The Best American Poetry

Sonnet LYII [by Mitch Sisskind]

Sonnet LYII

Man, you're being way too hard on yourself;
Don't bang a hammer on your own head.
If you want to make a good statue of an elf,
Use a big piece of wood or a rock instead;
People's weak spots are always easy to find,
Especially your own, which is why they're weak;
So find something else to occupy your mind
Like how an eagle only carries food in its beak;
Like how if we compare a bald eagle to an elf,
How the bald eagle flies like a silver streak,
While meanwhile the elf is too hard on itself
And at best is considered something of a freak
   Luckily I came along to point this out
   As when rain falls after a long drought.

Love Comics [by Nin Andrews]

The other day I was talking to a friend about literary influences when I confessed one of my dark secrets: love comics were a major influence on my early poetry. Yep. Love comics. My friend looked at me blankly. "What the hell are love comics?"  I tried to describe them, but I didn't know where to begin. So I began asking other friends if they knew what love comics are. Turned out no one did. How could anyone not know what a love comic is? Did they ever wonder what Lichtenstein's paintings Drowning Girl, Hopeless, and Oh, Jeff . . . I Love You, Too . . . But were based on? 

I grew up pedaling my fat-tired bike on summer days to a corner service station in Maine where I could buy penny candy and old second-hand love comics for a nickel each. On rainy days, my sisters and I read stacks of love comics, giggling over the best ones. Our mother was appalled. "What a dreadful waste of time!" she would say. Here's a quote from one called Swamp Flame:

What was the mystery of Mara King's strange life? Why had her father buried her alive in the depths of the Cypress Swamps, forbidding her even a glimpse of the world beyond the curtain of Spanish Moss? Mara never knew . . . until the day the rich and handsome Bob Westly wandered into the lost bayou and found her! Then, for the first time, she tasted the forbidden wine of Life and Love!!

Seriously! How could you resist?

 

 

Hey-ho Billy Pilgrim! 2024 is 1979 and getting worse [By Tracy Danison]

”Forteresses” by Gurshad Shaheman. Photo © Jérémy Meysen

Remember the scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five when, from behind his bandages, Billy Pilgrim whispers “I was there” to fellow patient Eliot Rosewater? There meant at the firebombing of Dresden during the Second World War.

Billy’s “I was there” is the debut of a short career explaining that Time is of a piece, a Truth he learned when kidnapped and living among the ETs of the planet Tralfamadore.

I fell into Billy Pilgrim consciousness during a performance of Gurshad Shaheman’s Les Forteresses, a sit-down theatrical narrative around the experiences of the playwright’s mother and two of his aunts before during and after the 1979 revolution in Iran.

Though Shaheman’s play notes emphasize the immigrant family experience –  if I had only notes and pictures and hadn’t seen the actual play, I would have thought it was about Shaheman himself –  his mother and aunts do all the talking. They talk about themselves and the mechanics of their lives right up to now, when they’ve become pretty much somebody’s unremarkable mom or granma or neighbor with a foreign accent. They are women of my own age, of my companion Karine’s age, of the age of most folks I know.

The mechanics of Shaheman’s mother’s and aunts’ lives come down to trying to deal with disabilities imposed on being a woman. Indeed, each woman’s story boils down to an unassuming tale of institutional, economic and sentimental dependence.

Shaheman’s mother is utterly dependent on an abusive husband and also has children to protect. One aunt has her aspirations systematically blown off by new woman-hating legislation which comes along to back up failing custom, the third is thwarted by sentimental entanglement with a blameless man.

I expect that Shaheman meant the title Les Forteresses – “Fortresses” – to allude to the rock-solid “strength” and “resiliency” of the women in the face of personal hardship and exile.

But what Billy Pilgrim heard was the women’s painful chorus of “What The Fuck?”

Because, frankly, why should one expect to be blocked and punished at every turn for what one is?

Condign punishment for existing was just not the expectation in the post-war world of 1979. Not in Iran and not in the USA. Not anywhere.

I was among the last of the John Gardner-Robert Creeley literati cohort at State University at Buffalo, which was, in 1979, already then, as today, a global engineering-education hub. Many of Shaheman’s mother and aunts’ national and spiritual brothers (and just a few sisters!) were there with me, aspiring to a modern education for a modern life.

Forteresses made me understand that “I was there”, an actor in the play, when Shaheman’s mother and aunts were coming of age. I believed then, as they believed, that women’s equality, like racial equality, like human equality, was a given of modernity.

”Forteresses” by Gurshad Shaheman. Photo © Agnès Mellon

All of us were carried along by the warm wind of revolution and naïve positivism.

Virtually no Iranian could imagine then that the lightning flashes of woman-hating were not just throwbacks to an atavistic “medieval Islam”, soon to dissipate in the sunshine of modernity. In the USA, I was not alone to think that egregious fanatic Phyllis Schlafly was a throwback, the fears of unisex toilets and the failure of the ERA, a joke, all a tribute to a sad, but dying, Christian atavism.

