The Best American Poetry

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 31, 2024

Judy Brackett Crowe’s The Watching Sky was published by Cornerstone Press earlier this year.  The poems therein are those of an expert storyteller, full of details of rural America and the natural world. She tackles the perils of class and climate change with an especially good poem about a tornado. Crowe looks back on her life with awe and candor, a nostalgia rooted in a way of life that seems long gone.  We are lucky to have her document it all for us!  Here’s a sample poem:

Geography of a Cloud

Once on a long-ago winter’s day she drew

a huge map of her world on butcher paper,

using every crayon stub in the small

cedar box that held the bright clear colors

of her life, an immense cloud-shaped world,

endless, with hills and wide rivers,

stick people, kind people like Teacher

and her aunties and her friend Jane,

houses, horses, dogs, sunflowers

and hollyhocks. The torn blue edges

were the sky and whatever lived beyond

the fall-off places and beyond the sky—

roiling deserts, flat black seas, ice-bound lands—

triangle creatures with wiry whiskers

and many legs.

 

Later, hundreds of thousands of miles later,

bittersweet and periwinkle and Prussian blue

and flesh and magenta later, and thistle, salmon,

gold and silver later, after decades in the fall-off

places, she found herself in that cloud-shaped

map again, the colorful world still smelling

of crayon and cedar, of onions and summer,

and of the fields she’d looked down upon

from her childhood window in that long-ago

time, surprised to find her map so small

and so red, blue, and yellow strange.

 

There's no business like show business. . .

 

"Schubert's Unfinished" [in "Literary Matters"]

Schubert’s Unfinished

Shall I devote a poem to the fragment, the unfinished?

Yes, because each thing is a fragment

and some works were meant to be unfinished

like Schubert’s Unfinished, my prime example

of the aesthetic of incompleteness,

or Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” its sublime ending

belying the fable of the poem’s composition,

an opium dream. Nor shall we overlook

the slaves of Michelangelo, encased in marble,

Shelley’s exit line (“ ‘Then what is Life?’ I cried”)

and Kafka’s novels, which begin everywhere

and end nowhere, as if no ending were equal

to the nothingness at the end of the rainbow,

the wall too high to climb at the end of the walk.

-- David Lehman

Schubert's unfinished" is one of "Three Aesthetic Questions" published  in "Literary Matters."
For the other two poems, click here: https://www.literarymatters.org/16-1-three-aesthetic-questions/

Frank O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency" [by DL]

Since the season premiere of Mad Men on AMC last night, people have been scrambling and googling to find out more about the poet Frank O'Hara and his book Meditations in an Emergency. In the show, the man reading it (with horn rimmed glasses and curly hair: code for highbrow) is sitting next to Don Draper at the bar of a midtown cafe -- like perhaps Larre's, where O'Hara, professionally a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, lunched often. Draper asks the man about the book. "You probably wouldn't like it," he is told. But Don buys it, we see him reading it in his office, and the episode concludes with Don's voiceover reading the fourth and final part of O'Hara's poem "Mayakovsky" in Meditations in an Emergency.

The title poem of the book began as a very sophisticated literary joke, an allusion to John Donne's "Meditations on Emergent Occasions." But as sometimes happened in O'Hara's poetry, the joke turned out to have a surplus of meaning. His poems are meditations -- but not the kind that comes after hours of quiet thought; they proceed from the heart of noise; they are written on the run, in a hurry, on a lunch break, in a perennial emergency. O'Hara's poems perfectly capture the pace of a New York day in 1962. He is a master of the art of gentle self-laceration: "Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern."

from the archive, July 28, 2008

Adrian Blevins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________

Quiet Part Out Loud

You are 9/10ths the heresies you cherish /  1/10^th something saintly, beaten & sly.   
                                                                                                ---- Rita Mae Reese

 

Years after it was over and he was gone, I would think of the unfortunate woman
he was living with now and engaged to marry. Poor woman with the face so pale and flat

like a slide down a mountain rock. Poor plus-fifty bride-to-be with the voice too whispery
and the chin too jutty. The hair too thin and white, the thighs too big, the walk so lumbering.

Years after it was over and he was gone, the face of that woman would wake me like I myself
had been recruited to fuck her and I had to get my courage up. Did I suspect that my ex-husband

couldn’t really want to do it? Or was I trying to find a way to finally face his lack of a certain
vital fervor? Was my ex-husband also unlovely? A petty bureaucrat?  Stupidly matter-of-fact?

