The Best American Poetry

Ballet de Lorraine Third Program: Ayelen Parolin’s "Malón" and Maud Le Pladec’s "Static Shot" in perspective [By Tracy Danison]

“Malón”, dance performance by Ayelen Parolin. Photo © Ballet de Lorraine

As part of the Ballet de Lorraine’s third program for the 2023-24 season, I’ll be seeing Ayelen Parolin’s newly-created Malón (“Chaos Agents”) in premiere and Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot for the second time at the Opéra national de Lorraine, place Stanislas, Nancy.

Natural turnover and state policy, and also the quantum wash that is making us a new culture era, as everywhere else, are welling up inside and outside the Ballet de Lorraine, so it’s a good idea to try to grind up some socio-esthetic lenses before I sit down to watch.

Parolin, who came to Belgium from Argentina in 2000, has been very creative, in view and quite successful in France these past couple years. The last Parolin dance performance I reviewed – but not the only one I’ve had the pleasure to experience – was WEG, in September 2021, at Atelier de Paris, when things were opening up again from the pandemic.

“WEG”, I wrote then, “Choreographs observation, imitation, vibration, variation and novelty, letting onlookers revel in the complex subjectivity of human relationships”.

Apparently, at some point in her life, Parolin took on “she” after having previously been identified or identifying as “he”. According to my friend, Wang, who nearly had a crise de nerfs when I told him I hadn’t realized any of this or its possible implications, says that the switch plays a role in how her work is conceived and perceived and how she is received. So, I’ll be going into Malón with the choreography of  identity and the complex subjectivity of human behavior as my lenses.

I’ll also be seeing Maud Le Pladec’s Static Shot through two lenses. My first focuses on the social-organizational implications of Le Pladec’s appointment and her role as a state culture actor. She is currently director of Centre Chorégraphique National (CCN) - Orléans, but will become director of the CCN - Ballet de Lorraine, starting January 2025. Who succeeds her in her old post and the direction she sets in her new one will send signals, make waves. She’ll be, at least for a while, not just one of the three women running one of the 19 CCNs, she’ll be the only woman running one of the five big regional dance companies, which include Ballet de l’Opéra national du Rhin, Ballet de Marseille, Ballet Preljocaj and Malandain Ballet Biarritz, two of which bear the name of their founders and current directors.

“Static Shot”, dance performance by Maud Le Pladec. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The centrally-funded but locally operated CCN are part of the Mitterand-era effort to institutionalize nouvelle danse française initiatives such as Ballet-Théâtre Contemporain (BTC), founded by Françoise Ardet, Philppe Thiry and Jean-Albert Cartier post-1968. Grossly drawn, each CCN today represents a mix of a more or less strong choreographic personality through its director (see above) and more or less local or regional culture- artistic action by its location-and dance culture tradition.

Along with a particular attachment to music, Maud Le Pladec claims BTC heritage, which promulgates a dance practice that not only eschews classic ballet but also ballets russes avant-garde style stuff. In addition to the clearly contemporary Static Shot, one of Le Pladec’s recent, and quite successful, productions, for instance, is Silent Legacy,  built out of Krump-style break dance featuring, besides a man and woman cross-genre performers, a 10- or 11-year-old Québec girl who can stomp and emote with the best in Compton. Le Pladec’s note says that the performance is a meld of break and contemporary dance and part of her ongoing investigation of dance genre and heritage. So, if at least some of Ayelen Parolin’s artistic identity may be said to turn on gender, going forward, at least some of Le Pladec’s innovation may turn on issues of genre J.

The most important lens for appreciating dance performance is spectator experience – truth is beauty, beauty, truth, 1066 and all that – does the technique, flow and sensibility bring the spectator beyond words, toward Imagination?

Largely, Le Pladec’s work does for me, as Static Shot did the first time. I noted that “Le Pladec seems to use music as the captain of one of those treasure-hunt ships uses a deck hose to wash the mud and barnacles off a long-hidden treasure, dazzling while incentivizing the crew. Instead of gold and jewels, she focuses the senses on the fantastic movement of these Ballet de Lorraine bodies” … Her approach, I thought then, goes to the shape and form of her consciousness, dovetailing neatly in this with Loïc Touzé’s quite choreographically different No Oco, with which Static Shot shared the bill.

Later on, after the show, I felt confirmed in the conviction that her piece had let spectatators stand for a moment on the balcony of her consciousness, run a finger along the woodwork, when I read this unexpected (prose) poem in her dance note:

Enfant, je danse sur les musiques pop de la disco-mobile de mon père, je suis peinte en tutu rose sur la portière de sa camionnette, je cours de galas en compétitions de moto-cross. Mon père aime la danseuse qu’il a fait peindre sur sa camionnette et j’aime que mon père l’aime. Je ne deviendrai jamais la danseuse en tutu rose peinte sur le C35 et pourtant, c’est bien grâce à elle que je danse tel que je danse aujourd’hui. 

(“As a girl I danced to the pop music playing from my Dad’s Citroën 35 van. I was the dancer in the pink tutu he had painted on the disco-van door and was dancing with him as he went from moto-cross race to moto-cross gala. Dad loved the dancer on the door and I love that Dad loved her. I have not become that dancer. But I owe it to her that I dance as I dance today”.)

