This is the epigraph that Edgar Allan Poe chose for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":
"What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture." -- Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial
Formidable and fascinating in its own right, the sentence is perfectly apposite to the story it heads.
Poe's example makes me want to composea succinct ode to the art of the epigraph, which involves not only a cunning eye for a great and somewhat out-of-the-way quotation but also a determination to build on the quoted material -- to use it to quicken a new work into being.
noun: A literary work, especially a poem, composed of parts taken from works of other authors.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin cento (patchwork). Earliest documented use: 1605.
NOTES:
Nobel-prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot’s observation is relevant to centos: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”
“Louis Zukofsky continued to write ... a play, a novella, a book of criticism, a 500-page cento of philosophy in homage to Shakespeare ...” Bob Perelman; Finding His Voice; Tikkun (Berkeley, California); May/Jun 2007.
514: Song lyricist was my dream career: Fill a dozen or so pages with drafts, send them off to my dependent collaborator (with a sweet voice, ear for melody, and recording contract), and live on royalties as I consume experiences for my next set of lyrics. The dream came true—except for the contract and royalties.
515: I was madly in love with the 60s singer-songwriters, playing their albums on repeat (pre-digitally on a turntable) and seeing them at The Gaslight, Fat Black Pussycat, Bitter End, Gerdes Folk City, Club 47, Central Park summer concerts, Palisades Amusement Park, Newport Folk Festival: Phil Ochs, Laura Nyro, Eric Andersen, Buffy St. Marie, Bonnie Raitt, Tim Hardin, Tom Paxton, Fred Neil, Paul Siebel, Patrick Sky, Richard and Mimi Farina, Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley, Steve Noonan, Janis Ian, and of course Bob Dylan. (Though I was never enamored of "Blowing in the Wind," which Peter Yarrow introduced on a live Peter, Paul & Mary recording with a Rabbinical "This song asks nine questions.” What motivated him to count the questions? Years later I asked him and he tousled my hair and said, “Oh you!”)
516: I took to the guitar at an early age. Here I am pretending to be a lap-guitar-cowboy (prepared for an unruly-crowd).
I toured local backyards as one of the first Elvis impersonators, right down to the cowlick.
517: When I was 15, I spent some of my Bar Mitzvah money on a $50 Harmony Sovereign guitar at the recently-opened branch of Sam Ash in Hempstead. Here's Paul Ash after closing the deal.
On the way home, my mother said, “Is this going to collect dust in the closet?” I took the bait and signed up for lessons from Al Wansor, who had an eponymous store in Lynbrook. At the first lesson, Al “taught” me to play “Love Me Tender”—single notes, no chords. I wanted to strum like Bob Gibson and fingerpick like Mississippi John Hurt. I didn't return so I never got to know that Al Wansor had toured with bands and did session work on albums. I did enjoy playing the notes to “Love Me Tender,” and eventually realized the repetition was starting to train my ear to recognize note differentials, training that was never completed because I gave up on Al Wansor.
518: I played the Harmony Sovereign at dozens of gigs, wrote songs on it, and filled cassettes labelled "noodling" and "messing." Everyone who picked it up admired its action and tone. Several years later, Jimmy Page would compose Led Zeppelin songs on a Harmony Sovereign (here on display at the Met Museum), and even played it on the recording of “Stairway to Heaven".
Also, Pete Townshend had one.
But first I had one.
519: I would pretend I wrote songs I admired, and sing them in imagined settings. I also fantasized going to go to my left on a fast break for the Knicks, which was never going to happen, but having my lyrics sung at the Gaslight was remotely possible (and did happen).
Fred Neil’s “Just a Little Bit of Rain,” comprises only 13 discrete lines, including:
And if you look back Try to forget all the bad times Lonely blue and sad times And just a little bit of rain And just a little bit of rain
I heard myself adding:
And if you look back Try to forget the last words Those hastily caste words And just a little bit of rain And just a little bit of rain
I felt like I had just gone to my left on a fast break.
520: Robert Middleman was my folkie friend throughout high school (and beyond). Somehow, we summoned the gumption to play hoot night at Gerdes Folk City (the original location, positively on Fourth Street), where on Monday nights anyone could do a song or two. The emcee sized us up and put us on first. As the sparse audience scattered politeness for Tom Paxton's "The Last Thing on My Mind," the emcee said, "Well, that's a hootenanny for you," which we took to mean, "We got that one out of the way." We were followed by a kid about our age who knew what he was doing. He was Gram Parsons, later of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers (who would OD at 26). Another performer was a cowboy-type with the refrain, "I proceeded to take 3 or 4 steps backwards and give her a dropkick right in the crotch." Everyone (including me) laughed at the line, which showed up a few years later on Jerry Jeff Walker's Driftin' Way of Life album. By then, I didn't laugh.
521: In the spring of my first year at Union College, my roommate from Carmel Valley said, "One of your folksinger friends was killed near my house." He said it with a combination of hometown pride and college banter. It took me a couple of days to find out it was one of my heroes, Richard Fariña, who had left a party for his wife (and collaborator) Mimi's 21st birthday to take a ride on the back of a motorcycle.
I mourned by singing "Children of Darkness" to Mimi:
Now is the time for your loving, dear And the time for your company Now when the light of reason fails And fires burn on the sea....
For I am a wild and a lonely child And the son of an angry land; And now with the high wars raging I would offer you my hand
I wasn't wild, I wasn't particularly lonely, and I wasn't a child, but I certainly felt the need to imagine Mimi's company.