A tawdry accident? But the teeth too small! The cheeks too wide! And the whole head far too big
like a pond on the end of a stick. And me so superficial with my sick heart in the darkness going

horse, horse, cow, cow. Yes yours truly that hollow like a puddle on a road at midnight in a ghost town
by amine. Honestly I did not care what he did except for what it said about the ugliness in me

that I could not seem to get over the ugliness of her. Unless that’s wrong and I did care that he would
dare taint our lost little family with a woman with a face like that. We had lived on a granite hillside

overlooking an ancient lake in a house of African violets. All around us my father’s paintings
like a cove of orange blossoms. Or a river of luxe bodies oiled to flame on a sunset beach.

And this antique lamp my mother gave us—this knockout of a lamp glowing on the desk
where I shut my eyes now to try to see everything like something died and made it Queen.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Adrian Blevins is the author of Status Pending, winner of the Maine Literary Prize for Poetry (Four Way Books, 2023); Appalachians Run Amok, Live from the Homesick Jamboree; The Brass Girl Brouhaha; and Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, a co-edited collection of essays by new and emerging Appalachian writers. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, among others. She directs the Creative Writing Program at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                         Quinten Massys (Flemish, ca. 1465--1530), Ill-Matched Lovers.

 

On Ashbery's Birthday (July 28)

This is from the 1970s, Kirkdale Bookshop, in London:

"The doorknob came off in my hand!" (on Les Gottesman) [by Bruce Kawin]

Kawin to Gottesman

 The elevator didn’t stop
this morning, the
solenoid’s
failing.

Every day
the long ones and
the short ones
you’re missing.

The Doorknob: Les Gottesman, Columbia Review, and the 1968 Student Protest

I met Les Gottesman in a Columbia dorm in 1963. All freshmen in the college had to spend their first year in a dorm. Our rooms were two doors apart. Most of the rooms were doubles, but I don’t remember anything about his roommate or whether he had one. Les and I became friends with another freshman, Aaron Fogel, and the three of us used to hang out and talk about books. All three of us wanted to be writers, and we all joined the college literary magazine, Columbia Review. In time, each of us became its editor.

An editor served for a year after spending at least a year on the editorial board. When Les and I were freshmen, Phil Lopate was the editor and Ron Padgett was on the board. The issues they produced were inspiring, brilliant work, authentically literary. Lopate and Padgett were seniors, and after they graduated, the next editor was Alan Feldman. In addition to the commercially printed literary review, we began to publish mimeographed books as Columbia Review Press. The first book was Six Arguments, a novel by Carol Lopate.

Aaron Fogel became the editor after Alan, and I was next. Les stayed on an extra year, and in his fifth year he was the editor. His competition had been David Shapiro, the poet who had published January, a hardcover book of poems, in his freshman year. Les was editor of the Review in 1967-68, the year of the student protest against Columbia’s plan to build a gym in a nearby park in Harlem, with no consideration for the people who used that space. To clear out the protestors, Columbia called the cops. (The more recent student protest and Columbia’s reaction may echo some of this, but the university president we had to deal with was both inadequate and inflexible, consistently ignoring what students and the community were trying to tell him.)

Les and the next (joint) editors, Hilton Obenzinger and Alan Senauke, were among those who occupied forbidden buildings on the campus. One of our greatest English professors, Frederick Dupee, was one of the faculty who tried to intervene between the students and the police, and like many of the students he was clubbed by a policeman—in the head, and he fell to the ground. Steve Vinocor, a guy I’d gone to high school with who was at that time enrolled in the Jewish Theological Seminary and studying to be a rabbi, was dragged down one of the narrow circular staircases in the library’s stacks by a cop who pulled his feet while Steve’s head dropped onto each steel step. A photo of David Shapiro smoking a cigar in the office of Columbia’s president went the predigital equivalent of viral.

David Shapiro, who died only a few months ago, went on to teach art and to publish volumes of poems that are essential reading. Les Gottesman, who died only a few years ago, had moved to the Bay Area, gotten married, worked in the school system, continued to write poetry, and among other things created Omerta Publications. He was the editor and publisher of Omerta’s books: original poetry and prose, there must have been more than 30 of them. As an editor he was both generous and ruthless. The last book Les told me about acquiring for Omerta, and he was very happy about it, was by Diane di Prima. Shortly after that I heard from David Lehman that Les died.

Les missed today, just as he missed, and was missing from, the recent day I wrote the poem. The doorknob came off in his hand. By which I mean:

One day when we were both undergraduates, I was sitting on a corner of the library steps when Les ran up the steps to me, talking fast—telling me what happened and his poem about it:

                              Paranoia

               The doorknob came off in my hand!

The doorknob came off in my hand!

He repeated it, he told me how it felt when he’d just now gone to open a door but the doorknob had come out of the door when he pulled on it, and he left both of us laughing and scared—because behind the laughing and the poem-making was the realization of how something we feared or didn’t expect, death maybe, could just suddenly be there. I don’t think he published it.

7/ 23/ 24

by Bruce Kawin

 for David Lehman

Mystery Guest

.

Clues:
I was a quiz kid, took a trip by train to Chicago.
Went to prep school, Harvard. Did not play tennis.
Lived in what had been Norman Mailer's rooms (Dunster House).
Who am I?

Sonnet ("Only until this cigarette is ended") [by Edna St. Vincent Milllay]

Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The color and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

“The Dover Bitch” by Anthony Hecht & Arnold's "Dover Beach"

“The Dover Bitch”

 A Criticism of Life: for Andrews Wanning

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour.

See Late Romance: A Poet's Life by David Yezzi, a biography of Hecht published this year by St. Martin's Press. 

Here is Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach":

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

 

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

 

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 

Introduction to Alan Wearne (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

Of all the major Australian poets, none have captured the Australian idiom as faithfully and expansively as Alan Wearne. A tacit member of the famed “Generation of ‘68”—the disputed label given to a group of poets who came to prominence at the end of the 1960s and reshaped the nation’s (then predominantly conservative) poetic landscape—Wearne has fashioned a truly original and idiosyncratic oeuvre, renowned for its narrative, character driven poetry. Often epic in their form and scale (his most successful published works are arguably the verse novels The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers Part 1 & 2), Wearne's poems take tales of urban Australia and unfurl them simultaneously in two directions: outwards through the country's sprawling and scattered metropolises, and inwards towards their characters’s equally expansive and discordant internal lives. Lovesick suburban drug dealers caught in webs of international power, adulterous politicians, blue-collar workers with philosophical bents—Wearne’s characters, via a cacophony of monologues, sing of an often bizarre, banal, endearing, brutal modern Australia, with irony, wit, compassion and pathos. 

Near Believing (2022), gathers a selection of these monologues and narratives from Wearne’s nearly 60 years of writing, from 1967 up to 2021. The first poem in the selection, “Saint Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete,” was written on the 22nd of July, 1967, the day before the poet’s nineteenth birthday—an extraordinarily precocious feat. The poem comically sketches Jesus as a first class runner. His apostle Bartholomew, unimpressed with his master’s teachings (“Brilliant. Yes. Yet never near to God”), finds Christ’s true grace in the splendor of his athletic prowess: “often we came down the mountains / (jogging loosely, never with a cramp) / my running partner, heading for Jerusalem, / appeared as if his feet were next to God.” 

Wearne has said that his poems are “rather like autobiographies in which I don’t appear.” While “Saint Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete” is of course a comic poem, it is more complex than the farcical portrait of Jesus the jogger it at first glance appears to be. For me, with my Jesuit upbringing, the opening phrase, “Always in training”, makes me think not only of training in an athletic sense (although I do like the idea of Jesus as an annoying, obsessive fitness junky), but a religious one also: the human incompleteness that requires the constant training of the soul to bring it closer to God in order to be filled with His grace; a process which is never complete (always training), or to paraphrase another poet “created unfit, commanded to be sound.” Meanwhile, the distinction between Bartholomew’s disdain for Christ’s words (“even when I felt he’d gone too far, / think Here we go again out came the logic / smooth as a circle”), and his reverence for Jesus’ actions—or action, perhaps the most rudimentary action of all: running—might inverse the hypocrisy the poet (or reader) found in the Christian orders of his youth, whose actions often fell short of their words.

 

Alan Wearne (photo by Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne)

Alan Wearne has published over ten collections of poetry, including The Nightmarkets (1986) which won the ALS Gold Medal, The Lovemakers (2001) which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the NSW Premier's Book of the Year, The Australian Popular Songbook (2008)  and Mixed Business which is to be published by Puncher and Whattman later this year. He is also the founder and editor of Grand Parade poets, which he launched in 2011 and has published fourteen collections of Australian poetry to date.

Saint Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete

 

         Always in training. Yet helping with his work

was partly boring, sometimes even nasty.

Still, even when I felt he’d gone too far,

think Here we go again out came the logic

smooth as a circle, Roman disciplined.

Brilliant. Yes. Yet never near to God.