Happy birthday, Artie Shaw [May 23, 1910]

Born May 23, 1910. Band leader and clarinetist whose versions of "Stardust," "Frenesi," "Begin the Beguine" "Moonglow," "Can't Get Started," "A Foggy Day," and others are sublime. He was a Gemini with huge sex appeal and a host of wives including Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Jerome Kern's daughter Betty. He had chutzpah. “Presumption is the mother of all fuck-ups,” he explained. He was also a sharpshooter with a rifle. He and Benny Goodman disagreed, Goodman saying ""We both play clarinet." Shaw said, "You play clarinet. I play music." He also said, "Jazz was born out of the whiskey bottle, was raised on marijuana, and will expire on cocaine." He was a good looking stud but it was the music that enchanted the fillies. "“You have no idea of the women I didn’t marry,” he said. He lived to be ninety.

And here are Helen Forrest's songs with the Artie Shaw band:

Artie: “Somebody asked me once, ‘Do you think that swing will ever come back?’ And I said, ‘Do you think the 1938 Ford will ever come back?’"

Tracing Dreams [by Lera Auerbach]

Last night, we said goodbye to my father. It felt unnatural to see him in the coffin, he who was always so full of vitality, humor, and brilliance. To honor my mother's wishes, the casket was opened so she could see him for the last time. To protect her fragile state, only the closest members of the family were present. The silence hung in the dimly lit room. Groomed and dressed in all white, my father looked like a stranger, someone I never knew—a wax figure instead of a real man. The strangeness permeated the room, turning everyone attending into shadows. I was an observer, and some part of me was still observing that observer and on and on through a mirror labyrinth of reflections, removing me even further from reality until I doubted whether any of it was real. I caught myself wishing to call my father on his phone and tell him what a strange joke he played on us by dying, only to realize that my call would remain unanswered.

During the last year, my father went from 210 pounds to a mere 110 pounds. He lost all his fat and muscles, becoming a living skeleton. He had many friends but avoided seeing them towards the end of his life—he did not want them to remember him like this. Lev was a proud and stubborn man. He was strong, courageous, and independent, and that's how he wished to remain in the memories of those who knew him.

Last week, I went for a solitary walk in Glasgow. It was drizzling, and the city looked gloomy and ghostly, with its streets covered in mist. I took a photo of the winding, empty road devoid of colors. It resonated with how I felt: a lonely path stretching into the unknown, full of reflections and shadows – abandonedly sad but also, somehow, hauntingly beautiful. I was thinking about my future senza Papa.

A few nights before he died, I had a nightmare. I was angry at my father in my dream because I knew he had let go of his attachments and was ready to depart. "You might be ready for this, but I am not," I screamed in despair, and my screaming woke me up. I fought the urge to call him right away. I was in Germany; he was in New York. I did not want to wake him up. I called him later that day. To my relief, he sounded cheerful. He had just returned home from the hospital. He asked me in detail about my upcoming concerts. He did not sound like a person who was ready to let go of life. I felt comforted and reassured, forgetting that even in my dream, it was I who was not ready for what was inevitably coming, while he had already accepted it and was awaiting this new adventure.

How he loved adventures! His favorite time was traveling. He felt best driving to some unknown, exciting destination. And now his greatest adventure was very near, and he no longer wished to resist its pull. I already knew he was terminally ill, but I was still harboring some stubborn hopes for a miracle. I knew it was selfish of me, but I couldn't help it. Just last month, he jokingly promised me to make it to his birthday. I was upset when he said it—since his birthday was only a few weeks away. We were making plans for the summer. I wanted him to think long-term, to believe he had a future, and to look forward to something. I still believed in the power of "we."

And now I was alone, walking on the empty road in Glasgow while my father was dead in New York. I could do nothing to change it. I knew—beyond any doubt—that he was in a good place, no longer suffering, that it was only his emaciated body, nothing more than a shell, what was left in New York, and that he was everywhere and in everything, partaking in the eternal dance of life everlasting. I felt joy for him and from him. Yet I also realized that he had been a constant in my life, a resounding tone of love and reassurance. As long as I had a father, I was still a little girl, a child discovering the world's wonders, knowing there was always someone to catch me if I fell.

My father taught me to be courageous. He said courage is not the absence of fear but the resolve not to let fear stop you from doing the right thing. He taught me to swim in cold rivers, ski down mountains, and jump from ski ramps. When I was four, he enrolled me in ice skating school. An hour later, I complained that they had only taught us how to fall. He told me, "To learn how to fall is an art in itself. Who knows, maybe it was your most important lesson. If you learn how to fall, nothing can harm you. If you learn how to fall, you can be fearless."

My father, a child of the war, born in the horrific year of 1937 when his own father (my grandfather Isaac) was sent to the Gulag, was a kind man who deeply believed in the goodness of people. He always chose to see the best in them, even when they failed him. Papa instilled in his children the importance of generosity, not through words but by being generous in his actions. Lev never complained, even in the harshest times. He was a natural leader, leading not by force but with kindness and by example. He was stubborn and, at times, impossible.

My father was the first reader of all my writings in Russian, both poetry and prose. His knowledge of the language was impeccable. He loved literature and was talented at drawing, blending analytical and artistic perspectives. We spent two and a half years living together in Florida during the pandemic. For the first time since I left Russia at 17, I spent much time with my parents, rediscovering them as people. I wrote a book about that strange time when I experienced their aging closely while reliving memories of my childhood with them. This book is "200 Glances Towards Sunset." I knew the sunset was just around the corner and treasured every moment of its fragile beauty. I did not want to publish it while my father was alive, but perhaps the time for that is nearing.