I explained away the Iran regime's obvious woman-hating then as “decolonization”, “national-religious” assimilation of the “fact of modernity”.

I was as wrong and as naïve about Schlafly and her Eagle Forum movement as Shaheman’s female relatives and those mostly young men chattering to beat the band in our student union were about the revolution that Khomeini’s Islamists seized.

In the USA and in Iran, the year 1979 marked the end of passive and customary resistance to women’s equality and a turn toward the active woman hating promoted across the world today. As much as Khomeini’s revolution, the success of Schlafly’s Eagle Forum gave the impetus for active opposition to women’s equality – i.e. woman hating – as a sine qua non of  “the fact of modernity”.

So, when I actually watch the action and listen to the stories, Forteresses is about how explicitly woman hating ideology has organized and strengthened to block and turn back women’s rights since 1979.

Ruhollah Khomeini’s ideological legacy is no medieval throwback, unless, of course, I suppose  that the regime’s nuclear, ballistic and cyber weapons capabilities, without speaking of its logistics and command and control capabilities, have been plucked out of a miraculous cave just outside Qom.

Iran’s government today is ready to club and poison every woman in the country to preserve itself – it should come as no surprise that de facto allies Russia (whose imperial venture in Ukraine is blessed by the Patriarch of Moscow) and Hamas unapologetically use rape as a weapon of war.

And what is Schlafly descendant  Tucker Carlson’s flushed-face “Christian national values” if not “the fact of modernity” without woman’s equality? In 21 states of the USA a woman may not freely dispose of her body; there is still no ERA...  

In 2024, woman hating is the name of their game wherever we live. No mistake.

___

The performers Shady Nafar, Guilda Chaverdi, Mina Kavani interpreted, accompanied and gave voice to Gurshad Shaheman’s mother and aunts at the 6 February 2024 performance of Shaheman’s Forteresses at Théâtre de la Bastille. Theirs was a profoundly Tralfamadorian performance. Nafar, Chaverdi and Kavani manage to crystallize, universalize and make timeless the vulnerability, discrimination and personal stagnation inflicted by inequality based on gender. A special shout out to Shady Nafar, whose empathic interpretation and rhetorical skill moved me especially deeply.

Joseph Harrison, 1957-2024 [by Mary Jo Salter]

On Tuesday, February 13, 2024, the poet Joseph Harrison died at home in Baltimore, not quite five months after a diagnosis of brain cancer.  He was 66 years old. Just days before the end, he had received an advance copy of his Collected Poems from Waywiser Press, and although he could no longer read, he was delighted to hold it in his hands.

He was a dear friend of mine, and in January I posted five of his poems and my short commentaries on them on the Best American Poetry blog .  You can see them at the links below, or here:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/01/liberties-of-the-imagination-5-poems-by-joseph-harrison-with-commentary-by-mary-jo-salter.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/01/libnerties-of-the-imagination-poems-by-joseph-harrison-commentary-by-mary-jo-salter-part-2-of-5.html

Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, grew up in Virginia and Alabama, and earned his B.A. in English at Yale—studying with Harold Bloom, who became one of the major admirers of his poetry.  Joe became a Baltimorean when he went to Johns Hopkins for graduate work in English. He was the Senior American Editor of Waywiser Press and had directed its annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, ongoing since 2006.  He published four volumes of poetry: Someone Else’s Name (2003), Identity Theft (2008), Shakespeare’s Horse (2015) and Sometimes I Dream that I Am Not Walt Whitman (2020).

Joe was the oldest of five children: all of his devoted siblings were with him at the end. He was a famous raconteur.  He loved to tell long, elaborate stories, and often found the turns in his own plots so funny that he was incapacitated by laughter, and would have to start over. He was a statistics-equipped expert not only in literature but in baseball, football, film, and American politics.  He was a marvelous, multitasking host, and grilled some of the best steaks I’ve ever eaten.  That mid-twentieth-century taste in food extended, unapologetically, to his writing style. He wrote in rhyme, mostly, and meter, always, and when he was told his work had elements in common with Anthony Hecht or Richard Wilbur (true), he was delighted. That said, he loved helping to discover and nurture younger poets who wrote nothing like him.  Joe had a nearly photographic memory and an awe-inspiring aural memory: he could quote passages at will by all of his favorite poets, who ranged from Horace to Shakespeare to Dickinson.  When he gave his own poetry readings, he barely glanced at the page: he declaimed his lines by heart in a unique Southern accent—an amalgam of Virginia, Alabama, and I don’t know where else—while training his eyes directly on his audience.

When he received his shocking prognosis—twelve to eighteen months, which turned out to be far too optimistic—he made a point of telling people what he loved and admired about them.  And he wanted, too, to spare us too much grief.  Around the time he turned fifty, probably thinking he had three or even four more decades ahead, he wrote the following poem, “To My Friends.” I want to pass it on now, not only to memorialize Joe but to offer comfort to you, reader, the next time you experience a major loss.   

