The Best American Poetry

Three Clerihews [by Jim Cummins] (& 3 by someone else)

Sporting Life

Wilt Chamberlain
discovered sin
required a log
to log them in.

*

Pete Rose, brother,
by any other
moniker would stink,
is what I think.

*

Joe DiMag
ruled like the Raj.
But when he passed,
they capped his ass.

Lunch with Tim McCarver in February 1987 [by David Lehman]

Tim McCarver died yesterday at age 81.

Back in spring 1987, McCarver, a terrific catcher who caught Bob Gibson with the Cardinals and Steve Carlton with the Phillies, was calling plays for the New York Mets. He made the cover of Esquire and had a book coming out (wotking with professional sportswriter Ray Ropbinson). I wasn't crazy about the book's title: Oh, Baby, I Love It! but the book confirmed that McCarver was as good a baseball analyst as there was. The Mets had won the 1986 World Series in the most exciting post-season of the decade, and a piece on the book made sense. At Newsweek the editors always preferred a feature to a straight book review, so I proposed flying to Philadelphia, taking Tim to lunch, and writing it up. I got the okay. 

McCarver, who lived in Gladwin, Pennsylvania,  proposed Le Bec Fin, the best French restaurant in Philadephia, for our lunch, and they gave us a private room. It was probably the most expensive lunch I ever charged to the magazine, with wonderful wines, and it lasted three or more hours, with Tim's wife stopping by for a few minutes and a cigar delivered to the room when it was time for espresso. According to my notes I wore a gray blazer with a knit tie and he wore a cashmere sport coat with a blue silk patterned tie and navy trousers.

With unforced pleasure Tim answered my questions and appraised various players and prospects. Tim, who had a lot of opinions and wasn't shy about sharing them, felt that a good sinking fastball made the batter feel as if he were "striking an anvil with sugar cane." Bob Gibson regarded the pitcher's mound "as his prIvate office." Spitballs should be made legal, because "nearly all pitchers throw them."  The "scuff" ball thrown by Mike Scott of the Astros, who gave the '86 Mets a fit, was "more illegal," but the Mets made a mistake in obsessing over it. "Of course if I'd been on the team, I would have probably done the same thing." What was the biggest psychological problem confronting a professional baliplayer? "Fear of failure." Also, "the hell of being alone." Tim agreed with Joe DiMaggio about opening day: "It's like a birthday party when you were a kid."

There was a rumor at the time that the Mets were offering Ron Darling and Mookie Wilson in a trade for the Dodgers' Orel Hershiser. "Ain't ever gonna happen," Tim said. "Hershiser is one of the great pitchers in the game." (This was before Hershiser's Cy Young year when he threw nearly sixty straight innings aithout a run and beat Oakland twice in the World Series, once by shutout.) As a traditionalist, he said "I hate the designated hitter," because it changes the very nature of the game. 

Tim loved Gerswin, Berlin, Cole Porter. When the Mets, tired of being loveable losers, started winning games in 1984, Tim hummed Duke Ellington's "Things Ain't What They Used to Be" on the air. Who was the best ptcher he ever faced? For sheer talent, no souithpaw could compare with Sandy Koufax. Keith Hernandez was "the most artistic fielding first-baseman" Tim had ever seen. Solidly built, six feet tall, Tim may have been the most artistic play-by-play man this side of Vin Scully.   -- DL

"A bona fide work of art . . ." Copland Dance Episodes at New York City Ballet [by Mindy Aloff]

The "long-footed godesss" Mira Nadon , aloft, and company in ‘Copland Dance Episodes’ Photo © 2023 Erin Baiano

People are talking about Justin Peck’s new ninety-minute ballet, Copland Dance Episodes, for thirty principals, soloists, and corps de ballet members of New York City Ballet. It is a bona fide standing-room only, standing-ovation hit and also aesthetically controversial. Against audiences excited by it as a work of non-narrative theatrical dance are some who register strong objections—or simply dismiss it as bland and inconsequential. I’ve seen it twice; the first time, I was among the objectors; the second time, I suddenly saw its parts anew and its references clearly. The second time, what had seemed blurry and unspecific suddenly snapped into a bona fide work of art, complete with fascinating textual engineering and a haunting visionary subtext. What originally had seemed to be mere repetition had the “mere” swapped out for “meaningful.” Both times, the dancers were thrilling, but the second time they also seemed in service of a statement larger than themselves—a chilling statement about the entire country. The structure of the libretto in the program—twenty-two chapters or sections, each with its own title-- gives a clue that, although there is no declared narrative, the ballet is not storyless. The fact that my second sighting of Copland Dance Episodes occurred the night of the President’s State of the Union address was purely coincidental.

The score for this ballet is derived from four of Copland’s most beloved compositions: the anthemic Fanfare for the Common Man and the dances Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, and Billy the Kid—in other words, Copland’s most popular music, all richly melodic and dynamically orchestrated and dating from the build-up to World War II and from the terrifying years of the war itself. All are also brilliantly optimistic sound paintings marked by brass and percussion, even Billy, whose drama is tied to the murderous costs of the country’s westward expansion. Justin Peck, a native of Washington, D.C., spent much of his childhood in San Diego and most of his young adulthood in New York. He’s partly a westerner biographically; however, the American West that Copland created was cleared, plowed, and barn-raised from the heritage of American song—“a couple of cowboy tunes,” he once told me in an interview, out west in Portland, Oregon: the kind of music that doesn’t need explanations to make its case with anyone who listens to it, thanks, of course, to its harmonic and rhythmic presentation by a student of Nadia Boulanger. NYCB’s orchestra, led by company music director Andrew Litton, played the Copland sumptuously, with pleasure and commitment.

