The Best American Poetry

Oscar Levant nails it again. . .

Oscar Levant defined a politician as a man who will "double-cross that bridge when he gets to it." Has anyone read hs book Memoirs of an Amnesiac? It's the sort of book I must have read, but I can't remember doing so. I have a feeling that I would have liked it. I am sure of it in fact.  Putnam published it in 1965. Three years later came The Unimportance of Being Oscar, another bravura performance -- not too wild, not too earnest, but full of self-deprecatory wit and wisdom. "I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients," he confided. He was very fast, very smart and knowing, a good guest on a talk show, a mordant foil to Gene Kelly's native optimism in An American in Paris. He wrote these lines that he says in the movie: "It's not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character." He also wrote "Blame it on My Youth" and other songs and was a buddy of George Gershwin. The jokes were spontaneous and delivered deadpan. When he said that he knew Doris Day "before she was a virgin," it was a valuable reminder of the band singer's brilliance -- with the Les Brown Orchestra in the 1940s, as Ruth Etting in "Love Me or Leave Me," in duets with Sinatra in "Young at Heart" -- which preceded the virginal image projected in the sugary pillow-talk movies of the 1960s. After Marilyn Monroe converted to Judaism, Oscar said, "now that Marilyn Monroe's kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her." -- DL

Thinking about the Myth of Icarus and a Poem by Saeed Jones [by Nin Andrews]

I flew from the coast of Maine back to Virginia yesterday—a long day thanks to the delay in LaGuardia “due to inclement weather.” Outside the sky was neon blue. “It’s so hot, the planes can’t fly,” a Delta representative explained. I pictured the plane melting. I thought of Icarus, his wings dripping beeswax. Then I thought of all the great Daedalus and Icarus poems, poems by Edward Field, W.H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, Jack Gilbert, Anne Sexton, Stephen Spender, Robert Hayden, Joseph Brodsky, Stephen Dobyns, Muriel Rukeyser . . .   

Reading the myth, I’ve often wondered about the character of Daedalus, a shady guy who murdered his first apprentice, Talos, when he realized Talos was more talented than he was.  What did he really think of Icarus, his son by a slave woman?  I know—Ovid suggests Daedalus loved Icarus, that he kissed him and wept and warned him to travel the middle path, that he grieved his loss. But how many adolescent boys travel the middle path? Daedalus was like a father giving a son, who has never driven, a Ferrari race car, telling him, “Don’t speed.”

Later, when my plane finally took off (though the day had only gotten hotter), I wondered, what happens to over-heated planes? Do they catch fire? Seated by the emergency exit, I imagined opening the metal door, tossing it to the wind, passengers leaping into the air, filling the sky like wingless Icaruses.

I love all the poems I've mentioned about this myth. This morning I discovered this brilliant poem by Saeed Jones.

Daedalus, After Icarus  

Boys begin to gather around the man like seagulls.
He ignores them entirely, but they follow him
from one end of the beach to the other.
Their footprints burn holes in the sand.
It’s quite a sight, a strange parade:
a man with a pair of wings strapped to his arms
followed by a flock of rowdy boys.
Some squawk and flap their bony limbs.
Others try to leap now and then, stumbling
as the sand tugs at their feet. One boy pretends to fly
in a circle around the man, cawing in his face.

We don’t know his name or why he walks
along our beach, talking to the wind.
To say nothing of those wings. A woman yells
to her son, Ask him if he’ll make me a pair.
Maybe I’ll finally leave your father.
He answers our cackles with a sudden stop,
turns, and runs toward the water.
The children jump into the waves after him.
Over the sound of their thrashes and giggles,
we hear a boy say, We don’t want wings.
We want to be fish now.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" -- Great Poems of the World, Episode 6, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

So eat a peach already! What the hell!

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T.S. Eliot

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

 

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

 

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

 

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

 

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

 

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

 

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

 

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume?

 

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

               And how should I presume?

 

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

               And should I then presume?

               And how should I begin?

 

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

 

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

 

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

 

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head

               Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

               That is not it, at all.”

 

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

               “That is not it at all,

               That is not what I meant, at all.”

 

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

 

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

 

I do not think that they will sing to me.

 

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Cardinal Newman's Cri de Coeur

A Meditation

God has created me to do Him some definite service.
He has committed some work
to me which He has not committed to another
I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection
between persons.
He has not created me for naught.
I shall do good.
I shall do His work.

