The Best American Poetry

Linda Ronstadt sings "Frenesi"

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: February 28, 2024

There are so many reasons to love Mary Gilliland’s latest book Ember Days, which will be published on March 1 by Codhill Press. Her title describes the light during both the summer and winter solstice, and her poems reverberate with that same golden brightness. Gilliland is a poet of witness and spirituality, grappling with climate devastation while also interrogating world policies and politics. But maybe the number one reason to love Ember Days is the savvy poem “Up with People” which brought me back to that 1970’s singing group of traveling teens funded by corporate America.

UP WITH PEOPLE

I remember the opening salute, the hours

of taping and reshoot, our show’s chief sponsor

Bab-O. I’d had to apply. It floors me now:

the ticked questionnaire on American

history, the patriotic essay I composed so

eagerly, a stalk among the standing waves of grain.

During commercial breaks for cleanser, I tended

my tender self-regard, inked in every anacrostic

in the book, won all spelling bees. Deadlines colder

than zero Kelvin in the outer regions before sleep

carried dust I could not fathom. Three. Two. One.

and camera rolled, the rest of the cast singing out.

They could not work me into their permanent

Youth Corps. Some they did, gathered at

the 30-year reunion, unbroken on the moving

belt of hearty cereal, furtive sex, and overtime.

I would have failed at reminiscing between

dances, blank on what I’d looked like, what I’d said.

 

For those of you too young to remember, you can hear the group’s signature song here:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skK1CKKlc0M

 

Congratulations, Mary!

 

"The Totally Incorrect Politician" [by Walter Carey]

As everyone from Yogi Berra to Niels Bohr has said, "it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future." 

When you make predictions about the past, it seems retroactively inevitable.  Nonsense.

That being said, as the creep says after paying lip service to the truth, here goes: 

TTThey, who know who they are, will go after an Ivy League institution or equivalent (Stanford, Harvard, MIT) and rattle the bones of the administration with the result that

(1) The Dreyfus Case will serve as a cause celebre for the second time
(2) There will be massive layoffs in higher education
(3) Five-year contracts will replace tenure
(4) The tax-exempt status of universities with giant endowments will come under threat
(5) The world is on fire.

Fantasia on the Letter W [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weary of grandma's antique Woodstock stories,

Well-off Winnetka women wearing whatever;

Winsome women, wind whipping their hair,

Wielding wicked witticisms with no apology;

Women wandering to where restaurants lie

Among the pussywillows, women whispering,

Weaving wildflowers, warbling whoop-jamboree,

Waking echoes across the fields of NSCD where

Of late we whisked the footballs around, where

In the weeds we went wee-wee, where we wept

On the study hall's linoleum at the hormonal

Halloween dance where crepe paper dangled --

Wait, wait: with the well-off women of Winnetka

The wised-up women of Wilmette likewise ariseth!

An Interview with Adrie Kusserow on her book, The Trauma Mantras: a Memoir in Prose Poems [by Elizabeth A I Powell]

Adrie Kusserow's The Trauma Mantras, a memoir in prose poems, explores the warp and weft of existence as she examines Buddhism, American culture, and global refugees.Trained in comparative religion and cultural anthropology, Kusserow is a Professor of Anthropology at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont. In this brilliant collection,  she critiques Western conceptions of trauma and suffering, sparing no one, not even herself, in these fierce, beautiful meditations.  Kusserow’s ethnographic fieldwork with refugees, as well as her role as poet, mother, professor, daughter, and noted psychological anthropologist inform and commingle around themes of self, place, violence, death and the giving up of desire. 

Ultimately, this collection is a powerful witness to human resilience, skillfully woven in a series of connected prose poems that form this innovative hybrid memoir. As Yusef Komunyakaa says in his foreword: “These poetic prose pieces are well made actions-not merely generated but lived-with jagged edges. And the reader must be ready to go there, to feel and dream the rhythmic burn of language as rage and beauty converge, and to arrive at a place of needful contemplation.”

One of the most striking aspects of The Trauma Mantras is Kusserow's unwavering commitment to truth-telling, to peeling back the curtain that obscures reality. What sets The Trauma Mantras apart from the quotidian is its innovative style, exquisite use of language and figuration, and a keen anthropological eye for observation of the world whirring around her. It is a testament to the power of language and art to inspire reflection, empathy, and ultimately, transformation.

What do you feel unites all of the prose poems in this book?

I think in large part, a kind of hunger, an impatience, to bust out of the confines of what sometimes feels like the narrowness of American individualistic conceptions of self, emotions, trauma, suffering. My years of doing fieldwork all over the world as an anthropologist have introduced me to a wide variety of cross cultural conceptions of self and suffering. Over and over I learned that humans can have profoundly different ways of experiencing their identity not as we are used to in America, (in largely biomedical, psychological and individualistic ways), but identifying the self with gods, spirits, land, clan, trees, animals, environment, family, tribe, planets, seasons, creation myths. Whether I am writing about getting through chemotherapy, sitting with a refugee in a psych ward, teaching American students prone to being triggered, contemplating my mother’s death, “mothering” my own children, or talking to a monk in Nepal, underneath it all is a kind of Buddhist sensibility that resists the notion of self as separate, bounded, independent, fixed and solid. I suppose I am trying to hint to the reader that there is a liberation and joy inherent to a widening of the self from its usual biomedical, psychologized and individualized definitions. The culturally available stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (whether it be I am connected to all other beings, sadness helps me be a more compassionate being,  or,  I am unique, separate and no one else is like me, I have a disorder) has a tremendous impact on the intensity and experience of our suffering.  

