The Best American Poetry

George Bilgere's "Poetry Town": Poem of the Day, Feb 28,, 2025

Click here to read about George Bilgere and to subscribe to his "Poetry Town" newsletter. An excerpt from today's follows.

Here’s a poem for today, February 28, 2025

February 7

by David Lehman

It used to be Garibaldi’s, then it was Sardinia, now it’s Greek & it’s still the worst restaurant in the city, so naturally we go there instead of Suburbia at the Angelika, & Robert orders octopus, which is rank, while Lucie orders a Greek salad. “Ugh,” she says, because she usually likes feta cheese but this stuff tastes like goat cheese, which she hates. “But Lucie,” I say, “feta cheese is goat cheese.” She thinks I’m joking. “Let’s ask the waitress,” Robert says. We bet the tab on it. And when the waitress (name of Tricia) confers with her colleagues, comes back with the hot chocolate, and says, “The consensus is, we’re not sure,” I knew I had my poem of the day. __________ From The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry, Scribner Poetry, 2000.

Why I Chose This Poem For this book, Lehman set himself the task of writing a poem each day for a year. In a poem like this one, it’s almost like he was waiting for the poem to find him. And it did, in the form of Tricia. Poets, we should give this a try. An aside: this poem, from 2000, could never happen today, thanks to the curse of the omnipresent smartphone.

Boys, Beware of the Bad Girl! [by Mitch Sisskind]

How ironic that, as intellectuals and aesthetes, those of us who live by words may underestimate the power of the words we speak or write. Just the other day I was in pleasant conversation with a talented versifier when he happened to mention the name "Lilith." Although he was referring to the radical feminist magazine that may or may not still exist, there is no doubt that the real Lilith still exists just as she has since the time of Adam. And to utter her name without quickly pretending to spit twice over one's right shoulder is asking for serious trouble.

Lilith (spit, spit!) as some of you may know, was Adam's first wife. When she affronted the Creator by insisting on "unorthodox" relations with her husband, she was banished from Eden and spent the next 500 years at the bottom of the ocean. Finally she surfaced, determined to wreak as much havoc as possible in human domestic affairs.

When Lilith hears a man mention her name, she surmises (quite correctly!) that a secret wish for her appearance exists in the speaker. Of course, as with any repressed wish, the poor fool may not be aware of his own desire. That's why Lilith always appears in disguise. The new temp at the office, the Fedex delivery girl, the grad student in need of help with her thesis -- any or all of these may be Lilith. But those potential incarnations are relatively easy to resist. Lilith is much more dangerous when she manifests as a man's own wife!

If a woman appears and sounds like his wife, a man -- and especially a poet, naive by nature -- may assume the woman is his wife indeed: "If it looks like a duck..." etc.  He may also forget that he spoke the forbidden name that morning in Starbucks. Well, he's in for a surprise -- and the worst part is, Lilith is dangerously addictive. Not only is she erotically exciting but she's also an excellent conversationalist.

There are two solutions for this problem, both recommended by the ancient sages of the Talmud. First, don't speak the name in the first place! Just refer to the Bad Girl and any educated person will know who you're talking about. Second, create a secret code with your wife that only the two of you know -- an arbitrary phrase like "plate of shrimp"  from the film Repo Man. If you sense anything unusual in your conjugal affairs, demand the password. If it's not forthcoming, fill a bucket with water and pour it on the demon woman. Lilith has hated water ever since her five hundred years in the ocean.

The images above are just two of Lilith's infintely various disguises. On top, of course, is Veronica from Archie Comics; below is a seemingly innocous dental hygenist. Poets! Choose Betty, not Veronica -- and floss daily!

from the archive; first posted December 5, 2014

How ironic that, as intellectuals and aesthetes, those of us who live by words may underestimate the power of the words we speak or write. Just the other day I was in pleasant conversation with a talented versifier when he happened to mention the name "Lilith." Although he was referring to the radical feminist magazine that may or may not still exist, there is no doubt that the real Lilith still exists just as she has since the time of Adam. And to utter her name without quickly pretending to spit twice over one's right shoulder is asking for serious trouble.

Lilith (spit, spit!) as some of you may know, was Adam's first wife. When she affronted the Creator by insisting on "unorthodox" relations with her husband, she was banished from Eden and spent the next 500 years at the bottom of the ocean. Finally she surfaced, determined to wreak as much havoc as possible in human domestic affairs.

When Lilith hears a man mention her name, she surmises (quite correctly!) that a secret wish for her appearance exists in the speaker. Of course, as with any repressed wish, the poor fool may not be aware of his own desire. That's why Lilith always appears in disguise. The new temp at the office, the Fedex delivery girl, the grad student in need of help with her thesis -- any or all of these may be Lilith. But those potential incarnations are relatively easy to resist. Lilith is much more dangerous when she manifests as a man's own wife!

If a woman appears and sounds like his wife, a man -- and especially a poet, naive by nature -- may assume the woman is his wife indeed: "If it looks like a duck..." etc.  He may also forget that he spoke the forbidden name that morning in Starbucks. Well, he's in for a surprise -- and the worst part is, Lilith is dangerously addictive. Not only is she erotically exciting but she's also an excellent conversationalist.

There are two solutions for this problem, both recommended by the ancient sages of the Talmud. First, don't speak the name in the first place! Just refer to the Bad Girl and any educated person will know who you're talking about. Second, create a secret code with your wife that only the two of you know -- an arbitrary phrase like "plate of shrimp"  from the film Repo Man. If you sense anything unusual in your conjugal affairs, demand the password. If it's not forthcoming, fill a bucket with water and pour it on the demon woman. Lilith has hated water ever since her five hundred years in the ocean.

The images above are just two of Lilith's infintely various disguises. On top, of course, is Veronica from Archie Comics; below is a seemingly innocous dental hygenist. Poets! Choose Betty, not Veronica -- and floss daily!

from the archive; first posted December 5, 2014

Nobody is getting off this train: interpreting “Qui Som”, a performance by Baro d’Evel [By Tracy Danison]

“Qui som” by Baro d'Evel. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Not too terribly long ago I was in a pretty fancy café on Paris' famous île Saint Louis. I fell into a chat with an American guy. He told me that France had a problem. That problem, this guy said, is in Saint Denis, a big suburban town to the north of the île Saint Louis.

From his chair, the guy portentously pointed as due north as he could.

I’m a smart-ass guy, sometimes, so I said, “The Monarchy”?

The basilica in Saint Denis, the city itself, is the burial ground of French royalty as well as the site of a lot of public housing for immigrants, mostly from former French colonies and current overseas territories, and since the 2024 Olympics, two, yes, I have written "two", public swimming pools for its lucky and remarkably stable population of 113,000. The tombstones in Saint Denis, by the way, go a ways towards showing that, even way way back, in the minds of its peoples “Europe” is a place that extends from Cape Finisterre on the Atlantic to that place somewhere above the Caspian Sea where people mistake oars for threshing sticks.

However, I asked my smart-aleck question because I grew up knowing that, because I’m so obviously what I am and he thus thinks that he can say any old word that begins with “n-“ around a guy like me that he could also confide some Azimovian “psychohistory” about “Islam” and “Western Civilization”.

Guys like him and me get our historiography from the Foundation series.

As I hoped, my smart-alecky question farted a little Hegelian doubt between us.

Politely resentful, the American guy-just-like-me, hesitated. I was able to get away.

You would think, though, heavily armed as we all are in our current head-long rush for some brand of Civilizational Apocalypse, Headstrong Ignorance himself would have begun to realize that, at the very least, the fault is not in the stars. Or that guys-like-me might do well to suspend the traditional belief that because a man can afford an over-priced cup of coffee, his fulminations can’t possibly be just plumb dumb or crazy.