                 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.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: February 14, 2024

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!  Sharing my favorite love poem.

TO X

Somewhere in history

Somewhere in untold ages

Somewhere in the sands of time

Somewhere in the vast seas of eternity

There is one person

Only one

Who could understand me and love me

And you're it

So get with it.

 

Bill Knott (1940-2014)

 

Emerson: "Are they my poor?"

<<<
I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
>>>

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Nine): Eugene Richie [by Angela Ball]

Early New York Evening

After Jane Freilicher
Chelsea Piers, August 15

Sometimes the very sight of you,
of your beautiful face and bare shoulders,
makes me feel faint.
In view of the Statue of Liberty,
you are ever present to me,
as when your naked arm
stretches above you in bed
or falls on my shoulders,
like a protecting aura.
The little waves on the surface
of the summery Hudson River
are like feelings coursing through me,
as I think of you,
or of that sudden blush of red
that rises to my forehead
and descends like the apron of a wave
over my bare shoulders
into the curly black and gray hair
on my chest. I see nothing
in this riverbank landscape before me
that suggests anything other than
the inimitable moments
life with you continually gives me
in the ways your beauty
shows me every day.
                                  -Eugene Richie       from Only Here, Between

 

Eugene Richie is the author of four collections of poems, most recently Only Here, Between (Gnosis Press 2023), with cover art by Win Knowlton, and two collaborations with the poet Rosanne Wasserman. He is the Director of Creative Writing in the English Department at Pace University in New York City.

Photo by Star Black

 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Nine): Eugene Richie

The day before Valentine’s seems the perfect one for Eugene Richie’s glorious love poem, “Early New York Evening,” after Jane Freilicher’s wondrous painting: https://www.kasmingallery.com/usr/library/documents/main/artists/18/jf_press-kit.pdf 

In a superb coincidence, Jane’s birthday is the same (in different years) as that of the poem’s subject, Ritchie’s spouse, Rosanne Wasserman. Jane Freilicher was one of John Ashbery’s first and most important friends in New York City, and Eugene Richie and Rosanne Wasserman were great friends and collaborators with John in Hudson, NY, in the latter part of his life. In these connections, limned so quickly here, live immensities of love.

Richie’s “Early New York Evening” is multiply ekphrastic: there’s the painting, and the subject’s and speaker’s bodies, but also a third entity: the body of their love.

The poem begins with its dominant sensory mode, vision:

Sometimes the very sight of you,

of your beautiful face and bare shoulders,

makes me feel faint.

But already, “faint” introduces a more visceral sense, that of equilibrium.

Then, in a wonderful surprise, their love’s body is conflated with the famous stature (accompanied by its own poem), The Stature of Liberty. The melding happens in form, gesture, and spirit:

     In view of the Statue of Liberty,

     you are ever present to me,

     as when your naked arm

     stretches above you in bed

     or falls on my shoulders,

     like a protecting aura.

It is worth noting that Freilicher’s painting is statuesque, connecting—with loving irony—the verticals of smokestacks with those of tender irises.

The word “naked” startles, shines out to remind us that love is physical as well as spiritual, as John Donne says at the end of his great “The Ecstacy”:

     And if some lover, such as we,
         Have heard this dialogue of one,
     Let him still mark us, he shall see
         Small change when we're to bodies gone.

Along with “Early New York Evening,” the poem’s ekphrastic body of love encompasses the immediate view from the couple’s bedroom, a “riverbank landscape” including not just the famous statue, but New York’s most famous river, as well:

     The little waves on the surface

     of the summery Hudson River

     are like feelings coursing through me,

     as I think of you,

     or of that sudden blush of red

     that rises to my forehead

     and descends like the apron of a wave

     over my bare shoulders

     into the curly black and gray hair

     on my chest.

What a perfect descriptor, that “summery.” Love, I think, is prone to confuse inner and outer landscapes—as it certainly does here, in the intricacies of these lines, where “waves” become “feelings,” and a “sudden blush of red” . . . descends like the apron of a wave.” How fabulous, how exact, the word “apron.” As above, the female body shelters the masculine—with the descending blush she incites, riverine, over the shoulders that mirror her own; and “into” the very masculine “curly black and gray hair.”

Then there is the wonderful red-herring line break at “nothing,” the playful fake-out continuing through the next two lines before we are overwhelmed with reward in the last four:

     the inimitable moments

     life with you continually gives me

     in the ways your beauty

     shows me every day.

How moving, the ending of this splendid love poem, where a spouse’s beauty becomes both teacher and endless quotidian work of art.

Eugene Richie’s “Early New York Evening” combines body and spirit, art and ekphrasis, representation and interplay. How imagine a valentine more permanent, more true. -- Angela Ball

Maureen Thorson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________

Typecast

 

I used to know the god Apollo.

