The Best American Poetry

The Joker's Wild (Happy Birthday, Novak Djokovic)

J. Tarwood: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Pause in Our Divorce

 

Tomorrow, we start again,

those leaflets on the blood of the lamb

swirling about my blockade of shot glasses.

Like a coffin with its lid kicked open,

our trailer will shake

when I blast out the door,

stuffed tigers tumbling from crooked shelves

to claw the carpet bought at Goodwill.

Apple tea in hand,

you will watch me tramp that gravel path

smeared with snow, my breath

a fist trembling open

once my back’s to you. But tonight

is a butterfly on our bayonet,

you in the rocker, wet black hair hanging

like a nun’s habit; and me wedged

in the easy chair, a whiskey-stained Othello

in my lap. We wonder how we’ll end,

like those enemy soldiers in World War I

who played football in no man’s land before Verdun.

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J. Tarwood has been a dishwasher, a community organizer, a medical archivist, a documentary film producer, an oral historian, and a teacher. After a life spent in East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, he currently lives in China, and has published six books: The Cats in Zanzibar, Grand Detour, And for the Mouth a Flower, What the Waking See, The Sublime Way, and The World at Hand. 

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                                                                  A re-enactment of the 1914 Christmas Truce

Vive la Différence [by Somerset Maugham]

“Have you never thought of divorcing Gray?”

“I’ve got no reason for divorcing him.”

“That doesn’t prevent your countrywomen from divorcing their husbands when they have a mind to.”

She laughed.

"Why d'you suppose they do it?"

“Don’t you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.”

-- Somerset Maugham, "The Razor's Edge"

Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828) [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

O be with me! How dear I am,

Flinging myself from chair to chair.

Hello, I am Lady Caroline Lamb.

Would you like a witty epigram

Or a discreet snip of my pubic hair?

O be with me! How dear I am!

For Byron I made pleasing shams

Dressed as squires or Scots lairds;

Hello, I am Lady Caroline Lamb.

But what now avails such flimflam

As we played, our unchaste dares?

O be with me! How dear I am!

For my novels I was also slammed

By vain unlettered aristo types. How unfair!

Hello, I am Lady Caroline Lamb.

Reader, let's meet among the damned

And do as we please, they won't care.

O be with me! How dear I am!

I'll write only paeans and dithyrambs

In hell, I'll be such a good girl there!

O be with me! How dear I am!

Hello, I am Lady Caroline Lamb!

                                ***

Some notes:

Stanza 2: Lamb sent this snip to Byron

on August 9, 1812.

Stanza 3: Lamb liked to cross-dress

to amuse Byron or to gain access to

him when he was trying to hide from her.

Lamb was a vastly more interesting and

talented person than I've been able to

convey in this poem (sniff, sob.) There's

an excellent biography by Paul Douglass.

"Prayer" [by Philip Metres]

Philip Metres
Prayer

Wither me to within me:
Welt me to weal me common again:
Withdraw to wear me weary:
Over me to hover and lover again:

Before me to form and perform me:
Round me to rill me liquid incisions:
Behind me to hunt and haunt me:
Down me to drown indecision:

Bury me to seed me: bloom me
In loam me: grind me to meal me
Knead me to rise: raise me to your mouth

Rive me to river me:
End me to unmend me:
Rend me to render me:

from Poem-a-Day (2015)

"Lufthansa" by John Tranter [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

"Lufthansa" is one of Tranter's best and most anthologised poems. The poem is mimetic of one of its early lines: it seems "struck by an acute feeling of precision" which leaves little room for interpretation or "meaning" that extends beyond the surface of its language. Michael Brennan has astutely drawn comparisons between the poem's "unity, precision and momentum" and a passage from Susan Sontag's 'Against Interpretation': "Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be… just what it is."