Peck’s choreography responds to each of Copland’s long musical lines, canonic interludes, and unexpectedly accented phrases with the assurance of a person in his own home. He does not, like Balanchine, set up a conversation with the music; he marries it, registering its emotions and its tonal variety while also creating imagery that invokes “common man” situations, such as horseplay among peers, a romantic couple on a carousel, a trio who share space and light but not interior worlds. Toward the end of the ballet, when we’re listening to the part of Billy the Kid that creates a gunfight through percussion, the marvelously variegated lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker suddenly throws many crossing figures into silhouette (the section is titled “Shadowboxer”), and we’re rocketed out of one couple’s dysfunction into a hallucinatory enlargement--today’s gun-sickened streets of Newark or L.A., Dorchester or East New York. Manipulating light, space, and choreography, Peck effects astonishing transformations. A hand that is tendered in a moment of submission becomes, once grasped, the agent of disunion. A head gently resting on a heart (a detail that Peck has slyly plucked from Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo and recontextualized), placed on that heart once too often, lightly yet decisively becomes the lever for divorcement. A section that ends with several male figures Biblically pointing straight skyward is revised in a subsequent section that ends with several female figures pointing forward into the future on a forty-five-degree angle, and that image is subsequently revised by a group of male and female figures seated in a circle, each lifting one leg with the foot pointed (the circle invoking a nocturnal moment in Billy when Eugene Loring’s outlaw is triggered into ruminations by a campfire). Tiler Peck’s variation to the “Simple Gifts” tune from Appalachian Spring does not quite lasso the entire herd of conflicting emotions that animate the Bride of Martha Graham’s frontier-wedding masterpiece, but how charming the analogy is. Peck’s pairing and then uncoupling of the long-footed goddess Mira Nadon and />the elementally mutable figure of Taylor Stanley was, for me, a risk worth taking. Their duet, with its partnered cartwheel and little catch step piquantly sited on the music, is one of the loveliest of Peck’s I know, and the intensity of its communication through dance movement made me think of the works of Alexei Ratmansky, who is about to join NYCB as a choreographer in residence. Peck’s ballet is bathed in color as well as pure light: Greeting the audience is Jeffrey Gibson’s drop, both minimalist in its geometric targets and triangles and maximalist in its multicolored profusion of forms, as he puts it in the program “inspired by indigenous American artifacts with the lyrics and psychedelic palette of disco music.” The program also notes that although Gibson’s painting “fuses his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and experience of living in Europe, Asia, and the USA,” its references “span club culture, queer theory, fashion, politics, literature and art history.” The cast is costumed in Ellen Warren’s leotards and tights, each person given a unique combination of deeply saturated, contrasting hues, with no single, overall colors allowed. Welcome to the twenty-first century. In case the audience forgets that’s where we are, the ballet opens on a tableau of the full cast, each person uniquely positioned and wrapped in a transparent tulle-like packaging. Nearly everyone then runs off into the wings to remove the wicked caul of yesteryear and returns in up-to-the-minute living color, bright-eyed with eagerness to, once again, embark on Peck’s westering of their spirits. 

Mindy Aloff's book of essays, Why Dance Matters, was recently published by Yale University Press.

[Editor's note: The New York City Ballet will perform "Copland Dance Episodes" during its spring 2023 season. Buy tickets here. sdl]

The Bennington Diary #2 (January 1998) [by David Lehman]

Bennington Diary January 14, 1998

Ed. Note: Back when the Inernet was a new toy, Slate had a five-day diary feature where writers reported on their activities in the field. In January 1998 I signed on to write about the experience of teaching in the low-residency program MFA at Bennington College. 

Wake up to dismal rain, dropping temperatures, and Sinatra singing “I’ve Got the World on a String.”
       Everyone says this has been a quiet residency so far. Nothing yet has happened as dramatic as the fistfight that broke out last June between two women vying for the attentions of playwright Mac Wellman, who was doing a pole dance at the time. (The women fought to a draw.) There is also the fabled Bennington moment when Gretchen (not her real name) stood naked in an uncurtained window for an hour, absolutely immobile.
       Tim O’Brien, who was supposed to arrive tomorrow to deliver three lectures and a reading, has canceled. Liam Rector, our director, asks if I’ll fill in for one of the lectures. I can choose the topic. A second substitute lecture will be given by Rick Moody, following a screening of The Ice Storm, the Ang Lee movie adapted from Moody’s novel. We’re renting the local movie house for the morning. Which morning? Like everyone else here, I’ve lost my time sense, punchy from too little sleep and too many sestinas.
       The time has come to think up acts for Saturday night’s Varsity Show. Amy Hempel proposes a “bad metaphor” contest, with a prize for the worst. Similes are eligible. Classics of the genre include “as tall as a 6’3” tree” and “Bob and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds, who had also never met.” Sven Birkerts has agreed to judge the “pithy summary” contest, with prizes both for the best and for the most authentically bogus summaries of great novels. Lynn Freed will do her Julia Child imitation, and Jill McCorkle will produce, script, and direct something she is calling the Novel SWAT Team. I am in charge of writing a skit satirizing a workshop in which people take turns abusing a sensitive poet until all see the light and burst into the “Hallelujah Chorus” or Johnny Mercer’s “Accentuate the Positive.”

first posted by Slate
Se also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/02/the-benington-diary-1-january-1998-by-david-lehman-.html

 

(Wide) Open Space at Etoile du nord, insight and a lot of pleasure [By Tracy Danison]

Cie Suzanne – “To Life”. Light and space inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky. Photo © filipfoto_avoiretadanser

The more often I go to dance and performance events at the Etoile du nord, the more often I want to go to events at the Etoile du nord.

For one thing, the dance performance programs that include artist question times, such as the Open Space program, are always full with young people, which makes me hopeful for the future of live performance. For another, it’s informative and stimulating to see and hear about what artists think might or should be put forward and why and how it might work for spectators.

Performer choreographer Joachim Maudet’s effort to use ventriloquism in a new solo performance, called Kid#1, for instance, got me thinking about the real, physical and psychological effects of movement and stage tricks on people. The ventriloquism – relocation of sound from source – along with an underpinning narrative about schoolyard bullying, manages to evoke really strong anxiety in me (and also, apparently, in the 8- or 9-year-old kid in the seat next to me).

The ventriloquism charges the pathos of the narrative with a certain menace as well as strengthens visual dislocations: in costume (adult dressed as kid – psychic confusion?), in place (on the floor – a sidewalk?), in posture (sat-sprawl – drunk or deranged?) and in sound (in addition to portentous music, the ventriloquism disembodies a confused mumble bubbles above or behind the adult-kid-drunk – bipolar?). The effect of the voice dislocation on the scene is to point the spectator away from the narrative theme and strongly towards the character. The former is full of pathos – How awful! – but the latter is downright dangerous – Christ, I hope he’s not armed!  

On the whole, this year’s Open Space program, at least from a spectator’s point of view, was much more visual or experiential than narrative.

For instance, Group Suzanne’s WIP To Life uses six people walking together alone and in different relations inside the light of a movie (especially referencing Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 classic, Stalker) in an experiment with (notions of) space in performance. Julien Rossin’s S'enembra explores the use of light in close-in body movement…. Nana Movemen’s evolving Jamais la fin looks mostly to the effect of repetitive movement on spectator visual experience, using what I think of as a “techno-quadrille” to “show the encounter of a masculine and feminine duo, mix them up and finally forget [that the two genders] exist”.