He taught me acting. I was terrible,

but those old Greeks delight in transformations.

His eyes glittered, sea-like, under Renaissance curls

as he lifted a cigarette to his lips, told me:

All actors should smoke; it’s the only way

to do nothing and be completely fascinating.

I hadn’t even gotten the hang of beer yet, but I was game.

He liked to have me yell my monologues,

would yell himself, egg me on:

Louder, more, remember how pissed you are!

When I let loose at an imagined jerk of a lover,

Apollo smiled, his teeth little matched pearls

between wine-stained lips. Really, I was a virgin

at everything, from kissing to cards,

but when Apollo is your teacher, you learn some things.

I learned to stand in my tight-fitting, miserable human skin,

and cast it off like a sales-rack coat,

revealing glad rags beneath. And if they were a sham, so what?

I had learned that everything is changeable,

my looks and my loves and my squeamish heart.

That’s when Apollo knocked my helmet off.

Careful, he murmured, breath smoky against my ear,

a cook can become a countess, but she’ll never burn a cake.

Nothing changes completely. That’s where he left me,

with my familiar doubt and newfound sneer,

with the dwindling orange eye

of the cigarette he’d hurled to the stage floor like a dart.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Maureen Thorson is the author of three books of poetry: Share the Wealth (Veliz Books 2022), My Resignation (Shearsman 2014), and Applies to Oranges (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011). Her book of lyric essays, On Dreams, was published with Bloof Books in 2023. Individual poems have appeared in Ploughshares, 32 Poems, and Calyx.     [“Typecast,” from Share the Wealth (Veliz Books 2022), first appeared in Cherry Tree (# 5, 2019).]

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                         

Charles Meynier (1768-1832), Apollo, God of Light, Eloquence, Poetry and the Fine Arts with Urania, Muse of Astronomy, 1798, oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art.

"Three Martinis" [by Boris Dralyuk]

 Three Martinis

            for J.L.

Dry

Life is served up with trace amounts of youth —
the ratio of vodka to vermouth.

Dirty

You asked for it. Again. An old mistake.
Dirt never settles or grows less opaque.

Perfect

Bitter and sweet may seal their win-win deal
but the wee hours ready its repeal.
 

from The Cortland Review

Silvia Gribaudi: Jump bigly! Monstrous revenge and the mystifications of age [By Tracy Danison]

“R.OSA” with Claudia Marsicano, by Silvia Gribaudi. Photo © Laila Pozzo

Ideas will get into the air. No sooner do I start thinking about criticism and difference (Festival Every Body 2024: Performing with difference), then all sorts of complexities wink on in the gloom: era, psychic construction, typology… you name it.

For instance, when I was a kid, there was still a Fat Lady at the local fair, a friendly monster… (Who, by the way, didn’t seem so very fat to me, just poor, while the uber-bellied Muscle Man surely was fat. His strength was all in the hollow barbells). Also, I realize that I seem to have been seeing my aging pretty much as deliquescence: I’m a wrinkling Captain Willard, waning with each vital breath as, all around, the jungle waxes hungry.

What’s the mission? What’s the mission?

Under cover of Christophe Martin’s Faits d’Hiver 2024 program, with performances of Grand Jeté, a new piece, and R.OSA, a classic, creator Silvia Gribaudi made a planned release of thornier perspectives for both age and body at Théâtre des Abbesses.

Gribaudi’s R.OSA twists the scrawny neck of my remembered Fat Lady friendly monster narrative. She doesn’t sweep her away as incorrect or supply me an updated version. She fixes her permanently in the corner of my eye, as a pense-bête.

Performer Claudia Marsicano, body mass deformed by obesity, balances delicately on tiny feet, gestures with tiny hands. The adipose swell of her thighs presents a baby-smooth bulging sex to me. Marsicano, between a gorgeous warble and well-meaning, no doubt healthy, weight-reducing, series of shared exercises, creates a sort of revenge porn that flays off the moral high ground and stuff a body can intellectually snatch at as she neutrally self-affirms: I am not just more out of control and weaker and stiffer than this fatso Claudia Marsicano, my thinking is cloudy, too.

R.OSA ends with a rendition of Brittney Spears’ Toxic – eminently danceable for Marsicano. But not for me. Marsicano also manages to capture the inscrutable doubleness of the song’s video. Abbesses was not full – it seemed to me younger people were more absent. Like me, they were afraid, I guess, either of dealing with the Fat Lady monster issue or with having to submit to a possible failure in a satire of it.

Age! Niagara Falls! Slowly I write, and step by step, inch by inch, I get up to … Gribaudi’s Grand Jeté. Jeté is ballet jargon for “jump”. Grand is “big”. Tone is important. Grand Jeté is vaudeville not comedy, parody, not farce.