 

Lufthansa

Flying up a valley in the Alps where the rock
rushes past like a broken diorama
I’m struck by an acute feeling of precision –
the way the wing-tips flex, just a little
as the German crew adjust the tilt of the sky and
bank us all into a minor course correction
while the turbo-props gulp at the mist
with their old-fashioned thirsty thunder – or
you notice how the hostess, perfecting a smile
as she offers you a dozen drinks, enacts what is
almost a craft: Technical Drawing, for example,
a subject where desire and function, in the hands
of a Dürer, can force a thousand fine ink lines
to bite into the doubts of an epoch, spelling
Humanism. Those ice reefs repeat the motto
whispered by the snow-drifts on the north side
of the woods and model villages: the sun
has a favourite leaning, and the Nordic gloom
is a glow alcohol can fan into a flame.
And what is this truth that holds the grey
shaking metal whole while we believe in it?
The radar keeps its sweeping intermittent promises
speaking metaphysics on the phosphor screen;
our faith is sad and practical, and leads back
to our bodies, to the smile behind the drink
trolley and her white knuckles as the plane drops
a hundred feet. The sun slanting through a porthole
blitzes the ice-blocks in my glass of lemonade
and splinters light across the cabin ceiling.
No, two drinks – one for me, one for Katharina
sleeping somewhere – suddenly the Captain
lifts us up and over the final wall
explaining roads, a town, a distant lake
as a dictionary of shelter – sleeping
elsewhere, under a night sky growing bright with stars.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: May 17, 2023

Campbell McGrath’s Fever of Unknown Origin was published on May 9 by Penguin Random House. The title poem takes place as the speaker fights a long illness and is in a hospital right before Christmas. Here is an excerpt:

The bad news is that I am periodically blind
in one of those otherwise excellent eyes, which flickers 
between darkness and light, like poorly connected cable TV.
It’s terrifying, that darkness. Enveloping. Confounding.
Immediately, all thought flows toward the remaining eye—
may it never falter, dear lord, may it guide me 
through the corridors of your mansion forever and ever, 
amen….

That love of vision—and that urgency it could be lost— infuses McGrath’s chockablock poems as he records the present, aware of the perilous future. The eye is a metaphor, a rush against the unknown—in terms of the political landscape and environmental devastation. McGrath documents the lush world with ecstasy and grace—the animals, the humans, and manmade structures all getting their due. He even turns the eye inward in the startlingly beautiful “Bukhara,” a dream poem in which he unites with his friend Tony Hoagland. “Nostalgia is time’s/ double agent,” McGrath claims, and though many of his poems drift to the past (to understand the present and the future) we are never mired in sentimentality. Fever of Unknown Origin is a mature, intimate, and wise collection.

For a sneak peek, you can hear McGrath read part of his poem “At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium” here.  You’ll see what I mean with all that intense imagery:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714295/fever-of-unknown-origin-by-campbell-mcgrath/#:~:text=Fever%20of%20Unknown%20Origin%20opens,reframes%20our%20perception%20of%20modern

Congratulations, Campbell!

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty): Tyrone Williams [by Angela Ball]

Border Clashes

 

We stroll out of El Zocalo

to find a world turning white

with snow. Not more than an hour ago,

or so it seems, it was still just a neighborhood

of homemade heaps and small dark houses

huddled against the single-digit skies

of southwest Detroit.

Kim plods to his Escort. I fire up the Tempo,

turn on the wipers.

1-75 to the Lodge,

I pretend to follow the north star

but pull off at the Warren-Forest exit

and pull into the Third Street Saloon.

I take out a five for a Stroh’s

and take a look around

at the only other patrons,

a table of students,

one of whom I know, a poet.

She catches my eye, looks away,

carelessly laughing as I recall

*

Christmas night at the Detroit-

Windsor border. I sat alone

in the back of an Accord

being driven by Mary, Katie

beside her, two sisters,

nearsighted, brown-haired, blond.

The guard bent down, jerked his head

my way, and sneered, “You gals

bringing anything across?”

Flashing licenses and teeth—

“Is—that--all?”—

Katie, enraged, swore for hours,

but how could I, I who have always

lived between countries,

between that night and another night,

thirteen years before,

when my girlfriend and I

found ourselves detained by Customs

because I was said to resemble

a West Indian brother

twenty years my senior?