522: Though not as momentous an occasion as Ezra Pound showing up at William Carlos Williams' room at Penn, I first met Carl Rosenstock when he appeared at my dorm room to check out the Harmony Sovereign he'd been hearing about, marking the beginning of a long songwriting/performing friendship. Usually one of us would write a first draft and the other might offer suggestions. Eventually we added Cliff Safane (a true musician who played piano, sax, and bass clarinet) and called ourselves "The 42nd Street Shuttle," which came to be known around campus as simply "The Shuttle." We were regulars at the North End, a makeshift campus cafe, where performers included Phil Robinson (later to build the Field of Dreams), and afterwards we might have beers at the Rathskeller with Jeffrey DeMunn (currently with 119 acting credits on IMDB), who blew us away with his Krapp's Last Tape at the campus theater in the Nott Memorial.
We also played frequently on Rob Friedman's Folk Fest radio show on WRPI (which went on for decades). And we somehow got on the stage at Caffe Lena in Saratoga, with Cliff playing bass clarinet (probably a first for a folk club). At the end of the set, Lena declared, "Well, that's the new music!" which we took to mean, "We got that one out of the way." Set list:
523: Some lies are so unnecessary (and ultimately disprovable) that they could hardly be worth the ephemeral pleasure they might bring. This lie still confounds me: A production company was making a documentary on Union College. The producer called and said he'd heard that "The Shuttle" was the folk group on campus, and could we record one of our songs for the soundtrack? (Maybe someone would see it and offer us a contract.) Weeks after we did the recording, a classmate mentioned he had seen a preview. "Are we in it?" we asked. "Yeah," he said. "The Shuttle, right in the opening."
We weren't in it.
524: I couldn't sing. I could finger-pick passably (thanks to someone showing me the secret of double thumbing), and my Harmony Sovereign sweetened my strumming. But I couldn't run a sequence of single notes, a minimal skill set for a lead guitarist. Carl liked—needed—having me around, so I was in the Shuttle lineup, home or away, and the lead lines were keyboarded or blown by Cliff.
One of my lyrics came out, wholly formed, in my notebook, triggered by my memories of playing the snare drum in the elementary school walking band.
Carl added a lovely melody, and since there were so few lyrics, Cliff had plenty of time to stretch out. One performance, I felt the music in a way I hadn't before, and improvised a very brief solo. The show was recorded, and when my solo came up on the tape, Cliff looked at me, smiled, and said, "You had a musical idea."
The next day, a friend ran up to me on campus, held my shoulders, said, "'Proud of your brand new shoes'—beautiful!" and ran off.
525: I met a student named Paul Harris when I was being rushed by both Jewish fraternities. Paul asked me if Eric Andersen was any good. "He's great, why?" His friend Harvey Brooks, a bass player, had asked Paul to join him accompanying Andersen at a concert. They hit it off so well musically that Eric Andersen did something perhaps unprecedented: He rerecorded his current album, 'Bout Changes 'N' Things, this time with Paul and Harvey.
Paul went on to an illustrious career with hundreds of credits as accompanist and arranger: The Doors, Nick Drake, B.B. King, Ian and Sylvia, John Sebastian, and so so many more, including a stint as part of Stephen Stills' group "Manassas."
One day Paul excitedly gave me a reel-to-reel of Richie Havens' forthcoming first album, Mixed Bag. We went to the campus library, and I listened to the whole album through headphones in one of the cushioned chairs on the mezzanine, tingling with the excitement of a career being launched. "What did you think?" Paul asked, and I told him I loved it except for "Sandy," which sounded more cocktail lounge than folk club. Paul seemed crushed. "I thought that was some of my best playing," he said, and I listened again and realized that Paul was transcending musical borders, and I should try to keep up.
Paul's most stunning early achievement was arranging and conducting Tom Rush's Circle Game album, utilizing compositional approaches he'd picked up from Edgar Curtis, a Union professor. When I ran into Paul backstage at the Newport Folk Festival, we got into a conversation about the merits of the two Jewish fraternities at Union. Tom Rush sidled up and said, "So, what are we talking about?" I tried to change the subject but Paul continued with Phi Ep vs. Phi Sigma.
After graduating, Paul toured with, among others, Judy Collins. By then we had lost touch, so when I saw that Collins was performing in Troy, I tried to reach Paul at the hotel. Someone else came to the phone and said, "My name is Michael Sahl, I'm filling in for Paul." He promised to give Paul my best. Decades later I was introduced to Michael Sahl at the graduation of his son Ben, my student and friend. I said, "It's a pleasure to finally meet you. Wa talked on the phone."
525: Carl and I took a bus to New York to audition for Vanguard Records. Not only didn't we get a deal, but someone stole my borrowed guitar from the waiting room. (Fortunately, it wasn't the Harmony Sovereign.) And we auditioned for an A&R man at April Blackwood. His name was Tony, and he told us that our songs needed hooks. He was sympathetic to our artistic impulses and said he had been on the performing side of the business. Then, the pre-Dawn Tony Orlando belted out "Bless you / bless every breath that you take."
526: The summer of 1969 I was living with my girlfriend in Riverside, California, working as a newspaper reporter (infiltrating the White Citizens Council, writing about street corner preachers and a women's liberation group) while occasionally sending lyrics to Carl, who was passing the basket in Greenwich Village coffee shops.
My girlfriend moved back East on a pre-determined date to start at a new college. As much as I thought I was prepared for the split, after she left for the airport I felt like the world around me had gone empty. I grabbed my notebook and wrote exactly what happened.