The parody features the MM Contemporary Dance Company, a company so good and so full of zest and energy that it put me in mind of the wonderful gusto of Hofesh Schechter. But without the gangland-murder-on-the-Basel-zubringer affect.

“Le Grand Jeté” by Silvia Gribaudi. Photo © Andrea Macchia

With preternatural teamwork, MM Company do everything from classical hip hop to girly ballet-school twirls to buck and shake a joyful Gribaudi choreography that boils down to a variety show with singalong and acts explained (why?) in embarrassed euro English interspersed with pidgin French and a little muttered Italian.

Silvia Gribaudi, not MM Dance, however, dressed for middle-aged dumpy, makes the show, highlights the company’s excellence, makes the audience laugh. She’s the disabused host of Yugoslav state television’s Saturday Singalong (you can see her trying to gauge how she can get by on inertia and expectations; there’s a lot of confused applause and participative false starts). Part of it is just the charming lost-ness of a good clown assuming the well-worn embarrassment trope. The Old Girl is tiredly game for it: she struggles to twist, bend and crimp up with the company’ lithe young assassins. Gribaudi (pretends to tire?) tires quickly, lets go, her expressions (are meant to?) comment her fatigue, the strain of entertaining.

At a certain moment everyone takes off their top. All fold an arm over their breasts; Gribaudi, though, has very big breasts. Not so easy to hold. And, quite suddenly, I realize that – even if I could see that she has been hamming it up, there’s no way a dance performer of Gribaudi’s experience would be such a dead mackerel – every bit of her out-of-place-ness is because of what she is: gotten older but not because she’s old. And it’s not so much that she’s out of place but that there isn’t a place for old, just for the play acting of age and its problems. At least, there isn’t if all you mean to do is Jump Bigly! …

In Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, the first victim of Alex and his droogs is an old drunk. The drunk is a sort of Don Juan figure: he not only survives (a fierce kicking), his song becomes motif: “It’s a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old, like you done. Oh, it's no world for an old man any longer…”

So, what are we all doing here? Out of place? Or playing at it? What’s the mission? Is it funny?

"Next Line, Please" (Throwback Thursday: Valentine's Day 2017)

<<<   This week everyone was encouraged to visit an art museum—or, if that proved difficult, to go to the website of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery, the Barnes Foundation, or some other great institution—and write a sonnet about the painting you name in your title.

The wonderful works that came in re-confirmed my belief that what we are doing is not a weekly competition but a weekly challenge—and that we are all what Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront wanted desperately to be: contenders. We are also, it turns out, what Marianne Moore in a celebrated poem calls “critics and connoisseurs.” The exchanges and comments made each week are a model of civil discourse at a time when that is rare. No anger, no snark, just insight and enthusiasm—a collective commitment to an esthetic ideal and to the joy that comes with the territory.

The gold medal goes to the unrhymed but tight sonnet Cheryl Whitehead wrote after she “went to the Met Breuer website and studied the Kerry James Marshall exhibit.”

Silence is Golden
(after Kerry James Marshall)

Silence is golden. You hear? Might keep you alive
or maybe you die. Black on black background, gleam
of white teeth & whites of black eyes. Shh! Black fingers
censor black words. Each raucous-thought black man
might tighten your throat with rope. The night. The howl.
The owl, the torch. The char of the forest floor.
The fire of white headlights winding through the dark
in Birmingham or elsewhere a tired black man
walks home where his wife & two small children wait.
The stroke of dusk of brush a black man paints
himself. A door into the night of his own
interior volition. Smoke shimmers in star-light.
Yes, he’s a riot of teeth & contrite eyes.
Black man, what fires do you suppose might loose you?

Powerful stuff. Ricky Ray, our unofficial critic of the week, observes that the image of the door in the night of volition “puts just enough musk into the abstraction to taste it.” I wonder whether the poet means “lose” or “loosen” with the last verb in the poem.

Second-place honors go to Courtney Thrash, whose rhymed sonnet was inspired by a Maxfield Parrish from 1908 on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas:

The Lantern Bearers

“Who are you?” said I. “Sorcerers? Sideshow?
Are you all one or all six that I see?
And how your orbs glow! What do they carry?
Galaxies? Goddesses? Surely they don’t!
Listen to me talking as though you won’t
remain silent, just oil on canvas, the
stairs made of strokes and reflected wavelengths.
Oh, jesters! Pray tell, how do your orbs glow?”

“Tis true,” said they, “that we are what you say:
magical, hanging whole worlds on a bough;
we are what you see, one and twice three; though
you ask for the end, we show you the way.
Please do not worry your head about how.
We bring light, and that is all you need to know.”

I admire the staggered rhymes— not until line eight do we confront the rhyme for line one, and then it returns victoriously at poem’s end. If it is objected that the poem is artificial in diction, I would concede the point but plead that it is too splendid an example to dismiss. Perhaps because I have Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” on the mind (“So twice five miles of fertile ground”) I was charmed by “we are what you see, one and twice three.” I have taken the liberty of adding the infinitive (“to know”) to the last phrase to make more apparent the allusion to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian urn.” Ricky Ray praises the “double-rhyming in bough / though and how / know.”