But, no.

“Qui som” by Baro d'Evel. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Indeed, the players of the performance troupe Baro d’Evel from Catalonia brought the home truth here home to me a couple weeks back with their lively and hopeful piece Qui Som (“Who are we – Who we are”) at Maison de la Culture de Seine Saint Denis, Bobigny or MC93. As a fact, the theater is not all that far from where guys-like-me such the American psychohistorian above, are claiming that “Islam” is skulking around those old royal tombstones, muttering the Coran, if not snorting coke. Anyway, not working.

Qui Som put it this way: “Nobody is getting off this train”. The phrase is meant as a call to solidarity in the face of catastrophe, of course. But I understood it as more like the Army marching song: “Aint’ no use lookin’ down/ain’t no discharge on the ground/Ain’t no use in lookin’ back, Jody got your Cadillac!/Ain’t no use in goin’ home, Jody got your girl an’ gone! Airborne! Airborne! Airborne”. Pugnacious-sounding resignation to the orphan yonder with his gun.

I rather liked being a soldier and I liked Baro d’Evel and Qui Som but both a train I can’t get off and Jody running off with my girl leave me depressed.

Indeed, don’t get me wrong. Qui Som is a really good show. Well done, Baro d’Evel! Their shtick is good: a flustered MC with the ability to get on with the show in spite of messy slip ups into an imponderable slime and into a sea of plastic trash, of much disaster and missed opportunity… A cast able to turn clay pots into hats and those hats into masks and masks into…

Well, it seems, there is little bit of magic still in this world of autonomous fighting drones and precision strikes that kill hecatombs…

All hail the ancestor Vaudeville, the messiah of the modern era: where apocalypse can amuse as well as kill…

Qui Som ends with a marching band. Spectators are invited to join a dancing fête in the theater foyer. The Baro d’Evel troupe have it right. Everything is still possible. But.

Usually ready to hang around, especially at MC93, where the bar-cafeteria is really gemütlich, I instead slink away, take my bike, don’t bother with my wet poncho, fade into the pouring rain.

It comes down to this: what do you do when a body is not sure how to frame the answer because a body is not sure what the operative question is or even if there is an operative question?

And, then: Ain’t no use in lookin’ down, nobody is getting off this train until it gets to where it’s going.

__________

I saw “Qui Som”, created and directed by Camille Decourtye and Blaï Mateu Trias at the MC93, Maison de la Culture de Seine Saint Denis, Bobigny, 25 January 2025, performed by members of the troupe Baro d’Evel, including Lucia Bocanegra, Noëmie Bouissou, Camille Decourtye, Miguel Fiol, Dimitri Jourde, Chen-Wei Lee, Blaï Mateu Trias, Yolanda Sey, Julian Sicard, Marti Soler, Maria Carolina Vieira, Guillermo Weickert with participation of Luc Delafrênée and Yasmin Nahioul of the La petite troupe de la MC93.

Pal Johnny, Our Greatest Story Writer [by David Lehman]

John O'Hara, author of "How Can I Tell You?" -- one of the subtlest stories in the language -- among other masterpieces, has one memorable sentence in his Hollywood novel, The Big Laugh (1962). It is said to the movie actor Hubert Ward, the book's protagonist:

<< There's more people see you in one picture than ever saw all of Shakespeare's actors in his whole lifetime. >>

I am reading Geoffrey Wolff's admirable biography of  Mr O'Hara, The Art of Burning Bridges, and I am inspired to read or re-read O'Hara's short stories. No one, not even Hemingway, can so brilliantly tell a story primarily in dialogue form. I greatly enjoy certain of O'Hara's novels, such as Appointment in Samarra and Ten North Frederick, and someday I will get around to reading them all. But in the genre of the short story, O'Hara is the best we have.

John O'Hara's Stories are available in a Library of America edition put together with an introduction by Charles McGrath, formerly the deputy editor of The New Yorker, in which magazine O'Hara published most of his best work. Of O'Hara, Lionel Trilling wrote in the introduction to Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara (1956), “The work of no other American writer tells us so precisely, and with such a sense of the importance of the communication, how people look and how they want to look, where they buy their clothes and where they wish they could buy their clothes, how they speak and how they think they ought to speak.”

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

from the archive; first posted January 25, 2020.

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

from the archive; first posted January 25, 2020.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-Five): David Lehman [by Angela Ball]

I Remember

     --After Joe Brainard

          1.

I remember high school and wanting people to call me Dave.

I remember a truck driver named Dave.

I remember when my older sister was sixteen and she and two

          girlfriends went on a triple date with boys named Fred, Steve,

          and Dave.

I remember when I didn’t want anyone to call me Dave.

 

          2.

I remember thinking that Communists didn’t exist.  They were

          bogeymen, invented to scare little kids, or they did exist but far

          away, in another country, or as abstract entities to be granted

          existence for the sake of an argument or the exposition of a theory.

I remember thinking no one took drugs or was a juvenile

           delinquent except in movies.

I remember getting up each morning and vomiting on the way to

          the elevated IRT stop at Dyckman Street and Nagle Avenue.

          Sometimes I could time it just right and hurl into a garbage can

          without breaking my stride.

I remember thinking that mental illness and profound sadness were

          two great romantic conditions.

I remember when there were two types of people, Jews and Catholics.

I remember when there were two types of people, those who were for

          the war in Vietnam and those who were against it, and there

          could be no connection between us.

I remember that the world was divided between Yankee fans and

          Dodger fans.

I remember thinking that to be an avant-garde artist you had to be

          rich and live in Paris, preferably near the Notre-Dame-des-

          Champs Métro stop.

I remember when the test of a true artist was whether he admitted that

          money motivated him to write.

 

          3.

I remember the first book I ever bought.  It was a book of Zen koans.

          with an orange-colored jacket and I bought it at a musty

          bookstore in the Village where Ben Hecto and I walked one

          spring afternoon in our senior year at Stuyvesant.

I remember two of the koans to this day.

I remember liking best the koan resembling the parable of wise

          Solomon except that two monks rather than two mothers are

          laying claim to a cat rather than a baby.

Nansen, the head monk, takes out a cleaver and chops the cat in two.

           When Joshu hears the story, he takes off his shoes, puts them on

            his head, and walks out of the room, and Nansen says: “Had

            Joshu been there, he could have saved the cat.”

I remember Nansen showed the three young monks a jug of water and

          challenged them to define its essence without naming it.  The first

          monk said: It is not a puddle because I can carry it.  The second

           monk said: Freezes in winter, thaws in spring, quenches the

           parched lips of summer.  The third monk kicked over the jug and

           won the competition.

(I don’t remember the prize or the purpose of the competition, but that

            after all is the nature of competitions.)

 

               4.

I remember “I Remember, I Remember,” by Thomas Hood, whose

            poems I read in the gloom of a foggy November morning in East

            Anglia.

I remember “I Remember You,” lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by

           Victor Schertzinger.

I remember I Remember by Joe Brainard in which every paragraph

          begins “I remember,” and the language is simple and unaffected,

          artless and innocent and charming.

I remember thinking that it took real genius to recall an early

           embarrassment or to exhibit your own naivete.

I remember discovering that I was funny.

 

                  5.

I remember the Woolworth’s on Dyckman Street where they had an

           automatic photo booth.  You put in your quarters, took a seat,

           and got four snapshots

 I remember the automat.  There was Bickford’s and there was Horn

            and Hardart.

I remember P.D.Q. Bach’s “Concerto for Horn and Hardart,” a witty

           title once.

I remember a dish of custard at the automat.

I remember watermelon, ten cents a pound, at the fruit stand.

I remember when white nectarines in upstate New York were the most

          delicious fruit.

