The Best American Poetry

"Scarface Nation" [by Ken Tucker]

Highly recommended.

Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie by Ken Tucker (St. Martin’s Press)
Not merely the behind-the-scenes making of the 1983 De Palma/Pacino film (and the 1932 Howard Hawks/Paul Muni version), but also a critical analysis of how Scarface has influenced pop music, TV shows, YouTube videos, and political culture (see the chapter “President Scarface,” starring Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney, among others). "Insightul, intelligent, memorable, true." -- Lawrence Starling

"The Big Heat" [by John Harbourne]

The most dramatic moment in The Big Heat, a memorable Fritz Lang noir for the early 1950s, is when Gloria Grahame turns the tables on her tormentor, Lee Marvin, by emptying a pot of boiling coffee on his face. 

"Last Words" [by Mary Jo Salter]

LAST WORDS

by Mary Jo Salter

Forgive me for not writing sober,
I mean sooner, but I almost don’t
dare see what I write, I keep mating mistakes,
I mean making, and I’m wandering
if I’ve inherited what
my father’s got.

I first understood it when he tried
to introduce me to somebunny:
“This is my doctor,” he said,
then didn’t say more, “my daughter.”
The man kindly nodded
out the door.
I thought: is this dimension
what I’m headed for?

I mean dementia.|
Not Autheimer’s, but that kind he has,
possessive aphasia: oh that’s good,
I meant to say progressive.
Talk about euthanasia!
I mean euphemasia,
nice words inside your head not there,
and it’s not progress at all.

No, he’s up against the boil
after years now of a sad, slow wall
and he’s so hungry,
I mean angry.

Me too. I need to get my rhymes in
while I still mean.  I mean can.

from Zoom Rooms by Mary Jo Salter ( Knopf, 2022).

Poetry & jazz: Dana Gioia reads "Meet Me at the Lighthouse"

 

from "Julius Jaffe: The Poems" [by Mitch Sisskind]

Julius Jaffe and the Angel of Death

 

Julius Jaffe was carrying a large box of bricks.

The day was hot. Too exhausted to go on,

Julius Jaffe dropped the box and called on

The Angel of Death to rescue him from

This life. Instantly the Angel appeared

And said, "Can I be of service to you, sir?"

Now trembling in fear, Julius Jaffe said,

"No, but how do you like them Cubbies?"

This shows the foolishness of Julius Jaffe!

Parable & Paradox

When Mort Plotkin died Julius Jaffe said,

"Mort Plotkin was a great businessman

"Except he never made any money."

Julius Jaffe added, "He was in the

"Schmateh business except he was

"Never in the schmateh business."

Herman Fishman asked, "Can this be?"

Julius Jaffe answered, "Yes and no."

He added, "Maybe and maybe not."

Feh!

Julius Jaffe said, "I will marry Esther Tabachnik."

He went on, in the name of Rabbi Rabinowitz,

"A man alone in a room -- feh, feh, feh! --

"Lilith will tempt him in the midnight hour,

"But Esther Tabachnik's price is above rubies,

"Her husband's heart safely resides with her,

"Nor doth she tempt him in all her days."

Jess Rabin said, "Feh! I mean, congratulations."

My Goal is to go to Mongolia [by David Lehman]

All day yesterday I tried to write a song in the Cole Porter manner beginning "My goal is to go to Mongolia," but the melody of "Columbia, the gem of the ocean" kept getting in the way. Well, I'll see what I can come up with when I'm over there. It's flattering to know they're prepping for my visit, though the cyclones and quakes do seem somewhat excesssive.

Tomorrow Stacey and I fly to Beijing; we will visit that city and two others in China, giving readings and lectures, in the next week. Then comes a week in Mongolia, where I'm hoping to ride a camel and hang out with Mongolia's poet laureate, who has promised to teach me a Mongolian verse form. If I can manage to post from those outposts I will do so, and if not I'm sure we'll have lots to tell when we get back in early June.

My Goal Is to Go to Mongolia.

My goal
Is to go
To Mongolia.

In Mongolia
I shall know
The whole of ya.