My father was a quiet anchor in my life, with his never-ending confidence in me. He taught me to play chess and helped me solve math problems. He believed in me even when I did not believe in myself. He encouraged me to fly high and take risks.

How much of my strength was just his projection? Was I strong because he believed me to be strong? Was I strong because I wanted him to see me strong? Was I ever strong? I don't know.

My father was not a saint, but I think he was at peace with his choices and did not have too many regrets. He was proud of his professional accomplishments, his children, and his grandchildren. He loved dogs and nature and traveled a lot. He had a remarkably interesting life.

I left Russia at the age of 17, and it took me ten years to bring my parents to New York. They missed much of my life from ages 17 to 27. That's why it was incredibly meaningful to have them in the audience whenever I performed. Four weeks before his death, my father attended the last performance he would ever see—despite significant health challenges, he traveled to Boston to see me conduct the world premiere of my String Symphony No.2 “Tenebrae lucis.” Was the title of the symphony, translated as The Darkness of Light (referring to the approaching night), a mere coincidence? Before the performance, I dedicated this concert to my parents. The audience gave them a long applause, and my father was deeply moved. I knew it would be the last concert he would attend, but I did not expect his final days to arrive so soon.

"Old age is such a strange thing to happen to a little boy." The little boy was still in him until the end. He would joke about his illness as if it were happening to someone else. His body was failing him, but not his sense of humor or his love. Those who love us never leave us, at least not entirely. At least, it is what I choose to believe. After all, where does the love go when the body is gone? It is energy, and energy can't just disappear.

The road is turning, and I do not know what awaits me. Whatever it is, I accept it. After all, fighting the change only makes it more difficult. You can't fight an ocean's wave, but you can ride it, trusting it will lead you where you need to go and trusting your strength to get there intact.

In many ways, my father remains a mystery. I will keep tracing his contours through my memories. At some point, I made a long list of uneasy questions I wished to ask my parents. But even as I was preparing this list, I realized that I could never ask many of these questions because I would hurt my parents by doing so. Questions are more important than answers; not all questions need to be answered. To understand someone’s life would take another whole life. True understanding requires compassion, and compassion means some things should never be asked. I will never fully know my father. But I will keep finding and rediscovering him, and by doing so, I will keep rediscovering myself.

 

The Map of His Dreams

My father never asks for directions.
Even when he’s lost – he looks quite confident.
He spends long hours drawing maps.
(If it’s not on the map – its existence is doubtful.)

My mother asks everyone for directions,
even when she knows where she is going,
even when she is near her home.
She is like a child waiting to be found.

My father likes the smell of his old car,
its obedient noises, familiar caprices.
He feels that only in the driver’s seat
he’s still in control, while all else is slipping.

My mother goes to sleep early,
she’ll sleep soundly until the morning.
He comes in quietly, fixes her blanket,
sits in the armchair, a book on his lap,
thinking of driving to an unknown sight
he is dozing off, his mouth open,
his nose sharpened as if growing into a shadow.

(In his sleep, he’s drawing the map of his dreams.)

"Reality Check" [by Nin Andrews]

Reality Check

after David Lehman

The orgasm likes the dusk best, the time of day
when the visible becomes the invisible,
and the physical world, a fantasy or dream.
That’s when the man and woman remember him again
even if it’s true, they’ve been married so long,|
the wife has become cheerless and drab
in her navy blue pantsuits—her Barbara Bushes
as she calls them, and the husband
has lost his shirt, as the saying goes,
and never found it again.  Sad
how failure becomes the story of a life,
a reality his wife says he should check.
(She’s always trying to cheer him up.)

But in truth the man squandered his estate
ages ago and now sells real estate during the day.
He says it doesn’t feel very real because he rarely
sells any. Define real, the woman argues,
as she slowly peels off her nylons
and massages her calves.  In the almost
dark she still looks like the braless girl
the man fell madly in love with on Election Day
on November 4th, 1980.  Never mind
that Ronald Reagan had just been elected,
that they’d voted for Jimmy Carter,
the woman still called it Elation Day
as she unzipped his pants.
What are you doing?  he asked.
Just waiting for you to grow up, she said.
And he did.  Again and again,
he grew up, replaying this scene

from Plume

First Publications by Liza Halley and Nancy Miller Gomez [by Nin Andrews]

I love scanning or flipping through poetry journals and discovering a first publication. Or discovering a debut collection at a bookshop. A while back, I found this poem, "Why I Retell My Grandparents Bubbemeises and Other Wisdoms," by Liza Halley and laughed out loud when I read the last line. Just the word: bubbemeise, delights me. Last week, I came across a new collection, Inconsolable Objects, by Nancy Miller Gomez. Her insightful and brilliant poem, "Tilt-A-Whirl" reminded me of summers long ago, of those awful rides at the State Fair that my sisters and I would spin around and around on, daring one another to do it again and again, the rides a perfect metaphor for the magic and terror of childhood. 

Tilt-A-Whirl 

It was a hot day in Paola, Kansas.
        The rides were banging around empty

as we moved through the carnival music and catcalls.
        At the Tilt-A-Whirl we were the only ones.