In some of these pieces you write of refugees being exposed to trauma narratives upon resettlement quite different from the meanings suffering was given in their own culture. Can you talk about this?

Suffering is understood and given meaning in vastly different ways all over the world. The concept that humans might have profoundly different ways of responding to a traumatic event or that we are very biased in what type of event we think will hurt the human mind is hard for Americans to understand. Furthermore, many cultures view traumatic events as principally damaging social webs and relationships, not the individual psyche. Trauma is highly historically contingent. Americans are quick to register and locate so much of reality in the private tight knit closed quarters of the individual psyche. Nor do all cultures believe distress is best relieved through mental health experts and privatized talk therapy. Many refugees don’t want individual counseling because it takes them away from the healing effects of fulfilling their social roles. 

One of the fictions we seem to maintain in America is that all refugees are traumatized. I’ve seen refugees with schizophrenia almost die because doctors were hell bent on insisting they had PTSD. I kept trying to convince the case workers and social workers that one refugee I knew was schizophrenic. I watched him run ragged and wild, paranoid, terrified, misdiagnosed until he was skin and bones, homeless.  By the time he arrived at the psych hospital he was starving, convinced his relatives were poisoning his food, convinced they were plotting against him at CVS, where he worked as a cashier. He slept on benches, in the chilly, mud Vermont spring. afraid to go home, he wandered the streets arguing with authorities in his head. It’s not PTSD I said, I’ve known him for years, when he goes off his meds, the paranoia warps his mind. He’ll die if you don’t intervene 

Is there a particular group of refugees that has taught you the most about how to deal with human suffering?

We have so much to learn from other cultures about what it means to live through tragedy. I learned this mostly through my work with Tibetan refugees and studying Tibetan Buddhism. The irony of the title of The Trauma Mantras is that in the Tibetan Refugee view of trauma, first of all, they don’t really have a word for it (trauma), they tend to downplay negative emotions and strive to move beyond them and not make them into a big personal deal. They identify suffering as a common component of human life, one of the four noble truths. They tend to view distress as a chance to cleanse negative karmic imprints and develop compassion for all those others in the world that are suffering. Hence, suffering is somewhat contingent upon how the mind frames an event. How a person interprets negative events, like imprisonment, displacement and torture, can cause more or less distress.  A monk I met when I was lost on a trek told me how he’d fled from Tibet after the torture. He described a resilient mind as one that doesn’t individualize suffering, claiming it as their own unique trauma narrative, but tries to be more like the sky, liquid, spacious, humble, compassionate. 

What are some other anthropological themes you explore in this book?

Many, many anthropological themes. I’m fascinated by the stories humans tell themselves, as ways of making meaning out of suffering, that are often woven from the available dominant cultural meanings that surround them. Another theme I explore is what happens when cultures create fictions of each other, that come to be supported by global media’s stereotypical generic and simplistic images and discourses. How are these fictions spread and maintained by social media? 

I also explore the impact of technological saturation on human consciousness. I’m especially interested in how this kind of technological saturation and stimulation feel in the bodies of humans? What kinds of emotions and illnesses is it producing? What kinds of feelings is it causing us to experience more than others? A few of the pieces explore mismatch theory – the mismatch between what hominids were designed for and the kinds of super saturated technological lives we are actually living, otherwise known as mismatch theory. 

Widespread global inequality is certainly a theme in the book, and the way I struggle with these jarring disparities as an anthropologist acutely aware of her privilege. As anthropologists who engage in “thick description” I believe we have a responsibility to write well, to write poetically, to grip the reader and engage every cell of their being. 

Explain the title. Why do you call the book The Trauma Mantras?

In Buddhism, a mantra is a sacred utterance, a sacred sound, a syllable, word or group of words in Sanskrit, Pali or other languages believed by practitioners to have religious, magical or spiritual power. It is often repeated to aid concentration in meditation. The Buddhist mantra Om Mani Padme Hum is perhaps the most well-known, which translates to 'praise to the jewel in the lotus'. The irony here is that many mantras aid in helping one realize one’s interconnectedness to all things so the idea of using a Western conception of trauma (often conceptualized biomedically, as deeply individualized, unique to that person, which separates them from others) as a mantra should be seen as jarring and ironic. 

Insofar as a mantra is sometimes meant to be said over and over again and connect the self to a larger version of self, beyond ego, desire, thought, it is especially ironic given that the Western trauma narrative can be quite narrow, constricting and individualizing and have the capacity to alienate the person from the larger world, rather than join them into a yogic collectivist view of suffering. I wanted to hint at the way the West has fallen in love with Trauma as a diagnosis, to the point that Americans evoke trauma narratives like household mantras, repeating them over and over like a mantra, perhaps thinking the trauma narrative will save them. PTSD is now the fourth most common diagnosis in America. In fiction and literature, trauma has become the Om Mani Padme Om of plot and character development. A personal Trauma Story has for some people become their raison d’etre, the defining story of their life, the narrative which explains all and holds everything. This has led to our everyday landscapes becoming trigger fields, triggers everywhere. 