“Let me seduce thee,”
Said he.
“Only if I be
The wlling accomplice
Of a kiss,”
Said she.

O let me kiss
Her and win her back,
And ride the back
Of a camel,
An ornery animal
With the smell
Of magnolia, 
In the desert
In Mongolia.

-- DL   from the archive; first posted May 15, 2008

François Gremaud & Samantha van Wissen’s “Giselle…”: A model classic [by Tracy Danison]

Samantha van Wissen. “Giselle… Comédie Ballet” by François Gremaud. Photo © Dorothée Thébert Filliger

Theater pieces always manage a “…triumph…” or a “… wonderful...” printed on the program. Could mean anything – “With thousands of slaves in tow, Julius Caesar brought his triumph to Rome…”; “It is wonderful, the persistence of the Ancien Régime …”

But quote me whole when I say of François Gremaud's and Samantha van Wissen’s Giselle… Comédie-Ballet that it gets inside the heads of today's and yesterday’s creators and spectators. Doing that, it touches at the heart of the famous classic Giselle, ou les Wilis: I listened with real interest and laughed at, too, what was effectively serious textual analysis and I gasped in spontaneous dismay when van Wissen-Giselle dropped dead. And that is certainly proof of wonderful performing inside a triumph of theatrical writing.

Giselle… Comédie-Ballet has the same plot as all the Giselles I’ve ever heard of – Act 1: disguised noble falls for peasant girl who dies tragically after learning truth; Act 2: dead peasant girl thwarts her own damnation and the vengeance of supernatural females called Wilis. Also, Gremaud  bases his Giselle…Comédie-Ballet on the script used for the Giselle, ou les Wilis première oof  28 June 1841 at the Paris Opéra by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Théophile Gautier.

Photo © Dorothée Thébert Filliger

Gremaud has modeled his Giselle… script as a palimpsest: you have to pay attention to warp, weft and splotches of the paper, not just the most recent print on it. At reading, the script shapes an indivisible, if pretty giddy, whole of parts.

Choreographer-performer Samantha van Wissen’s execution of Giselle… Comédie-Ballet is more than equal to the task of holding together the whole of Gremaud’s palimpsest, which includes bits of general history, social context, authorial intentions, writing, choreography, stagecraft, along with the points of view of historic observers and actors. into  Giselle… Comédie-Ballet.

Van Wissen uses a classic one-woman show format to turn the script into an amusing and instructive, even innovative, dance piece. 

Moving with that subtle, distinctly personal, body confidence of an accomplished dancer, van Wissen begins Giselle… by owning Giselle, ou les Wilis, the classic format, and Giselle, a character.  “Van Wissen”, she says, means “from Effacement” in Dutch, her native language. “Her” effacement alludes, she says, to one of the central issues raised by Giselle, ou les Wilis – which, one presumes, would include whether or not the effacement of Giselle is imposed or desired or self-imposed... Or just a literary intellectual’s will o’ the wisp.

Van Wissen goes on to demonstrate her ownership of the potential possible Giselles-Giselles through the piece, a significant pause here, a rising but always dulcet voice there for focus, but mainly letting spectators wander through, feeling they've decided questions and answers for themselves. 

Van Wissen dances: moves as she talks, talks as she moves.

Sometimes arch, sometimes not, she comments on topics as diverse as the historic association of pantomime and ballet, on librettist Théophile Gautier’s belief in the centrality of love, on the role of Bathilde, Giselle’s mom, or on the previous wild and European success of Italian Filippo Taglioni’s La Sylphide at the Paris Opéra, which, coincidentally, wink, wink, is chock full of hot but tragic and invisible gals, desirable, morally weak yet sentimental and well-set-up guys, betrayal, witchcraft, vengeance. The whole shtick of course flies about the woods in twilight.

Photo © Dorothée Thébert Filliger

Van Wissen demonstrates more than she says with hands and feet, pantomimes, mimes, dances, postures, figures, phrases…  Baulked lover, what a disguised noble as 19^th century ballet character looks like. Plays the leaping and twirling 15-year old Giselle, a dancing fool –  do you know, she has a weak heart? It’s a big worry for Bathilde.

