The Best American Poetry

"Ode to Poking Around" [by Catherine Woodard]

            “I wish to speak a word for the art of poking around,” begins philosopher and nature writer Kathleen Dean Moore in a fine art book beautifully built around her essay by lone goose press.

            I wish to speak a word for the artistry of Poking Around, the limited edition letterpress collaboration by lone goose proprietor Sandy Tilcock and artist Margot Voorhies Thompson. Poking around is exactly what they did for 10 days at the PLAYA residency for writers, artists and scientists in Summer Lake, Oregon. PLAYA’s high desert landscape is very much the fourth collaborator in the project.

            I arrived the same April night as Tilcock and Thompson and spotted them at sunrise combing the shore of the playa, an alkaline lake surrounded by desert, mountains and forests. What they found poking around often found its way into their pages in inventive ways. Thompson scooped up coarse dirt while hiking on the hillside the second day to study the complexities of colors underneath her feet and to add to her array of stains. Tule reeds, which Native Americans used for many things including weaving, doubled as something to draw and something to draw with. A bit of barbed wire for the final page marks the human hand on the landscape.

            Moore’s essay is from her 1996 book Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water. While her focus is paying attention in the natural world, Moore acknowledges that the art of poking around “can be practiced in libraries and antique stores and peoples’ psyches.”

            At our first communal dinner that week at PLAYA, three book artists, two stream biologists, a sculptor, a photographer and several writers discussed how crucial poking around – inside and outside of our heads – is to all art and to science. We agreed our best work is seldom what we set out to do but what we discover.

            PLAYA’s setting is steeped in surprise. During his 1843 mapping expedition, Captain John C. Frémont stood in several feet of snow on what he named Winter Ridge and looked down the snow-free playa he named Summer Lake. Because he had already seen the Great Salt Lake in Utah, Frémont correctly surmised there was a vast stretch of land in the West where water does not flow to an ocean that he called the Great Basin.

            One of my favorite pages of Poking Around is inspired by the cracks in the crust of the alkaline lake. Because PLAYA attracts residents who speak science as well as art, I now understand that the polygonal patterning is tensegrity, a structural term coined by Buckminster Fuller and an efficient way in nature or in building to control compression.

            In the video, Tilcock and Thompson explain the design evolution possible working together at PLAYA. They have collaborated several times before but never in the same space and time. Tilcock’s workshop, with its 1940 Vandercook 219 proof press, is in Eugene. Thompson lives 120 miles away in Portland. Only a few steps separated their PLAYA studios, so it was exhilarating for them to bounce back and forth as they blended art and type (Gill Sans for the text and Castellar for display). As Tilcock notes, Thompson’s drawing of the cracks “almost tickles the type.”         

            The book will debut Thursday, Oct. 22 [2016] with a reading by Moore hosted by PLAYA and Laura Russo Gallery 805 NW 21^St Ave. in Portland. RSVP to [email protected] for the 6-9 p.m. event.The original drawings and book will also be on display Oct. 20-Dec. 30 at the John Wilson Special Collections at Multnomah County Library at 801 SW 10^th Ave. Portland. Poking Around will be available at lonegoosepress.com beginning Nov. 1.

Catherine Woodard helped return Poetry in Motion to NYC’s subways and is on the board of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in CNN online, Painted Bride Quarterly, RHINO and other publications. She is a former journalist who lives and plays basketball in NYC. 

from the archive; first posted October 17, 2016

Three Amateur Poems [by Lewis Saul, Rachel Saul and Jordan Schifino]

MEMO FROM THE BIG G

Dear Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot crowd:

Your tin-foil hats are melting
My glaciers
And dripping down your
Collective Consciousness
Raising hell with my hosts

You're mucking around in the mud
And I'm thinking about breaking my promise
To Noah
And bringing about a flood
A Hallelujah-type event that only

Four people will survive ...
Malala and Greta, for sure; I'm still trying to decide on

The other two

Sincerely,

God (malevolent)

-- by Lewis Saul

***

SYSTEMS
of
a
down

All about hierarchy
up down and all around

If we all just took a minute
or two
or sixty

to breathe

to get out of our heads and into our bodies

We would be healthier!

