The Best American Poetry

Vincent Price reads "The Raven"

Bitchin' with Nin and Whitman [by Nicole Santalucia]

Bitchin' with Nin and Whitman [by Nicole Santalucia]

I've been bitchin’ with Nin Andrews about what it’s like to live like a gypsy, about how being a poet has led to a vagabond life.

I got a degree (hurray!), made a move for a job (at least I am lucky to get a job), and now I can’t help but think of how a lot of poets live out of a suitcase. And, it’s a little scary.

As I was in the last stretch before my move—I had till Monday, July 14th to finish packing—the sea of boxes and clutter and exhaustion consumed me. I was already worried: will I have to do this again and again?   

I always feel vulnerable in the process of upheaval... I know it's normal to get nervous before starting something new. But it's all new: the job, the school, the town, the people, etc.—and for me that brings up self-doubt. I have this fear, what if I can never write again?  Sorry to be dramatic. Moving brings out the drama in me, too. I wonder how many poets are out there, thinking these thoughts as they, too, move to another college town. 

To calm myself, I started bitching to myself, and then I started bitching to Nin, and then to Whitman as if he were my friend on Facebook. And that perked me up. Just the idea of Whitman on social media made me laugh. I am jealous of Whitman because he didn't have to worry about a classroom of freshman staring at him.  And I am jealous of Emily Dickinson, too. She just stayed in one room as long as she liked.  

As I was preparing to make my big move, it was a late afternoon, a Sunday, and Walt had just updated his Facebook status, There is no loss of time in the mountains! I sing on this day: happy birthday to you, Fanny Fern. On the off-chance that Walt had his iPhone while he was riding the ferry back to the main island, I sent him an instant message because I worried that no one would ever read my first book. I wanted him to promote me, loud and gregarious man that he is.  But I evaded the topic; instead, I started questioning him about what all of this means.

NS: But Walt, what about the loss of identity? I fear that I am really no longer here, in the flesh. If I exist at all, how is it that I no longer know how to splay myself on a grassy knoll and look out at the emptiness?

WW:  Answer.

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world (“Continuities”).

NS: But Walt, every time I am on Facebook I feel lost in space and time. It’s as if my senses have been removed—carved out of my being by a motherboard manufactured in some foreign country.

WW:  Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity; 
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. (“O Me! O Life!”)

NS: But Walt, I am faithless and foolish and full of myself—there is nothing but emptiness in front of me, behind me, between my fingers, between my ears, my breath.

But then the conversation stopped. Later Walt mentioned how he almost dropped his phone overboard, just as the ferry was approaching the port at the tip of Manhattan. He was on his way to pay back Fanny Fern the five bucks he borrowed from her over a year ago. I think he was telling me how his debts never go unpaid as a way to enlighten me. He also said it’s not good to burn people with a high profile. 

High profile. Is that what we're all looking to become?

from the archive; first posted October 30, 2014

Att 7 pm October 30: a celebration of Joe Brainard's Selected Letters

Joe Brainard is the only painter whose work adorns the cover of two volumes of "The Best American Poetry"

For Joe Brainard

The road sign said snow
‘Well, I never said it was spring’
in 1968 in whose loft downtown
under a cobweb of windshield

a butterfly beneath a branch within
a border of blue 1953 Easter Seals
the sun surrounded by streaks
of blue and white in a frame

and a wave crashing against it
the logic a rhyme of college and collage
the logic a rebus the message simple
Nancy a blueprint bingo cherries

and two fragments of letters
handwritten big block letters neat
I looked and the three hairs
in the sink spelled out Joe

David Lehman, 12/ 20 / 2000 

On October 30, 2024, at 7 pm at St Mark's Church in NYC there will be a reception in honor of Joe Brainard's Love, Joe: Selected Letters (edited by Daniel Kane; Columbia UP). .The evening will include readings by Brad Gooch, Vincent Katz, Anne Waldman, Keith McDermott, Michael Lally, Ron Padgett, and Ann Lauterbach.

Paul Auster and others remember Joe Brainard here.
https://youtu.be/I2Znn0oGrfE?t=304

See, too, this "Homage to Joe Brainard."

Nin Andrews: How to Write the MFA Poem

For Nin Andrews's must-read "Learning to Write the MFA Poem," click here. We printed the poem in its entirety on February 22, 2010, as you'll see if you use this link, but I can't resist offering this excerpt:

there is a certain kind of poem I was taught to write
when I was earning what my husband calls my mail-order degree
from a low-res program in the Northeast.  And I guess
I would call this kind of poem an MFA poem,
though the truth is, I never learned to write one very well
(though this is one of them, or is trying to be),
but I do see them everywhere now, these MFA poems,
which I despise, not because the poems are bad
but because I was taught how to write them
by this asshole professor (he was such a creep)
who was abusive to women, mostly,
fucked with their heads if not their bodies,
you know the type.  Back then
the women took whatever he dished out
because he was famous I guess.
I hated that, and how he would write poems
about being an asshole, which he was and is,
and about everything and anything else
because, he would explain, everything is happening at once,
so everything is happening in his poems, and happening so fast,
that the past, present, and future are all there in the poems
though nothing is ever really happening
because the poems are usually in some static place

The next stanza takes the poem to that particular place and does amazing things with the set-up. It's a tour de force -- the truth, the poetry, and the parody are one. Mega kludos, Nin.

I remember writing a poem called "The Guggenheim Poem," aping the kind of poems people used to write on their fellowship year funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The poems uusally took place in Italy -- in Venice, often, but sometimes Florence or Rome, with side trips to Siena, and maybe Arezzo, and certainly Rapollo, and once in a while Naples. The poet had gone to a museum in a flimsy skirt in the fierce heat and the eyes of the men were upon her as she walked on the hot brick or cobblestone streets and she wore sunglasses and imagined she was Audrey Hepburn but all pretense and fantasy fell away when she came face to face with the Titian of Venus and Adonis or the David of Donatello in Florence or Piero's Madonna and baby Jesus in Urbino or a Giorgione self-portrait in Venice, which she saw as a vision of her father or her husband, she's not sure which, though she has spent many hours analyzing the possibilities, but this she knows this: it was a sudden flash, an epiphany even, like seeing a broken statue and realizing you had to change your life. -- DL

from the archive; first posted May 30, 2012

For Nin Andrews's must-read "Learning to Write the MFA Poem," click here. We printed the poem in its entirety on February 22, 2010, as you'll see if you use this link, but I can't resist offering this excerpt:

there is a certain kind of poem I was taught to write
when I was earning what my husband calls my mail-order degree
from a low-res program in the Northeast.  And I guess
I would call this kind of poem an MFA poem,
though the truth is, I never learned to write one very well
(though this is one of them, or is trying to be),
but I do see them everywhere now, these MFA poems,
which I despise, not because the poems are bad
but because I was taught how to write them
by this asshole professor (he was such a creep)
who was abusive to women, mostly,
fucked with their heads if not their bodies,
you know the type.  Back then
the women took whatever he dished out
because he was famous I guess.
I hated that, and how he would write poems
about being an asshole, which he was and is,
and about everything and anything else
because, he would explain, everything is happening at once,
so everything is happening in his poems, and happening so fast,
that the past, present, and future are all there in the poems
though nothing is ever really happening
because the poems are usually in some static place

The next stanza takes the poem to that particular place and does amazing things with the set-up. It's a tour de force -- the truth, the poetry, and the parody are one. Mega kludos, Nin.

