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Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 30, 2022 at 12:04 PM in Art | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Ed note: This is part two of a series. Find part one here. sdl
Agon. What the hell was that? The program revealed that agon is a Greek word, meaning contest. Okay, but how do you pronounce it? Short a like apple? Or long a like acorn? It didn’t dawn on me that agon is cousin to agony: short a then.
This scene began NYCB’s week-long Ravinia residency:
The stage is bare, devoid of even a minimalist Godot-style tree. Four men in white Fruit of the Loom T-shirts and black tights appear. They walk upstage, place themselves equidistantly from each other with their backs to the audience, their curved arms extended downward— an image of grace. They pivot in unison to face us. Before the music starts, they move as a unit, doing simple steps at first—walking, feet angling inward and then out. They, not the orchestra, begin the piece.
A few counts later, the musicians blare a brass fanfare. The men engage in familiar steps, a plié, feet in first position. They strut across the stage in lockstep to the music’s rhythm. But immediately, Balanchine inverts the classical lines. The feet turn inward. Legs extend off-balance. Chests protrude beyond “elegance.” Heels flex upward on the floor, anchoring the leg. Arms swing casually. We’re in “West Side Story” territory, which also premiered in 1957.
Two minutes later, eight women in “practice clothes” uniform—pink tights, black leotard—enter. The urgent music borders on angry. They attack the beats, matching the tone of the music, and explode in jumps and turns, as if on a trampoline, sometimes in unison and sometimes following each other a count or two later: a visual fugue. Always moving, they create a stream of patterns: architecture in motion. Balanchine’s choreography unspools seamlessly, insistently, to the music’s flow.
The ballet continues for eleven more movements—trios, solos, full ensemble, and most famously, a male-female duet—and reveal shapes, patterns, and a kinetic dynamism I’d never seen before. There are no explicit guideposts that help you absorb the ever-churning complexity of the rhythm, tempo, and musical phrases these dancers literally embody. You can’t anticipate the progression of synthesized sight and sound, the amalgam of the past with an unchartered present, of this blend of grace and angularity. I could see the ballet a hundred times and still not understand how the dancers mastered its rhythm, still incapable of internalizing the choreography’s trajectory. The dancers are fireflies in tights. And all I wanted to do was catch them.
*
So what was the contest? Were the dancers really antagonists? Or were they protagonists, a group of equals exploring this new world? Balanchine was recasting old forms and contexts into an avant-garde vocabulary, but was he framing them as adversaries, as the title suggests? Don’t think so. This was a friendly face-off, an invitation to discover that evolutions embody the sources from which they emerge. The “contest” between eras is implied, inherent in the choreography’s unfolding. The ballet’s plotlessness might feel revolutionary. But for me, “Agon” declares that the imagination’s ability to transform the dimensionless medium of sound into a three-dimensional locomotive, is the greatest ballet plot of all.
Yet there is a basic scheme. Several of the twelve sections are based, loosely, on 17th century French court dances: the branle, galliard, and saraband. Balanchine called the other sections after the number of dancers in them.
The late Arthur Mitchell, who originated the pas de deux, revealed that it was the first section Balanchine choreographed. Thus it was the ballet’s centerpiece, though chronologically, it was the penultimate section—the climax of the preceding ones. And you wouldn’t be wrong to see a sexual context here. The choreography’s six minutes involve an intimacy that ranges from a simulation of court dancing—slow, processional movement—to serpentine entanglements that look lifted from the Kama Sutra. Sometimes there’s not much “dancing” at all, if dancing is continuous movement. Rather, there’s a blossoming of consecutive poses that suggest images on Greek amphora or the mirror images of Rorschach tests.
But in 1957, the choreography was almost beside the point. Arthur Mitchell was black. His partner, Diana Adams, was white. Interracial marriage was not legal throughout the US. It took a full decade later for Loving v. Virginia to settle the matter. Yet Mitchell and Adams enacted this choreographic coupling as if the only thing missing was the certificate.
Ultimately, if there are opposing energies here, it’s the failure of words to convey the full impact of this visceral, ephemeral experience, which, as we’re verbal creatures, is indeed a kind of agony: Dance, kaleidoscopic in form, always resists our ability to communicate its spell. Three-dimensional movement doesn’t readily translate into the abstraction of language. So, are all ballets agons? Maybe Balanchine in his sly way trying to make a universal statement about his art.
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Ed note: Here is former NYCB principal dancer Maria Kowroski on Balanchine’s AGON
This season, the NYCB is celebrating the 1972 Stravinsky festival with a series of special performances. Find the schedule and buy your tickets here.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 30, 2022 at 09:03 AM in Dance, Feature, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (1)
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<<< Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity defined the noir genre with its calculated coolness and eerily familiar scenes of suburban LA.
Barbara Stanwyck plays the ultimate femme fatale: a woman who lures a hapless insurance salesman (MacMurray in a handsome suit) into a complex murder scheme. The electricity between the killer couple is palpable and Edward G. Robinson (as MacMurray’s emasculated boss) crackles each time he steps into the frame.
Local author David Lehman will introduce the film, which is featured in his forthcoming book, The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir, published by Cornell University Press. Copies of the book will be available for sale at the screening. >>
Thursday, 05/05/2022 at 7:00pm. Willard Straight Theatre, Cornell University. "The space features the largest screen in Ithaca, Dolby Digital Surround Sound and the best projection in the area." For more information, click here.
For what it's worth, I do not concur with the notion that Edward G. Robinson's character is "emasculated."
Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 29, 2022 at 06:48 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Film noir, Movies | Permalink | Comments (1)
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One Plus One (1956): When one of the older kids in the neighborhood is told he “has no balls,” he replies, “I’ve got two of them, how many do you have?”
This is a question I have never asked myself.
That night, in the bath, I nervously count.
One. Two.
And no more.
Bobby and Joanie (1964): Someone tells me that in 1961 he was staying with a friend in Cambridge. From Harvard Yard he heard a male and female voice having a drunken argument. “Stop it, Bobby,” said the female. “Aw come on, Joanie, come back here,” said the male.
I will repeat the story many times, to the great pleasure of my listeners, who will choose, as I do, based on no evidence, to believe they were Dylan and Baez.
Sartre’s Concept of Good Faith Demonstrated by a Waiter in a Chinese Restaurant (1965): My father’s won ton soup is lukewarm, so he calls over the waiter and says, “The soup isn’t hot.”
“Soup is hot,” the waiter declares.
“No it isn’t,” my father says.
The waiter sticks his finger in the soup, and agrees with my father.
Do You See Where You Are? Do You Know How You Got Here? (1965): During my driver license (yes, that’s what NY State calls it) road test, the examiner asks me to cross a six-lane highway. I get halfway across when I realize there’s an onslaught of cars coming from the right. I squeeze the brake pedal and hope everyone stays in their lanes.
The examiner looks up from his clipboard and calmly asks: “Do you see where you are?”
“Yes.”
“Do you understand how you got here?”
“Not really.”
He makes a notation, clicks his pen shut. His work is finished.
What He Does (1974): One of our transient roommates is Ralph, who works for EMS. He never talks about what he does.
One night, we’re all watching the local news. The reporter describes a triple murder in the Bronx, and says, “One of the victims was dead at the scene, the other two died at the hospital.”
“Two were dead at the scene,” Ralph says under his breath. “And the other one died in the ambulance.”
Concentric Circles (1970): She’s a friend, she says she is horny, I ask what are you going to do about it, and she responds: “I thought about fucking you, but I knew you wouldn’t because of your girlfriend. You see, you put a circle around yourself. You’ll do anything within that circle, but you won’t even consider going outside of it.”
I tell her that I am always working on widening that circle.
She replies: “You’ve missed the entire point.”
Two Things My Mother Said: “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” “Like this you kill a day.”
“It’s a great life if you don’t weaken” is attributed to John Buchan in 1919, and later appropriated into a song made famous by Faron Young and Maurice Chevalier.
“Like this you kill a day” seems to be hers.
Shithole (1983): I have some kind of intestinal bug that won’t be snuffed. To make sure I don’t have an exotic parasite, the doctor sends me to a diagnostic lab that specializes in feces. You need to get several negatives before they rule out parasites. The lab is a converted apartment. Everyone there is leaving samples; often, chemical inducements are required.
I could go on, but I don’t want to write it. And you wouldn’t want to read it.
Youthful Pain (2001): I trip and scrape my knee against the pavement. During the two-second delay between the act and the pain, I remember crying as a little boy when I scraped my knee. As the pain kicks in, I think of John Berryman’s line “I am not a little boy,” and I feel tearful. It hurts so good to be a little boy for a few seconds.
Mama Rat and Her Children (2001): While the moon is being eclipsed, a mama rat and her children are crossing Riverside Drive as a taxi is paused at the Stop sign. The mama stops in the middle, waiting for the kids to catch up. The taxi driver honks his horn—two gentle beeps. The kids speed up and the whole family reaches the other side. The taxi goes on his way. The moon returns.
from the archive; first posted June 25, 2015.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 29, 2022 at 11:42 AM in Alan Ziegler, From the Archive | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 28, 2022 at 07:19 PM in From the Archive | Permalink | Comments (0)
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From The Common, this section of "Just a Couple of Mugs," a five-part prose poem from David Lehman's new book The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir (Cornell University Press). Here's one section:
<<<
Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell hate each other in a hotel room with sink in San Francisco. They have just had a fight or gone to bed; maybe both. “I’m waiting for something to happen,” he says. Then: “Nothing’s going to happen.” He takes off, goes to the Blue Gardenia, and catches the bartender’s eye. “What’ll it be?” “I’ll have a double scotch.” (Pause). “Make that a single scotch.” (Pause). “I’ll settle for a beer.” Those are the best lines he gets.
In the Blue Gardenia, Nat Cole sings and Jean Hagen recites a poem by Robert Burns. She can sing, too. “You’re hired.” “I get forty dollars a week plus bail money.”
>>>
For the rest of the poem as posted today on The Common, click here.
On The Mysterious Romance of Murder:
"Do yourself a favor and follow Lehman's lead on this idiosyncratic tour through the noir ethos in literature, poetry, music, and film. He's an erudite, insightful, and amusing tour guide, whether you're new to the terrain or a habitué."
-- Eddie Muller, host of Turner Classic Movies' Noir Alley and author of Dark City
"Books or films? Until now, travelers to the land of noir have tended to confine themselves to one province or the other, whereas veteran explorer David Lehman has mastered the language of both territories. His field report slides back and forth between page and screen with joyful confidence, offering sharp insights throughout and giving us not only the full picture but the full story as well. I am especially grateful to him for his delightful remarks on the importance of cigarettes, music, and wisecracks in these classic films, which only seem to get better as the years go on."