 

Collectif La-Ville-En-Feu – “Les Planètes”. Using dance performance to shape urban space. Photo © Julie-Folly_Belluard-Bollwerk

My favorite experiential-oriented WIP was Collectif La Ville en Feu’s Les Planètes. The collective – made up of performer choreographers Marius Barthaux, Thomas Bleton, Agathe De Wispelaere, Juliet Doucet, Jean Hostache, Louise Buléon Kayser, Giulia Dussollier, Myriam Jarmache, Simon Peretti and Garance Silve – has long been working Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring into the fabric of urban landscape.

Many of the collective’s members are or have been students of Nadia Vadori Gauthier, the choreographer, notably, of the well-known Une Minute de Danse Par Jour. Vadori Gauthier’s Une minute, created as it was in the wake of the Charlie-Hebdo terrorist murder-spree, affirms the right of people to animate and enjoy the city and its space. Rite of Springperformances are much in the same vein: a claim to enjoyment and pleasure in our public space. In contrast, the Les Planètes creation seems less to animate and enjoy space than to shape it, using performance as a tool to re-imagine it.

The collective's Open Space preview was a brisk and exciting taste of how the re-imagination might be done.

Without any warning, spectators are pushed outside and into a sort of exterior corridor between two fairly low-rise buildings. The ground space is crowded with shiny-leaf scritchy bushes, dry florist-style dirt and wood chips encroaching slabs of a concrete walkway, a notice board under a jiffy rain shelter. Above ground: a jumble of overhangs, metal struts and landings, catwalks, fixtures, chain-link accesses, intimations of roof-top equipment. It’s impossible to get a clear view.

The performers burst through up there, in the interstices. Spectators wriggle, stress and strain to see and hear as they jump and clamber, using the orchestral topography of Gustav Holst’s The Planets, a seven-movement suite with wordless chorus, as conceptual choreography and navigation.

They come slowly down. Spectators get out of their way. They conquer and carve out stages in the clutter and elbow-to-elbow bustle: fools and mad folk caper and roar, clump to make short, Planets-inspired drama and (a capella) sound and song. Fascinated, putty in their hands spectators try to follow them with our eyes, listen to what they can’t see… Just as they carve out stages from spectator space, they make them into stage hands and props.

Collectif la Ville en Feu’s ability to create and mold its performance space and master its spectators makes me think Les Planètes will be a different and wonderful experience of public art.  

The Bennington Diary #1 (January 1998) [by David Lehman]

Back when the Inernet was a new toy, Slate had a five-day diary feature where writers reported on their activities in the field. In January 1998 I signed on to write about the experience of teaching in the low-residency program MFA at Bennington College. This is installment #1, dated January 12, 1998

<<<

Today is day four of my semi-annual sojourn at Bennington College, where I teach in the “low residency” graduate program in writing. We -- 88 students, 20 faculty, and assorted staff --  convene here for ten days in January and ten in June; the rest of the work gets done by correspondence, with each writer on the faculty supervising five students in his or her genre.

These residencies are a cross between summer camp and boot camp, saturation experiences. Every hour of every day is filled with lectures, readings, workshops, conferences, and parties. We eat communally. The food sucks. Last June, in the Varsity Show the faculty puts on, the novelist Douglas Bauer took the Duke Ellington standard, “I Got it Bad, and That Ain’t Good,” turned it into “The Food is Shit, and That Ain’t Good,” and sang the new lyrics in the relaxed, sweater-clad Perry Como manner. I doubt that I shall ever be able to hear the words “artichoke bake” and “walnut cheddar loaf” without a shudder in my deep heart’s core. [That's Duke Ellington in a top hat on the left.]

Our isolation on this Vermont campus with its storied past (Malamud taught here, Bret Easton Ellis went to college here, and Donna Tarrt’s “The Secret History” is a roman-a-clay-feet set here) makes it the perfect setting for a murder mystery. There is never a shortage of motives, suspects, and candidates for victimhood. One year, the victim was played by Bob Hornbuckle, a good-natured St. Louis schoolteacher and aspiring fiction writer, who interrupted a lecture by visiting poet Robert Pinsky [pictured right, with David Lehman, in 2013] to argue a point about William Carlos Williams. Hornbuckle maintained that a certain Williams poem would be improved if the lining were changed. “That’s because you don’t know shit about Williams,” Pinsky replied. From then on, the “don’t know shit” locution was in constant use. Hornbuckle didn’t mind; he basked in the attention.

In workshops, the standard M.O. is to dissect a student’s story or poem, heedless of Wordsworth’s warning, “We murder to dissect.” People talk as they do nowhere else: “One thing I kind of objected to and then I fell in love with was the repetition of the word `hood’ in the second paragraph. But then I wondered about the prostitute. What if she were a nun?” Yeats’s “The Second Coming” might fare badly in a workshop. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre”: needless repetition, willful obscurity. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer”: show, don’t tell!

Today’s a rarity in a Vermont winter: a sky of unbroken blue and no snow on the ground, which is, however, soggy from the freezing rain that pelted us for our first forty-eight hours. No heat in my apartment the first night, so I gathered myself into three layers of clothes, my winter coat, and five blankets. There’s a red light in the window, which is supposed to go on when the temperature drops below fifty. The temperarure did and the red light didn't. Not that it matters. On the most sub-arctic of my five winters here, I shared a house with Doug Bauer and the poet Jason Shinder, and the furnace failed on the coldest night. The security man, making his three a.m. rounds, noticed that the red light had gone on, but decided to do nothing about it, reasoning that we were asleep inside and would resent the intrusion.

-- David Lehman

click here for the diary entry of January 18, 1998
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2013/10/the-slate-diary-4-bennington-college-jan-14-1998-by-david-lehman.html

Recommendation: "Why Dance Matters" by Mindy Aloff [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Raphael Soyer Raphael Soyer (American, b. Russia, 1899-1987) "Dancing Lesson"

I've been reading Mindy Aloff's Why Dance Matters (Yale University Press, 2022) and was delighted to see this much deserved rave review by Willard Spiegelman in the Wall Street Journal (paywall). The range and depth of Mindy's dance scholarship is, frankly, astonishing. I've had the lucky experience of attending ballet performances with Mindy, and she even agreed to join me at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to screen a film of an obscure ballet ("A Wedding Bouquet" by Fredrick Ashton with words by Gertrude Stein). Mindy's observations and insights have deepened my appreciation of ballet and now, having read Why Dance Matters, I am even more eager to contionue my exploration of the wide world of dance. 