         Only when he ran.

Only when I saw him striding.

(He’d leap and throw his arms above his head.)

It really was a case of Run with me.

I did. And often we came down the mountains

(jogging loosely, never with a cramp)

my running partner, heading for Jerusalem,

appeared as if his feet were next to God.

        This too was a feat: running for a month

(as rumour had it).

                            Sprinting in the temple

was nothing less than perfect. Tables knocked,

whips raised and money lost.

He charged them twice.

         Of course revenge was needed, and his arms

were raised once more; his feet, however, broken;

sort of enforced retirement. Still,

he made a comeback to end all comebacks.

                                                                       Once

there were ten, and I half-walking, pacing

(my room-mates, seated, limbered-up in thought).

We stopped the noise and movement; standing still,

I heard the footsteps pounding up the stairs. 

from "The Complete History of the Boy" [for Joe Lehman on 7/24/24]

from "The Complete History of the Boy"

The boy was mad at his mother who didn’t hang up
the phone right away when he fell and hurt his head.
He was indignant. “Hurts are more important than inventions.”

He dreamed his father died. “Mama told me in the car.”
When he woke up he climbed into bed with his father, happy.

He wanted to discuss the floor plan of the house:
“Is my room over the dining room?”

He wanted to know which was more important,
the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building.
The former is a symbol of liberty, the latter a symbol
of industry, his mother explained. That clinched things
for the boy. He unhesitatingly chose liberty.

“Which is more important, religion or God?”

He was still five years old.
They found a special school for him.
He took classes in Magical Thinking and excelled
in the making of weird predictions and dire threats
that scared you even though you knew
they wouldn’t come true.

He also learned how to walk and talk in his sleep.

Two years later he saw Hans Hofmann’s “Mirage”
only this time on the cover of a book
with his father’s name on it.
“Awesome,” the boy said.

The world was still a dance not a duel, with invisible swords.
And at the museum the Hofmann hadn’t changed a bit.

Joy in the house, laughter in the halls, the boy in pajamas:
There were still a few good boyhood years left.

-- David Lehman

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 24, 2024

This month, Graywolf Press reissued Claudia Rankine’s Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. The twenty years since its first publication are contextualized in a brilliant intro by Rankine.  While she was then engaging with terrorism, George W’s wars, and race riots, the book, sadly, holds to be as relevant today—even more so. “I stop watching the news. I want to continue, watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope.” She is writing about the reelection of Bush, but she could as easily be writing about the pandemic or any of the other tragedies that have followed. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo. The personal is political and the political is personal. And Rankine is able to make it a lyric. It was interesting to read in her introduction that Richard Howard first identified the poems in Don't Let Me Be Lonely as “lyric.” I was mesmerized re-reading this first in her lyric trilogy.  It holds up—and I only wish it felt more like history than our ongoing present.

"Auguries of Innocence" by William Blake -- Great Poems of the World, Episode 7, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

 

