The Best American Poetry

"Noir City" on William Holden, "Noir's Reluctant Hero"

NOIR CITY Magazine No. 34

 <<<<< Our cover story for NOIR CITY Magazine's latest issue offers a unique portrait of actor William Holden, an actor not synonymous with film noir. Yet, writer Rachel Walther shows how the actor "brought a brooding restlessness to his characters that distanced them from the mainstream—and sometimes thrust them into the realm of darkness we hold so dear."

Highlights in this issue include profiles of two actors – one classic, one contemporary: Stanley Baker/Loving a Thieving Boy by Ray Banks and J.T. Walsh/Solid Cold by Steve Kronenberg. And, for anyone who has followed the FNF's interest in Argentine restorations, particularly The Beast Must Die (1952) and El vampiro negro (1953), Imogen Sara Smith's in-depth article Down in the Depths/Román Viñoly Barreto and Argentinian Noir is a must-read! And there's plenty more, including Brian Light's Book vs. Film essay on the 1948 film Moonrise. >>>

https://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/noircitymagazine.html

 

"1945" by Gwen Harwood [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Last Wednesday, June 8, would have been Gwen Harwood's 102nd birthday. Harwood was one of Australia's finest poets and one of its leading literary hoaxers. On August 5, 1961, Harwood published a pair of sonnets, “Eloisa to Abelard” and “Abelard to Eloisa,” in the Australian weekly, The Bulletin, under the pseudonym of Walter Lehmann. Unknown to the editors at the time of publication, the sonnets read acrostically FUCK ALL EDITORS and SO LONG BULLETIN (you can read more about the hoax here).

Harwood's development of several heteronyms, including Lehmann and Francis Geyer, not only offered social critique to Australia's chauvinist mid-century literary establishment, but also allowed her poetry to map our species' labyrinthine psychological landscape with greater possibility. 

Harwood also wrote poems under her own name, with speakers who shared much of the poet's life experiences. "1945" details Harwood's move from her tropical home of Brisbane in the north of Australia, to soporific, grey Hobart, capital of Tasmania. The poem echoes Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, “Know’st thou the land where lemon- trees do bloom, / And oranges like gold in leafy gloom” (Book III, I). Both poems dwell on paradises lost, either through concealment or exile; in Harwood’s case, the land of citrus and color is being left behind for a new home whose light is much reduced from her tropical roots and which swells with the presence of Tasmania's violent colonial history.

1945

Nineteen forty-five. I have been sick
all the way from Brisbane; first time in the air.
My husband's waiting in civilian clothes.
Another name now. All those burning glances
cancelled, all those raging letters burned.
And my mocking friends - 'Holy MaTRIMony!'
'You've had your wings trimmed. You'll be Mother Goose.'

We melt with good old-fashioned happiness
at the desolate terminal. I see the city
ending in bush, St George's on the skyline,
KEENS CURRY on the hill. We find a cafe.
'Lunch is off. Afternoon tea's not on,'
the waitress snaps, and sniffs. She knows we're strangers.
Saturday afternoon.How doth the city
sit solitary. A shuttered delicatessen
proclaims HIGH GRADE AND CONTINENTAL FOODSTUFFS. 
What continent? Perhaps they mean the mainland.
I’m in my summer clothes. A wind breathes cold
truth in those English trees that tried to fool me
with their false fronts on a tourist office poster.
Know’st thou the land wherein the citrons bloom?

I do. Exile's the name i give that knowledge.
Even as I say How Beautiful How Charming
why do I feel that some demonic presence
hovers where too much evil has been done
near the harmless rivulet, the Georgian buildings?
Hungry, we link our lives and wait for evening.
In my husband's luggage the Tractatus waits

with the world that was the case already fading.

Oscar's bon mots! (10 Favorites)

–I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.

-- When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

-- A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me.

-- The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on.

-- There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

-- I can resist anything except temptation.

-- A good friend will always stab you in the front.

--  In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

-- Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

-- Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Happy Birthday, Boy George [by Nin Andrews]

I heard on NPR this morning that it’s Boy George's birthday today, which made me think of one of my favorite poems by Amy Gerstler from her collection, The True Bride, published in 1986. I can still remember reading this poem at the New Dominion bookshop in Charlottesville, Virginia, ages ago. I burst out laughing, and the owner of the shop came over and read the poem aloud. A few shoppers came over and listened. Afterwards, we all clapped.  

