The Best American Poetry

Henry James on "genders and pronouns"

"You bewilder me a litte," I replied; "in the age we live in one gets lost among the genders and the pronouns"

-- Henry James, "The Death of the Lion" (1895)

Lionel Messi and Novak Djokovic Celebrate

Lionel Messi grabbed the headlines this time on the tennis circuit as he attended Novak Djokovic’s Miami Open semifinal against Grigor Dimitrov at the Hard Rock Stadium. The Argentina and Inter Miami forward was present courtside Friday when the Serbian delivered a dominating performance to beat the 2017 ATP Finals champion and secure his place in the final.

Ryan Eckes: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

___________________________________________________

form

 

filing for unemployment again at the end of teacher appreciation week

along w/ 50 million other people

i almost put an air conditioner in the window backwards, on-switch facing outside

i almost cooled off the whole city

what are you doing, my friend said gently, flying down delaware ave, into the night

i appreciate you, i said, waving goodbye, on my way

back to the form:

were you absent from work when work was available:

no, never

i would never try to love my friends

every single day, skipping stones across the water

for pleasure, one dream after another

why would i ever want life to just get better

and better and better

did you or will you receive vacation pay

the car is parked, the door is locked

the room is empty, the fridge is closed

the day is long, the pain is old

when will you learn

said the carcass of an ATM

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ryan Eckes is a poet from Philadelphia. He is the author of Wrong Heaven Again, General Motors, Valu-Plus, and Old News. Recent poems have appeared in Prolit, Wax Nine Journal, and Windfall Room. Eckes has worked as an adjunct professor at numerous institutions and as a labor organizer in education.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                       Depression Bread Line by George Segal, 1991, bronze, 108 x 148 x 36

At Princeton [by John Hennessy]

I DATED MY FAVORITE POET’S DAUGHTER, AND OTHER BUM TRIPS [by John Hennessy, July 25, 2012]

I wasn’t planning to make it to Princeton for my 25^th reunion this year. It looked like no friends were going, but all the usual preppy suspects had registered early. Did I really want to pay two thousand dollars to lodge my family for a weekend among the hordes of Reagan Youth, especially now they’d gone smug with middle age? At the last minute I got an invite to crash at a big house in town with a few of my old buddies, one of whom has never left. “You don’t even have to officially register or go to the tents,” Ted said, “just hang out at Terrace.”

At Princeton, they don’t like to feed you in the dining halls after sophomore year, so most students join an “eating club.” My club was Terrace, a run-down Tudor mansion originally built for president Woodrow Wilson, literally and figuratively around the corner from all of the other clubs. It was the first to do away with “bicker,” a selection process similar to fraternity rush, the first to open its doors to everyone—Catholics, Jews, women, gays, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, scholarship kids. I was led there by a tall, skinny, blue-haired guy with a chain in his nose at the end of an otherwise miserable Freshman Week, and for the next four years I left only to go to classes, the library, and occasionally to sleep; in our day it was a refuge for the few punks, hippies, out-GLBT community members, and anyone else who didn’t belong on campus. 

The plan to spend reunions at Terrace had just one catch: Dead Head Night. Terrace was going to be jammed on Saturday. Phil Lesh, the band’s bass player, was playing a concert of Grateful Dead songs there with his touring group, which included two of his sons, one of whom was a graduating Terrace Club member.  No offense to those folks, but talk about bringing up a slew of bad memories:

Jerry Garcia

        The last time I saw the Dead—as a tourist among my more dedicated Terrace brethren—I had a bum trip. Of course. My style was club music, the earliest days of acid house. After stuffing myself full of a variety of groceries I’ve subsequently cut from my diet, all I could think was, “Whoa, this is a religious cult. And like my own religious cult, Roman Catholicism, this one is focused on a living man. Jerry Garcia. How bizarre.” At the exit signs, backlit people danced in that herky-jerky, wrist-flapping Dead Head way. Steal your face. The hirsute guy in front of me was picking splinters from his beard. His hands left angry little dove-trails. I tried closing my eyes. But as I was peaking (troughing), all I could think was, “These people worship Jerry Garcia. Unlike Jesus, Jerry can’t bank on rising again. What the hell are they going to do when he dies?” The whole concert was ruined for me: these poor misguided Dead Heads, worshipping a mortal. Who would console them in the future?

          For that matter, who was going to console me? I needed to be talked down. After the show I went looking for my girlfriend, Maud Kinnell, whose father, Galway, had until that day been my favorite living poet, my

poetry hero. For years his Book of Nightmares, a powerful exploration of family life, had been the first collection on my golden shelf. Visits home with Maud were like entering Galway’s book.  And how I identified with him. Enough to pick Princeton, his alma mater, when I had other choices. Like him, I was urban working class, a scholarship kid at Princeton. He was even—and this I hadn’t known until a few weeks before, when Maud and I went on a spring break retreat with him to his cabin in Vermont—a fellow alumnus of Terrace Club. As for his daughter, I was even more taken with her.

         The women I’d grown up with—on the Jersey side of the Arthur Kill, near the Merck plant in Rahway, and later a block from the boardwalk in Belmar—with their tough acts, dropped R’s, and tight clothes, were all about volume: big hair, big nails, big mouths, even big hearts sometimes. Much of a muchness. I was entirely unprepared for Maud Kinnell. She was like an Athena sprung fully formed from the brain of Baudelaire. Heathcliff transgendered.  A TB-clinic refugee. Very Gothic chic. An unlikely physics student, she wore black Agnes B dresses, Victorian boots, black eye shadow, and cultivated her resemblance to Louise Brooks by bobbing her straight black hair. Sure, her father was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, but her mother was dating Joseph Brodsky, a future Nobel-laureate. As a kid, she’d even watched Sesame Street with Amiri Baraka, her dad’s friend. But those living writers didn’t intimidate her. She read Proust for a laugh, Nietzsche for social hygiene, Jens Peter Jacobsen for aperitif lyricism, and Rilke for advice on love.