About a third of the way through Why Dance Matters, you encounter several paragraphs that address the question "Why does looking at dance matter?" I've often left the theater having been deeply moved by a performance and desperate to hold on to the afterimages of what I've just witnessed only to have them slip away when city noise intrudes. Here's why, says Mindy:  "If you consider dancing seriously -- as something more worthy of your concentration than gazing at a Lava Lite -- then you quickly learn that even for a short, simple number there is quite a lot of information to take in, and to do so requires fast eyes, keen hearing, and a capacious memory. There are elements in any dance, regardless of the tradition or style, that are difficult simply to recognize as they go by, much less to analyze and then discuss, just as there are indeed layers of possible significance to poetry that begin to reveal themselves only after many rereadings." 

And later: 

Simply trying to appreciate what actually takes place in a dance -- the facts of dance action -- is hard enough. A more extreme brain workout is trying to witness what the dancers are doing while remaining aware of the theatrical effects or illusions their movement is intended for the audience to see. If the choreography is coordinated to a musical score, then to recognize and track points of coordination as they happen and be able to recall them later should earn you admission to Mensa. And trying to keep track of all of this while remaining receptive to whatever epiphanies of meaning the dance may provoke -- and perhaps while being overtaken by rapture, too--requires a type of multitasking in while your consciousness, so to speak, has one eye on the stage and one watching your brain be a brain. 

The reader is then invited to take a walk with Mindy among dances where "the multitasking might prove not only as usefull to brain health as sudoko but even more enjoyable."

Take the walk! Buy Why Dance Matters here. 

Dance matters. You already know this if you're a season ticket holder to the local ballet company. And it matters if you dance alone while dusting, or with your partner at a wedding or Bat Mitzvah. 

John Forbes (Part 2) [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

When John Forbes died of a heart attack in January of 1998 while sitting around his kitchen table talking with friends, he left a relatively small body of work with an extraordinarily high strike rate. Forbes was well known for his critical acuity, and his trained eye did not suffer mediocrity, in his own work or the work of others (his friends included). As Laurie Duggan remembers, “John wouldn’t pretend (or allow you to) that anything could be gotten away with. He was his own harshest critic, and he may well have been the conscience of modern Australian poetry.”

 

Here are three of Forbes’ better known poems. Television features prominently in each of them. Forbes seems drawn to television for its democratic appeal and pervasive influence on the culture in which he was writing, with its ability, both as object and medium, to reflect back insights into our social, political and spiritual condition. The opening injunction of “TV” to dispense with an account of the program being watched in favor of a description of the actual television set itself, suggests that how we watch, the social and economic settings in which we encounter events, provides an architecture for experience which is just as consequential (and revelatory) as what we watch. 

 

TV

dont bother telling me about the programs
describe what your set is like the casing the
curved screen its strip of white stillness like
beach sand at pools where the animals come
down to drink and a native hunter hides his
muscles, poised with a fire sharpened spear
until the sudden whirr of an anthropologist’s
hidden camera sends gazelles leaping off in
their delicate slow motion caught on film
despite the impulsive killing of unlucky Doctor
Mathews whose body was found three months later
the film and the camera intact save for a faint,
green mould on its hand-made leather casing

“Love Poem” is a paradigm of concision. In ten short-lined couplets, Forbes is able to consider themes as hefty and varied as love, war (as entertainment, distraction and consolation), his own poetry (“whose letter / lets me know my poems show / how unhappy I can be”), and the power television wields over both the political and the personal. With its terrifying beauty, the televised bombing of Baghdad, which announced the commencement of the First Gulf War and was the first ever live coverage of war, comforts the speaker in the absence of his beloved. The poem makes the seemingly incongruous action of curling up with images of the war, as if they were a romantic comedy, eerily (and comically) apposite.The poem continues to play with this absurdity, switching between a clear knowledge and appreciation of military hardware and a forlorn romanticism: “Our precision guided weapons / make the horizon flash & glow / but nothing I can do makes you / want me.” The bombing is seen by Forbes as “what the west does best”, an advertisement of technological advancement and awe inspiring power—a detached brutality masked as a moral imperative. The closing couplets, in which Forbes considers that the whole performance has been put on for his benefit, speak to the deceptive force of television itself, which brings the war not just into our homes but our beds, making what was once distant and remote intimate and personal. The live images, however, far from increasing the “realness” of the event for the viewer, only further abstract it; paradoxically, the closer we come to the image, the further away we are from appreciating its reality for those who are truly experiencing it.

 

Love Poem

 

Spent tracer flecks Baghdad’s
bright video game sky

as I curl up with the war
in lieu of you, whose letter

lets me know my poems show
how unhappy I can be. Perhaps.

But what they don’t show, until
now, is how at ease I can be

with military technology: e.g.
matching their feu d’espritI classify

the sounds of the Iraqi AA—the
thump of the 85 mil, the throaty

chatter of the quad ZSU 23.
Our precision guided weapons

make the horizon flash & glow
but nothing I can do makes you

want me. Instead I watch the west
do what the west does best

& know, obscurely, as I go to bed
all this is being staged for me.

“Speed, a Pastoral” is among Forbes’ very best poems. From the opening line there is an irresistible descending propulsion that is mimetic of the poem’s concerns, the inevitable spiral downwards after a night of getting high: “your feelings / follow your career down the drain / & find they like it there”. Forbes himself struggled with addiction to alcohol and a codeine-based cough syrup. The poem opens with a ironic celebration of this intemperance, the strange combination of exquisite insight and unreasonable fallacy that one can experience when a certain level of delirium is reached. Towards its end, however, the poem shifts into a moving elegy for the Sydney born poet Michael Dransfield, a contemporary of Forbes (although the two never met) who died in 1973 at the age of 25, and in whose poetry drugs were a recurring subject. 

 

Speed, a Pastoral

 

it’s fun to take speed
& stay up all night
not writing those reams of poetry
just thinking about is bad for you
                                      —instead your feelings
follow your career down the drain
& find they like it there
among an anthology of fine ideas, bound together
by a chemical in your blood
that lets you stare the TV in its vacant face
& cheer, consuming yourself like a mortgage
& when Keats comes to dine, or Flaubert,
you can answer their purities
with your own less negative ones—for example
you know Dransfield’s line, that once you become a junkie
you’ll never want to be anything else?
                        well, I think he died too soon,
as if he thought drugs were an old-fashioned teacher
& he was the teacher’s pet, who just put up his hand
                                     & said quietly, ‘Sir, sir’
                       & heroin let him leave the room.