Pandemic free perhaps

Coincidence or puppetry

are as real as the

systems we made up

We need to break free
From the chains of duality

-- Rachel Saul (my daughter)

***

Scrollin'

Swipe 'n scroll
It used to be rock 'n roll
Scrolls of sacred text
Trolls of each sex
Silently doing their bidding
God forbid we show our face
This anonymous world
Ever connected
Severed from reality
The forces in life
Media and the like
Manipulating us for themselves
Man, what a world
A world against itself
A world lost in mindless scrolls
Empty scrolls
Empty yourself of emptiness
Be full of yourself
Be yourself
And Be
For you
And me

-- Jordan Schifino (my son-in-law)

Marsh Hawk Press Presents: Joanne Dominique Dwyer and David Lehman, Wed. Oct. 26, 2022

Marsh Hawk Press Presents: Joanne Dominique Dwyer and David Lehman Wednesday, October 26, 2022 6:00 - 8:00 pm at Parkside Lounge 317 E Houston St, New York, NY 10002

“Joanne Dominique Dwyer is an exceptionally talented poet, whose mind in motion on every page in Rasa gives pleasure. She writes that “Intimacy means profoundly interior / countless sets of keys and cryptic codes.” The book is intimate in this special sense.".—David Lehman, Judge of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize       David Lehman's new books include One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir (Cornell University Press) and Playlist: A Poem (Pittsburgh). He is the Editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Series Editor, The Best American Poetry

It's Round About Midnight and Happy Birthday to You, Thelonious Monk

"Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy."  T.M.

-- sdh

 

Elisa Gabbert: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Adalena Kavanagh

_________________________________________________

Bright & Distant Objects

 

I read a headline that said, “Human hair behind pigeons’ lost toes, study finds.”

I thought it meant that pigeons were growing human hair. . . behind their toes, their lost toes?

I felt sick with fear.

I read a headline that said, “Just thinking about bright objects changes the size of your pupils.”

So how do we know that we’re actually experiencing anything?

How do we know that we’re not just thinking about objects, bright and distant? Concepts? The future?

What do we know of “the actual”?

If you think about greyhounds, your pulse rate goes down.

I am thinking about 16 Psyche, a metallic asteroid so massive it exerts gravitational disturbances on other asteroids.

Some speculate it’s composed of gold and platinum, which would make it worth “quintillion dollars,” or billions of times all the money on Earth.

In these terms everything in the universe is money, a concept humans made up, like emotions.

In the future, objects in the universe will be so far apart that distant civilizations could never discover each other, even theoretically.

They could not even think about each other.

Sometimes, during a period of dread, I momentarily forget the thing I’m dreading, but continue to feel the dread.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m about to remember something, but the memory never arrives—just the all-consuming feeling of about to.

Or the memory has arrived, but it’s a memory of nothing, with nothing to be about.

The feeling of pure, empty remembering.

If things are just themselves, what do we know of things?

The moon? Clouds? Herons?

Are they decorative objects?

Details on the surface of the actual?

What is a human skull worth—really, what is the cost?

I want to purchase a human skull.

I want to know what happens to desire when you’re dead—should your desires be respected?

You can have your ashes embedded in a record, so your survivors can listen to your death.

You can turn all the carbon in your body into artificial diamonds—you can want that.

My friend the undertaker wanted to be turned into a diamond, then embedded in his own skull, a decorative object.

An undertaker takes the body under, a coincidence of language. (It’s just a euphemism: an undertaking.)

What you wanted, once you’re dead, is the real without feeling.

Desires with no one to want them.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Elisa Gabbert is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Normal Distance (out from Soft Skull in September 2022) and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays (FSG, 2020), a New York Times Editors' Pick and finalist for the Colorado Book Award. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared recently in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Believer.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                         Jacques-Laurent Agasse (1767- -1849), Nine Greyhounds in a Landscape, oil on canvas, ca. 1807

 

The Cartel Acadamy [by Armin Rosen]

<<<
One key difference between now and the 1920s, when the last largescale movement to exclude Jews from American campus life happened, is that Jews now lead and hold prestigious tenured chairs at major American universities, which host entire academic departments devoted to Jewish life and learning. That thousands of Jewish faculty and administrators, as individuals and as scholars, have allowed this resurgence of academic scapegoating and exclusion of Jews from campus life to happen with only occassional bursts of dissent is striking, at least to anyone who doesn’t spend their life on campus.

The institutional world’s hesitation to examine or even acknowledge its antisemitism problem points to a larger academywide fear of confronting institutional sins of the type that have little to do with Harvard’s or Yale’s involvement in the slave trade 200 years ago. Today’s universities are content with being unaffordable behemoths and lifestyle brands for the same reason they remain uninterested in the antisemitism they have historically practiced and indulged. The academy’s flaws, and the literal and figurative costs they arrogantly impose on the rest of American society, fall outside the purview of institutions that are rushing to add thousands of administrators who are supposedly dedicated to making the world a more tolerant and equitable place. In truth, the goal of these universities in a moment of disorienting and unpredictable social and political change is to protect their cartel from the scrutiny it has earned through its glaring inability to productively educate millions of students, and its determination to saddle ordinary taxpayers with the cost of its failures.