 

Dear Boy George

Only three things on earth seem useful or soothing to me.
One: wearing stolen shoes. Two: photos of exquisitely
dressed redheads. Three: your voice on the radio. Those songs
fall smack-dab into my range! Not to embarrass you with my
raw American awe, or let you think I’m the kinda girl who
bends over for any guy who plucks his eyebrows and can make
tight braids – but you’re the plump bisexual cherub of the
eighties: clusters of Rubens’ painted angels, plus a dollop of the
Pillsbury dough boy, all rolled into one! We could go skating,
or just lie around my house eating pineapple. I could pierce
your ears: I know how to freeze the lobes with ice so it doesn’t
hurt. When I misunderstand your lyrics, they get even better.
I thought the line I’M YOUR LOVER, NOT YOUR RIVAL, was I’M
ANOTHER, NOTHE BIBLE, or PRIME YOUR MOTHER, NOT A LIBEL,
or UNDERCOVER BOUGHT ARRIVAL. Great, huh? See, we’re of like
minds. I almost died when I read in the Times how you saved
that girl from drowning . . . dived down and pulled the blub-
bering sissy up. I’d give anything to be the limp, dripping
form you stumbled from the lake with, wrapped over your pale,
motherly arms, in a grateful faint, as your mascara ran and ran.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Nine): Matt Hart [by Angela Ball]

DEAR BERSERKER

The light came into my dream
from the right, so I opened my eyes
to a mulberry bicycle that Sam stole
heavenward in a poem of many errors.
Then I was puffed rice or a poisonous
enjambment. I ate a bowl of scrambled eggs.
I could’ve sworn I was drowning in the engines
of an airport. Patiently, I contrived
to replace the painted target
with a small silver policeman,
redacted from the force. But
all of that was earlier, before I drove
Agnes and Juliet to their final exams
in Algebra and Chemistry, and also
before I went back to blitzing in the denim
and dimming—sitting for my portrait
in the juice of a lemon. Sometimes
more than one of them puckers
a Venus Flytrap or rattles a contingent
of cloches that stream from the Exits to enter
the drag-strip, the testicle, the syrup
of The Muses. Why The Fates
and The Hours often fail to intervene
is a question. Why The Sirens often fail
to alert me to their presence is another.
I’m already dead when I notice the petunia.
This particular occasion is whatever/wherever
you want it to be, or merely the time I have left
before I go to meet Dean and drink more
of the oracular in the future where I’m shards
in the maw of the racehorse Conundrum. To start
or not to start? To stop or not to go? One thing
I can recommend is Andrei Voznesensky
via Anselm Hollo, where I, too, am hollow
and translated into a speakeasy, though
nothing’s ever easy that involves language,
and just to be clear, this is not
“channel surfing,” so don’t believe
the one-trick readers of ponies.
I have never been a pony, and this isn’t
some trick, it’s a real fucking miracle.
If you can’t see the ineffable in the shattered
geraniums of saints, then you have problems
that I can’t even begin to address.
Let’s just say we agree to split the baby birds
into teams—your failure of imagination
versus my deliberate distortions.
The long bombs get longer in the teeth
with every wallop. I’ve never met a shadow
in the light I didn’t like. The score
is a touchdown on an alien planet.
I am the alien at home in my amazement,
and you’re what comes in waves to destroy me.

--Matt Hart

 I hope, if nothing else, you can tell that I enjoy tremendously the process of writing poems and that I am in all of them trying to discover something about, and/or be surprised by, language and life. Writing is always, for me, a celebratory occasion. Even when the shadows rise up and the darkness falls, there may be some possibility that the soul will be shattered or moved or redirected, and through that we might connect in some way to the self, other people, and the world. A poem is a call for a response, and any response is itself a new call. 

--Matt Hart

Matt Hart is the author of nine books of poems, including most recently Everything Breaking/for Good and The Obliterations. A new book, Familiar, is forthcoming in 2022 from Pickpocket Books. Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including Big Bell, Conduit, jubilat, Kenyon Review, Lungfull!, POETRY, and Waxwing, among others. He was a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety from 1993-2019. Currently, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band NEVERNEW: www.nevernew.net. 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Nine): Matt Hart

Matt  Hart’s surprising and provoking  “Dear Berserker” is a story and an essay. So it is a real poem. I borrow that formula, of course, from Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter,” in which he says, "One day I am thinking of / a color: orange." He begins to write: "Pretty soon it is a / whole page of words, not lines," and O'Hara is transported: "There should be so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life. Days go by. It is even in / prose, I am a real poet."

Here, as in O’Hara’s poem, a self is under discovery, defined with and against the names that surround it: Agnes, Juliet; Anselm Hollo and the poet he translates, Andrei Voznesensky, “where I, too, am hollow / and translated into a speakeasy, though nothing’s ever easy that involves language.” Maybe not, but in Hart it is playful and punning, with an Ashberian enjoyment of cliché’s syntax.  And is a kind of whistling in the dark, a counter to “how terrible orange is / and life.”  According to Oxford Languages, a “Berserker” is “an ancient Norse warrior who fought in a wild frenzy.”