 

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: February 15, 2023

Here’s a post-Valentine look at romantic love and its opposite through poetry….Kathy Jacobs writes in response to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Jacob’s poem first appeared in SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) which was co-founded by Jen Karetnick and Catherine Esposito Prescott. This is my third shout out to SWWIM. It’s about time I tell you that you can sign up to receive daily poems from SWWIM at https://www.swwim.org

A Sonnet to Mad Men with Apologies to the Woman Poet (Who Requires No Definition) 

How do you love me let me count your ways
With an uppercut, a kidney jab, a backhand slap 
Hair by the roots, jammed to a barricade, slugged 
To the ground, to the depth your fist can reach 
Freely, as men are left to do; purely, from jealousy and spite 
With passion driven by monstrous ego, with hands and words 
And knives and knees and covetousness of my body, 
My choice, my dignity, my liberty, my land 
With boots and bullets, tanks and airstrikes, with need 
To prove your dominance, your excuses, your entitled rage 
On court benches and my kitchen floor, in senate chambers 
And through cities’ streets, on every step and stage 
Seizing my smiles, my pleas, my breath 
Despite all tears I’ll love you better after death

Kathy Jacobs (first published in SWWIM, January 9, 2023)

How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

She Got Pinched in the Assss. . . tor Bar! [by Stacey Harwood]

[In 2011] I visited my mom for a couple of days and while with her I went through some of her old photo albums.  Whenever I do, I find something that had previously escaped my attention.  This time, I came across this bit of memorabilia from a different age (below left, click to enlarge):

  



The Hotel Astor stood at 44th Street and Broadway, a stunning example of Beaux-Art architecture that was demolished in 1967 to make room for a 50-story office tower.  It was  walking distance from the Milk Barn, the coffee shop where my mother worked as a waitress.  Many of her customers were "garmentos" (as those who work the rag trade are now called) who would on occasion give her gifts of belts (she had a tiny waist) and monogrammed hankies.  I love imagining my mother stopping in at the Astor Bar for a post-work cocktail.  Did she?  She won't say.  But it was quite the place,  made even more famous by Cole Porter's "Well Did You Evah/What a Swell Party."  There are many great versions of the song (I like Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop's subversive take here. Listen for raunchy lyrics that Porter would have loved) but you really can't beat Der Bingle and Ole Blue Eyes in High Society as rivals for Grace Kelly, who is betrothed to another.

from the archive; first posted on February 14, 2011.

George Gershwin plays "I Got Rhythm"

 

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Four): Catherine Wagner [by Angela Ball]

from "The city has sex with everything"

                                                                     The city has sex with Megan

when the air shaped like the inverse of Megan
accepts Megan as she moves.

   If Megan is a system of exchange
that floats her labor and her point

  of view in vapor/liquid soup
passàging through her valves

and if her later corpse, collapsing,
  updates its inversion of the air

 even more than did the air displace
when she grew from brown-eyed baby

into strong laboring woman in blue jeans
  and heathered wool,

and if the air and earth draw from Megan’s corpse
  all the energy and minerals

  she pulled from her surrounds
to build her nails and bones and teeth—

  if the exchange doesn’t stop
but only ceases to support her consciousness,

 and if her consciousness was corpse anyway until
it found relation,

 then what demises
is the potential for the human social,

and another sociality
 will unbutton my whole shoe

and tongue hang limp,
  what sex is for but stops me

  at the barrier, a pixellated
glamor reef though very

   close and simple, smell a
flurry, parapluie paraphrase,

 energy funneled through a shape.
You filtered chemical

 information in such a pointy
fulgent scrambled way, in the city

    and outside the city in the vernal zones
   and aqua zones the city shaped, flow-charted, realist

trucked. The city caved under
    when the zones rose and lapped around the pilings,

manged foundations green,
   rotted the teeth out of the mouth of the city,

 harbor high-rises
dark and blown. The city is extremely fragile tender

human mesh and will be mush
  and mushrooms grow in, there is room in, ruins

roam the rearticulated harm.

 

                                          Speech by a flaneur—no a flaneuse

         On my face, D. folliculorum are relaxing
          like Tenniel caterpillars leaning on mushroom stalks
           against the bases of my hair follicles
          which provide shelter and shade.
         These critters are peculiar to
            the ecology of the human face
             which I take around the city
             open, close it is my means
            of feeding I rely on
         changing its shape
        in response to others’ faces and postures
         to reduce my risk and increase my safety
          and my likelihood of being
           included in the group’s collective
            life. I smile a lot and hope it
           don’t look fake.

--Catherine Wagner                              (first appeared in Poetry)

 

Catherine Wagner is a Cincinnati poet originally from Baltimore. She is author of five books of poems, most recently Of Course (Fence, 2020) and Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012), and she recently co-edited a collection of environmental humanities essays, Contesting Extinctions (2021). She is professor of English at Miami University in southwest Ohio, where she is organizing a labor union with colleagues.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Four): Catherine Wagner

Catherine Wagner’s extended poem, “The city has sex with everything,” like William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, is an epic built on the urban mundane. Instead of personifying the city (“a man in himself is a city”-W.C.W.), in this excerpt it depicts, as if from above, the city’s consumption of a person, Megan (“strong laboring woman in blue jeans / and heathered wool”) and also, I think, hers of it.

The poem is remarkable for its mating of metropolis with organic decay:

 

The city is extremely fragile tender

 human mesh and will be mush

    and mushrooms grow in, there is room in, ruins

roam the rearticulated harm.

 

and also for its mating of the abstract/philosophical to the immediate/physical, done in pungent language:

 

what sex is for but stops me

 at the barrier, a pixelated

glamour reef though very

   close and simple, smell a

  flurry, parapluie paraphrase,

The “pixelated / glamour reef” may call to mind comic-book illustration, while the last phrase, a ballet of p’s, lingers, dropleted, in mind and on the tongue.

The poem traffics in pulchritude and homeliness, giving both life and afterlife to its “manged foundations.”

Who is the “you”? Is it Megan? Us? It hardly matters, since matter is now  so confounded with idea and association.

Then we arrive at a kind of window in which the poet [?] announces herself as Baudelaire and/or O’Hara-like “flaneuse,” where we see, in all its teeming vitality, “the ecology of a human face” in hyper-granular detail:

1. folliculorum are relaxing

 like Tenniel caterpillars leaning on mushroom stalks

  against the bases of my hair follicles

 which provide shelter and shade

The extended poem, in a breath-taking alteration in scale, has taken us from observation-deck telescope to microscope; from the city’s destructive and destroyed life force to the intimacy of one human’s personal biosphere, in the process taking its diction from wet and marvelous hybridity to bland scientific specificity. Cartoonist Sir John Tenniel was the organism-portmanteau illustrator for Alice in Wonderland. As these ultra-specific organisms relax, they imitate art. Catherine Wagner’s riveting and wonderful dystopian  “The City Has Sex with Megan,” after having its brilliant way with us, ends by conveying the poet’s forlorn hope of survival, fronted by a humble, demotic teeth-baring:

I smile a lot and hope it

     don’t look fake

-Angela Ball

 

Kurosawa's 30 [by Lewis Saul]

In 2010 -- a Baker's Dozen ago -- the Film Forum ran 28 of Akira Kurosawa's 30 films. (Ran [1985] and Madadayo [1993] weren't shown). Your Editor invited me to make a few comments, which I did in a verbose 63,136 words. You can read them here. [This post tracks in at 1,963 words. I'm trying.]

