The Best American Poetry

Happy Birthday, Marilyn

On June the first, birthday of  the first Lady of Gemini

I have to catch my breath running

as a wide receiver catches a football,

shaking off tacklers and heading

for the goal line, progress unimpeded,

or like an angler angling for trout,

turning over phrases languorously

when I feel a tug, catch a bite, that’s

what this jolt of morning joe, like “joltin’

Joe” DiMaggio, has done to me but if

I could calm down long enough to stop

hurrying and concentrate on the lawn

in front of me the wind at my back the laughter

from Alexander Pope’s dagger-like couplets

still echoing from last night’s reading

of The Dunciad – or maybe just to clear

the mind of words, all of them, even

the honeyed sonnets of youth not

lost, just misplaced – if I could look

at the trees darkening as a cloud covers

the sun, look at the grass, the myrtle, the pine

needles and the maple leaves and the one

rhododendron the deer have not devoured,

what then? After ten minutes of bliss,

I shall return to my mind, and she will be singing,

“After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It.”

(June 1, 2013)

"When Love Is Not Love" [by David Lehman and William Wadsworth]

When Love is Not Love

Everything you do, you do in haste,
except when you make love to the one
whose mind, face, and heart at last
made you think twice and drop the phone.

A fool and his money get a slap on the wrist.
If the meaning of Capitalism is gin and vermouth.
the meaning of Bolshevism is vodka and lust.
On a tour of your assets from north to south,

I'd like to say that it starts with your mind,
but in truth the journey starts with your eyes
and their perfect view of the lay of our land.
Your lips come next, and how can I lose?

Easy. You lose what everyone else does.
Love is not love that alteration mends.
Our only future is the only all that is,
Our only hope, the tie that binds

us now. If the meaning of love is to sin
together, the meaning of lust is just a slap
on the butt.  A fool and his honey are soon
departed, and their only future is to sleep

apart, two disembodied voices on a phone.
What did you lose today? Mind, face, money?
The one you love belongs to you, not someone
else, but you better act fast, as gloria mundi

is gone tomorrow, and life makes short work
of love.  The angelic archer may shoot
his arrow, but his aim is just a shot in the dark,
and his target the foolish human, not some heartless bot.

[ipctured above: Bill Wadsworth]

Of Guns and Poetry with Dean Bartoli Smith [by Nin Andrews]

I was trying to write the other day when our gun-loving neighbors who live on a farm across the road began their monthly target practice. Blam-blam-blam. My neighbors aren't hunters, but they maintain that having a gun and knowing how to shoot is a necessary skill.

When I first moved back to a farm in Virginia, I thought about purchasing a gun. I was afraid of the wildlife in a way I had never been, mostly because the animals weren’t afraid of me. Bears toured the outside of our house and pressed their paws against the windows. They played with the lawn furniture, and once, tried to open a door, leaving claw marks in the wood. On autumn evenings they lay back on the hillside above our house, tossing acorns in their mouths like popcorn. Coyotes strolled down our dirt road in the middle of the day and looked at us nonchalantly, as if to ask, “Why are you here?” They kept us up at night with their yip-yip howls. One day, a fox walked so close to me when I was gardening, I was afraid it might have rabies. Another day a skunk ambled up to me and hissed, as if to say, Get out of my way. Needless to say, I did. Then there was the copperhead that nested in my compost. I quickly made another compost heap, only to have it settle there instead.

 

The man who leased our fields said he wasn’t comfortable with me not owning a gun. He came by one day with a carload of what he called “my babies” and proceeded to teach me how to shoot. "Now this one is my pretty girl," he said about one. "And this here is my son."  The lesson didn’t go well. I didn’t know he was handing me a loaded gun. We were lucky no one got killed. Before he left, I told him guns and poets don't mix. I was thinking about local poet, Gregory Orr, who accidentally shot his brother when he was a boy.

Then, a few weeks ago, I picked up the book,  Baltimore Sons, by Dean Bartoli Smith. Based on his Baltimore childhood, Smith’s collection reminded me of the TV series, The Wire. I don’t think I’ve ever read so many gun poems—poems with titles like:  “The Stickup,” “Pistol Range,” “Cap guns,” “Pure Shooter,” “Bullet Fragments,” “.45,” “.375,” “Snipers,” “Shooting Gallery,” “My Father’s Shotgun Sale,” “Shotgun,” “One Blow to the Brain.” Nevertheless, I read the book from cover to cover without pausing—it’s a surprisingly tender read. The poems tell stories of a broken childhood, a broken city, broken American promises and dreams. And the love of guns. 

Cash for Guns, 1975

Sunday mornings, bitter cold—
my father turned in
the Remington 700 deer rifle
he’d won selling spark plugs
in an Esso sales contest.

Before the divorce, I’d sneak
into my parent’s closet, unzip
the rawhide sleeve and lift
the rifle out. Peering
through the scope,

I aimed the heavy gun
at the floor, pulled the trigger.

Dad was behind
on his child support.
He needed fifty bucks
for food. I watched him walk
slowly to the police station,
cradling the rifle like a son.

"In 1976, When She Was Born" [by Molly Arden]

In 1976, When She Was Born

Life was dull in 1976.
Dad had to read "Ivanhoe" and write a report.
Sex was not yet Mom’s favorite sport.
The only rhyme that came to mind was "dicks."

Mom was somewhere north
of the Mass / NH border.
She was just following an order,
not calculating its moral worth.

She was on vacation
feeling unclever
and not happily after ever.

He promised to wait
for her return to the state
of eternal temptation.

-- Molly Arden. Painting by Duncan Hannah ("Honey Trap").  Poem published in Coconut.