For the spectator, Van Wissen’s dancer art brings all the comment and movement to a boil: showing Giselle, ou les Wilis creates Giselle… Comédie-Ballet. That’s that’s why I gasped at the mime of Giselle’s death. That’s why I and my partner walked out thinking of Giselle… Comédie-Ballet – as dance more than performance.

So, Gremaud's and van Wissen’s Giselle… is dance triumphant as well as well as literary or narrative art.

But I also think Giselle… Comédie-Ballet is pertinent to our times – by the thoroughness of its literary anatomy and in view of the needs of today’s spectators.

Remember van Wissen’s initial show-owning “effacement”? 

When all is said and danced, does the ultimate esthetic success of scripted Giselle, ou les Wilis turn on rubbing out the girl and/or the thrill of femmes fatales, or, like contemporary entertainment, are the words and clichés just a pandering mishmash of what some producers and mountebanks think attracts eyeballs?  Or is it a mix of its culture, commercial calculation and a desperate effort to talk about something universal and vitally important for human beings?

I come away from Gremaud and van Wissen’s Comédie-Ballet with the option of thinking it's the mix. At its heart, I'm with them, because it's clear that's what they think, too, "Giselle", as a concept, comes down to putting love, Love, capital L, on stage. In the end, it takes very little actual tweaking of Giselle, ou les Wilis to make that clear, too.

If the developer behind the Madame Butterfly I saw the other day had taken the care François Gremaud has taken with Giselle (…), I wouldn’t still be regretting the wasted 100 euros.  I wouldn’t be wondering about the state of mind of the opera’s creative developer, either.

Photo © Dorothée Thébert Filliger

Holy Cow! This Butterfly I saw was like stumbling into a screening of an irony-less Springtime for Hitler! Talk about bearing up under the White Man’s Burden. I can enjoy the pre-war works of novelist Louis Ferdinand Céline, a notorious racist and active anti-Semite. I can cite certain esthetic ideas of the social-climbing weasel Martin Heidegger, even knowing he was making love to Hannah Arendt even as he prepared to throw her, as well as his Jewish colleagues, under the Nazi bus. Still, there’s no way I can explain away that Madame Butterfly I saw that evening, in Germany, of all places.There’s just no rationalizing possible.

In the same vein, building on somebody’s graduate thesis about effaced “romantic heroines” and the long history of bootstrap-moralizing by rich American patrons and in the name of cleaning up historic misogyny, Akram Khan has recently managed to conjure Giselle, ou les Wilis as The Little Girl Who Could, switching the focus of the play from the sweet nebbish character of Giselle to the bracing message telling us that all a sillikins girl needs to do to undo eight thousand years of patriarchal oppression is show some dam' gumption.

I know the proverb about beggars, wishes and horses, but all the same, I am thinking now that if Khan had seen Gremaud’s Giselle… Comédie-Ballet, he might have considered using Gremaud's approach to controversial classics to do Madame Butterfly instead. Butterfly fits Khan’s esthetic mood better. More important, if Giselle, ou les Wilis turns around Love, capital L, Butterfly surely turns around Power, capital P. Imperial and patriarchal Power, to boot. There’s certainly room for a little female pushback in the opéra's narrative dynamics. Even a little American-style girl-gumption might actually do the trick! 

Let’s hope somebody produces Gremaud’s Giselle… Comédie-Ballet for international audiences – in English.

Beggars, mount up! Let’s especially hope that other aspiring classic controversy re-creators have a look at what Gremaud has achieved with his Giselle… Comédie-Ballet. 

“Giselle… Comédie Ballet” by François Gremaud was produced at the Théâtre de la Bastille with solo dance and performance by Samantha van Wissen with musical accompaniment by  Léa Al-Saghir or Anastasiia Lindeberg (violin), Tjasha Gafner or Antonella de Franco (harp), Héléna Macherel or Irène Poma (flute) and Sara Zazo Romero (saxophone). A printed libretto is available. I saw it on 6 January 2023. 