Later, back in the U.S.A.,

Katie and I danced our asses off.

Sweat flung from the sprinkler

our figures cut, twinkled like icy

stars on the stage

lit unlit by slo-mo strobes.

I could smell the sweat of a hundred

worlds, the sweet and sour stench

of cheap perfume and bargain-brand soap.

It was the hot sauce and garlic of Hamtramck

and Highland Park, Rayis Brothers

and Brothers Barbecue, Eastern Market

and Lafayette Coney, an ethnic festival

teeming with bloods.

When the lights came up, we filed out,

stunned, as though the places

to which we had to return--

Plymouth and Detroit--

had been found dead

in each other’s arms:

murder-suicide.

*

Last call, and I’m just fine.

I stumble to my car, spin out

of the lot in a spray of sleet and mud

and hit the northbound Lodge at sixty.

Not a few of these vehicles are harboring drunks

like me. The world is still turning white.

The white dotted lines are useless now.

We weave our ways home,

as best we can,

in lanes of our own making.

-Tyrone Williams

About the poem: It was written during, and about, the year I returned to Detroit (1986-1987) after spending three years in Cincinnati (1983-1986). For me it evokes that year I was trying to decide if I'd stay in my hometown or return to my job in Cincinnati (which I did) .-Tyrone Williams

Tyrone Williams is the David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of several chapbooks and seven books of poetry: c.c. (Krupskaya 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press 2011), Howell (Atelos Books 2011), As Iz (Omnidawn 2018), washpark (with Pat Clifford)(Delete Press, 2021)and stilettos in a rifle range (Wayne State University Press, 2022). A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving edited an anthology of critical essays, Inciting Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2019). His website is at https://www.flummoxedpoet.com/

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty): Tyrone Williams

Every border is a question, a passage from one state of being to another. Tyrone Williams’s compelling poem of passage negotiates straightforwardness and peril: the evening of a man-about-town á la Frank O’Hara, the decay of towns and their possibilities, and the danger of passing between worlds when trolls and their questions guard the bridge.

At the start, “we stroll out of El Zocalo”—a Detroit bar channeling a Mexican bandstand—“to find a world turning white / with snow.” We feel the pleasant shock of transformation that ennobles “homemade heaps and small dark houses,” but at the same time can’t avoid the ominousness of “a world turning white”—a world in which the poet-speaker’s presence is at best, questionable; at worst, dangerous—seemingly unlike the cityscape O’Hara strolls in “The Day Lady Died,” its material choices so rich that he almost falls asleep with “quandariness.” Yet mortality and injustice are at large in both poets’ worlds. As a Black performer and drug user, Lady Day has been targeted by law enforcement and forbidden to sing. She triumphs through a whispered performance so powerful that her audience stops breathing—as she herself will do, before long. The poem, steeped in this retrospect, carries both exhilaration and chill.

This poem’s “I do this, I do that” moment, “Kim plods to his Escort. I fire up the Tempo,” conveys massive information with a glancing touch. This is a familiar scene; the cars basic, their upbeat names ironic. The poet, after pretending “to follow the north star” finds himself diverted to another drinking spot—whose specific highway exit and name, along with “Stroh’s”  and “a five,” sink us into the scene the way O’Hara’s “New World Writing” and “Strega” do in “The Day Lady Died.”

The poet sees students, including “a poet I know,” whose laughter shades into a memory of “Christmas night at the Detroit- / Windsor border,” and an incident featuring a border guard who “jerks his head” in the speaker’s direction, asks the white women in the front seat, “You gals / bringing anything across?” His friend Katie swore for hours after this, but the poet, all too familiar with such scenarios, who “has always lived between countries,” remembers a worse incident, a time he was falsely detained on suspicion of being someone else.