What is this book trying to say about trauma?

Our ideas about trauma are based in particular Western conceptions of self that often view the self as fragile, triggerable, vulnerable, not very resilient and mostly identified with the biopsychomedical. PTSD usually focuses on internal states and chemical imbalances inside the individual brain which can actually make the experience quite isolating and alienating. American culture has one particular highly psychologized and individualized conception of trauma and suffering among many many cross cultural ways of viewing suffering and distress. The Tibetans have no word for trauma. The concept of trauma as it currently exists in America is not something universal and has a definite historicity to it. Our notions of how to heal trauma are based in culturally distinct views of body, self and mind which not all humans share and therefore not all humans will feel is helpful in healing their trauma or suffering. The book isn’t trying to deny the existence of trauma as a horrible, painful experience, but rather to emphasize the ways in which we in the West have popularized the term to the point that it is applied linguistically to almost any negative experience. So much more of our everyday landscapes are now viewed as trauma(tizing). A kind of Traumasphere has developed. In my anthropology class, I gave them the same PTSD questionnaire as I did South Sudanese female refugee students living in Uganda now. My students scored much higher in terms of trauma than the refugees did! My book emphasizes how we often hold on to one’s specific and individualized story of suffering vs. viewing this kind of intense focus as a kind of isolating, narrow, limited, entrapment. It suggests that wider meaning systems, narratives and discourses (nature, spirituality, morality, religion, tribe, spirit, ancestors) for the self might possibly make us a bit happier.  

How do you use poetry/creative writing as an anthropologist and use anthropology as a creative writer?   

The Trauma Mantras is an ethnographic memoir in mostly prose poems and lyric essays. Much of it focuses on my fieldwork with refugees over the past two decades in Bhutan, Nepal, India, Uganda and South Sudan as well as Vermont where I live. Long ago, when I was getting my doctorate in graduate school in cultural anthropology, I kept getting frustrated by academic articles, both reading and trying to write them. They couldn’t hold the subtlety, nuance and multidimensionality of the people I was doing fieldwork with – the language was too constrained and stiff, the format too tight. I needed metaphor, image, rhythm, poetry in order to evoke the complexity and richness of what I was witnessing. So I turned to poetry, sneaking in classes on the side of my regular coursework. I also found that academic articles couldn’t hold my presence either. According to the British male social anthropologists granting my degree, I was supposed to be removed, completely objective, literally absent from my writing, which in anthropological field work is never the case. So I needed a form that allowed me to braid my own experience as a mother, wife, daughter, American into the anthropological perspective through which I was studying the world. So I’d say my book is a combination of autoethnography, poetry and lyric essay, but it’s also an anthropological tool. I actually use my ethnographic writing to bring me closer to the people and situations I find myself in. They allow me a fierce meditation and analysis on the bodily subtleties, nonverbal behavior, and energetic shifts that travel underneath conventional depictions of reality. It is also a memoir of witness, because I have always felt I should never hide from the inequalities of this world. It is also a manifesto of sorts, at times a feisty critique of Western approaches to the self, suffering and healing. 

Early on in the book I interrogate the way American culture prizes a psychologized individualism, the supposedly fragile self. I also explore how this influences things like how we raise our children and think about and experience postpartum. I’ve always had a huge hunger to bust out of such narrow confines of individualism. I’m always looking for ways to widen the American self so that it includes what so many other cultures include within the self: tribe, family, ancestors, land, trees, animism. I tried in this book to not let myself off the hook, and much of it is also a rigorous reflection on my own position and commitments. As I travel, I am privy to the ways in which people stereotype the `West’ or `East’ – and social media has only made this more extreme, so some of what I write about is about these fictions. I’m also fascinated by the stories we tell about ourselves and obsessively weave from the available dominant cultural meanings that surround us. For years I wrote ethnographic poetry only, but found I wanted more of an essay that could accommodate my anthropological perspective. So I suppose the book is more of a multi-brid than a hybrid. Duke had a devil of a time trying to get me to call them prose poems, because I don’t think of many of the 1-3 page vignettes as poems at all. 

What does this hybrid form (autoethnography and prose poems) make possible for you as a writer?  

Ethnography is the process of writing about, representing recording and describing another culture. Autoethnography is qualitative research using self-reflection and writing to explore personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural and social meanings and understandings. Ethnographic poetry is part of a growing movement of experimental approaches to ethnography and anthropological inquiry that have gained momentum since the 1990s. Like many anthropologists, I was looking for the most nuanced ways to represent and understand issues encountered in my research in Uganda, South Sudan, Vermont and Bhutan and was particularly drawn to the ways in which form, metaphor, image, rhythm and affect could convey profound subtleties of meaning and bring me to places of fresh insight. During my research, I found that poetry was not something I waited to write until after fieldwork was complete but was helpful in the process of observation itself. Ethnographic poetry could give rise to aesthetic, less linear ways of thinking about the field experience. Ethnographic poetry is not just about accurately describing an experience but using the insight of its acutely nuanced language and artistic aesthetic to bring a wider array of meaning(s) to these facts than conventional wisdom offered. Far from being a kind of epiphenomenal icing on the cake, poetry encouraged a more rigorous analysis and theoretical understanding of what I observed. In this way, poetry embodied and emboldened my ethnographic research, requiring me to probe behaviors with all my senses. It also gave me the tool of metaphor, which helped me express and pay more deliberate attention to the many ways culture is embodied in the senses of those we study and attempt to represent for others. Vague and generic words do not help anthropologists or their readers crawl into the rich, multi-dimensional places most humans inhabit. Hence, ethnographic poetry is not something that simply reflects an initial ethnographic insight; it is an active ethnographic tool, a deep and refined phenomenological probing, as opposed to a dreamy, distant musing. The tentacles of the ethnographic poem, through image, metaphor, language, form and rhythm, enable me to inch even closer to the complex, subtle experiences I am trying to describe and understand.

Anything else you want to say?

I have always preferred looking at the world from a cross-cultural perspective, a large, existential, wide gaze as if looking down on planet earth and noticing patterns, migrations, collisions. I have never been very drawn to confessional poetry unless it points to the ways globalization and cultural values, beliefs and practices shape the deepest parts of the psyche. I also feel like I really try and critique myself along with everything else I am critiquing from an anthropological perspective. I am by no means above it all, preaching, I am acutely aware that I very much hold and perpetuate many of the Western psychologized and individualistic conceptions of self and emotions that I critique.

The New York School Diaspora (Part 70): Todd Osborne [by Angela Ball]

 

First, Second, Third Person (with a line from Robert Creeley)
in memory of D.R.

I am still stuck on poetry I said, once,
a lifetime ago, or not too long ago,

depending on who you are, or who I
is, when you reads this or I writes it.

And it’s true even now. An old friend
writes that she has moved beyond stanzas,

and all I can think is—how? I am trying,
even now, to decipher the mysteries

of a couplet, of an amulet and quick surprise
part of me wants to say, borrowing

another poet’s words, or stealing
like great artists are often said to do,

but I’m not sure that’s true. The words
stay the same whether they are mine

or someone else’s. Nothing is new
under the sun, cries the Preacher was

always one of my favorite verses, even
as a child, even young in faith and life,

believing so much in something I cannot
comprehend, like stanzas, like God,

like this life I have found myself happily
wandering into. I hope you found it too.

                                                             -Todd Osborne

 

Todd Osborne is a poet and teacher born and raised in Nashville, TN. His debut poetry collection, Gatherer, is forthcoming this April from Belle Point Press. His poems have appeared at CutBank, Tar River Poetry, The Missouri Review, EcoTheo Review, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in Hattiesburg, MS, with his wife and their three cats.

The New York School Diaspora (Part 70): Todd Osborne

Todd Osborne’s vibrant and affecting elegy begins with a confession more appropriate to a childhood crush than to a lifelong vocation: “I am still stuck on poetry,” a statement whose brash clarity disappears in a contretemps of times and selfhoods: “ . . . I said once, / a lifetime ago, or not too long ago, / / depending on who you are, or who I / is, when you reads this or I writes it”--a confusion worthy of Arthur Rimbaud, Bob Marley--or, in fact, John Ashbery, that master of equivocal identities.

“And it’s true even now” does little to settle the question of who the poet is in relation to his work. Like a contestant on a quiz show he reaches out to a friend, who unhelpfully says that she has “moved beyond stanzas.”  What, is she houseless?

 

     I am trying,

     even now, to decipher the mysteries

 

     of a couplet, of an amulet and quick surprise

     part of me wants to say, borrowing

 

     another poet’s words, or stealing

     like great artists are often said to do

 

Osborne’s couplets move by a process of incomplete figuration, their guide Robert Creeley’s fascinating, enigmatic phrase, “an amulet and quick surprise.” In other words, our luck carries us, along with opportunism—the ability to jump on that which enters our path.

Is Osborne’s late friend also a poet?  Have they, in the process of dying, entered poetry? Yes or no? Or should it be Yes and No?

In asserting that

 

     . . .Nothing is new

     under the sun, cries the Preacher was

     always one of my favorite verses, even

     as a child, even young in faith and life,

     believing so much in something I cannot

     comprehend, like stanzas, like God,

 

Osborne puts his faith in the familiar. But just as at the poem’s start, certainly turns itself inside out to become mystery:

 

     like this life I have found myself happily

     wandering into. I hope you found it too.

 

The poem’s last line, itself a rhymed couplet, expresses, with touching abruptness, many things at once, in a way that only the simplest of statements can. Life, like poetry, mixes familiarity with mystery. Also death. Todd Osborne’s “First, Second, Third Person (with a line from Robert Creeley),” in its unconventional eloquence, articulates how poetry and love arise from the constant benediction of discovery.- Angela Ball

Lyn Hejinian, 1941-2024

From Brian Kim Stefans, Boston Review, December 1, 2001:

<<< Hejinian's writing is principally concerned with knowledge, and when this knowledge is not of the "self" it is of the world as filtered and perceived, proprioceptively, through the self. To this extent she is a psychological writer, though she seems, for the most part, to have skipped over Freud, and to rely instead on an earlier confidence that self-examination is a trustworthy path to a knowledge. "Someone refers to 'the courage of her convictions,'" Hejinian writes. "The difficulty lies not so much in adhering to one's beliefs as in determining their object—what it is one is having beliefs about. This is particularly problematic in a world that is both overexposed and, at the same time, through the invasive sentimentalization of the private realm, concealed behind the titillating surfaces of public display." Some of her paragraphs seem like notes to the self, as in the movie Memento, in which the protagonist, lacking any ability to create new memories, has to tattoo his body with messages in order to maintain any sense of life's continuity. Hejinian seems to find pleasure, if not an untapped resource, in the ability to lose one's direction, as the objects of her thought—"my car," "my convictions," "my style"—do not easily persist through time, but are willed forward by artful decisions. These decisions put the individual at the center of one's own world; they constitute the struggle to maintain engagement with the "everyday," to understand every second as moments of judgment: chance leading to choice. The persistence of matter may be untroubled in Hejinian, but the persistence of mind about matter is always an issue.

There is also something spiritual—in the tradition of Buddhist poetics as explored by many West Coast writers, most notably Philip Whalen—in Hejinian's ideas, as when she writes in her introduction to Language of Inquiry: "Poetry, therefore, takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience." These sorts of doubling of words—"If Written is Writing," is the title of another essay—suggest a deep retreat behind one's mind in order to get perspective on how knowing actually works. Skepticism, the elite perspective of a hard-earned Western rationality, is matched with bodily discipline and thus questions all absolutes, including the authority of the skeptical mind itself, only finding satisfaction or assurance—further calls for discipline—when observing the mind in action. Consequently, this self-reflection takes on a social dimension—the heart of all of Hejinian's thinking—as one is, deep in the mind, a step further away from the socialization implicit in the "titillating public display" of hyper-mediating capitalist culture. Hence, this practice of thinkingthrough one's singularity, not in fear of it, is both aesthetic and ethical in nature.

Even Hejinian's essays that seem to be about the "social"—political ideas, relations of poetic form to social meanings, or feminist concerns—all hinge on the fact of the mind. In her 1995 essay "Barbarism" she re-reads Adorno's famous statement: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is an act of barbarism." The standard interpretation is that Adorno was declaring culture impossible in a world whose history had proven disastrous—guided by acts of the collective will in which such forms as the "lyric," now fallen from its "folk" status, cut off the individual from society. Hejinian suggests that his statement "can be interpreted in another sense, not as a condemnation of the attempt 'after Auschwitz' to write poetry, but…as a challenge and behest to do so." The poet, however, endeavors "not to speak the same language as Auschwitz" but instead to speak a language that is doubled, as incoherent babbling to the masters, poetry to the rest. >>>
We mourn the passing of Lyn Hejinian, celebrated poet, author of My Life, and editor of The Best American Poetry 2004. 

https://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/editors/?id=2004
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2013/03/23/review-my-life-and-my-life-in-the-nineties-by-lyn-hejinian-2/

Alise Alousi: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________

Detroit 1998, a Reminiscence

after Eliot Weinberger

 

In Detroit there is no fresh fruit.

 

We eat with our eyes. Our children are strong as weeds. They learn the alphabet backwards and

grow up never wanting to leave.

 

Our streets are named for cigarettes, highways—winning lotto numbers. In Detroit we don’t

stop at stop signs and traffic lights never turn red. We crave the smell of gasoline.

 

There exists only one map of the city. The mayor keeps it facing the wall in his home and you

must pay a fee to look at it.

 

The casino coughs blood into the night sky and the incinerator wears a surgical mask.

 

In Detroit our smiles are crooked, our canine teeth sharp as diamonds or hard candy sucked

to a fine point.

 

When it rains the streets smell like tortillas and wine and we play games where you must gather

with only those who look exactly like you.

 

In Detroit vines grow out the doors and windows of the oldest churches and you must cross the

street or travel with a machete to pass them.

 

There are seven kinds of birds that gather by railroad tracks at noon and dusk. All the gardeners

in the city take turns watching over them.

 

In Detroit our factories sleep with one eye open, their histories written in code on internal

walls.

 

All our cats are feral. They live on the roofs of our public buildings. Packs of dogs have been

sent to unseat them.

 

For in Detroit there is a secret freeway with only one car, its headlights dimmed, and the sound

of its bass makes roadside flowers grow.

 

The river is full of socks, hijabs, bicycle tires. Old men fish for hours off the sinking pier.

 

There is one library in the city and it is open every other day for fifteen minutes. Once an entire

family was killed in a stampede.

 

In Detroit we cover our houses with fine mesh and ivy. Wild roses grow everywhere.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Alise Alousi is the author of the poetry collection, What to Count. She has worked for over two decades at InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit and is a recipient of a 2019 Kresge Literary Arts Fellowship.     [For Eliot Weinberger, see this link.]

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

One of the Detroit Industry Murals (1932–1933), a series of frescoes by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, consisting of twenty-seven panels depicting industry at the Ford Motor Company and in Detroit. Together they surround the interior Rivera Court in the Detroit Institute of Arts. 

Wendy Cope: "The Waste Land" as 5 limericks

The Waste Land: Five Limericks

I

In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyantes distress me,
Commuters depress me--
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

II

She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions--
Bad as Albert and Lil--what a pair!

III

The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep--
A typist is laid,
A record is played--
Wei la la. After this it gets deep.

IV

A Phoenician named Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business--the lot,
Which is no surprise,
Since he'd met his demise
And been left in the ocean to rot.

V

No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.

-- Wendy Cope

I

In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyantes distress me,
Commuters depress me--
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

II

She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions--
Bad as Albert and Lil--what a pair!

III

The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep--
A typist is laid,
A record is played--
Wei la la. After this it gets deep.

IV

A Phoenician named Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business--the lot,
Which is no surprise,
Since he'd met his demise
And been left in the ocean to rot.

V

No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.

-- Wendy Cope

On Movies and Beauties (part one) [by Mark Strand]

When I was very young, say, around seven or eight, I went in for cowboy flicks. I usually went with a pack of boys my own age; we paid our dime and watched a double feature. The National Anthem was played and sometimes there’d be a yo-yo contest. There were usually one or two cartoons, a serial of Superman or Captain Marvel and always Movietone Newsreels. I had no use for Tom Mix or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers. I liked Randolph Scott, I guess because I admired his perfectly chiseled features and the fact that he didn’t sing. But I’ll talk about the male stars of my past at another time.

Now I want to discuss the females that I had begun to want to watch, the many on whom I developed a crush. I was nine or ten when I thought Esther Williams [left] was hot. It was her swimming, naturally, that did it for me. In those days I liked women who evinced some athleticism. I never really thought of them as women, but as grown up girls.  Esther Williams could swim. That was it for me. I thought her face a little broad, especially when she wore a swimming cap. The crush was short lived. I moved on. Athleticism ceased to be a necessity, since almost none of the female stars was athletic, at least not on screen. That is, with the exception of Ginger Rogers, whose dancing I considered a kind of athletic event. (As I grew older I ceased to think of it as merely that.) I should also mention Betty Grable [the GIs' favorite pin-up girl in WW II], who does a terrific solo in “The Gay Divorcee.” But this and other Rogers/Astaire movies I saw as many as ten years after they first appeared.  It wasn’t simply Rogers's athleticism that got to me, it was her energy, her perkiness. That’s it: she was perky, despite those eyes that could be a shade soulful, a little hurt.

Other Perky cuties I had a crush on were Janet Blair, Joan Leslie. I have not seen Janet Blair since I was ten years old, so I can’t say what effect she would have on me now, but I recently watched “Flying Down to Rio” and took a good hard look at the young Ginger Rogers [above] but was not overwhelmed. More overwhelming was the seemingly endless Carioca dance numbers with Fred and an ensemble of hundreds (it seemed). And most overwhelming was Dolores Del Rio [below] to whom I had paid no attention when I was a boy. Ah Dolores! I ran into her once in an elevator in Mexico City back in 1953. I was with my father and he noticed her right away and practically fainted on the spot. She was then 48 and I was 19. She was still beautiful, but not the way she was in “Flying Down to Rio.” She was darkly glamorous, which is about all that I could be certain of in the few seconds we were on the elevator. In “Flying Down to Rio” you noticed the playful intensity of her eyes and her perfect features. But more about the true beauties next time.

-- Mark Strand

Mark Strand is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently New and Selected (Knopf, 2009) and Man and Camel (Knopf, 2008).  Read more about Mark Strand here.

from the archive; first posted August 31, 2009

When I was very young, say, around seven or eight, I went in for cowboy flicks. I usually went with a pack of boys my own age; we paid our dime and watched a double feature. The National Anthem was played and sometimes there’d be a yo-yo contest. There were usually one or two cartoons, a serial of Superman or Captain Marvel and always Movietone Newsreels. I had no use for Tom Mix or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers. I liked Randolph Scott, I guess because I admired his perfectly chiseled features and the fact that he didn’t sing. But I’ll talk about the male stars of my past at another time.

Now I want to discuss the females that I had begun to want to watch, the many on whom I developed a crush. I was nine or ten when I thought Esther Williams [left] was hot. It was her swimming, naturally, that did it for me. In those days I liked women who evinced some athleticism. I never really thought of them as women, but as grown up girls.  Esther Williams could swim. That was it for me. I thought her face a little broad, especially when she wore a swimming cap. The crush was short lived. I moved on. Athleticism ceased to be a necessity, since almost none of the female stars was athletic, at least not on screen. That is, with the exception of Ginger Rogers, whose dancing I considered a kind of athletic event. (As I grew older I ceased to think of it as merely that.) I should also mention Betty Grable [the GIs' favorite pin-up girl in WW II], who does a terrific solo in “The Gay Divorcee.” But this and other Rogers/Astaire movies I saw as many as ten years after they first appeared.  It wasn’t simply Rogers's athleticism that got to me, it was her energy, her perkiness. That’s it: she was perky, despite those eyes that could be a shade soulful, a little hurt.

Other Perky cuties I had a crush on were Janet Blair, Joan Leslie. I have not seen Janet Blair since I was ten years old, so I can’t say what effect she would have on me now, but I recently watched “Flying Down to Rio” and took a good hard look at the young Ginger Rogers [above] but was not overwhelmed. More overwhelming was the seemingly endless Carioca dance numbers with Fred and an ensemble of hundreds (it seemed). And most overwhelming was Dolores Del Rio [below] to whom I had paid no attention when I was a boy. Ah Dolores! I ran into her once in an elevator in Mexico City back in 1953. I was with my father and he noticed her right away and practically fainted on the spot. She was then 48 and I was 19. She was still beautiful, but not the way she was in “Flying Down to Rio.” She was darkly glamorous, which is about all that I could be certain of in the few seconds we were on the elevator. In “Flying Down to Rio” you noticed the playful intensity of her eyes and her perfect features. But more about the true beauties next time.

-- Mark Strand

Mark Strand is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently New and Selected (Knopf, 2009) and Man and Camel (Knopf, 2008).  Read more about Mark Strand here.

from the archive; first posted August 31, 2009

Christine Bastin: You won’t have the words for your transcendence. But your dance will [By Tracy Danison]

Christine Bastin, center rear, artistic director, Fabrique de la Danse, with students. Photo © Emmanuelle Stäuble

Christine Bastin is a co-founder, with Orianne Vilmer, of Fabrique de la Danse, where Bastin has been artistic director and Vilmer has been director since 2015. Fabrique de la Danse was the first and remains the only dance school currently able to deliver a professional certification for choreographers.

Bastin calls herself a “dance native” and says she does not remember a time when she did not dance. She began dancing at 7 or 8 years old and was among the first graduates of Danse Création, an innovative contemporary dance performance school in the northern city of Lille, a brainchild of the charismatic dancer and teacher Anne-Marie Debatte (1918-2002), which opened its doors in 1975. Dance Création philosophy and mission were to educate and train “strong, joyful and responsible beings in relation with others and present in the world”. 

Debatte was among the pioneers in opening (or re-opening) dance to encompass and include human difference with intergenerational dance, dance for seniors and persons with disabilities as well as promoting dance in schools, businesses and public institutions such as senior living. Currently an associate at the coaching and well-being consultancy Optimé Persona, Christine Bastin has made this openness to movement activities and publics a significant part of her career.

“Lessons in dance were lessons in living,” Christine Bastin tells me. Her teachers and fellow students were a second family. She learned, she says, “not just to dance but also to put on a show, to teach and to create”, all the skills that she continues to use to this day.

For Bastin, dance is a spiritual resource. She describes it almost as a demiurge or spirit guide. “Dance was always there for me,” Bastin says. “It made me happy. It made it possible to express the joy I felt within myself. Dance is the creation of the world. Movement is living. If we leave it alone, dance will join [the split in] our body and mind”.

I ask her, To what end? Where does dance lead us?

She replies, “I’m looking for a transcendence. I think we are all looking for a transcendence.” When transcendence comes, she says, we won’t have the words for it, but dance will.

Christine Bastin came on the scene when the Nouvelle Danse Française – a movement away from the formalisms of American-style modern dance and Opera-de-Paris-style ballet – was expanding into the broad notion that has become “contemporary dance [performance]”. She joined other disciples of AlwIn Nikolaïs (an early actor in the Nouvelle Danse, a proponent of multimedia input in live performance and of “total dance” and dance as an aspect of an “art of motion” which is both message and medium, who arrived in Paris from the USA in 1968) in seeking new ways to perform and understand dance.

Bastin started dancing with choreographer Christine Gérard’s cie ARCOR. Gérard, along with Carolyn Carlson, Dominique Bagouet and Jaque Chaurand is among the best-known and most iconic movers of contemporary dance performance into the present.

Christine Bastin dancing her ”Fruition” (2013). Photo © cie la folia

Since the mid-1980s, Bastin has authored and produced more than 40 dance-performance choreographies, including guest pieces for prestigious events such as Biennale de danse de Lyon and Festival d’Avignon.

“Dance creation is a mirror of the self,” Bastin says. “Building a dance is to give form to an equilibrium which will then unbalance to bring about another equilibrium”, which equilibrium will then birth another...”. Bastin smiles pleasantly: “One dance can hide another”, in the way trains can.   

In the choreographic process, she continues, movement cleans up the original thought or idea behind it. In movement, the body has its own thought. ‘Mind-thought’ is the detonator for the ‘body-thought’” that gives real substance to dance performance.

Each of her choreographies, Bastin says, corresponds to some aspect of self-discovery, expression, opening outward or inclusion. Her Gueule du Loup (“Wolf’s Maw”), which she was invited to write for the 1992 Biennale de danse de Lyon, is an example.

Intellectually framed, as she explains it, by Federico Garcia-Lorca’s idea of duende –  …  “a force not a labor, a struggle not a thought”… – and with the thought of exploring the power of the unexpressed emotion such as Camilo José Cela dramatizes it in his classic The Family of Pascual Duarte, Gueule du Loup began with the question, mind-thought, “How do you express the great feeling inside you when there are no words for it”? or “How can the ‘poor in spirit’ make themselves exist?”

As Gueule du Loup responds to these questions, Bastin says, its movement, its body-thought, corresponds to “transmission to amateurs”. “The piece is simple and complex at the same time,” she explains, “But, especially, it is spiritual. To do the piece, you need technical ability, yes, but also, you need to find yourself as a dancer”.

In fact, Bastin’s involvement with Fabrique de la Danse began when Orianne Vilmer’s amateur dance performance troupe, Danse en Seine, contacted the choreographer about putting on Gueule du Loup.

Promoting and supporting dance performance has played a prominent part of Bastin’s career. She has developed and led dance promotion and sensitization programs the length and breadth of France, in the Paris suburbs and in its regions, as well as in Africa and Eastern Europe. “Dance connects us,” Bastin explains, giving me the example of an improvisational dance exercise: “Nobody has the steps or the music, but everybody has the appetite and the curiosity. Pressed by the appetite and the curiosity, the connection [that takes shape as dance] falls into place.”

______

I first met Christine Bastin at the Pavillon Carré Baudoin, once a country pleasure palace and, now beautifully restored, sitting on the very-urbanized lip of the rue des Pyrénées where it meets rue de Menilmontant. Bastin was watching her students and colleagues go through the public performance for the Fabrique de la Danse’s end-of-year 2022-2023 celebration. We met again to talk about “What is dance for”? in October 2023.

Some of Bastin’s more notable creations include:

La Folia (1986), Bless (1989), Abel Abeth (1990), Grâce (1991), Gueule de loup (1992), Affame (1993), Siloé (1994), La Polka du roi (1996), La Fugue (1996), Première neige (1997), Le p’tit Bal (1996), Noce (1998), L’eau vive (1998), Be(1999), Pigeon vole (2000), Un ange à la mer (2001), Pietà (2001), Elle & Lui (2003), De la lune et de l’eau (2003), Les mots blancs (2005), Florentina (2005), Même pas seul (2006), Celui qui danse (2006), Mariam (2007), J’m’attache à toi(2008), L’Entrouvert (2008), L’eau de personne (2010), Soir d’avril (2011), Fruition (2013), Cette parcelle de trésor(2013), Danse avec mon père (2014) and Noce l’invisible (2022).

John Ashbery's Multiple Choice Questions

From John Ashbery's "One Hundred Multiple-Choice Questions":

1. Thinking can help to solve problems because
2. a) problems exist only in the mind
3. b) problems must be taken seriously
4. c) mind triumphs over matter
5. d) not to think would be to avoid the problem
6. e) no problem can be completely solved anyway
7. f) it is our duty to think our way out of problems

Can't argue with that. Or this:

6. Religious freedom means
7. a) that God does not exist
8. b) that God is dead
9. c) that the individual is free to worship God as he chooses
10. d) that we need attend church only on Sundays
11. e) that we can do as we please
12. f) that there is no life after death

Finally,

68. "E=mc squared" alludes to
69. a) the personality quotient
70. b) the battle between the sexes
71. c) the generation gap
72. d) Heidi
73. f) The Little Foxes
74. g) all of the preceding

Give up? The correct answers are below.

-- DL

Correct answers: 1) g, 6) simon says, 68) A mazurka is a Polish dance.

Happy Birthday, Wystan

 

If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

-- from The More Loving One
by W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

 

 

Find more posts about W. H. Auden here.

-- sdh

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: February 21, 2024

In January, Knopf published Gregory Pardlo’s Spectral Evidence. “Spectral evidence” is an actual legal term referring to “witness testimony that the accused person's spirit or spectral shape appeared to him/her in a dream at the time the accused person's physical body was at another location.” Huh? Yes, I am serious. And so is Pardlo. This kind of evidence was accepted during the Salem Witch Trials. Pardlo’s poems brilliantly explore this notion as he brings forward the fear of “the other” not only in terms of gender but also of race—America’s continual projection and demonization. Pardlo’s poems takes us through history, the big injustices alongside the microaggressions of today. Here is his wonderful poem “Theater Selfie.”

https://yalereview.org/article/gregory-pardlo-theater-selfie

Congratulations, Gregory!

Emerson of the week: Why travel?

<<
Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.
>>>
Emerson, "Self Reliance"

Frank Sinatra sings "Stardust" on the Lucky Strike radio show (1942)

 

Garret Keizer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________

The Neighbors

 

When a man and woman built their house

on the hill behind mine, thus ruining

forever the satisfaction I took

in seeing no house but mine

in any direction,

I felt cheated and bitter.

I live at the foot of the hill,

I thought, and any time they wish,

they can peer into my yard.

 

But they were peerless people,

most times quiet as the trees

they had not cut, their voices murmurs

in the wind, their jackets flashing

colored wings among the branches.

The woman gave birth to a son,

who calls my name cycling down the road

as though I were his long-lost friend.

 

So I live at the foot of the hill,

and any bitter man who would climb it,

meaning my neighbors harm,

must first get past me.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Garret Keizer is the author of The World Pushes Back (Texas Review Press), winner of the 2018 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and of eight prose books including Getting Schooled, Privacy, and The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want. His poems have appeared in Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, Raritan, and The New Yorker. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Doris Day & Gordon MacRae sing the great WWI morale-booster

 

"If You Were The Only Girl In The World" from By The Light Of The Silvery Moon (1953)

To My Friends [by Joseph Harrison, 1957-2024]

To My Friends

My good friends, when you’re under the illusion

That the common end of things has ended me,

Whether that end was sudden or wretchedly slow,

Peaceful or violent, untimely or, finally, wished for,

Don’t spend too much time grieving, as if I were gone

To some murky underground region of swampy water

And cavernous absence, metallic and silent and cold,

Or some plush resort in the stratosphere of our dreams

Pillowed with cumuli, graced by ethereal muzak,

Or some massive confusing impersonal processing center

With lines and obscure snafus and numbers not names,

Away from the sun and the sound of the wind in the trees,

But after a short ceremony, public or private,

Listen for the wings of the birds, and ask where we’re going,

Alabama or Delaware, Canada, Yucatan,

And wish me luck in the next life, who now have wings.

from Joseph Harrison, Identity Theft, Waywiser Press, 2008.

That Old Black Magic (music Harold Arlen, words Johnny Mercer)