My big sister chose our carriage carefully,
        walking a full circle until she stopped.

The ride operator didn’t take his eyes off her
       long dark hair and amber eyes, ringed

like the golden interior of a newly felled pine.
        She didn’t seem to notice him lingering

as he checked the lap bar and my sister asked
        in her sweetest, most innocent — or maybe

not-so-innocent — voice, Can we have a long ride
        please, mister? When he sat back down

at the joystick, he made a show
        of lighting his smoke while the cage

of his face settled into a smile
       I would one day learn to recognize,

and then those dizzying red teacups began to spin
        my sister and me into woozy amusement.

We forgot the man, the heat, our thighs
        sticking to the vinyl seats, our bodies glued

together in a centrifugal blur of happiness
        beneath a red metal canopy

as we picked up speed and started to laugh,
        our heads thrown back, mouths open,

the fabric of my sister’s shirt clinging
        to the swinging globes of her breasts

as we went faster, and faster,
        though we had begun to scream Stop!

Please stop! Until our voices grew hoarse
        beneath the clattering pivots and dips,

the air filling with diesel and cigarettes, and the man
        at the control stick, waiting for us

to spin toward him again, and each time he cocked his hand
        as if sighting prey down the barrel of a gun.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: May 22, 2024

I just came across Málaga, Lucinda Ebersole’s novella, published posthumously by Peacock Press in 2023. Written in 224 chapters, none longer than a page and some as short as a sentence, Lucinda takes us on a journey from Jane Bowle’s unmarked grave to the ghost of Anaïs Nin to a suitcase full of plastic saints—via a threesome with strangers and an affair with a strange bullfighter. It’s a novella with a poet’s sensibility.  Lucinda Ebersole (March 12, 1956 – March 20, 2017) described  Málaga as "a really weird little novel that is sort of 'transgendered' kind of poetry, kind of a novel." It’s the perfect beach read as much of the action takes place by the sea! -- Denise Duhamel

"Wistful" [by Star Black]

WISTFUL

Guardian Angels have come.
We will be saved, the pedophiles
cautioned, the snuff-art locked away;
credit card scams careened in cyberspace.

Silwa will track down
the feral cybergangs and keep
all tendered innocents safe... Clinging
to silt, one more day, watching

the mariner sail away, the lipstick
doom descend, the polar bears rugged, I
still admire Silwa’s stalking grace: patrolling
crime, ferreting “ice,” cybertracing

gunlessly. Beached in a bikini, I
once watched surfers grace cruel heights
before privilized shortlines obscured the sea.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Five): Charles North [by Angela Ball]

CREPUSCULE WITH PAULA

 

Does realism get your vote? It gets mine.

The plants with their insatiable thirst for appearances,

the heart-stopping 7:00 p.m. air moonlighting as a pressed-

cardboard Korean ashtray

(server, modest coaster) decorated with a single blondish branch

holding six leaves and a piece of rose-colored fruit (pear,

plum, ripe peach)

slightly raised as if applied to the flat, creamy space behind

flecked with light gray, light green, and brown marks of varying

size

from pinpricks to ashes, pencil (it looks like) to brush.

The romance of the window panes (I'm squinting a little) has

nothing

to do with the misguided view, the one with the Fates schmoozing

under the maroon awning of the high-rise (schmoos is more like

it)

and the embarrassed-looking sycamores revealing for all they're

worth

in their slightly fictionalized but emotionally accurate way,

which contributes to the overall tone

without detracting from the realistic participation,

a motorbike taking the corner too fast, a cat knowing the worst

that can possibly happen and managing to avoid it,

which could be the key signature if not for a free-standing

radiance just outside, unmoored, a hint of plum or Anjou pear.

                                                                                                    -Charles North

                                                                                                   (EVERYTHING and Other Poems, 2019)

Charles North’s first, self-published, poetry collection, Lineups, was featured in two New York Post sports columns. He has published 20 books of poems, essays, and collaborations with artists, reviewed for Art in America, and served as Poet-in-Residence at Pace University NYC. With James Schuyler, he edited the poet-painter anthologies Broadway and Broadway 2. The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight (2001) was a finalist for the inaugural Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award, What It Is Like (2011) headed NPR’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, and Everything and Other Poems (2020) was a New York Times New and Noteworthy Book. Among his awards are two NEA Fellowships, four Fund for Poetry Awards, a Poets Foundation Award, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Five): Charles North

Charles North’s lyric of controversy, “Crepuscule with Paula,” explodes the romanticism of its title in its first line: “Does realism get your vote?  It gets mine.” The poem is named for—and thus is ekphrastic of—a composition by Thelonious Monk in which the contenders are beauty and cacophony, the off-handed and the sublime.

This poem is out for blood: to let two worlds duke it out via whatever is at hand, which is in this case “the heart-stopping 7:00 p.m. air moonlighting as a pressed- / cardboard Korean ashtray.” Among other things, this statement reminds us that everything we see is a collaboration between materials and the light that hits them. (A curious idiom, that.)

The plants’ “insatiable thirst for appearances” references both their need for water and their need to present to the sun.  It’s why wildflowers arrange themselves in bouquets--each flower head gets exposure. The ashtray can be multi-purposed “(server, modest coaster)”—the “modest” slyly humorous—can there be an “immodest” coaster?