Auguries of Innocence

William Blake

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage 

A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons

Shudders Hell thr' all its regions 

A dog starvd at his Masters Gate

Predicts the ruin of the State 

A Horse misusd upon the Road

Calls to Heaven for Human blood 

Each outcry of the hunted Hare

A fibre from the Brain does tear 

A Skylark wounded in the wing 

A Cherubim does cease to sing 

The Game Cock clipd & armd for fight

Does the Rising Sun affright 

Every Wolfs & Lions howl

Raises from Hell a Human Soul 

The wild deer, wandring here & there 

Keeps the Human Soul from Care 

The Lamb misusd breeds Public Strife

And yet forgives the Butchers knife 

The Bat that flits at close of Eve

Has left the Brain that wont Believe

The Owl that calls upon the Night

Speaks the Unbelievers fright

He who shall hurt the little Wren

Shall never be belovd by Men 

He who the Ox to wrath has movd

Shall never be by Woman lovd

The wanton Boy that kills the Fly

Shall feel the Spiders enmity 

He who torments the Chafers Sprite

Weaves a Bower in endless Night 

The Catterpiller on the Leaf

Repeats to thee thy Mothers grief 

Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly 

For the Last Judgment draweth nigh 

He who shall train the Horse to War

Shall never pass the Polar Bar 

The Beggars Dog & Widows Cat 

Feed them & thou wilt grow fat 

The Gnat that sings his Summers Song

Poison gets from Slanders tongue 

The poison of the Snake & Newt

Is the sweat of Envys Foot 

The poison of the Honey Bee

Is the Artists Jealousy

The Princes Robes & Beggars Rags

Are Toadstools on the Misers Bags 

A Truth thats told with bad intent

Beats all the Lies you can invent 

It is right it should be so 

Man was made for Joy & Woe 

And when this we rightly know 

Thro the World we safely go 

Joy & Woe are woven fine 

A Clothing for the soul divine 

Under every grief & pine

Runs a joy with silken twine 

The Babe is more than swadling Bands

Throughout all these Human Lands

Tools were made & Born were hands 

Every Farmer Understands

Every Tear from Every Eye

Becomes a Babe in Eternity 

This is caught by Females bright

And returnd to its own delight 

The Bleat the Bark Bellow & Roar 

Are Waves that Beat on Heavens Shore 

The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath

Writes Revenge in realms of Death 

The Beggars Rags fluttering in Air

Does to Rags the Heavens tear 

The Soldier armd with Sword & Gun 

Palsied strikes the Summers Sun

The poor Mans Farthing is worth more

Than all the Gold on Africs Shore

One Mite wrung from the Labrers hands

Shall buy & sell the Misers Lands 

Or if protected from on high 

Does that whole Nation sell & buy 

He who mocks the Infants Faith

Shall be mockd in Age & Death 

He who shall teach the Child to Doubt

The rotting Grave shall neer get out 

He who respects the Infants faith

Triumphs over Hell & Death 

The Childs Toys & the Old Mans Reasons

Are the Fruits of the Two seasons 

The Questioner who sits so sly 

Shall never know how to Reply 

He who replies to words of Doubt

Doth put the Light of Knowledge out 

The Strongest Poison ever known

Came from Caesars Laurel Crown 

Nought can Deform the Human Race

Like to the Armours iron brace 

When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow

To peaceful Arts shall Envy Bow 

A Riddle or the Crickets Cry

Is to Doubt a fit Reply 

The Emmets Inch & Eagles Mile

Make Lame Philosophy to smile 

He who Doubts from what he sees

Will neer Believe do what you Please 

If the Sun & Moon should Doubt 

Theyd immediately Go out 

To be in a Passion you Good may Do 

But no Good if a Passion is in you 

The Whore & Gambler by the State

Licencd build that Nations Fate 

The Harlots cry from Street to Street 

Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet 

The Winners Shout the Losers Curse 

Dance before dead Englands Hearse 

Every Night & every Morn

Some to Misery are Born 

Every Morn and every Night

Some are Born to sweet delight 

Some are Born to sweet delight 

Some are Born to Endless Night 

We are led to Believe a Lie

When we see not Thro the Eye

Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night 

When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light 

God Appears & God is Light

To those poor Souls who dwell in Night 

But does a Human Form Display

To those who Dwell in Realms of day
(1803)

 

The Freedom to Write [by Nin Andrews]

I've been worrying a lot lately. On a global scale, I've been worrying about . . . well, just about everything. On a personal scale, I've been worrying about my forthcoming memoir, Son of a Bird. I feel I might have spoken too freely in it  . . .  

My father used to say, “Only the artists are free.” It was his answer to Rousseau’s “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” A wannabe artist himself, he gave my siblings and me drawing pencils and pads as children, as well as drawing books—the kind that taught you how to draw a horse or a cow or a cat by starting with a circle. Yes, everything can start with a circle—or series of circles.

At night the family would sit by the fire, drawing. Sometimes he would give a prize for the best picture. Two sisters were extremely talented. One could draw horses that leapt off the page. Another, an ocean that lapped at my feet. Whatever they drew, my father would correct. I watched as his pen come down on their pictures, and the horses froze. The ocean, too. One mark, and the pictures died. The marks were technically correct, but they were also disturbing. They drained the pictures of magic.  “Do not touch my picture,” I said when he checked on my work. “Okay,” he said with a shrug, adding, “You could use some help. But it doesn’t matter—you aren’t exactly gifted.”

I agreed with his assessments. My father was a man who told the truth, even the cruel truth.  Later, when I began writing, and I first published a poem in The Paris Review, he called to tell me my poem was embarrassing. Women, he said, shouldn't write like that.  If I chose to continue, I should think about whether or not I wanted to publish. I saw his point. I did think about it. I decided yes, I did want to publish poems like that.  

After our conversation, I leaned into embarrassment. This was back in the early 1990’s, and I didn’t know other women poets who were writing about sex. The Vagina Monologues had not been published.  I didn’t have an MFA. I hadn’t read Kim Addonizio or Denise Duhamel or Molly Peacock or Sharon Olds. But I did feel a certain creative energy and power in leaning into my own discomfort.