-- Armin Rosen from Tablet, October 3, 2022); reporting that "The Anti-Defamation League’s annual nationwide audit of antisemitic incidents for 2021 reported an all-time record since the audit was first conducted in 1979. Incidents increased 34% overall year over year, with assaults spiking 167%, and harassment rising 41%. Sure enough, antisemitic incidents on college campuses rose by 21%." Diversity remains an ideal if in name only. "A remarkably diverse coalition of student groups at the University of California law school at Berkeley, including the Women of Berkeley Law, Law Students of African Descent, and the Queer Caucus, updated their bylaws to ban the invitation of any speaker supportive of 'Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.' This would bar 85% or so of American Jews from speaking at these groups’ events, including Berkeley Law’s own dean, the distinguished legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky."

The triumph of deconstruction as a method is the equation of Zionism with its antithesis.

We are all Zionists now. -- W.C.

In the new "Southern Review": Poems by Terence Winch

Fallen World 

You never cry anymore. The trees don’t make
you weep. The baseball season has almost
gone missing, but you aren’t really concerned.
You can’t go anywhere. There is a world of free
love, grocery stores, off-track betting shops,
and farmers markets. But that world has
slipped into another dimension, like when
you hang a jacket you got as a kid in your
closet and it turns into an old man’s
three-piece suit a half century later.

I am an absentee voter. I am an absentee
drunk. I assault my senses on a daily basis,
but nothing can open up the sky
again for me and you, no one can tell
us we are free to go. We get carry-out.
We get lonely and scared. No one can
open up the past and let it flow right
into the present the way it’s always
done before. Instead, it’s stuck back there
in the good old days. I blow a kiss to
the priests and rabbis, I genuflect to
the babies and bathing beauties. We will
see you soon, I hope, when the trees
remember the names of every fallen leaf.

-- Terence Winch

Two other poems by Terence Winch appear in the journal's Autumn 2022 issue (edited by Jessica Faust). The issue also includes a translation of Friedrich Hölderlin's magnifcent "Bread and Wine,"  which begins with this stanza:

The city’s asleep; on streets lit by lamplight,
      Carriages glide stealthily, with torches ablaze.
Men return from work, reflect on the day’s doings --
      Who’s in, who’s out, who’s leading, who’s losing --
Happy to be home; gone are the grapes and flowers
      Of the midday market; the craftsmen’s work is done;
But from distant gardens comes the sound of strings;
      Perhaps lovers are at play, or a man alone dreams
Of friends in distant places, or his own boyhood. Fresh
      Water flows freely and bathes the fragrant flower beds.
In the dimming light of evening, bells ring
      And the dutiful watchman calls out the hours.
Now wafts a breeze that touches the crest of the grove --
      And look! The shadow of our earth, the moon,
Rises without fanfare; the phantoms of the night come,
          The sky full of stars indifferent to human kind,
The astounding glow of night, a stranger among us,
          High over mountain peaks, with sad glamour.  

Ron Charles in the Washington Post on BAP 2022

<<<
Want to read more contemporary poetry but don’t know where to begin? For expert curation and variety, you can’t do better than “The Best American Poetry 2022,” edited this year by Matthew Zapruder. These 75 poems are arranged alphabetically from Aria Aber to Jenny Zhang, including Terrance Hayes, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Diane Seuss, Ada Limón and others I recognize and many I don’t. (One obvious omission is Zapruder himself [pictured left], but series editor David Lehman singles out one of his great poems in the foreword.)

Zapruder strikes just the right note in his introduction. “If you are reading this and don’t read much poetry, or feel uncertain in relation to it, you are more than welcome here,” he writes. “Please know that I chose these poems thinking of you. I, too, feel uncertain, unsure of what poetry is for, especially during eerie, frightening, and confusing times.” 

He finds encouragement — and motivation — in fine writing. “A hope that starts out as a tentative, inchoate feeling can, in a poem, be dreamed forth, envisioned as a concrete possibility; only then, when we start to imagine how things could change, can we begin to act to make it so,” he writes. “Poems remind us that, at our core, we share something deep.
>>>

-- Ron Charles, Washington Post
(Ooctober 7, 2022)

from "Duke Rhino," a work in progress [by Mitch Sisskind]

   

This was the first day of a new school year. I would be starting
seventh grade. My mother and I were in the breakfast nook.
The Chicago Tribune was on the table with two pictures on the
front page. One picture showed National Guard soldiers in Arkansas,
where the governor was trying to stop Negro kids from entering
the high school. I was familiar with that story. 
    There was also a picture of a blonde woman laughing, an actress
or some celebrity. I could read her name upside down.
    I asked, “Who’s Marilyn Monroe?” 
    “The most beautiful woman in the world.” 
    “Who’s the smartest man in the world?”
    “Albert Einstein.”
    “Who’s the strongest man in the world?”
    “Rocky Marciano.”
    “Which was the greater civilization, Egypt or Rome?”
    “What do you think?” 
    “Egypt.” 
    My father came into the breakfast nook and said good morning.
He gave my mother a kiss and went through the swinging door
into the dining room. I had already squeezed the orange juice so
my mother poured two glasses, one for my father and one for me,
and I brought them into the dining room. 
    On weekdays during the school year my father liked us to have
breakfast together, starting with orange juice. But my mother had
an attack during the night so she went to lie down, and it was just
my father and I at the table. When my mother had an attack, even
a bad one, we didn’t talk about it the next morning. We didn’t ever
talk about it. Soon we heard the door in the kitchen open as
Catherine arrived and started making French toast.