More Clerihews [with thanks to Rick Winston]

In 1995, Henry Rathvon and Emily Cox ran a clerihew challenge, and Rick Winston made a copy of the results:

<<<  ***Results of Clerihews in the News***

Mr. Rathvon and Ms. Cox
Don't fit any convenient box.
They push one to wax Ogden Nashish
For contests more addictive than hashish.

   Such is the opinion of contestant RPhill5136, whose views are expressed above in Clerihew style. The Clerihew, that odd little verse form invented 100 years ago by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, proved wonderfully fertile in a 1990s context. But it also proved quite challenging, as its staggered rhythms required an artful touch in order to elicit the proper funny-bone twang. Contestant Glemward mused:

Why choose
Clerihews?
How much sweeter
Are things that rhyme with the usual sort of meter!

   And VCRogers, reflecting on the havoc we word-gamers were wreaking, concluded:

E.C. Bentley
Did not go gently
Into that good night--
But after this, he might!

   Suffice it to say that your Clerihumor--from the subtle to the sledgehammer--gave us a lot of laughs. We'll conduct another of these Clerihew festivals in a future contest. Meanwhile our  favorite verses are listed below, topped by three jauntily witty winners. (Contestant Sean Med quipped, "Could the prize for this contest be considered a 'hew grant?") Each of our winners will receive 5 free AOL hours plus a book of his or her choice from the Atlantic's online bookstore. Congratulations Ravensegg, Cruciver, and JebMar!

***The Clerihew Winners***

General Shalikashvili--
Now, I ask you, really.
With a name like that
Shouldn't he wear a much bigger hat? (Ravensegg)

The Kennedys
Are used to having all of the amenities.
Their wealth's so great it even beggars
Schwarzenegger's. (Cruciver)

Peter McNeeley
Had a great deal. He
Fought Tyson from the deck and
Made thousands per second. (JebMar)

Five of the runners-up:

Dorothy Gish
Choked on a fish
At the cotillion
Embarrassing Lillian. (G8ly)

Henry Kissinger
Covets Kim Basinger.
If she were his frau
He'd be Kissinger now.  (G8ly)

Jean-Paul Sartre
Despised Descartes
Because of his insistence
On meaningful existence. (G8ly)

Warren Beatty
Loved to date, he
Fooled around with every girl he
Met except of course for Shirley. (StefSpad)

Elizabeth Taylor
Diets constantly so as to look frailer.
"Though I may at times be chubby,"
She says, "I'm never without a new hubby."  (Epithenas)

"Australia" by Ania Walwicz [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

In Ania Walwicz’s “Australia” we get a critique of the country through the eyes of an outsider. The poem’s diction (a vibrant, broken English), paired with the accuracy of complaints (“You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don’t excite me”) hints at an immigrant speaker who knows her subject well. The litany of grievances is elevated through the use of second-person pronouns, their intimacy giving the protestation a propulsive energy, with the “you” being addressed subtly morphing as the poem develops. We begin with complaints against Australia's too open landscape: “You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing,” followed by a shift to a more personal version of the pronoun, the “you” both an individual in and of themselves and an individual personifying the sentiments and attitudes of the nation-at-large: “You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don’t know how to be with me,” until we arrive at the speaker addressing you, the reader, and, perhaps, herself: “You go to work in the morning. You shiver on a tram.” The poem tracks the immigrant experience, from being a stranger in a new land to becoming immersed (if only with a measure of hostility) into the fabric of the country, becoming a constituent of the “you”—a part of Australia—herself.