Today, I make an attempt to merely summarize all 30 films -- the worst of which* is still worth seeing.

Wartime

1. Sanshiro Sugata (1943)

 

After a fruitful apprenticeship as an assistant director with Kajirō Yamamoto (Horse, 1941), Kurosawa got his chance to direct when he snapped up the options on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita.

Initially, Kurosawa wanted to be a painter. Just watch the opening shot and one can see the Meiji-era scene come to life. In a pan, we move down an alley and meet Sugata (Susuma Fujita).

The story of human struggle to attain perfection attracted the military censors. They weren't so happy about the love story and thus that subplot was mangled.

Hansuki Murai -- the girl's father -- is played by Takashi Shimura.

 

2. The Most Beautiful (1944)

 

A girls-only factory produces optical devices for fighter planes. Yōko Yaguchi is the heroine. She would soon become Mrs. Akira Kurosawa.

Check out the Eisensteinian montage of the volleyball game.

Shimura plays Chief Goro, the head of the factory.

*3. Sanshiro Sugata Part II (1945)

 

A sorry and soggy sequel. A Turk -- Osman Yusuf -- plays the bullying American sailor. The plot hinges on the superiority of Judo compared to the vicious American sport of boxing. Fujita returns, but Shimura wisely skipped this one. 

4. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945)

 

Based on the kabuki play Kanjinchō -- itself a remake of the Noh play Ataka -- the 12th-century general Yoshitsune Minamoto and his retainers are disguised as monks and who must evade his evil brother, Yoritomo, who controls the border checkpoint. The ambiguity of the denouement demonstrates the ingenuity of the young Kurosawa.

Shimura plays one of the monks. The comedian, Ken'ichi Enomoto, enlivens this short film with astonishing humor.

Occupation-era

5. No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)

 

General MacArthur and SCAP encouraged Kurosawa to make a film which help the populace understand the earth-shattering transition from militarism to democracy. Set in the mid-30's, Kurosawa seeks to humanize rather than simply caricture the militarists.

Fujita returns as the unfortunate pacifist martyr who is lucky enough to marry the incomparable Setsuko Hara (her first of only two films with Kurosawa). The great Denjirō Ōkōchi is her father.

 

6. One Wonderful Sunday (1947)

 

Struggling young lovers (Isao Numasaki and Chieko Nakakita) meet on Sundays, only to find nothing to do -- they can barely afford a cup of coffee. Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" features prominently in the plot.

7. Drunken Angel (1948)

 

Having discovered Toshiro Mifune and teaming him up with Shimura, Kurosawa finally had made a legitimate masterpiece. Gangster and alcoholic doctor become frenemies, while the viewer is treated to a documentary-like look at postwar Japan.

 

8. The Quiet Duel (1949)

 

A minor picture, liable to induce some cringing at the overwrought characters and their reactions to the then nearly incurable disease of syphillis. Mifune and Shimura are father and son.

 

9. Stray Dog (1949)

 

A fine noir, featuring a young cop (Mifune) learning the ropes from an old pro (Shimura). Mifune has lost his gun to a pickpocket on a sweaty, crowded bus, and we perspire along with him, as we count the number of bullets left.

 

10. Scandal (1950)

 

Considered a minor picture by most critics, but this reviewer begs to disagree. Mifune is a serious painter, whose career is threatened by a scandal sheet which prints a false rumor about an illicit affair with a famous singer (the gorgeous Shirley Yamaguchi). Shimura is his bedraggled lawyer, who must win the libel case in court, despite being bribed by the deep-pocketed opposition.

There is one unusual spiral wipe.

11. Rashomon (1950)

 

Marge: "You said you liked Japanese films?"
Homer: "That's not the way I remember it!"

12. The Idiot (1951)

 

Kurosawa -- a lifelong fan of Dostoevsky -- was furious when the producers couldn't stomach the running time. "Cut the damn thing right down the middle of the strip," he cried, more or less disowning the truncated release print.

Setsuko Hara returns as Nastasya/Taeko Nasu, the woman who stands between Masayuki Mori (Myshkin/Kameda) and Mifune (Rogózhin/Akama).

Post-occupation

13. Ikiru (1952)

 

Mifune took a leave of absence, leaving Shimura to star in this unforgettable tale of "it's-never-too-late," inspired by a short story by Tolstoy.

14. Seven Samurai (1954)

 

My old 8,984-word post will have to do. I was really into studying filmic punctuation back then -- There are 1,467 total cuts in the film; 1,399 straight cuts; 15 fade-to-blacks; 32 horizontal wipes left; 13 horizontal wipes right; and eight dissolves.

15. I Live in Fear (1955)

 

The 35-year-old Mifune plays an elderly factory owner who wants to move his entire family (mistresses included) to Brazil, where he believes they would be safe from a nuclear bomb. Godzilla -- from the previous year -- was meant to reflect similar fears then ever present in the Japanese public.

Shimura is a dentist who volunteers in a family court assigned to help the family sort things out.

 

16. Throne of Blood (1957)

 

Minoru Chiaki (Woodchopping samurai of the Seven) co-stars with Mifune as warlord generals in this adaption of Macbeth.

 

17. The Lower Depths (1957)

 

Based on the play by Gorky. A masterpiece of ensemble theater, Kurosawa as at the top of his game here. Mifune plays the thief (Vaska/Sutekichi), but Kamatari Fujiwara steals the show as The Actor. Bokuzen Hidari (Luka/Kahei) is golden as The Pilgrim.

Look for an incredible musical performance in the final scene. It may sound like a jazz improvisation to Western ears, but is called bakabayashi -- literally, "fools' orchestra" -- and has the poverty-stricken characters singing about the "avarice and hypocrisy of the Buddhist monks," as they sing sarcastic praises of all the  things salvation money can buy.

18. The Hidden Fortress (1958)

As the widescreen format reached Japan, Kurosawa immediately took advantage. This wonderful adventure romp stars Mifune as a general on an important mission and Fujiwara and Chiaki as two peasants along for the ride. (The latter was the inspiration for the droids in Star Wars.)