I remember writing a poem called "The Guggenheim Poem," aping the kind of poems people used to write on their fellowship year funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The poems uusally took place in Italy -- in Venice, often, but sometimes Florence or Rome, with side trips to Siena, and maybe Arezzo, and certainly Rapollo, and once in a while Naples. The poet had gone to a museum in a flimsy skirt in the fierce heat and the eyes of the men were upon her as she walked on the hot brick or cobblestone streets and she wore sunglasses and imagined she was Audrey Hepburn but all pretense and fantasy fell away when she came face to face with the Titian of Venus and Adonis or the David of Donatello in Florence or Piero's Madonna and baby Jesus in Urbino or a Giorgione self-portrait in Venice, which she saw as a vision of her father or her husband, she's not sure which, though she has spent many hours analyzing the possibilities, but this she knows this: it was a sudden flash, an epiphany even, like seeing a broken statue and realizing you had to change your life. -- DL

from the archive; first posted May 30, 2012

A "Next Line, Please" Reprise: Name that Line!

 

 

From 2014 to 2019, David Lehman helmed one of our most popular columns: “Next Line, Please,” which resulted in a finished, crowdsourced poem every week. Lehman’s prompts attracted professional writers and amateurs alike, who contributed sonnets, haiku, sestinas, centos, and other formal poems. Eventually these pieces were published together in an anthology, “Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers.” Five years have elapsed since Lehman’s “valediction forbidding mourning,” but fans of the column have held out hope that it would return. Today, Lehman finally brings it back—with a twist. 

https://theamericanscholar.org/in-reprise-next-line-please/

Click here to take part!

 

Joe Kloc: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

___________________________________________________________________________________________

82 Sentences, Each Taken from the ‘Last Statement’ of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984

 

Um, I don’t know what to say. I am not as strong as I thought I was going to be, but I guess it

only hurts for a little while. I sat in my cell many days wondering what my last words would be.

I’m not going to shout, use profanity, or make idle threats. I am not going to play a part in my

own murder, no one should have to do that. Can you hear me? This here is a tragedy. They are

fixing to pump my veins with a lethal drug the American Veterinary Association won’t even

allow to be used on dogs. I should not have to be here. I’m not a killer. I know how it look but I

didn’t do it. I didn’t kill my wife. I did not kill those drug dealers. I did not murder your loved one.

I am sure he died unjustly, just like I am. I have done everything to prove my innocence.

If I am paying my debt to society, I am due a rebate and a refund. Everybody has problems.

I allowed the devil to rule my life. I was a kid in a grown man’s world. I was sick, afraid, and l

looking for love in all the wrong ways. I messed up, made poor choices. But I am not guilty of

this crime. I don’t think the world will be a better or safer place without me. I hereby protest

my pending execution. There are a lot of things that are not right in this world, I have had to

overcome them myself. You know this ain’t right. I don’t know why all of this happened. I just

played the hand that life dealt me. I understand that you wanted this day to come, you got

what you wanted. I’m sure you think this is wonderful in your eyes. If this takes the pain away,

so be it. Whatever makes y’all happy. I know you believe that you’re going to have closure.

The truth is that you are going to feel empty after tonight. A revenge death won’t get you anything.

Sooner or later every one of y’all will be along behind me. You will answer to your Maker when

God has found out that you executed an innocent man. I wouldn’t wish this on you. I forgive all y’all.

It is all part of life, like a big full plate of food for the soul. Tell everyone I got full on

chicken and pork chops. I am going to miss those pancakes and those old-time black-and-white shows.

Sometimes it works out like this. I would like to tell my wife that I love her and thank her

for all the years of happiness. I don’t want to leave you baby, see you when you get there.

To my kids, stand tall and continue to make me proud. Don’t fight with each other. I know this is

hard for y’all, but we are going to have to go through it. Don’t cry, it’s my situation. I’ll be fine.

I won’t have to wake up in prison anymore. Don’t be angry at what is happening to me. Enjoy

life’s moments because we never get them back. Yesterday was my birthday. Ain’t life a bitch?

Where’s my stunt double when you need one? Oh, Lord. I am going home. I might have lost the

fight but I’m still a soldier. I am taking it like a man, like a warrior. Preparest a table before

me in the presence of my enemies. Tell them I finished strong. Death before dishonor. With this let

all debts be paid that I owed, real or imagined. Lord, send me a chariot. Hallelujah, holy, holy,

holy. I guess that’s it. It’s my hour. Only the sky and the green grass goes on forever. I’m done.

I have come here today to die, not make speeches. Warden, if you are going to murder

someone, go ahead and do it, pull the trigger. Let’s give them what they want. I’m ready when

y’all are. Are they already doing it? I can feel it, taste it. My left arm is killing me, it hurts bad.

Let me know that I will be in Heaven tonight, please let me know, I don’t want to be in Hell

with Satan or anyone else, please, that is something I need to know. I am starting to go. I am going

to sleep now. Begins singing: Amazing Grace.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Joe Kloc is a Senior Editor at Harper’s Magazine. His first book, Lost at Sea: Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America, will be published in April.  ["82 Sentences, Each Taken from the 'Last Statement' of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984" originally appeared in the Sept. 19^th, 2024, issue of the New York Review of Books.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                   Death row inmate Kevin Cooper's painting, It’s a Generation Thing in America.