The mood changes to manic festivity as, “back in the USA,” Katie and the poet dance frenetically: “Sweat flung from the sprinkler / our figures cut, twinkled like stars. . . ,” a moment eloquent with joy—human precipitation joins the poem’s snow and sleet-spray. The stanza throngs with place names—a sign, we have come to understand, that the poet is at home:

     It was the hot sauce and garlic of Hamtramck

     and Highland Park, Rayis Brothers

     and Brothers Barbecue, Eastern Market

     and Lafayette Coney, an ethnic festival

     teeming with bloods.

But the section ends with a darkly comic image of “The places to which we had to return-- / Plymouth and Detroit-- / . . . dead / in each other’s arms: / murder-suicide.” In its fatality, the poem reminds us that the border between place and people is permeable, that places determine lives, and that these are places that manufacture death.

The last section heads the poet home. “Just fine,” he stumbles to his car, spins out “in a spray of sleet and mud.” The highway’s milieu resembles the bar’s, except snow blinded: “The white dotted lines are useless now.”  Some borders are crucial to all.  We remember, perhaps, O’Hara’s statement, early in “The Day Lady Died,” that he will get off the train and go “straight to dinner / and I don’t know the people who will feed me,” this trivial uncertainty pointing toward an existential one, an uncertainty much more radical in Williams’s poem. Its “I” has become “We,” and we are left, in William Stafford’s phrase, “travelling through the dark”:

     We weave our ways home,

     as best we can,

     in lanes of our own making.

What is a free-verse poem if not “lanes of our own making”?  Tyrone Williams’s masterful poem recreates a complicated dystopia in which living while Black generates endless “Border Clashes.” Williams’s lines (or lanes) string tight, summon the tension between knowledge and mystery, safety and danger. Making of it a sort of song. -- Angela Ball

I Am Trying to Understand -- by Lynn Saul

 

2017

 

My big sister, Lynn, passed away in 2019. I think about her every day.

She was a lawyer, but gave it up to become a poet. This one's about our great-aunt, Annie.

I Am Trying to Understand (1997)

 

I am trying to understand a woman
who chose handmade lingerie
over America
who returned to her husband
to a place where their son
would be shot

Whose hand sewed the yellow star
onto her coat?

I am trying to understand how, four years after
they returned from the camp
a man and a woman are smiling at the lake
they are there with her cousin and their friends
Seven people
enjoying their vacation

What have the healing waters at Héviz
been able to wash away?

I am trying to understand
what a woman who has lost her son can think
when she plants four-o-clocks and daisies
in her garden
where they once sat, reading

I am trying to understand how a woman like that
can plant any garden at all
how she could tend her grapevines

The Communists allowed them one room in their house
that had been a wedding present from their father
the house confiscated in 1944
"Jewish owner: title cleared"
Which room did they receive?
Had anyone kept
the lace cloths, the crocheted bedspread?
I am trying to understand --
Did she want them back?

I am trying to understand
how they told her that her son was dead
Did it happen at his school?
Were they taken to the camps the same day,
or the next?

I am trying to understand
why I am standing in Annie's courtyard
Why I bend down to smell the tarragon
and chervil growing among rocks
Why I photograph bunches of fat grapes
Why I think this could be mine

 

-- Lynn Saul

"Doubting the Doubts" [by David Shapiro]

David Shapiro wishes Jasper Johns a happy birthday (May 15)!

Doubting the Doubts

A map dropped from my hands
And a voice cried, From now on
You will proceed in darkness.
Alas, he laughed, that is true.

Was it a black map?
I do not remember.

We all love clarity.
But you love darkness.
But darkness is clear.

We do not know now and we will never know.
White night, perilous night.

