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

Comments

[Nin Andrews]

I so love this poem, its breathless quality, and I love the book it's from, and, as always, I love Angela's exquisite insights.

[Joel Weiner]

I remember so many things you left out but i know you remember much of what i remember because you, David, have a great memory.

[Maria Leng]

David’s voice in his poems is like the tempo in a Mahler symphony— it takes you to the height of knowledge a gives you the intimacy of understanding.

[Mark]

You've got a typo sensei:
"he takes of his shoes" > "he takes off his shoes"

Great poem.

[Robert McDowell]

Excellent read & a fine poem.

[Angela Ball]

Yes, such a fine poem. Belated thanks to you, Robert McDowell!