 

 

Australia

 

You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me. Freckle silly children. You nothing much. With your big sea. Beach beach beach. I’ve seen enough already. You dumb dirty city with bar stools. You’re ugly. You silly shopping town. You copy. You too far everywhere. You laugh at me. When I came this woman gave me a box of biscuits. You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don’t know how to be with me. Road road tree tree. I came from crowded and many. I came from rich. You have nothing to offer. You’re poor and spread thin. You big. So what. I’m small. It’s what’s in. You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don’t excite me. You scare me with your hopeless. Asleep when you walk. Too hot to think. You big awful. You don’t match me. You burnt out. You too big sky. You make me a dot in the nowhere. You laugh with your big healthy. You want everyone to be the same. You’re dumb. You do like anybody else. You engaged Doreen. You big cow. You average average. Cold day at school playing around at lunchtime. Running around for nothing. You never accept me. For your own. You always ask me where I’m from. You always ask me. You tell me I look strange. Different. You don’t adopt me. You laugh at the way I speak. You think you’re better than me. You don’t like me. You don’t have any interest in another country. Idiot centre of your own self. You think the rest of the world walks around without shoes or electric light. You don’t go anywhere. You stay at home. You like one another. You go crazy on Saturday night. You get drunk. You don’t like me and you don’t like women. You put your arm around men in bars. You’re rough. I can’t speak to you. You burly burly. You’re just silly to me. You big man. Poor with all your money. You ugly furniture. You ugly house. You relaxed in your summer stupor. All year. Never fully awake. Dull at school. Wait for other people to tell you what to do. Follow the leader. Can’t imagine. Workhorse. Thick legs. You go to work in the morning. You shiver on a tram. 

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: JANUARY 18, 2023

Let’s all raise a glass to poet Rick Mulkey, whose ode exquisitely captures “the liquid mystery train / of peril and possibility.”  “Concerning Whiskey” was first published in MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature (January 2020.)

Concerning Whiskey

Potent, peaty, brine-filled dram

like the salt-washed rocks of sheltered bays;

like the turf fires beneath thatched roofs; like rain

falling hard and soot blackening the stone hearth;

like the venerable who curl into themselves

and wait for spring, old women, grown diaphanous,

who flutter like moths embalmed in their silver-haired cocoons,

aged, at last, into their ghostlier selves; like their men

no longer storming pastures as fierce scouring winds,

but, lost in their suffering, now gnaw remorse

and grasp at guilt as they once did pipe and pint.

 

This is the alchemy of fire and air, the chemistry of creek and valley.

The distillate of place and time. Distillate of memory.

Soft, sugary, amber-clouded elixir like the lure

of meadowsweet and chicory, like October smoke

hanging over maple and oak; like the sophistry of sex

on sunlit mornings in late December,

cold hands along the flushed length of spine and breast,

breath passing across the altar of tongue, frosting bedroom windows;

like the dulcet notes of mandolin, the sorrowful soaring of fiddle;

the primal groan of Cash’s Ring of Fire,

or Elvis’s moaning call to Love Me Tender.

 

This is the push and pull, the liquid mystery train

of peril and possibility we can’t explain

though it carries a little of everything: the bog, the raisin,

the raison d’etre, the pie safe and gun safe, the morning promises

and midnight faults, the scars forgotten and reclaimed,

the ice, in expectation, clanging in a glass.

 

Thanks, everyone. -- Denise Duhamel

The Piano Music of Charles Ives

The Piano Music of Charles Ives - Master Class with Dave Frank   www.davefrankjazz.com    Join NYC piano monster Dave Frank for a thoroughly unique, in-depth introduction to the life and music of America's greatest composer! ...   youtu.be   "I found this video that explains Ives's use of dissonance. If you start at 10 minutes and 30 seconds, the speaker explains the dissonances that Ives used." -- STL

 

Weather Report [by Lewis Saul]

Warm and sunny, with intermittent showers of be-bop, funk, and ... jazz fusion.

At some point in the 80's that term became a bad word. Perhaps jazz fission would have been better. (clean energy)

**

Weather Report was born after the great Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter ended their tenure with Miles Davis with two spectacular albums, In a Silent Way (1969) and Bitches Brew.(1970), and decided to form their own group.