 

 

The Golden Age of Paranoia, part II [by Joe Lehman]

Strange Days Indeed -- The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia by Francis Wheen was first published in Great Britain in 2009, amid the early days of the Great Recession following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September 2008. (I remember being far removed from the tumult of the 2008-09 cycle as I spent much of it off traveling on my wanderjahr trek across Australia.) Apparently Wheen felt that a recounting of the Golden Age of Paranoia was relevant to the then-present. As the book jacket describes it, “since the Great Crash of our generation, barely a week has passed without some allusion to the 1970s.” The U.S. edition of Strange Days Indeed was published a year later in 2010, and I read it that autumn, when incidentally, I was supremely depressed, having returned to the States and coming off the initial high of my backpacking adventures. The book’s chaotic subject matter reflected my equally chaotic state of mind,. Truth be told, I was well into my mid-twenties and aimless in my pursuits, so I really thought the world was ending, at least it was for me. Francis Wheen’s incisive examination of paranoid times in the 1970s provided me with plenty of escapist fantasy to enjoy at my reading leisure. In present day October 2024, the world feels like it is worsening in its unraveling. Especially a year into the shock treatment of the October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel, the war on terror in Gaza and Lebanon, and the reverberations of antisemitic activity on college campuses and in urban centers here stateside. 

Under these circumstances, rereading Strange Days Indeed is a much less pleasant experience. It feels negatively ironic poring over tales of wars, military coups, and terrorism that happened fifty years ago, painted with an edgy and almost humorous glow. For wars, military coups, and terrorism abound today, and it is plain ugly. I shudder at wondering how within the next half-century any author will depict the ongoing conflicts in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and their effect on the rest of the world, with the same kind of scholarly glow as Wheen depicts the urban guerrilla adventurism in Uruguay, the lethal I.R.A. bombing campaigns and British retaliatory strikes in Belfast, and the massive bloodletting in tinpot dictatorships like Equatorial Guinea.

Francis Wheen begins his history of the reputedly paranoid 1970s with his questioning of what main event signified the end of the idealistic 1960s. I’ve read other authors pondering that same question. The certain events that Wheen served up are the usual suspects. He points to August 9, 1969, when Charles Manson’s cult followers hacked to death Sharon Tate and four others in L.A. Joan Dideon apparently saw that as the death of the ‘60s. Or, Wheen writes, “the public burial of peace, love and flower power” was the tragic Altamont concert later in 1969, when Hells Angels hired as security guards killed a young attendee, Meredith Hunter. Or else, the ‘60s ended on May 4, 1970, when the national guardsmen gunned down four antiwar protestors. This could make for a keen game to play on long road trips: coming up with the exact event that ended the ‘60s. There are two events that Wheen doesn’t mention, like, for a lot of people it was when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in June, 1968, after winning the California primary. 

Personally, I am partial to the idea that the real death of the ‘60s was on December 8, 1980, when John Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman. After all, the ex-Beatle was the last remaining symbol of idealism for the Left, and Chapman was plenty disillusioned after John’s religiously blasphemous “we’re bigger than Jesus” comment. Maybe I see it as the best analogy because I wasn’t born until the early 1980s, and yet my musical tastes are frozen in the 1960s. I have been a beatlemaniac since childhood. I have a distinct memory of feeling a sense of terrible alienation coming of age in the mid-1990s and absolutely hating the crap music everyone else was into. Lousy lonesome childhood indeed. 

More tomorrow

Poem Beginning with a Line after Yehuda Amichai [by Didi Jackson]

Past the window in the room where we make love
waves follow one another like lines of laundry
as the cliffs unfold, spilling like bolts of cloth into the bay,
and it is the anise, they say, the snails
are after, defining the roads of Serifos
like small-change coins, curled and climbing fierce
as soldiers up each stalk in numbers so thick
they could be plucked like white berries ripe
with June, and they too would taste of licorice
succulent in a time of honey and nettles.

from Moon Jar by Didi Jackson. Red Hen Press, 2020.

from the archive; first published July 29, 2020

The Golden Age of Paranoia [by Joe Lehman]

Strange Days Indeed -- The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia by Francis Wheen was first published in Great Britain in 2009, amid the early days of the Great Recession following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September 2008. (I remember being far removed from the tumult of the 2008-09 cycle as I spent much of it off traveling on my wanderjahr trek across Australia.) Apparently Wheen felt that a recounting of the Golden Age of Paranoia was relevant to the then-present. As the book jacket describes it, “since the Great Crash of our generation, barely a week has passed without some allusion to the 1970s.” The U.S. edition of Strange Days Indeed was published a year later in 2010, and I read it that autumn, when incidentally, I was supremely depressed, having returned to the States and coming off the initial high of my backpacking adventures. The book’s chaotic subject matter reflected my equally chaotic state of mind,. Truth be told, I was well into my mid-twenties and aimless in my pursuits, so I really thought the world was ending, at least it was for me. Francis Wheen’s incisive examination of paranoid times in the 1970s provided me with plenty of escapist fantasy to enjoy at my reading leisure. In present day October 2024, the world feels like it is worsening in its unraveling. Especially a year into the shock treatment of the October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel, the war on terror in Gaza and Lebanon, and the reverberations of antisemitic activity on college campuses and in urban centers here stateside. 

Under these circumstances, rereading Strange Days Indeed is a much less pleasant experience. It feels negatively ironic poring over tales of wars, military coups, and terrorism that happened fifty years ago, painted with an edgy and almost humorous glow. For wars, military coups, and terrorism abound today, and it is plain ugly. I shudder at wondering how within the next half-century any author will depict the ongoing conflicts in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and their effect on the rest of the world, with the same kind of scholarly glow as Wheen depicts the urban guerrilla adventurism in Uruguay, the lethal I.R.A. bombing campaigns and British retaliatory strikes in Belfast, and the massive bloodletting in tinpot dictatorships like Equatorial Guinea. 

More to come soon!...

-- Friday, October 25, 2024

Alexandra Lacroix’s “Entre nous, les saisons”: How to perform climate catastrophe [By Tracy Danison]

“Entre nous, les saisons” by Alexandra Lacroix. Photo: © Raphael Creton

I was Googling an equivalent for du lard du cochon and ran across the factoid that, before the 18th century, there were two seasons.

From about 4000 BC until then, annual events worth remarking bore holy names such as Saint Répétition or quaint ones such as Awakening of the Groundhog in the different dead languages.

Great, mysterious things then began to happen. Going on into the 18th century, believing firmly that making stuff was understanding it, and sure that anyhow it could all be reconciled to Biblical accounts, people started hairsplitting scientifically. Thus encouraged, taxonomy (phylum, order, genus, species) and industry began to proliferate.

