The Best American Poetry

Green Mountains Review and 950 Other Journals To Submit Your Work to Now [by Nin Andrews]

Last week I received an email from Poets & Writers with the title 950 Literary Magazines to Submit Your Work to Now. "950?" I asked Maggie, my cynical poet-friend. "Who reads all those journals?" She shrugged, "No one. And who cares?" 

I've been thinking about that ever since, asking myself, "Do I care?" Isn't publishing a way of being read, of feeling heard? "Why do you want to be heard?" Maggie asked. She reminded me of a reading we participated in at a bar in Ohio with two accomplished poets and a young man who had just published his first chapbook. We readers were 50% of the audience. When the chapbook-author read, he climbed onto the table and shouted at the top of his lungs. In between poems, be belted out random lyrics from a Kenny Rogers song. He explained later that he just wanted to be heard, that Kenny was his muse.  "Who doesn't love Kenny?" he asked.

But I digress . . .

Back to the question, Who reads all those journals? I assume David Lehman and his guest editors have to plow through a lot of them as they edit the annual Best American Poetry. (Thank you, David, and all your guests!) I regularly read about 10 of the 950, which sounds like a pitifully small number, but Maggie assures me it's huge. I just finished the Poet Laureate edition of Green Mountains Review, which I loved, in part because I am curious about the poets laureate, those poetry ambassadors from different states. And I am grateful to them for promoting our cause, especially Maryland's poet laureate and Buddhist Badass, Grace Cavalieri, who also hosts the Library of Congress program, The Poet and the Poem. In this issue of Green Mountain Review, featuring 10 poets laureate, I particularly enjoyed the poet of Nebraska, Matt Mason's poem, "On Kansas 156," in which he alluded to Kenny Rogers. (And really, who doesn't love Kenny?)

On Kansas 156

All the radio has to say
is eighties rock

and Kenny Rogers.
You get behind

a horse trailer
and stay there

because you can't see
around it and,

oh man,
the radio seek stops

on "Right down the Line,"
Gerry Rafferty making love sound uncrappy

whether you're ten
with a fresh copy of City To City in your hands

or forty-five with your two daughters
bored in the backseat;

you feel helpless
as the station starts to slip

into static, last lines
of the song in and out,

oil pumps and grain towers,
cassettes you forgot

how they broke
after too many plays,

unspooling
deep

inside
your bones. 

Squibs 499-502 [by Alan Ziegler]

499: In 1967, Leonard Cohen asked Judy Collins, “Why haven’t you ever written any of your own songs?" which, she said, "felt like he gave me permission to write.” She went home and wrote “Since You Asked” in 20 minutes, and 55 years later the words, the music, and that voice evoke the end of Ikiru...


.... melding with Yeats:

                                      But O that I were young again
                                      And held her in my arms!

...bearing me back graciously into the past:



500: The pizzaiolo has one hand on the oven door handle. In his head are four silent timers with no numbers.

501: My offense is lacking but I am a terrific defensive bowler. 

502: Aspirational (remaining so) entry in notebook from early teaching days.

Melissa Studdard: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher

________________________________________________________

A Little Bit Rain

 

It seemed this bicycle was faster

when I first started. Now the afterlife

is gaining on me, and every billboard I pass

 

has the same five words. I know

you’d like to know what they say, but

if you’re ever going to build up those quads,

 

you’ll need to enter this race yourself.

I even hired the Rockettes to adorn the finish line

with their legs. All for you. That’s how much

 

I love you. The moon used to be yellow,

but I painted it green for your green-loving eyes,

then left a pack of cigarettes and two aspirin

 

on the nightstand. Maybe don’t get so drunk

next time, okay? I like it when you do that thing

with your tongue. It makes me want to get

 

matching tattoos. We could translate our bodies

into a new language. Your mouth a little

bit summer. My mouth a little bit rain. 

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Melissa Studdard’s most recent poetry collection is Dear Selection Committee. Her work has been featured by PBS, NPR, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and The Guardian and has garnered awards such as The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Tom Howard Prize, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                     Samantha Thompson, Back stage--Radio City Rockettes, oil on canvas, 2022

The Sixties [by Bill Wadsworth]

The Sixties

 

The cruelties of April

            and mornings in America still

                        reverberate even now

on the further side of the hill

            with our sixties behind us

                        and the day getting late

and the old wars behind us

            and our hair turned white

                        there's a late snowfall

melting fast into the Hoosic

            River there's a natural bridge

                        the water rushes below and through

and down over ledges into a gorge

            so deep no one can see how

                        it ends or if it ends at all

(4//22/23)

"The Sixties" is a 15-line sonnet written in response to a birthday sonnet sent to me by my old friend and collaborator David Lehman.  The poem looks back to the historical experience we've shared, and forward to the time when inevitably we ourselves will be history. 

-- Bill Wadsworth

The Rienzi Hotel [by Mitch Sisskind]

The Rienzi Hotel

Day is serious but night is play

Of dark around the headlights;

Police at the Rienzi Hotel anyway.

 

Queen Moon in her royal array

Don’t appear every single night;

Day is serious but night is play

 

Night, we do it our own way

Do whatever with all our might;

Police at the Rienzi Hotel anyway.

 

Day, here’s what I forgot to say

In embrace with you real tight;

Day is serious but night is play.

 

Night seems rather far away

During the day, right, right?

Police at the Rienzi Hotel anyway.

 

Oh, how like at night we sway

Because everything is okay;

Day is serious but night is play,

Police at the Rienzi Hotel anyway.