They released 15 albums, pretty much once a year between 1971 and 1986. Choosing one track per album is today's challenge:

1. Weather Report (1971)

Milky Way

2. I Sing the Body Electric (1972)

Unknown Soldier

3. Sweetnighter (1973)

Boogie Woogie Waltz

4. Mysterious Traveller (1974)

Cucumber Slumber

5. Tale Spinnin' (1975)

Between the Thighs

6. Black Market (1976)

Cannon Ball

7. Heavy Weather (1977)

Palladium

8. Mr. Gone (1978)

River People

9. 8:30 (1979)

Sightseeing

10. Night Passage (1980)

Fast City

11. Weather Report (1982)

N.Y.C.

12. Procession (1983)

Where the Moon Goes

13. Domino Theory (1984)

D-Flat Waltz

14. Sportin' Life (1985)

Corner Pocket

15. This is This! (1986)

Update

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Two): Kirsten Kaschock [by Angela Ball]

MY STUDENTS WANT MY TENURE

They want a little bit of mothering
and a little bit of God.

They want a little bit of someone-who-admits
-mistakes from someone who never makes them.

They want a safe space built where As
are hatched into beds of cotton. They want

a teacher who knows all the things so they
need not click on needless links.

There are so many of them
and their lives, so varied. I cannot intuit

their lives. And they are more afraid
than they’ve ever been—but not of disclosure.

Not of trauma. Their own is not what they find
impossible to offer. And they secretly crave

triggering. To feel. No, what they cannot say
is how they come to think.

It’s not refusal—I think most
do not know their home computers

to be machines they should take apart
to learn. To know this is to know a mind

may be manipulated. That alien
voices from far across space/time

can alter radically perspective through old
fangled technologies

called books. Such knowledge over-
whelms and shames. And eventually obliterates

me as I teach, as is my job, instructing students
in my needful obliteration. Here, I think

is the crux of their desire: more than almost
anything they want, they want

me, someone like me, to acknowledge my
inherent uselessness while I please

please retain my position.

                                          (from Explain This Corpse)

-Kirsten Kaschock

Kirsten Kaschock, a 2019 Pew Fellow in the Arts and Summer Literary Seminars grand prize winner, is the author of five poetry books: Unfathoms (Slope Editions), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press), The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press), and Explain This Corpse (winner of Blue Lynx Prize from Lynx House Press). Coffee House Press published her debut speculative novel—Sleight. Recent work can be read at Conduit, The Diagram, and Los Angeles Review.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Two): Kirsten Kaschock

Kirsten Kaschock’s “My Students Want My Tenure” astonishes in its astuteness about pedagogy, a subject so often dealt with in lofty abstraction. Like Frank O’Hara, Kaschock gives us, in dialogic, enjambed couplets, a live public, a marketplace of needs, opening with “They want a little bit of mothering and a little bit of God.” This brilliant comic statement clarifies an exchange too seldom explored. One other example occurs to me, and that is Donald Barthelme’s hilarious and affecting short story, “Me and Miss Mandible.” In Kaschock's poem, as in Barthelme’s story, what students need is vastly more murky than help with punctuation. The poem constructs an expansive empathy akin to Frank O’Hara's as he illuminates our need for Billie Holiday’s voice “whispered . . . along the keyboard” and for Lana Turner, whom we love, to “get up.”

How spot on, Kaschock’s description of students’ desire for authority minus its blunt edges: “They want a little bit of someone-who-admits / -mistakes from someone who never makes them.” And they want “A safe space built where As / are hatched into beds of cotton”—none of bewilderment’s discomfort, effort’s uncertainty. Students are haunted by the need to “make” grades—as though mere desire—or past achievement—can insure an outcome. Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto” comes to mind: “If someone is chasing you down the street, you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep!'"

How accurate, Kaschock’s reproduction of the fuzzy, the approximate often so central to human desires: “They want // a teacher who knows all the things so they / need not click on useless links.” And for their own part, the teacher is locked in approximation: “There are so many of them / and their lives, so varied. I cannot intuit // their lives.” Undaunted by this impossibility, after first dispatching what the students aren’t afraid of—“disclosure,” “trauma”-- the poem moves on to touch obscure, ineradicable aversions: the inability to see beyond the structures, economic and cybernetic, that so determine their thinking; the origins of which remain, to them, obscure.