Antonio Vivaldi was in 1723 thereby enabled to add Spring and Fall to our calendar and compose his celebrated Four Seasons concerti. Scrapping the wordy “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth” his wonderful Seasons formalize a compact and gorgeous “natural world”, which, pretty much, exists to provide the lake and lightning that will henceforth inspire all aspiring Mary Shelleys and their shitty little boyfriends to write their own Frankensteins.

The inconvenience of another take on the world was documented in Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in late Summer, 2019: Sweltering in Paris: Going to ground with Michel Onfray, Greta Thunberg & the death of Descartes.The “natural world” is as difficult to intellectually and morally shake off as its wordier predecessor. And, so much the worse for humanity, it is increasingly more difficult to maintain Nature at anything like service-optimal levels.

 

“Entre nous, les saisons” by Alexandra Lacroix. Photo: © Raphael Creton

 

Alexandra Lacroix’s dance performance, Entre nous, les saisons (“Between you and me, the seasons”), imagines “the fragility of [human] being” (in the environment) not as an alternative to the beguiling notion of a world all our own but as a more perceptive and sensible way of looking at it: Fragility is U. As a description of material peril and of the human role, “fragility” does a better job of highlighting humanity’s situation in the natural world than “(inter)dependent” and a far better job than “should be responsible”, that’s for sure.

The brilliant part of Alexandra Lacroix’s show is that she knows fragility is about showing and talk always gets to “should”: more do, less words.

The theater is a big hall, a concrete floor, bleacher-bucket seating; the stage is the space between the first row and the wall. To churn up a fragile ambiance, she uses musicians riffing on the Four Seasons with electronic and traditional instruments, amateur rock climbers, and scaffolding. The set is complemented with familiar images of the leafy and green and spectacular natural world projected through the scaffolding and on the back wall and sometimes accompanied by little NPR-tone talking.

The rest is metaphor, symbol, allegory, analogy, what have you.

The climbers clamber and fall and grunt and sweat up around and over scaffolds that give the impression of being stocked on, rather than part of, the set. A couple of the musicians, loosely centered among the scaffold struts and beams try out riffs and phrases and variations on the Seasons concerti. The climbers, singular and together, are absorbed in talk of choices, defeats and successes.

 

“Entre nous, les saisons” by Alexandra Lacroix. Photo: © Raphael Creton

 

In terms of the rhythm and pace of movement and interaction, sometimes the climbers seem to lead the musicians, sometimes to follow them, sometimes musicians or climbers use the set environment as a sound board or an instrument or a challenge. Seasons is an actor: the concerti have shared History but also personal intimacy – I have stared out the window at the frozen Earth to the rattle of steam heat and Spring. The riffs and phrases and variations bounce against my expectations of Vivaldi, not those I have for the musicians.

In sum, as fragility-awareness training, Lacroix’s piece works really well. I was absorbed into its gentle (very subtly organized) chaos – trying to identify riffs on Vivaldi and mostly failing, for instance; the gentle chaos gently unsettles me, makes me feel my vulnerability, without scaring me. Fear’s an important factor. Low dramatic tension means low resistance to what’s happening. Maybe  

my sense of vulnerability implies that the world around can and does act on and without me; it has agency.

Fragility of being, Entre nous les saisons’ gentle chaos suggests, is about me, not about the meanness of the hard hard world. And, when it’s all said and done, what’s about me is about you.

_______

I saw “Entre nous, les saisons” at Théatre de l’Aquarium, 18 September 2024, directed by Alexandra Lacroix assisted by Raphaëlle Blin, with musicians from l’Ensemble Le Printans et climber/performers
Oscar Villamizar Rueda, Sarah Rochereau, Aymeric Schultze. Sound by Jérôme Baillet, video by Jérémie Bernaert
and set by Fanny Laplane
with assistance from Laura Bauchet.

"Poem in the Manner of the 1950s" [by David Lehman]

a prose poem from Michigan Quarterly Review

Top of Form

Volume XLII, Issue 2: Mainly on the 1950s, Spring 2003

Poem in the Manner of the 1950s

Lehman, David

                         For Larry Goldstein

Meet Doak Walker, the last of the all-American glamour boys. Say a prayer for Gil Hodges, who went 0 for the World Series. There was one big secret that separated the men from the boys, and that was what a woman looked like without her clothes on. A naked girl in 1959 was not the same as a naked girl in 1939 or 1919, wasn't that true? It was indubitably true, but how would we get the girls to prove it? If one had pretty breasts we'd say she was "stacked" or had big "knobs." Of such remarks were many Friday night conversations composed. Rosemary Clooney cut a record with Bing Crosby covering "Brazil." Sinatra at the piano smoking a cigarette pointed out that it was great to "know your fate is / where the Empire State is." As nice as it may be to travel on the camel route to Iraq, it's a whole lot nicer to wander back. That was the consensus. The center fielder with the crewcut got the girl, Grace Kelly got the prince, and the heavyweight champ retired undefeated. Bill Holden blew up the bridge but died in the doing. There were no homosexuals yet one of them was expelled and no heroin addicts except jazz musicians and no card-carrying Communists except nondescript men in suits carrying briefcases with film canisters in them. The British meant well, poor suckers, but Europe was an old syphilitic with yellow teeth who smelled bad. We were the land of Captain Midnight and we took a correspondence course and we bought forty-eight commemoratives for twenty-five cents on a matchbook cover and the senators were Republicans, and Washington was first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League. The old general played golf and there were bungalow colonies in the summer and drive-ins with Deborah Kerr and Dugan's blueberry muffins and chicken chow mein at the Hi Ho or the Min Ju on Dyckman Street, and a red Coke machine dispensed green eight-ounce glass bottles, and Archie liked Betty but liked Veronica better, and there was a jukebox and there were hamburgers and chocolate malteds, all the things that made America great.

George Bilgere's Poetry Town, Elissa Gabbert's "The Essay As Realm," and Grace Cavalieri's Artwork

These days I don’t want to read the news. I don’t want to turn on NPR. I don’t want to check my phone and read all those annoying political texts.

Instead, I want to turn to my favorite things. Poetry, of course, is number one.

Every morning my inbox is full of those poem-a-day emails.  My favorite, Poetry Town, is sent out by George Bilgere whose choice of poems, commentary, and accompanying photographs are always a delight.

Here's a poem and commentary from Poetry Town that was posted on October 15th. 

Myrtle
by John Ashbery

How funny your name would be
if you could follow it back to where
the first person thought of saying it,
naming himself that, or maybe
some other persons thought of it
and named that person. It would
be like following a river to its source,
which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
They just automatically appear at a place
where they get wider, and soon a real
river comes along, with fish and debris,
regal as you please, and someone
has already given it a name: St. Benno
(saints are popular for this purpose) or, or
some other name, the name of his
long-lost girlfriend, who comes
at long last to impersonate that river,
on a stage, her voice clanking
like its bed, her clothing of sand
and pasted paper, a piece of real technology,
while all along she is thinking, I can
do what I want to do. But I want to stay here.