North’s description of the object—humorously thorough—takes on the careful, hesitant rhythm of artistic creation:

     decorated with a single blondish branch

     holding six leaves and a piece of rose-colored fruit (pear,

     plum, ripe peach)

     slightly raised as if applied to the flat, creamy space behind

     flecked with light gray, light green, and brown marks of varying

     size

     from pinpricks to ashes, pencil (it looks like) to brush.

The careful approximation of North’s description, supplying alternative “rose-colored” fruits and including even a suggestion of relief (“slightly raised as if applied”) ; his verb, “flecked,” embodying quick strokes, his color designations both accurate and modest—especially “brown marks of varying / size / from pinpricks to ashes” resemble and reenact the artist’s care with his own ashtray creation. The insertion of the tentative “(it looks like)” reminds us, again modestly, that the poem is guessing. This ‘guessingness’ is essential. It allows the lines to float free of what they describe, giving room for doubt, as in James Schuyler’s masterful “Korean Mums,” which ends with his one certainty, their name—a certainty that will “one day” vanish.

   . . . what

   is there I have not forgot?

  Or one day will forget:

  this garden, the breeze

  in stillness, even

  the words, Korean mums.

Without preamble, North’s poem moves outward—to “the romance of the window panes” undercut by “squinting” and irrelevance: “has // nothing // to do with the misguided view” (is not every city a concatenation of these?).

With an incongruity worthy of Monty Python, the fates appear, comically “smoozing” / under the maroon awning of the high-rise (schmoos is more like // it //)  and the poem’s archness, its high-handedness, its Monkian clatter intensifies:

     and the embarrassed-looking sycamores revealing for all they're

     worth

     in their slightly fictionalized but emotionally accurate way,

     which contributes to the overall tone

     without detracting from the realistic participation,

The orphaned words—the ones that hang like ledges—not only emphasize a tentativeness but also a brittleness that spreads from the depiction to the thing depicted. The poem seems to scramble here, with willed awkwardness, to piece together its romanticism and realism, through a process of digging and filling: “slightly fictionalized but emotionally accurate,” “without detracting from the realistic participation” that includes

     a motorbike taking the corner too fast, a cat knowing the worst

     that can possibly happen and managing to avoid it,

     which could be the key signature if not for a free-standing

     radiance just outside, unmoored, a hint of plum or Anjou pear.

The poem’s final movement is given over to the chaotic, phenomenal urban world, with the luck of a savvy cat we can hope to emulate as a “key signature”—a locus of meaning, a codification of tone—“if not for a free-standing / radiance just outside, unmoored, a hint of plum or Anjou pear.” How terrific that “radiance” is not a ledge word, that it washes over the words that follow, that denote closeness and freedom and nuance but are secured in place, tentatively, by the felt accuracy of “hint of plum or Anjou pear.” Charles North’s entrancing and enlivening poem leaves us a in a realm of romantic realism and/or realistic romance. Not only is it unnecessary to choose, but each choice gives way in the face of new ones. We are left in uncertainty, where we belong. It is, after all, the home of luck. – Angela Ball

"The Adlai Stevenson of the Art World" [by Jane Freilicher]

<<<
A 1956 letter written by Ms. Freilicher to Frank O’Hara, who celebrated her in his acclaimed “Jane” poems, initiated various plans to get together, beginning: “Dear Frankie, I was utterly delighted to get your cuddlesome letter. Perhaps you don’t know how much I’m missing you but it is quite a tel’ble lot. It is a terrible thing being the Adlai Stevenson of the art world without a Young Democrat like you by my side.” >>>
<<<
This relationship [with John Ashbery], and the others that grew from it, are the subject of “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets,” an exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Midtown, a show that places Ms. Freilicher’s work in the context of her exalted status among the poets of the New York School — Mr. Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler — to whom she was muse, confidante, beloved brain. “One doesn’t stay friends with somebody for 40 years unless they have a lot of nice qualities, such as brilliance,” Mr. Ashbery wrote two decades ago. “Jane Freilicher is also the wittiest person I have ever known.”

By implication, the show is an exercise in anthropology as well, an exploration of an ever-receding way of social life among successful creative people in the city, one in which the friendships built and circles configured seemed more firmly rooted in genuine affection, in affinity, in shared notions of whimsy, than in the prospect of mutual professional advantage.
>>>

From Gina Bellafante in "Jane Freilicher: A Painter amid Friends," a review of Freilicher's latest show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, The New York Times, May 25, 2013. 

<<<
A 1956 letter written by Ms. Freilicher to Frank O’Hara, who celebrated her in his acclaimed “Jane” poems, initiated various plans to get together, beginning: “Dear Frankie, I was utterly delighted to get your cuddlesome letter. Perhaps you don’t know how much I’m missing you but it is quite a tel’ble lot. It is a terrible thing being the Adlai Stevenson of the art world without a Young Democrat like you by my side.” >>>
<<<
This relationship [with John Ashbery], and the others that grew from it, are the subject of “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets,” an exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Midtown, a show that places Ms. Freilicher’s work in the context of her exalted status among the poets of the New York School — Mr. Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler — to whom she was muse, confidante, beloved brain. “One doesn’t stay friends with somebody for 40 years unless they have a lot of nice qualities, such as brilliance,” Mr. Ashbery wrote two decades ago. “Jane Freilicher is also the wittiest person I have ever known.”