                                                ***

    I was five years old when we moved into the apartment. There
were three carpeted bedrooms with high ceilings, four bathrooms,
a foyer, a dining room, a living room, a room we called the library,
a kitchen, the breakfast nook which used to be called the butler’s
pantry, and a long hall where I played football and bombardment
with my cousin Victor. 
    There were three televisions in the apartment, one in the living
room, one in my father’s bedroom, and one in the library. They
were like living things, each with its own personality and its own
job to do. Because the color television was in the library, the
library was the most important room in the apartment. 
    When we moved into the apartment my mother had a plan to
combine what was called the maid’s room with another room in
order to create the library. When the work was done, the library
had dark green carpeting, wood-paneled walls, and a special
ceiling for indirect lighting designed by Albert Arenberg. Albert
Arenberg had photographs taken that were published in a
magazine for interior decorators.
    The two main pieces of furniture in the library were the driftwood
table and the color television. The driftwood table was a curved
piece of glass about five feet long on top of a large piece of gray
driftwood. There was always a small bowl of candy on the
driftwood table, usually chocolate covered cherries. 
    People commented on the driftwood table, how they had never
seen anything like it before. But the color television was by far the
most important piece of furniture in the library. It was massive, you
could sense the weight of it, and the screen diagonal was twenty-
seven inches. The color didn’t really work, people’s faces were
orange or green, but you could adjust the settings so it turned
into a regular black and white television. That’s usually what we
did. But it was still a color television. 
    My father’s favorite leather chair and its ottoman were across the
room facing the color television. To the left of the chair was a small
end table with an ashtray, and beyond the end table was the card
table with four leather chairs where pinochle was played on Saturday
afternoons, Monday nights, and sometimes on Sundays. There
were also two large sofas in the library and another leather chair
with another end table where my father kept his cigars in a special
wooden box called the humidor. There were no books in the library
except the TV Guide.

                                                       ***

    I went to a private elementary school called the Harris School. When
my father was in the Jewish Orphans Home he had school every day
of the year and he got an excellent education. He gave me a medal for
physics that he won in the year 1904. He wanted me to go to a good
school and a hard school, although my grades weren’t important to him
as long as I passed. He didn’t think the public schools were good enough
and he thought most of the private schools were too easy. 
    There were very few students at the Harris School. In my class there
were only nine kids, seven boys and two girls. Most of the kids at the
school were smart, but not all of them. Most of them were peculiar,
but not all of them. 
    Boys’ uniforms at Harris School consisted of a blue blazer with a
gold Harris School crest embroidered on the pocket, a white shirt,
a black knit tie, gray woolen pants that felt horrible if the weather
was warm, and black lace-up shoes. Girls wore red blazers with
the Harris School crest on the pocket and dark blue skirts. All the
girls wore white Keds gym shoes and white socks although that
was not part of the official uniform. In second grade at the Harris
School all the boys started carrying brief cases but none of the girls did. 
    My father taught me how to tie a Windsor knot. I was the only kid at
the Harris School who could do that, not that anyone noticed. As I tied
the Windsor knot while looking in my bathroom mirror, I wished that I
was more excited about starting seventh grade. It was frightening when
my mother had an attack like she had the night before. The blue room
was right next door and the walls were thick but I could hear her
screaming. It always happened at night and it was forgotten in the
morning. Maybe it wasn’t forgotten but we never talked about it. 

                                                  ***

    My cousin Victor went the public school called Lemoyne which
was like a different planet from the Harris School. There were no
uniforms at Lemoyne. Tough kids went there. If two kids got in an
argument during the week they would say, “I’ll see you on Saturday.”
That meant they would meet in the schoolyard where fights took place. 
    There were fights between two boys or two girls or even between
boys and girls. Sizes or ages didn’t matter, anybody could fight anybody
else. Sometimes the fights were really bad with blood and even teeth
getting knocked out. Victor and I watched a few times and then we
stopped going.
    One summer when I went to day camp my father paid for Victor to go
also. He won the boxing championship of the camp but it wasn’t like he
was actually fighting. Victor was never in a fight. I certainly never had a
fight with him, not even after he burned my arm with the cigarette lighter
in the back seat of the car. Once when I knew I was going to sneeze I
waited until the last second and then sneezed right in Victor’s face.
He didn’t get mad. In fact we both laughed about it. 