 From Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, Ecco, 2007.

Why I Chose This Poem

Over the years I’ve learned the hard way not to fall into the trap of trying to explain what a John Ashbery poem “means.” Many a student of mine has dozed off while I stood floundering around at the lectern in a vain attempt to make sense of that canny old wizard. And while his poems can and often do drive me crazy, there is also something wonderful about the teasing way they almost always almost make sense, the same way Mae West almost always almost let you see it all.

A second favorite thing that helps me through times like this: essays. This week, my favorite is an essay from The Georgia Review called “The Essay as Realm” by Elissa Gabbert in which Gabbert describes the architectural qualities of her writing as well as her love of books on architecture.

 She writes:

“I think this is important: memories and ideas happen in a place. An essay is a place for ideas; it has to feel like a place. It has to give one the feeling of entering a room.”

 “Architecture books are full of good writing, and they’re also full of good writing advice. Venturi writes that he likes buildings that are 'boring as well as ‘interesting.’  He puts interesting in quotes, but not boring—interesting is the more suspicious category. I feel the same about books—I don’t trust books that aren’t a little boring.” 

“I think of an essay as a realm for both the writer and the reader. When I’m working on an essay, I’m entering a loosely defined space. If we borrow Alexander’s terms again, the essay in progress is “the site”: “It is essential to work on the site,” he writes, in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction; “Work on the site, stay on the site, let the site tell you its secrets.” Just by beginning to think about an essay as such—by forming the intention to write on an idea or theme—I’m opening a portal, I’m creating a site, a realm.”

As the daughter of an architect, I am particularly taken with Gabbert’s  insights. I have always loved blueprints, and I love the very idea of designing a poem, an essay, a story as a house that you will build, enter and live inside for a period of time.

Reading this essay, I was reminded of the family house that my father added onto, designing bathrooms with tubs that curved into the walls and secret passageways and unreachable cupboards—one you had to climb up a ladder and reach into it with a pole to knock things out—that was the hiding place for Santa’s gifts. The walls of many of the rooms featured built-in bookcases. In fact, the entire house felt like a giant library with books on every wall and table and sometimes spilling onto the floors.

After my mother died, the University of Virginia bought and remodeled our house and took out all the bookcases and weird bathrooms and secret passageways and unreachable cupboards. Now, the house is like so many any other houses—generic and unmemorable.  Not a unique moment in it.  If I were to compare the house to a poem, I'd say someone took it to an MFA workshop and took everyone's advice--editing out all it's interesting features. 

I love thinking of poetry in relation to other arts--which brings me to a third favorite thing: Grace Cavalieri—I don't know whether I like her writing or her artwork best. Lately I've been spending some time checking out her paintings. 

"Society Must Be Defended" [by Jerome Sala]

Society Must Be Defended

from this poem. Its inconsequence is a problem.
A problem Society doesn’t know about.
Problems known, as we all know (don’t we?)
can be harvested, like souls in need of repentance.
But the uncounted are worse than the uncooperative.
They are likely to increase or disorganize
the way of all flesh if allowed to bask
on their undiscovered beaches. Many unknowns
are out there. They are, in fact, known as “the many.”
The only traces they leave are something like black holes.
You know you see something, but on closer inspection,
you’re just gazing at absence. No one blames you
for looking away. After a while, all social space
seems more and more empty. That it goes on
like this for infinity. Scary. But not to worry.
Authorities assure us this too must end.

Jerome Sala's latest book is How Much? New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books). Forthcoming is Double Feature (Insurance Editions) a collaborative chapbook with his spouse, poet Elaine Equi. Other books include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books), The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier), and Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull). His work also appears in two editions of Best American Poetry (Scribners).

Two poems by joanne burns [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Another prose poem this week by another virtuoso of the form. joanne burns (who has previously been featured on the BAP blog here) has published fourteen collections of poetry since her debut Snatch appeared in 1972. For the next half-century, she has pushed the boundaries of genre, with her work often taking place in those indefinite spaces between poetry and prose—not only with prose-poems but also parables and microfictions. For decades she has renounced capitalization, preferring the egalitarian quality of exclusively lower-case words, which according to burns “levels the playing field.” 

“how to sneeze in peace” was first published in the Australian journal, Heat, in 2001 and showcases burns's imaginative faculty which allows her to so acutely locate the absurd in the quotidian. I also wanted to share “she had more friends,” a poem I have always loved. Ingeniously laconic, the shift in the poem’s direction is as sharp as the poet’s wit. The title in particular takes on a new and gloriously more sinister interpretation after the poem is read. Enjoy.

joanne burns lives in Sydney and is currently assembling a new manuscript of recent works: rummage.

how to sneeze in peace

the burden of dreaming, the bed a huge net dragging the monster octopus of story that lunges through the head at night: the corpulence of the drowning psyche. who, what, are these people, these shades, these feelings, places, likenesses, that tangle one up like a bad load of washing. this shamozzle of the long night.

tentacles shoot out new episodes, plots and subplots in the hours before dawn. who is the octopus – the dreamer or the dream. grubby stories, leviathan lore, cheap little anecdotes. you turn in the bed, and its creak documents another story. the glare, the smirks of strangers, familiar places, rearranged by the psyche’s cruel interior designer. you know the loci by name but they look different. as if you are awakening from an anaesthetic.

in dreams irony does not exist, even suspicion, perspicuity is a struggle, you suffer physical pain if you try to break out of the dream. the dream and its fleshy, multifarious burdens insists you remain naïve, compliant, committed.

but for those who have been blessed with dust allergies there is a way out. if you find yourself near dusty spots in one of your dreamings try to get as close as you can to these sprinklings or mites. within breaths you will feel it coming. a huge sequence of sneezing that will blast you from your deepest slumbering, with a shower of clear ink, writing invisible gratitudes across the lightness of air.

 

she had more friends

 

she had more friends 

than you could fit 

into the back of a truck

 

that's why she didn't mind 

leaving them parked 

on a cliff edge

 

while she went 

for a stroll

with the brake in her pocket

Charles Bukowski -- Great Poems of the World, Episode 13, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

 

 

 

from "Some comments on my last book of poesy"
     -- Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

why do you drink?
I saw you at the racetrack but I didn't bother you.
I'd like to renew our relationship.
do you really stay up all night?
I can out-drink you.
you stole it from Sherwood Anderson.
did you ever meet Ezra?
I am alone and I think of you every night.
who the hell do you think you're fooling?
my tits aren't much but I've got great legs.
fuck you, man.
my wife hates you.
will you please read the enclosed poems and comment?
I am going to publish all those letters you wrote me.
you jack-off motherfucker, you're not fooling anybody.