– David Shapiro (May 15, 2008)

How the Times Reviewed Fitzgerald, Forster, Woolf, Henry James et al

YThis is how reviewers at the NY Times treated certain books:

Scott Fitzgerald:
“Bad news is best blurted out at once: ‘Tender Is the Night’ is a disappointment. Though it displays Mr. Fitzgerald’s most engaging qualities, it makes his weaknesses appear ineradicable, for they are present in equal measure and in undiminished form. … His new book is clever and brilliantly surfaced, but it is not the work of a wise and mature novelist.” Reviewed by J. Donald Adams, April 15, 1934

Henry James:
“In ‘The Golden Bowl’ we find, standing for subtlety, a kind of restless finicking inquisitiveness, a flutter of aimless conjecture, such as might fall to a village spinster in a ‘department store.’ … How like ancient and tedious cronies the ‘wonderfullys’ and ‘preciselys’ and ‘adequatelys’ and ‘competentlys’ turn up on these pages — as a rule in places where no self-respecting adverb would choose to be discovered.” Reviewed by H.W. Boynton, Nov. 26, 19

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out:
“Aside from a certain cleverness — which, being all in one key, palls on one after going through a hundred pages of it — there is little in this offering to make it stand out from the ruck of mediocre novels which make far less literary pretension. As for the story itself, it is painfully lacking, both in coherency and narrative interest.” Unsigned, June 13, 1920

E. M. Forster, Howards End:
“As a social philosopher, evidently, Mr. Edward M. Forster has not yet arrived at any very positive convictions. … He evinces neither power nor inclination to come to grips with any vital human problem.” Unsigned, Feb. 19, 1911

If, on the other hand, you want to go against the grain in a big way, hire Vladimir Nabokov to take on Jean-Paul Sartre:

“Whether, from the viewpoint of literature, ‘La Nausée’ ['Nausea'] was worth translating at all is another question. It belongs to that tense-looking but really very loose type of writing, which has been popularized by many second-raters … Somewhere behind looms Dostoevsky at his worst.” Reviewed by Vladimir Nabokov, April 24, 1949

Two Versions of "Espana"

The Problem of Evil

Solzhenitsyn muses that if the intellectuals of Chekhov’s plays who wondered what things would be like in a few decades had learned “that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath . . . that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot . . . not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.” -- Gary Saul Morson, "The Gulag Archipelago: An Epic of True Evil." Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2023. 

Nicky Beer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Marlene Dietrich Plays Her Musical Saw for the Troops, 1944

 

See how the silver snaps in a lone spot,

the sound flirting with coyotes,

castrated foghorns, distant siren.

Observe how that polished body curves

in the strategy of lights, how its voice

is like a parody of mourning,

and so even more mournful

immersed in its high-pitched joke.

Admit that some other instrument

would fail—wood-honeyed curve,

funneled brass—when what’s needed

now is a tongue with the chill of steel.

Watch how the thighs hold that music

steady, how the dust and moths draw

closer to the song, a song that’s dying

even as it hovers in the dark,

a lost mouth moaning vowels

that are too close to your name.

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Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022). Her first two books, The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010) and The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015), were both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.

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                                              Marlene Dietrich, by Luana-Beatrice Lazar, 2014.

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Marsh Hawk Press: The New Issue

 

 

You Are Invited to Explore   Marsh Hawk Press Review for Spring 2023   Poetry | Paintings | Prose   POETRY by: NATSUKO HIRATA DAVID LEHMAN CYNTHIA HOGUE JOHN YAU MARY CRESSWELL CHARLES BERNSTEIN ELAINE EQUI SANDY McINTOSH JOANNA FUHRMAN TOM BECKETT SUSAN TERRIS ANDREW LEVY EILEEN R. TABIOS CARLOS HIRALDO SHEILA E. MURPHY MARK YOUNG JOY LADIN BASIL KING MARGARET HEATH JOHNSON CHARLES BORKHUIS TONY TRIGILIO DENISE DUHAMEL DANIEL MORRIS MARY MACKEY THOMAS FINK allia abdullah-matta GEORGE QUASHA SUSAN LEWIS STEPHEN PAUL MILLER SUSAN SMITH NASH  Read It Here     PORTFOLIOS OF PAINTINGS by:   Alice Zinnes Thomas Fink

Violoncello [Dovid Hofshteyn - Trans. by Lera Auerbach]

Dovid Hofshteyn (1889-1952) left Russia during the years of war and revolution and was a pioneer of modernist literature in Yiddish after the First World War. He returned to the USSR in the mid-1920s and became involved in Soviet cultural activities in Yiddish. Like other Yiddish writers, Hofshteyn participated in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In 1948, as part of the process of eliminating Yiddish culture in the USSR, he was arrested and tried alongside other Jewish authors. On August 12, 1952, he was executed by the Soviet government in what has come to be known as the Night of the Murdered Poets.