The empty suitcase slowly fills You take the candle off the windowsill The dresser's empty now You look around Make sure there's nothing you left behind
You take the ticket that I bought For the bus ride to the airport Baggage on the sidewalk We just sit and talk And the driver starts his engine going You're going
The driver moves to close the door He says we can't wait anymore Caught by surprise No time for goodbyes I walk away after you turn the corner You're going
We knew at the start that it would end And we knew just exactly when You'd go back east I'd stay west It's just what places It's just what places It's just what places Have to offer To offer
Months later, back in New York, I caught one of Carl's sets. I sat in the corner, alone, paying close attention to the wizard guitarist sitting on my old stool. A young woman with bright red hair yelled, “Do the one about the candle!” (I later found out she was the daughter of a famous folk musician.)
“You know the poet I’ve been talking about, who wrote the lyrics to that song? He’s here tonight.” Carl pointed towards me, and all eyes turned my way. “But he’s so innocuous looking," said the young woman with bright red hair.
I couldn't have felt more flattered.
527: I was writing poetry and editing a literary magazine, but I got down to the Village occasionally. Carl was part of a flock of folksingers, who would play a set or two, then head for drinks at the Kettle Of Fish (above the Gaslight). When the Kettle was full, it was over to Googie’s on Sullivan Street. When the bars closed, the migration might head a few blocks down to Chinatown. Among the crew, the one I thought most likely to make it was Patrick Chamberlain, a singer-songwriter-raconteur born in East Texas and raised in rural Pennsylvania. He greeted me at one of his concerts with “The gentleman from the press has arrived.”
Back row from left to right: Carl Rosenstock, Pat Chamberlain, and an innocuous lyricist (drawing by singer-songwriter-poet Rich Levine).
And then, tragedy. As I heard it, Pat was on the phone with an ex-girlfriend, threatening to blow his brains out if she didn’t come over. She didn’t come over. I played the cassette I recorded of his recent concert. Pat introduced a song with, “They say you need three things to make it in this business: experience, exposure and an ex old lady so you have some kind of experience to write songs.” Lyrics included “it gets in my veins I can hear her refrains / I hope that she is just fine.”
The memorial service was at Calvary Church. I overhead Paul Siebel say to Steve Goodman, “If it’s all the same to Pat, let’s not do this to each other.” Goodman replied, “It really kicked that shit out of me.” Siebel looked around and said, “He sure threw a good party.”
528: I had some money, so when Erik Frandsen (who once sang “Meet the Mets” at the Gaslight) told me about a Gibson J-45 at Matt Umanov’s shop, I went for a look.
As I was testing out the guitar, intimidated by all the pros in the room, I started strumming major 7th chords. Someone pointed to a sign that read, "No major 7th chords without a note from your mother,” and I switched to double-thumb fingerpicking and plunked down $350. I still have the guitar.
529: For a few years I wrote songs with former Shuttle-mate Cliff Safane, more pop than folk. They were performed by an up-and-coming singer (who didn't come up).
530: Back in the late 60s, a magazine identified Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne, and Steve Noonan as the Orange County Three. Noonan's career didn't take off like the others, but his first album never strayed from my rotation.
All Lafayette’s installations and performances happen within what is, essentially, an elaborate sculpture of space by architect Rem Koolhaas. Basically, Lafayette is a large three-layer light well with viewing platforms.
If you’ve lived in a flatiron or a round building or had to renovate “atypical space” to live in, experience or instinct gives you some measure of Lafayette’s ongoing technical and esthetic challenge, interesting in itself. More broadly, whether doing dance performance or living life, the space it takes place in is a primordial feature of it; we are in an existential exchange with our surroundings.
A space can be mute: choreography that works fine in somebody’s basement won’t necessarily work at Opéra Bastille. A space can talk back: current life choreographies are transforming the natural environment from an indifferent ally into an existential threat.
Mute or responsive, exchange with space is an existential imposition. But both authentic living and art require will and intention, so finding a way to dialogue, deliberately shaping and grafting intentions into given space, is essential to creative success. Because Lafayette’s “space sculpture” has so much relentless will and intention built into it – Rem Koolhaas is always talking back – it forces a spectator – at least, it has always forced me – to think hard about how a creator/choreographer/performer achieves dialogue from exchange.
So far, whether for installations or performance, Lafayette’s three-layer light well sculpture has been made to work pretty well. For instance, both as experience and brain-teaser, the articulation of light and dark for Agnes Gryczkowska’s Spring 2023 installation, Au-Delà: Rituels pour un monde nouveau, (“There Beyond: rituals for a new world”), modeled as an “initiation” evoking archaic, contemporary and future ritual, did the trick very well. And the space positively threw itself into its role as a big city pocket park for performance creator Lina Lapelyte’s The Mutes.
Strong choreographers at Lafayette can and do create dialogue through force of artistic intention. I’m thinking of Noé Soulier’s Mouvement sur Mouvement. Strong performers can and do master the space with a performance that creates a parallel space, resonating like an opera in a rocket ship. I’m thinking of Dorothée Munyaneza’s A cappella. Both performances featured in Echelle Humaine 2022.
At moments, too, Lafayette’s space can make for wonderful, one-of-a-kind success. My heart still beats hard when I think of watching dance performer Yuika Hashimoto’s re-creation of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s historic Violin Phase, which was followed by the choreographer’s de-creation of same at the bottom of that light well. Unforgettable stuff and only possible inside Koolhaas’ sculpture.
Essentially, Echelle Humaine 2023, which opens this Friday, 15 September, is challenging all its dance performance and installation creators to work deliberately within its unique performance space. Using public workshops, creator meet & greets, installations and choreographies, it has explicitly built its program around how that is, or can be, done.
