The Best American Poetry

Lally and Winch at KGB Bar Last Night (When We Were Young) ["Poets' Photos" by Star Black; report from Julia Cohen]

Terence Winch and Michael Lally read at KGB Bar last night when all of us were fifteen years younger. Star Black took their photographs. Julia Cohen's filed this report:

<<<
On Monday nights, sometimes I think about buying groceries after work and then going straight home. This week I actually made it to the grocery store. But then instead of getting on the subway to Brooklyn, suddenly I'm at the KGB Bar, tucking my groceries under a table, waiting for the reading to begin.

Last night the room was packed -- I was afraid my broccoli raab would be kicked by the crowd. Michael Lally and Terence Winch have such distinguished and dynamic careers, it's clear why the KGB was filled with a diverse and supportive audience. Lally is an actor, an anthology editor (re: None of the Above: New Poets of the USA, 1978), and the author of 27 books. On his blog, he characterizes himself as an, "ex-jazz-musician/proto-rapper/Jersey-Irish-poet-actor/print-junkie/film-raptor/beat-hipster-"white Negro"-rhapsodizer/ex-hippie-punk-'60s-radical-organizer's take on all things cultural, political, spiritual & aggrandizing." His poems have an intense musicality to them, a blend of Irish ballads, disco, and jazz that at some points spin out into archly political poems that address the disgraces of the Bush administration and at other times refocus on the microcosm of tensions embedded in his own Irish American culture/childhood that created a sense of rich tradition and community to the exclusion and expense of others, which Lally still contends with.

Winch is an acclaimed musician, a short fiction and a non-fiction writer, as well as a poet. Switching between elegies, villanelles, the Q&A format, and humorous but biting narrative digressions about his youth, Winch steered his reader through his Irish Catholic upbringing and examines the personal experiences, the larger social movements, and philosophies that made him test his faith. It's as though he has opened his memory box and allowed us to sort through it. In the process, we find much more than birthday cards and old love letters -- there are broken beer bottles, communion wafers, and a few flakes of dried blood.

-- Julia Cohen

Terence Winch
Photo by (c) Star Black

Michael Lally and son Flynn
Photo by (c) Star Black

from the archive; first posted October 7, 2008

Cri de Coeur [by Jim Cummins]

Oy vey, my country!  I would sob if it weren't such … an American crisis: goofy, headstrong, distracted, with a bunch of old men in dark suits running around looking for their mommies.  And we're poets: what do WE know?

-- Jim Cummins

from the archive; first posted October 3, 2008

Who Will Stop the Mad Man? [by Lera Auerbach]

My mother was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. As Hitler's army marched East in 1941, my grandparents abandoned all their possessions (including their beloved library and cherished collection of musical instruments). They boarded the train – heading towards Siberia. The news of ghettos and the fate of Jews in Hitler's territories had reached them – all they could do was to flee into the unknown.

A few years earlier, my mother's grandfather, Berl Fishbein, the head of the family, was tortured to death by Stalin's secret police). His only "guilt" was being born Jewish. While my family evacuated, their train was bombed by Hitler's armies. Another tragedy occurred: the family lost my mother's grandmother Ettel Fishbein in the confusion and chaos. She was grief-stricken after the death of her beloved husband, frightened and confused over all the changes and sorrows that the war and evacuation brought. Somehow, after the bombing, she was no longer with my grandparents on the train. They never found her and never learned of her fate. 

With my one-year-old mother, my grandparents deboarded in Chelyabinsk – a closed industrial city at the gateway of Siberia. I was born there some thirty years later. They never returned to their abandoned homes in Ukraine.

In today's war, the invading army marches from the East, and more than a million Ukrainian refugees head West – to Germany in a mirror retrograde of history.