-- Cardinal John Henry Newman

Great soundtracks: "Street Scene" by Alfred Newman

"Street Scene" by Alfred Newman

Also note "How Abut You??" by Burton Lane (music) and Ralph Freed (words): "I like New York in June, / How about you?"  Also, the Rodgers & Hart classic "Blue Moon"
See also this article on great movie soundtracks. https://theamericanscholar.org/great-movie-music/#.Xqhe4f9KiM8

Kandinsky in Paris

Two Versions of Marianne Moore's "The Past is the Present" [by David Lehman]

Marianne Moore didn't make it easy on us. She revised her poems, and often the later versions are radically different from and vastly inferior to the original.Thanks to the latest scholarship, I have learned that the text of "The Student" that I selected for The Oxford Book of American Poetry is weaker (and shorter) than an unrevised version that the poet wished to suppress.

Here are two versions of "The Past is the Present" by Marianne Moore. 

The first version is the one that I used for The Oxford Book. The second version is one that I found circulating in the web. What makes the second version corrupt is that it regularizes the spacing. Easy to understand why: idiosyncrasies of spacing, unusual typographical arrangements, and even simple indentation are often casualties of electronic transmission. But the spacing here is crucial. I maintain that Moore's poem if printed with conventional spacing is not the same poem –– and it is certainly not as good a poem.

The second version differs from the Oxford text for a legitimate reason as well: it is an alternative draft of the same poem. The difference is between "as on a recent occasion I was goaded into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse" and "as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse."

The alternative version is more compact, and usually this is a good thing, but in this case I believe that the original is superior because 1) it is more specific to Moore's personality and 2) it fruitfully complicates the situation and the poem. The phrase “I was goaded into doing by XY” implies that the great assertive sentence that rounds off the poem is not only a comment on what  “This man” (or “the teacher”) said but also a criticism of it as insufficient. The sentence by XY is vastly more interesting in this light: it exemplifies prose that lacks “a sort of heightened consciousness.” The discrepancy between the sentence’s broad truth and its own inadequacy as a vehicle for that truth thus irritates the poet into uttering her epigram. Notice, too, that the Oxford version has the word “occasion” in line four, obliging us to understand how the epigram applies to the making of this particular poem.

From the poem’s conclusion I drew the title of the anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. -- DL 

The Past is the Present

 If external action is effete
   and rhyme is outmoded,
        I shall revert to you,
   Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded
       into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed
                      Verse.
This man said – I think that I repeat
    his identical words:
       “Hebrew poetry is
    prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy
                    affords
       the occasion and expediency determines the form." 

– Marianne Moore

corrupt / alternative version found on the web:

The Past is the Present

If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said - and I think I repeat his exact words -
"Hebrew poetry is prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.

– Marianne Moore

from the achive; first posted February 2, 2018. Ian Probstein notes that "There are two more versions: 1) with a different spacing is in Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (The Macmillan Co/ The Viking Press [1967], 1981) and in the Academy of American Poets, which is a completely different text https://poets.org/poem/past-present"

Marianne Moore didn't make it easy on us. She revised her poems, and often the later versions are radically different from and vastly inferior to the original.Thanks to the latest scholarship, I have learned that the text of "The Student" that I selected for The Oxford Book of American Poetry is weaker (and shorter) than an unrevised version that the poet wished to suppress.

Here are two versions of "The Past is the Present" by Marianne Moore. 

The first version is the one that I used for The Oxford Book. The second version is one that I found circulating in the web. What makes the second version corrupt is that it regularizes the spacing. Easy to understand why: idiosyncrasies of spacing, unusual typographical arrangements, and even simple indentation are often casualties of electronic transmission. But the spacing here is crucial. I maintain that Moore's poem if printed with conventional spacing is not the same poem –– and it is certainly not as good a poem.

The second version differs from the Oxford text for a legitimate reason as well: it is an alternative draft of the same poem. The difference is between "as on a recent occasion I was goaded into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse" and "as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse."

The alternative version is more compact, and usually this is a good thing, but in this case I believe that the original is superior because 1) it is more specific to Moore's personality and 2) it fruitfully complicates the situation and the poem. The phrase “I was goaded into doing by XY” implies that the great assertive sentence that rounds off the poem is not only a comment on what  “This man” (or “the teacher”) said but also a criticism of it as insufficient. The sentence by XY is vastly more interesting in this light: it exemplifies prose that lacks “a sort of heightened consciousness.” The discrepancy between the sentence’s broad truth and its own inadequacy as a vehicle for that truth thus irritates the poet into uttering her epigram. Notice, too, that the Oxford version has the word “occasion” in line four, obliging us to understand how the epigram applies to the making of this particular poem.

From the poem’s conclusion I drew the title of the anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. -- DL 

The Past is the Present

 If external action is effete
   and rhyme is outmoded,
        I shall revert to you,
   Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded
       into doing by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed
                      Verse.
This man said – I think that I repeat
    his identical words:
       “Hebrew poetry is
    prose with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy
                    affords
       the occasion and expediency determines the form." 

– Marianne Moore

corrupt / alternative version found on the web:

The Past is the Present

If external action is effete
and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class
the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.
He said - and I think I repeat his exact words -
"Hebrew poetry is prose
with a sort of heightened consciousness." Ecstasy affords
the occasion and expediency determines the form.

– Marianne Moore

from the achive; first posted February 2, 2018. Ian Probstein notes that "There are two more versions: 1) with a different spacing is in Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (The Macmillan Co/ The Viking Press [1967], 1981) and in the Academy of American Poets, which is a completely different text https://poets.org/poem/past-present"

"My Life had stood - a loaded gun" -- Great Poems of the World, Episode 5, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

                                                                                                    Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)


                                                                                          Definitely - No


                                                                                              Probably - Yes


                                                                                        What do You - Think?

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -

In Corners - till a Day

The Owner passed - identified -

And carried Me away -

 

And now We roam in Sovreign Woods -

And now We hunt the Doe -

And every time I speak for Him

The Mountains straight reply -

 

And do I smile, such cordial light

Opon the Valley glow -

It is as a Vesuvian face

Had let it’s pleasure through -

 

And when at Night - Our good Day done -

I guard My Master’s Head -

’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s

Deep Pillow - to have shared -

 

To foe of His - I’m deadly foe -

None stir the second time -

On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -

Or an emphatic Thumb -

 

Though I than He - may longer live

He longer must - than I -

For I have but the power to kill,

Without - the power to die -

Freedom of Music and Mister! James!! Brown!!! put tang in Olympic B.battles [By Tracy Danison]

"Mon petit coeur imbécile", hip hop drama directed by Olivier Letellier. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

These damned Paris Olympics 2024 are like the Vichy regime, splashing mud even on Virtue’s shoes.

All the same, the Olympics give me the opportunity treat myself to a check-in à propos with top break dance performer and hip hop choreographer Valentine Nagata Ramos. I last talked to her almost two years ago.

Valentine has long had an interest in developing child-centered hip hop tales. She’s just completed the choreography for the theatrical adaptation of  Xavier-Laurent Petit’s now-classic children’s book Mon petit coeur imbécile (My silly little heart) directed by Olivier Letellier. Mon petit coeur is currently premiering with Les Tréteaux, a well-known summer theater festival in the Paris region.

Valentine’s big big job over the last couple years, though, has been evaluating potential B.girl and B.boy contestants on their home grounds, as prelude to the first-ever Olympic break dance competition, to be held at the Paris 2024 games.

She says brightly that in the last couple of months there’s been a strong tang of B.Battle in the air.

“Maybe it’s because everybody now feels the games really will happen”, she says, or, maybe, “Because now everybody can use their own music”. She explains that until recently, music rights were still in negotiation, so Olympic entrants couldn’t be sure that their choices were validated for coming battles. It’s an important point. She mentions or mutters her own B.girl affair with Mister! James!! Brown!!!.

 "Mon petit coeur imbécile", hip hop drama directed by Olivier Letellier. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

I think I may say that, in Valentine’s view, without Freedom of Music, Freedom to Break is mere fiction. She’s certainly not alone. Music and movement go together like horses and buggies or birds and bees, and, very often, gorgeously so: think of Madison Chock and Evan Bates figure skating to Dark Side of the Moon.

But, until the moment of my chat with Valentine, break dancing and James Brown had never shared the same space in my thoughts. They certainly will now.

In fact, there’s a lot to this sudden cohabitation of break and Mister! James!! Brown!!!, not just Valentine’s or my personal memories of dancing to his incredibly stimulating music.

Mister! James!! Brown!!! links the post-segregation America of Hair to global hip hop.

That’s the idea behind the  Give it up or turn it loose dance clip collage by Zay Visuals, for instance. Then, Brown sustains and directs a consistently high energy level: the athleticism of break dance, in Nairobi, in Tokyo, in Jakarta. Then, Brown’s will to own the body: the complex precision of break dance, in Brooklyn, in Rio de Janeiro, in Paris. Then, Brown’s determination both to be there with and be the music unite contemporary and break dancing, the one as presence, the other as existence. And vice versa.

And more still. Involved in Valentine Nagata Ramos and I sharing a memory of Mister! James!! Brown!!! is my sharing of sensibility with a woman half my age (and hers with a man twice hers) and a person of life experience as close to utterly different to my own as Japan is different to Spain and Bagnolet, France, 2024 is different to both and to Somerset, Somerset County, Ohio, USA, circa 1965, to boot.

Maybe I will after all amble on down to the Place de la Concorde to the break competition on 9 and 10 August … in honor of Mister! James!! Brown!!!

