Nelson Riddle [by Terry Teachout, 1956-2022]

Two excerpts from "The Man Who (Re)made Sinatra: The Riddle of Nelson" by Terry Teachout (February 6, 1956 - January 13, 2022) in Commentary (July / August 2021)

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Nelson Riddle was, perhaps, the greatest of all the arrangers who worked on the Great American Songbook, primarily because of the work he did in the 1950s with Frank Sinatra. The two men were brought together by Capitol Records in 1953 in the hope of updating Sinatra’s singing style, which still recalled his youthful crooning of sentimental ballads. Within a matter of years, Sinatra had recorded his two finest albums, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956) and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958), on which he emerged decisively as a mature artist, in part because of Riddle’s sympathetic backing. Riddle also wrote arrangements of like quality for Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Peggy Lee, and Dean Martin. Riddle’s innovative work defined the predominant postwar style of arranging, which may be the defining sound of the American century. Such an artistic force is deserving of a first-class full-length biography. Alas, Peter Levinson’s September in the Rain (2001), though full of illuminating detail about his life, is musically uninformed, while Geoffrey Littlefield’s newly published Nelson Riddle: Music with a Heartbeat, nominally co-written with Riddle’s son Christopher, is a vanity-press disaster, besmirched by factual errors and even more musically ignorant than Levinson’s book. Still, September in the Rain does let us see how Riddle developed as an artist, in the process enriching our understanding of the life of the chronically melancholy man and his uncomfortable relationship with the greatest popular singer of the 20th century.
>>>

<<< Today, Riddle’s style, especially as documented in the albums he recorded with Sinatra, is universally acknowledged as the high-water mark of postwar vocal arranging. Their making was a nerve-racking process for Riddle, who confessed to finding Sinatra terrifyingly mercurial: “Frank contributed a lot to the orchestral part of his own records, just by leveling a hostile stare at the musicians, with those magnetic blue eyes! The point of this action was to make me, or any other conductor, feel at that exact moment as if he had two left feet, three ears, and one eye.”

But the resulting tension, he admitted, was “a positive factor that found its way into the record,” and it brought out the best in Riddle. More than a half-century later, their albums sound as vital as ever—and his ability to overcome his fear of Sinatra and rise to the occasion is a large part of what has kept them so. >>>

For the entire article, click here. For the record, many Frankophiles consider "In the Wee Small Hoirs" an even better album of ballads than the great "Only the Lonely." Teachout is absolutely correct when he says that song arrangers are underpaid, underappreciated, and sometimes unacknowledged. Other Sinatra arrangers worth more than a mention include Billy May, George Siravo, Gordon Jenkins, Don Costa, Axel Stordahl, Quincy Jones, Neil Hefti, and Johnny Mandel. >>>

 

Two excerpts from "The Man Who (Re)made Sinatra: The Riddle of Nelson" by Terry Teachout (February 6, 1956 - January 13, 2022) in Commentary (July / August 2021)

<<
Nelson Riddle was, perhaps, the greatest of all the arrangers who worked on the Great American Songbook, primarily because of the work he did in the 1950s with Frank Sinatra. The two men were brought together by Capitol Records in 1953 in the hope of updating Sinatra’s singing style, which still recalled his youthful crooning of sentimental ballads. Within a matter of years, Sinatra had recorded his two finest albums, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956) and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958), on which he emerged decisively as a mature artist, in part because of Riddle’s sympathetic backing. Riddle also wrote arrangements of like quality for Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Peggy Lee, and Dean Martin. Riddle’s innovative work defined the predominant postwar style of arranging, which may be the defining sound of the American century. Such an artistic force is deserving of a first-class full-length biography. Alas, Peter Levinson’s September in the Rain (2001), though full of illuminating detail about his life, is musically uninformed, while Geoffrey Littlefield’s newly published Nelson Riddle: Music with a Heartbeat, nominally co-written with Riddle’s son Christopher, is a vanity-press disaster, besmirched by factual errors and even more musically ignorant than Levinson’s book. Still, September in the Rain does let us see how Riddle developed as an artist, in the process enriching our understanding of the life of the chronically melancholy man and his uncomfortable relationship with the greatest popular singer of the 20th century.
>>>

<<< Today, Riddle’s style, especially as documented in the albums he recorded with Sinatra, is universally acknowledged as the high-water mark of postwar vocal arranging. Their making was a nerve-racking process for Riddle, who confessed to finding Sinatra terrifyingly mercurial: “Frank contributed a lot to the orchestral part of his own records, just by leveling a hostile stare at the musicians, with those magnetic blue eyes! The point of this action was to make me, or any other conductor, feel at that exact moment as if he had two left feet, three ears, and one eye.”

But the resulting tension, he admitted, was “a positive factor that found its way into the record,” and it brought out the best in Riddle. More than a half-century later, their albums sound as vital as ever—and his ability to overcome his fear of Sinatra and rise to the occasion is a large part of what has kept them so. >>>

For the entire article, click here. For the record, many Frankophiles consider "In the Wee Small Hoirs" an even better album of ballads than the great "Only the Lonely." Teachout is absolutely correct when he says that song arrangers are underpaid, underappreciated, and sometimes unacknowledged. Other Sinatra arrangers worth more than a mention include Billy May, George Siravo, Gordon Jenkins, Don Costa, Axel Stordahl, Quincy Jones, Neil Hefti, and Johnny Mandel. >>>

 

"Parallel Bars" [by Geoffrey Young]

PARALLEL BARS

It gets bad and then it gets worse
And then the bottom falls out
But then it gets better, even great, you think
You’re there, but then it goes sour, totally alone, hurting,
But it comes back, new breath, friends again,
It’s the best it’s been in months,
Really clicking, it’s heaven, and then
Just about the time you think it’s going to stay heaven,
It gets bad, and then it gets worse, and then
The bottom falls out, will it ever get better? and then
It does, it’s even great, you blink an eye
And it goes sour, vicious, destructive,
But it comes back, new breath, friends again,
It’s the best it’s been in months, really clicking,
It’s heaven, and then just about the time
You think it’s going to stay heaven

--Geoffrey Young. Above: the cover of Young's new book Money (Prepared Remarks, 2022.)

"The Kiss" [by Italo Svevo]

The first kiss, I gave you as coldly as I would have put my name to a contract; the second, I gave with enormous curiosity to analyze you and myself, but in fact, I didn't analyze anything and understood nothing, as I was still feeling a kind of timidity that froze me; at the third kiss, and those which came after it, I could feel in my arms the sweet girl I had been searching for, and all that was left of my youth.  Now, I understand the whole business less and less; what's certain is that my powers as analyst are not what I thought they were.  I don't know the color of your eyes, your hair often surprises me, and I still don't really know your kisses.  Mine too have a strange quality; not passionate warmth, to be sure, because I'm careful, very careful, that they shall not be more than you allow them to be.  I don't want to be violent, I want to be gentle and kind.  My greatest pleasure lies in feeling that I've changed -- I don't care to say grown young again. 

-- letter from Italo Svevo to Livia Veneziani (from Memoir of Italo Svevo, Marlboro Press, 1991). 

-- sdh