The program is heavy on visualness and concepts. Installations include Alix Boillot’s Scénographie potentielle, a blue potato that inhabits it’s given space at the top of the light well and Tai Shani’s Reading room, which accents (her) recurring motifs. Ivan Cheng’s Clarities, is a purpose-built active installation-performance using video to satirize the creative process, Luara Raio’s Apocalypso, featuring Acauã El Bandide Sereia, and Paul Maheke’s L'Origine de la mort, featuring Alyssa "Ledet" Dillard, are both dance-performance duets, the former themed around cultural colonization and the latter around on the thinness of the lines between perceptions.
The praise poem was all the rage in certain circles in 1993. Kathy from Pussy Poets started it; she wrote a praise poem for Bobby Miller, and one for me, called “Mary Jane Girl.” “Mary Jane Girl” was all about how I would get her high and listen to her relationship problems with DC, and how awesome of me that was. I loved Kathy, too, but I never wrote a praise poem for her.
I never wrote a praise poem for anyone. The closest I came was a poem I wrote for Eliza, which wasn’t written so much for her as it was written to impress her. The poem was named for my old friend Melissa, and it implied that Melissa and I had slept together; in fact, we had not. But I wanted Eliza to think I had some credibility as a lesbian so that she would like me, and isn’t wanting someone to like you one of the highest forms of praise?
Eliza didn’t have any praise poems, though she had a response poem, which was kind of the same thing; just another way of flirting. Maggie Estep had a poem called “Fuck Me,” so Eliza wrote a response poem called “No, Fuck Me,” and of course Maggie heard about it and was flattered, but she didn’t swing that way, so Eliza read it to me, dancing ahead of me on the sidewalk on Allen Street, really performing the hell out of it. I was dying to swing Eliza’s way, and I almost did, for a few weeks there, after which she dumped me in the middle of Tompkins Square Park. Then I wrote a poem with Eliza’s name in it, but it wasn’t a praise poem.
I started dating Paul, who put me in just about every single one of his poems, which was his way of paying me back for letting him live with me and supporting him while he smoked all of my weed. He read one on stage at the Nuyorican one night – “And Janice will fill you up! And Janice will set you free!” – and I cringed, ashamed. Everyone knew how cheap I was, that I could be bought for the price of a few lines of not very good poetry.
In the meantime, DC wrote a praise poem for me. It was called “For J.E.,” and the word “genius” was used. This caused me to think about dumping Paul for DC, who had his own apartment, and a job, and was also a much better poet than Paul was. So I wrote a poem dedicated to DC. This caused Kathy to retire her praise poem for me, and to change one of the characters in the screenplay she was writing from a wonderful best friend type to an inane slut.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that no poem will get you laid faster than a praise poem, but if you use one to sleep with another poet, you’re either going to wind up supporting them while they smoke all your weed, getting dumped in the middle of Tompkins Square Park, or alienating your best friends. Probably safer to stick to limericks.
Ben Lerner’s The Lights was published September 5 by MacMillan. The poems contained therein are heady, energetic, and totally engaged with the now—our crisis as a nation and the world’s peril. Lerner contextualizes the horrors of our contemporary situation with the life of Whitman and the grass. There is a lot of grass in this book, actually—delicately pulled from the earth with reverence. Yet the weight of his subjects never feels too much as the tonal shifts in the book allow for humor. In the prose poem “The Media,” he writes “And it’s me, Ben, just calling to check in. I’m on my way to pick Marcela up from daycare and wanted to hear about your trip…Give me a call when you can. I’ll be around until the late nineteenth century, when carved wood gives way to polished steel, especially on lake surfaces….” And in the spectacular “Contre-jour,” a sparkly list poem chronicling luminosity of all sorts, Lerner injects, “I wish I’d known//you were a fan of light/I would have same some for you…”
There’s really nothing to see inside. The austerity that once numbed the rooms Died of a fever and rotted in the shadows Of the few trees left on the lawn. You can stare through the windows all you want, Nothing inside will be broken, the guests The dogs and stray cats will never appear. But something keeps me here. Maybe it’s The old man who whistles through his teeth. He sways lightly on the porch swing. His rifle Is covered with dust. Birds listen from the barns, Wait for their big chance. Maybe it’s Upstairs Helen, weeping in the shadows of gold. Maybe it’s the children moaning from deep Under the ground where they’re passing their lives. They wait for the tale’s perfume to blow away. They have asked me to step back and drift off Through the suddenly softly falling snow, Launched into the future, my hands thrown up, So we can all disappear from my mind.
-Richard Stull
Richard Stull was born and raised in Mount Gilead, Ohio. He lived for many years in New York City, where he worked as an editor and a freelance writer. He now lives in Newburgh, a small city on the Hudson River, about fifty miles north of New York. He has been a resident at Yaddo and was awarded an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The ParisReview, Sal Mimeo (edited by Larry Fagin), and Blazing Stadium. He is the author of several limited editions. These include A Walk With Jane, Drugged Like Mirrors, Canal, and The Adoration of the Golden Calf.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Nine): Richard Stull
Richard Stull’s “Country Music” begins with a compelling disclaimer: “There’s really nothing to see inside” and moves on to a brilliant matter-of-fact personification: “The austerity that once numbed the rooms / Died of a fever and rotted in the shadows / Of the few trees left on the lawn.” This poverty, natural and human, is the source of country’s music’s tortured falsetto and gravelly base—anguish and comfort in one. The house has nothing to offer—even its unofficial guests, the strays, stay hidden. Then the poet/speaker says, “But something keeps me here,” and posits “it’s / The old man who whistles through his teeth”—a carnivore’s music. The man seems more dead than alive, like a photograph of someone once living: “He sways lightly on the porch swing. His rifle / Is covered with dust.” “Birds listen from the barns, / Wait for their big chance.” What this means is mysterious, made even more so by the arrival of “Upstairs / Helen, weeping in the shadows of gold.”