-- Paul Auster
"This is a masterwork in which Lehman's encyclopedic knowledge of film, literature, and cultural history is synthesized by way of lively exegesis, quotes, poems (his own), catalogs, mini-biographies, and eclectic, brilliantly illuminated byways, both classical and pulp. His vivid, chromatic style is what one expects from a poet and critic of Lehman's stature. The Mysterious Romance of Murder must take a prominent place, stylistically and critically, alongside Luc Sante's Low Life, Julian Symons's Bloody Murder, and Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave. As with the very best mysteries?of the heart and the intellect?you can't put it down."
-- Nicholas Christopher, author of Somewhere in the Night
Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 28, 2022 at 11:41 AM in Adventures of Lehman, Film noir, Movies | Permalink | Comments (3)
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Tadeusz Dąbrowski na spotkaniu poświęconym Adamowi Zagajewskiemu
W nieco ponad rok od śmierci Adama Zagajewskiego w monachijskiej Kunsthalle odbędzie się spotkanie z pisarzami, który jako twórcy i jako ludzie wiele mu zawdzięczają. O poezji i eseistyce autora Jechać do Lwowa rozmawiać będą: Michael Krüger (poeta oraz wieloletni przyjaciel i wydawca Zagajewskiego), Renate Schmidgall (jego tłumaczka) oraz poeta Tadeusz Dąbrowski. Słowo wstępne wygłoszą: dr Stefan Kirchberger (Kunsthalle München), Holger Pils (Lyrik Kabinett), Jo Lendle (Carl Hanser Verlag) oraz Mateusz Werner (miesięcznik Twórczość).
Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 27, 2022 at 09:00 PM in Obituaries, Photographs | Permalink | Comments (0)
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An Féar Gorta
If I ever go back home again, we will drive
through the countryside just as it is getting dark.
We will gather together in the town’s only hotel,
eating, and telling jokes at each other’s expense.
My heart beats steady there, my spirit alive
to every gesture, every glance, the fire and spark
we find in those we love. Those to whom we tell
our dark secrets along with our idiotic nonsense.
Whatever route I take, I always seem to get lost.
I have a tendency to choose the wrong road
to the wrong place. I wind up confused and stranded
wondering if I’ll ever make it home.
But I want that ticket back, no matter what the cost.
At An Féar Gorta I want that rhubarb tart a la mode.
I am even willing to stand in the rain, and be reprimanded
for the sorry, soggy state in which I’ve left this poem.
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at An Féar Gorta with cousins Monica (Guthrie) Donovan and Mary Guthrie, Oct. 2013
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An Féar Gorta is one of my favorite eating establishments in the world. Located in Ballyvaughan, in County Clare, Ireland, where I have many beloved relations, it is a place, as the poem suggests, that I look forward to visiting again.
I originally thought the term meant "the hungry man," as "fear" is “man” in Irish. But the fada (accent) confused me---instead of "fear," it's "féar," which means “grass.” So, the name translates to "The Hungry Grass," a term going back to the Famine. More information can be found here, here, and here.
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Posted by Terence Winch on April 27, 2022 at 03:36 PM in Food and Drink, Poems, Terence Winch | Permalink | Comments (45)
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My downstairs neighbor, who is of a thrifty persuasion, very often makes his little sprites oatmeal for breakfast – I’ve seen the battered tin pot on his stove, dried-up oatmeal stuck on it. I know when he’s making the stuff – he calls it "porridge" – because our walls are pretty acoustical and he has a peculiar way of tap-scraping the pot in order to knock the last batch of dried-up oatmeal into the new batch: tap-tap-skrishhh.
Hearing that tap-tap-skrishhh sound wakes up a lot of feeling, in me, in the sprites, too, probably in their mother, still abed, probably in her thrifty husband.
As the neighbor stirs the oats, mood, experience and image bubble thick in all the brains around.
My brain, the sprites’ brains, probably the neighbor’s brain, make the sound of oatmeal a soundtrack of our personal movies.
I tell myself tap-tap-skrishhh is wake-up music, but it’s not music.
It’s just sound that associates to movement and feeling.
To become music, tap-tap-skrishhh needs a conjuror to grok the right pattern and choose the appropriate tools to weave that pattern with:
tap-tap-skrishhh, skrishhh, skrishhh, tap, Tap-tap a-skrishhh, skrishhh, a skrishhh, tap, skrishhh…
Along with, say, a hollow stick, plus, say, some lungs to rhythm the passage of air through the hollow of the stick.
Conjuring music is, obviously, no mean feat.
But conjuring music while teasing movement into dance seems to me not only a great feat but almost and impossible one, like building a large hadron collider or binding petroleum jelly and heavy water.
There are a few music conjurors who are also movement teasers, but not many, which makes them notable.
I’m thinking about sound and dance, conjuring music and teasing movement because, three years ago now, at Regard du Cygne, I was so struck by how naturally, artfully, powerfully, choreographer Marie Desoubeaux had bound together sound and movement in making RESTER (“Remain”), as far as I know, her first dance performance creation.
I walked out thinking RESTER was not a one-shot, not a happy accident, but that Desoubeaux had that rare knack for twining both essential arts so closely together they seemed one thing. My judgment, I thought, was certainly helped along by the art and power of dancer Margaux Amoros musician Robin Pharo.
All the same, I felt it was the “naturalness” of the apparent unity of music and dance in RESTER that upheld my judgment.
I finally saw a second Desoubeaux creation, Après tout, (“After All”) on 22 March 2022, at Théâtre de Vanves. I feel vindicated: Desoubeaux does have a natural when it comes to putting together sound and movement.