 

Violoncello

 

Vos boygstu zikh, mayn zel?
Vos brumstu brustik tif?
Un s’tsitern di vent,
di zayln fun mayn zayn,
un hekher, hekher shtaygt 
di shtil fun ere dayner,
un nider vert bagrobt
mit shtoyb fun dayne fis.

 

Vos boygstu zikh, mayn zel?
Vos brumstu brustik tif?
Vos bodstu zikh in shtoyb,
vos vashstu zikh in ash,
vi foyglen in a hits,
vos hobm furkht far vaser 
un kiln zikh mit erd un frishn zikh in mist?..

 

Vos boygstu zikh, mayn zel?
Vos brumstu brustik tif,
vi zod fun frishn blut
af shtumen roytn shteyn,
vi zod, vos vert nit shtil
fun umshuld zoyber-reynem,
biz gloybik heyses blut
mit tsiter im bagist.

 

Nu, boyg zhe zikh, mayn zel,
nu, brum zhe brustik tif,
un ver fun ashn klor,
fun blutn ver shoyn reyn,
un ver fun tsiter mild,
ver loyter shoyn fun veynen,
un zol tsu likht dir zayn
dayn groyser brokh, dayn ris!

 

 

Violoncello

Why do you vibrate, my soul,
rumbling deeply in my chest?
The walls of my core are trembling.
Higher, still higher, soars
your quiet honour.
Then, falling, it buries itself
under the dust of your feet.

 

Why do you vibrate, my soul,
rumbling deeply in my chest?
Why do you bathe in the dust,
and wash yourself in the ashes?
So are birds in the smouldering heat,
thirsty for water – can cool
themselves in the earth,
and get refreshed in the sand.

Why do you vibrate, my soul,
from the depth of my chest,
boiling like fresh blood
spilt on the mute stones?
The boiling will not subside
from its pure innocence,
nor from its hot devotion –
it is trembling, spilling over.

Oh, bend to me, my soul,
sing heartfully within my depth,
cleansed by ashes
purified by blood,
your strings tremble gentler,
enlightened by the sobbing …
Let the grief and sorrow
illuminate the way!

 

— “Violoncello” by Dovid Hofshteyn (Translation by Lera Auerbach)

Squibs 503-505 [by Alan Ziegler]

503: Remembering Murray the K 

1960s and 70s Radio disc jockey, real name Murray Kaufman; dubbed the fifth Beatle by either George, Ringo, or himself; played love songs for couples in cars watching the submarine races (for a long time I didn't get the joke); profiled by Tom Wolfe ("the first big hysterical disc jockey"); called his show The Swinging Soiree; don't mess with his ubiquitous straw hat (one man tried, once); invented the eponymous language Meusurray (which is Murray in Meusurray); bowled with the Ronettes;

presided over all-star rock shows at the Brooklyn Fox Theater;

and signed a random press release:

504: So much depends on a key and Bisquick

Two downtrodden friends on the 104 bus. “They got me a place. I'm on my way to pick up my key.” Key: a half-ounce melding of the metaphorical and the literal. I worry the keys in my pocket like amulets, conjuring long-forgotten doors. "After I get my key come over and I'll make my biscuits. Get me Bisquick. None of that Jiffy. You gotta get me Bisquick."  Now I'm on Nantucket, sun setting, the key to my rental bike somewhere in the sand, no place to stay, running to catch the last ferry. Backdoor opens: "Get me Bisquick!"

505:

The greatest advertisement for color TV was black-and-white TV. 