I remember England and going into an automatic photo booth with

          Jeanne, a junior at Mount Holyoke, and both of us were blond

          and smiling and wearing trenchcoats.

I remember hitching rides with Jeanne from Oxford to Cambridge and

          spending the night in a bed-and-breakfast on Queen’s Road.

I remember the embarrassment of the maid when she knocked on the

          door and opened it and saw that we were still asleep in our twin

           beds.

I remember writing love poems even when I wasn’t in love with

           anyone.

I remember thinking that love without an object was pure.

I remember hearing an explosion and thinking it was just my

            imagination.

I remember A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

I remember when I was in college and had one secret I kept from even

            my closest friends, and twenty years later I saw Bill, a newspaper

            editor just as he had always wanted to be, and he asked me

            about the secret and I couldn’t remember.

I remember that Bill and I and two other guys were going to meet at

             the Eiffel Tower on July 4, 1999.

I remember the smell of Gauloises and Gitanes sans filtre.

I remember the movie about three army buddies who meet as planned

           at a New York bar ten years after the war, and now none of them

           can stand the other two.

I remember the episode of the sitcom in which Ann Sothern and

           three old friends meet as planned after many years and all are

           fabulously successful except Ann, who is Don Porter’s executive

           secretary, but then it turns out that the other three were just

           putting on airs and Ann was the only honest one and so in an

           important way she was the most successful of them all.

I remember that the fight had something to do with a girl.

I remember the shock of finding out that girls like sex as much as

            boys did—maybe even more in some cases.

I remember buying a ring at a Woolworth’s in Dublin so she and I

            could stay together in a cheap hotel, pretending to be married.

I remember that the worst meal I have ever eaten was at a Chinese

            restaurant that summer in Dublin.

I remember expecting Chinese restaurants in New York, where spicy

            Szechuan cooking had come into style.

I remember the squawk of the gulls and the gray of the sky above the

            Irish Sea.

                               -David Lehman

from Poems in the Manner Of . . . published by Scribner Poetry, 2017

David Lehman is a great fan of Frank Sinatra, the subject of his book Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World, which HarperCollins published in December 2015, the centenary of the singer’s birth. That month, Jack Daniel's released a limited edition of high-priced bourbon packaged with a thumb drive featuring a Sinatra set from Las Vegas in January 1966; Lehman got to review both the bourbon and the performance for The Wall Street Journal. His book Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991) infuriated critical theorists and accurately predicted the major crises in the humanities that have bedeviled higher education. Lehman has also written about the composers and lyricists of the American songbook; A Fine Romance won ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award in 2010. Among his many other nonfiction books are The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998) and One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir (Cornell UP, 2019), which uses his four-year ordeal battling cancer as the framework for memories, desires, fantasies, dreams, and meditations. Lehman’s books of poetry include The Morning Line (Pittsburgh, 2021), When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005), and The Daily Mirror (Scribner, 2000). Lehman edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry and has been the general editor of The Best American Poetry since he launched the annual anthology in 1988. (Bio by Freddy Chervil).

[Photo of John Ashbery and David Lehman by Star Black, 2011]

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty-Five:  David Lehman

David Lehman’s large and lifelong project has been to pay tribute to poets and the grandeur and humor of ordinary life as transformed by them. This he has done through his own stellar body of poetry, his longstanding and monumental book series, The Best American Poetry, this eponymous blog, and in countless other ways. A student of Kenneth Koch’s at Columbia, Lehman was certainly in the avant-garde of recognizing the importance of the New York School of Poets, and his perceptive and seminal The Last Avant-Garde not only makes an eloquent case for the NYS as exactly that but also provides a model of how poets can inspire each other through loving collision and a shared ethos of exploration and play. Lehman’s own work is exemplary of the values and ideas he has fostered and sustained, and no book more so than 2017’s Poems in the Manner of . . .

In his introduction, Lehman says of the project, “I had in mind the shibboleth that in writing poetry, to have a distinctive ‘voice’ is everything.” He goes on to say that “style is misunderstood; it is not the end in itself but the means to an indefinable end . . .”  What happens in this book is akin to the transformation that can arise from a supremely good costume: in impersonating someone else, the reveler happens on a deeper version of their own personality, one somehow connected with all that transcends personality and its inherent impermanence.

The locution “In the Manner of” derives from two poems in Ted Berrigan’s landmark The Sonnets: “Poem in the Traditional Manner” and “Poem in the Modern Manner.”  Lehman’s ideas about poetry and art in a sense depend on the on-going struggle between “tradition” and “modernity”: the old versus the new. In his introduction to The Last Avant-Garde, Lehman quotes Gertrude Stein: ‘For a long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause everybody accepts,’ Stein wrote. ‘In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.’” Then, Lehman quotes Kafka’s famous parable “Leopards in the Temple”: ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink up the contents of the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated again and again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony.’” [Photo on right: Kenneth Koch, David Lehman, and John Ashbery, Worcester, Massachusetts, circa 2000]

It is this knowledge, in part, that allows Lehman to play poetically fast and loose with previous poets and to also pay tribute to the “ceremony”: the mysterious continuum where all true art resides.

Lehman’s  “I Remember –after Joe Brainard” plays a signal role in this volume.  Joe Brainard, a brilliant poet, artist, and playful cartoonist, a particularly tragic casualty of AIDS epidemic, embodies the antic spirit of The New York School of Poets and, in particular, the love affair between the comic and the nostalgic so prominent in their work—Kenneth’s Koch’s in particular.

I first encountered this book in a British edition discovered in a used-and-rare shop in London circa 1983. I went directly to a pub; and, refreshed by a cold pint, read the book in its entirety. “Entirety” seems the right word, since Brainard’s remembrances, though of a boy growing up in rural Oklahoma, seem somehow all-encompassing, universal. He added more to them during his short life, amplifying that effect. Since that day, I have used “I Remember” as a prompt and inspiration for every undergraduate writing class I’ve taught; the poems inspired by it seem almost to write themselves. I remember in particular the brilliance of this line, written by an undergraduate in an honors composition class: “I remember my dog, his smell of dusty cornflakes.”

David Lehman’s “I remember” employs Brainard’s engine of anaphora to propel an urban boy’s memories. This may be a city kid, but no less bewildered than Brainard; and, like Brainard, he seeks to resolve his uncertainties through formulaic categories: “I remember thinking that mental illness and sadness were two great romantic conditions. / I remember when there were two types of people, Jews and Catholics.” This oversimplification is disarmingly ironic: we see the huge shortfall of understanding driven by a young person’s need to make sense of the world’s proliferating complications. We are reminded of James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and his flyleaf inscription: Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe.

It is impossible in a small space to detail all of the celebrations and transformations of Brainard in this expansive poem. It does seem important to point out how Section 2 recognizes and develops “I Remember”’s affinity with the Zen koan:

     I remember Nansen showed the three young monks a jug of water

          and challenged them to define its essence without naming it.  The first

          monk said: It is not a puddle because I can carry it. The second

          monk said: Freezes in winter, thaws in spring, quenches the

          parched lips of summer.  The third monk kicked over the jug and

          won the competition.

This particular koan, remembered in homage to “I Remember,” resonates throughout Lehman’s oeuvre as poet and scholar. One example occurs in the next section of the poem:

         I remember “I Remember” by Joe Brainard in which every paragraph

              begins “I remember,” and the language is simple and unaffected,

              artless and innocent and charming.

         I remember thinking that it took real genius to recall an early

              embarrassment or to admit your own naivete.

         I remember discovering that I was funny.

 

The last line of this section not only makes Lehman’s poem “meta”--a temple within a temple, it also kicks its own jug.  And it would be difficult to find a more direct and accurate characterization of Brainard’s work than “the language is simple and unaffected, artless and innocent and charming.”