19. The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

 

Time to get serious again. Loosely based on Hamlet, Mifune plays Kōichi Nishi, buttoned-down secretary to Iwabuchi, the important Vice President of the "Public Corporation" (Mori, aged beautifully). Nishi is not what he seems, however, his late father standing in for Hamlet's ghost ...

 

20. Yojimbo (1961)

 

Forever copied, but never equaled, this megahit features Mifune as a ronin, with smarts. If you ever wonder why John Belushi's SNL samurai imitation is always scratching himself -- as Mifune does here -- it is because he never had clean clothes, and was being bitten by fleas.

 

21. Sanjuro (1962)

 

The studio, of course, demanded a sequel, and Kurosawa was not about repeat his youthful mistake with Sugata II.

 

Although Mifune's ronin yojimbo is the same character (thirty [sanjuro] going on ...), this is a very different film than Yojimbo, set in a different time-period and involving very different circumstances.

Now the wise ronin is made to advise ten young, rather stupid, samurai retainers of a lord thought to be corrupt. Once again, the widescreen format allows for amazing compositions. Tatsuya Nakadai is the delicious villain who makes film history in the final scene.

 

22. High and Low (1963)

 

Loosely based on King's Ransom by Ed McBain, this powerful police procedural has Mifune playing a shoe company executive who is unwillingly drawn into a kidnapping. The film is bifurcated into two equally suspenseful halves. The young Tsutomu Yamazaki (Tampopo) is the kidnapper.

23. Red Beard (1965)

 

In Kurosawa's final black-and-white film, and Mifune's swan song with the director, he is again beautifully aged to play "Red Beard" -- a Japanese expression for any physician who was trained in the medical arts at Nagasaki by the red bearded Dutch.

In fact, it is the young Yasumoto (Yūzō Kayama) who passes on his Nagasaki training to the elder Mifune.

185 minutes flies by in this -- one of Kurosawa's great masterpieces.

 

Post-Mifune

24. Dodes'ka-Den (1970)

 

He surely must have missed Mifune as often as he cursed television for drying up the money he required to make films. Joining with three other prominent Japanese directors, "The Four Knights" club was formed with the intention of producing each others films.

Kurosawa went first with this tale of a retarded boy who pretends to be a trolley car (thus the title: dodes'ka-den is the sound he makes imitating the engine), along with all the inhabitants of a Tokyo slum. A fascinating watch, the film tanked and Kurosawa tried to kill himself. Thank God, he did not succeed.

 

25. Dersu Uzala (1975)

 

But with no funding available to him, he set off to the Soviet Union to visit Tarkovsky, who was in post with Solaris. Inspired, he signed onto Mosfilm, and went as far away from civilization as possible -- to the frozen tundra of Siberia.

Here he found his Dersu (Maxim Munzuk) -- a Tuvan actor -- and made an extraordinary film about humanity surviving in the indifferent conditions of Mother Nature. Vastly underappreciated.

26. Kagemusha (1980)

 

Finally, three very successful American directors (Lucas, Spielberg and Coppola) recognized a genius in trouble and provided much-needed financing.

In the five-year period between films, Kurosawa had hand-painted complete storyboards and the only major hiccup in the production occurred in casting. Kurosawa imagined that the great Shintaro Katsu (Zatoichi) would make a great Kagemusha (shadow-warrior) in a 16th-century story involving a great warlord who employed his look-alike brother as a double. Realizing the need for a third "double," they recruited a thief was about to be crucified as a stand-by. Katsu was to play both the warlord and the thief.

But his swelled ego blew his chance on the first day of shooting (he brought along his own film crew and argued with AK, until he was thrown off the lot.) "Call up Nakadai -- see if he's available," and the whole thing was fixed. Nakadai played the dual roles, with Yamazaki (High and Low) playing the brother.

 

27. Ran (1985)

 

King Lear, with sons instead of daughters. Color-coordinated so as to never lose track of who's who, Kurosawa raised the epic to new levels. Nakadai stars.

28. Dreams (1990)

 

Eight vignettes, each preceded by a caption "and I dreamed that ..."

Uneven, but the episodes that work really work! The first two for example: "Sunshine Through the Rain," and "The Peach Orchard" are miniature masterpieces. Disappointments follow until we reach "The Crow" starring Martin Scorsese as Vincent Van Gogh. The final dream "Village of the Watermills" stars the great 86-year-old Chishū Ryū playing a man who is 105.

29. Rhapsody in August (1991)

 

Ooh, how the American critics savaged this for just one scene where the kids ask why there is no American memorial in the Nagasaki Peace Park. "Because they were the ones that dropped the bomb."

A survivor is grandma to a bunch of thoroughly Americanized kids, who gradually come to realize the horror that was visited upon her in her youth. Richard Gere steps in to smooth things over, and a Schubert song on an out-of-tune organ plays a big part in the story.

Watch for the ants crawling up the rose in the Sutra scene.

30. Madadayo (1993)

 

The 83-year-old filmmaker was "not yet" done. This heartwarming tale of a German professor traverses time and space and features a lot of beer drinking. The title refers to a kid's expression when playing hide-and-seek: "Are you ready?" ... "Not yet!" (Madadayo).

KGB Bar: 25 years ago. . .

Below: photograph of Paul Violi and Star Black at KGB Bar; David Lehman and Stephanie Brown; Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez, Michael Quatrrone; John Deming and Matthew Yeager; Deborah Landau and David Lehman; Star Black at the lectern.

About the Series:

Labeled New York's best poetry series by such publications as New York Magazine and Time Out New York, the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Reading Series has hosted over 550 poets in more than 300 readings since it was founded in February1997 by Star Black and David Lehman; it  focuses on combining established writers with the most exciting young and upcoming poets.  The list of past readers includes legendary American and international poets: John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Jericho Brown, Anne Carson, Billy Collins, Elaine Equi, Mark Ford, Terrance Hayes, Richard Howard, Fannie Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Ada Limon, Sharon Olds, Molly Peacock, Katha Pollitt, Marie Ponsot, Tomaz Salamun, Vijay Seshadri, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, James Tate, Anne Waldman, Dara Wier, Charles Wright, and Kevin Young.  Currently, the series is curated and hosted by poets John Deming, Jada Gordon, and Jason Schneiderman. Former curators incluide, besides Black and Lehman, Laura Cronk, Deborah Landau, Michael Quattrone, Mathew Yeager, and Matthew Zapruder.