Impossible to overlook Angela Ball’s lovely appreciation of a painting by Pierre Bonnard at the Tate Gallery in London:

Incunabula of Marthe Bonnard in the Bath

We know she is reticent, thirty years keeps secret
her true name and age. The pair’s domesticity inviolate,
Bonnard stands painting her in a bath so constant it seems
one, interrupted by a joint of ham, some cheese and vin
rouge, after which Marthe returns to its relief, its expanse
the blue-green-yellow of striated sky, of amplitude and seclusion,
of a body featureless but for divergent nipples, navel,
and labia’s unwavering statement. In time,
the bath bathes Marthe’s ancestors: scullery maids
naked to save fabric; beggars who wore fake
eye patches and corpse-robbed uniforms; artist’s models more regal
than any royal. The bath swells beyond its station, bathing even its own
          paint—
but at the crucial moment it stops, baffled
by Marthe’s persistence, her lunar, impassible face.

Ricky Ray’s take: “The sky line had me view the tub as a stretch of sky under an open window, the ancestral bathing suddenly brought Eliot into the experience, and the bath bathing its own paint sent me down a delicious, in-turning spiral simultaneously inhabiting and shedding forms.”

Nor can I leave unacknowledged Berwin Moore’s superb ode to color in general and blue in particular:

Picasso’s “Woman with a Crow”

Not cobalt, azure, or lapis –
there is no word for blue like this,
binding woman and bird in a rigid
embrace. Maybe the cold blue of heaven
shrouds them, the woman’s face the color
of a corpse – but there is no death here.
Her fingers, like talons, stretch across
the bird’s dense black; its head, turned
like hers, bows into itself, wings in mute
submission. All that separates them is color:
the cold blue moan, the hushed black caw,
the pale skin veil. It must be their kiss
that transforms me. They are not woman
and bird. They are not two – but one crow.

Like Ricky Ray, I warmed to “that lovely triad of triple stresses: ‘cold blue moan / hushed black caw / pale skin veil.’”

Honorable mention: Paul Michelsen twice over, for “The Persistence of memory” (Salvador Dali) and for the charming Frank O’Hara-ish “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware’ and Then Reading ‘On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware’ by Frank O’Hara,” the title of which is itself a poem. Both are keepers.

Michael C. Rush’s “Wanderer in the Storm, 1835,” after a painting of that name by Julius Von Leypold, ends brilliantly with this “melancholy fit” (Keats): “the day is spent / in discontent / with the wind / around this pond / until the storm /I wait for comes. Again I’m with Ricky Ray: “I swear I’ve taken that walk.”

Finally, Millicent Caliban shines new light on that dark favorite, Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” imagining that the couple at the counter saves their quarreling for when they are home and wondering about the fellow, “not quite depressed,” who “drinks all that coffee and cannot rest.”

As next Tuesday is Valentine’s Day, how about a poem in the spirit of the Rodgers and Hart song “My Funny Valentine”? If you don’t know it, listen to Sinatra’s version, or Chet Baker’s, or Ella’s. or Miles Davis’s, or all of these and more. Or just let the title take you where it will.
>>>

For the comments generated by this post, click here for the piece as posted by The American Scholar, February 7, 2017.

“to paint like picasso before 1904” by Grace Yee [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Congratulations to Grace Yee who last week won Australia’s richest literary prize, the Victorian Prize for Literature, for her debut collection Chinese Fish (Giramondo, 2023). The collection traces the story of an immigrant family from Hong Kong living in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. The judges comments noted that Chinese Fish “focuses on women’s experience; particularly, how migration tests the relationship between a mother and her daughter. (Yee) tells this story with sparkling humour, wit, and stylistic verve, while paying sustained attention to historical circumstance – particularly everyday racism and the discriminatory government policies which affected Chinese migrants.”

 

In “to paint like picasso before 1904”, first published in Overland in 2019, Yee’s “sparkling humour, wit, and stylistic verve” are on full display, along with a beguiling mix of registers switched so seamlessly and effectively, it is near impossible to get one's bearings within the poem. In "to paint like picasso before 1904", Yee takes from us our sealegs so she can more easily steer us through the urgent and the absurd until we arrive, implausibly, at the poem's title.

