The Best American Poetry

Dancing history, art and color to another state of mind [By Tracy Danison]

Aurélie Gandit, “Visite dansée, retable d’Isenheim”, Musée d’Unterlinden. Photo © Cie Callicarpa

 

The retable d’Isenheim, the “Isenheim altarpiece”, is made up of three folded layers that open out to depict scenes of the passion, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, along with ordinary disease, suffering, anguish and death. Visually, the presence of Saint Anthony, a healer-hero in the Catholic-Christian pantheon and the symptoms of “Saint Anthony’s Fire” – ergot poisoning and plague: carbuncles, gangrenous swelling, madness, convulsed death – create a thematic unity.

In 1277, religious from the order of Saint Anthony set up an ergot poisoning and plague specialized hospital in “Isenheim” (nowadays written “Issenheim”). Isenheim was then, Issenheim is now, part of a string of upper-Rhine river towns, pretty much equidistant from Colmar to the north and Mulhouse to the south, all three anchored by Basel in Switzerland and Strasburg in Alsace.

Though a mere village, Issenheim retains some of its old-time shine: Prince Albert of Monaco is hereditary Lord there. Centrally located on trade routes, “Issenheim” is today in wine country but Isenheim was then in rye-growing land and, because ergot molds are especially common in rye and there was a great deal of human passage, Saint Anthony’s Fire was a big problem.  No surprise, the hospital did a booming business and came to hold many treasures, among them, the altarpiece. Painted for its chapel, the piece is a dramatically unique example of bright and colorful Renaissance painting: beautiful, visually ingenious, also shocking, revolting. New Science burgeons in the gorgeous horror, too. The lesions, carbuncles and convulsions featured are as medically realistic as disgusting.

Looted from the hospital during the French Revolution, the retable d’Isenheim is now dismounted as a separate exposition in the Musée d’Unterlinden in Colmar.

And that would be that –  place, time, a little O-wow-did-you-know?! commentary – if not for Aurelie Gandit’s dance performance, meant to “open the regard, make the eye listen”.

For me, it opened a portal on a state of mind that, unless, of course, I’m concealing a lately personally accepted obscure form of first-century CE judeo-gnosticism, has long since passed away.

 

Aurélie Gandit, “Visite dansée, retable d'Isenheim". Photo © Cie Callicarpa

The altarpiece’s Crucifying Jesus, Aurélie Gandit’s dance let me see, expertly anatomic, covered in scientifically accurate sores, is not a stern reminder of death from the unbending universal father. It is not either a commentary on the redemptive power of suffering. It is not either, as often explained today, a reminder of the universal god’s love.

Rather, that crucifying god, is a consolation by a brother, a fellow-sufferer, a sibling. Jesus is an agonizing inmate of Isenheim, just another sufferer in among the over-large family of a doting mother and a distant, if glorious, father.

Accepting pain, I realize, were no act of faith: plague-ridden Crucifying Jesus is a god like me. Anguished, we both face the gorgeously explicit horror of Saint Anthony’s Fire. Gods the Father might be out, but we little gods, Jesus and I and the other patients and the monks and the attendants are in it together, not alone.

Although Gandit’s performance notes say that she uses her body to project the strength of emotion in achieving her result, that is not my experience, or for that matter, my companion, Karine’s, either.

Though it has many figures, and notwithstanding sado-masochistic iconography, the experience of pain is just too personal to have an esthetic. Also, emotion may follow or precede pain but doesn’t seem to me (or us) to inhabit it – pain is deaf, dumb, dull, timeless, empty. I (or we) live inside pain.

To enable this other and more ancient state of mind in me, Gandit’s movement just tore a little hole in the fabric of routine.

Like an ordinary guide, she begins by describing the historic and symbolic and liturgical and esthetic ins and outs of the altarpiece. But there’s a flatness or lack of artifice to her. And her voice speeds up slightly. Her gesture becomes a little frenetic. She’s like a poor actor trying to play “hysteria”. She becomes absurd.

Then, all of a sudden, she falls to the ground.

And, when she falls to the ground, it’s a shock.

A little shock, but all shocks are a shock, are a breech in perceptual routine. And a little shock “open[ed my] regard, ma[de my] eye listen.”

__________

For another view of the experience of Aurélie Gandit’s dance performance with hisotircal artwork, see “Conundrums and sweet embrace: Aurélie Gandit’s “Visite dansée” with La Dame à la licorne”, The Best American Poetry, July 2022.

Mick Imlah, 1956-2009

On January 12, 2009, the English poet and editor Mick Imlah died at age 52. He was the author of two books, Birthmarks (1988) and The Lost Leader (2008). After graduating from Oxford with a first (top grade) in 1979, Imlah helped revive Oxford Poetry. He became poetry editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1993. As Mark Ford notes in his Guardian obituary, "Imlah was in fact blessed not only with astonishing literary talent, but with the looks of a movie star. He was, in addition, a formidable amateur rugby and cricket player; both sports feature often in his poems."  

<<< He was born Michael Ogilvie Imlah, with a twin sister, Fiona, in Aberdeen. His first 10 years were spent in Milngavie, near Glasgow. In 1966 the Imlah family moved south, to Beckenham, Kent. Mick attended Dulwich college, and in 1976 was awarded a demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford. There he met, as his tutor, the poet who would be the most significant influence on his own development, John Fuller. In due course they would collaborate on a wonderful series of six-line poems on the counties of England, published in Poetry Review in 1986.