Suddenly we are in the realm of myth—incongruous in this cornpone setting, but somehow right. Think of Loretta Lynn—was she not a kind of Iphigenia? In shadows of gold from the glittering costumes that surrounded her? I am far afield, but the poem invites that, I think.
It takes us next to an underworld: “Maybe it’s the children moaning from deep / Under the ground where they’re passing their lives.” “Passing their lives” manages to suggest so much while at the same time withholding it. “They wait for the tale’s perfume to blow away.” What is the tale and why is it scented? Because of an Attic breeze—not from under-roof storage, but ancient Greece? Like all of us, the children wish for things to be different. Maybe scentless.
The word “Maybe” in the poem keeps us at the threshold of reality, the house we don’t need to enter.
What happens next astonishes—the poet has heard from the children. The poem opens wide,suddenly, with the poem’s words addressing its maker. These are not quoted, but summarized--“They have asked me to step back and drift off”—and suddenly it’s snowing—the same prophetic snow that covers the end of James Joyce’s great story, “The Dead,” and we are carried on its drift along with the poet. The poem’s astounding ending violates and remakes the rules of personification: “So we can all disappear from my mind.” How to parse this statement? As opaque and teasing as Arthur Rimbaud’s “’I’ is another,” it says all this is fantasy—straightforward enough—but also violent. The poet’s posture is like someone shot, pushed over a cliff, powerless: “Launched into the future, my hands thrown up.” The casualties include the shotgun codger, the strays, the birds, and—most heartbreakingly--Upstairs Helen. If the poem said “so they can all disappear” we would witness a familiar poetic desertion, like the one in Keats’“Ode to a Nightingale,” when the poet must return to his “sole self.” That’s not what happens. Instead, we “all disappear,” “launched”—shades of Helen—into an unknowable future that is decidedly non-mythic. The inclusion of poet and reader in the disappearance makes magic--and in this moment, the poem, like breath, is knocked out of us. Yet something reverberates in reverse: a willed poverty, a Keatsian surmise. - Angela Ball
Ray Gonzalez is the author of 16 books of poetry, including Suggest Paradise (University of New Mexico Press). He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
What of my fourth grade teacher at Reynolds Elementary, who weary after failed attempts to set to memory names strange and meaningless as grains of dirt around the mouthless, mountain caves at Bahrain Karai: Tarik, Shanequa, Amari, Aisha, nicknamed the entire class after French painters whether boy or girl. Behold the beginning of sentient formless life. And so, my best friend Darnell became Marcel, and Tee_tee was Braque, and Stacy James was Fragonard, and I, Eduard Charlemont. The time has come to look at these signs from another point of view. Days passed in inactivity before I corrected her, for Eduard was Austrian and painted the black chief in a palace in 1878 to the question whether intelligence exists. All of Europe swooned to Venus of Willendorf. Outside her tongue, yet of it, in textbooks Herodotus tells us of the legend of Sewosret (Seosteris I, II, or III), the colonizer of Greece, founder of Athens. What's in a name? Sagas rise and fall in the orbs of jumpropes, Hannibal grasps a Roman monkeybar on history's rung, and the mighty heroes at recess lay dead in woe on the imagined battlefields of Halo.
from The Best American Poetry 1994 guest editor Lyn Hejinian
Pictured left: Jamie Katz followed by this cipher 9 8 44 72 280
Click here to read Jamie Katz's brilliant feature on Donald Keene, the Western world's leading interpreter of Japanese literature, a Columbia professor for more than seventy years. On a visit to Japan in 1990, I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Professor Keene, who, in addition to discussing everything from Basho and linked-verse to the merits of a traditional Japanese breakfast, taught me the two key rules of pronouncing Japanese and made my two-week stay go a lot more smoothly than would otherwise have been the case. With his books and anthologies, Keene taught an appreciation of Japanese culture to generations of students, not only at Columbia, his home base, but the world over.
In April 2003 Keene was awarded a medal of honor from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. At his request I wrote the inscription, appropriating the tanka as an appropriate form:
To Donald Keene we owe much of what we know of Japan's verse and prose.
In shadow of rising sun stood the lean tree unobserved.
Then Keene could be heard: in accents lucid and keen he rendered the scene.
And the bare branch of winter burst into cherry blossom.
Here's an excerpt from Katz's feature in the current Columbia College Today. -- DL
<<< Keene’s approach to teaching and writing bears the imprint of his freshman Humanities instructor, Mark Van Doren ’21 GSAS. “He was a scholar and poet and above all someone who understood literature and could make us understand it with him,” Keene writes in Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan. “Van Doren had little use for commentaries or specialized literary criticism. Rather, the essential thing, he taught us, was to read the texts, think about them, and discover for ourselves why they were ranked as classics.”
The experience of taking the College’s general education courses was “incredible,” Keene says, and he fondly remembers the great teachers he encountered as an undergraduate. Among them were the “learned and gentle” classicist, Moses Hadas ’30 GSAS; Lionel Trilling ’25, ’38 GSAS and Jacques Barzun ’27, ’32 GSAS, who led Keene’s Senior Colloquium; and Pierre Clamens, a French instructor “who was very stern, but gave everything to his students,” Keene says.
His chief mentor, however, was cultural historian Ryusaku Tsunoda, a pioneer of Japanese studies at Columbia whom Keene often refers to, simply, as Sensei. “He was a man I admired completely,” Keene says, “a man who had more influence on me than anyone else I can think of.”