And the Moon and the Stars and the World

Long walks at night --
that's what's good for the soul:
peeking into windows 
watching tired housewives
trying to fight off
their beer-maddened husbands.

Me Against the World

when I was a kid
one of the questions asked was,
would you rather eat a bucket of shit
or drink a bucket of piss?
I thought that was easy.
"that's easy," I said, "I'll take the
piss."
"maybe we'll make you do both,"
they told me.
I was the new kid in the
neighborhood.
"oh yeah," I said.
"yeah!" they said.
there were 4 of them.
"yeah," I said, "you and whose
army?"
"we won't need no army," the
biggest one said.
I slammed my fist into his
stomach.
then all 5 of us were down on
the ground fighting.
they got in each other's way
but there were still too many
of them.
I broke free and started
running.
"sissy! sissy!" they yelled.
"going home to mama?"
I kept running.
they were right.
I ran all the way to my house,
up the driveway and onto the
porch and into the
house
where my father was beating
my mother.
she was screaming.
things were broken on the floor.
I charged my father and started swinging.
I reached up but he was too tall,
all I could hit were his
legs.
then there was a flash of red and
purple and green
and I was on the floor.
"you little prick!" my father said,
"you stay out of this!"
"don't you hit my boy!" my mother
screamed.
but I felt good because my father
was no longer hitting my
mother.
to make sure, I got up and charged
him again, swinging.
there was another flash of colors
and I was on the floor
again.
when I got up again
my father was sitting in one chair
and my mother was sitting in
another chair
and they both just sat there
looking at me.
I walked down the hall and into
my bedroom and sat on the
bed.
I listened to make sure there
weren't any more sounds of
beating or screaming
out there.
there weren't.
then I didn't know what to
do.
it wasn't any good outside
and it wasn't any good
inside.
so I just sat there.
then I saw a spider making a web
in the window.
I found a match, walked over,
lit it and burned the spider.
then I felt better.
much better.


Poem in the Manner of Charles Bukowski
   -- David Lehman

You do what you want,
I’ll do what I want,
and we’ll see which one of us
gets to the twenty-dollar window
in time for the fourth race at Del Mar.

On the goddamn radio
that’s always playing
in my bitch’s kitchen,
I heard some East Coast big-shot author
say he needs to jerk off before he can write.
All is I can say is fuck that shit.

I hate poets who beg you
to like them because you feel sorry for them.
Do not feel sorry for me.
I won on Bitches’ Brew in the fourth
and went home and drank
 a fifth of bourbon
and got laid.

After Bukowski
   -- Mitch Sisskind

summer nights after work 
bill and I played tom and john
in basketball in the park by
ford city and then we'd go
to the old gripe and groan. 

bill and I were okay at
basketball while john 
was terrible but they 
usually won on account
of how tom was great. 

in fact in two rivers wisconsin
where tom went to high school
tom is in their high school sports
hall of fame in all three sports
in two rivers wisconsin.

well one night bill and I won
in basketball but the next
night they won again and
then we went over to
the old gripe and groan

and tom said i really wanted
to win tonight on account
of you won last night so |
i didn't have a drink
last night not even a

beer and i didn't 
fuck my wife
last night and not
this morning
I didn't
fuck her
neither one. 

R.I.P. Robert Coover (1932-October 5, 2024) [by Stacey Lehman]

Ed. note: I just learned that Robert Coover died on October 5, 2024. I read and loved several of his books. I had a terrific chapbook of his short-short stories "In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters". One of the "encounters" describes a rolicking night in a convention hotel that makes me wonder if he was describing an experience at the MLA or AWP. Unfortunately, the chapbook went the way of books that are loaned to friends: I no longer have it. Here's a post I wrote way back in 2009. Don't forget to read the comments:

 

A Tale (Tail) of Two Covers [by Stacey Harwood]

 

David Yezzi’s post a few days ago about Philip Larkin prompted this post by Jim Cummins, which prompted a comment string about Robert Coover’s Spanking the Maid, a book I read and loved when it was published in 1982 (Grove). I was living in Albany, NY at the time and Coover came through to promote another book. When I asked him about Spanking, he told me that the book was really about “language.”  I was confused, felt dumb.  The book I read was about the S&M relationship between a man and his maid. Oh well.

Anyway, Jim Cummins hasn’t read the book, though he would like to, so I did a quick search to see if it is still in print.  It most certainly is, yet with a different cover than the Coover I read and loved.  Check this out.  On the left is the book I read in '82; on the right is the cover as it appears today.

 

Which cover would you like, Jim? 

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Nine): Cate Marvin [by Angela Ball]

BLACK UMBRELLA

What to do stationed beneath an awning curtained
falling with rainwater but read books on dinosaurs?

Better to peel open tins of tuna for the stray cats
nestled wet beneath porches of the neighborhood.

No one wants them in their hunger, nor for piteous
cries to interfere with the sounds of the televisions.

If the town had one huge umbrella, we might all join
to carry it above us together. But there is no together.

Unless you can call a collection of structures together,
when all we’ve really got is a shambles of inhabitance.

Nothing throbs warmth near midnight, no clock can
admit its choking, and sheets have never had license

to speak. They hate us lying atop them, hate turning
in the washer, the dryer, over and over, as I am come

to despise someone I never saw in the rain. Someone
who has lain on my sheets. (I’ve not been discreet.)

One who rarely or never, you choose, gave me license
to speak. As the liquor store clerk demanded tonight,

Are you in a bad mood, or are you tired? I said I was
neither. He assumed that meant I meant I was both.

I assured him I was none. See? Your expression, your
tone! I told him he must be projecting, that I was sorry

he felt worn and alone. This is the price you pay in this
town when you neglect to hand your smile to no one.

But the cats would froth at your doorstep should you
attempt to feed them. You’d have to bat them back!

It’s best to remain still in rainwater and read your best
dinosaur book, read it aloud loudly. For instance, you

might think they’ll never come back. But I myself fear
I’m becoming one right now. That I’ll roam this town

beneath a giant black umbrella I’ve fashioned for my
enormous frame. That I’ll gnash my placid neighbors

in my jaws should they attempt to suggest once again
I ought to water my flowers more often. That’s what

rain’s for, friends! Just think of it as the sky’s watering
can. I’ve bought the deed to this plot. I’m so American

I’ll bury myself alive right here beneath this fatigued
rosebush, and my bone-mulch will push out petulant

blossoms pinker than ever. Because I stocked up. I got
supplies. The cats have my back. Because I’m trying to

explain myself while swilling water off my window sill.
Ill-humored clouds from distant smoke-stacks please me.

Because that crisp smell you call fall I don’t care about.
                                                                                         -Cate Marvin

Cate Marvin teaches poetry writing in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program at the University of Southern Maine and is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, she lives in Scarborough, Maine. Event Horizon, her fourth collection, appeared from Copper Canyon Press in 2022.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Nine): Cate Marvin

Whereas John Ashbery’s poems, when in search of a past, may gravitate to the fervid realities of early cartoon characters, in her intense, magnetic “Black Umbrella” Cate Marvin takes refuge with archaic animals: “What to do stationed beneath an awning curtained / falling with rainwater but read books on dinosaurs?”  Yet Marvin, restless, revises this notion: “Better to peel open tins of tuna for the stray cats /nestled wet beneath porches of the neighborhood.” They are pariahs, despised for their “piteous cries” that “interfere with the sounds of the televisions.”

Were we to sum up Frank O’Hara’s New York in one word it might be “togetherness.” The characters and objects of his poems--construction workers, Miss Stillwagon at the bank, a copy of the journal NEW WORLD WRITING, even the louse cohabiting his office at the Museum of Modern Art—all somehow belong, contributing to the ongoing personality of the city. Marvin’s city is somewhat different:

 

     If the town had one huge umbrella, we might all join

     to carry it above us together. But there is no together.

     Unless you can call a collection of structures together,

     when all we’ve really got is a shambles of inhabitance.

 

What devastating phrase, that “shambles of inhabitance.”

Here, the “black umbrella,” with its tetradactyl struts, connotes a city of divisions and misunderstandings. In Kenneth Koch, personification is an opportunity for play, even when he addresses World War II.  Here, things personified express neuroses and grudges:

 

     Nothing throbs warmth near midnight, no clock can

     admit its choking, and sheets have never had license

     to speak. They hate us lying atop them, hate turning

     in the washer, the dryer, over and over, as I am come

     to despise someone I never saw in the rain. Someone

     who has lain on my sheets. (I’ve not been discreet.)

 

Marvin’s dark approach is a welcome surprise--especially when, as above, it is spiked with dark imagination—those poor sheets!—and sardonic rhyme. Her persona, no pussycat, threatens to “gnash” her neighbors should they “attempt to request again” that she water her flowers. Here a comedy of personality emerges, another surprise! There is playfulness here after all, albeit the comedy of a curmudgeon who delights in raining on any available parade. One need not be optimistic to be American:

 

     I’ll bury myself alive right here beneath this fatigued

     rosebush, and my bone-mulch will push out petulant

     blossoms pinker than ever. Because I stocked up. I got

     supplies. The cats have my back. Because I’m trying to

     explain myself while swilling water off my window sill.

     Ill-humored clouds from distant smoke-stacks please me

 

Everything is coming up roses--tired, funereal blooms when seen from beneath Marvin’s self-fabricated black umbrella, a place to shelter from a world of fall-bibbers and leaf-peekers.  The season bids togetherness; Marvin’s tart persona supports isolation and eccentricity: “Because that crisp smell you call fall I don’t care about.” This  bold stroke is reminiscent of “Marriage,” Gregory Corso’s most bravura poem, where he briefly  imagines himself “the scourge of marriage, the saint of divorce.”  Gripped by Cate Marvin’s eloquence, we are reminded that fall is as dark as it is bright, and we revel in the corrective of her speaker’s bitter comic voice. We remember that opposition is individuality, and that for art nothing is more exigent, more precious than that very quality. - Angela Ball

2001: A Space Odyssey [by Mark Jarman]

2001:  A Space Odyssey

 

First, they threw up beside their towels

Laid on the sand.  One said he had to repocket

His paraphernalia and threw up again

Into a handful of keys.  The other said, “Whoa.”

Then, I led them into the cool dark of the movie theater

Where they slumped, as if coolness and darkness

Were weights on their chests.  But safe –

It was safe for us in there.

A family padded in next to us across the aisle,

Three kids, mother, father, trailing sand and heat.

And the screen lit up with trailers

And the matinee feature, Kubrick’s sci fi epic,

Newly released.  We settled in.  My friends sank

Further under the weight of reflected light,

They were more like the towels

They’d left on the beach beside their puddles.

Mescaline, as I remember.  I was their babysitter.

Late sixties summer, as I remember –

 

I’d seen a former youth minister in the beach crowd.

He’d left his wife. He had a new haircut. 

He saw me see him as I entered

The theater with my tripping friends.

It was not a pleasant look of recognition.

It was a look that said I know you know.

And I did know.  His wife had said to my father, their pastor,

“How would you like to have sex with a bag of shit?”

It was about what had come between them.

 

I was eager to leave for that other planet, college,     

And couldn’t imagine regretting my absence.

The movie ended.   The father across the aisle leaned toward me

And said, “What the hell did that mean?”

Back out in the sun, on the blinding pavement,

I thought I could have told him.  Not now, though.

 

One of those friends leans a cello back and begins.

One flies apart on his own wings.

It is not too late to pray for us all, living or dead,

Or simply to bring us all to mind for one moment.

 

first published in Literary Imagination. Pictured: director Stanley Kubrick, whose movies did amazing things with certain wonderful pieces of music by Strauss, Strauss, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Ligetti, and Shostakovich. not to mention "Daisy" and "Singing in the Rain.".

Nathalie Handal: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________

Awón/Sin

 

We will tell each other that

we can't choose

between one country and another,

we will tell each other

that we will kill

even if we don't want to,

we will regret saying it

and we will start

all over again.

Your pain will hang inside mine,

mine inside yours, you will

comb my hair, and I will comb yours.

You will press your ears against my wall,

I will press mine against your body,

we will love and inspect,

we will try and live

with what follows us—

but no one can change this:

we are unable to tear

our eyes from each other.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Nathalie Handal has been described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” She has lived in four continents, is the author of 10 award-winning books, translated in over 15 languages, including Life in a Country Album, winner of the Palestine Book Award, and The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers,” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Fondazione di Venezia, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, and Africa Institute, among others. She is professor at New York University-AD, and writes a column, “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders.  [Author photo by Andrea Salerno.]

“Awon / Sin”: Aramaic. Awon appears frequently throughout the Old Testament, and in parallel with other words related to sin, such as chatta'th and pesha’.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

       Tahia Halim (1919-2003), Four Women Braiding Each Other’s Hair. Halim was an Egyptian painter celebrated for her poetic and folkloric works.

Tarsila do Amaral: breaking out from Woman Invisibility [By Tracy Danison]

"A Cuca, 1924”. Photo © Ville de Grenoble - Musée de Grenoble. Photo: J.L. Lacroix

Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), whose work is on show at the Musée du Luxembourg until February 2025, is a painterly personality of special vision and real skill. Were she a man, she would by this time be eponymous for a genre, like Magritte or Braque. I say that flatly, with a cowboy hat and boots, bold and belligerent. Through a series of quirks of family life and 20^th century politics, a sufficient oeuvre of a truly original (woman) painter has managed to survive the Woman Invisibility (Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 25/5/2023) process.

The bulk of the work in the exhibition, about 150 pieces, mostly dates from do Amaral’s mid-30s to late-40s and includes works such as Auto-retrato (Manteau rouge) 1923, A Negra, 1923 or A Cuca, 1924 that have been appreciated, but outside an oeuvre.

“Academia n°4, 1922”. Photo © Romulo Fialdini

Tarsila do Amaral’s painterly skill and particular ability to project a personal vision is patent the moment you walk into the exhibition. To the left, sure lines of Academia n°4, 1922 put an “academic” nude into sublime motion. To the right, a top-prize exercise of the expressionist-cubist-surrealist environment she’s working in.

"Caipirinha, 1923". Photo © Ding Musa

A bit further on, I am especially touched by portraits of herself and her second husband, Oswald de Andrade. 

Do Amaral's portrait, Auto-retrato I (Self-portrait 1), 1924, composed photo-realistically, has an indefinable but unmistakable trace of tough brushed into it. 

“Auto-retrato I, 1924”. Photo © Artistic-Cultural Collection of the Governmental Palaces of the State of São Paulo. Photo: Romulo Fialdini

Oswald’s portrait, Retrato de Oswald de Andrade, 1923, photo-realistic under an expressionist composition, layers in tender. I say “tough”, “tender” trying to convey the idea that do Amaral fuses in a sensibility rather than a feeling or a label: angry, easy, butch, femme.

“Retrato de Oswald de Andrade, 1923”. Photo © Acervo Museu de Arte Brasileira – MAB FAAP, São Paulo. Photo: Fernando Silveira

Other faces show this same kind of subtle fusion of sensibility into the composition. I am thinking of the foregrounded face of a worker in a rice field in “Trabalhadores, 1938”. I say to myself, working for peanuts in water up to his knees to support a large family, not, Despair. Despair is too broad and too narrow for what do Amaral draws my attention to.

 

Trabalhadores, 1938”. Photo © MASP

Many if not most paintings that caught my attention are composed of well-defined, brightly-colored shapes and forms that are arranged in, often enough, dreamy-versions of otherwise typical scenes – garden, street, figure in a (desert) landscape, for instance.

"Floresta,1929". Photo © Museu de Arte Contemporânea da USP Collection, São Paulo, Brazil. Photo Romulo Fialdini

These compositions engage me on two levels. On the first level the elements compose a narrative, conjure a visual place. The narrative is structured to point a parallel second level of engagement where all the different elements of the first exist independently, in un-narrative space.

“Distância, 1928”. Photo © Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo. Photo: Isabella Matheus

Though it’s a first impression, it seems to me that this quality of pointing from element of composition to thing for itself, from place to space, distinguishes do Amaral from the scrum and ruck of the approaches in her time, especially Cubist or Surrealist work.

“O Touro, 1928”. Photo © Romulo Fialdini

It seems to me the colorful reductions and fabulous arrangements of, say, Picasso’s Cubism underline the narrative quality of composition. De Chirico’s or Magritte’s Surrealism or distortion of forms and de-familiarization tend to question the on-looker’s interpretation of visual narrative rather than assert the act of composition-imagination, as Tarsila do Amaral does.

 

"Passagem de nivel III, 1965". Photo © Jaime Acioli

The documentation makes a strong case for do Amaral as an actor on a broader artistic scene in Paris from the turn of the century into the 20-30s of the previous century. She situates, according to this, in a cultural climate where an interest in African and other indigenous arts give her permission to use her personal – but what they call “Brazilian” – experience in her own art.

“Carnaval em Madureira, 1924”. Photo © Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo. Photo: Isabella Matheus

Husband Oswald even wrote a pamphlet for do Amaral’s little group of Paris Brazilians proclaiming “cannibal art” – meaning that it is by “eating up” (absorbing) European painterly nous, the Brazilians, including do Amaral, create a syncretized, unique, “Brazilian” form of art.

 

"Porto I, 1953". Photo © MASP

So, building on her ability to depict her lived cultural environment in modern/European style, as a subject of art commentary, Tarsila exists as a “national Brazilian”. However, even if she did fit herself into this national identity story, I am not convinced by it.

“A Negra, 1923”. Photo: © Romulo Fialdini

Looking around, I just don’t think there is much of anything other than Tarsila do Amaral that is especially or exclusively “Brazilian” in her work. Otto Dix, who was from Germany and served in the German Imperial army and painted all those shocking World War 1 scenes from German trenches and German streets, is not classed as a “national German” painter but known rather as a particularly acute observer and Expressionist painter of war, like Goya.

 

"Terra,1943". Photo © Marcio Rangel

I say, let do Amaral be Tarsila and let’s let her paint her vision of her experience, wherever she acquired it. I say, she tagged herself as Brazilian because she could exist publicly in it, and, between her sex and her family and her society, there weren’t many places she could do that – the label protected her work from Woman Invisibility. That’s enough.

 

“Auto-retrato (Manteau rouge) 1923”. Photo © Museu Nacional de Belas Artes Ibram, Rio de Janeiro, Photo: Jaime Acioli

Tarsila do Amaral is an artist, a painter, a woman, a Brazilian for the whole world.

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Cecilia Braschi
is the curator of “Tarsila do Amaral: Peindre le Brésil moderne” at the Musée du Luxembourg until 2 February 2025. The show will move to the Guggenheim Bilbao for an exhibition that begins in February and lasts into June 2025. Tarsila do Amaral’s works previously figured in a 2018 solo exposition in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Latin American painter series that featured Diego Rivera, Cândido Portinari, Roberto Matta, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Armando Reverón, José Clemente Orozco and Joaquín Torres García.