Section 5 remembers, among many other things, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and that “the worst meal I have ever eaten was at a Chinese restaurant that summer in Dublin.”

And there is this final, ravishing compound image: “the squawk of the gulls and the gray of the sky above the Irish Sea.”

In a way, this poem and all the poems from Poems in the Manner Of …  reflect John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror; with the poem encompassing not just the poet, but a welter of sensibility, emotion, and recognition: part of what Wallace Stevens called “the long conversation between poets.” And it may be true that every poem—no matter when in life it is created or read--is a bildungsroman, like A Portrait of the Artist, reintroducing the world, making us new.

-Angela Ball

The End of February [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

Subj:    Re: Another Homage to an Aphorism: in case I can't write one tomorrow       
Date:   2/24/2003 2:35:55 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

There is no wing like meaning, said the salesman.
There is no wing like meaninglessness, said the tail man.

There is a left wing to each bird, Durer said.
There is a wing if not a horse's head in my bed.

There is no wing like manning a bird or a swan,
Said Leda, almost a second after her breast felt wan.

There is no win like a meaningful one over warm.
There is no wind like meaning to in a storm.

Then not meaning to, when the wing feels frayed and unsteady
And under the wings, some cartiliginous stuff is bloody.

There is no wing like an homage behind an aphid
Chewing on a leaf so that the flood will come enchafed.

There is no wing and meaning is its corridor.
There is no wing and a window is the door.   ‑‑ DS, 2 / 24 / 03

 

From:  DCLEHMAN
To:DaJoShap
Re: wing and a prayer in the shadow of the dome

Hi I'm David Lehman, your caffeinated host
Talking to David Shapiro about "Paradise Lost."

Were we the last to love John Milton,
That cornerstone Romanticism was built on?

The Leaning Tower of Pisa keeps tiltin',
But does anybody still read Milton?

Lovers of cheese love their stilton,
But not even English majors read John Milton.

There's no shortage of things to base your guilt on.
Some would nominate Satan as depicted by Milton.

It'sa a heartbreaking story, the expulsion from Eden,
But one that makes compelling reading.

So that's it for now, David Lehman signing off.
I'm about to read "Lycidas," paradise enough.  ‑‑ DL, 2 / 25 / 03

 

Fight Night couplets; for the crumpets I may be going; for the Love of Milton       
Date:   2/26/2003 9:09:05 AM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

I Alone Wished It Had Gone On Longer: Paradise Throw‑Away

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee
The poetry of Cassius Clay impressed me

Float like an amnesiac, sting like a key
Love the poetry of Muhhamed Ali

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal knee
I was impressed by my father screaming at me

Float like Satan, sting like Raphael
I was willling to eat beans with Frank Lima in Hell

Float like a masque, and twitch your mantle blue
I was overinvested in the symmetry of you

Float like rude berries, sting like Lycidas
I thought fighting over beauty was the real razzmatazz

Round us there rolls our hideous day
But Moore praised my poetry‑‑ and Cassius Clay.    ‑‑ DS,  2/ 26 / 03

from: DCLEHMAN
t:o: DaJoShap
02/26/03

Fit Audience Though Few

Yesterday I had lunch with Stanley Moss, who was excited
To learn about this collaborative project of ours. “Write it!”

The previous evening I had told Star Black about our haikus
And couplets, and she, too, was genuinely enthused.

Of course Stacey knows all about it, has even read a few,
And made positive statements about me and you.

What does Lindsay think of this our labor, or not labor, game:
Does she think it a lovely glorious nothing? A waste of shame?

Donne and Jonson wrote sonnets when sitting in the same unlit room
And Jonson grinned when he saw what his friend had done in the gloom.

The audience was invisible, yet we could tell
The ghosts would come like thirsty travelers to the well.

No wish have I greater than this desire to fly
On wings of prayer and song along the length of the sky.  DL, 2 / 26 / 03

 

Re Couplets: a meditation done in the two minutes my son permits

Date:   2/27/2003 9:42:04 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

I congratulate us, David, for one heroic cup:
The cup may be broken but we tried to clean it up.

I congratulate us David for one dirty yawp:
We tried our best to stir again a permissive soup.

Of course, let's beware congratulating ourselves too much:
Kenneth thought collab was best with a conflicted touch.

Two voices have we, let no one say who's best.
All I remember of art will be some fragmentary breast.,

Eros I loved and the anarchic giggling Venus.
The Talmud I loved as a kind of Kafakesque pianist.

Eros and Psyche I dreamt about, one heroic couple.
Her arms were green,, her breasts are Keats, her neck was blue and supple.

I want to say a couplet should click like her face in one fell instant:
But I know enough to keep on going into the blue and distant.

So congratulations David on shattering the cup:
The cup may break again, but the earth will drink it up. DS, 2 / 27 / 03

from: DCLEHMAN
to: DaJoShap

02/ 28 / 03

On the Shattered Cup

No cup but has a crack, no saucer but with a spoon.
No diner, no coffee, no jukebox, no tune.

But we walked in and the place was full of flowers
We gave names to and in that way passed the hours.

At night I turned into Nabokov's schizophrenic hero in "Despair."
The night was chill but I was drunk on air.

Eros I loved, and Venus in her best‑of‑class swimsuit,
And Psyche in the dark, while I played my flute.

Let my yawp barbarian from yon rooftop resound!
You can score two ways, directly or on the rebound.

More men know more women today, more women men,
And I cannot blame any of them, and that was then.

Today is today, and I congratulate all who discover
The morning in bed sleeping with a lover. ‑‑ DL, 2 / 28 / 03

Re: The Party of Poets and congrats on essay in APR I LOVE PROSE      

Date:   2/28/2003 9:23:30 AM Eastern Standard Time 
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

The Party of Poets

Rimbaud was there, attacked by fighter plane.
Baudelaire also felt sad, because the Presidents were inane.

Buster Keaton whimpered softly, I resign.
The stigmata on his palm was growing larger than a stop sign.

Buster Keaton clutched his 3D valentine.
But his lover had just awoken in another time zone.

Rimbaud had blue veils draped across his eyes.
He looked inside and saw that War was simple and life‑size.

James Joyce burst in with gifts and the boxes kept flying.
One red box kept on sounding and rising.

Virginia Woolf was wearing earrings of a conch.
Kenneth Koch was not dead and sang, "Let's all have some lunch."

He sang: If you don't know the difference between poetry and prose
You don't know man and woman apart, like rose from rose.  ‑‑ DS, 2 / 28 / 03

Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles, Blood Pumps, Flesh Quickens [By Tracy Danison]

“Uncertain Journey”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

How better to attract enormous crowds and dithyrambic media reviews than masses of single red threads stretching from a single point into red clouds floating just under the ceiling? What more likely to attract unruly multitudes than recondite video loops of a 50-something woman from Japan crawling around in dirt among tree roots or shivering under the mud plopping from her shower head? Or, better, what is more likely to invite murmurs of wonder than video clips of said lady’s sets for Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas? And, of course, what more attractive than said lady's showing off her prize collection of scales old window frames? And doll-house bric à brac picked up at an ex-East Berlin flea market?

 

“Connecting Small Memories”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

Well, I don’t know if I’d recommend the approach to artist friends, but it does work: the crowds pour in and lookers do genuinely seem to love what the find. Also, from looking myself, I do know that the said 50-something from Japan, the artist Chiharu Shiota, definitely does know something about art and from knowing about art, knowing about appealing to people. The Soul Trembles, her exhibition, the first for the work-in-progress re-opening of the Grand Palais, is a top-of-the-line artistic achievement. “Tremble” here has the sense of “quickening, as ‘a leaf in the wind’” not of “quaking in fear, as ‘a betrayed soldier’".