The Many Generations of the Versatile Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson, England's first poet laureate, wrote great poems conjoining wit and powerful feeling. Consider "My Picture Left in Scotland") about which I have written a short essay, which you will find here).  His poetry, his plays. his great influence have overcome its one-time state of being universally admired and universally ignored, as T. S. Eliot wrote a hundred years ago. He is a great poet and I should do a little column on his elegy for his son, "child of my right hand, and joy." Ben and the son who predeceased him had the same first name. Benjamin, in Hebrew, means "son of my right hand."

Of all the poets born on June 11th, Ben Jonson is unquestionably the most accomplished. An astrological proifile of this Gemini all-star is long overdue.

Less well known is that avatars of Ben continue to perform in important and unexpected ways in our culture. Many of them have added an aitch to their last name perhaps to honor their forerunner or to bless Ha-shem.

In The Wild Bunch, for example, Ben Johnson was Warren Oates's brother. 

Now (according to the September 2022 issue of Kiplinger's) Ben Johnson is head of global ETF research at Morningside, the financial data firm, and he has this to say to nervous investors: Worry "is part of the price of admission. If it's too hard to watch, then step out and look at the trees, which at this time of year are mostly green, unlike the markets."  Note the simile's elegant allusion to Ben Jonson's book Timber, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter (1641).

PS. On a separate but related note from the department of onomastics, a double of the late Philip Levine is the former mayor of Miami.

-- DL

Note: Under the title "Ben Jonson tells investors to face the music," we aired this post on August 10, 2022 but a glitch made it unintelligible to readers, so here it is with a new title and a new postscript. It is also worth noting that Philip Larkin is the corpse in an early Perry Mason (1958 or '59) and that yoiu'll meet Jim Tate and Bill Mathews in high-grade noir fiction of the 1950s.

Breaking, ballrooming, tumbling, poésie: is dance sport? [by Tracy Danison]

Daily life is getting back to… dance… sport … art ... life. Collectif de danse Move And Art. Photo © Sarah Meunier

October already!

Daily life has definitely been regaining substance.

Neighbor photographer Sarah Meunier has turned her lens back to life in public, especially to our newer, neighbors.

From the bright and shiny evidence, some of these youngest sweetest neighbors, at least, must have only just learned their break, just when it became an Olympic sport.

But break stays dance, right? Just like ballroom dancing – “dancesport”?

Dance as sport. How can that happen?

Though I’m sure tourist-board marketing geniuses have been toying with the pairing since France got the 2024 games, I only touched on the topic just before the Covid lockdowns, with Christina Towle, the programmer at Regard du Cygne. At the time, Christina was putting together her Bounce Back, a choreography for four that mixes contemporary dance, basketball and electronic music.

I went back to Christina, who is now working on a new sport-dance choreography around the 400-meter relay tentatively titled Près feu (“Ready, set”), and asked about the relationship of sport with dance. She was fairly definitive.

Collectif de danse Move And Art. Photo © Sarah Meunier

Sport is strictly-coded choreography, she says, adding that movement analysis bears her out on the choreography part of the equation. The strict coding - there are moves you always must and always must not do in sequence to achieve certain results - which generally allows scoring by points, also sets sport apart.

There are athletes that use the strict coding to go beyond “sport” and become dancers. Christina cites Muhammad Ali, reminding me that the greatest boxer of all time described his boxing method as “float(ing) like a butterfly, stinging like a bee”, and consistently referred to himself as a dancer. The video evidence and my own memory suggest Christine isn’t wrong.

Christina’s experiments in bringing out the dance in sport apart, for me, anyway, the theme of “sport” + “dance” has been floating around only since late Spring, when Carreau du Temple hosted a Festival Jogging. Part of the city’s “Formes Olympiques” program to drum up interest in the 2024 games, Jogging, which picked up again as Atelier de Paris’“Dansez sport!” in early September, featured quality choreographers and performance such as Valeria Giuga & Anne-James Chaton’s Coaching, Marine Colard’s Le Tir Sacré and Alban Richard’s Vivace.

Roughly, but close enough, Coaching and Le Tir Sacré treat shared sport-dance themes of unity of body and mind, elegance & perfection, as well as surrounding language or rhetoric. Alban Richard’s Vivace sews an incredible variety of dance intentions and styles into a vivacious 35-minute relay race.

“Dansez sport!” had a family-oriented pedagogical complement, highlighting in-practice links between sport and dance, offering, among many other beguiling workshops, a “Krumpfest back to school de Wrestler Danse”, complete with battle. Krump is a particularly expressive form of break dance: very apt to make one think about the sense and sensibilities of its performers. Also on offer: classes on break-dance footwork, table tennis, roller and blade skating and sports commentary. 2024 Olympic visitors might do well to look at dance activities at Carreau du Temple and Atelier de Paris, as well as other dance-venues, to liven up and deepen their experience.