People ask me now if I ever winced  at my work. Yes, I did. If I received creepy calls from men. Yes, I did. If I lost friends. Yes, I did. If women responded to me oddly, too. Yes. (I had one woman ask me after a reading to tell her how to have an orgasm.) If I have any shame about my body of work. Sometimes. I still have poems I’ve held back, poems with titles like “Don’t Look Now” and “The Magic Pussy.” But they would not be startling by today’s standards.    

I have always admired poets who feel free to speak their minds, who toss aside the criticisms of men and culture and tradition and expectations. I love boldness in writers, especially women writers. It’s refreshing in a world that wants to keep us small, cramped, easily defined. 

That said, I also wonder about the role our parents play in who we become, what we do, say, write . . . 

The Sisters of Sexual Treasure by Sharon Olds

As soon as my sister and I got out of our
mother’s house, all we wanted to
do was fuck, obliterate
her tiny sparrow body and narrow
grasshopper legs. The men’s bodies
were like our father’s body! The massive
hocks, flanks, thighs, elegant
knees, long tapered calves—
we could have him there, the steep forbidden
buttocks, backs of the knees, the cock
in our mouth, ah the cock in our mouth.
                           Like explorers who have
discovered a lost city, we went
nuts with joy, undressed the men
slowly and carefully, as if
uncovering buried artifacts which
proved our theory of the lost culture:
that if Mother said it wasn’t there,
it was there.

Paul Genega: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________

Clip / Caste

 

It’s the Friday before a holiday so the barber shop

is wild with boys, all from my school, none a friend.

 

Glum in the back, I wait to be summoned to one of four

barbers. Jimmy the owner up front is the one you want

 

and the cool boys from the nice blocks swarm

his chair, jostling each other, laughing big laughs

 

until they are called to the clippers, while I—

predictably—get Pete, short guy with the fourth chair

 

who quickly snips, buzzes, rubs in green goo, combs.

I hand him the coin father gave me for the tip.

 

He says nothing. Nor do I. Outside in the gathering

dusk, Jimmy’s boys are waiting for their pals.

 

Our haircuts, I see, all look perfectly the same.

But theirs are better.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Paul Genega is the author of Outtakes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2023 (Salmon Poetry, 2023) and six previous collections. His poetry received the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, the Lucille Medwick Award from The New York Quarterly, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. He is Professor Emeritus at Bloomfield College, New Jersey, where he founded the creative writing program, taught literature and writing, and served as chair of Humanities. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                 Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang, Brooklyn, NY, 1959

A Toast to Luciano Berio's "Sinfonia," 3rd movement / and the scherzo of Mahler's 2nd symphony

Greatness - the scherzo of Mahler's second symphony ("the Resurrection") with superimposed words culled from Beckett and others. . . .With great thanks to Lewis Saul, who introduced me to this music. -- DL

and here is the scherzo without the words:

"How It Will Be" [by Mitch Sisskind]

Sometimes you're tired maybe because you
Didn't sleep last night or you drank too much
So even if you did sleep it wasn't a real sleep 
Yet somehow you make it through the day 
Until around 4 or 5 pm you lie down and sleep
Till maybe midnight when you briefly wake up 
To check the time and then go back to sleep
Clear until morning when you at last awaken
To the sun shining and the birds chirping 
And any dog or cat you had in your life 

Is there jumping up and down with joy and 
Some even peeing with wild excitement and 

Because they can all talk now they're saying 

"We've been waiting for you!" That's how it will be.

The "Only Poems" Interview [with David Lehman]

As a graduate student at Columbia, I alternated with Michael Andre as host of a weekly radio program for WKCR-FM. We called it "The Only Poetry Show." In the first weeks, we played Luciano Berio's "Sinfonia" and recordings of T. S. Eliot and other poets. Morris Dickstein came and talked about contemporary ficrion; Ron Horning read Robert Desnos's "Fantomas." Bill Zavatsky talked about writing poetry while Bill Evans played piano. There were songs from Franz Schubert, "The Three Penny Opera," and William Blake, and poems from John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

What fun to be interviewed, more than fifty years later, from a new outfit called "Only Poems."

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more This newsletter is run by ONLY POEMS. Read more about why we’re doing this here. Paid subscriptions help fund the magazine. We also offer workshops & editorial feedback. Shaping American Poetry with David Lehman Interview with the series editor for Best American Poetry KARAN KAPOOR JUL 12     READ IN APP   “No one thought it would last. One publisher’s “optimistic” forecast: we’d last two, maybe three years, and be lucky to sell maybe 2,000 copies. Poetry isn’t supposed to be an asset on the publisher’s balance sheet.” David Lehman inaugurated The Best American Poetry series in 1988. Lehman’s work as an editor also includes such volumes as The Best American Erotic Poems (2008), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), and others. He is the author of several collections of poems. He is also known as a prominent editor and literary critic. Lehman's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, and many more. Lehman is on the core faculty of the graduate writing programs at the New School and New York University. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York   “It’s difficult to judge one’s own poems – that’s why we value sympathetic poetry editors, who help us determine which of our poems should be released and which should be locked in the drawer.” KARAN David, let’s begin with the famous process question. Would you share with us how your daily surroundings or routines influence your creative process? Do you have a writing routine? How has it changed over the years? Do you have any particular habits that help you stay creative?

DAVID

I write every day. There are few things I like more than writing.  If you write every day, you will have the chance to surprise yourself.  If you want inspiration, you can go to the computer, look at a Delacroix, listen to Tony Bennett, and take it from there. As a classic Gemini, I constantly divide my mind and subdivide my time in a way that ultimately leaves me charged up and eager to do more, it being my assumption that all the writing you do helps all the other writing you do. There are only so many hours in the day that you can devote to writing poetry. So, you have other hours to fill: I read a lot, write books, edit anthologies, prepare lectures, see to my correspondence. For example, I edit the Best American Poetry blog. 

---

KARAN

You've edited numerous poetry anthologies and have a vast knowledge of poetic forms and history. How do these roles influence your own writing? Are there specific poets or movements that continually inspire your work?

DAVID

My reading feeds my writing. I love imitating the great poets of the past and I enjoy writing in form. Very old-school: I subscribe to the idea that poetry is a vocation, a calling, that requires us to familiarize ourselves with the history, traditions, and conventions of our art form. I love memorizing a Shakespeare soliloquy. I also get a lot of stimulus from other art forms – from the movies, for example.  Lately I’ve had the chance to write regularly for The American Scholar on the subject of movies.

---

KARAN

Over the years, your poetry has evolved in both form and thematic focus, yet there’s a voice or the person behind the poems (you) who remains. Could you discuss the arc of your writing, and also the mysterious element that remains the same? 

DAVID

Good question. A dedicated reader of my work (if there were such a person) would be in a better position to answer. I believe that however different my poems may be on the surface, in the end they sound like me. I don’t look back, and sometimes, like this morning, I will pick up a book of mine that I haven’t read in years. This morning I picked up The Evening Sun, a book of daily poems that Scribner published in 2002. It was wonderful to like poems that I had written so long ago.

---

KARAN

Music appears in your poems frequently. I consider music to be the supreme art form, and many consider it a great influence on their poetry. I’d love to know your thoughts on music, especially as it relates to your poetics. Additionally, what do you like to listen to? Who is your favorite classical composer? Why?

DAVID

I’m comfortable with Walter Pater’s assertion that music is the condition to which the other arts aspire. My favorite classical composer is Beethoven, but I also dearly love Schubert, Mahler, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, et al. I love many others, too, and I am passionate about the American songbook as performed by Sinatra, Ella, Bobby Darin, Michael Buble, Doris Day, Lee Wiley, Helen Forrest, Nat Cole, Mel Torme, Ray Charles, Joe Williams, Johnny Hartman, no to mention piiano players like Art Ttaum, Teddy Wilson, Thelonious Monk, Fats Waller.  When I write, the classical  or jazz radio station may be playing in the background, and sometimes the music itself enters the poem.  Writing about music is a delightful challenge, and I like challenges.

---

KARAN

Would you tell us about your journey as the editor of Best American Poetry? Did you have an inkling it’d become so huge when you started it? The literary landscape changes every decade or two — can you delineate for us the trajectory of the poetry world from 1988 to 2024? What has changed for the better, what for worse?

DAVID

No one thought it would last. One publisher’s “optimistic” forecast: we’d last two, maybe three years, and be lucky to sell maybe 2,000 copies. Poetry isn’t supposed to be an asset on the publisher’s balance sheet. Luckily, John Glusman (then with Macmillan, later with Scribner) believed in the project, and Scribner has published BAP since 1988.

To discuss the “trajectory” would take much time and many pages, but I believe that my forewords for each volume since 1988 may provide a shortcut.  They are collected in The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014 (Pittsburgh) and The Birth of the Best: The Making of the Best American Poetry (Marsh Hawk, 2023), which contains the forewords for BAP 2015 through 2022. I’d love to see the books reviewed as a springboard toward a discussion of the evolution of American poetry.

---

KARAN

As the series editor of the most famous poetry anthology ever, you’ve shaped the way poetry is received by the public. What do you look for in a poem when deciding to include it in Best American Poetry? How do you balance personal taste with broader appeal? I imagine it to be an extremely difficult task to bring the millions of poems published in a year and bring it down to 50 or so poems. Since we have a new guest editor every year, what is your role in the selection process?

DAVID

How to “balance personal taste with broader appeal”: as someone said of psychoanalysis, it’s not only impossible but also very difficult. I do my best. But the beauty of the series is that a different guest editor makes the selections each year. That assures variety. My role: to assist the guest editor, to pick the cover art, to supervise the whole process of making a manuscript and seeing it through production. 

---

KARAN

You’ve mentioned elsewhere that selecting poems for these anthologies is very different from selecting poems for your own books. Would you speak more about this divide? Are you more or less critical of your own work? Do you have specific examples of how you approach these two tasks differently?

DAVID

It’s difficult to judge one’s own poems – that’s why we value sympathetic poetry editors, who help us determine which of our poems should be released and which should be locked in the drawer. This is especially important for someone like me, who is a good critic of other people’s work but less confident about his own productions. It’s easier to judge other people’s poems because the onus is on them to win you over, and if they do, you want to shout hallelujah to the heavens. It is a very nice feeling knowing that you’ve made a big difference in the life of a poet, who needs all the support he or she can get. 

---

KARAN

How has being an editor shaped your practice as a poet? For instance, has it influenced your approach to writing, your thematic choices, or even the way you revise your own work?

DAVID

I am a great believer in revision. Revision is a creative act, and it beats staring at “le vide papier que la blancheur défend.”

---

KARAN

How do you think the rise of digital platforms and social media has affected the landscape of poetry? Do you see these changes as beneficial or detrimental to the art form? What are your thoughts on Instagram poetry? Moreover, more and more literary magazines are also turning online. How do you perceive that change — positively or are you wary of it?

DAVID

When it comes to tech stuff that everyone is supposed to be enthralled with, I tell people that I come from a different century. But I am certain poetry will survive.

---

KARAN

I imagine, like most people who read so much, you must have a list of poets who you think are not as well known as they ought to be. Would you introduce us to a few of these hidden gems and why you think we should be onto them?

DAVID

There are many. I would recommend looking at each year’s Best American Poetry. We have made a habit of introducing new, little-known poets – such as, in the 1990s, Anne Carson, Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Amy Gerstler, Kay Ryan, A. E. Stallings, and Dean Young. Isn’t that a terrific list? And then there’s Nin Andrews, Laura Cronk, Elaine Equi, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mitch Sisskind, Adrienne Su, and Matthew Yeager. Some writers known for their fiction, such as Julia Alvarez and the late John Updike, write terrific poems and are represented in our volumes. 

---

KARAN

What advice would you give to poets who are just starting out, especially those who might feel overwhelmed by the breadth of content and style in contemporary poetry? 

DAVID

Read the great poets – Shakespeare’s sonnets, Donne, Pope, Gray’s elegy, the Romantics, Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, and Stevens. Write every day, even if it’s only a few lines.  Enjoy the experience. Remind yourself that you don’t have to depend on your poems to earn you a living. Let the love of poetry be your guide, and do not be distracted by rivalries or the desire for recognition. 

---

KARAN

What are you working on now? Will you tell us about any upcoming projects or collections you're particularly excited about? What can your readers look forward to next?

DAVID

I’m almost always working on multiple projects. Right now I am writing a book of “astro profiles,” astrological readings of twenty-five of my favorite individuals from Antigone to John Keats

.

photo: Jack Mitchell, copyright (c) 1997 Jack Mitchell. 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 17, 2024

On July 9th, Norton published Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne. This is the best book I have read on Plath....and I have read them all. And so has Emily Van Duyne, who is able to build upon and refute earlier accounts of Plath’s life. Van Duyne confirms (with evidence!) everything you may have suspected about Hugh's abuse and control, and the ultimate shaping of his wife’s legacy as the madwoman/witch.  But Van Duyne also captures the light/wonderful parts of the Plath's legacy. Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation is an extremely well-researched account, which highlights misogyny in the literary world—and the world at large—and the way intimate partner violence is often ignored or excused.