His Critical Condition: On F. R. Leavis [by David Lehman]

In literary criticism, we remember the great practitioners by their errors and blind spots. Samuel Johnson dismissed Milton’s “Lycidas” -- perhaps the greatest elegy in English literature -- as artificial and insincere. T. S. Eliot introduced the term “objective correlative” in order to judge Hamlet a failure. Yvor Winters thought the world of Elizabeth Daryush, a poet as deservedly obscure today as sixty years ago when Winters trumpeted her name.

F. R. Leavis fit this pattern. Narrow and dogmatic, the legendary Cambridge don refused to divulge his criteria when making absolute pronouncements. He advocated the “great tradition” of the English novel but limited it to a half dozen writers (Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, and Lawrence) overlooking all the rest. His embrace of modern poetry extended no further than T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. He did not write well. Irascible, undiplomatic, and as frank as his first name, he was quick to excommunicate his disciples for their real or imagined apostasy.

Yet for all his faults, Leavis was one of the handful of literary critics who stamped his own identity on the enterprise, changed its nature, and brought it squarely into the modern world, as we are reminded by Ian MacKillop's biography F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (St. Martin's, 476 pages, $35.) Leavis practiced his craft ferociously, as if the fate of civilization depended on it; he had a reverence for literature that should be, but is no longer, a sine qua non for budding assistant professors. It is possible that he took himself and his opinions too seriously. But the moral seriousness of his literary criticism gives it an importance far beyond the validity of any of his individual judgments.

Frank Raymond Leavis was born on July 14, 1895, in Cambridge, the university town that would dominate his professional career. He had from the start a grand sense of destiny. As a child on a summer holiday in France, he had the impression that the festivities of Bastille Day were in honor of his birthday. Following World War I, in which he served as a cook and orderly, seeing action in Ypres and the Somme, Leavis returned to Cambridge, where his father owned a piano-and-music shop. English was a new subject at Cambridge when Leavis took it up, and he helped define what “English studies” were about. He impressed and irritated his professors and colleagues, with whom he would often quarrel in the years to come: Leavis’s biography is a chronicle of conflicts -- e.g., with E. M. W. Tillyard (author of The Elizabethan World Order), F. L. Lucas (Tragedy), and I. A. Richards (Practical Criticism).

Although devastated by his father’s death -- the funeral took place on the day Leavis was scheduled to take his “tripos” examination in the field of tragedy -- Leavis performed brilliantly. But the ladder to academic glory at Cambridge was full of slippery rungs. Leavis, who routinely gave offense, was passed over for promotion until it became impossible to ignore him.

Leavis married the most accomplished and devoted of his students, Q. D. (“Queenie”) Roth, the daughter of orthodox Jewish immigrants, in whom he found the perfect partner. The two of them edited the journal Scrutiny, which exemplified modern literary criticism as synonymous with the close reading of texts. Building on the example of William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity), Leavis valued ambiguity and complexity and was instrumental in revising the canon of poetry. Milton was out, John Donne was in, and modern poetry at its most vital -- Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” and “Gerontion,” Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and selected works by Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and William Butler Yeats -- was understood to be a repudiation of Romanticism and an extension of the 17th century ideal of “metaphysical” wit. New Bearings in English Poetry and Revaluation were books that the serious student had to read, as was Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public.

Characteristically, Leavis became known on this side of the Atlantic as the result of a controversy. In 1959 C. P. Snow published The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Although a successful novelist himself, Snow was a physicist by training who was highly esteemed for his managerial skills and his popularizing of scientific concepts. In his famous lecture, Snow seemed to suggest, in Ian MacKillop’s words, that “the scentific mind was socially progressive and the literary mind reactionary.” (p. 314). Denouncing Snow’s thesis, Leavis argued that “the advance of science and technology means a human future of change so rapid and of such kinds of tests and challenges so unprecedented, of decisions and possible non-decisions so momentous and insidious in their consequences,” that humanity will need all the intelligence and spiritual guidance that high culture can provide. (P. 318). Leavis’s cri de coeur is as timely today as when he uttered it. “You cannot point to the poem; it is `there’ only in the re-creative response of individual minds to the black marks on the page,” Leavis wrote. “But -- a necessary faith -- it is something in which minds can meet.” (P. 320).