By implication, the show is an exercise in anthropology as well, an exploration of an ever-receding way of social life among successful creative people in the city, one in which the friendships built and circles configured seemed more firmly rooted in genuine affection, in affinity, in shared notions of whimsy, than in the prospect of mutual professional advantage.
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From Gina Bellafante in "Jane Freilicher: A Painter amid Friends," a review of Freilicher's latest show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, The New York Times, May 25, 2013. 

Remembering Paul Auster in Paris, May 18, 2024, Luxembourg Garden

Two Poems [by Amit Majmudar]

from What He Did In Solitary by Amit Majmudar

Embodiment Pantoum

When you’ve had the same lover long enough,
You want the same lover in a different body
So that renewal isn’t quite betrayal
Nor the second first kiss a Judas kiss.

You want the same lover in a different body,
But every resurrection requires a death,
And what tastes like a kiss to the tongue of Judas
Can wither the tongue in a liar’s mouth.

If every resurrection requires a death,
What killed your love for the body you had?
The tongue and all its tastebuds blossom lies.
When you’ve lost your one lover long enough,

The tongue in your mouth can’t taste the kiss.
There was one incarnation, and you betrayed it.
A second first kiss is death to the first love.
You’ll die wanting the same love in the same body.

Nostalgia

Once upon a time. Twice, on her parents’ bed.
She freaked out when she found the human stain
Dried rough in the rough shape of the male brain.
Cautious ever after, after that she said
She liked it when I shot her in the head.
She blew my brains out. Bang bang, I was dead,
Unarousable there in the first floor master.
Sometimes, on long drives, she’d gun me. Faster, faster
I tongued the olive pressed between her thighs.
Floaters, she swore, as bright as rescue flares
Would dive across the dark behind her eyes.
I pearl dove and never once came up for air
There in her aunt’s houseboat on Lake Champlain.
The wetter she got the harder I smelled the rain.

-- Amit Majmudar

Click here for Luke Hankins' take on Amit Majmudar:
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/10/patrice-de-la-tour-du-pin-and-amit-majmudar-by-luke-hankins.html

It's nice to go traveling. . .

 

 

Covert Art

"Cover Art is also covert art," one friend said, and a second sent me this sparkling picture by a Belgian painter I had never heard of, Henri Joseph Thomas (1878-1972). I also found the Olympia,, below.  DL

Fulke Greville's Epitaph for Huxley's "Point Counter Point"

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!

Born under one law, to another bound,

Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity:

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws—

Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?’

—Fulke Greville

the epigraph for Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point

June Events 2024 dance performance festival likely to tickle critic [By Tracy Danison]

“Tonewall”, performance by Jazz Barbé, Laura Frigato and Léon. Photo © Cie Parc Thumette

The other day I ran across a film from Finland called Dogs don’t wear pants by Jukka-Pekka (J-P) Valkeapää, who has obviously not had the pleasure of seeing Parisians with their spoiled lapdogs of a chilly winter morning.

The title tickles me: “Dogs don’t wear pants”, indeed. I spent a whole evening chuckling about it. Karine and I had good laugh translating it into French. According to her, it can’t be, I am to understand, “Les Chiens ne portent pas de pantalon”, which didn’t make the beloved smirk but must be ”Un chien n’a pas de culotte”, which does. I notice that that’s the actual French title uses “pantalon”.

Thus revved up, I went to see J-P Valkeapää’s Dogs don’t next day.

“Vagabudus” performance by Idio Chichava. Photo © Mariano Silva

There are many words or phrases such as the Dogs don’t film title that just tickle me, make me merry, push me to action.

I reckon this tickling is the expression of the power poetry has over me. Poetic power runs from amusing to consoling and, beyond that, I believe to opening the doors to perception, imagination, beauty.

For instance, I ran into a David Lehman poem just now called To be a Guest on the Grace Cavilieri Show – “The Poet and the Poem”. It tickled me into reconciling with the idea that somebody might take real pleasure in the things that loom large there: banana splits and hot chocolate and watching or admiring a show called “The Poet and the Poem”, or God knows, Kierkegaard.

“Le Cabaret de la rose blanche”, performance by Radhouane El Meddeb. Photo © Agathe Poupeney

More important, well beyond the acceptance of the possibility of otherness and, if it’s not beauty, truth and imagination, then it’s something damned close, Lehman’s words tickled me into pondering my song of myself. And it’s no matter that Lehman may or may not have intended what happened or seen the possibility of it once he’d finished scribbling.

Sure, To be a Guest has literary merit – image and language that embody intention – but I don’t think its tickling power really comes from a well-made echo of the story the words eventually tell.

I believe the tickling is actually the sensation that I’ve brushed shoulders with the word maker, the person: that would be something like sharing the sensibility of writing Lehman becoming living David.

“Dona Lourdès” performance by Némo Camus and Robson Ledesma. Photo © Valeriia Shcherbina

How that sort of experience happens, I’m not sure.

I am sure, though, that it’s not the words but the happening + applied art (of words or otherwise) that bring the tickle, poetic power, with it.

Dogs don’t wear pants happens when a widower gets into relations with a professional dominatrix while waiting for his daughter to finish an appointment with a tattoo artist.

The form of words attracts my attention, like a twig breaking on the narrow, seemingly empty, forest path behind me,

Widower: (Petulantly) Why do I have to take off my pants?