Earlier this year, I wrote a cello concerto, Diary of a Madman, inspired by Gogol's famous short story about Poprishchin, a government clerk who gradually descends into insanity. The concerto was premiered last month by the Munich Philharmonic, Giedrė Šlekytė, and Gautier Capuçon. Nikolai Gogol (or, more correctly, romanized from Ukrainian – Mykola Hohol) – was a genius writer, born in Ukraine, father of Russian language literature, and a visionary far beyond his time. I have been fascinated by his work all my life. Ten years ago, while composing my opera Gogol, I read and re-read everything he ever wrote. After my opera's premiere in Vienna, I received an open letter from Russia calling me "Vrag Naroda" (Enemy of the People) – the same terminology used against Shostakovich and many other artists years earlier. My website was hacked, erased, and replaced by the slogan "Death to Jews" and a skull. It felt terrible, but I was not afraid – since 1991, I lived in the West, and since 2001, I no longer had any relatives in Russia. I was responsible only for myself, my words, and my actions. 

While composing the cello concerto Diary of a Madman, I did not think of Vladimir Putin. Now, Gogol's tale carries an eerie resonance. Diary of a Madman is a story of a lowly government bureaucrat with a minimal, easily forgettable personality. In his increasingly demented diary entries, Poprishchin claims that a state cannot "be without a king." As the storyline progresses, he becomes increasingly mad, starts having delusions of grandeur, and, finally, on the "43rd of April of the year 2000" he believes himself as the King. (V. Putin was first elected president of Russia on the 7th of May of the year 2000. Gogol wrote his story in 1835!) Finally, Poprishchin ends up in an insane asylum. 

Perhaps, Gogol, the visionary and one of the greatest writers who ever lived – could see beyond the 19th and 20th century – into the heart of the 21st, where we are doomed to continue the eternal tale.

I think of my grandparents and my child-mother in Ukraine, leaving everything behind, heading into the unknown – evacuating from the onslaught of Hitler's army. Could they have imagined that eighty years later, the land of their birth would face again a very similar nightmare and that refugees would now head West to Germany to save their children?

Gogol's visions and nightmares become a reality, with the whole world turning into a lunatics' asylum as the great tragedy unfolds. Who will stop the Madman? 

from the archive; first posted by Lera Auerbach on March 04, 2022 at 06:59 PM 

My mother was born in 1940 to a Jewish family in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. As Hitler's army marched East in 1941, my grandparents abandoned all their possessions (including their beloved library and cherished collection of musical instruments). They boarded the train – heading towards Siberia. The news of ghettos and the fate of Jews in Hitler's territories had reached them – all they could do was to flee into the unknown.

A few years earlier, my mother's grandfather, Berl Fishbein, the head of the family, was tortured to death by Stalin's secret police). His only "guilt" was being born Jewish. While my family evacuated, their train was bombed by Hitler's armies. Another tragedy occurred: the family lost my mother's grandmother Ettel Fishbein in the confusion and chaos. She was grief-stricken after the death of her beloved husband, frightened and confused over all the changes and sorrows that the war and evacuation brought. Somehow, after the bombing, she was no longer with my grandparents on the train. They never found her and never learned of her fate. 

With my one-year-old mother, my grandparents deboarded in Chelyabinsk – a closed industrial city at the gateway of Siberia. I was born there some thirty years later. They never returned to their abandoned homes in Ukraine.

In today's war, the invading army marches from the East, and more than a million Ukrainian refugees head West – to Germany in a mirror retrograde of history.

Earlier this year, I wrote a cello concerto, Diary of a Madman, inspired by Gogol's famous short story about Poprishchin, a government clerk who gradually descends into insanity. The concerto was premiered last month by the Munich Philharmonic, Giedrė Šlekytė, and Gautier Capuçon. Nikolai Gogol (or, more correctly, romanized from Ukrainian – Mykola Hohol) – was a genius writer, born in Ukraine, father of Russian language literature, and a visionary far beyond his time. I have been fascinated by his work all my life. Ten years ago, while composing my opera Gogol, I read and re-read everything he ever wrote. After my opera's premiere in Vienna, I received an open letter from Russia calling me "Vrag Naroda" (Enemy of the People) – the same terminology used against Shostakovich and many other artists years earlier. My website was hacked, erased, and replaced by the slogan "Death to Jews" and a skull. It felt terrible, but I was not afraid – since 1991, I lived in the West, and since 2001, I no longer had any relatives in Russia. I was responsible only for myself, my words, and my actions. 

While composing the cello concerto Diary of a Madman, I did not think of Vladimir Putin. Now, Gogol's tale carries an eerie resonance. Diary of a Madman is a story of a lowly government bureaucrat with a minimal, easily forgettable personality. In his increasingly demented diary entries, Poprishchin claims that a state cannot "be without a king." As the storyline progresses, he becomes increasingly mad, starts having delusions of grandeur, and, finally, on the "43rd of April of the year 2000" he believes himself as the King. (V. Putin was first elected president of Russia on the 7th of May of the year 2000. Gogol wrote his story in 1835!) Finally, Poprishchin ends up in an insane asylum. 

Perhaps, Gogol, the visionary and one of the greatest writers who ever lived – could see beyond the 19th and 20th century – into the heart of the 21st, where we are doomed to continue the eternal tale.

I think of my grandparents and my child-mother in Ukraine, leaving everything behind, heading into the unknown – evacuating from the onslaught of Hitler's army. Could they have imagined that eighty years later, the land of their birth would face again a very similar nightmare and that refugees would now head West to Germany to save their children?

Gogol's visions and nightmares become a reality, with the whole world turning into a lunatics' asylum as the great tragedy unfolds. Who will stop the Madman? 

You Can't Always Get What You Want [by Lewis Saul]

Fanny Robbins

We addressed my maternal grandmother's sisters as Tante (tan'-ta), from the old country ...

Tante Fanny was a towering figure. After her husband's death, she took over his business -- a wholesale toy store, on Forbes Avenue, near downtown Pittsburgh.

My earliest memories of her consist of visits to her store -- which she ran with autocratic authority. The place seemed like a magical castle filled from floor to ceiling with the most fantastic toys!

I was probably five or six when I spotted a shiny new toy car on one of the higher shelves. "I must have that little car, mommy," I must have shouted a few times, as my mom explained it that I wasn't getting it.

I began to throw a full-throated tantrum. [Of course, I don't remember this, but my mom told me this story so often that it seems real, even today!]

Tante Fanny:

"Get that child out of my store, and never bring him back again!"

Well, sometime later, mom and Tante Fanny must have withdrawn the severe decree, because I did indeed finally get my precious little car.

But mom was still going to teach me a lesson. After unpacking it, she insisted that every kid in the neighborhood would get to ride in it before I got my turn.

Here I am with my next-door neighbor riding backwards:

When mom was in her 80's and we were reminiscing about this, she turned to me with a sorrowful look and said, "I'm sorry I was so mean."

"Permanently" [by Kenneth Koch, born today]

Permanently, by Kenneth Koch

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing—for example, “Although it was a dark rainy day when
        the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face
        until the day I perish from the green, effective earth."
Or, “Will you please close the window, Andrew?”
Or, for example, “Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill has changed color
        recently to a light yellow, due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby.”

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, “And! But!”
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the Adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

Roger Reeves: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________

Cyclops and Balthazar

 

I was not a very good dog in my former life. I bit

My owner, James, often. When he prayed, I howled

His one eye opening. He said I sounded like a cyclops

That had fallen into a ravine. I heard raven.  As I said,

I was not a very good dog, more so a ravine

Bringing the howling darkness to my owner’s ears.

A raven that took flight only when watching the other ravens

Lift from the pines like scabs ripped open to reveal

What life runneth under. Towards the end of my life,

A donkey with a white flower and a crown of leaves

Befriended me at the edge of a field. At night,

His head moved “like a veil across the stars”

Revealing for me, for the first time, the stars.

Balthazar, the donkey, once, asked me if I ever thought

Of the consciousness of trees, their reflection

In the river. Or if there was an etiquette to dying.

I said, “stop that. You sound like a man

With his back to heaven.” He said, “someone will

Always have their back to heaven,” then walked

Into a pasture of sheep and died. “Goliath,

Goliath,” said the sheep’s bells around their necks.

“No,” I said. “Balthazar. It is Balthazar that has died.”

And when I called out to him behind the door of the house

Of the dead, the night called back in my own voice.

And I, like a good dog, ran toward it with both eyes closed.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a 2015 Whiting Award, among other honors. Best Barbarian, his second book of poems, was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    
                                        Olayanju Dada, At the Lagos Dog-Show, acrylic and oil painting on cardboard panel, 2015

"Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust" [by B. A. Van Sise]

"The Wild Bunch": Last of the Great Westerns [by David Lehman]

My latest "Talking Pictures" column for The American Scholar (February 23, 2023) is titled "Brilliant Carnage: Sam Peckinpah’s slow-motion bullet ballet"

I have seen The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 masterpiece, many times. The film marks the definitive end of the truly Western Western, a farewell to the time when desperadoes played poker in frontier saloons, gunfighters fought legendary battles, and the cavalry saved the day or died with their boots on. A righteous man could be John Wayne romancing Claire Trevor in Stagecoach or Gary Cooper taking on three killers in High Noon, and a little boy could end the movie by begging “Shane! Shane! Come back!” Once, when my son Joe, then twelve, and I watched The Wild Bunch together, he came up with the perfect two-word description of the movie: “brilliant carnage.”

Myths die not all at once but in stages, and the Western always owed something of its appeal to the knowledge that the era it depicted—and, to some extent, invented—was long since gone by the time talking pictures filled movie screens. With each year, the cowboy-as-hero, whether lawman or bandit, grew more distant. Of the horsemen making up The Magnificent Seven (1960), Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen are the only two who ride off into the sunset. Though they have defeated the bad guys who terrorized Mexican farmers, they know their days are numbered. “Only the farmers won,” Brynner says. “We lost. We always lose.”

In The Wild Bunch, Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads the eponymous outlaws with Dutch (Ernest Borgnine) as his right-hand man. Tector (Ben Johnson) and Lyle (Warren Oates) are brothers with bad tempers and a healthy lust for liquor and ladies. Angel (Jaime Sanchez) is the one Mexican among them, passionate and brave, while Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), a good-natured elder statesman, remains behind the scenes, because he can no longer meet the physical demands of a hold-up job. The bunch would have had one extra fellow, but Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), Pike’s closest friend, was arrested, flogged mercilessly, and blackmailed by a vicious railway baron (Albert Dekker) into leading a team of “peckerwood” trash to hunt down the gang. The actors up and down the line give sterling performances.

The movie begins on the outskirts of San Rafael, a small Texas town, with children gleefully burning straw atop a battle of ants and scorpions. It is a powerful image, conveying the idea that cruelty and an impulse to destroy may be innate in even the youngest and most innocent human beings. In sharp contrast, a salvation salesman leads an open-air temperance meeting in the center of town, where a pathetic crowd swears off alcohol and sings “Shall We Gather at the River?”

It is then that Pike and his men, dressed in U.S. army uniforms, ride in to rob the railway’s offices. Their plans have been anticipated, however, and an ambush organized against them. In the ensuing crossfire, only Pike and five others ride their horses to safety. One of them will die of his wounds minutes later. And their bags of stolen treasure turn out to contain no treasure—just dime-store metal washers.

from The American Scholar https://theamericanscholar.org/brilliant-carnage/
for more click here

In Praise of Non-Conformism

In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson urged resistance to the conformism implicit in thought-control. It is possible that independence of mind, resistance to the mentality of a mob, is something that cannot be taught

To the extent that the poet is a public figure, Emerson’s belief in “the independence of solitude” retains its pertinence. “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Assignment: what would Emerson say about Twitter and "the twitter mob"?

The Bennington Diary #3 [by David Lehman]

Bennington diary #3 / Jan 16, 1998

       Anne McCarty and I hold our “exit meeting”–the one that faculty members are supposed to have with the five students they’ve worked with during the last six months–at the Blue Benn Diner, Bennington’s best. Anne (Greek omelet and home fries) tells me (short stack of multigrain pancakes with berries and Vermont maple syrup) about the lecture she plans to give in June. (All graduating students are required to give a public lecture and a reading during their final residency.) Anne wants to address the subject of humor in the works of Emily Dickinson, Jane Kenyon, and Anna Ahkmatova, three poets who are not famous for their comic side. There seem to be two directions Anne can pursue. She can argue that subtle humor may enhance tragic pathos. Or she can present somber lines and, with Borgesian poker face, demonstrate that they are secretly hilarious. I doubt that she’ll do the latter, though the possibilities delight me. One could argue, for example, that much of Wordsworth is merciless self-parody but that it requires the advanced reading techniques of Stanley Fish, another self-parodist, to discover this. [Jane Kenyon is pictured above with her husband Donald Hall. The two of them attended the very first session of Bennington low-residency MFA program in January 1994. Jane and I were on the fasculty; Don was a visiitng lecturer.]
       Two more “entrance meetings” today. Unlike some writing instructors, I favor the use of specific assignments. For the packet of work due at the end of January, my students must choose the best and worst poems of The Best American Poetry 1997. They are then to write two poems, one better than the best, the other worse than the worst. The deliberately bad ones are invariably the most surprising. Because our ideas of “good” and “bad” are, and perhaps ought to be, in flux, setting out to write a bad poem seems to give one the permission needed to try an adventurous gambit one would ordinarily intercept. The assignment for February: Write at least one poem in a received form (sonnet, villanelle, sestina, prose poem) and at least one in an ad hoc form such as a menu or TV listings.
       Am cutting Rick Moody’s lecture on John Cheever to write these notes. I wonder if Susan Cheever is in the audience. I’ve been writing a poem a day as an experiment, and when Susan and I gave back-to-back readings the other evening, I read my poem of Nov. 13, which was inspired by her father’s journals. “I have a date/ with a certain great novelist/ in my apartment/ whose idea of heaven is the men’s room/ of Grand Central Station/ and hell a prison in a posh suburb/ with a swimming pool where/ you can feel like a fly in a highball,” I wrote. After the reading Susan said, “I don’t believe I know you,” words that sound ambiguous on the page but conveyed ardor in person. That’s when Jill McCorkle turned up. “Are you still writing your poem a day?” she asked. Before I could answer, she said, “I wrote two novels this afternoon.”

posted by Slate; January 16, 1998. This was the first of five posts written during the January 1998 residency at Bennington College.

-- David Lehman

Haunted by Dead Souls and Lively Angels: Jennifer Homans’s "Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century" [by Mindy Aloff]

Mr. B. airborne (left), and in a deep plié during a 1961 teacher workshop. Photograph © Nancy Lassalle

George Balanchine (1904-1983) is generally considered the greatest--and, with 425 known works, the most prolific-- choreographer of the twentieth century, possibly of any century. By the time that Jennifer Homans, his newest biographer (herself an erstwhile professional ballet dancer and the author of Apollo’s Angels, the much-heralded history of ballet) decided some ten years ago to write a book about Balanchine, his life and work had been examined intensely in several languages.

First off, in English alone, there were five critically appreciated book-length Balanchine biographies (by journalist Bernard Taper, whose book was based on his interviews with Balanchine for The New Yorker; by Richard Buckle, the critic and biographer of Serge Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky; by the ballerina Moira Shearer, star of the film The Red Shoes; by Robert Gottlieb, the head of Alfred A. Knopf and a member of NYCB’s board who had programmed company seasons for ten years as a volunteer; and by the music critic and biographer Terry Teachout). Francis Mason’s anthology of memoirs I Remember Balanchine, which runs to six hundred pages, could be considered a sixth biography.  Balanchine himself had (with the editorial assistance of Mason) already published a long autobiographical essay on his career up to his early years in the U.S. and--assisted editorially by Lincoln Kirstein, with whom he had co-founded both the New York City Ballet and its affiliated School of American Ballet--theoretical essays on music and choreography and on the filming of ballet. 

Kirstein, on his own, had published two books on the history of NYCB plus a personal memoir; and Balanchine had given long, unguarded interviews concerning his thought processes to Ivan Nabokov and Elizabeth Carmichael at Horizon Magazine, to the Russian journalist Solomon Volkov, and to essayist and poet Jonathan Cott. Furthermore, scores of his dancers and nondancing colleagues had produced remembrances of him, and biographies and other studies of Balanchine’s collaborators contain extensive information. There were the unpublished memoirs of him (by ballerinas Ruthanna Boris and Karin von Aroldingen)—not to speak of the many studies of his ballets, beginning with historian Nancy Reynolds’s Repertory in Review, critic Nancy Goldner’s two excellent collections of essays, and the collected reviews and penetrating essays of Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce. And there is the large section on him in the immense oral history by dancer Frederic Franklin, Balanchine’s choice as ballet master at Sergei Denham’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where Mr. B worked in 1940 and then again, as the company’s resident choreographer, from 1944 to 1946.

And when Homans was starting, there were already available many analyses of his choreographic process in the video programs that constitute The Interpreters Archive and of The Archive of Lost Choreography, produced by The George Balanchine Foundation. (In these film shoots, currently numbering 75 and counting, the original principals and/or early principal casts of individual ballets, going back to 1925, coach younger dancers to pull from their dancing bodies what Balanchine had asked for when the works were being made.) 

So, when a press release from Random House, the U.S. publisher of Homans’s Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century, and the dust jacket of Granta’s British edition of the book present it as the “first major” biography of its subject, a reader familiar with the literature is brought up short.

More perplexing than that are the covers of the U.S. and UK editions. Their common source is an image by Martha Swope showing a rehearsal moment from Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, a ballet Balanchine made for Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell in 1968, based on the number he’d choreographed for the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes. On both book covers, Swope’s photo has been severely tampered with, but more objectionable is that they present the relationship of Balanchine and Farrell as a summarizing illustration of Homans’s title, “George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century.”

Farrell was a very great dancer indeed, but to encourage the notion that her relationship with Balanchine overshadows his entire career is not only distorting but is also unfair to the book, which diligently attempts to relate his story from cradle to grave. Homans offers enough here for a small monograph about what made Farrell’s dancing unique to Balanchine, viz. that, by choice, she did not use her technique in service of conventional models of perfection, which was fortunate, as Balanchine did not want perfection. Homans is fascinated by how their mutual experiments with Farrell’s capabilities led the ballerina to make impeccably arresting musical choices freshly at every performance and to look beautiful even when her body was violating academic rules of classic dance: That is, Farrell somehow intuited what Balanchine really wanted from dancing and, even more, to his delight eventually taught him what he ought to want.

"One Plkus One" [haiku by David Shapiro]

    it may be too hard
    to think of me as silence
    like thirsty flowers

    in the Luxembourg
    I paused to cry for hours
    beside patient friends

    I read Thus Spake Z
    in a minute or two and
    saw my life in clouds

    and inside last clouds
    I saw my sister hiding
    behind the grillework

    snakes danced up curtains
    and a miserable pink
    of which Michaux spoke

    Half a century
    later I look at tulips
    try to see glory

    not Lawrence's kind
    but the modest buds in Bronx
    where diners pop up

    thirteen synagogues
    and some are shuls the way Saul
    Bellow preferred them

    Unlike a true Jew
    I like to go alone, weep
    (kills community)

    Today someone writes
    as if anyone around
    Frank froze him with lies

    Generosity
    is not a word for critics
    but Frank hated pricks

    haha the theory
    is he was a dead man and
    this is false theory

    But let's go back to
    say l962 or
    let's pay attention

    involuntary
    memory as in Proust is
    more than I can bear

    in England I smelled
    my mother's glitzy perfume
    and I also heard

    inside myself the
    tune of her blue jewel-box
    I still remember    

    Too tired to forget
    too rebellious to count
    lonely syllables

    well father would say
    what's so lonely about them
    the one equals one

    I want to build that
    with long Icelandic "menhirs"
    one plus one is one

    for the madness of
    my old friend the architect
    One monument one

    You pushed me into
    talking today but really
    the best rest is two

    but I want to build
    one day like white white Legos
    one plus one is one

    -– David Shapiro,
    September 8, 2008

Schopenhauer & "The Will to Live" (on the day he was born, Feb. 22, 1788)

The Will to Live

“They say that Schopenhauer is pessimistic. That is not saying very much. [His] is a grandiose and tragic vision which, unfortunately, coincides perfectly with reality.”

– Witold Gombrowicz, A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes

1. Arthur Schopenhauer was a competitive man
   who felt nothing but scorn for Hegel.
   So he scheduled his philosophy lectures
   on the same day and at the same time
   and therefore Hegel had a packed auditorium
   while only a handful of us – a Polish writer,
   an ex-girlfriend, a few wayward apostles
   and I – heard Schopenhauer’s lectures
   on Descartes, doubt, and the will to live.