       . . .That alien

       voices from far across space/time

 

       can alter radically perspective through old

       fangled technologies

 

       called books. Such knowledge over-

       whelms and shames. And eventually obliterates

 

       me as I teach, as is my job, instructing students

       in my needful obliteration. . .

 

How apt, the word “crux,” in “This is the crux /of their desire.” The students want to see someone, a teacher/martyr, swallowed by the impossibility that presses them onward (too frequently goaded by parents’ insistence that they “make something of themselves”) so they won’t be. To take the hit of knowledge in their stead. So that confusion lessens, pain lessens. There’s nothing personal about it:

     . . . they want

     

     me, someone like me, to acknowledge my

     inherent uselessness while I please

 

     please retain my position.

 

Kaschock’s final phrase, “retain my position,” in its bureaucracy-speak, underscores the obliteration that the teacher invites. This is dark comedy indeed; and, like the best examples of that genre, it refuses to absolve us from futility—except that we know that this poem, as a bearer of insight, is itself one of the “voices from far across space/time” that “can alter radically perspective.” Kirsten Kaschock’s “My Students Want My Tenure” is a true emissary of fresh air to counter sentimental, self-serving, and otherwise perverse depictions of the classroom, that micro and macrocosm.

--Angela Ball

Freud on the problem of evil

Let us look away from the individual to the great war that is still devastating Europe. Think of the colossal brutality, cruelty, and mendacity which is now allowed to spread itself over the civilized world. Do you really believe that a handful of unprincipled place-hunters and corrupters of men would have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of their followers were not also guilty? Will you venture, even in these circumstances, to break a lance for the exclusion of evil from the mental constitution of humanity?  -- Ninth Lecture, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Memories of the BAP 1992 Launch (ed. Charles Simic)

Bill Wadsworth, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, organized the launch readings of the 1992 and 1993 editions at the Alliançe Francaise in New York City.  Bill kept these photos from the 1992 event, including a group portrait of the participants, a portrait of the series editor and one of Lynda Hull with Charles Simic looking over her shoulder.

Daniel Wolff: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________

The Drift of the World

 

You are not forgotten. How could so large a part of us ever be?

When you left this life, a marker dropped. Time swirled slowly past, and who

we remembered you as worked itself free. But even if current carried your memory

off, tide brought you back. We forgot a little, then remembered more. And through

that give and take, you stayed right here. The only thing that washed downstream

was the way we remembered you. All we need is to narrow our vision—

focus on what matters—and back you come, perfect, as if in a dream,

your one hand lifted in a wave. You remember us! And we have forgotten

nothing, nothing. How could we? If we forgot you, we would be lost. Never

mind that other shore—where we supposedly go and you are supposed to be

waiting. In this world, this world, we have to have you, have to remember.

Why won’t life stop? Why must it always pull everything, even you, away? We

stand right here where this all began and watch as the memory of you (who

we are – what else?) drifts. We do what we can: we keep forgetting you.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Daniel Wolff's latest book of poems is More Poems about Money (Four Way Books, 2022). [“The Drift of the World,” written for poet William Bronk, first appeared, in a slightly different version, in The Literary Review.]

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                                               Daniel Leary, Bill in a Red Chair, monotype, 20 x 16, 1997. Portrait of William Bronk (1918--99).

On Eve Kosofsky Sedwick, "Queen of Queer Theory" [by Blake Smith]

from  "Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Big Fat Nonbinary Mistake" by Blake Smith
Tablet, January 12, 2023

Subhead: "The queen of queer theory sought to relieve the persecution complex that haunted the West. Instead, her work has intensified it"

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There are (at least) two sorts of women who love gay men in a way that makes gay men like me nervous. Camille Paglia is one of the best-known representatives of the first sort—along with those other Italian American celebrity fruit flies, Madonna and Lady Gaga: energetic, pretentious, (pop-)cultured women who imagine gay men as their “creative” and “interesting” counterparts.