Sing, Sing, Sing on Gemini gem Benny Goodman's birthday (May 30, 1909 in Chicago)

"Sing, Sing, Sing"
is the epitome of Big Band swing!

music and lyrics by Louis Prima; drum solo Gene Krupa

From Wikipedia: <<< On July 6, 1937, “Sing, Sing, Sing” was recorded in Hollywood with Benny Goodman on clarinet; Gene Krupa on drums; Harry James, Ziggy Elman, and Chris Griffin on trumpets; Red Ballard and Murray McEachern on trombones; Hymie Schertzer and George Koenig on alto saxophones; Art Rollini and Vido Musso on tenor saxophone; Jess Stacy on piano; Allan Reuss on guitar; and Harry Goodman on bass. The song was arranged by Jimmy Mundy. >>>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2S1I_ien6A

Couplets, Previously Unpublished [from "The Two Davids," Shapiro and Lehman]

In February 2003, David Shapiro and I corresponded by couplets. Here's a sample from our exchanges. - DL

Re: love and the stickerist redesigns his heroes,       
Date:   2/8/2003 7:46:41 PM Eastern Standard Time
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

Lover

He wanted to be one of the many keys she carried.
Her face was a blow which he could never have parried.

He was not even one of the keys she carried.
He wasn't Prince Hamlet. He was already married.

He took out the garbage and let in the laundry.
He sculpted hysterical misery like a foundry.

He put green snakes on Arthur Rimbaud's blue eyes.
He launched Stealth planes out of Baudelaire's thighs.

He burst James Joyce with gifts he could not give.
He surrounded Franz Kafka's with hearts, pigs and jive.

He bit the flowers of Mondrian under quarantine.
And General Buster Keaton resigned from the Green.

His presents floated above the white birch lake.
The silk on Rimbaud's eyes began to shake . >>     DS, 2 / 8 / 03

 

Re: Agamemnon’s concubine after Achilleus left Priam’s tent
From:   DCLEHMAN    
To:       DaJoShap

She wished she could believe what he had said.
She feared the words he didn’t say in bed.

She went to bed with a flower, not with a gun.
She posed for Picasso in the evning, for Matisse in the morning sun.

She played piano.for an audience of one, Ulysses in a beard.
When he was strapped to the mast, this is what he heard.

She sang beyond the sea as the Florida fat man
Transcribed, and shone like the moon on an ash can.

She was willing to accept her role in the play
if he agreed to take her to Denmark and Norway..

She was elected. She was not rejected. She came to the game.
She mastered the rules of the game and redefined fame.

She was asked what her son would get her for Mother's Day.
"A hard time," she said. Flowers surrounded her all day.

– DL, 2 / 9 / 03

 Agamemnon's concubine after Achilleus left Priam's tent   
Date:   2/9/2003 3:11:17 PM Eastern Standard Time
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

Who doesn't sulk in his tent like Mondrian.
When you sulk in Holland, it's spelled Mondriaan.

Who doesn't hope slaves be treated like tripods.
But some of them will be able to remove their kneepads.

I was embarrassed that the President undressed.
But, after all, he was brilliant to have confessed.

Agammenon shook, and all the siftings shook.
Whatever he saw he wanted, as in a book.

The old men wavered behind Helen's hook.
They said, "The war was worth it" and awoke.

Suddenly, in Egypt, Helen felt safer and slicker.
Her smooth “escape” couldn't have been more like a sticker.

The heroes sulked, and all their ankles broke.
Paris caressed the ghostly skin like a crook..   – DS, 2 / 9 / 03

 

Five Games of Blindfold Chess (Rimbaud,Fisher,Cage.Koch,duchamp)          

Date:   2/10/2003 5:52:32 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap
To:       DCLEHMAN

End Game

And someone said, Commuting is the fun part
Like Beckett's impotence, a cry of done art.

And dun art where the brown is excremental.
And I try the heroes' cloaks on‑‑in my tent lull.

The quiet stops. Hamlet walks with Pasternak.
The tiger is sheepish and the goat emits a quack.

Rimbaud and Kenneth Koch play chess at once.
Kenneth is the only one to treat Him like a dunce.

Bobby Fischer kibbitzes, says: Sacrifice queen!
Kenneth: That's near infinitude! What can you mean?!

Then sacrifice your sound, laughs old John Cage.
And Kenneth, more responsive, shouts: Oh, Act your age!

The game divorces all of them from their smirks.
They lost at chess, but we know them for their works.  – DS, 2 / 10 / 03

 

Re: The Hero's Horse and the Tyger, Mate in Three

from DCLEHMAN
to DaJoShap

Mate

What a clever fellow was our Kenny.
So sang the muses for whom he sang for pennies.

When I think of you, David Shapiro, I
Walk with ghosts on Riverside under a melting sky.

The tiger is brilliant and wiser than the didactic horse
Who stares straight ahead and never changes course.

We were wrathful young geniuses on a mission
Which ended as all movies do, with a couple kissing.

Thank you I said to him and he said thank you to me
And then we played more chess and drank more tea.  DL, 2 / 11/ 03

3.3 million People Viewed a Picture of Robert B. Weide and Me in Paris [by Alan Ziegler]

Setting:
Rue de Buci, Paris; May 22, 2024

Characters:
Alan Ziegler, Erin Langston, and surprise guest star Robert Weide (multiple Emmy-winning director of thirty Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes, writer-director of documentaries on Kurt Vonnegut, Woody Allen, and Lenny Bruce (Oscar nominee), and somehow involved in everything that has made you laugh or giggle ever.