Imlah was fortunate in the other literary friends he made during his time at Oxford; his circle included the novelists Alan Hollinghurst, John Lanchester and Isabel Fonseca, and the poet Bernard O'Donoghue. He graduated with a first in 1979, and embarked on a DPhil on Arthurian legends in Victorian poetry. This was never submitted, but his research into the work of Tennyson and Browning is easily discernible in his early poems, which make clever use of the dramatic monologue. The title poem of his first pamphlet, The Zoologist's Bath, published in 1982, mingles fantasy and fact in a manner that would become a hallmark of Imlah's poetry: it recreates the life of an eccentric Victorian evolutionary theorist, who is convinced mankind will soon return to its original element, the sea; he therefore refuses to get out of the bath, imagining he is developing a fin.

In 1983 Imlah, along with the Auden scholar Nicholas Jenkins and the poets Peter McDonald and Elise Paschen, set about reviving the long dormant magazine Oxford Poetry. So began a 25-year career in editing and literary journalism. That autumn he was appointed, with Tracy Warr, co-editor of Poetry Review, succeeding Andrew Motion. In 1989 he took over from Motion again, this time as poetry editor at Chatto & Windus, a post he held for four years. From 1993 he was poetry editor at the Times Literary Supplement; it was characteristic of his absolute devotion to the business of editing and publishing the poetry of others that he insisted on vetting contributions and judging the TLS poetry competition even in the final stages of his illness. >>>

from the archive; first posted 5/18/09

Liberties of the Imagination: Poems by Joseph Harrison, commentary by Mary Jo Salter [part 4 of 5]

Today’s poem by Joseph Harrison employs one of the oldest poetic forms, the ballad, to take on the tragic subject of an early death by a beloved contemporary.

OH

When Love herself came to me
Framed by the classroom door
Her presence shot straight through me,
My heart dropped to the floor.

Nothing phantasmal slew me.
What eyes and hair and skin
Could do they did to do me,|
Helpless and hopeless, in.

Oh, when her news came to me
—Ovarian, forty-four—
Her absence echoed through me,
Ringing my hollowed core.

Ballads usually rhyme ABXB (with X indicating an unrhymed end word) or ABAB, but those actual rhyme sounds tend to change from quatrain to quatrain.  As we saw in Wednesday’s sonnet, where Harrison upped the ante by rhyming fourteen lines with a single rhyme sound, he won’t allow strong feeling to weaken his commitment to difficult form.  Here, in a three-stanza poem, only the middle stanza has a unique pair of rhyme sounds; the first and third stanzas sonically agree.  Looking again, we see there is only one occasion in the entire poem, the center rhyme of “skin” and “in,” which doesn’t rhyme with “to me” or “door.”  What this insistent repetition creates, if I’m not being too fanciful, is a closed system which connotes the inevitability of death. Or here’s another possibility: every line that rhymes with “to me” or “door” indicates what we might call the normal, expected health of the poem; cancer enters with the one freak rhyme of skin/in.

Another sound is essential to the poem’s emotional impact, and the clue comes in the very title, “Oh.” A surprise, or a lament, or both, are coming.  The sound recurs at the beginning of stanza three: “Oh, when her news came to me/--Ovarian, forty-four…” Now the capitalized “O” of “ovarian” gains equal weight, as the clue to the poet’s misery. The word “cancer” need not be uttered, and the O in the “Love” of the first line returns to our memory. The two O’s in “forty-four” emphasize not only this new sound but also the other “or” sounds—door, floor, core.  At the core of the words “core” and “hollowed” is an O, a hollowed core that is also a sigh.

-- Mary Jo Salter

"Oh" is from Shakespeare's Horse, Waywiser Press (2015)

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: January 17, 2024

Today’s offering is by Cassandra Atherton, an Australian prose poet and scholar. Her poem below is from the first issue of The Mackinaw which “celebrate(s) prose poetry, in the present as well as its history and its future, and provide(s) a space to publish, read, and discuss this wonderful genre.” “Plum(b)” is full of wordplay and literary references.  Smart and fun, this poet sees not a red wheelbarrow, but a fancy red fridge. Always ahead of her time, it will already be tomorrow (for us in the US) by the time Cassandra reads this in Australia.

Plum(b)
 
William Carlos Williams was a genius. And he has my lover’s initials. Or rather my lover has his initials. I often eat the plums that were in the fridge. But I don’t expect to be forgiven. Not everything depends upon that. Or the wheelbarrow of promises that still lies at the bottom of his heart. That’s just a vain hope. My lover likes plums. The ones with the tough skins and the scarlet flesh. Not the yellow. We like the same food. Except for chops. I won’t eat lambs to the slaughter. Once I was called a ‘goo-goo-eyed’ vegetarian. Which basically means I won’t eat anything cute. With big imploring eyes. Because it would be almost like me eating myself. Baby cows are cute. Pigs are cute. And lambs are definitely cute. Even mutton dressed as lamb. So they are all out.  But I eat chicken and fish and sometimes beef. If it isn’t veal.  He lived on a farm once.  So he hates sheep. He tells me that sheep are the stupidest animals ever. They deserve to be eaten.  He even tells me the story about how sheep follow each other in straight lines and that the earth becomes shiny and solid beneath their feet. And he and his brothers would ride along their little tracks. On their bikes. Red bikes. Like that wheelbarrow in his faulty heart. One day he might even grow me some plums so that I can pick them and put them in our fridge. I want a red Smeg 473L fridge. I want my whole kitchen to be red. He draws the line at a red fridge. He has never heard of Smeg. Smeagol. Smaug, the dragon. He doesn't believe in the nuance of sound. He doesn’t understand the importance of a big, red, expensive fridge. He thinks they are just for keeping things cold. Like plums.  -- Denise Duhamel

 

Cassandra Atherton

 