Ian MacKillop’s biography is less valuable as a synopsis of Leavis’s writings than as a case study in the rebarbative realm of academic politics. The description of Cambridge in-fighting will jolt even jaded readers familiar with the nasty in-fighting and acrimony in English departments in the US.  After his retirement in 1962, Leavis had hoped to hand-pick his successor at Downing College -- most of the teaching at Cambridge is done in tutorials at the student’s home college rather than in university-wide lectures -- and when Downing strayed from the approved path, Leavis severed his ties with the college.

This bald summary gives little idea of the byzantine turns that the affair took. A story full of intrigues, betrayals, hurt feelings, and paranoid explosions, the Downing mess had the emotional violence of a Dostoyevsky novel without either the bloodshed or the promise of redemption. It is sad that one’s final impression of Leavis’s life has less to do with his powers of intellectual stimulation than with his ruinous penchant for intramural warfare. But this, too, augments one’s sense that Leavis’s career was a parable of modern literary criticism in its perils no less than in its virtues.

From the Wall Street Journal, June 10, 1997: "His Critical Condition," a review of F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism. By Ian MacKillop.

See, too, this post, "Does Anyone Still Care About F. R. Leavis?" https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2022/06/does-anyone-still-care-about-f-r-leavis-by-david-lehman.html

"Mother Died Today" [by David Lehman]

Mother Died Today

Mother died today. That's how it began. Or maybe yesterday, I can't be sure. I gave the book to my mother in the hospital. She read the first sentence. Mother died today. She laughed and said you sure know how to cheer me up. The telegram came. It said, Mother dead Stop Funeral tomorrow Stop. Mother read it in the hospital and laughed at her college boy son. Or maybe yesterday, I don't remember. Mama died yesterday. The telegram arrived a day too late. I had already left. Europe is going down, the Euro is finished, and what does it matter? My mother served plum cake and I read the page aloud. Mother died today or yesterday and I can't be sure and it doesn't matter. Germany can lose two world wars and still rule all of Europe, and does it matter whether you die at thirty or seventy? Mother died today. It was Mother's Day, the day she died, the year she died. In 1940 it was the day the Germans marched into Belgium and France and Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister. The telegram came from the asylum, the home, the hospital, the "assisted living" facility, the hospice, the clinic. Your mother passed away. Heartfelt condolences. The price of rice is going up, and what does it matter? I'll tell you what I told the nurse and anyone that asks. Mother died today.

(May 10, 2012). Photo: (c) 2003 by Stacey Lehman

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: May 10, 2023

In March, Todd Boss launched his podcast THERE'S A POEM IN THAT. Unlike Cheryl Strayed’s "Dear Sugar" advice column on The Rumpus, or Rick Moody’s “Life Coach” column on Literary Hub, Boss’s podcast does not so much offer counsel or enlightenment but rather an honest conversation with a total stranger that results in a poem. Listeners wanting a poem are invited to call a hotline and leave a message about their lives. If chosen, Boss will get in touch with them for a series of there hour-long interviews, which the podcast condenses. Boss, of sweet temperament and deep intelligence, is a listener. He listens for image, idiosyncrasy, metaphor, any thread from which he can write his poem. The podcast made me think of how lucky we poets are—chronicling our lives, seeing patterns in the chaos, having our say. Boss provides that gift to nonpoets, often to effect personal transformation, revelation, and tears. His poems in each episode go beyond the occasional poem, which traditionally honors a specific event. Instead he draws upon his 15-year practice of writing on private commission to get to know the people with whom he talks. The first episode features Joan, a singer who’s lost her voice but not her laugh.  When she describes her vocal chords as in a state of “atrophy,” Boss reframes the experience and writes a poem called “A Trophy.”

You can listen here:

poeminthat.com