Après tout is very different to RESTER.
Where RESTER is almost purely music and movement in twilight and seen from hard benches, Après tout is almost theater.
Set in an elaborately visual pink-quartz quarry and seen from upholstered seats, Après tout has a story line and an up-to-date topic: it brings out the brief lives of its three very active performers in light of Earth abiding.
In Après tout, Desoubeaux shows, too, that she is deft with the dramatic implications of story-line, visuals and sounds – the pink quartz quarry, sound choices and characterizations work; she knows how to transform spectators into participants.
But these things show Desoubeaux is a capable movement creator, like many others. What interests me, and should interest potential spectators, is what continues to set her apart. And what sets her apart is, as I’ve said, a knack for binding sound to movement.
This knack, talent, shines through in Après tout (which Desoubeaux's notes describe as “a musical and choreographic creation”). The knack, talent, is what struck me hard in RESTER (which her notes describe as “a solo in two voices for a dancer and gambist (viol player)”): a capacity to bind two distinct arts so that they seem just one, a knack for conjuring music while simultaneously teasing movement into dance.
Put Marie Desoubeaux on your Paris dance experience bucket list.
Posted by Paul Tracy DANISON on April 27, 2022 at 02:15 PM in Beyond Words, Dance, Paris Performance Calendar, Tracy Danison, Paris correspondent | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Après tout, Marie Desoubeaux, Regard du Cygne, RESTER dance-performance, Théâtre de Vanves
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NA: Your latest book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, is part of a mini-anthology, featuring three books under one cover, called Generations, and published by Etruscan Press.
I thought we should start with the title poem, which I love.
DD: Thank you Nin and Amanda. I’m grateful to be able to have this conversation with you both. Generations also features The Nazi Patrol by William Heyen and How It Is that We by H.L. Hix. Here’s my title poem, which is the last poem in Lullaby with Incendiary Device:
Lullaby with Incendiary Device, Breached Hull, & Oil Slick
Before you were born, I dreamed you
into each cadence I would ever hear.
You board a paper boat and cross the sea.
One note of bluebird’s orison endures.
I love you so much the schooners inside
my heart keep crashing into each other
and capsizing, but, at least, they aren’t
all sunk yet, and no sailors have drowned
so far. What I mean by this is simple:
stay close always. Teach me to crayon fire.
Better yet, teach me the crazy hairstyles
of fire burning on the water’s surface,
my dear little one. Teach me what the fire
looks like from the underside of a wave.
AR: Many poems in Lullaby with Incendiary Device are about your children. Did becoming a parent change your poetry? If so, how?
DD: I have a four-year-old daughter (Luciana, who we call “Chi Chi”) and a seven-month-old son (Dante Jr.). Lullaby was written in the first two years of my daughter’s life. It’s really her book.
Becoming a father changed me and changed my life in innumerable subtle and immense ways; inevitably, then, parenthood changed my poetry. Parenthood, like poetry, reorients, intensifies, and recalibrates one’s attention. Parenthood turns you toward another, in much the same way that poetry does, or ideally, should. For me, poetry has always involved an interiority turned to face the world, an act of opening up, which involves a shedding of ego (breaking the mind forged manacles of Blake’s Urizen, echoing E.M. Forster’s injunction: “Only Connect”). Poetry and parenthood both involve what Seamus Heaney called a kind of “earned communion.” Both involve attention directed outward. There’s the shared duende of poetry and parenthood too: the knowledge of our own mortality in every diaper change and volta and skinned knee and spondee and snuggle and heroic couplet rocking you from blue hour to blue hour.
On a more practical level, parenthood changed the way my life was organized. My life now revolves around the schedules, needs, and wants of our little ones. I’ve had to dial back some of the poetry-related things I love doing like writing book reviews, but I still find time to read and to write and to engage with other poets living and dead.
My daughter and I have begun writing poetry together and my wife and I read the children poetry in addition to books like The Runaway Bunny and The Giving Tree and Dragons Love Tacos. My wife and I also collaborate on community poetry projects through the Tioga Arts Council in upstate New York, which she runs. We have curated ekphrastic and reverse ekphrastic exhibits. I run a reading series. We are developing community workshops and we’re working on a poetry trail (a series of signposts with poetry displayed on them throughout the county). My children are a part of all these endeavors from planning stages to execution; they’ve both attended many local poetry-related events since the time they were in utero.
For me, the goal is that poetry be a constant part of my daily, ordinary, unromantic, middle class, suburban life, and that that life be a constant part of my poetry. The older I get, the less difference I feel between the poems I read and reread and memorize and dwell in, and my actual, seemingly boring, quotidian life.
Also, on a practical level, parenthood gave me a new set of experiences to write about. You don’t really know what fatherhood is until you live it yourself, what it’s like to be in the room when your child is born, what you feel when you hold your son or daughter for the first time, what it’s like to see them take their first steps, how they acquire language and relate to the world, what it’s like to be sleep-deprived and wakened in the middle of the night to clean up vomit off a beanbag chair and yet to feel happy about it, what it’s like to live daily in close proximity to the mind of a toddler. These are such intense, piquant, inestimably valuable experiences. And these experiences connect you, more deeply, to the great round of the human condition as it has unfolded for millennia.
Lastly, I’ve come to see my writing as a bequest for my children. I hope that my poetry means something to them when they grow up: that they have this series of artifacts from my time on earth, that they might see my work as a chronicle of the joys, pains, enthusiasms, struggles, desires, and perplexities of a lifetime. Ultimately, I pray that having access to these records of my interior life will help them through their own difficulties. If nothing else, I hope they see repeated over and over and over again, in every line, how much I love them and their mother, and how grateful I am for this life.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.
Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains.
Nin Andrews is harvesting the winter lettuce in her garden today.
Posted by Nin Andrews on April 25, 2022 at 03:24 PM in Interviews, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The blessed babe in a divine Eden is a Romantic trope, but it received a pure exposition long before the age of Blake and Wordsworth. A shoemaker’s son from Hereford, Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) captured the radical wonderment of childhood in his poems. Educated at Oxford (Brasenose College), he published next to nothing in his lifetime, and for many years his poems were casually and mistakenly attributed to Henry Vaughan.
Not until the turn of the twentieth century was Traherne’s authorship of Poems (1903) and the prose Centuries of Meditation (1908) recognized. The latter comprises paragraphs of reflection that may be considered forerunners of the prose poem. Traherne wrote as one for whom angels were real. The child is “heir of the whole world,” able to converse with everything he sees. Clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars, he was born to celebrate creation: “the skies in their magnificence, / The lively, lovely air.”
From Centuries of Meditation: “Once I remember (I think I was about 4 years old when) I thus reasoned with myself, sitting in a little obscure room in my father's poor house: If there be a God, certainly He must be infinite in Goodness: and that I was prompted to, by a real whispering instinct of Nature. And if He be infinite in Goodness, and a perfect Being in Wisdom and Love, certainly He must do most glorious things, and give us infinite riches; how comes it to pass therefore that I am so poor? Of so scanty and narrow a fortune, enjoying few and obscure comforts? I thought I could not believe Him a God to me, unless all His power were employed to glorify me. I knew not then my Soul, or Body; nor did I think of the Heavens and the Earth, the rivers and the stars, the sun or the seas: all those were lost, and absent from me. But when I found them made out of nothing for me, then I had a God indeed, whom I could praise, and rejoice in.”
Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 24, 2022 at 05:10 PM in Adventures of Lehman, Feature, Great Poems | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Epistemology
Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle,
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate,
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing.
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love.
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.
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Catherine Barnett is the author of three books of poetry, Human Hours (2018 Believer Book Award); The Game of Boxes (2012 Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award for Best Second Book); and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper's, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and The Washington Post. A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature, which honors exceptional accomplishment in any genre. She is a member of the core faculty in the NYU MFA Program in Creative Writing and a Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College. She lives in New York City, where she also works as an independent editor.
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Susan Campbell, Windy Night, 2021, Fine art archival print
Posted by Terence Winch on April 24, 2022 at 09:31 AM in Pick of the Week, Poems, Terence Winch | Permalink | Comments (16)
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Ed note: This is part one of a two-part series. Watch this space for part two, which will post next week. sdl
This year marks the golden anniversary of the New York City Ballet’s historic Stravinsky Festival. The celebration was conceived and directed by NYCB choreographer George Balanchine to pay tribute to Igor Stravinsky a year after the composer's death, at 89. The festival began on Sunday, June 18, 1972, the day after what would have been the composer’s 90th birthday, and concluded a week later.
Balanchine, born in 1904, and his compatriot Stravinsky, in 1882, were what you might call “evolutionaries.” The twentieth century was their runway. They took off at the dawn of the era, taking with them the established traditions of their respective art forms to new destinations. From their native Russia, they landed in New York and Los Angeles, and over decades, transformed and expanded the formal and expressive vocabularies of their genres to create what we call Modernism. (Interestingly, James Joyce, born the same year as Stravinsky, did the same for literature.)
While Stravinsky composed music for ballets before Balanchine emerged as a choreographer, they eventually collaborated, to create one of the most productive and dynamic artistic partnerships of the twentieth century. Their synergy gave the world sound and sights not seen nor heard before.
The ’72 Stravinsky Festival began with a brass fanfare the composer wrote for the company upon its move to Lincoln Center, in 1964. Balanchine followed up with a speech from the stage. The week-long tribute concluded with a community toast to Stravinsky: For the occasion, Balanchine ordered 40 cases of vodka and distributed shots to the audience. The composer’s widow Vera was there as the guest of honor.
It’s not a stretch to say that between those two Sundays, the most extraordinary week in American ballet history transpired. All the music was composed by Stravinsky. And the sheer numbers of the festival were astounding:
Several of those premieres are now staples of the company’s repertory.
Scheduled for the festival’s penultimate night were the Balanchine-Stravinsky Greek ballets: “Apollo,” “Agon,” and Orpheus.” “Apollo” was the very first ballet of their collaboration, premiering in 1928 with the Ballet Russes, and is the oldest ballet in the NYCB repertory. “Agon,” for me, was the apogee of their partnership. Premiering in 1957, it had the power and boldness to claim the stature of The Iconic Ballet of the 20th century. “Agon” electrified me when I saw it at the age of 15, where afterwards, colors were brighter, sounds, clearer, hormones wilder. The former ballet critic of The New Yorker, Arlene Croce, revealed she couldn’t sleep for a week after seeing the work for the first time. Clearly, I was on to something.