As ally against these warriors, Hart enlists the angel of surprise. The poem starts with the filmy line, “The light came into my dream,” but instead of something equally filmy, we get something exact: “from the right,” then the commonsensical “so I opened my eyes,” followed by the beautiful and puzzling “mulberry bicycle that Sam stole” (a mulberry-colored bike, a bike made from mulberry? Sam a miscreant neighbor?), then, “heavenward in a poem of many errors.” Perhaps Sam is S.T. Coleridge, levitating language in response to dejection. He is, after all, a poet known for error, at least in the case of the star he inserts between the horns of the crescent moon in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” when in fact the dark moon is between those horns, and a star is impossible, dammit. (It should be noted that an older meaning of “error” is “wandering,” as in Milton’s streams of Eden in Paradise Lost, that flow “With mazy error, under pendant shades.” I would like to call Coleridge a “poet errant.”)

Poems that rely on animation of voice, on what has been called "ultra-talk," can sometimes look like a series of stunts. Not this one. The transformations the voice reports in its straightforward way aren’t arbitrary, but make nonsensical sense. For example, “Algebra and Chemistry” are well known scholastic berserkers. And the collisions the poem reports are comic in their absurdity—absurdity that nails something about the thing described. This section, for me the funniest in the poem, begins with writing frustrations and moves to academic ones:

     . . . Why The Fates

     and The Hours often fail to intervene

     is a question. Why The Sirens often fail

     to alert me to their presence is another.

     I’m already dead when I notice the petunia.

     This particular occasion is whatever/wherever

     you want it to be, or merely the time I have left

     before I go to meet Dean and drink more

     of the oracular in the future where I’m shards

     in the maw of the racehorse Conundrum.

“I’m already dead when I notice the petunia” is apt. In fact, were I of a tattoo persuasion, this might be my pick. (The problem with tattoos is that they trust the future. In this they are romantic.) Deans and other university administrators sometimes seem to dwell in a grandeur-filled future that will exist if we only implement this or that cut; survive on a pittance; serve a galloping purpose, outcome unknown.

From “nothing’s ever easy” onward, the poem challenges the unconvinced, advocating its own method while practicing it (the latter something that, to a certain degree, all the founding poets of the New York School do and that “Why I Am Not a Painter” does in spades).

     and just to be clear, this is not

     “channel surfing,” so don’t believe

     the one-trick readers of ponies.

     I have never been a pony, and this isn’t

     some trick, it’s a real fucking miracle.

     If you can’t see the ineffable in the shattered

     geraniums of saints, then you have problems

     that I can’t even begin to address.

“I have never been a pony, and this isn’t /some trick, it’s a real fucking miracle,” attacks the opposition with the winning vehemence of wordplay, a Groucho Marxian chicanery. “If you can’t see the ineffable in the shattered / geraniums of saints,” a gonzo version of William Blake’s “heaven in a wildflower,” dizzily shifts to logic and sanity: “you have problems / that I can’t even begin to address.” The close of Matt Hart’s “Dear Berserker” relies on a pledge he exacts from us to “see the ineffable” and make a home in “amazement”; though in so doing we choose a terrible vulnerability, as holy and foolish as Saint Francis eschewing bodily drapery for the sake of his home-hewn church. In this case, of course, the sanctuary is art, visible only to those who are civilized: uncertain, open to breaking.

--Angela Ball

"Blue Poles" [by Jackson Pollock]

"On the canvas was not a picture, but an event."

Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News (December 1952)

The Enemy (L'Ennemi) by Charles Baudelaire [trans. Sandra Simonds]

The Enemy 

My youth was so full of rage
that only the most brilliant of suns
could puncture it. Thunder and rain
ravaged me until my garden filled
with venom. But now my mind
has come to the autumn of its ideas
and one must rearrange this earth
with a shovel and rake. Flowers
are holes as big as graves. What are
these new futures I dream of?
Futures that burst from a soil
of grief. What mystical alignment
gives them such vigor?
Oh, sweet things! Time is a strange
enemy that gnaws at my heart.
It is blood and blood
alone that fortifies it.

Sandra Simonds is the author of eight books books of poetry, most recently : Triptychs (forthcoming Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando, (Wave Books, 2018), and Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, 2009). Her poems and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Best American Poetry, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. Find out more about Sandra here. 

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet, essayist, art critic, and translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

Squib 479 [by Alan Ziegler]

For Roger Angell (1921-2022), Part Two.

Part One

In the subway heading to The New Yorker for an editing session with Roger Angell, I fantasize hovering near the receptionist’s desk as a line of supplicants with manila envelopes are each declined entry (“I just want to make sure he gets the references”). They watch their precious cargo being tossed into a huge bin marked Slush, and stare as I approach, no envelope in tow. The mere mention of my name gets me a smile and a wave-through. “Who is that, did you catch his name?” one whispers, and I turn and say, “Keep at it. I was once slush, too.”
When I arrive, no supplicants, no Slush bin, but I do get a smile and a wave-through. At first glance, Roger Angell reminds me of Fred Clark, the original Harry Morton on the Burns and Allen show.

“We were talking about you at dinner last night,” he says. "Hariette Surovell was over, and she spoke highly of you. [I had met Hariette 15 years earlier, in Kurt Vonnegut’s workshop at City College. On the first day of class, Kurt recounted a dinner conversation from the previous night and turned to Hariette for confirmation: “You were there.”]