Dominatrix: (With assurance) Dogs don’t wear pants.

But what happens then may or may not get me to something beyond or well beyond the words.

“Something like this”, performance by Sonya Lindfors. Photo © Tuukka Ervasti

So it is that the title “June Events”, the annual pre-summer dance performance festival at the Atelier de Paris, always tickles me. That’s through the form of words: “events” awaiting final significance –  I mean “events” such as “January 6^th”, “February 24^th”, or “Charlie Hebdo” – and the historic June Days of 1791, attract my attention:

Attraction through intention: new live work by 21 diverse dance performance creators who, as I noted last year, have moved on from developing dance or performance genres to developing an art of movement (The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words June 29, 2023: “Varieties of dance performance: trading a mess of pottage for sense and awareness”.

Attraction through the festival’s execution: physical intensity and setting – 15 sessions over 18 calendar days, mostly in the Bois de Vincennes (with the natural ambiance-potential well-exploited by Atelier production) and probably the best overall environment a dance performance fan can get for the money.

“La Probabilite du Neant”, performance by Alexandra ‘Spicey’ Landé. Photo © Gabriel Paquin_______

Performances and principal creators, June Events, 22 May – 8 June, 2024

Jimmy, Pierre Pontvianne; Vagabundus, Idio Chichava; Something like this, Sonya Lindfors; Heliosfera, Vania Vaneau; Cherche forêt, Ikram Benchrif and Paul Girard; Tonewall, Jazz Barbé, Laura Frigato, Thumette Léon; Shido, Lil’C; Tropique du képone, Myriam Soulanges and Marlène Myrtil; Volcelest, Capucine Dufour; Tendre Carcasse, Arthur Perole; Cabaret Brouillon, Loïc Touzé;Le Cabaret de la rose blanche, Radhouane El Meddeb; Agrimi Fauve, Lénio Kaklea; La probabilité du Néant, Spicey; Unarmoured, Clara Furey; Contre-forme, Marie Orts, Talia de Vries and Roméo Agid; L’Opéra du Villageois, Zora Snake; Fampitaha, Fampita, Fampitàna, Soa Ratsifandrihana; Dona Lourdès, Némo Camus and Robson Ledesma; Zonder, Ayelen Parolin

"Men Marry What They Need" [by John Ciardi]

"Men Marry What They Need" [by John Ciardi] 

John Ciardi, a poet and editor whose verse translation of Dante many of us read in college, and who is sometimes patronized as "middle-brow," wrote an amazing poem, which you should read: "Men Marry What They Need":

Men marry what they need. I marry you,
morning by morning, day by day, night by night,
and every marriage makes this marriage new.

In the broken name of heaven, in the light
that shatters granite, by the spitting shore,
in air that leaps and wobbles like a kite,

I marry you from time and a great door
is shut and stays shut against wind, sea, stone,
sunburst, and heavenfall. And home once more

inside our walls of skin and struts of bone,
man-woman, woman-man, and each the other,
I marry you by all dark and all dawn

and have my laugh at death. Why should I bother
the flies about me? Let them buzz and do.
Men marry their queen, their daughter, or their mother

by hidden names, but that thin buzz whines through:
where reasons are no reason, cause is true.
Men marry what they need. I marry you.

-- John Ciardi

I wonder what a woman would say in reply. -- DL

from the archive; first posted May 16, 2012

The Magical, Mystical Claire Bateman [by Nin Andrews]

A religious studies major in college, I’m a sucker for poets who have a spiritual leaning, even if I am an agnostic who struggles with faith. I come by my doubts naturally. When I was a girl, my father took the family to an Episcopal church to experience what he called “an exposure to cultural archaism.”  I remember the picture of Pale Jesus in the foyer. Where did you come from?  I wanted to ask. Norway? It didn’t help matters that the same church had served as a school for white children whose parents opposed integration in the 50’s.

 Nevertheless, I envy writers with faith. I enjoy reading the poets who have a Biblical story or logic to frame their works, poets like Richard Chess whose engaging monthly posts on Slate describe his life as a dialog with poetry and the Torah. Poets like Christian Wiman, whose book, Bright Abyss, speaks of poetry and faith in the face of personal illness and the current global crisis.  Poets like H. L. Hix who rewrote the Gospel. Poets like Charles Wright, whose poems often possess a spiritual longing and humor that I can't seem to get enough of.

One of my favorite mystics is the poet, Claire Bateman, whose magical writings are a pure delight.  

Book Soup

When the youngest child in a family feels ready to give up the self-illuminating book all little ones sleep with, it’s presented at breakfast to the mother, who drops it into a large cook-pot where the night books of the older siblings have been waiting, tattered but still faithfully exuding small flashes of phosphorescence.

Everybody stands back as she pummels and kneads until the bindings come loose and the pages separate to simmer in the mingled lights all day long.

At bedtime, she ladles out a portion to each child to drink as they enter this new and longest phase of their family life, their stories glowing unseen within them.

The Day Doris Day Said Good Night [by David Lehman]

The great Doris Day, who died the other day [May 2019], was celebrated for her work in romantic comedies of the 1960s. She was box office gold with James Garner, Cary Grant, and Rock Hudson. But her real achievement was as a singer. In musical movies she gave outstanding performances as Ruth Etting (in Love Me or Leave Me in 1955) and as Mrs. Gus Kahn (in I'll See You in My Dreams in 1953). One of the finest of all Big Band vocalists, whose version of "Sentimental Journey" is a madeleine that can transport you to 1945, she sang with the Les Brown Orchestra when swing was king.