Just before my high school sophomore year, our family of six moved from the South Side of Chicago to a three-story house a block from Lake Michigan in the North Shore suburbs, after a kid held a gun to my mother’s head. It was a crushing dislocation that exacerbated long-simmering family tensions. And I was lost and lonely in these manorial enclaves, carrying the shame of an immigrant who didn’t know the local culture, mores, or territory. Yet our house was only a few miles—a fifteen-minute bike ride—from Ravinia, the oldest outdoor summer performing arts festival in the country. Ravinia primarily featured music but plays and ballets filled out the roster. I had younger twin sisters, and though we all took ballet lessons, the youngest twin was the more talented and serious dancer. To supplement our lessons, we went to as many performances as we could. Which meant waiting until companies from New York toured Chicago. Our city was pretty much a ballet desert.
So when the New York City Ballet was scheduled for a full week residency at Ravinia in the late summer after our move, I looked forward to the visit as if the cavalry were coming to redeem my misery. It was 1971, the year before the Stravinsky Festival, the era of company greats Patricia McBride, Edward Villella, Kay Mazzo, and Peter Martins.
From the very first moment, the company fulfilled my expectations if not my desperate hope for transcendence. “Agon” began the residency that Sunday night. It would transform my life.
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Eden Elieff, a native Chicagoan, lives in Dallas with her husband and has taught both fiction and nonfiction with Writing Workshops Dallas as well as with several high schools in both cities. Twice a Pushcart nominee, Eden has published work in both genres in various literary magazines, such as The Mississippi Review, Minerva Rising, The Sycamore Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Crab Orchard Review, as well as the Dallas Morning News. She received her MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 23, 2022 at 03:00 PM in Dance, Feature, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Think of tonight's episode, the best of the 5th season so far, as the Four Twenty Edition of Mad Men with a bummed out Peggy playing hooky smoking a joint with some horny stranger in a dark movie theater watching "Born Free" (I think that's what it was). . .
Roger Sterling goes on an acid trip with his wife, Jane, who, it turns out, speaks Yiddish when she is high (Roger thinks it's German). No sooner has Roger announced that LSD ("your product, Mr. Leary") is "boring" than he opens a vodka bottle and hears mighty Russian chorale music. You can hear it every time the bottle is uncapped -- and as long as the bottle remains uncapped. The cigarette in Roger's mouth shrinks. In the mirror he sees himself with half his hair gray, the other half black, as in a magazine ad, and Don Draper appears over his shoulder and tells him everything will turn out okay now go back to your wife and he does and she says things like "How can a few numbers contain all of time?"
In the cab Bert Cooper's face appears on the five-dollar bill. And her epiphany is that he doesn't like her. And his epiphany is that it's going to be easier to get out of this marriage than he thought. "It'll be expensive," she tells him, but he doesn't care, he's free, it's gonna be a great day. . .
And Ginsberg, who needs no drugs to establish his extraterrestrial bona fides, finds a witty way to tell Peggy he was born in a concentration camp.
And Peggy is smoking more and drinking more Canadian Club and she resembles no one more than Don when she tells off the guy from Heinz who rejects her "Home is where the Heinz is" campaign, though it's, well, awesome ("the fire is primal. . .and it's the beans that brought them together on the cold night at the end of the summer") and she gets taken off the account and that is why she is bummed out enough to go to the movies and get high and fall asleep in Don's office and later she gets a weird brusque phone call from Don, "Did you get any calls? Has anyone called you?" which makes no sense until we go over the same stretch of time from the point of view of Mr. Draper himself, who is driving to a HoJo Motor Lodge with Megan (in beautiful orange-striped sweater that goes perfectly with the decor) where they have a blowout fight which ends when he loses his temper and bolts. "Don't you dare pull away. I'm talking to you," she says helplessly as he pulls out and drives off without her. Cooling off, he goes back and looks everywhere for her including the ladies' room. (She took the bus back, furious.) No pot, no acid, but a sleepless Don smoking cigarettes in a period sedan and having odd flashbacks to composite car trips is enough of a high to end on. A brilliant episode. 1966! -- DL
from the archive; first posted April 22, 2012
Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 22, 2022 at 04:20 PM in From the Archive, Television | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Seamus Heaney
DUE CAMION
Piove sul carbone nero e sulla calda, umida cenere.
Nel cortile tracce di gomme: il vecchio camion
ha le sponde abbassate e Agnew il carbonaio
col suo accento di Belfast fa la corte a mia madre.
Le andrebbe di vedere un film a Magherafelt?
Ma piove e lui ha ancora metà del carbone
da consegnare. Stavolta era nero-seta il filone
da cui hanno estratto il nostro carbone, così la cenere
sarà del bianco più sericeo. L’autobus per Magherafelt
(via Toomebridge) passa. Così mezzo vuoto, il camion
coi sacchi flosci, ripiegati, commuove mia madre:
amabili i modi, con quel suo grembiale di cuoio, del carbonaio!
Ma un film nientemeno! Presuntuoso d’un carbonaio …
Rientra e prende la carta smeriglio e lo spazzolone
con la grafite per lucidare la stufa questa madre
degli anni quaranta, e tenta di togliersi la cenere
col dorso della mano da una guancia, mentre il camion
richiuso fa manovra, riparte verso Magherafelt
per l’ultima consegna. Oh, Magherafelt!
Oh, sogno di velluti rossi e di un carbonaio
di città mentre il tempo scatta in avanti e un altro camion
romba feroce, lungo Broad Street, verso un’esplosione
che ridurrà la stazione degli autobus in polvere e cenere …
Dopo il disastro, mi comparve in visione mia madre,
morta-vivente sulla panchina dove la solevo incontrare
nella sala d’aspetto dal pavimento gelato a Magherafelt,
con le borse della spesa colme di palate di cenere.