Roger shows me a copy of my manuscript with edits, including several new commas. Before I can garner the guts to resist, he adds, “These are Mr. Shawn’s commas. You don’t want them, do you?” This could be the beginning of a beautiful editorial friendship.

We move on to Roger’s markings. As we resolve each edit, he crosses out a notation in the margin.

I've been working on an essay categorizing feedback comments (reactive, descriptive, prescriptive, and collaborative). As an example of collaborative feedback I'm using a New Yorker edit: “Not every word in a published piece has necessarily been written by the name in the byline. New Yorker editor Harold Ross wrote ‘bucks’ for John Cheever during his editing of ‘The Enormous Radio.’ In the story, a diamond is found after a party; a character says, 'Sell it, we can use a few dollars.' Ross replaced dollars with bucks, which Cheever found ‘absolutely perfect. Brilliant.’” So I am inwardly giddy to see high whistles have become clanking chains, and zips turned to cuts. And my “Ghost Story” will forever be known as:

Here's a fine example of an addition-through-subtraction edit:


Throughout the session, my downward peripheral vision is drawn to a substantial collaborative edit at the end of the story.


This won't be as easy as Mr. Shawn's commas. I'm not sure if I get it. But I accept the change, hopeful I will share John Cheever's appraisal: "absolutely perfect. Brilliant." [Eventually, I come to read it as, "My ghost re-merges with ghostly traffic—his work here done."] 

I leave the New Yorker and float to Times Square, a whisper amid the talk of the town. I wind up at Lee's Art Shop and treat myself to a leather portfolio [which I still use].

The process isn't over. 

The sentence in question:


I picture—as a New Yorker cartoon—a huddle of writers and editors trying to make sense of a coffee cup's open window revealing a now-cold night: Barthelme and Beattie almost come to blows as Mr. Shawn keeps muttering about commas. 

I am touched by the care Roger Angell is taking with my story, and his use of prescriptive feedback: "I wish you'd tone it down." I love seeing his self-edit:


The modest solution is, "He stares at the cold coffee."

There's one more wrinkle. When I receive the author's proof I become fixated on "project hand-shadow ghouls onto the wall." Onto or on to? On to or onto? becomes as agonizing as the eye exam question "this way, or is it better this way?" I finally decide that on to better captures the act of projecting, rather than placing. I call and leave a message asking for the change. 

Early publication morning, I run toward the newsstand on Broadway. I stop, suddenly terrified that my story was cut at the last minute by Mr. Shawn ("I warned you about those commas!"). But it's in there! My story in The New Yorker. Yes. I glance through till jolted by:

I will realize that onto is the right choice, but not before several hours of self-haunting. Traffic, no doubt.

Jerome Sala: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

___________________________________

A History of White People

 

white people were paid well

not to witness

the fact that they were white

 

you know the theory

white isn't a color

but color's unlimited absence

 

white goes with anything

that's why it seemed fair that white people

conquered the world

 

they were the real invisible men

cause they could perch on top of a country

and say they weren't there

 

they could move through its neighborhoods

like mysterious aliens

with this difference:

 

in ufological lore

aliens often infiltrate a world

without its inhabitants knowing about it

 

but when white people invaded

everyone could see them

but themselves

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jerome Sala’s books include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books),The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier), Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull Press), and the forthcoming How Much? New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books). His poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Pleiades, Boundary 2, Rolling Stone, The Best American Poetry series, and many others. His blog–on poetry, pop culture and everyday life, is espressobongo. [“A History of White People” originally appeared in Hanging Loose magazine (circa 2004) and Look Slimmer Instantly 2005.]

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                      Emma Amos, About Whitness, 1995. Oil and laser transfer on paper. Whitney Museum of American Art

O'Hara or Ashbery? Place your bets [by Mitch Sisskind]

A Daughter, Her Father and the Long-Gone Poet Who Brought Them Together

In her memoir “Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me,” Ada Calhoun set out to write a poet’s biography and found a connection to her father instead.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/books/ada-calhoun-book-frank-ohara.html?searchResultPosition=1

I'm really looking forward to this book! The NYT article references Schjeldahl's remarking that Ashbery was a "better poet" than O'Hara. Without debating the whole questionable enterprise of rating poets in the first place, I do believe that Ashbery was "better" in at least two respects. First, if we compare the "best" poetry of both men, Ashbery at his "best" was "better." Also, Rivers and Mountains is one of the "best" books of poetry in the 20th century, in a league with Four Quartets. O'Hara himself wrote in a review (in Poetry magazine)  that Ashbery's Some Trees was "the most beautiful first book of poems since Wallace Stevens' Harmonium." Actually, Rivers and Mountains (Ashbery's thrid book) makes Wallace Stevens's Harmonium look like a Sunday school picnic.

On the other hand, I also believe that Ashbery did not again produce a book at the level of Rivers and Mountains, nor a poem at the level of "The Skaters." But who could? And he certainly kept at it. Who knows what O'Hara might have done if he'd been able to keep at it? (Her died at the age of 40). When Bertrand Russell was told he was too young to write an autobiography, he agreed that he might someday have become president of Mexico.

 

And one more thing, as Columbo used to say.  O'Hara's Lunch Poems, is a masterpiece in its own right, "better" than anything Ashbery did in its own way, and not the less for that. Everything about it is great, the text, the size of the book, the colors, the publication date. Sam Johnson, always interested in physicians, taught that a correct prescription encompassed many factors: the drug, the patient, the season of the year, the time of day, who knows what else. I had the great fortune to buy my copy of Lunch Poems at City Lights bookstore one day in 1965. The exact right thing, at the exact right place, at the exact right time. Thanks, boss. Much ass grassy ass.

"The Trouble with David Lehman Is" [poem by Ken Lauter]

(ed note: Today is David Lehman's birthday and this poem, which came in "over the transom," seems just right! Thank you Ken Lauter. sdl)

The Trouble with David Lehman Is

that he’s like a huge hurricane spun up
in the Atlantic Ocean of Erudition
or he’s just a fucking non-stop reader

who blows in on our Coast of Lethargy
with a new introduction to a new BAP
that shreds our sheds of poetic assumptions

and prejudices and leaves us gasping for
poems, poems, and more poems which
Mr. Lehman, thank god, promptly delivers.

                               -- Ken Lauter

Born on the Eleventh of June [by DL]

Our Birthday (June 11)

Dear Beth, Leo, Allan, and Pauline,
Lawanda, Sabrina, Deborah,
Joshua, Lise, and Christine,
Born today, like us, were Jonson, Ben,
and Googe, Barnabe, two men
of poetic greatness; and how about some confetti
for Vanzetti (of Sacco and Vanzetti)
and Loeb (of Leopold and Loeb)? Ready
or not, here comes coach Vince Lombardi,
who said winning is the only thing,
and Joe Montana, who won more than one ring;
also, Gene Wilder, a funny man of note,
and Erving Goffman, who wrote
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life;
Irving Howe, whose name’s a terse
question of the universe,
and William Styron, beset by inner strife.
So let me praise this day on which, in 1966,
Tiffany Cohen was born, who made us smile
when she won the 400 and 800 meter freestyle
in Los Angeles in the 1984 Olympics.

Judy Gemini, Born Today: An Astrological Profile [by David Lehman]

Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, cheerful and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate.  She habitually came late to the set fortified with bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.

    On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, and four inches more height, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. Great as her later work was, in the movies, in concert, or on TV with friends Sinatra and Martin, she peaked as a child actress. She is why the "Andy Hardy" movies are still worth watching. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.

          Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

         The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.

An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars.  From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.

          As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not writen by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.

         In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.

            In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.

           Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

            If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

The dash of Lord Byron in "Don Juan"

‘T is pity learnéd virgins ever wed
With persons of no sort of education,
Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred,
Grow tired of scientific conversation:
I don’t choose to say much upon this head,
I’m a plain man, and in a single station,
But — Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all?

from Don Juan, canto one

Gil Hodges in the Hall of Fame at last

The Dodger great managed the 1969 Mets to the World Champoionship. He would have been 98 on April 4. Great first-baseman, clutch hitter, drove in both runs when the Dodgers won the 7th game of ther 1955 World Series,beloved in Brooklyn.

“Not getting booed at Ebbets Field was an amazing thing. Those fans knew their baseball, and Gil was the only player I can remember whom the fans never, I mean never, booed.” — Clem Labine

“Gil Hodges was the most important person in my career. Above all, he taught me how to be a professional.” — Tom Seaver

Water and bread, not wine and cake: choreographer Mylène Benoît speaks up for dance [by Tracy Danison]

WONDER by Mylène Benoît:  “Body memory working on the body present”. Photo © Fabrice Poiteaux

The portico on the Théâtre des Abbesses boasts a quote from Pina Bausch, a genius, sure, but also beloved of those who knew her: “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.” ... Over her writing desk, where I often sit procrastinating, my Karine, also beloved of her friends, has a brittle yellowed Post-it note with a quote from, of all people, Augustine of Hippo, a man terrified of the beat of his own heart: O, Mensch, lerne tanzen, sonst wissen, die engel im Himmel mit dir nichts anzufangen/ “O! Friend! Learn to dance or the angels will not know how to begin with you”.

These words and these persons move me.

So you’ll understand why the choreographer Mylène Benoît impressed me so during a panel discussion on the future of dance at Palais de Chaillot in Fall 2021, just when we were first coming out of lock down. Alone among the personalities involved, Benoît pointed out that dance – movement, live performance –  was a need. And in saying that, she reminded a lot of people for whom dance-performance can often be just a budget – especially in trying times –, that dance is a human need, a fundamental value - water, not wine, bread, not cake – not entertainment or a culture product. Op. cit., Augustine and Pina.

I bestirred myself to make an appointment with to learn more about Benoît’s thinking.

Until her appearance on the panel, I knew of her only through an intriguing 2018 performance piece called Gikochina-Sa / ぎこちな さ / La Maladresse (“Awkwardness”), which she created in conjunction with a 2017 residence in Japan. I saw it through the Rencontres choregraphiques internationales de Seine Saint Denis 2018 program. Gikochina-Sa/La Maladresse explores a potential gestural and poetic language deriving from unintentional movement. Working with Atsushi Heli, an expert in the gestural repertory of Japan’s Nichibu dance genre, Benoît was seeking to create a unique – unique in the sense of un-reproducible – performance language.

During our talk in late November 2021, in Lille, where Benoît currently lives with her partner and her two young children, I realized that the Gikochina-Sa is a good introduction to what turns out to be Benoït’s ongoing quest to get a handle on the nature of dance and its representations. She’s a born intellectual with a love of matter and energy, seeing and feeling.

 

On the power of women, ARCHEE by Mylène Benoît. Photo © Delphine Lermite

While Benoît has a good hand for doing current or classic or political themes – I’m thinking here of her most recent work, Archée, touching on the power and place of women, she also tends to embed such broader questions of dance nature as “the diffusion of images and their articulation into the body” or “body knowledge and memory” or “co-opting body with image in social choreography”.

Archée makes its Paris début as I publish, at the Palais de Chaillot, National Dance Theater, from 8 to 17 June, 2022.

At some point during our long conversation does a sort of Ode to a Grecian Urn invocation. I can’t recall if it happens à propos of any one of our talking points, but she stands, walks, situates, positions and then swings her leg up from the exact join of her hip, rippling thigh, knee, ankle, foot upward until the root, arch and spread of her sole comes lightly against the flat smooth plaster of the wall just behind her chair. Judgments and terms roll over me. To me, foot and wall become numinous: I feel, “each itself, themselves together”. That’s good “dance”! Again to myself, I figure “ballet” though I can’t recall offhand such an image, let alone such a move in ballet. Maybe it’s the “gracefulness”.

Mylène Benoît today bills herself a visual artist as well as a choreographer, which she describes as doing “choral arrangement”. During our chat she says she thinks of the body as a corps sachant, “an information body” at macro and micro (cellular) level. Dance, she also tells me, is movement over which we can impose or share cultural images or emotions, or teach ourselves emotions. In this communication function, dance is “primary belonging”.

Her present thinking, Benoît says, has its origins in her first creation project, a video installation, which got her wondering about the authenticity of the images of emotions and attitudes she was using.  She wondered, for instance, whether and how the cartoon images of emotional states such as anger, sadness, or surprise derived from real body states or postures. Using short choreographies to explore the issue, she says she was surprised to understand that the images, or memes, she was using were not attached to real-body experience. They were, instead, a part of a separate narrative repertory – “figures” – representing “emotions” that may or may not exist, or, if they exist, may or may not be universally or, even, just, identifiable. In a nutshell, figures or memes are ways of talking about movement but do not describe or express it. Body movement itself references the whole movement of an individual as it interacts with and relates to itself and Others.

L’AVEUGLEMENT: “The body in transformation of forms of encounter with the world. Photo © Patrick Berger

As a result of her explorations and experience, Benoît says she determined to use only real-body experience in her choreographies. But, although movement communicates, movement is essentially “silent”.

What Benoît means by “silent”, I think, is something like “present without language”. Remember the opening scene in 2001, Space Odyssey. Some apes suddenly start whooping it up around a monolith. The whooping it up against the silent monolith enables the production of a third thing – for Kubrick, a “human” – that is different from the apes and differently perceives the monolith differently.

Clearly, movement, like the monolith, is another genre of communication to sound or figurative communication. They are not necessarily “complementary”, seeming more like two streams of water, each generating its own fluid ecology. The meaningfulness, or the “third thing” enabled, come more from proximity than otherwise.

So it is, perhaps, that Benoît takes care to call herself a “visual artist” and “choral arranger”: where the principle character is silent, how and where and with whom and who says what where are the most important ways to enable a meaningful spectator experience.

As to need, if it’s clear there’s a type of communication we call “language” and humans need its memes, figures and narratives, it’s also clear to Benoît there’s a type of communication we call “movement” that enables us to “impose and share … images and emotions”. Whether dance is more important than talk, as I think, is a matter of opinion, but that it is a human need, equal at least to language, seems to me, indisputable.

On leaving, I ask Benoit what she expects will be the result if we required kids to skill up dance as we require them to do for talk?

“The body creates, reshapes and liberates narrative," she replies. "What we’ll get is better health, more empathy and [since the process is archeological as well as teleological] … more introspection, from cell to species to personal experience."

An Interview with Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman [by Nin Andrews]

Recently, I had the pleasure of reading a delightful collection of micro-fictions/prose poems: The House of Grana Padano by Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman. I have to confess that I was hesitant to open the book because I rarely enjoy reading collaborations. In my opinion they often read as inside jokes or private dialogs between two writers in which one riffs on the style and quirks of the other. But The House of Grana Padano proved to be an exception. It reads as if Meg and Jeff are one writer. Somehow, they composed seamlessly together. I wondered as I read it: are their sensibilities, artistry, and voices that similar?  I thought I’d ask them about the process that brought this book into being.

NA: How did the book come about?                         

JF: Meg and I came together initially at a YouTube reading for Lit Youngstown. We were both fans of each other’s writing but had never met in person. We had exchanged some emails before the reading, but then after the event, we began meeting every Tuesday on Zoom. The darkness and loneliness of the pandemic created a real need in both of us to reach out, and our Zoom sessions were so energetic and lively. The book idea emerged spontaneously from these sessions. Meg brought it up, but I jumped on it. We had already been doing prompts together, and then almost spontaneously and unconsciously, we stepped into a story and began riffing off each other as we had done in our conversations. From there, we came up with various methods and approaches for working on pieces. At some point, we realized we were on our way to a book with six or seven different thematic threads.

NA: What are the best and/or the hardest aspects of composing with another prose poet or writer of micro fiction?

MP: Our book emerged out of playfulness and the need for something joyful. Things seemed to come easily. It was as if Jeff, and I had known each other all our lives, and the more we talked, the more we had in common. We trusted each other almost immediately and while writing, we always said “yes” to whatever creative ideas or images emerged in the initial writing phase. We would just keep writing, building on what each of us wrote, trying to see where our poems or micros might go. Our two voices never merged, but instead created a dynamic tension in the pieces. We revised every piece together. The hardest part might have been cutting pieces we really loved from the book, because they just didn’t fit. There are still one or two pieces we wish we hadn’t had to cut.  Working with each other has been inspiring for our individual work as well. We were two strangers at the beginning, and now we’re brother and sister.

NA:  I’d love it if you each picked a prose poem and commented on its evolution.

JF:

The Salesman Gets a Suit

My father walks into a clothing store. “Sell me a suit,” he says to a thin bald-headed man. Without even looking, the bald-headed man pulls a blue silk suit off the rack. “This suit is made for you,” he says holding the hanger in his right hand and letting the pants legs drape over his arm. “Just feel it.” My father brushes it gently with his fingers as though smoothing out the curls of his own hair. “I’m a salesman too,” he says. “I knew it,” the bald-headed man says. “I could tell the minute you entered the store.” The suit is shiny like the lobby in a posh hotel, shiny like a brand new Cadillac parked in the car dealer’s window. My father takes it into the dressing room, and when he comes out, the suit swells with his plump belly. The sleeves of the jacket swallow his hands. The pants legs sweep the floor. He looks short and fat, lost in cloth. “This suit makes you look like a whole new man, like someone ready to make a killing,” the bald-headed man says and leads him to the mirror. In the mirror, the suit shapes itself to his body, fits him to a tee. In the mirror, he’s as graceful as a shadow, as light on his feet as a cool breeze rustling his pants legs. He leans forward as if telling the suit a secret. He smiles, and the suit smiles back.

From The House of Grana Padano

Initially published in On the Seawall

I wrote “The Salesman Gets a Suit” to accompany Meg’s “My Mother the Realtor.” We both had parents who were in sales. This piece, like so many in the book, weaves a line between prose poem and micro. In the “Salesman Gets a Suit,” the salesman and his son enter a store that sells men’s suits. The store salesman spots them and begins pitching the father on a very expensive suit, and the father, though the suit clearly doesn’t fit him, buys it because he’s charmed by the store salesman. I did witness something like this when I was fifteen. But my father was buying an overcoat, not a suit. He was a very good salesman, but an easy target for flattery. The experience is transformed through the lens of a tale. The store salesman is like a sorcerer weaving a spell over the father, and the mirror is a magic mirror in which the suit suddenly fits perfectly and in which the father looks years younger. He smiles into the mirror, “and the suit smiles back.” The piece is a lyricized narrative that derives its power from images, associations, and rhythmic intensity.

MP: 

Fatherless Daughters  

In Springtime, abandoned daughters burst like myopic butterflies with binoculars attached to their faces while they try to identify their absent fathers, who zip through the clouds like geese, but they’re not geese, and they have no sense of direction.  “Can you see me down here, Dad?” one abandoned daughter trills, while one father zigzags ever closer to the sun. “It’s hurting my eyes,” he yells waving his pale wings like flags. Another abandoned daughter spots a cloud in the shape of her father. “He wasn’t much of a father,” she says. “He’s better as a cloud.” Another daughter shouts, “Heads up!” as her father falls from the sky headlong into the crowd of abandoned daughters. The other fathers cringe and avoid looking down. “They’re out to get us,” they say. “They want money or hugs or something.” The daughters, tired of treading air, fling themselves toward their fathers, eager to bring one home, even if he’s someone else’s father, even if he never earns another dime, even if he sheds all his feathers—but the fathers prove illusive, no longer really fathers.

From The House of Grana Padano

Initially published in Plume

I grew up without a father and write about it a lot. Working with Jeff got me very excited about writing poems and stories informed by tales and fables. I wrote “Fatherless Daughters” in response to one of his pieces. I saw it almost like a painting in my mind with fathers floating in the sky and abandoned daughters below hoping to catch one. The piece creates an emotional landscape, a metaphorical reality that is somehow true to my own experience. It is darkly funny and perversely sad. Jeff and I share that sensibility, so it was easy for him to contribute. “Fatherless Daughters” is driven by images. The daughters in the piece are bereft. They want to know why the fathers have abandoned them, and though the fathers prove to be illusive, each of them is still hoping that one will fall to earth so she can claim him. I was trying to get a different angle on a story that is actually quite commonplace. The daughters are alert to finding their fathers, while simultaneously aware that the fathers aren’t real. 

JEFF FRIEDMAN is the author of ten books of poems and mini stories, including The House of Grana Padano cowritten with Meg Pokrass (Pelekinesis, 2022); The Marksman (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020); and Floating Tales (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017); Friedman’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Poetry International, New England Review, The Antioch Review, and The New Republic. He has also been published in Alcatraz: An International Anthology of the Short Form (fall 2022), Awake: New Prose Poetry From the US, UK, and Australia (fall 2022), Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Jewish Poets, Flash Fiction Funny, Best Microfiction 2021 and 2022 and many other anthologies. Friedman has received numerous awards and prizes including a National Endowment Literature Translation Fellowship in 2016 and two individual Artist Grants from New Hampshire Arts Council.  https://poetjefffriedman.com

 

 

 

MEG POKRASS is the author of 10 flash fiction books, including The House of Grana Padano (co-written with Jeff Friedman, Pelekinesis 2022), Spinning to Mars (2021) and The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down (Etruscan Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in over 1,000 literary journals including Electric Literature, American Journal of Poetry, McSweeney’s, Smokelong, Five Points. She has been anthologized in 3 Norton flash fiction anthologies: Flash Fiction International (2015), New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (2018), and the forthcoming Flash Fiction America. Meg’s flash fiction has been widely anthologized, appearing in The Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, and 2022, Wigleaf Top 50, and the forthcoming Alcatraz: An International Anthology of the Short Form (Gazebo Books). She is the Founding Editor of Best Microfiction and New Flash Fiction Review. She has won the Blue Light Book award in 2021 and 2016. She lives in Inverness Scotland and wears too many hats. http://www.megpokrass.com

Happy birthday, Dean Martin

"I couldn't feel any better or I'd be sick
Tell me quick ain't love a kick in the head. . ."

On D-Day (Just In Case) [by General Dwight D. Eisenhower]

 

On June 6, 1944, nearly 3 million Allied troops readied themselves to cross the treacherous English channel in less than ideal weather. On this day, the first 160,000 of those troops landed on the beaches of Normandy, France. As they stormed the beaches, General Dwight D. Eisenhower's words rang in their ears: 

"You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you," he wrote in a famous letter sent to troops before the assault. 

"We will accept nothing less than full victory! Good Luck!" But in case of failure, he had this note in this pocket. He had written it by hand, under great stress, and got the day and month wrong. The words are those of a leader of men:

National Archives

"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

Emily Fragos: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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The Sadness of Clothes

 

When someone dies, the clothes are so sad. They have outlived

their usefulness and cannot get warm and full.

You talk to the clothes and explain that he is not coming back

 

as when he showed up immaculately dressed in slacks and plaid jacket

and had that beautiful smile on and you’d talk.

You’d go to get something and come back and he’d be gone.

 

You explain death to the clothes like that dream.

You tell them how much you miss the spouse

and how much you miss the pet with its little winter sweater.

 

You tell the worn raincoat that if you talk about it,

you will finally let grief out. The ancients forged the words

for battle and victory onto their shields and then they went out

 

and fought to the last breath. Words have that kind of power

you remind the clothes that remain in the drawer, arms stubbornly

folded across the chest, or slung across the backs of chairs,

 

or hanging inside the dark closet. Do with us what you will,

they faintly sigh, as you close the door on them.

He is gone and no one can tell us where.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Emily Fragos is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize  from the Library of Congress, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry, Unrest, Saint Torch, Hostage, and Little Savage, and the editor of seven poetry anthologies for The Everyman’s Pocket Library: Music’s Spell, Art & Artists, The Great Cat, The Dance, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Poems of Gratitude, and Poems of Paris. She has also written numerous articles on music and dance, and served as guest poetry editor for Guernica. Her work has been translated into Spanish by Natalia Carbajosa and into Japanese by Yuka Urushibata. Emily Fragos has taught at Columbia, Yale, and NYU. She lives in New York City.

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                                                                    Király Nikoletta, 1978. Hungarian Painter.