Collectif de danse Move And Art. Photo © Sarah Meunier

Since he took up the directorship of the National Dance Theater at the Palais de Chaillot just a few years back, Rachid Ouramdane has been playing with the dance + sport/athletics theme, especially through his work with the 19-member cie XY circus troupe. Cie XY is, perhaps, an expression of Ouramdane’s looking to blaze a trail, as he told the webzine Danses avec la plume, towards “diversity within a common culture” - e pluribus unum, as the US dollar puts it.

Karine and I saw Cie XY’s Möbius in early September. The show was first of all a demonstration of very intense, carefully choreographed, up-close and physical interaction. From the beginning, a seeming casual confidence in which truly remarkable feats were executed highlighted the individual responsibility of each performer to the rest as well as to the whole troupe. Real physical contrasts among performers and an obvious distribution of roles by tested capacity and choreographic goal rather than by gender or even size and other “visible criteria” – catching a body that has casually leapt 20 feet in the air takes more than will, after all, even if the catcher doesn’t have to be male, 7-foot high –  drove home this reified interdependence. Think of Möbius as a perfection in which proprioception, empathy and compassion have replaced common sense, morality and reason.

Karine and I both saw dance in it. But a pair, at least, of our fellow spectators, felt Möbius remained sport, saying dance is a story the performers tell about themselves while sport is a test of the human body. For them, while the performers did tell their story, the performance lacked “poésie” – that quality of going beyond itself, the “self-transcendence” where Christine Towle sees sport becoming dance. Karine agrees but claims that the perfection of cie XY’s movement together by itself created dance. Insufficiency in the self-story and poésie, she says, is the responsibility of the choreographer, adding that the same disconnect of performance-movement and choreography-performance happens in Swan Lake – “dance dance”.

So, I think I’ve identified about seven ways of approaching the couple “dance + sport”. Sport becomes dance by surpassing itself; sport is a form of dance; dance is a form of sport; dance and sport are part of a larger art of movement; movement is dance, whatever you call it. As to my own idea, for the moment, I have decided that while dance cannot be competitive, sport must be. I’m with my fellow Möbius spectators: the goals make dance and sport chalk and cheese. It’s intention and perception that make them different and physics that makes them alike.

Mary Gilliland, Guest Author

This month we welcome Mary Gilliland as our guest author. Mary is author of The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (2020). Her poems are widely published in print and online literary journals and most recently anthologized in Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice; Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose; and Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms In Our Hands. Her new award-winning poetry collection The Devil’s Fools is out from Codhill Press on November 1. Find out more about Mary here. Follow her on twitter here. 

 

 

Welcome, Mary. 

-- sdl

In Praise of Bruno (1983)

Two redheads having a much-needed snooze in Ludlowville (July 1983).

Steady My Laden Head [by Mary Gilliland]

The hours don’t count, I don’t count the hours. This is not a task but an activity. Unassigned. A practically involuntary part of the day, sowing itself in my unconscious during times I might not be physically involved. I’m winging it, without formal education. It looks like I have chosen to engage, but really the chooser was something larger that said Do.

What is done is admired by walkers on the South Hill Recreation Way, both people I have met before, and people I will never know. A couple with their dog stopped along the trail while I was weeding not far away, uphill: “When we see these flowers, every year, we know that spring’s really here!” This was during the era of my corralling Garlic Mustard by—every autumn—laying down Dame’s Rocket seedheads on areas among the trees where I’d weeded out G-M. Yes, “like a gleaner [I did] keep/steady my laden head across a brook”—the freshet, that is,
behind our shed, that by this time of year is a dry streambed. My strategy was to replace the invasive with a secondary invasive, one that blooms more prettily and at first glance looks like phlox. A place holder.

The scent of hesperis matronalis rises in the evening. The flowers bloom pink, mauve, white, purple and, sometimes, an eye-catching white streaked with one of the other hues, or vice versa. Those I would mentally note to let stand through the frost. The seeds matured, then I deliberately scattered them in new areas in order to multiply the striated enchantment. Which, last year, I discovered is caused not by genes but by a virus. Was it nature or culture that brought me the next-door neighbor whose PhD research focused on plant-virus interactions? Lizzie studied host and pathogen as they co-evolved; my brassica species, Dame’s Rocket, hosts turnip mosaic virus—resulting in variegated color in the flowers.

Turning the rocky hillside acre into a garden began with an earlier next-door neighbor’s retirement. He was of the tribe who trim every blade of grass to the same length, edge the sidewalk and allow no chipped paint on trim or siding.“Mary,” he asked after once more perfecting his holdings, “would you mind if I took some of those privet bushes out of your woods?” When purchased, our house had been closed in by invasive privet and Japanese honeysuckle, up to every door. By the time Walt posed his question, there was some green lawn, my husband’s joy. I imagined the clearance would lead to lovely walks in our very own wood after a day of teaching. But the cleared land was, next spring, thickly carpeted with a mystery plant. Helped by a few students, I pulled them all out. They returned. Pull. Return. And again. GarlicMustard had just begun its inexorable march across the Lower Forty-eight.