 

“Inside – Outside”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

Shiota’s stated artistic intention is to “enable anybody from anywhere to find an echo of their own emotion in her work”. Her approach to the big wide theme of “presence in absence” in The Soul Trembles seems to anchor less on works presented and more on personal reflection on and personal experience of the vision underpinning the visual experience of the works presented.

 

“Prayer”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

This rather complex distancing and refocusing – visual experience of the work, experience of visual experience, personal reflection, vision to visual experience – has an unexpected effect. A body feels that Shiota just sort of nestles up snug with the looker, shares her bulging photo album; she giggles and mugs, points sublime details with her stubby fingers. There are studies of Shiota's own hands, for example, or videos of short performances such as the mud shower mentioned earlier, whose esthetic value is in the experience they represent for her and through her for the looker, rather than visual esthetic of the physical thing. I expect you can call her approach “meta-art.”

 

“In silence”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

A looker winds up considering or feeling Shiota's take on the work presented as much as on the work or the work's concept just as it is. Also, her works very often take the shape of a simple personal concern: the strands of red yarn represent/are blood in the body, not the symbolism of blood or even the biology of blood, but blood's simple, bloody existence, for instance. Or a work may have the shape of personal experience, for instance, a burnt piano to which a wave of surreal dismay at the fire that destroyed it somehow remains clinging after all these years. Often, a piece is shared common-personal experience: who hasn’t already seen the peeling window frames she’s put on display? The window frames are positioned within the exhibition in a way to remind the looker that a view is, above all, framed.

 

“Accumulation - Searching for the Destination”, Chiharu Shiota. Photo © Grand Palais

Shiota’s meta-art resonates with the public; lookers above all seem to enter into a friendly dialogue with her. As they might with a neighbor grubbing out a back garden, they compliment her efforts, comment to each other on her particular visualizations and visions and those she shares with everybody else. “So, Chiharu”, they seem to say, pointing to a photo, “Ouf, golly, You stretched out all those red threads into a red cloud? Just so we can speak about blood: relations, biology, symbology”? Or, with her at the looker's elbow: “Chiharu? You made the set for emotionally gigantic operas like Gotterdammerung and Siegfried? I see Brunhilde. I see Siegfried. Was it you made the fringe of the curtains or what? It’s hard to tell from this opera video; is your work in itself or part of something else"? And with a smile of contentment, "That puzzle is the point."

 

View of the exhibition "The Soul Trembles", Chiharu Shiota : opera sets. Photo © Grand Palais

When packing the emergency exile bag, don’t forget to make a note of Shiota’s exhibition but also of pianist Keiichiro Shibuya’s March 14 Concert Miroir fantôme (Mirror Ghost). The cancelled concert ticket will get you in for a night-visit, the last visit, to The Soul Trembles.

The Miroir fantôme concert themes around voice, which is re-imagined as a ghost of the real thing: synthesized sounds and voices in a phantasmagoric ambiance. “The piano of Keiichiro Shibuya, the single human presence in the concert”, the programmers write, “Is a metaphor for a humanity confronted with the feeling of impending apocalypse”.

Sounds like just the thing!

________

I visited Chiharu Shiota’s installation “The Soul Trembles” in company with my partner Karine at the Grand Palais on 6 February 2025. Keiichiro Shibuya’s “Concert Miroir fantôme (Mirror Ghost)” takes place Friday 14 March 2025 at 21h. The entrance to both concert and exhibition is at Entrée Clarence Dillon, Galeries 10.1. “The Soul Trembles” will be open for post-concert visiting from 22h to 23h30.    

Spencer Reece: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________

Ephphatha   

        for Dorothy Moran

 

            When the pandemic hit, the priest

died first. Refrigerator trucks chilled the dead. 

The parish stacked the hymnals in tubs

and St. Mark’s/ San Marcos closed in Queens,

the mocked Simon and Garfunkel borough

where coins in dryers clickety-clicked like clocks

in European town squares.

 

            Seven months later, Roosevelt Avenue

jounces with mango slices in Zip-locks. 

The vestry interviews me.  Last day of August,

no AC, we sweat and fidget with our N95 masks. 

The wardens, Henry and Jorge, jigger

the broken tumbler to unlock the safe. 

“Cut the parish hall in half, don’t fundraise,

leverage the lot. Less people in church,”

says a new bishop from his Zoom-perch.  

 

            A woman stands in the garden.

Forever a woman stands in the garden. 

She rides the 7 to work, is over ninety,

first woman to work on Wall Street. 

Much she won’t tell or only tell me.

My invisible incomprehensible work.

I go where I am sent.

 

            A bloated deacon gossips and picks

at the many pimples on his forehead.

O, buckling blue esotery falling all apart!

My anonymity increases with each entrance.

Will our hope be transfigured by this dust?

My black uniform sticks to my pocked back

like a sealed envelope.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Spencer Reece is the canon and rector of historic St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Wickford, Rhode Island.  He has published  three books of poetry:  The Clerk's Tale, The Road to Emmaus, and Acts.  In addition, he published The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir and All The Beauty Still Left: A Poet’s Painted Book of Hours, watercolors.  He edited Counting Time Like People Count Stars: Poems By The Girls of Our Little Roses. He founded an author series connected to his church called the 14 Gold Street Author Series, in which writers read at the public library and are hosted for a meal at the rectory.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________                           Art Garfunkel, left, and Paul Simon in front of the latter’s childhood home at 137-62 70 Road in Kew Gardens Hills, spring 1975.

“Muse Circe Reclaims Her Lucre”: 5 new "Next Line, Please" prompts

For our next round, write a poem using as your point of departure one of the following five “Proverbs of Hell” by William Blake (pictured left).. Your poem may, by anecdotal means, illustrate or confute the infernal axiom you have chosen. It need not quote the Blake line you chose; you can let your readers guess. Limit 15 lines. Or write a cogent one-paragraph discussion, elucidation, and analysis that brilliantly addresses (or argues with) the line. {Limit 15 lines for the paragraph as well?}

1. Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.
2. Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
3. The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
4. The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
5. Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.

For the latest column, with a review of the outstanding entries written in response to last monthh's prompt, click here.

https://theamericanscholar.org/muse-circe-reclaims-her-lucre/

Big news from Hungary! Specters stalk Europe (and world) says Boglárka Börcsök’s and Andreas Bolm’s “Figuring Age”

"Figuring Age" by Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm. Photo © Patricio Cassinoni

If somebody dressed up in Blackface for a very sympathetic and strong solo performance about Frederick Douglass and his struggle to abolish slavery, how would a body take that? How should a body take that? I think that most sensible people would take one look and just walk right out the door: Blackface? Are you joking?

But what about young people play acting old people – “Oldface”? Looking around me, sensible people don’t seem so prickly as to that. The spellchecker underlines the word in red. “Oldface”: the young playing the old. I’ll add it to my personal dictionary.

I am certainly no sensible person, but I wanted all the same to walk right back out when I saw Boglárka Börcsök – the talented, well-trained and cultivated performer and choreographer of Figuring Age, the evening’s one-woman performance around oldness and part of Festival Everybody 2025 at Carreau du Temple, Paris.

Boglárka Börcsök is streaked pale with whited greasepaint. Vital, serious-eyed, concentrated, Börcsök stands in the central place of what seems a hospice tent, over-heated and too-white bright, with a hospice bed to one side, her leftside. I notice that Börcsök wears a white blouse and transparent surgical gloves, clipped mid-finger. She leans forward in that way some old ladies – my girlfriend, Karine, for instance – especially, do.

Standing there in the light of the tent, Börcsök is channeling the single spirit of Éva, Irén and Ágnes, pioneers of modern dance in Hungary. These women were battered first as women in the post-1918 keep Hungary great national, tradition and murder whirlwind that brought fascism, war and massacre through into the mid-1940s. Then as dancers, the women were officially repressed as bourgeois avatars in post-1945 communist Hungary.

 

"Figuring Age" by Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm. Photo ©  Lukáš Horký

Like a specter then, Börcsök in Oldface picks a stiff and unsteady way through the spectators who fill the few ordinary seats and the whole floor of the tent. I stand upright somewhere to her right, my arms crossed; in what passes for a corner. My old back has decided this: I avoid sitting on the floor at all times.

As Börcsök moves, she tells telling bits and pieces of Éva’s, Irén’s and Ágnes’ girlhood, womanhood; a bit about dancing. Can these things be separated? She asks often for help getting up or around.

Also, I notice, my hackles giving a little sigh, she orders people into situations more suitable. Gently, so as a sensible person might not notice. But it’s there, in the performance, in my experience, in the old.

I am thinking. “There is a difference between infirmity and oldness”.

I furiously remember my great grandmother, brittle and luminous as a paper lantern. Weak. But strong: “Sweetie, a-now. Your hand”. Once, my mother has me open a Mason jar of some preserve she’s put up years before, and while I’m struggling with it, jokes she’d not be dying. Instead, she’d wither down to a wisp of a command lingering at the bottom of one of those Mason jars. She’d wither down, she says, to Sibyl with diktat.

Oldness, I am thinking now, is, after all – and Börcsök, it seems to me, is also semaphoring this –  becoming weak while continuing the habit of strong. Exhaustion is weakness’ killing stroke.

As performance, Boglárka Börcsök’s Oldface shtick certainly works for me.

But then, maybe it is her theory of ghosts, or, rather, theory of haunting, that is really at work inspiring the deep ambivalence and strong praise in this essay, not the greasepaint or figuring in Oldface.

Börcsök says there are two kinds of ghost: the eaten ones, the ones who have become part of a body and the merely swallowed ones, undigested bits. The former, I guess, would be transparent ghosts, see-through, like new glasses, like history, adjusting or distorting vision. The latter, I guess, would be specters like Scrooge’s Jacob Marley, Banquo or Hungarian Admiral Horthy’s desperately reactionary post-1918 nation and tradition regency or Victor Orban’s 2024 illiberal democracy, haunting the present and veiling the future.

______

I saw “Figuring Age”, written and performed by Boglárka Börcsök 14 February 2025 at Carreau du Temple, Paris. “Figuring Age” is based on the film documentary “The art of movement” by Börcsök and Andreas Bolm, a film maker. The film features the real versions of the three aged modern dance creators evoked in Börcsök’s one-woman show.

 

Happy Birthday, WHA

Born February 21, 1907, W. H. Auden came to NYC in 1939. Here is his poem "The More Loving One" below which you will find the videotape of a discussion I led on Auden. -- dl

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

On Auden's Birthday: What the Stars Say [by Jill Baron]

Why Auden is an Aquarius [by Jill  Baron]

Wystan Hugh Auden, born February 21, 1905

When I read "Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times" (the Phi Beta Kappa Poem Auden read at Harvard in 1946) for the first time, my astrological radar detected an Aquarius. Who but the Water Bearer -- also known (according to astrologer Steven Forrest’s list of Aquarian archetypes) as the Genius, the Truth Sayer, the Scientist, the Exile, the Revolutionary -- would write these lines: “Thou shalt not be on friendly terms / With guys in advertising firms, / Nor speak with such / As read the Bible for its prose, / Nor, above all, make love to those / Who wash too much. // Thou shalt not live within thy means / Nor on plain water and raw greens. / If thou must choose / Between the chances, choose the odd: / Read The New Yorker, trust in God; / And take short views.”

Only an Aquarius would have the chutzpah, or, in Auden’s case, the gall, to reveal opinions so conclusive they sound like truth. For an Aquarius is above all a person of strong individuality. An Aquarius speaks his mind without fear of recrimination. Despite pressure to conform, socialize, and be accepted, an Aquarius will choose his own path, remaining loyal to his personal truths. An Aquarius is a maverick. Auden is a maverick. Therefore, Auden is an Aquarius.

You may be thinking: but all poets are mavericks. Well, wasn’t Auden especially so? Doesn’t Auden represent the Truth-Sayer, the Exile, and the Revolutionary? Liberty and freedom of choice are paramount to him. As he wrote in his essay “The American Scene": "liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one.” Auden’s biographer Edward Mendelson wrote, “[Auden] hoped that art could serve persuasion as well as freedom by guiding its readers into making the right free choice instead of the wrong one.” And Marianne Moore has commented, “the thought of choice as compulsory is central to everything [Auden] writes.” So yes, fellow poets and devotees of Auden – what we have here is an Aquarius through and through.

Imagine my dismay when I discovered that our Truth-Sayer, Revolutionary, and Exile all wrapped into one was not technically an Aquarius but a Pisces! The sun rests in Aquarius from January 20 to February 18, throwing Auden in deep water with the other fish. And yet despite the plain facts of the case, I have decided - in true Aquarian spirit - to hold fast to my own personal truth. That’s right. No one could ever confuse Auden for a Pisces, the sign of dreamers and mysticism. In fact, didn’t Auden deplore Yeats for the elder poet’s interest in the magic and the occult? “The deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India.” This was a man – and a poet – who told it like it was, in plain talk, or (in Marianne Moore's phrase) “plain American which cats and dogs can read!”

Or – did he? Was Auden as clear as air, or rather, a poet who made much use of irony, a rather more murky enterprise that achieves its means, according to Fowler, through – gasp! – mystification! Oh dear. I’m afraid that my aim – to prove that Auden is an Aquarius – has come undone. Perhaps my reliance on sun signs is flawed. [Right: Auden with his collaborator and fellow traveler Christopher Isherwood.]

Not many essayists disprove their thesis in the middle of an essay and continue writing in an attempt to make amends, but I suppose not many essayists write the words “Aquarius” and “Auden” in the same title line. Maybe it’s just this: I admire the Aquarian traits, and I admire Auden, and I wouldn’t mind having some more of the former, and being more like the latter, and I would foolishly like to think of Auden not as a human being, complex in his beliefs and counterbeliefs and charms and foibles, but as the fulfillment of the archetype of the Trailblazing Poet and Ideas Man. Which he was, undoubtedly - though he was also a devout Christian, raised on Norse mythology, whose “first religious memories [were] of exciting magical rites.”

The problem with archetypes is their one-dimensionality, which I suppose is why we really shouldn’t use the sun sign to define an individual’s personality. If Auden were here today, reading my defense of astrological reasoning, I suspect he would turn that superb one-liner on me: “Sorry, my dear, one mustn’t be bohemian!”

-- JB      from the archive, first posted Febriuary 21, 2010                                                              

When I read "Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times" (the Phi Beta Kappa Poem Auden read at Harvard in 1946) for the first time, my astrological radar detected an Aquarius. Who but the Water Bearer -- also known (according to astrologer Steven Forrest’s list of Aquarian archetypes) as the Genius, the Truth Sayer, the Scientist, the Exile, the Revolutionary -- would write these lines: “Thou shalt not be on friendly terms / With guys in advertising firms, / Nor speak with such / As read the Bible for its prose, / Nor, above all, make love to those / Who wash too much. // Thou shalt not live within thy means / Nor on plain water and raw greens. / If thou must choose / Between the chances, choose the odd: / Read The New Yorker, trust in God; / And take short views.”

Only an Aquarius would have the chutzpah, or, in Auden’s case, the gall, to reveal opinions so conclusive they sound like truth. For an Aquarius is above all a person of strong individuality. An Aquarius speaks his mind without fear of recrimination. Despite pressure to conform, socialize, and be accepted, an Aquarius will choose his own path, remaining loyal to his personal truths. An Aquarius is a maverick. Auden is a maverick. Therefore, Auden is an Aquarius.