La morte le passò accanto col volto di polvere come un carbonaio
che ripiega i sacchi dei cadaveri, impila con passione
vuoto su vuoto, in un tourbillon
di pulviscolo e rombi di motore, ma che camion
era adesso? Quello di Andrew o quello che, morta mia madre,
più pesante, più letale, doveva causare l’esplosione
in un tempo oltre il suo tempo a Magherafelt …
E allora conta i sacchi e fa’ la corte al buio, carbonaio,
ascolta la pioggia che schizza su nuova cenere
mentre sollevi il carico di polvere di carbone che fu Magherafelt,
poi ricompari da dietro il camion nei panni del carbonaio
da sogno di mia madre, sotto una pellicola bianco-sericea di cenere.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 20, 2022 at 09:09 AM in From the Archive, Moira Egan, European Correspondent, Translation | Permalink | Comments (1)
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Carody Culver is a Brisbane based writer, editor and poet whose recent chapbook The Morgue I Think the Deader it Gets (published online here at one of Australia's best homes for poetry, Cordite Poetry Review) deserves your attention. Playful, ironic and genuinely funny, these poems are marked by a casual erudition and a humor that is at once generous and scathing—no small achievement. Like Jawbreaker candy, Culver’s poems are perfectly sweet until you take a bite into them.
“Short biographies of magicians’ assistants” offers up a list of names of magicians’ assistants and a pithy description of their demise. The brevity and inventiveness of the poem (I love the assistants’ names) make it easy to look past the otherwise obvious and uncomfortable detail—all of these assistants are women, all of them suffer violent ends. Culver’s clever use of rhyme and meter give the poem the feel of a nursery rhyme, a feeling which is abruptly ended by the final line’s refusal to conform, breaking the poem out of its own illusion.
Short biographies of magicians’ assistants
Tallulah Sparkles—cut in half
Delilah Diviner—sawed apart
Phoebe Angel—guillotine chop
Amber LeBon—dagger head box
Electra Montgomery—live cremation
Mary-Beth Moonshine—failed levitation
Juniper Bliss—disembodied
Daphne Golden—disappeared.
The Morgue I Think the Deader it Gets takes its title from a line in the chapbook’s opening poem, “The More I Think”, which itself takes its opening line from a well known public artwork in Brisbane by the conceptual artist Sebastian Moody (who is, coincidentally, my cousin). The poem rearranges the artwork's maxim until we reach an aphorism that could be a worthy companion piece to the original.
Sebastian Moody Think Bigger (2009)
The more I think
The more I think about it the bigger it gets
The bigger I think about it the harder it gets
The harder I think about it the sharper it gets
The sharper I think about it the pointier it gets
The pointier I think about it the sorer it gets
The sorer I think about it the sicker it gets
The mirth I think about it the laughter it gets
The bisque I think about it the lobster it gets
The morgue I think about it the deader it gets
The years I think about it the older it gets
The sage I think about it the wiser it gets
The sound I think about it the louder it gets
The money I think about it the richer it gets
The think I get about it the better it gets
The gets I better about it the thinker it bets
The better I get about it the thinker it mores
The more it thinks about it the lesser I’m for
The less I know the more it gets
The less I am the more I know.
The brilliance of “A short guided meditation by a thought leader” is that it is as ridiculous as it is believable. Culver borrows from corporate jargon and the language of spiritual capitalism to usher us through a guided meditation in which we collaborate with our breath, visualize our inner core competencies and connect to our own best practices. It would be of no surprise if we were to see some of these phrases used in absolute earnest by an upcoming ad campaign, as some new brand assures us we are shovel-ready and results oriented.
A short guided meditation by a thought leader
As a thought leader, I’ll be leading your thoughts in today’s guided meditation.
Think of this exercise as a form of change management. A way to move the needle on your future potential. A chance to touch base with yourself. Are you ready to take things offline? Let’s pivot.
Close your eyes. Collaborate with your breath. Action that in-and-out. Be purposeful. Be the champion of your diaphragm. Get yourself in the loop. Connect to your own best practice and really put those boots on the ground.
Now let’s curate your own innovation. First, visualise yourself as the head of a for-profit start-up. Amplify that vision. It may have lots of moving parts, but you’re the one who can make it pop. I want you to buy in to your own empowerment, cradle to grave. Find that culture fit. Don’t guesstimate—this is your time to land and expand.
Let’s take it to the next level. Visualise your business strategy: are you a game-changer? A disruptor? An influencer? Breathe in on your scalable ideas, breathe out on your entrepreneurial approach to Industry 5.0. See yourself shifting that paradigm. Visualise your inner core competencies. Amplify them.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Peel your own onion. Ride your own tailwinds. Be your own strategic partner. Feel yourself expanding your bandwidth as you run this up the flagpole. It’s about organic growth. It’s about building your brand. Raise the bar—you’re shovel-ready and results-oriented. This is your summit.
Get all those balls in the air. Every one of them is authentic. Every one of them can build capacity. Every one of them has its own special sauce. Crowd-source yourself. Drill down. Tee up to empower your new normal.
Now it’s time to circle back and close the loop. Sit up. Reach out: let’s all join hands and form a steering committee.
Ms. Culver has produced a gem of a chapbook. I urge you to seek it out.