Hence the mass plantings: of deer-proof perennials that spread. Not so many rocket now, but cowslips, hellebore, brunnera, primrose varieties (including
Wanda!), pulmonaria, trachystemon, comfrey, andcetera, follow spring’s explosion of flowering bulbs, ephemeral pink corydalis, Virginia bluebells.

I garden at the end of a one-block cul de sac. This area bordering the woods is classified on the municipal maps as vacant land. Yes, it’s poetry.

                                                                                ——MG, 5 October 2022

Yom Kippur, Grand Concourse, Bronx, 1948 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Renee and Huy Harwood, my parents, eager to end the Yom Kippur fast.

-- sdl

Wednesdays with Denise [by Denise Duhamel]

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE
October 5, 2022

Sharon Olds’ latest book BALLADZ was published yesterday. It is a tour de force of mature, startling, haunting poems that reach over time from the speaker’s childhood to the recent pandemic, from first loves to present day romance and loss, concluding with a series of wise, powerful elegies. The book also plays homage to poetic lineage, most notably a suite of poems in conversation with Emily Dickinson. Olds also acknowledges a slew of poetry friendships and their sustaining power. Here is just one example in which she writes a poem “like a mate for Galway’s ‘Bear.’”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/a-song-near-the-end-of-the-world

And here is the late Galway Kinnell’s poem:
https://poets.org/poem/bear

Congratulations, Sharon!

In the photo above, Sharon Olds (right), David Lehman (center), and Gerald Stern (left) prior to the "Best American Poetry" launch reading of 2010. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Six): Clarence Major [by Angela Ball]

Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving

                                                                   --based on an old photograph bought in a shop at Half Moon Bay, summer, 1999
No sound, the whole thing.
Unknown folk. People waving from a hillside of ripple grass
to people below in an ongoing meadow.

Side rows of trees waving in a tide of wind,
and because what is moving is not moving,
you catch a state of stasis.

Opposite of this inactivity
you imagine distant music and buzzing and crickets
and that special hot smell of summer.

To the garden past the Bay to the meadow,
cliff sheltered with low clouds, offset by nodding thistle.
Tatter-wort and Stinking Tommy along footpath
worn down by locals. But who and why?

In the photograph itself you’re now looking the other way
to unknown clusters of houses.
Where forces are balanced to near perfection.

Who could live
in such a great swollen silence and solitude?
You hear church bells
from Our Lady’s Tears breaking that silence nicely
but just in the right way so silence continues
as though nothing else matters day after day.

And anyway, each face seems so familiar.

What do you do when you wave back?
You wave vigorously.
You remember your own meadow,
your cliffside and town,
photographs forgotten,
the halfhearted motion of your hand,
your grandmother’s church-folk
gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness.

You name the people
whose names are not written on the back.
You forgive them for wrapping themselves in silence.

You enter house after house and open top-floor windows
and you wave down to future generations like this.

--Clarence Major

From CONFIGURATIONS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. Copyright © 1998 by Clarence Major. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Source: Waiting for Sweet Betty (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

The old photograph got my attention right away and stirred my imagination. Who were these people? Who were they waving to? What were their lives like? Where are they? What is their history, their future? Sometimes old photos—and I used to look through a lot of them in street bins in France—evoke so much. --Clarence Major

CLARENCE MAJOR is a novelist, poet and painter. His novels include Dirty Bird Blues (a Penguin Classic), Such Was the Season, a Literary Guild selection; My Amputations, winner of the Western States Book Award; Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year; and One Flesh. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Harvard Review, and dozens of other periodicals. He is the author of sixteen collections of poetry. A Fulbright scholar, Major won a National Book Award Bronze Medal, the Western States Book Award for fiction, a National Council on The Arts Award; in 2015 he won a “Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Fine Arts” from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and in 2016 a PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett “Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature.” He was elected to The Georgia State Writers Fall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth century American literature at the University of California at Davis.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Six): Clarence Major

Clarence Major’s “Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving” is an ekphrastic of the unnamed, named. Which is to say it speaks to and for its subject. Major, himself painter as well as poet, is a maestro of relations between art and life, experience and memory, motion and stillness. It is fitting that the poet found the photograph at a store at the mysterious-sounding “Half-Moon Bay.” A bay is a stasis, a peacefulness—it is the sea’s Sunday.

The poem starts by removing sound, since a photograph is silent, and this one particularly so—so it can surprise us later. The poem is not just visual, but kinesthetic. It moves us, not just emotionally, but spatially.

The first motion is of the anonymous hands, whose undulations translate into “ripple grass,” to an “ongoing meadow,” to “side rows of trees waving in a tide of wind,” "and because what is moving is not moving / you catch a state of stasis.” The “you” makes us spectators of the photograph, puts us under its spell.  And, since opposites invite one another, “you imagine distant music and buzzing and crickets / and that special hot smell of summer.” How effective, that leap of smell, how it penetrates.