About the Venue:

A former single-room speakeasy (one of Lucky Luciano's favorites), KGB Bar was transformed into a Ukrainian socialist social club in 1948. To this day, the bar retains original decoration from its former incarnations, including a red hammer-and-sickle flag hanging from the tin ceiling, plus stained-glass Beaux Arts cabinetry, red walls, Soviet triumph posters, photographs, paintings, and sculptures.  KGB Bar is located at 85 East 4th Street in New York's East Village (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue). Readings begin at 7:30 PM. There will be one ten-minute intermission. No cover charge for admission. All readings open to the public. Though it is smoke-free, the massive pervasive cigarette cloud that existed as little as twenty years ago (and contributed much to the venue's conspiratorial air) is still easily imagined

"River" [by Stephanie Paterik]

River

The river never threatens to
dry itself up, or cast itself into itself.
The river holds the plank
but never walks it. River,
you must be my summer friend.
I will explore every blade
of your manmade banks until I know
you properly, and I will write you
these stories about myself, not as an act
of ego but an effort to expose myself
to you, so you might know me
and call me friend, too.

from the archive; first posted June 19, 2012

River

The river never threatens to
dry itself up, or cast itself into itself.
The river holds the plank
but never walks it. River,
you must be my summer friend.
I will explore every blade
of your manmade banks until I know
you properly, and I will write you
these stories about myself, not as an act
of ego but an effort to expose myself
to you, so you might know me
and call me friend, too.

from the archive; first posted June 19, 2012

Tonight at KGB Bar: Taije Silverman + Sharon Dolin!

Monday, Feb 13th, 2023
KGB BAR 85 E. 4th St. NY, NY 10003
Doors open at 7:00 pm
Readings start at 7:30 pm
Hosted by John Deming, Jada Gordon, and Jason Schneiderman
All readings are free and open to the public!

*****

The Night I Slept with My High School English Teacher

I want to begin this story where it ends.
He drops me at the station in the rain before dawn
and says well, should I kiss you goodbye.
His eyebrows rise into the boredom of his body
the way they’d rise in class when someone
suggested Leopold Bloom was homosexual.
All over New Jersey it’s raining. He is speeding
to the train, thinking if he can get me there on time
he will not have to wait and I do actually mistake
a blurry streetlamp for the moon and nod yes
to the kiss as if he’d offered it. At the end
I’m a helmet of ambivalence. All transparent shield,
all bulletproof bubble, the vast yes and no of pure metal.
In the middle I can’t sleep so I suck on his cock.
It stays limp in my mouth as desire like venom
seeps into the past where I sat on the vast other side
of his desk to talk about my future and his wall
made of books cut a path through the sea back to Ithaca.
Now around us the bodies of sixteen-year-old boys
are asleep on both floors of the dorm and his cock
is a mumbled apology for whatever they did or did not
want from me in the middle of the story as the story
goes: I don’t go to that school anymore, I am as old
as Isabel Archer, Dorothea Brooke, the end
of books. It’s morning, my ticket in hand.

Taije Silverman is the author of two books of poems (Houses Are Fields and Now You Can Join the Others) and the translator from Italian of the Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli. Poems from her new collection have been in The Massachusetts Review, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches poetry and translation.

Michael Mark: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________

Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet

 

For the fourth time my mother

asks, “How many children

do you have?” I’m beginning

 

to believe my answer,

“Two, Mom,” is wrong. Maybe

the lesson is they are not mine, 

 

not owned by me, and 

she is teaching me about

my relationship with her. 

 

I wash my dish and hers. 

She washes them again. I ask why.

She asks why I care.

 

Before bed she unlocks and opens

the front door. While she sleeps

I close and lock it. She gets up. Unlocks it.

 

“What I have no one wants,” she says.

I nod. She nods.

Are we agreeing?

 

My shrunken guru says she was up all night

preparing a salad for my breakfast.

She serves me an onion.

 

I want her to make French toast

for me like she used to. 

I want to tell her about my pain,

 

and I want her to make it go away.

I want the present to be as good as

the past she does not remember.

 

I toast white bread for her, butter it,

cut it in half. I eat a piece of onion. 

She asks me why I’m crying.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Mark is the author of the chapbook Visiting Her in Queens is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet, which won the 2022 Rattle Prize. His poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, The New York Times, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Southern Review, The Sun, and elsewhere. His two books of stories are Toba (Atheneum) and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). [This poem originally appeared in The Sun.]

_______________________________________________________________________________________

              Attributed to Vincenzo Campi (1530-1591), Old Peasant Woman with a Distaff and Spindle

"The Variable Foot" [by Nin Andrews]

This comic is based on a few lines from the introduction to William Carlos Williams in The Oxford Anthology of American Poetry that made me laugh:

“I write in the American idiom, “ Williams noted, “and for many years I have been using what I call the variable foot.” One of the secrets of American poetry is that no one knows what “the variable foot” really is.

from the archive; first posted December 7, 2016

"Ultimately Justice Directs Them" [by Craig Morgan Teicher]

Ultimately Justice Directs Them

1.

The soldiers are coming.

The soldiers

   are coming to break America.

The soldiers are dispatched

from America

   and they are landing

their boats on American shores.

2

Why are the soldiers coming?

Not because they believe

in what

they were told

but because they believe

that ultimately justice directs them,

that ultimately

the right thing will happen.

3

We say they are

the soldiers, but they are not:

they have chains and

moustaches

and hairstyles and daughters

and expressions on their faces

that their mothers remember on the faces

of the infants they were.

4

They are coming to break

everything down

to basics: America

has become too frumpy

for its pants.

Its health

care system cares not

for health.

5

Its laws are more paper.

6

Its schools are more paper.

7

Its schools are brick and paper.

8

The soldiers are yellow ribbon.

9

America looks at itself

and sees

itself, not America.

10

Itself looks at itself

and calls

what it sees America.

11

America has begun

calling everything

America no matter what.

12

Now more than ever.

13

Operation America.

Operation With Extra Cheese.

Operation With Fries With That.

Operation No Child Left Behind.

Operation Enduring Cheeseburger.

Operation Regurgitated Eagle.

Operation Prince of Freedom.

Operation All Night Long.

Operation Perhaps.

Operation No Really.

14

——

15

The soldiers are here.

16

Operation Big Time Pause.

17

Operation Please

And Thank You.

18

Operation Paper.

Operation No More Stars.

19

The Solders are wearing

yellow ribbons

in support

of the return

of the regular guy.

20

The soldiers are on TV

right outside

the door.

21

They are knocking——change

the channel.

22

Operation America Go!

Operation Yes!

Operation OK, OK.

Operation Every Man

for himself

and best of luck

to the women and kids.

23

——

24

By part 24 it is

already done.

– from No Tell Motel and The Best American Poetry 2009 [ed. David Wagoner]

"Rightly to be great / Is not to stir without great argument. . ."

How all occasions do inform against me
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus'd. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th' event,-
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward,- I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do,'
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me.
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff'd,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.