The story:
Our last night in Paris. Erin and I perambulate for an hour or so, sidewalk-shopping for our final dinner. Almosts but not-quites. We pass Atlas on Rue de Bac three times (where we first ate 29 years ago). As we're about to sit down at Cafe de Paris, Erin says, “I’m still thinking Atlas," where we were intrigued (and slightly terrified) by the raw bar parked on the sidewalk. 

We order Les Plateaux L'Atlas, and a granfalloon of sea creatures is deposited on our table; they will not be sleeping with the fishes tonight. 

Erin receives shelling and other tips from the server. About these little darling he says, "Just pop them in your mouth. It is OK."

I think of the line in Midnight in Paris "In bed with a bad oyster," and wonder if one of us should abstain, like couples who won't fly on the same plane.  Erin goes to work cracking, and I retreat to Twitter to take my mind off  the carnage. This photo jumps out:

The post is by Robert Weide: "Sitting at an outdoor cafe on the Left Bank. A local just walked by, wearing a Curb Your Enthusiasm T-shirt. I seriously considered going up to him and introducing myself, figuring it would blow his mind. By the time I decided to do it, I’d have had to chase him, so passed...."

Robert Weide has been on my radar for many years—“Curb” of course—but mainly his Vonnegut film. I had studied with Kurt in graduate school and meant to see if Robert might need a teaching anecdote—Kurt rarely taught so there aren’t that many of us (John Irving being one). I never reached out, but started following Robert on Twitter. By the way, “X” looks very much like a study for Vonnegut’s signature drawing of an asshole, introduced in Breakfast of Champions:

And by the byway, the above scan is from the copy Kurt signed to me exactly 50 years ago, when he was 50-years-old. 

 

Back to Paris.

It doesn't take a forensics expert to realize Robert Weide is across the street.

(Later, I will ask myself the cop-show question: “Can you zoom in there?” Not enough to be admissible in court, but there we are, kettle of fish and all.)

Rue de Buci used to be easy to cross--no cars--but now one has to look both ways multiple times for bicycles (a wonderful comedy school classroom for learning double-takes under pressure). I make it across and search the outdoor tables futilely for beef bourguignon. What does he look like? There's a man leaving who looks like what I remember him looking like in the Vonnegut film. "Are you Robert?"

I'll let Robert pick up the narrative from his subsequent tweets:

"I get up to leave. An American guy walks up to me and says, 'Are you Robert Weide?' I answer affirmatively, and say, 'How could you possibly know that?' since the name is famous, but the face is not. He says, 'I'm a big fan and I follow you on Twitter, and I just popped in to look at Tweets and I saw your photo about the guy in the Curb T-shirt, and saw the plate that said 'Cafe de Paris' and realized my wife and I were right across the street from you.' They were at the Cafe Atlas, which you can see in the picture. His name is  @AlanZiegler and his wife is Erin. Alan not only was he a fan of Curb and my Woody Allen doc, but was a graduate student of Kurt Vonnegut's when Kurt taught at City College in NY in the late 70s. We were calculating the odds of his seeing that photo at that place at that moment, when we looked at the photo again and zoomed in, and realized that Alan and Erin were visible in the shot. So now we come full circle with a photo of Alan and me at the Atlas. We should have angled it so you could see the Café de Paris in the background. Anyway, that's the magic of my first day in Paris. Who knows what synchronicity lies ahead in the next couple of days? And yes, it was Beef Bourguignon." 

(Thank you, Erin, for thinking to grab your phone and asking us to pose.)

Now here's where it gets really strange. Later, Robert texts me to check out the thread he's made of his recent tweets, featuring Erin's photo: "829k views and counting." Before I can digest this number, Robert texts, "So far 994k views. We'll pass 1m within the hour."

When Erin and I land in New York the tally is 2.9 million.

We top out at: 7:19 PM · May 22, 2024 3.3M Views

The most bewildering number is that Robert Weide has fewer than 60k followers. What's the appeal? Maybe this comment says it best:

"Wow, how cool is that. I’m sorry but I don’t know Curb, your face or name but may I say it’s still a cool story?"

Here's a sampling of other comments (most from people who do know Curb):

"A bit anti-Curb, don’t you think? Would have been more in the character of Curb if he picked a fight with you, maybe about the ending & you trying to explain it wasn’t you who directed that one."

"Wow, I had to zoom in before I realized that Alan was the head of the undergrad writing department at Columbia when I was a student there. Very nice guy. I spent two years developing a comedy series with Tim Gibbons of Curb. It’s a tiny world."

"Alan may be a member of your karass."

"OK we need to plot that story in the format of a graph of Vonnegut's Shape of Stories"

"It’s my first day in Paris too! I’m going to look for you (and Alan and Erin)."

"How is it that all romance would be lost in this story if you were in NYC eating at the New York Cafe."

"Alan looks ai generated no offence Alan."

"Sounds like the kind of circuitous serendipity that was Curb’s bread and butter. Are we certain LD didn’t outline this?"

"omg, I love Alan Ziegler, he was one of my most memorable professors at Columbia! I read this thread with interest because things like this are so much fun and then ended up having my own fun small world moment lol"

"I love small world stories. Looks like you made a new friend. And I got a lovely Friday morning read on my back patio with a cup of coffee. Sometimes this world is a miraculous place."

"A perfect story for this format. Strong start (with a hint of mystery), interesting middle, and a a satisfying ending. Plus, a gorgeous location to boot. (And it had Vonnegut!) "

"My mind is blown!!! That is a complete holiday in a day. Glorious connecting for both and oh the connections and threads of life."

"That's wild and so beautiful! Maybe your urge to take a pic of the guy wearing the Curb shirt wasn't just random. Per your first post, something was telling you to make a connection. And then this gentleman appeared! Perhaps Linda had a hand in it!"