Three Cheers: Poems by Cayanan, Lehman, Musakovska in "The Common," April 2023

The Common
Poetry editor John Hennessy
April Is Poetry Month: New Poems By Our Contributors

MARK ANTHONY CAYANAN, DAVID LEHMAN, and YULIYA MUSAKOVSKA (translated by the author and OLENA JENNINGS)

The Remedy
By David Lehman

Although I do not have
the remedy for the isolation
despite the illusion
that we’re in constant touch
beyond the hectoring
that passes for discourse,
I console myself with
the knowledge that life
as a wounded old-timer
coupled with a loving wife
is superior even to sleep,
which is what one poet
wrote that she will miss
the most when she is dead.

Click here for the other poems in the April poetry feature. https://www.thecommononline.org/april-2023-poetry-feature/

In Honor of the Late John Tranter [by Thomas Moody]

John Tranter, one of the foremost figures in Australian poetry over the last half-century, died earlier this week aged 79. Perhaps no one has done more than Tranter, as poet, editor, anthologist, publisher, critic and radio broadcaster, to place Australian poetry’s response to modernism (and postmodernism) into an international context. From his early interests in the the poetry of Rimbaud and the American avant-garde of the 1950s and 60s -- whose formal experimentation became a rich source of inspiration in his own writing -- to his revolutionary online magazine Jacket, Tranter seemed set to blow apart the provincial, Anglo-centric character of Australian poetry and open direct lines of communication to the rest of the world.

Described by the publisher and poet Michael Brennan as the “established agent provocateur of Australian poetry”,Tranter achieved a status in his home country similar to that of his good friend John Ashbery in the US: that of being a major poet accepted and acclaimed by both the avant-garde and the establishment. With his 22 collections, Tranter won nearly every major poetry prize in Australia. His poetry was relentlessly inventive. He seemed to live and die by the motto found in the early poem “Red Movie” (1972) that "an experiment which succeeds... is no longer an experiment, but has become / a demonstration of the obvious,” and maintained the urge to reinvent his poetry into to his later works through his embrace of technology, including a series of mistranslations of poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallamre using speech-to-text software. Tranter’s love of experimentation was matched by his mastery of form and a detached, ironic voice, distinctly Australian, that Tranter himself referred to as the “Laconic Mode.”

Born in the small country town of Cooma, Tranter grew up on a farm on the south-coast of New South Wales (in an interview with Toby Fitch, Tranter, tongue in cheek, draws a line between Rimbaud, Ashbery and himself as poets who all grew up on remote farms). Moving to Sydney in the early 60s, he studied intermittently for a decade, traveling across Europe and Asia before earning a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Literature in 1970, the same year he was to publish his first full-length collection Parallax. Disappointed with the state of Australian poetry, and the country writ large, which he described as “suffocatingly dull and hideously authoritarian in those days”, he took a role as a publisher’s editor in Singapore after completing his degree.

On his return to his homeland  in1973, Tranter became a vitalising force in Australian poetry as an editor, anthologist and radio broadcaster. He edited the two major anthologies of modern Australian poetry: The New Australian Poetry (1979) which confirmed the status of the “Generation of 68”, who, in Tranter’s own words, “rose to public notice on the crest of a wave of poetry readings, ‘underground’ magazines, and a generally expressed antagonism to the established mainstream of poetry at that time, which they saw as too conservative,” and were to change the course of Australian poetry; and The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991) co-edited with Philip Mead, which includes the entire oeuvre of the hoax-poet Ern Malley alongside works by indigenous poet Lionel Fogarty. Tranter also resurrected his journal Transit as a publishing company, publishing collections by friends including Gig Ryan, Martin Johnston and John Forbes. In 1975 he co-developed the first iteration of Books & Writing on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) radio. He would later take charge of a weekly, two-hour arts program, Radio Helicon on ABC Radio National from 1987-88  on which he interviewed a range of Australian and international poets including notable interviews with John Ashbery and John Forbes.

Tranter was early to recognise the power of publishing through the internet, and in 1997 began the international online poetry journal Jacket. His championing of Australian poets alongside internationally recognized names was instrumental in establishing contemporary Australian poetry throughout the world as a distinguished and distinguishable poetics. In 2004, Tranter established the online Australian Poetry Library which presented biographical and bibliographical information on over seventy Australian poets, as well as poems, book reviews and interviews.

Tranter’s own poetry, meanwhile, became renowned for its innovative style in which heightened disjunction and the use of surprising and irregular metaphor appeared to respond to the postmodern condition, in which we daily encounter a confluence of incoherent phenomena. 1976’s ambitious long poem “The Alphabet Murders”, in which each new stanza opens with the proceeding letter of the alphabet, begins:

“After all we have left behind

this complex of thought begins

a new movement into musical form, much as

logic turns into mathematics and automatics

turn into moonlit driveways — ‘form at the edge

of hearing’

Tranter’s increasing formal experimentation, including audacious pastiches, mistranslations and reimaginings of other poetic works, seemed to dislocate the poet almost entirely from the “I” of the poem. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald upon the occasion of the publication of 2010’s Starlight: 150 Poems, Tranter compared his poetry in the light of Buneul’s quote about the ideal film having no names in it, and for the screenwriter and director to be anonymous. “In the same way medieval cathedrals give you this intense emotional experience yet you have no idea who designed them or built them, films and poems could be like that too, in a way.” The opening lines to Tranter’s poem “Having Completed My Fortieth Year” seems to confirm this outlook “Although art is, in the end, anonymous, / turning into history once it’s left the body.”

In my favorite poems of Tranter’s, however, the “I” is very much located, grounded in both a temporal and geographical space, and more often than not that space is the city of Sydney. In his verse novel The Floor of Heaven, Sydney appears almost as a character, while in “In Praise of Sandstone,” which takes the end words of Auden’s famous poem “In Praise of Limestone” and places them in a Sydney landscape, we get a portrait of the city’s topography, a short history of it’s convict past and a study of a typical workday.  “Ode to Col Joye” takes its setting as a shower in Sydney, with the speaker trying to pin down which poet the day he has woken to most represents. Is it a John Forbes day? a Ken Bolton day? a John Ashbery day?

                                         it’s the kind of day

where I notice that my Renault—

      a beat-up Renault; how

          Sydney, and how French!—

has the name RENAULT on its side in chrome letters—

how metonymic

                             that the name of the object is seen as

being part of the object to which it refers

This is the Sydney I grew up in—cosmopolitan, sardonic, colorful, confident, playful— the same features that we most often encounter in Tranter’s poetry, which, like “Ode to Col Joye”, begins in Sydney and spirals across Australia and the world, continually delighting those who happen upon it.

-- Thomas Moody

See also this obit: https://jacket2.org/commentary/remembering-john-tranter

An inspired editor, John was always able to get me to write something for Jacket -- or to find a place for something wonderful that came my way. A wonderful writer, he was, until the day of his death, Australia's leading poet.-- DL

Laurence Goldstein, Editor and Poet, 1/5/1943 - 4/16/2023, Ann Arbor

On April 16th we lost Larry Goldstein, longtime editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review (32 years!), an inspired anthologist, editor, poet, and professor at the University of Michigan. I have often said that the editors of literary magazines, underpaid and overworked, are among the unsung heroes of literature. Larry was certainly in that category.  He would have an idea -- for a special issue of the magazine, or for a book -- and he had the knack of getting a writer to drop all else and get to work on it. I speak from experience. Larry's interests were many; his knowledge of poetry was matched only by his devotion to Los Angeles and classic Hollywood movies. Richard Howard selected Larry's poem "Permissive Entry: A Sermon on Fame" for The Best American Poetry 1995.

When Larry contemplated stepping down from MQR, the university established a Laurence Goldstein Prize for the best poem published ion the magazine that year. Asked about the editor for whom the prize was named, one winner, said, "what makes it great is that Larry's just about the best there is." 

Here is my favorite sentence from the official obit: <<< An essay on the mystery word "Rosebud" in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and another on poets' fascination with Marilyn Monroe, both published recently, testify to Larry's abiding interest in films.
-- DL

from the Ann Arbor News

<<<
Laurence Alan Goldstein died on Sunday, April 16, in Ann Arbor with his loving wife Nancy and sons Andrew and Jonathan at his side. The cause of death was an overwhelming bacterial infection. Born in Los Angeles Larry graduated from UCLA, later earning a PhD from Brown University. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan's department of English Language and Literature in 1970 and retired as Professor Emeritus in 2016.

Beginning his career at Michigan as a specialist in the field of British Romanticism, Larry moved on to offer such courses as Modern Poetry and Contemporary Poetry, and undergraduate and graduate seminars in a variety of specialized topics such as William Faulkner's fiction, the literature of Detroit, the literature of Los Angeles, Hollywood and Visual Culture, and the literature of the city. Graduate students whom he mentored--as well as undergraduates--kept in touch over the years from their careers and lives around the world, writing to let him know that they remembered his generous gifts of teaching.

As a poet and literary critic and historian, he wrote, edited or co-edited sixteen books and published dozens of essays and book and film reviews. At UCLA, Larry was arts editor for the Daily Bruin, seeking out interviews with local movie industry notables such as director Billy Wilder and Stan Laurel (Laurel and Hardy). As an undergraduate, and later in his career, he wrote several book reviews and op-ed pieces for the Los Angeles Times, and later for The New York Times.

At Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, he founded a poetry magazine and wrote book and film reviews for The Providence Journal. In addition to teaching and writing at the University of Michigan, Larry delighted in his secondary position: "My 32 years as editor of the University's flagship scholarly and creative arts journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, is arguably the defining accomplishment of my tenure at the University of Michigan. I changed it from a literary magazine to an interdisciplinary journal reflecting the diversity of subjects studied at the university. . . . attracting notable U of M talent as well as Nobel Prize winners and renowned writers such as Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe and others. I am especially pleased to have introduced many now-eminent authors to the reading public."

Larry especially loved baseball but also was a Go Blue football fan, always wearing his lucky MICHIGAN shirt to watch the games on TV, thrusting a fist in the air to the cheers from the Big House, quite audible in his comfy OWS home.

Memorial tributes may be made to Hospice of Lenawee www.hospiceoflenawee.org, Alzheimer's Association, or to the Michigan Quarterly Review. Muehlig Funeral Chapel, Ann Arbor muehligannarbor.com
>>>

Published by Ann Arbor News from Apr. 19 to Apr. 23, 2023.

Squib 498, after Frank O'Hara [by Alan Ziegler]

It is 5:43 p.m. in New York a Saturday
one day before my birthday, yes
and the Manhattanville Viaduct with her face on it.

and I am sweating a lot by now (because it's August)
and thinking of Barney Josephson, pushing 80, 
leaving his apartment in an early 80s snowstorm
to host at the Cookery and a young neighbor says 
"Mr. Josephson, you shouldn't go out there"
"I have to, she will get in from Roosevelt Island"


and indeed she does and so do I amidst a smattering of devotees
Mr. Josephson dapper in a suit
he could have worn introducing Lady Day at Cafe Society
tells of his concerned young neighbor and up she bounds
impish smile launching into "My Castle's Rocking"
("I'm laying it on the line for protection")
and Gerald Cook and everyone and I breathe deeply

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: April 26, 2023

Eileen Myles has done it once again—delivering poems so deceptively simple this reader is shocked by the intimacies and revelations within.  In a “working life,” they make it look easy—this dance between the scrupulous ecstasy of the present while never far off is the concern for the future of our planet.  a "working life" was published yesterday by Grove. Congratulations, Eileen!

Here's a sample poem from the book:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09/march-3

 

Musical Plagiarism Then and Now [by Lewis Saul]

Musical plagiarism was an accepted practice in the 17th and 18th centuries. In fact, is was considered more of an homage.

When discovering the works of Vivaldi, Bach went to work on rewriting them in his own style. No lawsuits were filed.

Here's a great example. Joseph Haydn wrote these very unique eight notes to begin the menuet of his 21st symphony, 1764:

 

 

 

A full 23 years later (1787), Mozart felt no compunction about lifting them whole cloth for his minuet in his famous Eine Kleine Nachtmusik:

 

**

Now let's skip ahead to our litigious age where George Harrison's My Sweet Lord and many other accusations of copyright violations were settled in court.

I only provide two examples here, though they differ in the basic intricacies of copyright law.

In this first example, Keith Jarrett laid down a funky little riff based on only two chords (Long As You Know You're Living Yours), but listen to the similarity in the rhythm:

 

 

Now listen to Steely Dan's Gaucho from 1980:

 

After Jarrett filied suit, Fagen & Becker settled by adding his name to the "composed by" credit.

 

Jarrett’s clip is YouTube Premium only. So see this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfVSLdfP1Y8]

The following case is much different. Bill Evans's Peace Piece consists of only two chords (CMaj7 / Gsus9):

 

 

Lady Blackbird copied this for her song Fix It in 2021. The copyright law wouldn't prohibit this, presumably because the chord progression is simple and any composer might think of such a chordal movement:

Tony Towle: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________

In Progress

 

We adjust the background

so that I am still in a forest,

but the traditional kind,

not one made of cement and glass,

but composed primarily of wood

and auxiliary vegetal matter,

aerated with avian sonorities,

and partly veiled by more “air products”:

innocuous mist or fog —

for there is such a generous

spacing between predators

that it would make our Paleolithic relatives,

wherever they might be watching from,

think that living in our world

would be a safe and wonderful thing.

 

I pause in the mist or fog, because

it is a good place for retrieving ancient data

to supplement the present with;

that is, what’s left of the present

after the morning news

has finished most of it off —

 

and I found something: When Phil Niekro

retired from the Atlanta Braves

there was no longer anyone

playing in major league baseball

older than I was. He achieved

this distinction in 1987             

and will never relinquish it.

 

What has happened since then?

 

Honestly, I don’t keep track of him.

Oh, you mean to me? Well, lots of things,

really, but I’ll get to them later,

since I’ve often admonished myself

for living in the past, although

I only did that when living in the past.    

The Phil Niekro discovery

came through one of the newspapers

I perused during the eons of down time

consequent to proofreading at Forbes,

where in two years my only noteworthy

“catch” was pointing out that Luxemburg

was not a principality, as written—a synonym

for a minuscule polity—but a grand duchy.

In the following week, while

resting imperceptibly on my laurels,

I missed a typo so egregious that my luster

was tarnished beyond reclamation.

 

So back to the present, or what’s

left of the present after the evening news

has chewed it to pieces —

but there was not a word

about the Somali pirates

who attempted to seize my poems

and hold them hostage.

 

What were your poems doing

in the Strait of Hormuz?

 

You mean the Gulf of Aden.

You may well ask.

I wish I were at liberty to say.

                        *

So that’s as far as I got with the first draft on my laptop,

while sitting unnoticed for an hour in the shoe store

except by the guy in the chair on the other side of the aisle,

who was keeping an eye on me until my contact showed up—

2 o’clock was that approaching hour—and then he abruptly left

a minute before she, the no-nonsense-taking Mrs. Blackstone,

walked in from a long-past-due assignment,

and when I mentioned the departed observer, she said

that he wasn’t one of hers; and I looked down at my watch  

to evade the stare that italicized my blunder,

and saw it was a quarter to three—I had just lost 45 minutes!

but in fact it was 55 years that I needed to go back and fix.

Those alterations will never fit in the space at the end of the file,

though they set off reflections enough to beguile the obfuscating eye.

                                                                                     

  2019-20

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tony Towle began writing poetry in 1960. His connection to the New York School dates from 1963, when he took workshops at the New School with Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara. Since then, he has published thirteen books of poetry, most recently Noir (Hanging Loose Press, 2017); as well as a book of prose: Memoir 1960-1963 (Faux Press, 2001). My First Three Books (Vehicle Editions, 2020), combines an interview, photographs, and a CD of Towle reading some of his early work. More of Towle’s poetry, interviews, readings, etc., can be found at his website and at Penn Sound.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                         Vintage photo of men in shoe store

In Praise of the Late John Tranter [by Thomas Moody]

Word has just reached us that John Tranter, the brilliant poet and editor, died on April 21, just eight days shy of his 80th birthday. We will be running a tribute to John Tranter and posting some of his poems in the coming days. For now, let us let Thomas Moody introduce American readers to Australia's leading poet and literary editor. Part one of Moody's essay is below; click here for part II, which we posted on  September 1, 2021
 -- David Lehman

An Introduction to John Tranter [April 29, 1943 – April 21, 2023] (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

The difficulty in introducing John Tranter is knowing where to begin. Surely any attempts to elucidate his poetry would be reductive, and any measure of its influence fall embarrassingly short. Tranter is a major poet and in my estimate the major Australian poet of the second-half of the twentieth-century (though John Forbes might have something to say about that). His renown stretches far beyond our antipodal boundaries. As his good friend John Ashbery wrote in the introduction to Starlight: 150 Poems, Tranter is an "international phenomenon".

In the course of his more than twenty collections, Tranter has seemed to live and die by the motto found in one of his most ambitious and accomplished poems, "Red Movie," that "an experiment which succeeds... is no longer an experiment, but has become / a demonstration of the obvious." Tranter's poetry always surprises and refuses to rest on its laurels—just as you think he's hit on a winning formula in one collection, he upends it in the next. Through his fifty years of writing he's employed a multitude of styles and techniques, but always present are his keen ear for the Australian vernacular, a frighteningly sharp intelligence, and a "larrikinism" that never lets his poetry take itself too seriously. 

 The poem I'd like to share today is not particularly representative of Tranter's oeuvre, though it does exhibit several qualities that we can find in many of his poems: his wit, a love of the movies, and his extraordinary ability to absorb the essence of another poet and transmute it into a contemporary Australian landscape (both geographical and emotional) to offer us something at once uncannily familiar and entirely original. "After Hölderlin" is a favorite of mine, and I suspect it may be a favorite of Tranter's too, as it serves as the opening poem to his new & selected, Urban Myths. I plan on sharing much more of Tranter's poetry over the coming months, so stay tuned.

After Hölderlin

When I was a young man, a drink
often rescued me from the factory floor
or the office routine. I dreamed
in the mottled shade of many a beer garden
among a kindness of bees and breezes
my lunch hour lengthening.

As the flowers plucked and set in the little bottle
on the table still seem to hanker for the sun,
nodding in the slightest draft, so I 
longed for a library loose with rare volumes
or a movie theatre's satisfying gloom
where a little moon followed the usherette
up and down the blue carpeted stairs.

You characters caught up in your emotions 
on the screen, how I wish you could know
how much I loved you; how I longed
to comfort the distraught heroine
or share a beer with the lonely hero.

I knew your anxieties, trapped
in a story that wouldn't let you live;
I felt for you when you were thrown from the car
again and again; when the pilot
thought he was lost and alone, 
I was speaking the language of the stars
above his tiny plane,
murmuring in the sleepy garden, growing up
among the complicated stories.
These dreams were my teachers
and I learned the language of love
among the light and the shadow
in the arms of the gods.

Posted by Thomas Moody on August 04, 2021 at 10:45 AM in Australia | Permalink

Comments

Thank you, TM, for this column on the "international phenomenon" that is John Tranter. I love the poem -- perhaps the more so because, for me as for the two Johns referenced (Ashbery and Tranter), Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry is and has long been an inspiration. Looking forward, I am, to more Tranter -- and more Moody.

Posted by: David Lehman | August 05, 2021 at 12:24 AM

How good to be reminded of Tranter’s excellent poetry which doesn’t get seen much here in the US.

Posted by: Mark Pawlak | August 21, 2021 at 08:59 AM

From the archive; first posted  August 4, 2021

See also

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/an-introduction-to-john-tranter-part-1-by-thomas-moody-1.html

Zao Wou-Ki at MAM Paris: intriguing (painterly) commentary on modern art in Europe [By Tracy Danison]

Zao, Wou-Ki 趙無極, Encre 79, N°6, 1979. Photo: Charles Delepelaire/Parisienne de Photographie © Adago, Paris

A donation of nine Zao Wou-Ki paintings has recently been added to the Museé de l’Art Moderne de Paris (MAM Paris). The donation, by the poet’s widow, Françoise Marquet, brings the museum’s holding to eleven paintings, four India ink drawings, four prints and seven vases. The new (and the old works, too) are a treat as well as a useful addition to the museum’s fund of critically important work.

Born in Beijing in 1920, arriving in France in 1948, Zao Wou-Ki was in at the beginning China’s opening to the modern European takes on visual and plastic art. He attended China’s first arts faculty, the China Academy of Art between 1935 and 1941, studying there under Fang Ganmin, an early advocate for a fusion of China and European practices. The academy, founded in 1929, supervised by French-trained painter and educator Lin Fengmian, promoted the idea that, in a modern society, art could take the place of religion – a common enough idea in art circles in Europe at the time and not far from the surface today. The academy has survived all China’s political vicissitudes; it has operated under its original name since the 90s.

Zao, Wou-Ki 趙無極, Hommage à Henri Matisse II 21.5.93

Though there’s absolutely no visual resemblance that I know of, Zao Wou-Ki’s work always puts me in mind of the ideograms of the I Ching. These invite the onlooker to contemplate the natural forces represented in the light of a question. Zao’s work, especially his ink drawings, seem to emphasize the role of onlooker perception. Like the I Ching, Zao seems to call to pure perception, not to the self that is perceiving nor to the particular structures of what is perceived.

The emphasis on individual onlooker perception seems to me unique among the moderns with whom Zao associated, as well as those whose influence he claimed, including Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne.

In contrast to Zao, all three artists – and their contemporaries, too –  seem to be trying to impose some specific underlying form of the world perceived, whether that’s atomic lattices or color theory or some projected psychology or political message.

At least in the MAM’s newly fortified collection, Zao seems to go out of his way to underline his difference with his contemporaries without spelling out what that difference may be (which makes sense).

Zao, Wou-Ki 趙無極, Citrons, 1949-1950. Photo ©Naomi Wenger

For instance, Zao’s Hommage à Henri Matisse II (already in the collection) invites me to wonder where, exactly, the old color maven is to be found in a rising pillar of black between rose and blue, mostly up and down brush strokes. My visual memory finds itself somewhere between Yves Klein and Rothko – no easy connection to Matisse. Is Zao trying to call attention to something implicit in Matisse’s famous color and figure or to his own approach to perception?

Also, a still life called Citrons (part of the recent donation) recalls the intense “real-reality” value of Cézanne’s take on these homely scenes. But Zao entirely dispenses with the older artist’s visual abundance and warmth of color. Citronsmakes me feel I’m reading Heidegger’s essay through the sole of Van Gogh’s Shoes – am I missing how manipulative Cézanne is?

None of the intention I’m lending Zao is out of the ball park. He had a broad of view of how visual art comes to be and plenty of the type of experience in living that tends to blunt the sense that you know what the world is about.  For his romantic companions, Zao chose the composer Lalan, the actress and later sculptor Chan May-Kan and the art historian and curator Françoise Marquet (who made the donation).

Zao, Wou-Ki 趙無極, A la mémoire de mon frère Wou-Wei ,15.12.22-11.02.79). Photo: Courtesy Musée de l’art Moderne de Paris

Zao claimed to be an acolyte to Paul Klee as art theorist as well as a painter. Among his many friends and acquaintance in his adopted country, he counted poets, writers, and even politicians, among many others, poet and painter Henri Michaux, novelist François Cheng (who, among many other endeavors, translated classics of French poetry into Chinese), the sculptor Alberto Giacometti (who also spend a lot of time wondering what was what and why), the Résistance hero and high culture advocate, André Malraux, and l. M. Pei, another important figure in the China-Europe esthetic fusion and architect of, notably, the pyramid of the Louvre.

Have a good long look yourself if you’re in Paris. God knows, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to see Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne. And then, there are also many more works by Zao at Musée Cernuschi, musée des Arts de l’Asie de la Ville de Paris.

"Northern Pike" by James Wright [as presented by Jenny Factor]

Jenny Factor on James Wright

Stacey Harwood's important post earlier this week put me in mind of James Wright. A poet and exemplar of endurance. A sturdy fragile voice. Perhaps I'm looking for an antidote. Perhaps I'm just looking. In any event, I was reminded this morning of his "Northern Pike". 

This is one to read slowly to oneself, twice-in-a-row. (It's an argument with the self, I think...). It works best on a kind of rhythmic repetition...

Northern Pike

All right. Try this,
Then. Every body
I know and care for,
And every body
Else is going
To die in a loneliness
I can't imagine and a pain
I don't know. We had
To go on living. We
Untangled the net, we slit
The body of this fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet whom we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making
under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.
We prayed for the game warden's blindness.
We prayed for the road home.
We ate the fish.
There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy.                      

       --  James Wright

Mary Oliver once wrote of those poets and other artists who commit suicide, "I forgive them/their unhappiness.../...for walking out of the world./But I don't forgive them.../for taking off their veils/and dancing for death. for hurtling/toward oblivion/on the sharp blades/of their exquisite poems, saying:/this is the way/// I was, of course, all that time/coming along/behind them, and listening/for advice. She concludes "Members of the Tribe" from her 1986 Dream Work with these lines that remind me of my own high school darkness, and how, on the day after, I'd feel so light my head and shoulders just floating up without any of the ego or striving left in me:

And the man who merely
washed Michelangelo's brushes, kneeling
on the damp bricks, staring
every day at the colors pouring out of them,

lived to be a hundred years old.

So here's a toast...To the muskrats. To the game warden's blindness. And to life. Inventive. Fragile. Liveable.

L'chayim!

Posted by Jenny Factor on April 18, 2009 at 05:04 PM in Jenny Factor -West Coast Correspondent | Permalink

Comments

Dearest Jenny, I had a few bad months and didn't tend to things, so missed this. I too love Wright, especially The Green Wall, his first and more formal book. But I love his spirit in all of them, though he was a problematic guy, I guess. (Ask Franz.) I met him once; he and Annie danced around the room after the reading; the room was full of sunlight and the gesture was not a gesture but a feeling. I took them to the airport and the three of us spent a glorious hour giggling and reminiscing about the (his) old days. (I didn't have any old days then.) I'd spent two years trying to get him to visit; we'd talk on the phone. He didn't want to leave NY even for a visit; he said he didn't have enough courage to leave his shrink for any length of time. Also, he reiterated, many times, what we already knew: that Ohio was, for him, the Land of the Dead; and crossing the Ohio River, even in a plane, was not something he wanted to attempt. But he did finally come (we paid for Annie's ticket, too, of course); and I, at least, had one of those "times" that one remembers forever, and that becomes part of one's own old days. Thanks for the love that shows through everything you write.

Posted by: jim cummins | July 15, 2009 at 01:04 PM

Ah, Jim. So good to hear from you. Sometimes I don't even have the words (and i'm sorry about the months...)... (i know you only online but you have an online presence that is like when a kindred spirit walks into the room at a big party. Well, I look up and before I smile, I flush).

My own months have been pretty odd too. Taught a few courses last term and helped to build a large online learning module for the low-residency MFA program. A lot of work--but the good news about that arrives roughly now--there are students in the module, so I have the pleasure of those ether-voices during the distance-learning project periods which can otherwise become so...distant. I really love my Antiochians--smart, interesting, and good company. And it's nice to have a place to settle in and teach in the five months that separate each residency...if only because I can ask my scads of unanswerable poetry questions aloud.

Is it possible that I've read about that later-in-life trip to Ohio? I think I have--perhaps in the notes from some 92nd Street Y audio-recording, or perhaps I heard it in Wright's patter to the audience (which is my better guess). Or perhaps I'm thinking only of Marilyn Hacker's, "Elevens" which is about flying into Ohio, thinking about Wright flying into Ohio: "James A. Wright, my difficult older brother.../You are the lonely gathering of rivers/below the plane that left you in Ohio...."--(it's in rough sapphics, and that first line sounds best when you really let the trochee-trochee-dactyl-trochee-trochee out. The other lines have wandering dactyls, so you have to let 'em wander).

Do you know this poem of Billy Collins, "This Much I Do Remember"?
http://nexus.typepad.com/nexus/2003/12/this_much_i_do_.html

Then all of the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all of the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.

Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.

Your moment reminds me of that. Do you remember--cause I don't--who wrote about how little we control the moments we get to mint--how they simply sneak up on us? How the milestones--the ones we hope to remember always get lost--but some odd inadvertant instant finds a way into forever.

Hoping you'll mint yours in the big factory where they chug out puffy clouds and happiness...on a series of long and languid summer days. Will write again soon if that's okay.

thinking of you--

Posted by: Jenny Factor | July 17, 2009 at 10:13 AM

From the archive; first posted April 18, 2009 as “Dear Life: Still Here!" [by Jenny Factor]

Three Sonnets [by Mitch Sisskind]

Tears of the Intellectuals

Tears of the intellectuals, bitter dew,

Moistening pages of ponderous books

Schmerz of the intellectuals, sad but true,

Bellyaching of the egghead schnooks,

Kvetching, self-loathing anchored deep

In the hearts of intellectuals albeit they know

The galaxies' secrets, and what life forms creep

In brackish saltwater, and how protozoa grow.

Oy, as knowledge expands, oft doth the pain

Of being an intellectual expand apace, because

There's never quite enough money to sustain

A half-decent lifestyle, and there never was.

Yet intellectuals will do what intellectuals do,

Are you an intellectual? Fuck me, I'm one too.

To a Statue

 

Queen Sennuyw of the Middle Kingdom's lore,

Your statue, 4000 years buried in the sand,

Now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts forevermore;

What an astonishment it is. No restoration is planned.

In life you surely were graceful and serene,

Tall and proud, strolling around in the dunes,

Embodiment of all your rule had come to mean,

Worshipping Khonsu, goddess of the moon.

Now, even in stone, your eyes seem able to see

Far beyond the BMFA, off to where the Nile flows,

Where life and death were an engaging harmony,

Benign circularity, as the Nile's yearly flooding showed.

Sennuyw, enduring queen of the antique land,

Antipode of Ozymandias, carved by an unknown hand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Santa Claus in Springtime

I know Santa Claus is in the chimney tonight
But I don't waken startled, or even surprised;
I've learned to accommodate an amorphous fright
That gets more and more morphous, then dies.

I'll have to croak too, of course, or as the Brits say,
Pop off, which is the message when a tooth falls out;
So as your various faculties are slipping away,
Remember the song, better not cry, better not pout,

Because Santa Claus has always been in town.
You didn't want to come here, my good man,
And now, though you want to stay around,
What you want is different from what you can.

Santa Claus knew you on the day you were born.
Best not to stress about it. But you've been warned.

 

Introduction to a History of the Sky [by Tom Disch]

There is not a single sky but rather a diversity
of single sky-moments strung out like beads
on a celestial necklace. The Greeks believed
in a single sky with Zeus its ruler
and his son Apollo a traveler
traversing it each day like the conductor
on a modern railway train. Any child knows better
now, knows that the sun is a burning cloud
of hydrogen, a fire that is never extinguished,
just as the sea never stops feeding the sky
with the clouds bringing rain. Like those clouds
the sky lends itself to much vain speculation.
"Very like a whale," Prince Hamlet says,
agreeing with Polonius, but he is not being
serious. No cloud is even approximately
whale-like. [See Table 3, in Appendix D:
Cloud shapes.] Nor should we try to analyze
the sky in terms of ages and eras. The sky
does not have its own French and Indian Wars.
It has, as we have observed above, moments.
To begin to understand the sky
you must find a vantage high enough
to command a view in all directions,
some mountain top or the crow's-nest
of a ship at sea. Then you must integrate
your observations with those of sky-chroniclers
in other latitudes, measuring such variables
as Bright and Cloudy, Auspicious and Dull,
and set these down in a bound ledger.
At first the task may seem beyond
your capabilities. It is! History is
a humbling discipline. The sky is finally unknowable,
but only its historians know that.

February 19, 2008

"An Argentine Gaucho Named Bruno. . ." [from The Best American Erotic Poems]

<<<
Even to attempt a definition of key terms such as erotic and pornographic is a hazardous task. But about a few things there is general agreement. This is from My Secret Life (c. 1890), that classic work of late Victorian pornography written by an anonymous gentleman with a big-time itch and the compulsion to repeat and record his amatory adventures:

“Providence has made the continuation of the species depend on a process of coupling the sexes, called fucking,” he writes. “It is not a graceful operation – in fact it is not more elegant than pissing, or shitting, and is more ridiculous; but it is one giving the intensest pleasure to the parties operating together, and most people try to do as much of it as they can.”

The artless simplicity of these sentences is their charm, though they are more complicated than meets the eye. Notice the relation of “coupling” to the perpetuation of the species on the one hand and to superlative pleasure on the other. The conjugation of the bodies is the observance of a sacrament, a religious imperative, but it also involves the unrelentingly gross human body in an “operation” no finer than urination or defecation, and “more ridiculous.”

Call it fucking or call it making love: the “process of coupling” is the central fact, the rock thrown into the previously placid pond, around which widen the circles of erotic implication. Fucking remains the ultimate profanity. But any word or phrase for sexual intercourse, euphemistic and genteel, or clinical and precise, or lewd and graphic, will prove problematic, and the array of possibilities suggests that contradictory impulses are at work, or contradictory ways of presenting the same impulse. An instance of heterosexual love, for example, can be depicted as the union of yin and yang, husband and wife engaged in the blessed task of procreation, or contrarily as an anomalous episode during a temporary truce in the battle between the sexes. We know, in any case, that sexual desire is a drive that seems to trump all others and dictate human behavior sometimes against all reason or beyond any rational explanation. We know that it is the most intense and irresistible of bawdy pleasures, that it makes fools and rascals and buffoons of us and often lowers the attitudinal level from tragic postures and epic vistas to bedroom farces and comedies of Eros. Yet as Anonymous noted in 1890, “most people try to do as much of it as they can,” and everyone thinks about it more than anyone will admit.

In the realm of the erotic, the sacred and the profane converge, and so do the sublime and the ridiculous. The familiar image of the “beast with two backs” is ridiculous but accurate and therefore a valuable corrective to high-minded or romantic representations of the theme. The subject of sex gives rise to elegant aphorism (“Sex is the lyricism of the masses”: Charles Baudelaire), extravagantly mixed metaphor (“Sex is a black tarantula and sex without religion is like an egg without salt”: Luis Bunuel), and exceedingly clever limericks (“An Argentine gaucho named Bruno / Declared there is one thing I do know: / A woman is fine, / A boy is divine, / But a llama is numero uno”). Sex in The Waste Land is a nightmare from which the typist may never recover, consisting of passionless caresses, “unreproved, if undesired,” from “the young man carbuncular” – surely the least desirable epithet ever conferred on a man. But then T. S. Eliot’s poem is an example of what Lee Upton calls “dysterotica,” which bears the same relation to the erotic as the world-view of 1984 or Brave New World has to Utopia. 

-- David Lehman
>>>

from the introduction to The Best American Erotic Poems (2008)

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: April 19, 2023

Vievee Francis’s fourth book The Shared World was published on April 17 by TriQuarterly Books. Revelatory and redemptive, Francis is a poetry seer writing searing verse. The book’s cover art is a 1965 photograph of Galway Kinnell being assisted by Juniata College senior Harriet Richardson after Kinnell had been hit by a state trooper’s billy club in Montgomery, AL. The photograph sets us up for what is to come in Francis’s powerful book, including her brilliant ekphrasis prose poem “1965.” Francis’s necessary poems are politically charged with a tilt that will shatter your heart, constantly reminding her readers of our stake in resistance. In “Finding Myself in the Market of Accra,” Francis writes of a doll she saw on a trip to Africa:

“She was hard but could be broken. I am
only as hard as I need to be and have been
broken many times. No one seemed to find it odd
there in the market. The obvious American
holding tightly the Ghanaian doll, rocking it
back and forth in the bassinet of her arms,
cooing, It’s OK. It’s OK. It will all be OK.”

The poet is comforting herself the same way a college senior/student organizer comforted a poet all those years ago. The Shared World is a world of pain, humor, and a violent history. Francis shares a full life with intimacy and grace. She is a poet of generosity both in her disclosures and the sheer number of poems she gives us.  This book is 130 pages long.

Her two prose poems about Marvin Gaye transcend any pop culture fluff and go straight to the heart of betrayal, jealousy and love: Of course my best friend married my boyfriend. Of course my boyfriend shared my love letters. What did I expect? You can get a sneak peek here:

https://www.spin.com/2021/02/a-poetic-tribute-to-marvin-gaye/

Congratulations, Vievee!

Quote of the Day [by Harrison Ball]

NYCB Principal Dancer Harrison Ball. Photo © Ricky Cohete

Ed note: Soon after Harrison Ball was made a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet in 2022, he suffered several injuries that have ended his promising dance career. He is retiring from the company this spring, at 29. His final performance is on April 30. Here is an excerpt from a recent interview. Substitute just about any pursuit for "dancer" and the words of wisdom would still apply: 

Do you have any special words of wisdom or helpful hints to share with dancers who are either new to the art form or to the Company?

If I could give advice to dancers who are in training or beginning a performing career it would be a few things. I would say that as deeply as you work on your craft, you must work on yourself. The body is indeed the instrument you use but it is the mind that informs everything you do. Travel, travel, travel. See the world and expand your mind. You must attend performances in all theater mediums, go to museums and galleries and learn about the great artists, educate yourself on cinema and culture, keep up with the current affairs of humanity, watch other companies all around the world (social media can be a tool in this regard), learn new styles of dance, read the great literature of the world, take an acting class and learn how to be truthful in the moment, find a hobby that enhances your creativity as a performer. Most importantly, learn to be honest with yourself. It’s easy to get wrapped up in small things in the dance world. It is not life or death. Stick to the big picture. Once you get your first paycheck, you are an adult. Take responsibility in your life. There is no such thing as authority once you begin working. You will fear performance, colleagues, and faculty. Tell yourself to not be afraid anymore until you aren’t. Have no fear! And remember to not take yourself or everything too seriously. Fight to maintain your curiosity and joy. Have fun and enjoy your career no matter where you are. Work as hard as you can. It goes quickly. Most importantly, enjoy life.

You can read the full interview here. 

And it's not too late to catch Ball in his final performances. Find more information about programs and casting here. 

--sdl