The second kind—stereotypically nerdy, mousy, and frumpy sweater-wearing—loves gays not as a gaggle of chattering slags who support her self-conception as someone sexy and scandalous, but rather from the safe distance of books. These women read and often write about gay men and gay sex, in an intellectualized fantasy through which they escape their own sexuality. (Why young women of this type increasing purport to be gay men, and pursue surgery in an attempt to make themselves so, is a mystery for another time.)

Perhaps the most intellectually significant example of the second type was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders of queer theory. In her books Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Sedgwick laid crucial theoretical groundwork for the study of how male homosexuality, and queerness more generally, shaped and were shaped by the literature, philosophy, and culture of the modern West. As a gay man and an academic, I have long felt a pull of gratitude toward her, and also a push of revulsion against what I can’t help but recognize as her cringe-inducing type.

Sometimes reading an author you have the unsettling certainty that if you’d known them in high school, you’d never have let them sit with you in the cafeteria. In the same way that I shudder inwardly at the sight of a dowdy, apparently asexuated woman reading “boys’ love” manga or The Song of Achilles, I am troubled whenever I read Sedgwick—a fat straight woman who recounted the miserable paucity of her sexual relations in Dialogue on Love (1999)—write about male anal eroticism with annoyingly evident delight at her transgression of academic propriety. The gay male thinkers who made her work possible, like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, never insisted on such ostentatiously provocative specificity in their writing, whatever they did in practice—not least because they imagined that the erotic, as Barthes’ American translator Richard Howard put it, is what the writing intellect can obliquely evoke but not directly enact.
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Is Poetry Kaput? [by Michelle Rochefoucauld]

It used to be God whose decomposing corpse made the big stink. Nietzsche announced the death. Freud put forth the exposition in The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents. In its cover story of April 8, 1966, Time made it official in a cover story wisely phrased as a rhetorical question: “Is God Dead?” 

If religion had been the opium of the masses, and masses on Sunday mornings were a casualty of deicide, people could turn to the usual alternatives – politics and art – but the youth culture was in full swing in 1966, and the nearest thing to transcendence was an acid trip at a rock festival or blowing yourself up making a bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Meanwhile, the subject has receded to the terrorism and fundamentalism pages of the newspaper, and the obituary focus has long since shifted to literature.

The death of the novel had worried all-star panelists for years. Now, with Updike and Roth dead, a new consensus started to form around the notion that the TV serial as exemplified by The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Fauda, House of Cards, and Homeland has displaced and supplanted the novel as a mass entertainment form -- one that can aspire to be both wildly popular and notably artistic, as the novel was at its best. The past tense in that last clause makes me sad, though I have the seen the future and it is even more enthralling than Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga as done BBC-style with Damian Lewis as Soames.

The death-of debate of the moment centers on poetry and takes the form of essays, sometimes jeremiads, in wide circulation monthlies. Last month the NY Times declared that poetry is dead because T. S. Eliot murdered it, which was a novel though not poetic way to note the 100 anniversary of ”The Waste Land.”  If you wonder at magazine editors who run variants of the same article, rehashing the same tired arguments, don’t. Think of the ingenuity that goes into the packaging. This time: poetry as the corpse in a detective story whose culprit was the least-likely suspect.

 “People who are not poets make fools of themselves talking about poetry,” La Rochefoucauld said. “It is the one thing they have in common with poets."

-- DL

Jan Steen, "The Drawing Lesson," circa 1665.

Jan Steen, The Drawing Lesson, ca. 1665, Oil on panel, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 

"Let's Make a List" [by Tom Disch]

It's always a delight to stumble upon a new, previously uncollected poem by a master. Here is a poem Tom Disch wrote in December 2007.

Let's Make a List

The letter L
has cast her spell
on the whole English language.
The other letters willingly
anneal with her to form
all the words and things
we love the most: flowers
opening to the morning light,
the little birds fluttering
about the feeder, the swallows
along the river, ripplings,
dapplings, even loss.
L dies -- then lifts her head
and lives again. She smiles
in that special way she has
and it all becomes clear.
Look! there she is again

12/23/07

— Tom Disch

 Reprinted by the Estate of Thomas M. Disch c/o Writers' Representatives LLC, New York, NY 10011. All rights reserved.