RIP Stanley Moss (1925-2024)

On his 97th birthday, I wrote "97 Reasons to Celebrate Stanley Moss on June 21, 2022"

Because you stand still long enough to gather the finest moss.
Because you stand.
​Because you roll.
Because you rolled 197 topping​ all competitors at Neptune Lanes.
Because you're Stan the Man.
Because we had lunch at Lupa on Thompson just off Houston.
Because you know Irwin Shaw and forgot to tell him.
Because you are a bronze satyr.
Because of Wystan.
Because of César Vallejo
Because one Stanley deserves another
Because if you're Stanley I'm a living stone
Because of Kunitz and Moss
Because the angel was wrong but angelic
Because it's better to be angelic than right
Because when you were 82 it was fifteen years ago. Just think of it.
Because of European painting.
Because of Rome and Barcelona.
Because there are ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall.
Because I'm just getting started.
Because God breaketh not all men's hearts alike.
Because I believe in God.
Because 81% of Americans believe in god.
Because of what happens if you put "only" before "81%" in that sentence.
Because I capitalize the God I believe in.
Because of the history of color.
Because of the intelligence of clouds.
Because you speaketh the truth.
Because of your stance, Stan.
Because of Yale and the Navy.
Because very few poets were born during the summer solstice.
Because your ideal age is 32.
Because I could devote 65 more lines to celebrate your birthday.

From a cellar in Kyiv: Theophrastus rules [By Tracy Danison]

A residential bomb shelter in a tower block island development somewhere in Kyiv, Ukraine, 10 July 2024 - Just so there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind, the blast that killed 27 sick childred was from a missile. A walk  around ground zero and the neighborhood shows that in the way glass and a sprinkling of other random stuff are so neatly shattered over the streets: it’s the result of a calculated, industrially-tuned blast wave. 

And it’s impossible to doubt it was a deliberate hit. When all is said and done, the Russians have done a bang up job of wrecking the country’s electricity production - lots of good targeting in those many many attempts to get their bombs through. Also, this particular mass killing follows many other hits on civilian targets that defy any explanation but the intent to murder people at work, people at play, people just being people.

If we consider that Russia’s

Ship of State is commanded by a bully - a human type or character (I don’t recall if Theophrastus has one or not and can’t check because I am currently in an air raid) - rather than a rational actor - a psychosocial profile - a mass murder of children makes more sense. 

Unlike a rational actor, a bully has no goal; they are a type of human, basically, a psychic windmill, set to “win”. 

“Win” for a windmill just means “churning”. 

Donald Trump is a good example of how this churning works and why a bully is often misunderstood by rational actors. 

Trump’s famous “unpredictability” or “opportunism” or “transactionalism” is just a way to keep himself churning. His “achievements” are entirely incidental - he sees no contradiction in overturning Roe vs Wade and denying responsibility for wrecking abortion rights, for instance, while the achievements cited by supporters are largely in their own minds. 

Trump supporters and opponents, brought up in a society that worships winning, just assume Trump means “winning” as they do: dominating or mastering a situation and achieving desired and gratifying result. But Trump doesn’t. He’s just keeping on keeping on. 

Similarly, murdering some sick children is just Putin’s windmill churning. It signals or it should signal, to NATO bigwigs that the bully has churned into its default position: he doesn’t give a shit about what they think or feel or how powerful they are. 

From the get go, a bully effectually thrusts all the responsibility for what happens next on those who share space with them. These, mostly ordinary people, either by dint of their bureaucratic position or personal disposition, are all rational actors.

They are asking themselves, If he (Putin) does not care, what can we do (to make him care)? 

Those who have had particularly rebellious teenage children or experience with sexual or other types of harassers know what I mean. With a bully, the bullied or harassed always hold the responsibility bag. 

Responsibly, Putin’s opponents, like a flustered E. Jean Caroll wondering what to do when and after Trump humped her behind the clothes rack in a public place, always fall into prudently searching for responsible responses to a flagrant lack of personal responsibility. Trump zips up his fly and walks away; Putin hugs that Mohendra Mohdi guy in Red Square. 

But there’s no use trying to bring a bully to reason. Searching for responses makes the rational actor waste their time trying to get in the bully’s churning head. And since the others are responding, the bully has the sense of winning. 

How, frustrating, depressing to think, hiding down here in this catch-as-catch-can shelter, that this Putin asshole doesn’t care if he kills me and my friends or not - even as a mere edifying act of terror. E. Jean Caroll, I salute your years of tenacious patience and forbearance. 

So what to do with a bully if not respond? 

First off, it’s impossible to make a person care and, in respect to a bully, even more impossible since not giving a shit is keeping their little windmill a-churning. Then, and this important, Putin’s actions, like Trump’s, like any bully’s, are not connected with any particular goal or objective. He’ll lob a nuke or eat his dinner, as pleases. It has everything to do with him and nothing to do with you. And, finally, he just don’t care.

Down here in this basement hiding from him, it seems to me the only way to deal with Putin is to stop the churn of his windmill, give him a Putin equivalent of Trump’s 83-million/dollar judgment, which has effectively stopped the churn in E. Jean Caroll’s vicinity.

As a practical matter, I think that’s coming with the F-16s, which, with drones and good artillery, will pretty much stop Putin’s missiles, bombs and drones from coming into Ukraine. In addition, it will effectively end Russian sovereignty in a large swathe of Russia, a fact not likely to go down well with Russian patriots and plotters and which will thus keep him occupied elsewhere, among friends and familiars.

The late John Tranter on Ira Gershwin [on the day George died]

That's George Gershwin, on the left, with his older brother, Ira Gershwin, who wrote the words not only for George's songs but -- especially after George's untimely death on July 11,1937 -- for songs by Jerome Kern ("Long Ago and Far Away"), Vernon Duke ("I Can't Get Started"), and Harold Arlen (The Man That Got Away"). As John Tranter, in his review of Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist by Philip Furia (Oxford University Press), puts it, the Gershwins and their confreres "took America’s dreams and set them to music." Here is the rest of Tranter's review.

<<

Shelley claimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but then Shelley was mad. Poets have missed out on the law courts, but they have carved a comfortable niche for themselves in the business of advice to the lovelorn. In the modern world, rhymers have set the rules for popular emotions, especially when young folks’ fancies turn to thoughts of love.

Poetry of course is everywhere, and has been since the invention of radio: vibrating through the walls of our homes and over the oceans, amplitude or frequency modulating waves in the radio spectrum to the tunes of popular songs and ads for hair cream, and squealing from a thousand Walkmans.

Most of these song lyrics are drivel. The Romantic poet Keats set a bad example by rhyming ‘moon’ and ‘June’ in his poem ‘Endymion’, and it’s been downhill ever since. ‘Sun’ and ‘fun’ are generally the best it gets these days, as the Beach Boys remind us. But it’s not all rubbish. Much of this writing was cleverly done, especially in the twenties and thirties, and the best of it had a special sparkle.

New York between the wars was America’s equivalent of the Elizabethan Age: exciting, dangerous, filled with the discovery of exotic art, music and literature. Dorothy Parker and the wits of the Algonquin ‘round table’ were popular among the clever set, but much more widely popular among every set were musicians like the gifted George Gershwin and songwriters like his inventive older brother Ira.

They took America’s dreams and set them to music — George produced the tune, Ira crafted the words. They collaborated on hundreds of songs — by the time Ira died in 1983 he had written more than 700, including But Not For Me, Fascinating Rhythm, I Can’t Get Started, I Got Rhythm, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, Love Walked In, Shall We Dance, Someone to Watch over Me, and They Can’t Take That Away From Me.

There were plenty of turkeys, too — songs like Uh-Uh, Blah Blah Blah, Please Send My Daddy Back to My Mother, The Gazooka, and I’m a Poached Egg.

Ira was born Israel Gershvin in 1896. The family, Russian immigrants originally named Gershovitz, changed their name to Gershvin when they arrived in America (and to Gershwin later, when George had his first hit under that name.) They lived at various addresses in Manhattan as the father moved from one business to another.

Ira was a clever boy —  he won a scholarship to Townsend Harris Hall, a high school for bright kids from the Lower East Side. But when the family bought a piano, it was George — likeable, impulsive and energetic — who got to play it. Ira was the shy and thoughtful one — family friends said he was usually to be found standing a little to one side, out of the limelight, browsing through a book.

The teaching of English has so degenerated these days that it’s hard to believe that Ira’s school curriculum included a rigorous training in classical verse forms such as the ballad, the triolet, the rondeau, the villanelle and the sonnet, but it did.

In the first decades of the century the daily newspapers in New York were full of poetry too: there were columns devoted to light verse, and often a theatre review or sports notice would be written in couplets or quatrains. Ira used to cut out his favourite poems and pasting them into a scrapbook, and imitate them in his school magazine. He was soon buying anthologies of verse, and eventually owned more than two hundred volumes. He drew on all that knowledge for his songs.

In an introduction to Lyrics on Several Occasions, a 1959 collection of his work, Ira wrote ‘resemblance to actual poetry, living or dead, is highly improbable.’ Maybe; but the literary skill required was formidable.

His songs were apparently simple — they had to be — but that simplicity took a lot to achieve. He wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote again. His nickname among his colleagues was ‘The Jeweller’.

The songwriter of the period was looking for a balance between wit — which often involved puns and complicated rhymes — and ‘singability’, the fluent flow of syllables along the surface of the tune. Ira achieved this balance more often than most, though many of his all-night efforts were dumped when the storyline of a musical or review — the ‘book’, in theatre parlance — had to be changed.

Most of the Gershwins’ collaborative work was done for Broadway musical theatre. They moved to Hollywood in the thirties to tackle the movies — a much more difficult proposition due to the demands of the machinery of movie-making, and the callousness of the producers and studio bosses.

They’d hardly begun when George died of a brain tumour in 1937, and the oomph went out of Ira’s life. He went on working, on movies such as A Star is Born and An American in Paris, struggling to contrive songs that would make the Hollywood moguls happy. He even wrote words for many of the dozens of unpublished melodies George had left behind, in a ghostly kind of posthumous collaboration.

For a writer of sophisticated songs about love and passion, Ira’s own life seems to have been suburban and uneventful. Perhaps, like Flaubert, he led a dull life in order to create the conditions to enable him to make brilliant art.

This book is mainly about that art, and it ends up being not much more than a chronicle of Ira Gershwin’s working life. That has its interest, and as such it is a useful volume. As one might say of a Broadway show, if the ‘book’ is not so hot, at least the lyrics are memorable.

-- John Tranter

from the archive; first published July 11, 2016

"Instant Freud" [by David Lehman]

Instant Freud

The holiest word in the language
is mother
and the nastiest
is motherfucker

-- David Lehman

"Sein und Zeit" by Judith Bishop (Introduced by Thomas Moody)

You don’t need to be familiar with Heidegger’s opus “Being and Time” to appreciate Judith Bishop’s namesake poem “Sein und Zeit.” There is an opacity to the poem which is unsettling; opening with the line “We can walk into a room not knowing”, we are never told exactly what it is we do not know, only that our not knowing extends to “whether” (a choice or an inquiry into something), “or when,” (a period of time), “or even that” (something we know we can determine or identify). The totality of this ignorance, of this absence of knowledge, gives it a kind of presence—a phantom that haunts the whole of the poem.

Bishop further obscures things by telling us that whatever it is we don’t know, “Only you will know.” One of Bishop’s achievements in "Sein und Zeit" is that she is able to create a near impenetrable obscurity from clear, precise language. The contrast seems to reinforce the significance and deepness of the unknowing—the overwhelming vagueness of existence which eclipses our lives even at their most particular.

 

 

“Sein und Zeit” is taken from Circadia (UQP, 2024), Bishop’s third collection of poetry. She is the winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets University prize and a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. Her translations from French (Philippe Jaccottet, Gérard Macé) have been published in Australian and international journals. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Melbourne, an MFA in Writing from Washington University in St. Louis, and an MPhil in European Literature from the University of Cambridge. She lives with her family in Melbourne.

Sein und Zeit

 

We can walk into a room not knowing.

It doesn’t happen every time.

 

A white room can be painted to be pure.

I mean, just to show us that it’s clean.

 

But it doesn’t have to be.

We can walk into a room

 

not knowing whether,

or when, or even that.

 

That

can be the hardest room.

 

Only you will know.

First there is the walking.

 

The floor, a chair or two.

The posters

 

of visions

of someone else’s visit

 

to a room. Take a chair.

 

Only then the talk begins,

like a reckoning of beads,

 

like the body measures sweat,

words wrong

 

as a rainbow that has paled

to a shadow of itself.

 

There is always an end.

We can stand and walk again.

 

We can leave the room in silence,

carrying its moment

 

in and out of days

 

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 10, 2024

For today’s offering, here’s Sandra Yannone’s gorgeously long, skinny, balloon string of a poem which was first published in SWWIM on May 17. The shape of the poem also invokes the emaciated bodies of that era—and her deft line breaks slow us down on this elegiac path.

 

At the AIDS Walk in My Pre-Gay Twenties

 

Years ago

now

 

I walked

among

 

the dying.

I was

 

already dead.

I was

 

a shroud

of skin

 

wrapped

around bones

 

no one

could touch.

 

This is

one version

 

of what

it means

 

to be

dead.

 

Around me,

often circling,

 

teetering

like metal

 

candelabra

angels,

 

were

too plenty

 

of the others

dying, who

 

in the moment

had outlived

 

1. Mostly

middle-aged

 

gay men

dying

 

into

their shadows.

 

We all walked

for miles,

 

for each other,

for liberation,

 

for purification,

for healing, for life.

 

The walks began

and ended

 

with swan boats

in the Boston

 

Public

Garden.

 

By the time

I crossed

 

the bridge

at the finish

 

line, under

a rainbow

 

of tethered

balloons,

 

more among me

were that many

 

steps closer

to death,

 

the air

exhausted

 

in their

lungs

 

labored

further

 

heaving,

sighing,

 

some pulsing

into oxygen

 

masks

while seated

 

in wheelchairs,

escorted

 

by lovers

and friends,

 

some who

would not

 

be

permitted

 

to witness

their beloved’s

 

final

grasps

 

for air

before

 

the lights

blew out

 

behind

their eyes.

 

But this day,

sunlight.

 

Every AIDS walk,

sunlight.

 

We would walk

into the sun

 

for miles

beaming

 

before

together

 

we

would burn

 

our skin

always

 

like flash

paper

 

ready

to combust.

 

 

Proust's Dunkin' Donut

And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with
water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without
character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves
and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or
people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our
garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the
good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and
the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes
and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my
cup of tea.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Happy birthday, Marcel (10 Juillet)

Peter Paul Reuben's Judgment of Paris

Peter Paul Reuben's Judgment of Paris 

 

A review of "Owning the Not So Distant World" by Grace Cavalieri [by Charles Rammelkamp]

July 8, 2024

Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

Owning the Not So Distant World
by Grace Cavalieri
Blue Light Press
May 2024, $17, 88 pages, ISBN: 978-1421835617

Grace Cavalieri is by turns as sagacious and oblique as a Zen koan, her verses brimming with aphoristic wisdom, and also charmingly chatty, like your best friend in the world, oscillating between aloof and intimate but always appealing. Take the poem, “To Be Perfectly Honest With You,” a title which automatically promises confidences. Cavalieri begins:

this poem didn’t know it was dishonest –
thinking about small children
walking out from morning’s mist
into the safe sun with me
warm and fed
never to sleep within sorrow

The first line makes us smile, not necessarily what we expected, but the warmth of her voice is so reassuring.  “I was thinking of my own small children / I swear it,” she goes on, as if it were a point of contention, before telling us about “another poem” in which children were playing in the dirt; “that is the poem which wanted to be written / although it started with my own secret life.” She concludes the poem, again in the voice of a confidante, “and that is the absolute truth.”

To be shielded from sorrow: isn’t that the ultimate pipe dream? After all, wasn’t the first of the Buddha’s four noble truths that life is dukkha, suffering? Wise as the Buddha, Cavalieri has seen enough of the world in her ninety years to know there’s no protection from sorrow, but she does not succumb to despair, either. Indeed, the prose poem, “The Bride” begins: “SORROW asked me to marry him – he knew I’d fallen for him long ago.” “Wedding Planner,” several poems later, which is for Ken, her late husband, is a short, eleven-line poem, the first ten of which end with the word “we”:

turned memory into tenderness we
hurt each other into love we
did not judge this experience we
transmuted fear we…

Divided into two parts, Owning The Not So Distant World, dedicated to her four daughters, which already tells us much about her convictions, begins with poems involving her personal life. “House” is like a fairy tale riddle about  a man and a woman who loved each other, universal stick figures:

this poem was
written so
they could
sit upon a chair
within the walls

The following poem, “White Suit,” is an amusing story about the poet and her husband to be, the late sculptor Ken Flynn, as awkward teenagers, and then a Depression-era poem about hobos asking for food, followed by “To Judy,” a poem of mourning (“How things got away from us like a book underlined in the wrong places”).  Perhaps the next poem,  “They Say Nothing Ever Dies,” succinctly captures the impulse of the poet’s thinking. “All that beauty around us and in us. It has to be somewhere,” she writes, and the poem ends so wisely and beautifully:

Energy never goes away although I know (well I know) how
perilous time’s pistol can be.
(Still) (yet) because I am (a fool, or brave, or) in pain with
longing
I look back and wave and wave
I am waving and waving and I will (I will) until someone
waves back.

Part 2, “Whether By Good or Bad Fortune,” a suite of some two dozen poems, includes “On My 90th Year,” which also repeats the word “we” and may or may not implicitly refer to Ken. Or maybe it’s the general “we” of experience.

we took advantage of the fact that we were human
with accommodations
pockets of imagery
the landscape it’s always dangerous with desire     hot and dry
but cooler sailings promised

The following poem is definitely to her late husband, “Every Night In My Dreams Every Night We Are Back In The Navy Every Night.” “We’ll never see each other again,” Cavalieri writes. “The best part of being in the Navy is this dream: my dead / husband and I decide where we want to retire.”. This is a dream to which we can all relate. Who doesn’t dream of their intimate dead?

The collection ends with the long poem, “Fame,” which is as much a parable as the first poem in Owning The Not So Distant World, “House.” It’s the story of an old man essentially seeking to understand the meaning of his life.  It starts: “What is the part of your life / you can never forget?”