 

 

to paint like picasso before 1904

 

        there is a species of tavern where drinkers make disparaging remarks about chinese

immigrants. it is patronised by a squadron of pirates of otherwise sweet temperament, who

truck their goods with whomever they please.

        baring dog-yellow teeth, they sit in plastic fold-up chairs in cheap t-shirts designed

by europeans unmolested in canton.

        each ship at the bar plays furiously, leaving a trail of wild colonial girls cruelly

strangled after the first wash.

        in the wake of their missionary grandmothers, the risk these women take is

calculated on trigonometrical principles. female players have the option of wearing cones so

they don’t get kissed for no reason.

        everyone looks for their partners online these days, including an entire class of

whining feminists for whom postpartum incontinence has never been a problem, but who

nonetheless kegel jade eggs at every opportunity.

    it’s hard for these women not to feel violated by the knowledge that their dna is

half-man, but the smarter chicks check their purses of emotional labour in (the taverns’) tiny

grimy bathrooms and suspend intercourse by returning to campus via the victorian roads.

        in high pollen weather, with abscesses fit to burst, they heroically collaborate in their

efforts to arrest the flames.

        after years of feckless liaisons, some of these women set sail for the orient. landing

in the earl’s court, they feel secure in their portion of comparatively uncontaminated

empire.

        with contempt in equal parts for men and aliens silently stoning their gallbladders,

they manage to live peacefully, albeit corpulently, by a calendar of saints for years under a

special licence to paint like picasso before 1904.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: February 7, 2024

Just when you think Dorianne Laux’s poems could not get any better—more beautifully sonic, more profound, more YES!—she gives us Life on Earth. The title poem begins: The odds are we never should have been born./Not one of us. Not one in 400 trillion to be/exact…

From there, Dorianne praises the miraculousness of what comes next for each of us, including our pain. Published by Norton last month, the poems in Life on Earth give a domestic nod to “Bisquick” and “Singer” (the sewing machine), elevating and complicating the life of women and mothers. You can get a sneak peek of just how connected she is (to life, to poetry, to the past) in her poem “Spirit Level”:

https://aprweb.org/poems/spirit-level

Congratulations, Dorianne!

Save the Date: A Poetry Reading in Response to Antisemitism [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Sunday, February 18, 2024, 2:30 PM

In Person at the Museum of Jewish Heritage
Edmond J. Safra Plaza
36 Battery Place
New York, NY 10280

Livestream

Cultural critic and keynote speaker Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall, will provide historical context for today’s worldwide uptick in antisemitism, focusing specifically on New York City. Curators Martine Bellen, Ruth Danon, and Andrew Levy have brought together poets Rosebud Ben-Oni, Jordan Davis, Sharon Dolin, Joanna Fuhrman, Nada Gordon, Patricia Spears Jones, Pierre Joris, Adeena Karasick, Vincent Katz, Burt Kimmelman, Basil King, Stephen Massimilla, Sharon Mesmer, Uche Nduka, Mercedes Roffe, Sean Singer, Yerra Sugarman, Anne Tardos, and Edwin Torres to share works, reflecting on this current moment. 

Find more information here.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Eight): Laura Cronk [by Angela Ball]

TO MY TWENTIES

Stop what you’re doing
and come with me. We’ll
walk out into the wild
cold, you in your pink
sequined shell from the
consignment shop –
you can have my coat.
Let’s be out together
in the world, the wind
beating against us, the
sidewalks cracking with
ice. Though you shrink
from the cold, my twenties,
you’re still lustrous, still
throwing off heat. We’ll
walk past the schizophrenic
piano player and the junk
dealer poet, there are bad
boyfriends around every
bend, but we’re together
now and we don’t have
to stop. We’ll go back
to my apartment and
open the door and the
kids’ faces will pop
with happiness. They’ll
run toward us, ram their
heads into our stomachs,
so eager to be held.
It’s not the kind of
greeting you’re used to.
After dinner I’ll get you
a cab, my twenties,
but you’ll take the shape
of a great gray bird
and fly away.

                           -Laura Cronk                  first published in StatoRec  Included in Ghost Hour

Laura Cronk is the author most recently of Ghost Hour from Persea Books. She teaches writing and pedagogy courses at The New School in New York.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Eight): Laura Cronk

Laura Cronk’s sparkling “To My Twenties” takes after a poem of the same name by Kenneth Koch that begins

     How lucky that I ran into you

     When everything was possible

     For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart

     And so happy to see any woman--

     O woman! O my twentieth year!

Though Koch’s poem is more “excitable,” to use Frank O’Hara’s term for Koch himself, it is a poem of retrospect and nostalgia. It ends this way:

     You never, ever, were stingy. What you gave me you gave whole

     But as for telling

     Me how to best use it

     You weren't a genius at that.

     Twenties, my soul

     Is yours for the asking

     You know that, if you ever come back.

In contrast, Cronk’s poem, a direct rendezvous with her twenties, functions as a kind of sequel to Koch’s. Her twenties catch up with her somewhere in the city, and she invites them home—her invitation an arresting demand:

     Stop what you’re doing

     and come with me

What a brilliant way to involve the reader! We are now part of the poem, impersonating we know not what, exactly. Years? A person? A set of attributes?

Cronk’s twenties—and we—come alive in thrift shop threads, “a pink / sequined shell” both vulnerable and outrageous. It is fun to live them again, both as revealed here and through inserting our own experience. Koch talks about what things were like when he was “in” those years; Cronk diegetically reunites with them in reanimated form. At first. By the time the second sentence has arrived, “We’’ll,” we’re in the hypothetical realm of the future—exactly where Koch hopes to meet his twenties. I’ve misread! But, I believe, reading is a process—and misreading can play a productive part.  Cronk’s scenario somehow manages to be both real and projected as the poem details the perils that will greet her and her third, inclement decade—in which inner and outer weather conjoin:

     Let’s be out together

     in the world, the wind

     beating against us, the

     sidewalks cracking with

     ice. Though you shrink

     from the cold, my twenties,

     you’re still lustrous, still

     throwing off heat. We’ll

     walk past the schizophrenic

     piano player and the junk

     dealer poet, there are bad

     boyfriends around every

     bend, but we’re together

     now and we don’t have

     to stop.

What more accurate evocation of a woman in her twenties than “lustrous”? Though the “schizophrenic / piano player” and the “junk / dealer poet” may be gone, bad boyfriends are eternal (a possible book title?). In the present tense inside the future tense, “we’re together”—and “don’t have to stop.”

But we do—it’s late, as Kenneth Koch’s poems often remind us. It’s often late in the New York School. Stars would shine through its big windows were it not for the city’s competing lights. Encountering the speaker’s kids in her apartment seems the beginning of the end. After dinner, a cab needs to be called for the brilliant girl, who--suddenly and scarifyingly--becomes Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”—and the cab goes wanting.

Experiencing Laura Cronk’s comic and poignant “To My Twenties” transports us to a past transfigured by a tangible future. Sadly, we watch the disreputable angel / past self’s flight—hoping, as so many poems hope, that togetherness returns.  -- Angela Ball

A Collage by David Shapiro

David Shapiro contributes this "New Angel on the Internet (Klee)."

"Drink of the Gods" [by David Lehman, 2/4/24]

Drink of the Gods

Good bourbon (Four Roses),
Lemon juice,
One maraschino cherry, smashed
Creme de Cassis (1 teaspoon).

Studied psychology,
Went into marketing,
Then advertising.

That was my life in the novel
I meant to write in the first
full flush of joy
in being a poet, a boy

barely twenty years old,
tall, thin as a man who runs
and never stops, enjoying it, like Sisyphus.

Emanuel Xavier: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

Radiance

for Brian

 

You will take care of me after radiation. I will appear to be

perfectly fine and still make you cackle with my humor and wit.

We will go see a Broadway show the next evening for the

holidays and then we will enjoy a heavy dinner which will make

me wish my appetite had been suppressed. I’ll make catty

comments about the clientele. I will make you forget the

bandages just came off that morning. My new fancy hat will

conceal the wounds. I’ll let you complain about your friends and

browse through Facebook to see who got married and who just

had another baby. And the next day we’ll celebrate

 

Christmas and gift each other with the latest Apple technology.

We’ll go to my mom’s to be with my family before the two-hour

drive to your sister’s in Connecticut. The memories of nails

driven into my skull will dissipate in

 

fear of a deer jumping out at us on the road. Speed limits will

help gauge recovery time. When we arrive, Duke the dog will

substitute for Alexis the cat and the love that healed breakups

and violent attacks and surgery. There will be no time to think

about headaches or nausea or tiredness. In fact, there will be

no symptoms out of the ordinary other than an early

 

night. You will perhaps be more exhausted emotionally than

I am physically. We’ll come back to my apartment in time to put

together a last-minute New Year’s Eve party much like I

had originally hoped to have before the diagnosis. There will

be family and close friends and lots of Fireball shots, of

course. I will laugh at your imitations of the local hipsters and

kiss you when the ball drops in Times Square. By then, my

bruises will look like nothing more than chickenpox. We will

have better sex than most healthy, younger couples.

 

It’ll be like nothing ever happened except for the selfie I took 

while drugged up wearing a metal piece on my head. The

two of us simply happy that we found each other after all these

years.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Emanuel Xavier is the author of several poetry books including Pier Queen, Americano, If Jesus Were Gay, Nefarious, and Radiance. His latest collection is Love(ly) Child (Rebel Satori Press, 2023). He is recipient of a New York City Council Citation Award, an International Latino Book Award, and a Gay City Impact Award. His work has appeared in Poetry, A Gathering of the Tribes, and elsewhere.   [Photo of Emanuel Xavier by Brian Berger, 2023.] 

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                             Bigots are angry because ABC & CNN aired a gay kiss on New Year's Eve

The Purple Plums of Pierre Bonnard

Good enough to eat

at the National Gallery

Here comes GBS

“A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.”

"“Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.”

"If at age 20 you're not a liberal you have no heart. If at age 40 you're not a conservative you don't have a brain."

“The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.”

"“Heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation.”

“Written over the gate here are the words 'Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.' Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.”

"Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."