"Wait a second. No Larry David stare-down either by Alan to make sure it WAS you or by you to make sure he WAS a Vonnegut student? Surely, there was an accordion player nearby who could have supplied the stare-down theme as one of you finally concluded, "D'accord, d'accord..."

"Stories like this is why I can’t leave this site."

What a great story. Nice Twitter detective work on the part of Alan! Are you saying you studied with Kurt Vonnegut, or only Alan did? What an amazing experience that must have been."

Yes, amazing. Here’s a little memoir of Vonnegut. 
 
            I have been admitted to the City College graduate writing program as a poet, but I convince the director to let me also take Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction workshop.
 
            The class meets in Kurt’s midtown Manhattan townhouse. A few sessions into the term, Kurt tells us that his writing isn’t going well and he needs to take a week off. He looks pale and dispirited as he explains that he is trying to write about heaven and can’t figure out how to do it. Two weeks later, when I ask how the writing is going, he smiles, waves his thumb like a flag, and says, “A-number one.” He looks terrific. (His depiction of heaven doesn’t appear until a few years later, in the prologue to Jailbird.)
 
            I write a short story about rock musicians. Kurt thinks it should be a novel, that writing short stories is like “playing poker and winning $7. Are you going to settle fr easy victories, be happy with an ‘A’ in Creative Writing?”
 
            I would be thrilled with an “A” in Creative Writing from Kurt Vonnegut, but I say I’ll give it a go. Kurt replies that I shouldn’t agree so fast: “Telling you to write a novel is like telling you to get married.”
 
            Every couple of weeks we have a one-on-one meeting. Kurt usually says something before we even sit down: “You’re on to something,” and, later in the term, “You’re racking right along. It looks like a book.” The supreme compliment comes when he declares that in addition to being a poet I am “becoming a man of letters.”
 
            After reading a new chapter, Kurt says, “These guys are trouble, get rid of them,” about two of the protagonist’s band members. I assume he is speaking to me as the author, and I am ready to expunge the characters, but he clarifies that he is talking through me to the protagonist, who should fire them in the story.
 
            I leave feeling great. I am creating characters.
 
            My momentum is strong, and Kurt invites me to meet with him after the term ends. A couple of weeks go by, and I muster the courage to call for an appointment. His wife answers and tells me, “The term is over, he’s not seeing any students.”
 
          Before I can plead my case, Kurt comes on an extension and says, “It’s all right.”
 
          At our meeting, Kurt asks, “Do you know famous rock musicians?”
 
         “Not famous ones.”
 
         “Well, this is the way rock musicians will act in ten years.”
 
         “Huh?”
 
            Kurt explains that some kid in the Midwest will read my book and become a famous rock musician, emulating my characters because that’s all he knows about how a rock musician acts. Then kids will emulate him.
 
            I am not only creating characters, I am creating people.
 
            I ask how his book is going, and he replies, “It doesn’t much matter. It’s not going very well.” I can take this two ways:
 
            1) If Kurt Vonnegut has such doubts, who am I to even try to get into the game? Or, 2) The fact that I, too, have such doubts doesn’t mean I am not worthy of being in the game.
 
            I opt for the latter.
 
            At the end of the session, Kurt inscribes my copy of Breakfast of Champions: “For Alan Ziegler, who has begun a book of his own.”
 
            I never finish that novel, but fifteen years later my manuscript of short stories wins a minor award, and I am happy with this collection of “small victories.” I send Kurt the manuscript, and ask for a blurb, figuring I am probably the tenth writer that week to ask him for one—all with connections less tenuous than mine—and that he has probably long ago forgotten me. I include a return postcard, asking him to check one of five boxes: “I will try to take a look at the manuscript and maybe write a blurb.” “No, but try again with the galleys.” “No.” “Yes, but be patient.” “It’s done. Here’s the blurb.”
 
            A week later, the postcard comes back. Kurt has checked the “be patient” box and added, “Just got back from England, so have to catch up on a lot of stuff.” But in the same batch of mail is an envelope with his blurb, which is prefaced by: “I’m honored to know you.”
 
            Likewise, I am most sure.

*

And so it goes. Pretty Pretty Pretty Good.

 

“A History of Blue” by Ella Jeffery & “The Blue” by John Forbes [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

In Australia, especially on the east coast, the color blue is inescapable. The sky is a deeper, wider blue than you will find almost anywhere else, mirrored by the blue of the ocean and harbors around which almost all life takes place. It’s a blue that’s used to sell the country to international tourists; a blue that facilitates our “sunny” national character. We have bluebottles, blue-tongue lizards, and the deadly blue-ringed octopus. The size and intensity of the blue sky can be overwhelming: I remember once returning home to Sydney from a lengthy visit to northern Europe and feeling both supercharged by the expanse of light and color, and also somehow claustrophobic by the sheer distances this blue suggested. 

“the sky’s huge blue hand pressed / against the windows” is how Ella Jeffery captures this paradox of feeling penned in by a vastness of sky. “A History of Blue” opens with the “Brainscan blue” of the pre-dawn sky, a slight nod to Eliot’s etherized evening, and goes on to offer a compendium of some of the most surprising and compelling ways one can describe a color. The “drowsy” blue of the grandfather’s tattoo is my favorite; you can almost see the old, fading blue-ink yawning and sliding down the skin as if slinking into bed.

 

Ella Jeffery’s debut collection of poems, Dead Bolt (2020), won the Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poems and the Anne Elder Award. She is a recipient of the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and her poetry has appeared widely in journals and anthologies.

 

A History of Blue

 

Brainscan blue of the horizon’s edge

before dawn. That is the blue

of indecision. Five blue lights blinking

the plane through metaldust sky

while the Pacific lilts like aquarium-plastic

around some humid or hypothermic blue latitude.

Look closer. Here’s Stradbroke Island

in shades of blue-ringed octopus,

blackblue crabs on rocks like moving bruises.

Drowsy blue of my teetotal grandfather’s tattoo

and the blue book of his brain

that remembers all birds by their Latin names.

Blue guts of swimming pools, blue-tongues

scrummed in one shady corner. First and last:

the sky’s huge blue hand pressed

against the windows. 

“The Blue” illustrates two of John Forbes’ greatest talents as a poet. The first is his ability to take the transcendent and reduce it down to the domestic and routine in an image that perfectly reflects back to us the banality of modern life. In this case, it is the blue of Sydney which is “built-in like / a modern appliance / at my fingertips” suggesting that the color’s sheer accessibility cheapens its effect. The second is the propulsion the poem gathers and where Forbes chooses to interrupt it. Reading the poem aloud, we are thrust irresistibly forward until an anticlimax arrives with the lines “I can’t mix up love / with the weather & / feel better,” wherein a pause occurs and we are allowed to gather our breath, only to be launched again into an impelling force, driven by the repetition of “sky” and “only” and landing at a closing line that is at once exasperated, resigned and proud.

 

You can read more about John Frobes here and here.

 

The Blue

 

The blue in Sydney 

has nothing to do 

with yachts or ideal 

ways of life, it's 

built-in like 

a modern appliance 

at my fingertips & 

far out beyond the 

scenes & decor 

days blue as pencils 

pass by & even cut 

to tears on a cold 

blue empty morning 

I can't mix up love 

with the weather & 

feel better / the sky 

is only the sky & 

that's only a symbol 

of fucking Sydney 

or the wide blue 

yonder I wouldn't 

live anywhere else

 

Born today, JFK (May 29, 1917 - November 22, 1963), a Gemini Gem

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: May 29, 2024

Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine (Alice James, 2024) is a gorgeously produced volume worthy of a major American poet. In her foreword, Anne Marie Macari aptly and elegantly describes Jean as a “once-in-generation poet of the interior life.” Light Me Down gathers all of Jean’s books as well as series of stunning “new” poems written in the last four years of her life, from 2016-2020. The titular poem is the first poem in the collection—

Light me down to the long meadow
to where the new snow taps on the fallen snow
with the fingers of the lost tribe.

Who would want us to listen?
Someone does want it:

          Mother of snow
smoking your cigarette ration, your dark
lipstick mouthprint hungry

for the frail paper,
long after the war was over.

While Jean was indeed a poet of interiority, she was also keenly engaged with the world—wars, family life, poverty, injustice. Her daring and mysterious verse, rooted in time but yet timeless, wants us to listen.

 

"On the Beautiful and Sublime" [by DL]

Immanuel Kant's essay on this subject is nowhere near as famous and influential as those of Longinus and Edmund Burke, but it is a splendid piece of writing, showing an aptitude for dividing the world and everything in it in two  -- a dichotomous impulse unrivaled by anyone until Auden took the reins and found the fork in every road.

Here is the "donnee" (as H. James would call it), the gift or the given, the material you have to work with, lifted from Kant's book (available in a slender paperback from Yale UP) : "Knowledge is beautiful, understanding is sublime."

I took off from there, and this is what I came up with:

On the Beautiful and Sublime

                      Knowledge is beautiful; understanding is sublime. – Kant

Radio is a hot medium;
Television, a cool one.

A train ride in Russia is a novel.
A train ride to Chicago is a movie.

A flight to Miami is a disaster movie.
A yew tree is a poem.

A banyan tree is the prose
of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A woman’s undergarments (any epoch) are poetry.
A man’s undergarments (any epoch) are prose.

Panties (white, silk, high rise) are beautiful.
Jockstraps are sublime.

Paranoia is poetry.
Insomnia is prose.

Death by lethal injection is prose.
Death by hanging is infernal.

Death by firing squad is the noble sublime.
Homer is the tragic sublime.

Cigarettes are sublime, especially Camels and Luckies.
Cigars are sublime.

Pipes are beautiful.
The Song of Songs is beautiful,

Genesis and Job are sublime.
Isaiah is sublime. Samuel I and II are sublime.

Ruth is beautiful and sublime.
Wordsworth is sublime. Keats is sublime and beautiful.

Knowledge is beautiful,
Understanding is sublime.

Mark Bibbins, poetry editor of The Awl, posted it on September 6, 2012. If I find a picture of the philosopher I'll caption it, "Who says he Kant?" Well, let's see if I can. But perhaps I should close with a more heroic less wrathful Sandy than the ranting storm fiend that just wreaked havoc in our world.

That's my Sandy. -- DL               from the archive; first posted November 4, 2012

Immanuel Kant's essay on this subject is nowhere near as famous and influential as those of Longinus and Edmund Burke, but it is a splendid piece of writing, showing an aptitude for dividing the world and everything in it in two  -- a dichotomous impulse unrivaled by anyone until Auden took the reins and found the fork in every road.

Here is the "donnee" (as H. James would call it), the gift or the given, the material you have to work with, lifted from Kant's book (available in a slender paperback from Yale UP) : "Knowledge is beautiful, understanding is sublime."

I took off from there, and this is what I came up with:

On the Beautiful and Sublime

                      Knowledge is beautiful; understanding is sublime. – Kant

Radio is a hot medium;
Television, a cool one.

A train ride in Russia is a novel.
A train ride to Chicago is a movie.

A flight to Miami is a disaster movie.
A yew tree is a poem.

A banyan tree is the prose
of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A woman’s undergarments (any epoch) are poetry.
A man’s undergarments (any epoch) are prose.

Panties (white, silk, high rise) are beautiful.
Jockstraps are sublime.

Paranoia is poetry.
Insomnia is prose.

Death by lethal injection is prose.
Death by hanging is infernal.

Death by firing squad is the noble sublime.
Homer is the tragic sublime.

Cigarettes are sublime, especially Camels and Luckies.
Cigars are sublime.

Pipes are beautiful.
The Song of Songs is beautiful,

Genesis and Job are sublime.
Isaiah is sublime. Samuel I and II are sublime.

Ruth is beautiful and sublime.
Wordsworth is sublime. Keats is sublime and beautiful.

Knowledge is beautiful,
Understanding is sublime.

Mark Bibbins, poetry editor of The Awl, posted it on September 6, 2012. If I find a picture of the philosopher I'll caption it, "Who says he Kant?" Well, let's see if I can. But perhaps I should close with a more heroic less wrathful Sandy than the ranting storm fiend that just wreaked havoc in our world.

That's my Sandy. -- DL               from the archive; first posted November 4, 2012

Anthem for Doomed Youth [by Wilfred Owen 1893 – 1918]

Anthem for Doomed Youth [by Wilfred Owen 1893 – 1918]

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds

The Germini collection: born today, May 27, Henry Kissinger (1923-2023)

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1973/kissinger/facts/

I wonder who's Kissinger now. . .

"Painting Continued" [by Anna Cypra Oliver]

(Ed note: This is the fourth in a series by Anna Cypra Oliver. Find yesterday's post here. sdh)

PAINTING CONTINUED

I keep at it, after the first course ends, and a second, as Stephan drifts back to pens and watercolor. For years, a few hours a day, I keep on. I slow down, become more meticulous, more willing to set up properly and to take the time needed to prep a canvas. I set up a studio with a proper exhaust fan and dress carefully each time before starting.
I get better, acquiring the competence that comes with simple slogging on. At first, I obsessively paint flowers in 12x12 squares. Then the canvases start to get bigger: 30x30, 36x48, and the subjects more complex: a ketchup bottle on a NYC diner table, interiors bisected by light and shadow. I love it, in a way that I once loved words, which I have essentially stopped trying to set down.

I don’t have a philosophy of painting, no grand vision of art in the twenty-first century. As a painter I’m exactly what I was as a writer: a documentarian, a literalist. In writing the actual attracts me—overheard dialogue, found details, people’s life stories—though not in any kind of whole cloth way; my interest is in framing and selecting, seeing the resonances between one element and another. My approach to art is even simpler: something attracts my notice, and I paint it. I’m drawn to bright colors, the curvy organic shapes of things like chairs and bowls and flowers, the splash of light on a wall. Nothing that would win space in a gallery in Chelsea. I paint what I see, or try to, though I have gotten better at leaving things out; I also try hard to see light and shadow, something most neophyte painters fail to capture.  Like most people of my class and background I’ve been trained to feel a little disdain for any representational art, no matter how masterful, but I can’t for the life of me seem to abstract anything on canvas myself, something about which I always feel defensive. My inspirations are Vuillard, Bonnard, Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicher, but I can rarely achieve even their softness of focus. I draw lines
as straight as I can. I’m fixated on accuracy. Maybe that’s just the learning curve. A handful of classes and sketching with Stephan constitutes the whole of my art education. Because I have little formal training I’m still just trying to get my hand to obey my eye. People with backgrounds in art are always telling me that perspective is not important, that formal training can be deadening, but I want to gain enough command to be able to break a line by intention rather than pure amateurishness. A deep knowledge of grammar seems to me a prerequisite for being a writer—when I fracture a sentence, I usually know I’m doing it. Why should painting be any different? Picasso could render a plaster bust so precisely that it seemed three dimensional. De Kooning once said of his wildly fragmented women, “A classical educationfreed me to do this.”

My mind when I paint seems strangely blank, attentive to color and light and shape, but otherwise—empty. It’s an emptiness akin to meditation. I’m a restive person, always needing a project or in a stew about something I’ve heard on the news, unable to sit still for five minutes at a time or nap because the moment I lie down I start to fret about the ten other things I need to be doing. But painting gives me sanctuary from my own restlessness. Often, it takes time to get to that place, to let my usual agitation and anxiety drift to the bottom of consciousness, allowing the sensual squish of paint to take over. Once achieved, two to three hours can pass without a worry except whether I’ve mixed a color correctly.

Maybe “empty” is not quite apt. Shape fills my mind. What is the shape of that shadow? I hear my instructor Sonya saying. Don’t paint an elbow: paint the shape of an elbow. Carve the spaces between things. And songs often pipe themselves through my head, which is strange because I have only the most modest interest in music and rarely play any. “How does it feel,” Bob Dylan suddenly demands to know, “to be on your own?” Or Burl Ives croons, “Fare thee well, O honey…” and then, out of nowhere: “She’ll have fun fun fun till her daddy takes the T-Bird away…”

  Color, too, occupies my thoughts. Ochre mixed with cadmium orange mixed with Naples yellow light creates a lovely Caucasian flesh tone. Add a bit of umber to darken it down or a dash of burnt sienna to warm it. That blue—almost cornflower! How in the world do I mix that precise shade of blue?

I used to have words in my head this way, a running loop of sentences that I would memorize if I couldn’t immediately write them down, but for the moment the images crowd out other forms of mental dialogue. Even when I sit down with a book, the letters on the page develop shadows and halos, as if they are objects to be painted, rather than words to be read. The demands of image, for the moment, seem to be exerting greater force on me than the demands of text.

CRITICISM

The question of being good inevitably enters: am I any good? As I paint, I find myself wondering if I have talent, if I could “be a painter.” A great painter? To that I already know the answer: no. I don’t have the drive, the imagination or the kind of passion required. Were it my calling and I brilliant at it, I would have been hard at work long ago. But how about a good one? At the moment, my main goal is still to capture the world realistically, to learn, essentially, to see. It’s all about craft and the building blocks—a grammar that needs to be mastered before any rules are broken—not any decision I’ve made about whether I want to paint figuratively or otherwise. But still, to immerse myself in the medium, to keep going at the pace I’ve recently set, it seems necessary to have the potential to be more than a Sunday painter. The challenge of that possibility motivates me, though, at the same time, I wonder at the recurrence of the question in my mind.  

At a dinner party not long ago, I proceeded to tell the painter seated next to me how much pleasure I got out of oil painting. She too had enjoyed it once, she loftily replied, but that was before she started waking up every morning with the weight of all of art history on her shoulders. I sat back in my chair. The weight of all of art history? This woman may have been a world-class artist for all I knew, but my hackles rose at the utter pretension of her tone. Oh, I said, I’m not concerned with all of art history—I only aspire to sell to decorators and tourists. If even that, I could have added. If even that. But she had already given me a thin, cold smile and turned to speak to the diner on her other side.

The need to professionalize is in our culture—witness the tendency of little boys now to go to five-day-a-week summer football camps and to play on Little League teams whose games are broadcast on national television—but in my family, where it ran with such a hot current that my mother became a hippie and then an ardent Christian to escape it, it can still be traced to the old first-generation immigrant drive to succeed, as well as the fierce hunger and the equally fierce pride that makes some people crave distinction. Years ago, I shared a selection of travel sketches with my grandmother Rose. She exclaimed over them, thought they showed talent—there was the clear evidence of Juan Oliver in my blood, the highest compliment that could be paid in my family. “Well,” she mused, “maybe you could have a second career as an artist.” This took me completely aback. They were just nice little sketches that I did with Stephan two or three times a year on a trip. Why must the question of career even enter it?

But she was like that. She hated that for years my mother worked as a secretary in the church in which I grew up—menial work, in her mind, demeaning—but was genuinely delighted when my mother became a licensed minister. It could never assuage the hurt she felt at her daughter having become a Christian, but a degree, that at least was something she could understand. Her daughter no longer seemed to be throwing her life away. It was also something she could crow about to other people. She could say, My daughter, the Reverend, just as she had long said, My son, the Ph.D.—or slipped in the “Dr.” in front of her own name, a title of which she was justly proud, having earned a Ph.D. in psychology at the age of sixty-three. Sitting next to me in the car outside my mother’s house in upstate New York, waiting for my mother to come out so we could go somewhere to celebrate the newly conferred degree, my grandmother suddenly said, half to herself, “We’re all full of honors in this family,” and sighed with satisfaction. Astonished that she would actually voice such a sentiment, I recoiled a little, though I loved her. It was one of her least admirable traits, and the most like a stereotypical Jewish mother.

In my family, at least during my grandmother’s lifetime, no one could achieve anything greater than success as an artist. Prospering in business was good, if faintly distasteful, a doctorate was a much-lauded achievement, but we saved our greatest admiration for those with that hidden ore of talent, passing judgments about who had an “eye,” who possessed—or lacked, despite their pretensions to art-making—Juan’s, our standard-bearer’s gifts. Even my great-grandfather Nathan, the entrepreneur/engineer who made the family’s fortune, spent his off-hours and retirement making sculpture. Most of us were hobbyists or connoisseurs, but we believed in the idea of the lone genius, the anointed. The making of art, as well as its appreciation, represented the next step in the evolution of an immigrant family: from shtetl to Central Park West to downtown bohemia, the second generation freed by the hard-scrabbling of the first to acquire the sophisticated accoutrements of true upper middle class gentility.

It’s a rare and wonderful thing to come from a family that loves creative expression as much as ours, but it can also be as demanding and difficult as any that requires members to be top-of-their-class doctors and lawyers. The valuation of art was so high that my mother felt she had to flee her family to escape it, since she, a dancer and potter in her youth, was convinced that she could neither meet the standard nor find sufficient fulfillment in the process to build her life on it. Just recently she had to drop a watercolor class, her first, because the mere thought of trying to make visual art made her so tense and anxious. She just had to give up the idea, she said.

Maybe this history has more than a little to do with why I allowed my literary agent to have so much power over me, why I was so susceptible to her voice. I was ripe for judgment; I was primed to flee.

Fear of failure, my husband said. Sophomore slump. So psychologically simple an explanation that I resisted it, though I see now that it was very likely true. I thought about writing another book, but it made me so tense and anxious, I just had to give up the idea. 

All images Copyright © 2015 Anna Cypra Oliver

(This is the fourth post in a series. Find the final post here. sdh)

Herman Wouk was born today: another great Gemini (May 27, 1915)

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/17/468790231/herman-wouk-the-jackie-robinson-of-jewish-american-fiction-dies-at-103

https://navylog.navymemorial.org/wouk-herman

Cleo Qian: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________

Animal, Look

 

The miracle is not that this
is a lover’s poem, but that I
am the one writing it.

In the bathroom, I perch
at the edge of the tub
while she brushes her teeth
under the light.

Firm line of muscle behind the round shoulder,
stencil sketch of the sharp backbone.

It isn’t that I believed I would never love again,

only,

sometimes, these several years,
I believed I would never love again.

I wrote about deserts, copper,
shorelines and springs.
How the hourglass of life never
is turned.

Now, this woman’s back against my blue
brushed-cotton sheets.

The miracle was not her:
tender, vain, playful,
certain to leave.

Cold edge of the bathtub.
Harsh light of midnight.

It was my own heart I marveled at,
its skip and unease,

How it shifted, a small animal in its nest
raising its head, finally, to look.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Cleo Qian (she/her) is a queer fiction writer and poet born in California. She is the author of the short story collection Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go (Tin House, 2023) which was one of Time’s 100 Best Books of the Year as well as being longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, among other accolades. Her writing has been published in outlets including ZYZZYVA, Pleiades, The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, and others.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

French, School of Fontainebleau (last quarter of 16th century), Portrait présumé de Gabrielle d'Estrées et de sa sur la duchesse de Villars (Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters).

Kafka: It can always get worse. . .

"Let the bad remain bad, otherwise it will grow worse." 

T. S. Eliot Criticizes the Critics

<<<
Upon giving the matter a little attention, we percerive that criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences.
>>> 

"The Russian Revolution took a backseat to the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact"

The Race

“The civil war in Palestine was overtaken by World War II.”
-- David Brownstone and Irene Franck, Timelines of the Twentieth Century

The lean and hungry years of the Great Depression were eclipsed by the
outbreak of hostilities in Europe as the decade expired..

The Russian Revolution took a backseat to the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact.

Stalin’s Great Purge was put on hold by Germany’s invasion of Russia.

Official American neutrality was interrupted by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The Enlightenment was suspended until further notice by the race to build an atomic bomb.

But nothing overtook the murder of the Jews.

                                                                         8 / 14 / 08

Homage to Joe Brainard [by Jacques Bernard]

At the New School's Tishman Auditorium on Tuesday, May 8 [2012], writers who knew and loved Joe Brainard (1941-1994) read from the Library of America's new edition of the artist's collected literary works. Joe, a modest man, whose "modesty" (John Ashbery once wrote) "is the modesty of the gods," would have been astonished to find that his poems and prose have been published so handsomely under an imprint so prestigious as that of the Library of America. On hand was Ron Padgett, Brainard's closest friend, who edited The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, Padgett was among those who read their favorite Brainard pieces, as was Paul Auster, who contributed the volume's introduction. Other presenters included Frank Bidart, David Lehman, Edmund White, and Library of America editor-in-chief Geoffrey O'Brien.

A beautiful Brainard anecdote told that evening has Joe on holiday with three friends touring Sicily. Whenever the group reached a new destination, an affectionate postcard from Joe awaited each of them. Edmund White said that on their first date the notoriously shy Brainard brought along a pad so the duo could pass notes back and forth in lieu of talking. 

Portions of I Remember were read aloud as were prose poems, diary entries, aphorisms, sui generis writings, and a play. Some Joe lines: "Writing, for me, is a way of 'talking' the way I wish I could talk." "Actually, I am practical. It's just that, sometimes, being impractical seems practical to me." Or, in a different register, "I remember my parents’ bridge teacher. She was very fat and very butch (cropped hair) and she was a chain smoker. She prided herself on the fact that she didn’t have to carry matches around. She lit each new cigarette from the old one. She lived in a little house behind a restaurant and lived to be very old."

In a letter to Padgett in 1965, Brainard wrote, “I find myself with a certain talent that Frank O’Hara has, and that is to say something quite simple so absolutely that one, without even thinking, assumes you are of course right.” Simplicity and honesty combine in Brainard's "I Remember." The recurrent use of these words at the start of each new entry in a list has become a poetic form and a standard poetry workshop prompt. From an interview with Anne Waldman on the subject of "I Remember": "I feel very much like God writing the bible.  I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written ..."

The Collected Writings does us the service of printing the whole of I Remember (including "I Remember More" and "More I Remember More") while simultaneously showing us how rich a trove Brainard left us beyond this signal masterpiece. And all this writing was done in the twenty-year period when Joe, on speed, created his paintings and drawings and collages -- hundreds and hundreds of them until the day he quit taking speed. For the last fourteen years of his life Joe Brainard produced no new work. What did he do? He stayed in his SoHo loft smoking Tareytons and reading great Victorian novels.

Joe was a sweet man. As an assistant professr at Hamilton College I arranged for a retrospective exhibiton of his work to be shown at the Root Art Center in the winter of 1978. The exhibiton coincided with a course I was giving on the New York School. The show featured such collages as "Yellow Madonna," "Butterfly Madonna," "Flower and Butterfly," "Smoke," "Morning Glory," "The End," "Let Me Entertain You," "Shower," and "Eight of Diamonds," as well as a pencil sketch of Jasper Johns," a self-portrait, paper cut-outs, oil-painted canvases, watercolors, gouaches, and numerous mixed media pieces. In all, seventy-eight of Joe's pieces were on display. We invited Joe to spend a January week at the college, during which he gave a reading and a gallery talk. I remember most vividly the afternoon that we had a very large art studio at our disposal and everyone in the class was encouraged to collaborate with a partner on a painting or drawing, a piece of writing, or some admixture of the two. Joe and I filled two dozen pages of a sketch book with our collaborative efforts that afternoon.

If you're wondering, Jacques Bernard is a nonexistent personage. In "I Remember" Joe recalls when he signed his paintings "by Joe." There were also times he thought of adopting a pseudonym -- Bo Jainard or Jacques Bernard. Such an impulse might last a week. But Joe was always Joe in his art, whether painting an Ernie Bushmiller icon (as in the "Nancy Diptych" above) or the whippet on the cover of The Best American Poetry 1998 -- or remembering that, as a boy, when he read "after five days return to" in the upper left corner of an envelope, he thought that after five days the recipient of any letter should return it to its sender.

-- DL    from the archive, first posted May 11, 2012