The title poem, the penultimate poem in the book, reiterates Cavalieri’s essential idea of the immanence of beauty in the world that we saw in “They Say Nothing Ever Dies”:

All comfort does not belong to the outside world.
If we are dependent on that
we are dependent on
the tricks of the mind coming home,
attributing falseness to beauty,
thinking it will vanish,
when it has always just arrived.

Yes! it is “as if we were someone the world loves,” the poem concludes. Grace Cavalieri has earned her wisdom, and we are fortunate that she shares it with us in such beautiful verse. Owning The Not So Distant World is a gorgeous collection, as is its cover, Cavalieri’s own artwork.

About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.

Russia strikes hospital: acceptance and lucidity

Kyiv, 8 July 2024. As we hurried across the “fruit tree park” toward shelter, my hostess remarks that Ukraine fired 30 rockets at Russia in the wake of the 40 fired by Russia earlier in the day. They were targeting a power station and a specialist hospital, the one with the aim of making people uncomfortable, the other with terrorizing and demoralizing in mind. Note that I call my hostess “hostess” because using her name might result in her murder. 

 

But  I realize suddenly that accepting the possibility that what is happening as tit for tat is to accept a premise that justifies the strikes - there’s cause and effect, which transforms Putin and company into rational actors.
But what rational actor would target a power plant to make people uncomfortable and a hospital for paralyzed children to terrorize and demoralize them?
Accepting the status of rational actor suggests that somewhere there’s a rational solution to all this murder. And there isn’t.

The people who are doing this are bullies, not rational actors. A rational actor has a goal and something to give in return. A bully accepts only a self-imposed minimal acceptable level of shittiness. The only way to stop a bully, as the non bullies all know from experience, is to make them stop.

Accepting Russia as a rational actor when it is a bully has all sorts of consequences for lucid thinking about this war. For one thing, it implies that this war is a ‘conflict’, where two “opposing sides” are trying to get something both want. This word obscures the fact that all the Ukraine side wants is to be left alone.
So, if it’s not strictly speaking a conflict and the only way to stop a bully is to make them stop, shouldn’t our effort be making them stop, not helping the Ukrainians to defend themselves in view of negotiations? There’s a difference. And thinking it over, the risks of nuclear war are probably less if we try stopping them.

Finally, accepting this war as a conflict between rational actors makes it easier to accept the consequences, not just the murder of paralyzed children but everything that comes with that - my hostess’ friend, an energetic 30 something with a son and a brother serving in the army since 2014, feels helpless and has a cynical view of humanity, it’s ability to do good and make the world better. She thinks this, although she spent the day on an emergency team taking care of the dead and wounded and organizing psychological help for survivors; she and friends have organized so that nobody’s kid is ever left alone. We are talking together in a Soviet era, “fruit tree” park: a gorgeously painted gazebo and small buildings in late art deco Bolshevik style. We are lopping, with hundreds of others, on sit-things ranging from benches to chairs to bean bags - all free and open to all comers… so maybe it might not be good idea for her to be believing things about her own life that are so removed from real experience (when we take war and mass murder from the equation of course) … We leave when the air raid sirens go off, it’s a hoof to the shelters…

Natasha Rao: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________

Abecedarian on Shame

 

A mushroom quietly throbs with poison. I

bloat full of lies. Spurred by my

capacity for ruin, I insulted my brother

during the brief visit home, got too drunk in the

expensive restaurant while my mother’s worry

fermented. When confronted with my lack of

gentleness, I blame birth control or the moon, but

haunted by the palpitations of a mouse stuck

in glue, I knew atonement was beyond my trapping.

Just months ago I shaved all my fur then

knelt naked in front of not-you, have

laid in unfamiliar beds, squeak becoming purr,

metamorphosing into whatever kind of

nocturnal creature strangers desire. I keep

offering the soft meat of myself to

people I meet on the internet, save the stinging

quills for those who love me. I don’t know how to

reassemble myself into the kind of animal who

sniffs her way home every time. Somewhere,

there is a version of me whose instinct is to

tell the truth. She has no reason to

unravel in the doctor’s office, no sudden fits of

viciousness and rage. She does the right thing even

when no one is looking. I envy her timeline, the

x-axis aligned. Somehow I grow more twisted, each

year eluding guilt with skill. It’s easiest to pluck

zinnias if you don’t look them in the face.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Natasha Rao is the author of Latitude, which was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. The recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, she has also received fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Community of Writers. Her work appears in The Nation, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is currently Co-Editor of American Chordata. 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
                                           Henri Rousseau, La Bohémienne endormie (The Sleeping Gypsy). 1897, oil on canvas.