You may be thinking: but all poets are mavericks. Well, wasn’t Auden especially so? Doesn’t Auden represent the Truth-Sayer, the Exile, and the Revolutionary? Liberty and freedom of choice are paramount to him. As he wrote in his essay “The American Scene": "liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one.” Auden’s biographer Edward Mendelson wrote, “[Auden] hoped that art could serve persuasion as well as freedom by guiding its readers into making the right free choice instead of the wrong one.” And Marianne Moore has commented, “the thought of choice as compulsory is central to everything [Auden] writes.” So yes, fellow poets and devotees of Auden – what we have here is an Aquarius through and through.

Imagine my dismay when I discovered that our Truth-Sayer, Revolutionary, and Exile all wrapped into one was not technically an Aquarius but a Pisces! The sun rests in Aquarius from January 20 to February 18, throwing Auden in deep water with the other fish. And yet despite the plain facts of the case, I have decided - in true Aquarian spirit - to hold fast to my own personal truth. That’s right. No one could ever confuse Auden for a Pisces, the sign of dreamers and mysticism. In fact, didn’t Auden deplore Yeats for the elder poet’s interest in the magic and the occult? “The deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India.” This was a man – and a poet – who told it like it was, in plain talk, or (in Marianne Moore's phrase) “plain American which cats and dogs can read!”

Or – did he? Was Auden as clear as air, or rather, a poet who made much use of irony, a rather more murky enterprise that achieves its means, according to Fowler, through – gasp! – mystification! Oh dear. I’m afraid that my aim – to prove that Auden is an Aquarius – has come undone. Perhaps my reliance on sun signs is flawed. [Right: Auden with his collaborator and fellow traveler Christopher Isherwood.]

Not many essayists disprove their thesis in the middle of an essay and continue writing in an attempt to make amends, but I suppose not many essayists write the words “Aquarius” and “Auden” in the same title line. Maybe it’s just this: I admire the Aquarian traits, and I admire Auden, and I wouldn’t mind having some more of the former, and being more like the latter, and I would foolishly like to think of Auden not as a human being, complex in his beliefs and counterbeliefs and charms and foibles, but as the fulfillment of the archetype of the Trailblazing Poet and Ideas Man. Which he was, undoubtedly - though he was also a devout Christian, raised on Norse mythology, whose “first religious memories [were] of exciting magical rites.”

The problem with archetypes is their one-dimensionality, which I suppose is why we really shouldn’t use the sun sign to define an individual’s personality. If Auden were here today, reading my defense of astrological reasoning, I suspect he would turn that superb one-liner on me: “Sorry, my dear, one mustn’t be bohemian!”

-- JB      from the archive, first posted Febriuary 21, 2010                                                              

Major Jackson: "On occasion though, a devastating feeling hits me . . . "

(Ed note: Every volume of The Best American Poetry includes contributors' notes for which the poets share something about the inspiration for the poem chosen for the book. Here's what Major Jackson writes about "Why I Write Poetry," which Denise Duhamel selected for The Best American Poetry 2013. -- sdh)

Some mornings, I wake and say to myself: “I am a poet.” I say this mostly in disbelief, but mostly it is an utterance that connects me to writers of poetry (some of them friends, many not) in other countries and throughout the ages who have decided to courageously break through the anonymity of existence, to join the stream of human expression, to stylize a self that feels authentic, and quite possibly, timeless. The kinship is palpable; the rewards are many; and the act of writing and reading poetry is one that has afforded me endless hours of meditative pleasure and contentment. Other people’s poems afford me the greatest pleasures. On occasion though, a devastating feeling hits me, not unlike that absurdist moment during puberty of looking into a mirror and being startled by the person looking back. “I am a poet.” How did I end up here, in this life? I’ve talents in other areas: why not a career as an orthopedic surgeon or a foreign service diplomat or a partner in some firm? Yet, my life could not have been scripted and nor would I change it. Attempting to identify the significant decisions that have led me here is mostly futile. Over the precious years, the person returning my gaze in the mirror has become increasingly familiar, an old friend and interrogator. But occasionally, I need to write poems that point to the mysteries and attempt to explain the unexplainable.

You can read Major Jackson's poem "Why I Write Poetry" in The Best American Poetry 2013.

Join Major Jackson and David Lehman at the New School (66 W. 12th Street, NYC) on Wednesday, December 11, at 6:30 pm for the final poetry forum of the season. After reading from his work, Major will join David Lehman in conversation and take questions from the audience. FREE More information here.

Some mornings, I wake and say to myself: “I am a poet.” I say this mostly in disbelief, but mostly it is an utterance that connects me to writers of poetry (some of them friends, many not) in other countries and throughout the ages who have decided to courageously break through the anonymity of existence, to join the stream of human expression, to stylize a self that feels authentic, and quite possibly, timeless. The kinship is palpable; the rewards are many; and the act of writing and reading poetry is one that has afforded me endless hours of meditative pleasure and contentment. Other people’s poems afford me the greatest pleasures. On occasion though, a devastating feeling hits me, not unlike that absurdist moment during puberty of looking into a mirror and being startled by the person looking back. “I am a poet.” How did I end up here, in this life? I’ve talents in other areas: why not a career as an orthopedic surgeon or a foreign service diplomat or a partner in some firm? Yet, my life could not have been scripted and nor would I change it. Attempting to identify the significant decisions that have led me here is mostly futile. Over the precious years, the person returning my gaze in the mirror has become increasingly familiar, an old friend and interrogator. But occasionally, I need to write poems that point to the mysteries and attempt to explain the unexplainable.

You can read Major Jackson's poem "Why I Write Poetry" in The Best American Poetry 2013.

Join Major Jackson and David Lehman at the New School (66 W. 12th Street, NYC) on Wednesday, December 11, at 6:30 pm for the final poetry forum of the season. After reading from his work, Major will join David Lehman in conversation and take questions from the audience. FREE More information here.

On Archie [Ammons] on His Birthday [Feb 18]

Archie 

I’m listening to Eric Dolphy without understanding a word

there are no words but I know what you mean

on the drive back to Hamilton College

after visiting Archie for the first time

in Goldwin Smith Hall in 1976 I brought my hardcover copy

of Diversification he signed it and took me

to Epoch headquarters we took a walk

around the Cornell arts quad he showed me

the one building on campus he liked (was it Barnes Hall?)

because it “has some diversity to go with its unity”

he complained of bad health bad teeth bad skin

well, I said, you look good

well, he said, I fuck a lol

11 / 19 / 17

from Playlist by David Lehman (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Photo of A. R. (Archie) Ammons.

Who said it? (2025 series, #5)

"You can be free if you want to be."

"Don't kill the criminal; make him work for you."

"Don't kiss the fool; ignore his opinions Opinions have killed more people than earthquakes and vocanoes."

"The public is a ferocious beast that can never be satisfied."

"If god didn't exist, it woud be necessary too invent him."

"You are gulty of all the things you could have done but didn't."

"If I had more time, this would have been a shorter letter."

[Picture of La Grenouille in NYC contains no hints or clues.]

Susan Barba: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________

Player Piano

 

My face is a case study

in gravity. A face study. A grave.

Effaced, I introduce myself

by name, a quippy

delegate, ceci Susan,

this lifelong stand-in.

Named after my mother

or rather, the pseudonym that hid

her foreign origin. Shoushik.

She’d take her breakfast

on the balcony. Tehran

1943. Feeding the ants

and plants her onion-tisane

milk. My little mother.

From her ovaries

came I. An alloy.

Reproduction reproduces

inexactly, doesn’t it?

Soldering like to unlike,

an off-rhyme, like me

and time, the clock ticks.

Those aren’t notes but holes

that make the music.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Susan Barba is the author of two poetry collections, Fair Sun and geode. She is the editor of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide, which won the 2023 American Horticultural Society Book Award. She earned a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University and works as a senior editor for New York Review Books. [“Player Piano” appeared in the New York Review of Books, 1/16/25.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

     Golnar Adili (Iranian American),The Organization for Documenting The Mood of The Country, 2013. Printed Japanese paper,hand-stitched thread, batting, canvas. 42 x 60 x 1 inches. Used by permission of the artist.   

How People Reacted to Jackson Pollock's Paintings [by David Lehman]

Abstract art seemed to fly in the face of good old American horse-sense. The standard response to a reproduction of a Pollock [pictured above] was, "Why, my five-year-old could do that." Or, “It looks like inedible spaghetti.” To this day, the works of the Abstract Expressionists retain their power to disturb if one measure of that power is the still-widespread impulse to mock them. In the movie An Unmarried Woman (1978), Alan Bates playing a famous New York painter tells Jill Clayburgh that when he was six his mother threw a pickled herring at his father. It missed its target and splattered against the wall. “At that moment I became an Abstract Expressionist,” Bates says, to which Clayburgh replies that his work does resemble pickled herring. That occurs in a movie sympathetic to the myth of the Abstract Expressionism. There are less friendly ways of responding. A prizewinning biography of Jackson Pollock maintains that his “drip” paintings originated in the haunting boyhood memory of standing on a flat rock beside his father urinating. Pollock is supposed to have said to himself, “When I grow up, am I ever going to do that!”^[i] Others have tried to put that reductive psychoanalytic theory into practice. At a show at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions in Los Angeles in 1995, a painter by the name of Keith Boadwee presented fifty pieces of so-called body art that he had produced by giving himself enemas of egg tempura paints and then squatting over canvases. Boadwee had the Abstract Expressionists in mind. "I wanted to prove that I can make just as good a painting as they can, with my butthole," he said.^[ii]

[i]. See Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Life (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), for an alaborate version of this theory.

[ii]. Above the paintings in the gallery were TV monitors showing videotapes of Boadwee in action, including his squatting nude over canvases. Buzz, August 1995; Art in America, October 1995.

"Bright Star" [by John Keats]

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–

No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever–or else swoon to death.

When I Was Straight, A Tribute to Maureen Seaton, Edited by Dustin Brookshire [by Nin Andrews]

Tears in Sleep

All night the cocks crew, under a moon like day,
And I, in the cage of sleep, on a stranger's breast,
Shed tears, like a task not to be put away—-
In the false light, false grief in my happy bed,
A labor of tears, set against joy's undoing.
I would not wake at your word, I had tears to say.
I clung to the bars of the dream and they were said,
And pain's derisive hand had given me rest
From the night giving off flames, and the dark renewing.

― Louise Bogan

As I wrote yesterday, I feel as if we have just entered a new era, an era of tears, an era that defies belief in which one might want to cling to the bars of dreams. Or if not dreams, then poetry that can remind one that they have souls, a conscience, an ability to bear witness. Poems like those collected in Dustin Brookshire’s anthology, When I Was Straight, a Tribute to Maureen Seaton, a lovely celebration of both Maureen Seaton’s legacy and the LGBTQIA+ experience. And Maureen Seaton is truly a poet we all miss.

In his heartfelt introduction, Dustin Brookshire writes: “I fell in love with Maureen Seaton’s work when she read at Java Monkey Speaks in the fall of 2004. I was taking poetry classes as electives at Georgia State University, and Maureen was the first rockstar poet that I had met. I can still close my eyes and see Maureen on the Java Monkey stage and hear her reading her poem “Furious Cooking,” I sat in the audience in awe of Maureen. I’ve remained in awe of her since that day, and I’ll remain in awe of everything she accomplished and who she was until the day I die. If you also knew Maureen, then you’re nodding your head in agreement because you know exactly what I mean.”  I do know. And I am nodding my head now.

This collection is not only brilliant, and necessary, it is also a gathering of exquisite poets/poetry. Like this one by Julie Marie Wade.

And this poem by Diamond Forde, which beautifully captures the adolescent experience.

          When I Was Straight by Diamond Forde

The van mumbled in rush hour, a cemetery yawning gray teeth across the hillside to our right. “Hold your breath,” the birthday girl said, & all the five girls ‘cept me clap shut, hands smacking their happy mouths, matching bracelets nibbling red marks in their cheeks

& it wasn’t because I couldn’t afford a bracelet. & it wasn’t because this was my first sleepover (thought it was, twelve & never spent a night not home)

or that when I entered the birthday girl’s home I stumbled on the stairs that went forever, stiffened hallways, a white couch, a stand mixer, one lilac room, all hers—the birthday girl—who made us play celebrities, so I stilted into Ashanti (because her song carried me through all my imagined heartaches—the first, that none of you knew her name—)

and it wasn’t because there was a girl playing Justin who smelled like soap & smiled when she flicked bangs from her brunette eyes (I sighed, leaning my head into the basket of her thighs, when we claimed a minute, hoping my heartbeat didn’t clang its bell)

but because the birthday girl was Britney & each time their hands fluttered like dizzy birds to meet, I swallowed honey, spoke a quiet sweet enough to drown. What did I know about myself that wasn’t a key in the wrong lock? This desire, unaffordable—the dusty pocketbook of my heart clamped shut.

And this poem by Kelli Russell Agodon, which also takes one back to the life of a teen girl’s sexual awakening.  

When I Was Straight by Kelli Russell Agodon

I thought everyone was easy
to love. The boys who brought me

bouquets of bluebells, the girls
braiding daisies into my hair at slumber

parties—the girls I couldn’t tell.
When I was straight, I was mostly curved,

a windy road of fading firs, a sunset
on a dead-end street holding the Indigo

Girls in one hand and Elvis Costello
in the other. Remember how I always wished

to be Tom Sawyer, maybe for the raft,
maybe to be closer to the perfect

Becky Thatcher. Looking back, it’s easy
to understand how I was in enchanted

with every pathway, how each exit was also
a possibility. Everyone is easy to love, I told him,

I told her, I told them—a garland of forget
-me-knots blooming around my waist.

And I can’t resist posting one more on the same theme.

When I Was Straight by Alison Blevins

When I was straight, my body was detached. My face, a portrait in every mirror, changed each night, some new arrangement of drip and swirl, watercolor hair, my lips thin pastel rose then absurdly large and quirked at each corner. My body now still resists recognition, insists on new arrangements of color and sound. But when I was straight, my eyes sand most mornings, sang a language of green and gold—something felt promised to me then, at 13, at 15, so young, fresh mourning in my mouth and breath, even behind closed doors, even afraid, even flat and still in my best friend’s bed, our fingertips only just so, our hips pulling and pulling. Silent in her bed, her fingers touched my arm—gentle as blue and sweet corn and pond water lapping. Nothing would ever be the same after—that pain promised—how want burned, want wetted our lips and teeth. In Japan, they have a word for when your mouth is lonely. Pain promised to never let go at 16 in her bed, on our backs, barely touching skin. When I was straight, I hoped that pain might last forever.

"Love’s Philosophy" [by Percy Bysshe Shelley]

The fountains mingle with the river

   And the rivers with the ocean,

The winds of heaven mix for ever

   With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;

   All things by a law divine

In one spirit meet and mingle.

   Why not I with thine?—

 

See the mountains kiss high heaven

   And the waves clasp one another;

No sister-flower would be forgiven

   If it disdained its brother;

And the sunlight clasps the earth

   And the moonbeams kiss the sea:

What is all this sweet work worth

   If thou kiss not me?