The poem continues its waves of description, “to the garden past the Bay to the meadow / cliff sheltered by low clouds, offset by nodding thistle,” its rhythms lifting and dipping, to the pungent surprise of the “common” names “Tatter-wort” and “Stinking Tommy,” plants that become personages “along footpath worn down by locals. But who and why?”

And then, we may feel, we suddenly enter this domain of strangers—“you’re now looking the other way / to unknown clusters of houses.” What a fine précis of architecture, “where forces are balanced / near perfection,” but also of the poem, its rolling descent of the page.

Just as we wonder at the lives of those within the “great swollen silence and solitude,” we hear: “church bells” from the wonderfully-named “Our Lady’s Tears,” each bell a tear made audible, each bell inviting silence, “as though nothing else matters day after day.” Isn’t silence the essence of church, and bells its handmaidens?

Then a wonderfully casual one-line stanza, “And anyway, each face seems so familiar.”Just like that, we have moved from contemplating anonymity to feeling at home:

     What do you do when you wave back?

     You wave vigorously.

     You remember your own meadow,

     your cliffside and town,

     photographs forgotten,

     the halfhearted motion of your hand,

     your grandmother’s church-folk

     gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness.

At one stroke the people are real to us, our familiars, forgiven their aloofness—and our own past forgiven its lost photographs, our half-gift of a reluctant wave; all of this blessed by the “saintly quietness” of “your grandmother’s church-folk,” a vanished generation:

      You name the people

      whose names are not written on the back.

      You forgive them for wrapping themselves in silence.       

Clarence Major’s bravura “Photograph of a Gathering of People Waving,” itself a wave, ends in a cascade of wonders. Finally, we access the soi-disant cliffside mansions to “to open their top-floor windows, . . .and wave down to future generations like this”—the casual, masterful “like this” both describing our own waves—for we are now waving—and making us at home inside the photograph, its life and art.

--Angela Ball

Grace Cavalieri's Milestone Birthday [Terence Winch]

Happy 90th birthday to the extraordinary & indefatigable Grace Cavalieri, an inspiration to all who know her. Poet, playwright, painter, and long-time host of “The Poet and the Poem” interview program from the Library of Congress, Grace deserves all the love she asks for.

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This Poem Is Asking for Your Love

This poem is not usually like this
I don’t know what came over it
It’s mostly violet under the sun
with a large yellow parasol and a pond
with a center that never freezes
I swear I had no idea
I’m so used to trees of hearts and
cherries within its branches
I can’t imagine
what woke this poem up
with a truth I never wanted
It called out the tower window and said
I was alone
That in itself is a morbid lie
I have long shadows in Autumn and clouds
anytime there is a sky
In fact everything was going so well until
this poem wanted to undress me
and bring back my love
and hold me close and rub
my forehead when I had fever
It had no idea what trouble could come
from this so I wrote it
then I ran from it
now I can erase it
to show I never needed it after all
because don’t you know, Poem,
if you have to ask for something
it’s no gift.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                                Autobiography, mixed media, by Grace Cavalieri

Jack Skelley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Skelley, photo by Gary Leonard

______________________________________________________

Green Goddess

 

Who made the salad

Whose tangy vinegar made me wince

Who played pouty Venus to my impudent Caesar

Who taught me to renounce meat

Who flowed forth lubricants

Who performed dark sacraments

Whose tart shrub tangled my tongue

Who with unctuous poses oiled me

Who received my verdant sacrifice

Who, as I reclined panting, poured herself into her dressing

Who lured me to the garden and dragged me into deep greens

Who instructed me on the use of the proper fork

Who inserted an oblong cucumber

Who shredded slender carrot sticks

Whose burning bush consumed the sky god’s timbers, shaking his heavens to the rafters

Who roused me in damp chambers, dousing reasonable fires to consume knowledge raw

Who at the crack of the vernal equinox, broke seasoned bread into bite-sized croutons

Who parted beet-red vestments

Who swelled my painted cave-beast proud and pregnant

Who put me in the red-pepper pink

Whose celestial power I would enviously drink

Who succored me when I lay pallid

Who made the salad

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jack’s Skelley’s “Green Goddess” appears in his latest collection, Interstellar Theme Park: New and  Selected Writing (BlazeVOX books). Other books include: Monsters (Little Caesar Press), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred &amp; Barney Press), and Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), spring 2023). He is also songwriter and guitarist for psychedelic surf band Lawndale which just released a new album, Twango.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    “Product Placement”—one of nine collages by Erin Alexander for Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing by Jack Skelley.

Quote of the Day: Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz (1903-1989)

Born on this day, 1903, in Kyiv, Ukraine.

“Always there should be a little mistake here and there - I am for it. The people who don't do mistakes are cold like ice. It takes risk to make a mistake. If you don't take risk, you are boring.”

 

-- sdl