As a senior, Keene enrolled in Tsunoda’s course in the history of Japanese thought. Fifty years later, in a CCT interview (Winter 1991) with David Lehman ’70, ’78 GSAS, Keene remembered: “The first class, it turned out I was the only student — in 1941 there was not much pro-Japanese feeling. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a waste of your time to give a class for one student?’ He said, ‘One is enough."
The Alta California Chapbook Prize is now open & accepting submissions from Latina/e/o/x poets of all levels residing in the U.S. Please send 8-12 pages of poetry, written in English or Spanish, to Gunpowder Press via Submittable by October 1. Two manuscripts will be selected and published in the spring in bilingual editions. Poets will receive $500 each, 10 copies of the chapbook, and an invitation to read at the Mission Poetry Series.
Past winners of the prize are Grief Logic, by Crystal AC Salas; Levitations, by Nicholas Reiner; Sor Juana, by Florencia Milito; and On Display, by Gabriel Ibarra.This year's judge is award-winning author, editor, & translator Alexandra Lytton Regalado (Relinquenda, Beacon Press, 2022/National Poetry Series) & Matria (Black Lawrence Press, 2017/St. Lawrence Book Award). The series editor is Emma Trelles.
Bret Stephens in Sapir (Autumn 2022): <<< What exactly do we mean by “cancel culture”? It’s obviously not a matter of being fired for cause. Harvey Weinstein wasn’t a victim of cancel culture: He’s someone whose serial abuses were moral, professional, legal, and criminal. Nor is it cancel culture simply when private companies, universities, or other institutions discipline employees or students for violating long-established and widely agreed standards of professional and personal conduct. When actress Roseanne Barr tweeted in 2018 that Valerie Jarrett, the former Obama-administration aide, was the baby of the “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes,” ABC had a legitimate reputational interest in giving her the boot.
A better way to understand cancel culture is to break it down into five component parts: an action, a method, a capitulation, a mentality, and a culture.
The action is cancellation. But cancellation doesn’t simply mean losing a job, a book contract, a TV show, a speaking gig, and so on. It’s more like erasure. A canceled person will lose not only his job but also his career. He will lose not only his career but also his reputation. He will lose not only his reputation but also many of the people he once considered friends. He will lose not only his friends but also, in some cases, his will to live. David Bucci was a 50-year-old professor at Dartmouth and a married father of three when he became entangled in allegations that, as a department head, he had looked the other way at a campus culture of sexual harassment. Though he was never accused of personal misconduct, the school’s failure to declare his innocence sent him into a spiral. He committed suicide in October 2019.
The method is usually the social-pressure campaign — with the aim to not only destroy the intended target but advertise the destruction far and wide as a means of intimidation. Person X is deemed a malefactor for a statement or action that an exceptionally vocal minority of people consider immoral or that causes “harm” and makes people “feel unsafe.” Sometimes these campaigns begin with an accusation that turns into a workplace whisper campaign; at other times with a social-media post that quickly gains wide attention and descends on the designated target like a Himalayan avalanche. Employers, allergic to public controversy, seek to make the problem go away as quickly as possible, usually by extracting an apology from the targeted employee. That apology, often given under acute emotional distress, is seen as an admission of guilt. Termination swiftly follows.
Capitulation is an underappreciated but integral aspect of cancel culture. After David Sabatini, a renowned cancer biologist, was pushed out of his job at MIT on account of a non-disclosed consensual relationship with a younger colleague that went sour, friends of his who thought the charges against him were nonsense sought to bring him to New York University. When word got out of his potential hire, it led to public protests, to which the NYU administration, including university president Andrew Hamilton, promptly caved. Sabatini, once touted as a future Nobel laureate, is now unhirable in American academia. Cancel culture flourishes because coward culture allows it.
Then there is mentality. The best term I know of for practitioners of cancel culture is “cry-bullies.” It captures the combination of self-pity and vindictiveness (the former providing limitless justification for the latter) that explains so much of the way cancel culture operates: the disdain for due process; the unlimited deference shown to the accuser; the indifference to the possibility of innocence or, at least, mitigating factors; the reputation-smearing; the foreclosure of any possibility of second chances or redemption; the demand for complete professional and personal excommunication. There’s a reason, as Lionel Shriver notes, why today’s cancel culture reminds people of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or Robespierre’s Terror (minus, for now, the bloodshed). Only those fully convinced of their utter righteousness can be so completely pitiless.
So this is cancel culture: a highly effective social-pressure mechanism through which the ideological fixations of the aggrieved and truculent few are imposed on the fearful or compliant many by means of the social annihilation of a handful of unfortunate individuals.
Finally, culture. Cancellation is awful, but it befalls relatively few. The broader impact is on a wider circle of people who fear that they, too, can be canceled at a moment’s notice for saying or doing the wrong thing. It’s what leads to increasingly widespread habits of self-censorship, speaking in euphemisms, professing views one doesn’t really hold, pulling intellectual punches, or restricting candid conversations to a close circle of like-minded and trusted friends. It is why more than 60 percent of Americans admitted in 2020 that they have views they are afraid to share in public, and another 32 percent fear that their job prospects could be harmed by speaking their mind. It’s also why young undergraduates such as Olivia Eve Gross, a third-year student at the University of Chicago who is publishing her debut essay in this issue, thinks twice before raising her hand in class. >>>
from https://sapirjournal.org/cancellation/2022/10/jews-and-cancel-culture/
Our way to measure or perceive things changes from day to day, so naturally things change even if we can’t, don’t want to, or have senses and capacities inadequate to talk about what is happening:
Muon g-2 experiment reinforces surprise result, setting up physics ‘showdown’ The difference of g from 2 — or g minus 2 — can be attributed to the muon’s interactions with particles in a quantum foam that surrounds it. These particles blink in and out of existence and, like subatomic “dance partners,” grab the muon’s “hand”, changing the way the muon interacts with the magnetic field. The Standard Model incorporates all known “dance partner” particles and predicts how the quantum foam changes g. But there might be more. Physicists are excited about the possible existence of as-yet-undiscovered particles that contribute to the value of g-2 and would open the window to exploring new physics. - uchicagonews, 11 August 2023
The shift may have come about as a result of Béasse’s beginnings as a visual artist combined with a remarkable native insight into the physical mechanics of psychology.
However it may actually be for Béasse, sense, or Imagination, is what I think Dance, capital D, is all about, so I think the public success of her work is Sign and Portent of a developing un-narrative or performance way to do what we usually call theater.
The fascination with the un-narrative is the quantum foam shaping my optics on the noteworthy change of management at the Théâtre de la Bastille. Claire Dupont, 42, recognized as founder and director of Prémisses, especially for her work in developing performing arts through inclusion, has replaced Jean-Marie Hordé, 75, known for rescuing and then developing theater (live performance) culture, after better than 30 years of more than good theater and dance. With Dupont’s accession, Théâtre de la Bastille has also become publicly operated, part city of Paris and the region, part ministry of culture. Le Monde calls the appointment of Dupont “audacious”, but the 40-something’s professional career objectives and the government’s policy ends seem to me to dovetail famously. The ministry certainly saw that and saw, too, that her success thus far signals she’s serious about the future.
The change is noteworthy for me because of the g-2 element of it, as I say, but also because of a personal element. When I first came to France, I made it my business to see all the classic plays and all the then current ones I could. My aim was to get a handle on the society I was living in – that seemed to be one good way to go forward. My main but not only theaters of action were Comédie française, Théâtre de la Colline and Théâtre de la Bastille. After a performance of The Master & Margarita, I decided I’d had enough of theater, and of words words words in general; I’d got all the handle that was possible for me to get. I can say now that my life accomplishments so far include sitting through Racine’s oeuvre, seeing the Great Wall of China and realizing that Gorbatchev had really read Crime & Punishment. All that is no mean feat. And what comes next is of interest.
In addition to the personal, the management change at Bastille is significant in a couple of public and social ways. First, because generational; this Claire Dupont could be my own daughter; I might have been at school with Hordé; this change is happening everywhere and increasingly. Too, it’s significant as politics and public policy. In a country where culture is seen as the basis for social cohesion and not its result, it’s value in terms of inclusion and intégration will weigh more, maybe than its public esthetic success. And that esthetic success is what concerns me most.
So, what stands out to me from what I know this far is how clear and coherently Claire Dupont has been about her task of creating a framework for intelligent, popular, inclusive living performance. Her terms of art on paper just seem to make so much logical sense. Her plans for going forward, at least as I can make them out in her project description and season program, strike me as sensibly modest and well-paced.
First off, in the declarative, Dupont writes that her theater will use contemporary spoken French. This suggests two things: that she realizes that language as spoken by today’s creators is an accessory to performance and she’s serious about developing writing today. Second, she’s declares that she’s introducing what she calls “parliamentary” artistic management. And so it is that her announced way of going about it shows she actually knows what “parliamentary” means: her MPs among them represent enough serious “lobbies”, skills, competences, experiences and general artistic sérieux to set up and staff an all-genre dance performance theater. Which is, I suppose, is the idea.
From my reading between the lines, Dupont, among other things, has a particular care for people who know how to work with others and who learn the ropes of a project through experience of it.
Gurshad Shaheman, who arrived in France as a 12 year old refugee from Iran, trained as a Persian-French translator at Paris VIII, as well as an actor in a public-university associated regional acting school in Marseille. Shaheman has been working since 2004 in every conceivable aspect of live performance: performer, director, caberetist playwright; he has apparent intellectual and emotional heft on migrant and LGBTQ issues.
Agnés Mateus and Quim Tarrida come from Catalonia and are currently working together on the performance Rebota, rebota y en tu cara explota (“Bounce, bounce: in your face”), themed around ordinary violence. Mateus trained as an actor and journalist and now calls herself a multidisciplinary artist. To begin her performance career, she joined Collectiu General Elèctrica at its founding in 1996. The mission of the Barcelona performance collective was to break the barriers between performance, theater and dance. Throughout her career, as she is now with Quim Tarrida, Agnès Mateus has worked in co-work and/or co-contribution projects. Rebota, rebota y en tu cara explota is a second collaboration. Tarrida is a materials and visual artist who now defines himself as a performance artist.
Betty Tchomanga, whose constituency is Dance performance, was born in the west of France in 1989. Educated and trained in Bordeaux and Angers, Tchomanga has lately been having good success with public and critics alike. She seems at the beginning of an interesting maturity as a choreographer and performer after working with the exceptional choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas since 2014. Tchmonga strikes me as a creator whose concern is, on the model of the dance performer Dorothée Munyaneza, sensibility, creating atmosphere, reaching toward the sacred and spiritual in the material.
Bastille’s MPs will be on campaign in season 2023-2024, so spectators will get a sense of how they do creation as well as sit through performances the same artists have had a hand in choosing. In addition to the wide variety of performance habitually offered, spectators can savor Gurshad Shaheman’s Les Fortresses, featuring members of his own family; Agnés Mateus’ and Quim Tarrida’s Rebota, rebota y en tu cara explota, which explores the same ambient violence that Barbie reported during a recent visit to reality; Betty Tchomanga’s Mascarades, incarnating the energies of Mami Wata, voodoo earth mother.
In succeeding years, Dupont’s plan is, each artist will develop individual thematics or performance lines to follow.
In addition to Tchmonga’s Mascarades, the 2023-2024 season’s dance offer will figure dancer and choreographer Laura Bachman, born 1994, veteran of the Paris Opéra and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Cie Rosas, doing Ne me touchez pas(“Don’t touch me”) a feminine duo. Mohamed Toukabri, born in Tunis in 1990, a street breaker from Belgium in the 2020s come to contemporary dance performance through Academie Internationale de danse in Paris and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S. program, performs The Power of the fragile, with his mother ; Nach (Anne-Marie Van), who came to dance in her 20s through Krump, the psychotherapeutic variant of break dance, on-the-hoof apprenticeship and just plain creative intelligence, has created her own take on contemporary dance (La Biennale de la danse du Val de Marne 2023 #2: I got that hip hop feeling [By Tracy Danison]. Her solo contribution is from 2017, the first of her work I saw : Cellule, around freedom in the body self.
The energy and the g-stuff are in place. Switch on the collider.
The wind runs free across our plains, The live sea beats forever at our beaches. Man makes earth fertile, earth gives him flowers and fruits. He lives in toil and joy, he hopes, fears, begets sweet offspring.
… And you have come, our precious enemy, Forsaken creature, man ringed by death. What can you say now, before our assembly? Will you swear by a god? What god? Will you leap happily into the grave? Or will you at the end, like the industrious man Whose life was too brief for his long art, Lament your sorry work unfinished, The thirteen million still alive?
Oh son of death, we do not wish you death. May you live longer than anyone ever lived. May you live sleepless five million nights, And may you be visited each night by the suffering of everyone who saw, Shutting behind him, the door that blocked the way back, Saw it grow dark around him, the air fill with death.
— translated from the Italianby Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann
We have asked Ed Ochester (above) to edit our Sunday poetry pages for the next few months. Here is one of Ed's poems:
March of the Penguins
The editor of National Review urged [Young Republicans] to see the movie because it promoted monogamy. A widely circulated Christian magazine said it made a strong case for intelligent design --The New York Times, 9/13/05
What the hell are they going to do now with the libidinous bluebird, who lines up a couple of extra girlfriends every summer, not to mention the evil house wrens-- don¹t be fooled by their cheery little calls, they have up to five mates at a time! I won¹t even mention the gay rabbits we had once, in love with one another’s ears, etc., and even now my old friend Walter may be declaiming how God planted dinosaur bones to test the faith of Christians with the appearance of evolution, thereby demonstrating once again we are the first country to pass from barbarism to decadence without an interlude, and as for “intelligent design,” even Britney Spears wouldn’t drop her eggs at 70 below.
from UNRECONSTRUCTED: POEMS SELECTED AND NEW (Autumn House Press, 2007)
Under Ed Ochester's leadership, the Pitt Poetry Series has maintained a reputation for feisty independence -- so much so that "the pit bull poetry series" is an inevitable pun. He writes:
<< I've been the editor of the Pitt Poetry Series for thirty years. Some of our best-known poets are Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Russell Edson, Bob Hicok, Etheridge Knight, Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Malena Morling, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Afaa Weaver, David Wojahn and Dean Young. Most of these were not very well known when they started to publish with Pitt, and many of our younger poets who aren't well known yet are terrific and deserve (and will get) wider readership. That's one of the pleasures of the business –- to "discover" new poets and watch their reputations grow. Another pleasure, for me, is making eclectic choices. American poetry is bigger than one or two schools, one or two ways of doing things. I like to think I irritate or, even better, outrage certain academic critics and poetry gangs with the eclecticism of the Pitt list. I do think we've helped increase the readership for poetry: many of our books have sold more than 10,000 copies, and a couple have even reached 100,000. We're also one of the few poetry publishers – maybe the only one? – that doesn't require subsidies. For the next few months on this site I've chosen poems from recent books of ours, mainly. I hope that you enjoy them, of course, and that the enjoyment will motivate you to buy some. We need to remember Kenneth Patchen's gentle observation: "People who say they love poetry and never buy any are a bunch of cheap sons-of-bitches. >>
Ed Ochester's most recent books are UNRECONSTRUCTED: POEMS SELECTED AND NEW (Autumn House Press, 2007), THE REPUBLIC OF LIES (chapbook, Adastra Press, 2007), THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE (Story Line Press, 2001), and AMERICAN POETRY NOW (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), an anthology of contemporary American poetry. In addition to editing the Pitt Poetry Series, he is the general editor of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction (University of Pittsburgh Press). From 1978 to 1998 he was director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, and was twice elected president of Associated Writing Programs. He is co-editor of the poetry magazine 5 AM and is a core faculty member of the Bennington College MFA program.
Dominic Symes’ “Intimacy” was first published in the bi-annual journal Meniscus in 2021, an issue of the magazine in which the specter of Australia’s covid-lockdowns understandably hangs over many of the poems and short-stories included. It is difficult not to read Symes’ poem in this context: for many of us, the lockdowns transformed intimacy into a state of near claustrophobia. But Symes instantly turns this association on its head: the intimacy he is speaking of is gained in solitude, finding the quietude offered by reading and the small gestures of the natural world. The impersonal torpor of the lockdowns is brought back to us in the brilliantly depressing couplet “how we both sleep better after sex / but we’re both too tired to initiate”. The poem then shifts again to that liminal space we are taken to whilst reading, at once a lonely and intensely sociable act, in which we often develop a deep intimacy with the writers we read, noticing the most subtle shifts in their style, like a borrowed reference, as clearly as “ the haircut changes the shape of your face”.
Dominic Symes’ first book, I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation, was published by Recent Works Press in 2022.
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark