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The birds in a V-pattern
and the denuded tree with a dozen mighty branches
skeletal against the light blue sky
three varieties of purple in the distance
as the sun sets, and the birds exchange notes.
My dog Johnny falls asleep at my feet
on the terrace. I sip my drink and think:
just as having an even tiny portion of your portfolio
in bonds can help your long-term performance,
so even a few drops of dry vermouth
will improve your martini.
from Literary Hub
December 21, 2022
Dante, as depicted by Domenico di Michelino in 1465. This painting is located in Florence Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore.
The end of the year brings with it a stunning new translation of the entire Divine Comedy by the poet/scholar Michael Palma, already celebrated as the preeminent translator of Italian poetry into English. What he achieves in this monumental volume is quite extraordinary---"As a poet myself," he writes in the frontmatter, "I have sought to re-create the poetry of Dante's Commedia, as I see it on the page and hear it in my head when I read the original. To me, a large and necessary part of what this means is an attempt to re-create the terza rima structure." This he accomplishes brilliantly, as I discovered when I read the first canto aloud at my desk last night. Here is a 700-year old poem in Italian, in a complex verse form, springing to life in 21st-century English with all of its structural grandeur intact. A miracle of rare device indeed. I should also mention that his introduction is as good an overview of Dante and his work as you will find anywhere.
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I was delighted to discover that NPR did a short piece on the new book, which you can listen to here. I should further note that Michael and I go back a long way, to our meeting as college freshmen in 1963. Even back then, at 18, he was an impressive repository of literary knowledge, clearly destined for the kind of achievement that his new translation of The Divine Comedy represents.
Michael Palma, 1967
On Matisse's Birthday (December31)
Matisse’s Open Window
Do you believe that Matisse’s “Blue Nudes” (1952)
in its simplicity — one color, one fluid motion —
was easier to compose than his “Open Window” (1905),
a harbor of sails framed by the shutters
of his hotel room window in the bright fauve day?
Matisse didn’t have to think. He looked and knewt
he harbor is life, and blessed be the light
that results in such blossoms of color,
an exuberance that proves every seascape
is a lover’s state of heart. “Blue Nudes,”
a set of four lithographs, reflects Matisse’s “cut out”
method of composition, paper on paper, blue on white,
no paint at all. With this in mind, which
would you say was the more avant-garde?
https://www.literarymatters.org/16-1-three-aesthetic-questions/
Charles Baudelaire
An open window never reveals as much as one that is shut. Nothing is more profound, more mysterious, more stimulating, more sinister, or more brilliant than a window lighted by a lone candle. Reject the light of day. In the dark or luminous space behind an opaque windowpane, life goes on, goes on dreaming, goes on suffering.
Across the rooftops, I notice a woman of a certain age, worn out, poor, always bent over, never able to get away. From just her face, her clothes, her gestures, from next to nothing, I have fabricated this woman’s life story, or rather her myth, and sometimes when I tell it I burst into tears.
(If the individual I saw had been a poor old man, I would have made up his life story just as easily.)
And I lie down, proud to have lived and suffered in lives other than my own.
Maybe you’ll object: “Are you sure that the story you told is true?” What does it matter, what difference does it make, if it has helped me to live, to feel that I am and what I am?
—Translated from the French by David Lehman
published in Conduit
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It’s Often Time to Feed the Birds
The ornaments are still on the tree.
We’re still playing Irish carols.
And damned be anyone who says
our sweetness of feeling is excessive or false.
Jim Harrison is smiling and fiercely
reminding it’s better to live as
a sentimentalist than to die a smart ass.
I was at the back window watching
our dog, my wife, and our daughter,
the dog bounding into the wind-drifted
snow as they, bundled and laughing,
trudged their way to the front door.
It’s a new year. But is there such a thing?
The sun sets, rises, sets, and we name
the days that tumble one into
another while 500 million light years away
lies a galaxy with suns that have no
days, no war, no need for a manger.
Here we must waken, roll away the stone
from our empty tomb of sleep, step
through another sunlit tragic day, trying
to believe in the snowplow, the mail,
the hello from the next-door neighbor, the mourning
doves fluffed at the nearly empty feeder.
for Dan Gerber
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Jack Ridl has published eight collections, the latest being All at Once (CavanKerry Press, which also published his Losing Season). Wayne State University Press published his Saint Peter and the Goldfinch, Practicing to Walk Like a Heron, which received the ForeWords Review Gold Medal for poetry, and Broken Symmetry, named the year’s best book of poetry by The Society of Midland Authors. Billy Collins, Poet Laureate at the time, chose Ridl’s Against Elegies for the NYC Center for Book Arts Award. Ridl is co-author with Peter Schakel of Approaching Literature and co-editor of 250 Poems, both from Bedford/St. Martin’s. The Carnegie Foundation named him Michigan’s Professor of the Year. More than 80 of his students have earned their MFA in poetry, and more than 100 are publishing, several having won first book awards. Jack Ridl’s weekly YouTube program “The Sentimentalist” centers on everyday, non-newsworthy subjects, each program ending with a poem.
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Style is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward. -- Robert Frost (pictured)
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. -- W. H. Auden
Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ― Mark Twain
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. –Emily Dickinson
Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. -- Vladimir Nabokov
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. ~Oscar Wilde
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.
from the archives; first posted January 27, 2009. The originaal post continues to provoke many comments:
During a recent lunch with my friend Jen, we got to talking about the holidays and other matters when she casually mentioned that in the early days of the last century, her great uncle, Jacob Starr, invented the ball that drops every year in Times Square. Jen knew some, but not all, of the details around Starr, a relative of whom she is understandably quite proud.
My family's New Year's Eve tradition was to go to a kid-friendly movie (The Sound of Music comes to mind) and upon returning home have dinner and later watch the ball drop to welcome the new year. These days billions of people around the world watch the spectacle on television and thousands brave the cold in Times Square to watch in person. While I've marvelled at the Times Square ball, I've never wondered about how it was made and by whom.
Who was the Jacob Starr who had such an outsized influence on our culture and the urban landscape of New York City?
It didn’t take much more than a quick on-line search to find out more about this gifted man.
The New York Times started the modern-day tradition of dropping a ball on a pole to mark the beginning of the new year. Fireworks displays had already been drawing crowds to Times Square but a ban of such pyrotechnics in 1907 put an end to that practice.
To continue to attract visitors to Times Square, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs commissioned Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant and metalworker Jacob Starr to create an illuminated iron and wood ball to be lowered from the flagpole of the Times Tower. The first ball-drop in Times Square took place at the turn of the year from 1907 to 1908. It was a huge success.
Jacob Starr was quite a remarkable person and it’s understandable that my friend Jen would be proud to be his relative. He came to the United States from the Ukraine--a dangerous place for Jews--in 1897 and in 1903 went to work at a small New York sign company founded by Benjamin Strauss. While occupied with menial tasks during the day, he attended Cooper Union, the highly competitive tuition-free college in lower Manhattan that offers a world-class education in art, architecture and engineering. Starr graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. Starr, along with his partner Strauss came to be known as the “lamplighters of Broadway” for the many spectacular signs atop buildings in the Great White Way. Jacob Strauss owned the company since 1931 until his death. The Artkraft archive resides at the New York Public Library and makes for fascinating reading. Artkraft designed and built some of the most memorable signs in New York City--the fizzing Coca Cola sign, the painted Camel cigarette sign that blew smoke rings, and hundreds of glittering billboards, theater marquees and illuminated signs that symbolize New York City to visitors from around the world. The neon landscape of Times Square is almost entirely the handiwork of the Artkraft Strauss Sign Corporation.
This year, when you join the billions of people who count down the final seconds of 2024 while watching the famous Ball-drop, remember that it was created by a Jewish immigrant with humble beginnings whose genius found its full expression in the USA.
--sdl
One of the unique things about the experience of people born after 1935 is the frequent cognitive dissonance induced by living long enough to have experienced the “eras” and “ages” of contemporary (potted) history.
Take the “Civil Rights Era 1950-1963”.
Born in 1955, I do remember the shock of running into a segregated water fountain in South Carolina and buying some candy in a “Negro” grocery in Georgia (and, notably, getting warned off afterwards, by a white man). I witnessed then, have witnessed since, witness now a lot of racism, legislated and cultural, have benefited a lot from legislation made to remedy it. But I can’t for the life of me locate a “Civil Rights Era”.
That’s because if “history” is something that has happened, which events, effects and outcomes are known and accounted for, then I’m living, along with others born on the tail-end of the Baby Boom, the struggle for race equality right now. Maybe the “Civil Rights Era” references a time period when elites were obliged to notice; Jim Crow may be down by law but not, by any means, out. The South is still solid, too.
Again, born in 1955 and placed in a Catholic elementary school in Wadsworth, Ohio, I learned early to squat correctly under a school desk in the event of atomic attack. Also, I remember, am still today touched by, the scene from the Time Machine where the elderly Filby (Alan Young) urges George (Rod Taylor) to get to the shelter, atomic satellites, you see. I reckon, then, as well as the Civil Right Era, I’ve been living, have lived, am living the “Atomic Age”.
But “Atomic Age” doesn’t name the time I’ve experienced, nor the outlook I’ve developed or, for that matter, those of my fellow humans. “Atomic” is not the right adjective, “Age” not the right noun.
“Atomic” puts aside the awful realization that “the bomber will always get through” as well as the actual experience and effects of the non-atomic firestorms at Dresden and elsewhere, the flattening of Warsaw, the flattening of Stalingrad, the flattening of Germany and then of Viet Nam, then of Afghanistan, now of Ukraine. If “Atomic Age” names the politics and social psychology involved in threats of indiscriminate mass killing with ecocide, why so? With a single exception none of the experienced horror has involved atomic booms.
Since 2022, for instance, not a week has gone by without Vladimir Putin, a fascist strongman who runs a now capitalist, neo-colonial Russia, threatening atomic war. It is said, and I believe it, the United States promises a non-atomic response more than adequate to such occasion. As previously, both sides hesitate. That all seems to me to be about getting in the best boom, not the atomic-est one.
Instead of “Atomic Age”, why not “Best Boom Age” or “Age of Boom”, then? Because the absurdity of “Age of Boom” points, at least for poets and lovers of irony, the absurdity of using “Atomic Age” to name humanity’s urgent struggle to get a grip on its relationships with each other and the rest of nature.
So, cognitive dissonance was my first reaction to the exhibition Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique(“Artists confronting history – the Atomic Age”), which recently opened at the Musée de l’art moderne de Paris. The curators say that the invention of the atomic bomb and its use marked a turning point in the modern history of the atom, starting a “new”, second Atomic Age. Since that big boom at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, art, science and politics have become indissociable.
<< Dietrich added something vital to every film she was in, from Stage Fright (1950), a second-tier Hitchcock effort, to Judgment at Nuremburg (1961), where, as the widow of a German general executed by the Allies, she spends quality time with Spencer Tracy, a judge at the trial of accused Nazi war criminals. “We hated Hitler,” she tells him. In my own allegorical understanding of that film, her character, a magnificent proud ageless blonde who claims that the populace didn’t know about the death camps, stands for nothing less than Germany herself. >> -- DL
A Sonnet
Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times
Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes,
The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:
At other times--good Lord! I'd rather be
Quite unacquainted with the ABC
Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.
-- J. K. Stephen (1859-1892)
KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series—FALL 2008
Hosted by Michael Quattrone, Laura Cronk & David Lehman
Mondays @ 7:30 PM
Admission is FREE
September 15 Janice Erlbaum & Kevin Young
September 22 Caroline Knox & Danielle Pafunda
September 29 Nicole Cooley & Kimiko Hahn
October 6 Michael Lally & Terence Winch
October 13 The Why And Later anthology reading, with Jan Beatty, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Teresa Carson, Harriet Levin, Amanda McGuire, Erin Murphy, Kiely Sweatt, and editor Carly Sachs
October 20 Jordan Davis & Katy Lederer
October 27 Rick Barot & CAConrad
November 3 Jill Bialosky & D. Nurkse
November 10 Jim Cummins & David Lehman
November 17 Brenda Shaughnessy & John Yau
November 24 Paul Muldoon & Jim Richardson
December 1 Star Black & Dan Nester
December 8 Heather Christle & Maurice Manning
KGB Bar • 85 East 4th Street • New York, NY 10003 • (212) 505-3360 • www.kgbbar.com
Near the NW corner of Second Avenue and Fourth Street
Pictured: John Deming, Matthew Yeager, Laura Cronk, David Lehman, Danielle Pafunda, Caroline Knox, Michael Lally, Terence Winch, Michael Quattrone, and Star Black. Photos by Star Black. Copyright (c) 2008 by Star Black. Photos of Star Black and of Michael Quattrone and Star Black by David Lehman. Copyright (c) 2008 by David Lehman.
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Olympia
after Édouard Manet (1863-65)
Ignore them. You look as if coming
from or stepping toward pleasure.
Quelle scandale. I want to be that,
goddess, Olympia, atop a divine mound
of flowers strewn. Very clever, Manet,
his Irish haired siren as oily mythology.
They think they know you but forget
they pay to quench their thirst for you.
You must be used to people pampering you.
The critics and crowds are shocked. Do
you dare return a stare? But how little
they know. You whore. Your allures,
your back-tired maid, your unfinished canvas,
you’re blasé about that massive bouquet of flowers,
just another pink shower of petals; it happens
every day since turning thirteen. Consider
the chapter left in your roman à clef, then
an outing with your sister, a passé pussycat,
an overblown choker, that obvious orchid
in your ear. Critics diminish your esprit,
the audacity of a ripened body—packaged
by perception. This moment chosen
for subjugation, a slice of servants and
dreams, he wills the world to view.
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Andréa Ferrell Gannon is a memoirist-poet, native Californian, daughter of an immigrant mother and Lakota father. Find her now or soon in The Washington Post, The Coachella Review, GRXL, Kelp, Cricket, and Poet Lore.
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Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Musée d’Orsay.
The Moorman Symposium [organized by Angela Ball] starts tomorrow [May 2, 2014] To prepare for the panel discussion on New York School poetry, I thought it would be good to sit our visiting poets -- Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, David Kirby and Barbara Hamby -- down with New York School poets -- John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler -- for an informal Q & A.
In this mock-panel, questions found in New York School poets' work are answered with lines from contemporary poets. This conversation is so seamless you wouldn't know that decades, wars, and multiple presidents all existed between the questions and replies!
*special thanks to my New York School studying peers Nicholas Benca, Jennifer Jacob, and Tracie Dawson for help "facilitating" this Q&A
O'Hara: "Am I looking handsome?"
Kirby: “if not handsome, beau-laid, / as the French say, or handsome-ugly, as we all are / in our way.”
Schuyler: “‘What are the questions you wish to ask?’”
Duhamel: “When James Taylor and Carly Simon / broke up, I was shocked. Taylor’s drug use or not, / couldn’t they work it out? [...] How could they part having written all those love songs? And how could they go on / singing those love songs after the divorce?”
Ashbery: "What can we achieve, aspiring? And what, aspiring can we achieve?"
Hamby: "Well, we're in hell, and like Persephone fighting dark Hades, it's a waste of time."
Koch: "How many people I have drunk tea or coffee with / And thought about the boiling water hardly at all, just / waiting for it to boil / So there could be coffee or chocolate or tea. And then / what?"
Lehman: “The dog walked in and peed on the carpet and the chaplain’s wife / Said, ‘Oh, Rosebud, you’re being boring.’ / Boring meant something other than boring.”
O'Hara: "Dear god, I think that iron gate I put up as a weather vane is creaking. An angel must be arriving. Who do you suppose it could be?"
Collins: "I am the dog you put to sleep / as you like to call the needle of oblivion / come back to tell you this one simple thing: / I never liked you - not one bit."
Schuyler: "What am I supposed to be the poem doctor?" (Ron Padgett quoted by Schuyler)
Padgett: "I don’t know anything about hemorrhoids / Such as if it hurts to sit when you have them / If so I must not have them / Because it doesn’t hurt me to sit/ I probably sit about 8/15 of my life"
Ashbery: "Meanwhile what am I going to do?"
Hamby: “Pass me the beer and the goddamned pool cue, / Romeo.”
Koch: "Haven't I Lost that sweet easy knack I had last week, Last month, last year, last decade, which pleased everyone And especially pleased me?"
Lehman: “...do you recall/ when I visited Cambridge/ I left you a note// with the Clare porter./ The world is charged (I wrote) with / the grandeur of you!”
Schuyler: “Are you a larch?”
Collins: “It might interest you to know, / speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof. // I also happen to be the shooting star, / the evening paper blowing down an alley, and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.”
O'Hara: "Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?"
Duhamel: “To tell you the truth, / it’s easier to be blonde because the gray blends in, / just the way I’ve always wanted to blend in and not.”
Schuyler: “What’s with art anyway, that / we give it such precedence?”
Hamby: “...testosterone run amok, / or so I’m thinking here from my present perch
Ashbery: "Then what unholy bridegroom / did the Aquarian foretell? / Or was such lively intelligence / only the breath of hell?"
Kirby: “Holy moly-- / the Antichrist!”
Koch: "The connection here is how serious / is it for the tree / To have its arms wave (its branches)? How did it ever get such flexibility / In the first place?"
Collins: "The leafless branches against the sky / will not save anyone from the void ahead,”
Koch: "Almost any amount of time suffices to be a 'minor poet' / Once you have mastered a certain amount of the craft / For writing a poem, but I do not see the good of minor poetry, / Like going to the Tour d'Argent to get dinner for your / dog, / Or 'almost' being friends with someone, or hanging / around but not attending a school, / Or being a nurse's aid for the rest of your life after / getting a degree in medicine, / What is the point of it?"
Kirby: “My psychodynamic electrohelmet / would have explained everything, but I never got / to use it.”
first posted May 1 2014 pior to the Moorman Symposium at the University of Southern Mississippi
A Voice in the Studio of Peter Paul Rubens
Are these bloated corpses or pink sunlit clouds–no one can decide
Whether outfitted in smart attire, traditional outfits, or athletic gear
When will you draw the bitterness inflaming our upturned faces
Tell us which chariot will measure the daily turmoil
Whether outfitted in smart attire, traditional outfits, or athletic gear
We will lean on past arguments, whose expiration date has come and gone
Tell us which chariot will measure the daily turmoil
Who among us can respond patiently to the litany of anonymous complaints
We will lean on past arguments, whose expiration date has come and gone
While a texture of devastation shuttles its multicolored threads throughout the day
Who among us can respond patiently to the litany of anonymous complaints
The distribution of wealth is not about delivering buckets of money
While a texture of devastation shuttles its multicolored threads throughout the day
I decide to wear a tuxedo complete with glossy pompadour and fly into the sun
The distribution of wealth is not about delivering buckets of money
Our ugliness preceded us like a mirror held up to the assembling wind
Are these bloated corpses or pink sunlit clouds–no one can decide
I decide to wear a tuxedo complete with glossy pompadour and fly into the sun
Our ugliness preceded us like a mirror held up to the assembling wind
When will you draw the bitterness inflaming our upturned faces
-- John Yau
The Byronic Fallacy
It is possible that a day in a Kansas wheat field
will do more for Mr.Smith than three years in Rome.
Many men, some of whom possess genius, have gone
downhill since trying to write
a thousand dollar prize poem
or a ten thousand dollar prize opera.
How many masterpieces have we killed this way?
A cocktail will stimulate the appetite but not satisfy it.
No bishop would give a prize to the priest
who would love God the hardest for fifteen days.
Free thought and free love do not frequent
the same cafe. Everyone has the right to say
"fuck you" in the most cordial way --
but himself not his patrons must he obey.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