2. Life’s a bitch and then you die. Everything proceeds from this proposition.

3. Many philosophers, professional sad sacks,
   make merry with women and whiskey at night.
   Not Schopenhauer. He was logical. Eating
   a delicacy like pressed goose livers with
   a good Sauterne proved only that nothing
   exists except the temporary satisfaction
   of a hunger that will return and a thirst
   without which no liquid tastes good.
   Pleasure is merely the absence of pain,
   not a thing in itself, and the same may be said
   of peace in relation to war. And yet –

4. Look at all the things we need to endure –
   death and pain, struggle and fear –
   in order for the species to survive,
   and so great is our determination to live
   that endure these hardships we do, putting
   a good face on things, hurricanes
   and suicide bombers, the death of adulthood
   and the abandonment of the beautiful
   English language. And yet –

5. One of the apostles asked about suicides.
   What about them, Schopenhauer replied.
   “Don’t they invalidate your theory
   of the will to live?” “Not at all,”
   he smiled for once. “In suicide they prove
   the will to live is greater than they are.”

6. There were two proofs:
   (a) God must exist
   if we can conceive of god
   (b) God must but cannot exist
   if we can conceive of that
   than which nothing greater
   can be or be conceived.
   Therefore,
   God has to exist
   as a logical possibility
   impossible to disprove
   or credit.
   That’s what he said.
   I wrote it down.
   You may think he was
   a world-class pessimist
   but then you didn’t know him
   as I did in Berlin
   a hundred years before Hitler.

– David Lehman (first published in Michigan Quarterly Review)

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: FEBRUARY 22, 2023

Earlier this year, Knopf released a paperback/expanded edition of David Young’s Field of Light and Shadow: Selected and New Poems.  The book is over 300 pages—spanning almost 60 years of writing—and a treasure trove of insight, wit, and reverence for the natural world. Congratulations, David! Here is one of my favorites:

Faux Pas

The fox paused at the field’s edge, paw raised,
looked back and switched her tail, the way
a thrush will flutter among maple leaves—
that’s when I thought of you, choosing
your words, taking your careful steps,
sleeping so restlessly.
Our distance is not so much miles
as years and memories, mine such leafy compost
I shake my head, too full of duff and humus
to get a bearing or a fix. Foxfire, that weird
by-product of wood-decay, pulses in me today . . .
And look: after the vixen left, trailing a faint rank scent,
a freight passed slowly, flatcars in mizzling rain,
some of them loaded with truck trailers, some not,
objects that no more need attention than you need
waste time upon my lurching, coupled feelings.
Go with the fox—I send a sort of blessing
as gulls lift off the reservoir and day,
a spreading bruise against the western rim,
drains January and the freshened year.

 

Happy birthday, W H. Auden

Their Lonely Betters

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.

-- W. H. Auden

Auden (an Aquarius, born Feb 21) on Psychoanalysis

<<
Psychoanalysis, like all pagan scientia, says: "Come, my good man, no wonder you feel guilty. You have a distorting mirror, and that is indeed a very wicked thing to have. But cheer up, For a trifling consideration I shall be delighted to straighten it out for you. There. Look. A perfect image. The evil of distortion is exorcised. Now you have nothing to repent of any longer. Now you are one of the illumined and elect. That will be ten thousand dollars, please."

And immediately come seven devils, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

-- W. H. Auden, "Lecture Notes" (6 November 1942)

Note: Multiply the bill by twenty for 2022 dollars. The devil count remains the same.-- DL

from the archive; first posted February 26, 2011. 

Cheek to Cheek [by Lewis Saul]

This is dedicated to Leah, who requested it.

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Cheek to Cheek (1934-35)

7 versions

Irving Berlin (pictured above) knew as much about music theory as I knew about refrigerator repair. But he had a natural gift for songwriting that few have ever equaled.

This one's a doozy. It breaks with the traditional AABA form with an AABBC form.

Let's look at the details. He begins on the sixth degree of the scale, with the first syllable of Hea-ven -- like a sigh from some angel high above!



Then with ascending steps (and chords):



and the amazing symmetry when he skips back down:

Now the B section -- a simple progression of ii/V/I repeated four times:

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then -- with a sudden shift to the minor -- this extraordinary C section, which Berlin cleverly ends with a vi/ii/V to return us to the A section:

 

 

 

 

 

From the original version from the film Top Hat to Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett, this masterpiece never loses its kick.

1. Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers (1935)
(5:02)

from the film Top Hat. Check out that dancing!

2. The Boswell Sisters (1935)
(2:48)

Thanks to Donald Fagen for hipping me to these gals.

3. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong (1956)

EF, vocals

LA, vocals, trumpet

Oscar Peterson, piano

Herb Ellis, guitar

Ray Brown, bass
Buddy Rich, drums
(5:54)

 

4. Frank Sinatra (1959)
(3:06)

 

5. Diana Krall (2008)
DK, piano, vocals
John Clayton, bass
Anthony Wilson, guitar
Jeff Hamilton, drums
Paulinho DaCosta, percussion
(6:23)

 

6. 11-year-old trumpet prodigy (2012)
Geoff Gallante, trumpet
Rossano Sportiello, piano
Nikki Parrott, bass
(7:45)

 

Wow.

 

7. Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett (2014)
(2:50)

 

 

"Coming Soon to a Screen Near You" [by Tom Disch]

 

The soul has its own entertainment industry
as complex as Hollywood's, with premieres
scheduled every night of the week.
The papparazzi have been popping their flashbulbs
since before your first erection. Rival producers
vie to cast Ingrid Bergman as the nun
who proved her love for you by teaching you
arithmetic. But ah! it is the cinematographers
who are our secret masters. How can they trick
a string of neurons into a set
so persuasively resembling cities
we have flitted through heedlessly
before there was even VistaVision?
before we could tie our own ties?
And just as with the movies we've seen
we forget all these wonderful dramas
almost as fast as we can dream them up!
New names appear in the magazines,
teen idols kill themselves, but the glamor
never dies, the glamor goes on eternally.

February 19, 2008

Eliot of Becket (Thomas a) and Beckett (Samuel)

And yet it is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it.

--  Samuel Beckett in Watt, which Erica Cairo believes is a veiled reference to Thomas Becket and his king.

“They know and do not know, that acting is suffering
And suffering is action. Neither does the actor suffer
Nor the patient act. But both are fixed
To an eternal action, an eternal patience
To which all must consent that it may be willed
And which all must suffer that they may will it,
That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action
And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still
Be forever still.”

― T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

Sarah Arvio: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sponge

 

Soul like a dirty sponge that soaked up all the dark bits

from yours   all messed up and mixed in

 

with the dirt of the days   the old hairs and hatefulness

Oh my god I knew there was hate in the human world

 

but I didn’t know it was the job of my soul

to clean it up   How can I clean it up if my soul

 

is the sponge sponging it up   In the end   it doesn’t

go anywhere except into my dirtier and dirtier soul 

 

And I say   well   crying will clean it up   but then I’m

bent over crying because my beautiful sponge of a soul

 

that lay in the depths of a cool warm aquablue tropical

sea with little fishes flitting about in their exquisite

 

jewel colors   and rays of sunshine raying through 

has been used to sop up an angry man’s leftover

 

cruelty   Yes   cruel does sound like jewel and there

should be a jewelty   How can I squeeze it out   I'll

 

need a new sponge   but I can’t throw out my soul and if

each tear is one drop of an aquablue tropical sea       

 

maybe I can cry back my sea   It’s not so easy

to clean a soul   some say weeks   and some say centuries

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Sarah Arvio’s new book of poems is Cry Back My Sea (2021), which has been called “an ode to love.”  Earlier books are Visits from the Seventh (2002), Sono: Cantos (2006), and night thoughts: 70 poems & notes from an analysis (2013), which is a hybrid of poetry, essay, and memoir.   Her translation of poems and a play by Federico García Lorca, Poet in Spain (Knopf, 2017) has been received to wide acclaim. Among her honors are the Rome Prize and fellowships from the Bogliasco and Guggenheim foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Poems have appeared in such places as Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Boston Review, as well as in many anthologies, including two editions of The Best American Poetry.  A poem from Poet in Spain appears this winter in 100 Poems That Matter, curated by the Academy of American Poets.  Arvio worked for many years as a conference translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland.  A graduate of the Columbia School of the Arts and a lifelong New Yorker, she now teaches poetry and literary translation.

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