Posted by Thomas Moody on April 20, 2022 at 09:04 AM in Australia | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Posted by The Best American Poetry on April 18, 2022 at 12:40 PM in Adventures of Lehman | Permalink | Comments (2)
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It’s Easter Sunday, and I'm remembering how my father used to equate religion and superstition. He practiced both, just in case. He made me practice them, too, insisting that I go to church, understand the basic tenets of the faith, pray on my knees before bed, and also, that I never pass the salt shaker hand-to-hand, and if I spilled salt, I tossed it right hand over left shoulder. I was instructed to hold my breath when we drove into a tunnel or under a bridge or past a graveyard. I still find myself touching wood, crossing my fingers, my toes, myself, and I can still hear my father’s voice advising me on how each superstition is best performed. Maybe it’s no surprise then that I was completely taken with Elizabeth A. I. Powell’s series of prose poems that were published in the recent issue of the Seneca Review titled Rituals and Spells so Nothing Heinous Happens. There was quite a buzz about one that also appeared in Pleiades and Poetry Daily. I decided to ask Elizabeth to say a few words about these poems and to let me post a poem from the series.
Elizabeth A.I. Powell:
These poems use the ritual and spell-like qualities of poetry to try and discern and examine the liminal space between rituals and spells on the one hand and madness on the other. Rituals live in our mythologies and religions, but when a ritual goes off kilter it turns on a person. I’ve tried to reflect on the space where that yin and yang meet, the between thing between the two. Samuel Coleridge famously said poems are the best words in the best order, which is similar in definition of what a spell is, giving letters in the right order, or a state of enchantment enacted by words. Spells are more like content in poetry, and rituals are more like poetic form in that they observe a set of forms to enact a kind of worship. Indeed, many of us have written ourselves out of the mental abyss through poems. Where ritual becomes pathological or a mental illness is interesting because on the one hand you can pray and it's lovely, but when it is obsessive, compulsive, and superstitious it begins to be a most egregious interrogation.
Touch Wood
Everyone agrees since I’m the prettiest, I’m the stupidest. Our grandfather sips scotch, loosens his tie we picked out for him to wear to MC our Miss America Pageant. This year’s real pick for Miss America was from Wisconsin: in ten years she’ll host the 700 club that fuels the Moral Majority that will upset me. You don’t even know where Wisconsin is, my sister says. I will remember this moment forever, and when I’m nineteen, I’ll go to the University of Wisconsin, where I will be incredibly miserable just to prove that I know where Wisconsin is.
I’m touching wood, wearing an evening dress. In reality, we are all wearing our grandmother’s silk nightgowns, hitched up. What are you doing? my cousin asks. I am touching this wood, I say. That’s not wood, she says. Yes, it is! Grandpa this is wood, right? I say. It’s Formica, Josephine, he says. He calls all us girls Josephine. Maybe its because Josephine is Hebrew for God’s increase, and he has lots of granddaughters. We don’t yet know the name for flirt. We love him fiercely. Bet you don’t even know what Formica is anyway, my older cousin says. It’s melamine, a laminate, right Grandpa?
Our grandfather announces: No Miss America if you can’t get along. Also, Formica is made of melamine. Wood is from trees, Josephines. We are the e pluribus Unum of Josephine, he is the king of midcentury modern office furniture. He’s a long way from Vilnius. If we can’t be Miss America, we want to work in the family office furniture business as his secretary, have a mahogany desk and a credenza. Now that I know it is Formica I have touched instead of wood, I am anxious to proceed. We are getting ready to walk down the stairs with books on our head to show poise, but we have to wait for our grandfather to announce us to our audience, which is the rest of the family. Our cousins are behaving perfectly, so they might win.
I hobble in my grandmother’s gold lame 1940’s shoes, I love them more than the 1972 Democratic National Convention passes my grandfather got us because he supplied chairs. I sleep with mine under my pillow. To me, wood is the brain of God, but I touch the bannister made of brass, which means, jinxed, I will lose, which will make me sad and itchy. I balance two books on my head.
Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, most recently “Atomizer” (LSU Press). Her second book of poems, “Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances” was a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker. The Boston Globe has called her recent work “wry and fervent” and “awash in synesthesiastic revelation.” Her novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” was published in 2019 in the U.K.
Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Women’s Review of Books, among others. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University. Find her at www.elizabethaipowell.com
Posted by Nin Andrews on April 17, 2022 at 05:07 PM in Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (0)
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A Grandfather’s Lecture
If punched, you punch twice as hard, and in the face,
a wop right in the nose. Use the flat counter of your fist
or the palm’s hard ridge. Lean into it but brace
your stroke with your back leg then lift
your whole blow into his mug. He’ll crumble.
If you’re lucky, blood will pour in rivulets
down his mouth and chin leaving him startled,
dazed like the newly awakened. Don’t relent.
Think what he’d do to you if given the chance.
Throw what we used to call a haymaker.
Nest fear inside but don’t tremble. Don’t parade & prance
like you’re Ali. Don’t hesitate. Land a jawbreaker,
jab him in the gut. Did you know the Brown Bomber
never televised a hit, never reared back, just snuggled in,
leaned close shoulder to shoulder, calmer
than most then kapow to the ribs? Schmeling struggled
on the ropes. Life’s no boxing ring, but know your power,
what your shadow is made. Then always make up.
Show your adversary you’ve got class; don’t tower
over him. That’s for punks. Extend a hand. Help him up.
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Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Absurd Man. His collection of essays, A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose, is forthcoming in Fall 2022. A recipient of fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Whiting Writers Award, Major Jackson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.
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Praying with Grandpa by Henry Ossawa Tanner (American painter, 1859-1937)
Posted by Terence Winch on April 17, 2022 at 09:38 AM in Pick of the Week, Poems, Terence Winch | Permalink | Comments (13)
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Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman