The Best American Poetry

Finland in the Headlines [by David Lehman]

"What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success." It doesn't quite measure up to "Worthwhile Canadian Endeavor," which won the award for dullest headline of the 1980s, but it is still a thing of beauty, and it reminds me of James Tate, pictured above, for a reason I will explain.  

In the age of advanced technological surveillace, there is little about us that the computer doesn't know. So everyday one gets an e-mail tailored to one's specific proclivities, with a link to a can't miss headline. This is what Big Brother sent my way on January 12, 2012:

<< What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success theatlantic.com -  The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because . . .

 >>

What I love most is "Keep Ignoring." Irresistible.

James Tate, who died on July 8, 2015, has a wonderful poem titled "I Am a Finn," which Mark Strand chose from The Iowa Review for The Best American Poetry 1991:

I Am a Finn

I am standing in the post office, about
to mail a package back to Minnesota, to my family.
I am a Finn. My name is Kasteheimi (Dewdrop).

Mikael Agricola (1510-1557) created the Finnish language.
He knew Luther and translated the New Testament.
When I stop by the Classé Café for a cheeseburger

no one suspects that I am a Finn.
I gaze at the dimestore reproductions of Lautrec
on the greasy walls, at the punk lovers afraid

to show their quivery emotions, secure
in the knowledge that my grandparents really did
emigrate from Finland in 1910 – why

is everybody leaving Finland, hundreds of
thousands to Michigan and Minnesota, and now Australia?
Eighty-six percent of Finnish men have blue

or grey eyes. Today is Charlie Chaplin’s
one hundredth birthday, though he is not
Finnish or alive: ‘Thy blossom, in the bud

laid low.’ The commonest fur-bearing animals
are the red squirrel, musk-rat, pine-marten
and fox. There are about 35,000 elk.

But I should be studying for my exam.
I wonder if Dean will celebrate with me tonight,
assuming I pass. Finnish Literature

really came alive in the 1860s.
Here, in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
no one cares that I am a Finn.

They’ve never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää,
winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a Finn, this infuriates me.

This and the companion poem, "I Am Still a Finn," appear in The Oxford Book of American Poetry.

'Beautiful women like to look in the mirror...' [by Mitch Sisskind]

Beautiful women like to look in the mirror
For long periods of time sometimes hours
So if you ever manage to land one of them
Be ready to sit solitary at the television set
All afternoon long and on into the night.

Here's another thing to know about them.
They will try on every article of clothing
In the closet before venturing out into
The world so when you finally return
There's a big pile of clothes on the bed.

What if you hear a wolf whistle while
You and her are out walking? Okay
Write something on a piece of paper
And while the degenerate looks at it
You suddenly kick him in the balls.

One upside of the whole thing is how
If she's beautiful enough you can get
Comped in expensive restaurants like
Happened to me and her do you want
To know where? Okay. Wolfgang Puck.

You, who ask me for a prompt, please consider "Reclining Nude" by Isaac Israel (1865-1934)

"Days of Winter" and "Limbo" [poems by Sean Singer from "Today in the Taxi"]

Days of Winter

Today in the taxi I brought a Chinese couple, parents of a student at Columbia, from Amsterdam Avenue to JFK. The girl was crying, the mother was crying, etc. The parents sat in silence for most of the trip. They didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Chinese. I did offer them a little package of tissues. On the other hand, the sun came out and it warmed to 24 degrees.

A driver should find a fixed object on the road, such as a sign or a tree, and when the car in front passes it, count three seconds before his own car passes it. Then add a second for each hazard—rain, or darkness.

The road is not unlike a little pressed-between vessel that the car pushes along its black bloodstream. A psalm instructs that It will be as it is said.

Limbo

Today in the taxi, driving a commercial real estate type from 43rd and Madison to 57th and Park I said, “Would you prefer to go up Madison, or Park?” He said, “It doesn’t matter. Either way we’re fucked.”

And it was true when a black pier of birds burst from the building, like fulfillment.

I too, seek to weave a memory from foam. A black bottle opener and the blackest bottle, and the flow of liquids. You cannot know it; you can see it.

General “Beedle” Smith reported that in April 1945 when they liberated Buchenwald, he witnessed:

“General Eisenhower go to the opposite side of the road and vomit. From a distance I saw Patton bend over, holding his head with one hand and his abdomen with the other. I too became sick.”

When the oncoming headlights are too bright, it is said you should look to the side at the lines on the road. You would stop yourself from being blinded, and stop yourself to imagine the road ahead, unstrung, and the rubber against it.

Sean Singer was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, in 1974. He has an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark. Singer is the author of three books of poetry: Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022). In 2005 he was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Find out more about Sean Singer here.  You can purchase Today in the Taxi, from Bookshop, Amazon, and Tupelo Press.

"The Value of Stones" [by Michael Quattrone]

The Value of Stones

It’s never what they weigh; it’s not the depth
of silence they have known; it’s not the round-
or hardness of their edges, certain color
or uncertain age that proffer worth. Metals,
crystals, precious on their own, may dwell
within the body of a rock, but never mind
those false alarms of wealth. The treasure
of each stone lives in its skill: the subtle art
of timing, moving even still, invisible
for eons—until now, when heavy, sad,
I sought a place to put my head, first walk
without the old dog; not wanting to
remember, nor forget the creamy softness
of her faithful fur, one velvet ear; her
eager and then fallen eyes, her earthy
nose, dank breath; her batting tail and puppy
temperament, until her body failed. I
sank down and something bore me up: a piece
of bed unnoticed on the overlook
we’d risked each day on our six aging legs—
but here it was: a stone that never left
a man unturned. I sat and stayed, I curled
up and yelped. It polished me, the surface
of the hurt I felt. Such is the kindness
of a rock: however ancient, deep or sharp,
it waits, the patient body of the earth
immune to what afflicts our softer flesh,
as we dig up what modest giftedness
we can in human time. The measure of
a stone, and what it marks, is never mine.

Michael Quattrone is the author of the chapbook, Rhinoceroses (New School, 2007). His poems have appeared in journals like Barrow Street, New York Quarterly and Pool, as well as the Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008) and the Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2018). Click here for the poem as it appeared in Streetlight.

Nomads [poem by Charles Baudelaire tr. Sandra Simonds]

Portrait of a 23-year-old Baudelaire, painted in 1844 by Émile Deroy (1820–1846)

Nomads

A tribe of prophets
moves through the mist
carrying a bit of money
and little kids on their backs,
kids with enormous appetites.
The men are barefoot, Felix,
just like me and their weapons
are long, just like mine.
The mist pulls their wagons
as they pass me, singing,
breaking the desert stones
open with their notes.
They move beyond
the stones full of water.
Our futures, so familiar.

 

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.

"Aubade" by Max Harris [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Max Harris is best known as the editor responsible for publishing the oeuvre of the fictional poet Ern Malley. The hoax has become the stuff of legend and Harris’s role as the dupe overshadows his substantial contributions to the arts in Australia for over half a century, as an editor, publisher, poet and the country’s most vocal champion of its nascent Modernism, in both painting and literature, throughout the 1940s. Harris’s journal Angry Penguins, which he founded at the age of 18, placed the Australian avant-garde in an international context, and included artists such as Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval and Australia’s leading surrealist, James Gleeson. 

 

“Angry Penguins” became both a movement of artists, and a label of scorn used by conservatives for modernist trends in the culture. The phrase is taken from Harris’s poem “Mithridatum of Despair” and refers to drunks in tuxedos at night “straddling the cobbles of the square / tying a shoelace by fogged lamplight.” Harris’s early poetry is heavily influenced by European modernist and surrealist techniques, but an irrepressive lyricism is evident in even the most experimental works. The Ern Malley affair represented a fault line in the poet’s own writing. After the scandal, which saw Harris charged with Obscenity for publishing “indecent advertisements,” his poetry became less ebullient and more pensive, clear and declarative. “Aubade”, which imagines an elderly Oblomov, still in bed, stirring at a lyric gathering in his bowels, displays the poet’s own sardonic humor.

 

Aubade

 

Open up, Oblomov: for the dust pan sings

Tinny-tang for all your years asleep.

Who knows what maidens may have crept

And brushed their lids against your cheek.

Awake old slav, the kitchen calls,

Eggs are frying, a saucepan falls,

Outside an old grey wind begins to weep.

 

In your bowels a lyric stirs—

Your toilet call, you morning birds,

Urging out your lazy feet

To rest like dumplings on the boards.

Your brain now beats about its bowl,

Cake-making, for your acquaintance, Soul,

Will make a formal call at five.

Thi is, if you are still alive.

 

Old poet, dragging on your drawers,

Seeking a rhyme without a clause—

All creation is about its chores!

Oblomov sighs, subsides, and snores

Darragh Park's Cover for "Two Journals" by James Schuyler

In 1985 James Schuyler and Darragh park commenced on the project of "accompanying journals," in Park's phrase, Schuyler's in prose and Park's in drawings. The journals were not "mutually descriptive," but did reflect conversations the two men had and thus constitute "not only in some way an account of our relationship but also evidence of some of the things which nourished our relationship."

Of Park's cover for Two Diaries (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1995), Douglas Crase writes:

<<
This is the view out Jimmy Schuyler's window onto 23rd Street--"a street that doesn't have much going for it," if I remember Jimmy's description aright. The building with the egg-shaped medallion, directly across, is the old Eastman Kodak building, designed by McKim, Meade, and White (they also did Eastman's house in Rochester).The street front has been brutally remodeled but you can detect their classicizing in the upper stories. Not too much, though; Eastman insisted on the economy version. Darragh gave me this drawing and I have it in my studio here in Pennsylvania so I can always share Jimmy's view -- this much at least.
>>

from the archive; first posted April 21, 2009

T. S. Eliot: The More You Know, The More You Don't

Poet, playwright and critic T.S. Eliot, circa 1920.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

From T.S. Eliot’s essay “The Perfect Critic” for the literary journal Athenaeum in 1920:

The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.

Sherman Alexie: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_____________________________

Gentrification

 

Let us remember the wasps

That hibernated in the walls

Of the house next door. Its walls

Bulged with twenty pounds of wasps

 

And nest, twenty pounds of black

Knots and buzzing fists. We slept

Unaware that the wasps slept

So near us. We slept in black

 

Comfort, wrapped in our cocoons,

While death’s familiars swarmed

Unto themselves, but could have swarmed

Unto us. Do not trust cocoons.

 

That’s the lesson of this poem.

Or this: Luck is beautiful.

So let us praise our beautiful

White neighbor. Let us write poems

 

For she who found that wasp nest

While remodeling the wreck.

But let us remember that wreck

Was, for five decades, the nest

 

For a black man and his father.

Both men were sick and neglected,

So they knew how to neglect.

But kind death stopped for the father

 

And cruelly left behind the son,

Whose siblings quickly sold the house

Because it was only a house.

For months, that drunk and displaced son

 

Appeared on our street like a ghost.

Distraught, he sat in his car and wept

Because nobody else had wept

Enough for his father, whose ghost

 

Took the form of ten thousand wasps.

That’s the lesson of this poem:

Grief is as dangerous and unpredictable

As a twenty-pound nest of wasps.

 

Or this: Houses are not haunted

By the dead. So let us pray

For the living. Let us pray

For the wasps and sons who haunt us.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sherman Alexie’s most recent book is You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, a memoir. He has published six books of poetry with Hanging Loose, the most recent being What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned. He lives with his wife and sons in Seattle.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                     Mher Chatinyan (Armenian), Wasp, 2021.

 

Donald Shambroom's "Forsythia" at Mercury Gallery (Rockport)

Forsythia, oil on canvas, 42 x 46 in.

Donald Shambroom is a visual artist and writer whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 1973, after graduating from Yale University where he studied philosophy and painting, Shambroom moved to Boston to pursue his career as a painter. His work has been shown at Francis Naumann gallery and Half Gallery in New York, and at Mercury Gallery and Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston.   For the past decade, he has lived and worked on the banks of the Millers River in north central Massachusetts. Shambroom’s book “Duchamp’s Last Day” was published by Zwirner Books in 2018. He is currently working on his next book “Mirror Image: Leonardo da Vinci and Marcel Duchamp.”

What Makes a Restaurant Great? [by Mitch Sisskind]

So many evenings in the early 80s I made my way along Bennett Avenue, past Yeshiva Samson Raphael Hirsch (familiarly known for some reason as "Breuer's," with D. Lehman a proud alum) to 181st Street and the Hilltop Restaurant, pictured above.

I must digress for a moment. I once watched a television interview of former Chicago Bears player and coach Abe Gibron. The question was asked, "What makes a great restaurant?" and I will always remember Coach Gibron's reply. 

He said, "A great restaurant is a place where they take care of you. I call them up and say, 'I'm coming over. I like to eat and I'm not afraid to pay for it.' When I get there, they've cooked a goat." Excellent advice! Try it yourself. Just be sure to use Coach Gibron's exact words: "I'm coming over. I like to eat and I'm not afraid to pay for it."

For me, however, a great restaurant is a place of wonderful memories. That's why I feel so strongly about the Hilltop. The food was certainly good, although not exceptional. I always ordered either the soup of the day, spaghetti with meat sauce, or the chicken club sandwich. But it was the conversation that really made an impression. Sometimes the whole restaurant would take part, as when the following joke was passed around:

One night a flying saucer landed in front of a farm house. The farmer and his wife came out and were greeted by two space aliens. The aliens asked if the farmer and his wife would like to have sex, and they agreed.

While fucking the wife, the first alien asked if she would like his penis to be longer. When she said she would like that, he told her to pull on his left ear. Then he asked if she would like his penis to be thicker. When she said she would like that, he told her to pull on his right ear.

Later, when the flying saucer had departed, the farmer asked his wife how she had liked having sex with the space alien. She said, "It was great! How was it for you?" The farmer replied, "It was okay, but she kept pulling on my ears."

Another memorable conversation at the Hilltop Restaurant was a discussion of whether New York was the greatest city in the world. The consensus: No, but it used to be.

Finally, there was the time I overheard an angry argument between two young men about an age old question: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" The argument went something like this: "The chicken came first because you can't have an egg without a chicken!" "No, the egg came first because you can't have a chicken without an egg!" "Chicken!" "Egg!" "Chicken!" "Egg!" "Listen fuckface, the chicken came first because in the Bible it says God made the chicken! It don't say He made the egg! So shut the fuck up!"

from the archive; first posted June 4, 2008

Saturday Surprise [by David Lehman]

Here are five sentences that I didn't write. I proffer them not only because of the formidable intellect behind them but also because of the insights into our culture and into human nature. Some, if we consider when they were written, are of prophetic power.

To play, identify the author (and name the specific source or publication) in the comments field. Or don't. Just think about these observations. I will identify the auithor before the weekend ends. The art illustrating this piece is a red herring with a red cape.

"Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it. "

"Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth."

“It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.”

"We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us."

“We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.”

Two Poems [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Old Nellie and the Big Spiders

After 4 July how quickly summer goes until

Toward the end the big spiders come whom

I love but more than love respect them for

The web astonishments they each night build.

Sure, I'd like to get a new wristwatch but

How would my well-loved Timex feel as

The hour of the big spiders draws nigh

Which needs accurately to be clocked?

Wait, I've got it. I'll put a new watch in my

Amazon checkout cart but not finalize

The sucker till football season starts and

Then retire Old Nellie to my sock drawer!

Rabbi Frankenstein

That anyone could be named Rabbi Frankenstein

Seemed impossible but Rabbi Frankenstein was

His name! That he had a glass eye also seemed

Impossible but there it was! In the old days around

1957 Rabbi Frankenstein used to suddenly appear

And I always wondered why but looking back on it

Now I understand that he wanted a donation from

My father Lou and he never failed to get one either!

To start the ball rolling Rabbi Frankenstein would

Always give me a gift like a ceramic elephant or

A small jet plane as Lou smilingly looked on and

Then they went into the library to talk for about

30 minutes although Lou just wanted to write the

Check already but he never spoke disrespectfully

Of Rabbi Frankenstein he would just say oy vey

When Rabbi Frankenstein was finally gone!

Lina Lapelytè’s “The Mutes” at Lafayette Anticipations: on dance, shoes, singing and paradox in the Garden of Nettles [by Paul Tacy Danison]

Wandering carolers find themselves in the Garden of Nettles only to find their selves. From “The Mutes”, Lina Lapelytè, June-July 2022, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris. Photo©Rasa Juskeviciute 

Right off, I need to claim Lina Lapelytè’s The Mutes for dance.

I do because I've come to think that, when all is said and done, dance is people at movement among life's paradoxes – The Mutes certainly has paradox. “Movement” (of eye, ear, mouth, skin, brain, consciousness) – which The Mutes has too – is the mechanism that makes us realize that all stories are as true as false. What we call “dance” sculpts, then performs, movement, enabling imagining: opposite as apposite, song as sound, stinging nettle as tickling feather, floor as foot.

Space as place, too. When Yuika Hashimoto twirled, turned and spiraled her moving reprise of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Violin Phase in 2018 in Lafayette Anticipation’s auteur space, the performance found a place; The Mutes magics space into place: the Garden of Nettles.

 

Da sein! From “The Mutes”, Lina Lapelytè, June-July 2022, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris. Photo©Rasa Juskeviciute

Movement into The Mutes is through a parallel visual-culture narrative: nettles, food-weed/medicine-irritant, a pair of clogs made for a surface rather than for feet. Pairs of clogs tease the brain as I stroll glancing into the bushes for the them – they remind me: Burma Shave signs with their intriguing streaks of Midwestern jokeyness strung along the old two-lane interstates.

Strolling creates the paths I now see among stands of nettles. I am pulled into, I almost run into, a sound experience of paradox and becoming. A band of intensely ordinary carolers orderly gather in a corner in front of a pillar, held between clumps of nettles. They chant-sing “off-key” and well. They carol select stanzas from Sean Ashton’s 2017 novel Living in a Land

I’ve never gone back/I’ve never gone back/To my childhood home I’ve never gone back

To my childhood home/and found it to be emotionally sterile/

I’ve never gone back/To my childhood home

And come to the conclusion that we live

in time not place, time, not place, not place, time, not place/ 

We live in time not place/time not place/time not place/time not place/time not place

I laugh.

My guard down, in an eyeblink, a mischievous spirit flies into my ha-ha hole, gets a grip on my tongue. It takes only a second to jar me loose. I feel I’ve heard this before (without ever having heard it), without saying it, have felt it, felt it and said it, at a fancy party. Also, “Time not place” comes to me. Also, I may actually have “driven a “7.5-tonne truck”. 

Feeling tickled in place not time pulls me from memory. I listen to what I’ve seen. The caroling shapes to Song(s) of Myself(ves). The carolers shift to Intensely ordinary Selves, as true as Walt Whitman’s own. Less overblown language, too.

The Selves are zazen kinhin devotees wandering vegetable paradox, carving out a place in somebody’s else’s bijou design. A pillar of squared light and air thrusting between narrow plots of nettle becomes a multilevel pocket park where people – intent and deliberate in polyester multifiber-mix shirts and dresses, decent pants, skirts, bottoms and shoes my mom would approve – pause to breathe while waiting to move on. I add. Forever. Until.

 

I’ve never gone back/To my childhood home/And come to the conclusion that we live/in time not place, time, not place, not place, time, not place … – Sean Ashton, Living in a Land. From “The Mutes”, Lina Lapelytè, June-July 2022, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris. Photo©Rasa Juskeviciute 

It's all good. Let me count the ways.

The ability to conceive then put together the elements that make my experience makes Lina Lapelytè a fine choreographer. Also a top sound and sight composer. Then, the choreographer-composer in her knows how to choose, as Buddhists say, right collaborators most apt to realize right texts, sets, cast and costumes…. A special mention here for designer Egle Cekanaviviute, whose talent for situational dress lent much to my appreciation of The Mutes’ remarkable “every-person” amateur cast. 

Finally, Lapelytè seems to enjoy the undefinable but undeniable quality of natural humor. Her work imbibes it. I didn’t just laugh inwardly and outwardly and during The Mutes. I am smiling now.

The Mutes – inaptly titled “Les Silencieux” for the Paris performance – is a fine and pleasant spur to Imagining, then, seeming to me a case study in dance, capital D. However, Lapelytè seems in the way of getting claimed for contemporary opera rather than dance-performance.

Lapelytè herself – trained up in Lithuania as a concert violinist but choosing to study sculpture in London –  has had a hand in this: her (as far as I know) first big performance is Have a good day! Opera for 10 cashiers and supermarket sounds and piano. Also, her début on the international scene follows a Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale for Sun & Sea, called “an opera-performance” in my promotional material and which is bluntly called opera in the little Google blurb.  

Why make even a five-line fuss about this? After all, opera is a non-objectionable genre of music. And the really good singing in the little of Lapelytè's work I’ve seen does have something of opera cliché about it. But – and maybe it’s only her natural humor at work – “opera” just doesn’t seem to be what she’s up to creatively. If Hofesh Shecter’s noisy chorus-line-like scenarios are a reflection of his creative impulse, there’s a lot more opera in him than in her.

Worse than the label’s confounding me, though, is that saying "opera" whenever Lina Lapelytè’s name comes up could limit her in terms of audience appeal. Opera is richer than performance, but there's a lot less of it.

So, in the same spirit as I claim that playwright Nathalie Béasse is a visual artist tweaked for a un-narrative theater-performance, let’s all claim that Lapelytè is a visual artist tweaked for dance-performance who delights in sound. Let's think of her as a brand: Lina Lapelytè, movement lyricist. That will get critical programmer attention!

The Mutes runs until 24 July 2022. Lapelytè will once again be imposing her fertile imagining on Parisian real estate from 18 to 22 January 2023 with stint of  Sun & Sea under the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce (the Pinault Collection).

Put Lina Lapelytè on your bucket list.

"The Garden of Allah" [by Boris Dralyuk]

The Garden of Allah Hotel, playground of the movie stars during the 20s and 30s, will be torn down to make way for a new commercial and business center. ... The hotel originally was the home of Alla Nazimova, late stage and screen star.
—Los Angeles Mirror-News, 1959

And now I watch another era fade,
Cyrillic letters scraped from shuttered storefronts,
tar-crusted bread, stale fish, stiff marmalade
sit sulking on the shelves, unchosen orphans
in what were once the bustling little shops
of Russian Hollywood. Hardly a soul now stops
to thumb the plums, frown at the penciled prices;
the neighborhood is lurching towards crisis,
all in slow motion. Rents climb out of reach
for émigrés ... There’s nothing new in this.
Think of Nazimova and of her short-lived bliss
beside her pool—her private Black Sea beach ...
She died a tenant in a bungalow
of a hotel razed sixty years ago.

from My Hollywood, Dralyuk's first book of poems (Philadelaphia: Paul Dry Books, 2022). Photo credit: Jennifer Croft.

On "Joan Mitchell" [by Sharon Preiss]

                                

                    Harbor December (1956)                                                    To the Harborbormaster (1957)

The Baltimore Museum of Art had to wait two, long, pandemic-years to open its Joan Mitchell retrospective. But finally, Harbor December and To the Harbormaster’s jittery wine-dark reds and cold-water greens are lapping the walls in Gallery 1, while the joyously mercurial La Vie en Rose and the exuberant Salut Tom warm the walls deeper in the exhibition.

Mitchell was born to old-school wealth in watery, windy Chicago in 1925, spent some early obligatory years on the East Coast, and was a contemporary of the abstract expressionists who broke painting’s rules and assured the triumph of the New York School. But Mitchell was of that scene, not in it. Or in it but not of it. She began traveling to Paris starting in the mid-fifties, after successfully showing with the East Village heavy hitters at the Ninth Street Show, and ultimately bought a property in Vétheuil, northwest of Paris, where she, her paints, and her army of German shepherds lived until her death in 1992. Her paintings are a dynamic blend of Abstract Expressionism’ hardscrabble muscularity and France’s vibrant Post-Impressionist affair with life and color.

As a synesthete, color was the lens through which Mitchell felt and saw the world. She was also an athlete, and her physical engagement with her canvases is evident. The intense verve of her work surprises over and over, and to walk through the galleries at BMA is to be awestruck. Never mind the violent darkness of some of them, nor what you may know about her prickly personality, her turbulent relationships, her fraught romance with scotch. Though she could be, at times, angry and bitter, her expressions in paint, even of her darker or more confused feelings, are rife with her urgent love of life.

With many of the pieces on loan from private collections, and so rarely seen in public, the chronologically arranged show presents some small early pieces of figurative work along with photos, books of poetry by friends, and a looped video interview with the painter in her Vétheuil studio. There’s also a supplemental soundscape of letters, music, and poetry guiding the viewer through the galleries. The listener is privy to a personal tour of Mitchell’s thoughts and inspirations, from her early pieces that experiment with cubist obfuscation on through the creation of her masterworks and late paintings, including an homage to one of Van Gogh’s final paintings, Wheat Fields with Crows. Mitchell’s painting, an eight-foot-long diptych of wind-whipped evergreen and gold blowing across a mostly white ground is slyly titled No Birds. No omens, no doom, just the dark swirling wheat beneath a weather-heavy sky interspersed with… Wait. Is that pink!? Is the weather breaking? La Vie en Rose, indeed.

                                         No Birds (1987)

Speaking of La Vie, if you’re lucky enough to live in New York City, that painting is usually on display at the Metropolitan Museum in their Modern and Contemporary Art wing. Ironically, (or perhaps not), this quintessential Joan Mitchell work came out of a particularly dark and artistically dry period in the mid-1970s, as did the absolutely sunny Salut Tom. Both pieces are among her largest, each one a quadriptych, with the four panels stretching together to a stunning twenty-two and twenty-six feet, respectively, and reaching upward of nine feet in height. Patricia Albers, in her 2011 biography of Mitchell, Lady Painter, calls La Vie’s “four movements…a symphony…Joan’s tour de force emotional reckoning” of her long, turbulent relationship with fellow artist Jean-Paul Riopelle, which finally imploded when he and Mitchell’s young protégé, Hollis Jeffcoat, became a couple and ran off together. While the painting is stunning on its own, knowing the backstory makes the moody intensity of the work even more potent.

  
La Vie en Rose (1979)                                                                               Salut Tom (1978)

The same could be said for Salut Tom. Not only is the painting also part of this period of loss and despondency, it’s a post-mortem homage to Mitchell’s great friend Tom Hess. Hess was the longtime editor of Artnews and, as such, championed Mitchell and her contemporaries. His death, at 58 from a heart attack, was a devastating shock. Yet Mitchell’s luminous yellows interspersed with airy puffs of white and sky blue are a celebration rather than a dirge.

Many print reproductions don’t do Mitchell’s work with color justice. But the installation images on BMA’s website give a taste of the sheer WOW of the show. It’s on display in Baltimore until August 14 and will travel to the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris from there.

https://artbma.org/exhibition/joan-mitchell/images

"Ode to My Father’s Manhattans" [by Beth Gylys]

Ode to My Father’s Manhattans

Clink
of ice
in a glass,
crack
of the cubes
as he poured,
bright red
eye
of a maraschino
bobbing
in the brown
gold
slosh
of Jim Beam
and sweet
vermouth.

Surely
we could
swim
in a lifetime
of those drinks,
gallons
upon gallons
swirled, sipped,
swilled
and swallowed,
sticky
on the counter,
the twinkle
of his high.

My father’s
Manhattans
sometimes
made him
want to dance,
to tell
the latest joke.
My shy father
lit
from within
becoming
someone
other
than himself,
sloppy-jolly,
sometimes
standing
(or that
is how
I remember it—
him at the table
standing
(hands
moving
like an Italian
from my mother’s
side of the family),
my father
and the glass
empty
but for
soft stones
of melting ice,
my father
abuzz,
chatty,
full of stories—
then
my father,
spent,
his chin
on his chest.

From "Sincerity and Authenticity" on July 4th, Lionel Trilling's Birthday

Here is the magnificent final paragraph of "The Authentic Unconscious," the final chapter of Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), his last book, which originated as the Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 1970.

<<< Yet the doctrine that madness is health, and that madness is liberation, receives a happy welcome from a consequential part of the educated public. And when we have given due weight to the likelihood that those who respond positively to the doctrine don’t have it in mind to go mad, let alone insane—it is characteristic of the intellectual life of our culture that, in radical psychology as in radical politics, it fosters a form of assent which does not involve actual credence—we must yet take it to be significant of our circumstances that many among us find it gratifying to entertain the thought that alienation is to be overcome only by the completeness of alienation, and that alienation completed is not a deprivation or deficiency but a potency. Perhaps exactly because the thought is assented to so facilely, so without what used to be called seriousness, it might seem that no expression of disaffection from the social existence was ever so desperate as this eagerness to say that authenticity of personal being is achieved through an ultimate isolateness and through the power that this is presumed to bring—the falsities of an alienated social reality rejected in favor of an upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity, each one of us a Christ but with none of the inconveniences of interceding, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals, of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished. >>>

Notice the last phrase and how eloquently it concludes the allegorical identification of "each one of us" as "a Christ." Written to counter the idea that madness is a necessary component of genius, the graf concludes with a summary statement followed by a dash, not a typical Trilling ploy. What follows the dash reiterates the main point with a twist achieved by the strategic use of "psychopathic" to alter the common meaning of "upward mobility" -- as if a term usually associated with matters of money and social class could well apply to the case of madness as an ideal. And then follows the remarkable metaphor, with its understanding of what divinity entails, its definition of what it means to be "a Christ." In the Gospel According to St. John, Christ's last words on the cross are  "It is finished." These are the book's last words.-- DL

 

Remembering Tom Disch, February 2, 1940 – July 4, 2008 [by Dana Gioia]

Tom Disch, who died on this day in 2008, is pictured here with his terrific computer game "Amnesia," a participatory novel in which the player awakes naked in a hotel room without any clues as to who he or she is. From the Wikipedia entry on Tom Disch: << David Lehman singled out "Amnesia" for praise in his essay "You Are What You Read" in Newsweek (January 12, 1987). In an interview published in the Southwest Review (edited by Willard Spiegelman), Lehman asked Disch about the origin of "Amnesia." "Please don't say 'I forget'," Lehman said. "It's true," Disch replied. "I forget my own life all the time, so amnesia was a natural subject for me." >> Here is Dana Gioia's remembrance of Tom:

<<<
Tom Disch was one of the few people I’ve ever met whom I considered a genius. Not that genius did him much good. He had a superabundance of invention, an often startling clarity of perception, and a preternaturally quick mastery of literary technique. At the same time he had little ability to handle the ordinary challenges of daily life. If he possessed the fertile imagination of a brilliant child, he also had a child’s social awkwardness and vulnerability. A connoisseur of self-loathing, he never understood how much his friends adored him. He was enormously good company—endlessly funny, intelligent, and genuinely sweet—except when he fell into a rage or depression. He could be difficult but he was never, never dull.

Their weird turns of invention, darkness of vision, and rough humor go far beyond the conventions of the genres in which he worked.The originality of his novels beggars description. While each book shares a common sensibility, these bizarre and compelling volumes not only differ from one another; they are unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. Their weird turns of invention, darkness of vision, and rough humor go far beyond the conventions of the genres in which he worked. Disch loved to outrage respectable opinion—not just middle-class opinion, the easy target of most writers. He also mocked proper liberal opinion and habitually violated even the most flexible limits of good taste. This eagerness to outrage would have been tiresome if he had not been so consistently funny and insightful.

Disch was never popular among science fiction, fantasy or horror readers. His admirers were mostly fellow writers. And despite Disch’s remarkable literary achievements, the fans were right. They knew he wasn’t writing for them. The literary mode of genre fiction is romance—the narrative tradition of wish-fulfillment featuring exciting adventure, idealized characters, and satisfactory closure. Disch upended the conventions of fantasy and science fiction by creating narratives that stubbornly refused to proceed in the proper directions. His heroes almost inevitably lose, mostly after humiliating defeats. Love ends in betrayal and abandonment. Villainy or mere incompetence triumphs. Moral authority proves useless or hypocritical. Disch’s mode was not romance but bitter satire. He liked to amuse his audience, but he took even greater pleasure in frustrating them.

Disch’s central importance in science fiction and fantasy was his determination to transform the imaginative possibilities of the science fiction and fantasy genres. Each of his novels pushed the boundaries of the field in a new way. (Had he constantly pushed the boundaries in the same way, as Philip K. Dick did, Disch might have eventually developed a cult following.) His best novels—On Wings of Song, 334, The Businessman: A Tale of Terror, and Camp Concentration—occupy a unique place in the canons of American science fiction and fantasy as disturbing and unruly counter-classics. The best of his short stories are perhaps finer still, though they await a judicious editor. The Brave Little Toaster is an utter joy—unlike the awful Disney adaptation. There was also another side of Disch’s prodigious talents—his poetry. He wrote so prolifically that his verse also awaits a skilled editor, but his best poems are not merely good but truly distinguished. Had he never written a page of science fiction, he would have a claim to posterity on his poetry alone.

I hope that in some alternative universe, a slimmer, happier Tom Disch sits in his beach house with walls lined by awards and a stack of royalty checks on his desk. It seems entirely possible. Tom had enough talent to fill several dimensions.
>>>

from https://danagioia.com/essays/reviews-and-authors-notes/remembering-tom-disch/

See, too, https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/04/the-businessman-the-statesman-and-the-poet.html