You can read more from The Mackinaw here:

https://www.themackinaw.net 

Liberties of the Imagination: Poems by Joseph Harrison, commentary by Mary Jo Salter [part 3 of 5]

Today I want to comment on the ingenuity of just one poem in Joseph Harrison’s crown of sonnets, “As If.”  This one is the third in a series of… twenty-two sonnets!  All of them speak of an unrealized love affair.

from "As If" (#3)

Look in my heart, what’s left of it, and write
The honest declarations that just might
Move you to love me, even for one night,
If I could only get the phrasing right?
If I could only get the phrasing right,
I’d hold your hand in candelabra light
And step by step ascend the spiral flight
Of marble stairs—or are they chrysolite?
Oh, I can never get the phrasing right!
There is no text, much less a copyright,
And all’s been said much better than I might.
I’ll sleep alone, like every other night.
Belaureled lovers hold their dreamgirls tight
And all I do is write.

The English majors among us will recognize in Harrison’s first line an adaptation of the first sonnet of Philip Sidney’s series of love poems, “Astrophil and Stella.” Sidney’s speaker is rationalizing and bemoaning his writer’s block when an impatient interjection on line fourteen chides him: “‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’” And indeed, Harrison’s sonnet that directly precedes this one ends with these lines: “And I thought you were someone I could choose, //Not just be chosen by. ‘Fool,’ said my muse.”  A rule of sonnet crowns is that the last line of a sonnet must recur as the first line of the next.  Harrison has been clever in a different way: He has split Sidney’s final line in half, giving the first part as the conclusion to one Harrison sonnet and the second part to the beginning of the one that follows. In fact, with a switch of pronouns—“thy” to “my”—the poet establishes that he’s hoping his beloved will do the writing for him. Then Harrison tortures himself with another rule: he must write in an “A” rhyme scheme for fourteen lines in a row.  Admittedly, he repeats himself with the phrase “If I could only get the phrasing right,” but that’s clever too, since we repeat ourselves when we’re trying to get out of a writing jam. Besides, the phrase is never really repeated verbatim, since its first iteration ends with a question mark, the next with a comma, and the last with an explanation mark.  How fitting that the only rhyme sound Harrison employs is what goes with “write.” And of course the sonnet has to stop short of a full pentameter ending: “And all I do is write” suggests the poet really can’t complete his poem.  Meanwhile, Harrison has aced it.

-- Mary Jo Salter

 "As If", part 3 is from Someone Else's Name, Waywiser Press (2003)

Liberties of the Imagination: Poems by Joseph Harrison, commentary by Mary Jo Salter [part 2 of 5]

Today’s poem by Joseph Harrison, the second of five favorites I’ve chosen, has a title that invites us to consider one of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes.

HAMLET

It’s quiet here. A stoic rectitude

Props up the weather-pummeled citizens,

Craggy yet almost cheerful.  Uniform

Gray granite cottages, precipitous

And sturdy, make the most of things.  The wind

Does all the talking hereabouts, and who

Would think to think about the universe?

Their certainties define them, not their doubts.

“Weather-pummeled”: yes, we say to ourselves, we’re in the rotten state of Denmark.  It’s cold out there, and “The wind// Does all the talking hereabouts.” Clever, we think: Harrison must be referring to the early appearance of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and the sentries’ questioning whether he’s really there and really speaking.  Like that ghost, the poet speaks in iambic pentameter. “Precipitous”: that suggests the precipices of a high castle, as well as the danger Hamlet poses to Claudius, and vice-versa. Yet… when the poet asks “who// Would think to think about the universe?” we stop to question the implication.  Hamlet does think about the universe, as does his friend Horatio; even pompous Polonius can claim credit for philosophizing.

The poem’s final line makes us doubt everything we’ve been thinking: “Their certainties define them, not their doubts.”  Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the quintessence of doubt.  The poem cannot be primarily about him or his environment, we understand now, but about a village, a little town, a hamlet, where nothing is large scale!  We see “gray granite cottages,” “almost cheerful,” for what they are, not castles, and the inhabitants of the hamlet as provincial, limited souls who are defined by all they’re (probably wrongly) certain about.  People in the hamlet are the unheroic opposite of Hamlet.  The shortness of this poem makes the title that it shares with Shakespeare’s longest play a wry comment in itself.  Brevity is the soul of wit.

-- Mary Jo Salter

 "Hamlet" is from Shakespeare's Horse by Joseph Harrison, Waywiser Press (2015).

Tomorrow's piece today:  click here.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Seven): Dylan Loring [by Angela Ball]

Pardon My French

I couldn’t decide between
French bread and French fries,
sipping French roast
I made in my French press,
preparing to cook either breakfast or lunch
for the woman who began the previous evening
in a brown French braid
before we started French undressing
and spent the night French-kissing.

If French bread, why not
French toast, my mind rotated,
biking from Normandy to Paris.

Instead I chose to retreat
through the French doors
to the yard so I could get
some dirty air, chain-smoking
and coffee-sipping, smelling
like someone’s Grandma’s house
until a cartoon-looking skunk walked by.

Inside, she was eating French
vanilla ice cream, thinking about how
she had to take her bulldog
to the vet before showing up
to work for the day
--she’s an au-pair for the CEO
of French’s, the mustard company,
and was supposed to make little Stephanie
onion soup for lunch.
But first she suggested we hop in the pool
and take a French dip.

24 hours of thinking
I was le man later,
we met over cans of LaCroix at the coffee shop,
and I told her the one about the guy who mistook
a bidet for a drinking fountain, after which she stuffed her phone
into her brown, star-covered Louis Vuitton purse
and turned to me all serious,
saying she only liked me
for my American accent, that I spent
most of my time making jokes that weren’t funny.
So I told her I was just trying to show her
my level of commitment
and teach her about American culture,
and she said she didn’t have time
for a relationship anyway and that she would learn plenty
about American culture on her own
since she was going to be in a community
theatre performance where she’d get to wear
a pink jacket and pretend
to be a beauty school dropout.

                                                  -Dylan Loring

Dylan Loring is a poet from Des Moines, Iowa and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire – Barron County. His poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, jubilat, Ninth Letter, The Laurel Review, and Forklift, Ohio. Along with his friends Kate MacLam and Jordan Deveraux, he edits Lost Pilots. Dylan’s first book of poems This Smile is Starting to Hurt (SEMO Press) will arrive March 2024.

The New York School Diaspora (Part 67): Dylan Loring

Dylan Loring’s “Pardon My French” deadpans us through a series of idioms that function both as a challenge for the poet (à la Oulipian obstructions) and a humorously obsessive send-up of our commodified culture.

The poem may remind us of Gregory Corso’s “Marriage” with its oppositional invocations of matrimony; and even more of Kenneth Koch’s brilliant “You Were Wearing,” in which young love is abetted by clothing including an “Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse” and “George Washington, Father of his Country, shoes”—a prophetic example of product placement. All three poems end with a drastic and inspired change of tone.

“Pardon My French” begins with breakfast ideas and a skillfully engineered flashback to the night before:

     I couldn’t decide between French bread and French fries, sipping French roast

     I made in my French press,

     preparing to cook either breakfast or lunch

     for the woman who began the previous evening

     in a brown French braid

     before we started French un-dressing

     and spent the night French kissing.

From the start, the poem mainlines its artifice. That is, it acts as if its Gallicisms are the most natural thing in the world. Rather than tipping its hand, it displays it.

As in life, the real and the ersatz change places. Is the French au-pair’s “bulldog” related to John Ashbery’s “bouldogue,” a real breed that sounds like a humorous affectation?

Loring’s characters’ Gallicism is no matter of mere appearance—it defines them. The speaker may not be able to join the Tour de France, but his mind can. He chain-smokes while sipping coffee and “. . .smelling / like someone’s Grandma’s house”—the latter detail not so much "French" as simply an inspired description. We get a cameo from the much-missed cartoon character, Pepe le Pew. Soon after, the French girlfriend punningly suggests a “French dip” in the pool.

Loring’s poem reminds us of the apparently universal predilection for exoticizing or villifying things or phenomena by assigning them to a foreign country.

Take for example Algernon Charles Swinburne’s choice for the most beautiful word in the English language: “syphilis.”  The English, the Germans, and the Italians termed it "the French disease,” while the French referred to it as the "Neapolitan disease,” and the Dutch as the "Spanish/Castilian disease.”

Such labels may function as distancers of something undesirable; but also, of course, as vectors of glamor. Our speaker has begun to regard himself as “le man”—an affectation whose downfall begins as the two share a fizzy water named “LaCroix.” The name is explained at the website “thrillest” by Meredith Heil, who says, “The fake Frenchy name is actually a cross between the St. Croix, a river that runs along Wisconsin's western border, and LaCrosse, the beverage's Wisconsin hometown.”

     and I told her the one about the guy who mistook

     a bidet for a drinking fountain, after which she stuffed her phone

     into her brown, star-covered Louis Vuitton purse

     and turned to me all serious, saying she only liked me

     for my American accent, that I spent

     most of my time making jokes that weren’t funny.

At least two things of note happen in the poem’s final stanza: the girlfriend defies the poem’s apparatusto become three-dimensional, and the poem’s tone fails to shift into one of transcendence—a shift that happens in both “Marriage” and “You Were Wearing.” It ends by comically exposing the woman’s chauvinistic and superficial notions of “Americanness.” Then she takes her French leave:

     So I told her I was just trying to show her

     my level of commitment

     and teach her about American culture,

     and she said she didn’t have time

     for a relationship anyway and would learn plenty

     about American culture on her own

     since she was going to be in a community

     theater performance where she’d get to wear

     a pink jacket and pretend

     to be a beauty school dropout.

The “genuine” French woman has more specious ideas of America than our speaker does of France. America is a country populated by airheads, and she is going to “learn plenty” from impersonating a “beauty school dropout.”

Dylan Loring’s very funny “Pardon My French” reminds us not only that when we think of other countries we largely think in cliché, but also that we surround ourselves with words and objects that connote glamor and desirability: with “Frenchness.” At every turn, language connives with self-deception. As when watching a play by Molière, we learn that it’s fun to witness the foibles of others—this time by way of a poem that is both a tissue of false attributions and an agent of truth.

-- Angela Ball

Liberties of the Imagination: 5 poems by Joseph Harrison, with commentary by Mary Jo Salter

Liberties of the Imagination: 5 poems by Joseph Harrison, with commentary by Mary Jo Salter (pictured left).

Joseph Harrison (b.1957) has many admirers, but I’ve always felt that his works deserve a wider audience. Harrison, who lives in Baltimore, is the author of the forthcoming Collected Poems (2024). He is also the American editor of the Waywiser Press, founded in England by Philip Hoy. A signal goal of the press is to publish winners of the Anthony Hecht Prize, given for a distinguished first or second collection of poetry. Hecht, an important influence on Harrison, wrote an introduction for Harrison’s first book, Someone Else’s Name, published in 2003 J

As Hecht wrote, Harrison is “alive to the liberties and limits of form and imagination.” Liberties and limits—the alliterative phrase links the similar sounds of two words seemingly opposite in meaning.  But as Harrison’s poems illustrate, the limits of form often make possible the liberties of imagination.  Harrison is about as formal as contemporary poets come, a writer who delights not just in sonnets but longer perfections like sonnet crowns and sestinas. His meter is pitch-perfect, and rhyme, when he uses it, is almost always exact.  That said, he uses such conventions to highlight unresolvable ambiguities, disparities, mysteries.

Someone Else’s Name was followed in 2008 by Identity Theft, whose similar title highlights one of Harrison’s themes: who am I?  Am I the person others take me for?  Love poems, and notably Harrison’s, often ask whether our true selves have been read properly by the loved one. It’s not only his love poems, though, that profit from biographical elements, and often the lives described or narrated are of other writers: Horace, Samuel Johnson, Dickens; most of all Shakespeare.  In fact, Shakespeare’s Horse is the title of Harrison’s volume of 2015, and it was succeeded in 2020 by Sometimes I Dream that I Am Not Walt Whitman, which includes deft homages to Whitman as well as Dickinson. The challenges of naming and of being named are as old as Adam, but Harrison continually does new things with the abstraction of identity and with how we name those conceptions.

To show at least some of what I mean, I’m going to write every day for five days a brief comment on one poem by Harrison among my favorites.

Let me start with the very first poem in Joseph Harrison’s first book.  In retrospect, it’s highly characteristic of his poems to follow, diverse in manner as they are.  It’s written in rhyme (couplets) and meter (iambic, though with lines of varying length). Consistent with Harrison’s lifelong devotion to Shakespeare, it mentions several of the Bard’s characters, and places us in woods that call up the Forest of Arden. I’ll say more after you read it.

ALL THAT’S LEFT

Will someone tell me, please,

Who carved these trees
With someone else’s name?

These woods won’t be the same,
For I thought, all along,

Mine was the only signature among
These pale textures of bark

Rising out of the dark
Underworld of the forest floor.

But who was here before?
Who chiseled each new line

On everything I thought was mine,
Initialing all these

Purely imaginary trees
Deep in the forest of my mind?

No Orlando, mad for Rosalind;
These cuttings, even when crude,

Speak only out of solitude,
The signs of a single heart

That gave its love to art
And wore that on its sleeve,

Having come to believe
It was the necessary sacrifice,

And paid the price.
If someone else could see

These careful lines, would he,
Underneath their curlicue and flair,

Hear the real pathos there,
The note of the ultimate cost

When feeling itself is lost
And all that’s left is the mark

Of absence against the dark?

I said at first that the poem is in couplets, but that’s a tricky assertion.  The poem actually begins with a one-line stanza and ends with a one-line stanza.  Furthermore, the first line, “Will someone tell me, please,” rhymes with the end word, “trees,” of the first line of the second stanza, at which point a rhyme for the next couplet—broken by the space between stanzas—is introduced and seems to be dropped. The rhymes are always immediately heard, yes, but the visual effect if you were only to read one rhyme-staggered stanza at a time would be that nothing rhymes. The stand-alone first and last lines of the poem also serve to illustrate the theme: the poet can only write if he can be alone with his imagination. Yet he learns as time passes that other poets (symbolized by those who write their “signature,” or their “lines,” on trees) have been here in the forest before him.

Harrison’s rhyme scheme enacts that delay, that indebtedness to the past. In a further twist, lovers write their joined names on trees, but the poet gives his primary love to art itself. I take the last lines “all that’s left is the mark// Of absence against the dark” as deliberately ambiguous.  “Absence” may mean that most poets never make a mark that endures, like Shakespeare’s.  Or it may mean that the poet’s mark on a tree—on a poem, that is—only highlights his physical absence after death.  Or maybe Harrison intends both readings.  The “real pathos” for me is that he sets down in especially skillful lines the doubt of all poets as to whether they’ve made their mark.

-- Mary Jo Salter

"All That's Left" is from Someone Else's Name, Waywiser Press (2003). For tomorrow post today (part two), click here.  For part 3, click here.

Karisma Price: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________

This Is a Song for the Good Girl (Or the Lonely)

 

I draw a black band on my arm with Sharpie

Mourn for America they say

Say! Say Mami with the braids. I like ’em short!

My mom is the only number in my Recents call log

I now understand why Saturn devoured his son

I sleep with the TV on to combat loneliness

Today my cousin turns seven in a twice-drowned city

Every year I tell him he’s a grown man

Lying runs in my family

My sister steals a graham cracker

Animal control comes to put her down

We found a gun in my dead aunt’s bedroom

The silence hangs over us

like a guillotine’s blade

I dream of fish and close my legs

I stopped playing the alto saxophone

The president threatens to drop a bomb

It felt too close to giving birth

The earth holds me like a dead snake in the grass

Each of my days is a failed manifesto

I clench my jaw as to hold myself

Who will Jodeci cry for me as I undo my twist out

What is a man but a pocket

full of rose thorns

They are always so afraid to bleed

I do it without being asked

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Karisma Price is the author of I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Oxford American, Four Way Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day Series, and elsewhere. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize, was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and is the 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. A native New Orleanian, she holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. 

[Jodeci is an American R&B quartet formed in 1988 in Charlotte, North Carolina.]

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                                    William H. Johnson, Little Girl in Orange, ca. 1944, oil on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Vintage Noir ("Le Jour se leve") and the exquisite ecstasy of paranoia ("Vertigo") at the Film Forum [Nov. 2014]

Marcel Carne's little-shown pre-war classic "Le Jour se leve" is at the Film Forum on West Houston Street in downtown New York and must be seen by fans of Jean Gabin, admirers of Arletty (daringly naked in one scene), devotees of "film noir" in its earliest incarnation, and would-be writers and artists of all stripes who will, with a nostalgic ache, watch Gabin smoke one Gauloise after another as he is holed up in his top-story hideout, alone, with dawn about to break and les flics poised to come in for the kill. The dialogue is by Jacques Prevert and while it is fashionable to denigrate the man's poetry, as a writer of screenplays he possessed something approaching genius. The picture's title translates as "Daybreak" but is best left in the original. That's Gabin with co-star Jacqueline Laurent in the picture below:.

 

If you plan to take in the 9:30 PM screening on Monday the 17th, you can make a rare double-bill for yourself as "Vertigo," one of Hitchcock's greatest pictures, will be ending its limited run at the Film Forum -- and you can take in the 6:45 PM show, refresh yourself in powder room or nearby bar for a quickie, and head back to the theater for "Le Jour se leve" at 9:30 PM. The former explores the consequences of unquenched desire for an illusory object; the latter is a masterpiece of melancholy and murder. In a sense both movies qualify under the heading of murder mysteries; the plot in each case revolves around a homicide. But the real subject -- one might say the real hero -- is Eros. -- DL

from the archive; first posted November 17, 2014

Marcel Carne's little-shown pre-war classic "Le Jour se leve" is at the Film Forum on West Houston Street in downtown New York and must be seen by fans of Jean Gabin, admirers of Arletty (daringly naked in one scene), devotees of "film noir" in its earliest incarnation, and would-be writers and artists of all stripes who will, with a nostalgic ache, watch Gabin smoke one Gauloise after another as he is holed up in his top-story hideout, alone, with dawn about to break and les flics poised to come in for the kill. The dialogue is by Jacques Prevert and while it is fashionable to denigrate the man's poetry, as a writer of screenplays he possessed something approaching genius. The picture's title translates as "Daybreak" but is best left in the original. That's Gabin with co-star Jacqueline Laurent in the picture below:.

 

If you plan to take in the 9:30 PM screening on Monday the 17th, you can make a rare double-bill for yourself as "Vertigo," one of Hitchcock's greatest pictures, will be ending its limited run at the Film Forum -- and you can take in the 6:45 PM show, refresh yourself in powder room or nearby bar for a quickie, and head back to the theater for "Le Jour se leve" at 9:30 PM. The former explores the consequences of unquenched desire for an illusory object; the latter is a masterpiece of melancholy and murder. In a sense both movies qualify under the heading of murder mysteries; the plot in each case revolves around a homicide. But the real subject -- one might say the real hero -- is Eros. -- DL

from the archive; first posted November 17, 2014

If you plan to take in the 9:30 PM screening on Monday the 17th, you can make a rare double-bill for yourself as "Vertigo," one of Hitchcock's greatest pictures, will be ending its limited run at the Film Forum -- and you can take in the 6:45 PM show, refresh yourself in powder room or nearby bar for a quickie, and head back to the theater for "Le Jour se leve" at 9:30 PM. The former explores the consequences of unquenched desire for an illusory object; the latter is a masterpiece of melancholy and murder. In a sense both movies qualify under the heading of murder mysteries; the plot in each case revolves around a homicide. But the real subject -- one might say the real hero -- is Eros. -- DL

from the archive; first posted November 17, 2014

Tis the Season for Resolutions [by Nin Andrews]

Or is it already the season of forgoing resolutions?  On my way to the swimming pool this morning I heard on the radio that people are already forsaking their best laid plans. The reason: their goals are too ambitious. One should make small attainable goals. Instead of planning to become a triathlete, one should plan to go to the gym four days a week. Allow a few mornings to sleep in.

A lot of people must have slept in today.  For the first time all month, the pool was blissfully empty. 

Or rather, almost empty. There was also a college swimmer I often see at the Y, a leggy blond who made a resolution to lose weight. Already as thin as Popeye’s beloved Olive Oyl, she told me she needed to take off ten pounds.  “Of course you don’t!” I said. “You’re already too skinny!” She smiled and stood on the scales. “I am a little less each day,” she bragged. Then she pinched her waist to show me what she called her love handles. “And look!” she added, pointing at her thighs. “I think I’m already getting cellulite.” 

I’d like to say this girl is unusual, but when the high school swimmers are in the locker room, I hear a litany of complaints about their sylph-like bodies. The girls are forever sharing advice and cosmetics and clothes and romantic tips.  “I think one of my boobs is getting bigger than the other. Can you tell?” “Do you have any coverup—I have new zit in my cleavage.” “Do you shave your toes?” And then, there’s always the question,  “Do I look fat in this?” as they giggle and twirl in front of one another.

I wonder if the boy swimmers are primping in the Men’s locker room. If there’s a skinny kid among them who stands on the scale every day and worries about his weight. Who pinches his skin and wishes he were leaner, smaller, or somehow other? Do men get cellulite or fear it? 

I am reminded of the premise in Buddhist psychology that we don’t see who and what we really are. We lack clarity. It’s as if we are looking through dirty glasses that we can’t clean.

I think of this now as I try to edit on my latest book, Son of a Bird, a memoir, due out in 2025. I keep changing the sentence-order, questioning my word choices, my logic, my everything. I feel an overwhelming sense of self-doubt. If only I had a little more clarity. I am beginning to wonder if I am just too much of a perfectionist. Am I, like the anorexic teenager, unable to see what is in front of me?

I have been emailing my editorial questions back and forth with two accomplished women-poets. They, too, are agonizing over their final manuscripts. They, too, lack confidence in their own vision. I also correspond regularly with several male poets, but I never hear them questioning their validity in the same way. I’ve never had a male poet send me an accepted manuscript and ask, “Is this as bad as I fear it is?”  

Am I imagining these gender differences? I don’t know. But today, I am making my first New Year’s resolution. I will stop worrying about my book for two days. I know—it’s a very small resolution. But I doubt I can keep it. 

While not editing today, I found this poem on the internet by Louise Glück, a poem that addresses what I am thinking/writing/wondering about here.

LOUISE GLÜCK- 4. THE DEVIATION

It begins quietly

in certain female children:

the fear of death, taking as its form

dedication to hunger,

because a woman’s body

is a grave; it will accept

anything.  I remember

lying in a bed at night

touching the soft, digressive breasts,

touching, at fifteen,

the interfering flesh

that I would sacrifice

until the limbs were free

of blossom and subterfuge: I felt

what I feel now, aligning these words–

it is the same need to perfect,

of which death is the mere byproduct.

Napoleon Times Two [by Mitch Sisskind]

Sam Feldman

When Napoleon wanted a woman he said

Bring me a woman and they brought him one,

Poof poof no nonsense and the whole thing

Was over in half an hour. Yet Napoleon's

Relationship with Josephine was extremely

Complicated not to say convoluted which

To a somewhat lesser extent was also true

Of his marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria.

It shows the difficulty of comprehending

The five foot five inch Napoleon who was

Responsible for the deaths of approximately

Four million people between 1796 and 1815.

Now what about Sam Feldman who owns

Same Day Cleaners? Or what about me?

Napoleon's First Letter to Josephine:

A Modern Translation

December 1795

Hey babe 9 a.m. and I haven't

Slept all night not one wink!

I know you sleep till noon

So I'll see you in three hours

Clock is ticking hahaha!

How you looked last night

Babe I keep thinking of it

Which gets me turned on

All over again weird weird

I can't rest 'cause quaffing

The flames from your lips

Has made me really horny!

Thanks a lot mio dolce amor!

I imagine terrifying things!

from the archive; first posted Jan 12, 2023

How Do I See Myself? [by Molly Arden]

How do I see myself? Molly gets asked this a lot. She looks in the mirror and sees Picasso's understanding of her distorted self. In the chat room that served as her a senior seminar, she introduced the picture as “ravished mlf looks in the mirror after all-nighter.” She also wrote a poem, "Self-Portrait in a Concave Mirror," revealing an affinity with the late John Ashbery. 

 

Self-Portrait in a Concave Mirror

 

My mirror, I ask you, where have you been?
Proud of tits, mine or ours, we love, I miss.

Mirror made from eyes my beaux go

blind for closing them when we did kiss,

        when I did hiss, when you did piss
        but the battle between us (you cannot win

        that necklace of shards lost slapping your reflection)

        from toes to tips of tongue torn tights up for review

 

        she stands before the pier glass with rings and jewels
        and the poem on the pillow written with her lipstick
        is carried dactyl by furry dactyl to the waiting goddess in the mirror

       to swallow ah my ersters molly sighs I am a mess
       neither mess nor mass but the girl who was Miss
       Universe has gone down with the ship looking for Moby Dick.

 

      -- Molly Arden

Blast from the Past: Rigoberto González tells his truth about BAP 2007

<<<
’Fess up. You bought a copy.

I did this year, anyway. I actually buy the essay and short story anthologies in the Scribner Best of series year after year without fail because I tend to use them as inexpensive readers for my writing students, but I’m more selective with the poetry volumes of the same series. In fact, when I took inventory from my personal bookshelf, I only have (or kept) the volumes edited by Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa. I refused to buy the edition The Best of the Best, which was edited by Harold Bloom, who excluded anything from Rich’s selections and then gave a lame explanation for it. I do remember buying the anthology edited by Lyn Hejinian, mostly out of curiosity, though I didn’t keep it.

Why am I so picky with the poetry series? Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve never been included. . . 

(though I was short listed for the Best American Essays once). I tell myself (just like I tell my students) that this is one editor’s selections and therefore quite subjective. I tell myself that I really don’t care that I can’t put that little gem of a recognition on my CV or even in my bio. I tell myself that when I read the list of contributors in the collection listed on the back cover, that it’s more out of interest and not because I’m looking to make crazy gesticulations like “Her!”.

This year, the volume is edited by Heather McHugh, a poet I read, respect and admire, so out of my loyalty to her work and her politics I bought my yellow copy with the Lichtenstein graphic on the cover. The purchase was further encouraged by the fact that I recognized a few of the names: Kazim Ali, Denise Duhamel, Peter Pereira, Natasha Sajé—friends who are heretofore demoted to acquaintances because I’m so jealous. (Kidding, kiddos!)
>>>

Click here for more: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2007/10/the-best-american-poetry-2007. "If criticism has degenerated into blurbery, the serious conversation takes place covertly, and sometimes noxiously" -- Freddy Chervil

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: January 10, 2024

Lately I have been with obsessed with the sonnet—all it can hold within those 14 lines. So many variations of the sonnet (Coleman, Hayes, Hamby, just to name a few!)...Enter Aaron Smith who uses the same end word—sissy—all the way through….

Sissy

I can’t remember my dad calling me a sissy, 
but he definitely told me not to be a sissy. 
I secretly (or not so secretly) liked all the sissy 
things. We had a hunting dog named Sissy. 
Really: Sissy. My father nicknamed my sister: Sissy. 
Still, he says, “How’s Sissy?” and calls her Sissy 
when she goes home to visit him. Belinda (Sissy) 
is one of the toughest people I know. My sissy 
(sister) has kicked someone’s ass, which isn’t sissy- 
ish, I guess, though I want to redefine sissy 
into something fabulous, tough, tender, “sissy- 
tough.” Drag queens are damn tough and sissies. 
I’m pretty fucking tough and a big, big sissy, 
too. And kind. Tough and kind and happy: a sissy.

You can hear Aaron read the poem here:

https://poets.org/poem/sissy

"Passing Through Chicago" by Petra White [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Petra White has published five collections of poetry, including her most recent Cities (Vagabond Press, 2021). Here debut collection, Incoming Tide (John Leonard Press, 2007) was shortlisted for both the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards and the ACT Poetry Prize, while in 2010 she was awarded the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for The Simplified World (John Leonard Press, 2010).

 

 

 

Passing Through Chicago

 

Rivers of road, rivers of river, snow-clumped trees,
the angel, flowering in moonlight.
People would have muttered if they’d seen.
What good is an angel now?
His terrifying beauty, hidden beneath a wing.
If we think we could be rescued, from the fate we’ve shored up,
it is not an angel, it’s a person, rising out of flames.
Perhaps the angel, fallen to earth as lightly
as a feather from a falcon, has nothing to offer but himself,
pale clawed feet in the dark street, his feeble torch
on this avenue of twitching flags, threads of a great anxiety.
He crawls into the attic of number 1813.
In the space between home and state,
the angel shudders, turns, cramped wings shake open –
through the house a molten dream, through breakfast and dinner,

through the silver sorrows of the city,

its lumpy cracked streets, its America, soaring in the snow.

Somerset Maugham: on Art, with Heart

“I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed. On taking thought it seemed to me that I must aim at lucidity, simplicity and euphony.”

"There is nothing more awe-inspiring than when a man discovers to you the nakedness of his soul. Then you see that no one is so trivial or debased but that in him is a spark of something to excite compassion.”

"There is in the heroic courage with which man confronts the irrationality of the world a beauty greater than the beauty of art.”

"“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

"I began to meditate upon the writer’s life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him, and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax-gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man."

 

May Swenson's Four-word Lines

To welcome the new year, I turn to May Swenson and her poem “Four-Word Lines” for a prompt that I enjoy doing. Swenson’s poem explains itself and its procedures better than a paraphrase:

Your eyes are just
like bees, and I
feel like a flower.
Their brown power makes
a breeze go over
my skin. When your
lashes ride down and
rise like brown bees’
legs, your pronged gaze
makes my eyes gauze.
I wish we were
in some shade and
no swarm of other
eyes to know that
I’m a flower breathing
bare, laid open to
your bees’ warm stare.
I’d let you wade
in me and seize
with your eager brown
bees’ power a sweet
glistening at my core.

“The poem is breathtaking,” the writer Sharon Preiss observes. “The precise and compact ‘four-word lines’ move the poem ‘forward,’ yet the form forces line breaks that slow the reader down so that she can revel in the mellifluous aural flow of the poem. The sound of longing that the interlinked long i’s and e’s create in the first few lines then floats down and through the lilting feeling of relief the double f and l sounds create in ‘feel like a flower.’”

https://theamericanscholar.org/four-word-lines/

Here are poems that May Swenson's poem inspired: https://theamericanscholar.org/tributes-to-may-in-january/

Chris Banks: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Garden of Human Delights

 

Not that I ogle Rubens’ nudes any more

than the next guy, but nudity in oil paintings

really shows us what we gave up when

we closed the gate on Eden, and put on

clothes. Everyone has a recurring dream

about being naked and embarrassed at work.

The Pope is no different. The only exceptions

are blissed-out nudists playing volleyball

who would not recognize a crucifixion

from a church lady driving nine-inch nails

through their limbs with disapproving eyes.

In the 70’s, people got naked in musicals,

and it changed nothing. I look at some

priests, and wonder if they will implode

from human longing. Sex should be viewed

less as a dirty little business of feathered boas

and flavoured oils, and more a communiqué,

a telegram sent between distant galaxies.

The message: I know you. I trust you.

Let’s be more to each other than a drive-by

transaction of spermatozoa. At least tonight.

We can decide in the morning if a lifetime

of snuggling, arguing over who washed

the dishes last, is for us. My girlfriend

tells me I need to write more poems

about sex, but the Angel of Suffering

keeps telling me I’ll go blind from all

the innuendo and erections. Maybe

there is a garden of human delights

for sale down the street. Maybe we can

match the asking price if we combine

our incomes. Maybe we can live there.

Maybe be happy. Despite the thorns.

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Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator (forthcoming, Nightwood Editions, Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada.  His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, The Walrus, American Poetry Journal, The Glacier, and Prism International, among other publications. He lives with dual disorders—chronic major depression and generalized anxiety disorder—and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.

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                                                        Peter Paul Rubens (1577--1640), Leda and the Swan

Lovesick [poem by Major Jackson]

December 23, 2023

First, you will need to cross some dark threshold.
I suggest lying on your back
in a pasture of cut ryegrass or in a city park.
I suggest planting an arm behind your head.
You have inherited acres of a night sky
and she is your aurora borealis
and though you cannot see the world's
wild shadows, here she will be, nacreous,
grace wavering in bands of blue—green light,
ribbons of gold neon swimming beneath skin.
You will want to write a long letter to your dead.
You will encounter her mind as a kind of iridescent song,
heroic and dense. You will feel fetched as though
from some polluted river. Her glances will pass over you
like folklore. Do not be afraid. This is wonder
mirroring itself and breaking across your face, endless
treetops in silhouette, knowing looks of your elders.

 

---by Major Jackson

 

(Ed note: This poem first appeared in Sierra,the magazine of the Sierra Club.) 

 

Photographer Kyle Seymour captures Northern Lights glowing over South Hero, Vermont