Maybe her biggest single hit was the Academy Award-winning song of 1956 in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much in which she played opposite James Stewart. In honor of Doris Day, "Che Sera, Sera" was sung at sing-alongs in smart clubs all over the nation yesterday.

Doris gets her own day in my Playlist:

1 / 4 / 18

Doris Day is a great screen name because
of Oscar Levant’s witticism  (he knew Doris Day
“before she was a virgin”) but mostly because
of the voice of Doris at break of day or when
driving on Rte 17 and listening to  her sing
“Sentimental Journey” with Les Brown (“and
his band of renown”) and “Dream a Little Dream
of Me” or “Someone Like You,” “A Hundred Years
from Today,” or “Love Me or Leave Me,”
the face cherubic, the flip side of Sinatra’s
brooding in Young at Heart, blonde
and relentlessly upbeat, but there is sex in that voice

from the archive; first posted May 15, 2019

Two Poems by Melinda Smith [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Here are two poems, "Stendhal Syndrome" and "Fugal State," from Canberra based poet Melinda Smith, both taken from her most recent collection Man-Handled (2020). Smith won the  2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call.

 

 

Stendhal syndrome is a curious phenomenon in which a person suffers dysautonomic symptoms, such as tremors and fainting, in the presence of works of art. Reading about the condition reminded me of the great opening passage of Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station, in which the narrator watches a man crying in front of  Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross in the Prado, and wonders if the man is having a “profound experience of art.” The narrator, a poet, worries that he is incapable of having such an experience, and is deeply suspicious of anyone who claims they can: “Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, the profound experience of the absence of profundity.” 

The speaker of Smith’s “Stendhal syndrome” takes this skepticism as the consensus position and, in disbelief of her own experience, claims an exception. The fact that she is arguing her case to a judge suggests there is a kind of failing in allowing oneself to be so affected by art, a slouching of our modern, permanently ironized, posture. It’s interesting to consider where the guilt arises from: is it too indulgent an act to submit so fully to an artwork? Or, perhaps, are such experiences only available to rubes and philistines, and to admit to one would be to admit to one’s own lack of sophistication?

 

Stendhal syndrome

 

Swooning is so 1817. But I can say truthfully, it happened, 

this century, in the Uffizi. It happened.

 

Tears, even. I know. I thought

I was past that. I thought we all were.

 

Everyone cringes at words like transport,

ecstasy. I was drunk, your honour, drunk on paint -

 

no, drunk on charcoal and paper,

those only. Or the echo of prayer. Struck 

 

dumb and ringing like a cuffed head, a bell,

a gong, trembling, concussed, a pulsing

 

tuning fork, thrumming the same note

as all the others, overcome by the marks of the master's 

 

hand, this last sketch too much, the straw, just

grey and black on yellowed paper, just perfect 

 

love, caught, still breathing, one radiant face

among thousands, full-on   felling me   still

The following are two definitions of Fugue taken from the Oxford dictionary:

1. Music a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
2. Psychiatry a loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

 

In “Fugal State,” Smith ingeniously demonstrates both definitions in the repetition of a single line: “You are always beginning again.”

Fugal State

 

You are always beginning again—

it is only a matter of degree:

you walk into a room, forgetting

 

the book you came looking for, walk out

with a dirty glass you lay down

another ring without realising

 

like a tree it doesn’t hurt a bit

You are always beginning again:

you walk into the forest, forgetting,

 

there is a storm, there is a morning,

you walk out, trailing possibilities

from your hands they drip, like

 

snapped branches There was a storm,

there was a morning There was

a name, once, a specific and grievous

 

history, a mobile number, a particular sequence

of houses, an immunity to certain indignities,

there was more and more forgetting

 

Entering a room full of bonsai, you breathe

moss, and cypress, and the clean, bald smell

of long-dry river-stones  The air hums

 

with age, with what the trees have known

and have forgotten and will know again

they are always beginning

 

you breathe, you dream you have been

reborn as a small ceramic deer

You sit under the momiji, the scarlet

 

baby’s hands of the Japanese maple,

in a forest small enough

to fit on a dinner plate

and begin

again

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: May 15, 2024

My friend Maureen Seaton (1947 –2023) was a dedicated collaborator.  She was part of a writing group Tres Abuelas y Una Mamá whose chapbook was just published by Anhinga Press.  Maureen (one of the abuelas) wrote with two other abuelas—Carolina Hospital and Holly Iglesias—and one mamá Nicole Hospital-Medina. This is what I provided for the back cover:

HOW TO GET INTO TROUBLE will delight you in every possible wicked (and sacred) way! Tres Abuelas y Una Mamá weave their poetry magic, collaborating on poems so sly you’ll never be sure which mamá wrote which (witch?) line. Now that you’ve had your cake and eaten it too, surrender to the wiles of your foolhardy heart and go wherever she wants to go. When the poets go solo (each poem is identified by initials) you still feel the influence of the other mamás. This is a gem of a chapbook with great advice— Call upon a fairy who is yourself. You’ll find yourself reading and chuckling then wanting to write poems, too, to join in the mischievous fun.

You can hear this fabulous foursome here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lOWpHgacmY