 God, was she obsessed with Rilke. She did her best to impress his modes upon me, especially his penchant for solitude. I was only nineteen, but still she opined that I’d never have any success as a poet until I’d learned to embrace solitude, to put my art before all other things, including—and especially—people. Even her.

(Not that she particularly like her own solitude: Within weeks of our first conversation, which lasted all night, she insisted I move into her dorm room because she hated to be apart from me. She aborted every trip home to see her folks. She’d turn around at Penn Station and come straight back to me at Princeton. Eventually we adopted an expedient policy: I agreed to go with her whenever she wanted to visit her family or friends. Enmeshed, they’d call it now.  It doesn’t take a psychologist to see it made her feel better to criticize my abstract commitment to writing.)

I wasn’t ambivalent: I hated solitude. I’d grown up with an enormous Irish and Italian family—even lived in a tiny house with my grandparents, parents, and eight of my mother’s nine brothers and sisters for a couple of years before my siblings were born. While I appreciated a daily walk in the woods, a quiet morning at the typewriter, I liked a bit of noise, family and friends around me, at the end of the day. Still do. After the bummer at the Dead concert, I wasn’t having any of it. Rilke. What did he know? Who if I cried out would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? Where was Maud? 

After the Dead show, Maud wasn’t around: not at Terrace, not in the dorm room we bunked in together, not in the library, lab, nowhere. Then I remembered why she hadn’t gone to the concert in the first place: Galway took her to a dinner party in town. The whole dinner party had been engineered in order to introduce Maud to X (not his real name), another undergraduate, someone Galway and the other oldsters wanted to fix her up with. Before we started dating, Maud had expressed interest in X, but now we’d been together for six months, an eternity in college. Why was Galway trying to introduce them now?

X was a descendent of Chinese feudal lords on one side, one of the twentieth century’s greatest European violinists on the other. He was beautiful, impeccably dressed, elegantly mannered, and dumb as a brick. “He’s perfect for you,” Galway told her. So Maud reported, once we finally caught up with each other. I was devastated. Completely betrayed. The fact that Maud hadn’t actually gone home with X—or even made any plans to see him again—didn’t mitigate things much. How could she have agreed to go to that dinner? How could Galway have planned it? What kind of asshole names a collection of poems about his wife and children The Book of Nightmares?

I broke up with Maud, left her room, and went to Terrace Club, where I spent the night under a table, still twitching..

*

**

Well, the worst has happened, of course. Jerry Garcia died in 1995, less than ten years later. But it looks like the Dead, and all those Dead Heads, are still going strong—they’ll still turn out by the hundreds, thousands, even at Princeton, to hear the children of the Dead, grown now, playing the standards that were already oldies when I was young. Certainly they were still powerhousing the night of my 25^th reunion at Terrace Club. The place was jammed to full capacity, people were on the roof, the terraces, the lawn, even hanging out of windows from all three stories of the building. People who couldn’t fit inside the club’s property were crowded up beyond the fences, around the circular driveway, and behind the outdoor stage. The band played a host of those old songs, even the ones this amateur knew: Uncle John’s Band, Sugar Magnolia, Casey Jones, and Phil Lesh’s kids sounded even sweeter than Bob Weir or Jerry. Strangest of all, they were joined by jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan, another Terrace alum, who was there to celebrate his thirtieth.

We studied Stanley Jordan’s moves, fingers pounding the neck piano-style. “It’s straight out of Robert Johnson’s playbook,” said my buddy Rob Brink, who’s presently making a feature film about the great blues guitarist. Rob and half a dozen other friends and I danced to the Dead (that’s not dancing, that’s butt-dipping, my eldest son Nicholas, an expert hip hop dancer scoffs), mostly sober, really enjoying it. Between sets we broke out our phones, showed each other pictures of our families.

“I’m so glad you married a beautiful woman,” my friend Kate said, oddly. “I always hoped for that for you.” What a strange remark for Kate, especially since I’d just been saying that Sabina Murray, my wife, grew up in Western Australia before joining her mother’s family in Manila, and she puts up with zero whinging, no self-pity. Merely a flesh wound, and I’m going to tease you if you ask for a band-aid. The fact that she’s the funniest person I’ve ever met, as well as one of the best writers in my generation, the youngest winner of the PEN/Faulkner-Award for fiction ten years ago, didn’t exactly put me off her, either.

But then I realized that Kate was one of the people who helped me through my final break-up with Maud Kinnell, almost a year after that first one the night Galway tried to fix her up with X. The exact details of that lasting argument are lost to me now, but in the run up to it I remember a deep critique of my poetry, Maud concluding, “If I don’t love your poetry, how can I love you?”

I’ve come up with several answers to that question in the years since, but they’ve long ago become moot. (Luckily I’ve gotten a little better as a poet since I left my teens, and, having generated my own company as a parent, my relationship to solitude is more easy-going these days). Those answers were even less relevant once the band began playing again. They weren’t the Grateful Dead, but then again I wasn’t that young man anymore, either. In fact, I enjoyed the band—and myself—much more than our earlier incarnations.

What a privilege it was to have them there. And I was left with that, an appreciation for that deep privilege, surrounded by Rob, the best actor I’ve ever seen on a stage, Kate, whose art installations I deeply admire, and half a dozen other old friends, some more, some less conventionally successful now, but all very intelligent, all serious thinkers, vivid, mercurial conversationalists. What an excess of privilege it had been to live there with them for four years, at Terrace, at Princeton. And as very young writers—I didn’t forget where I came from, in my old neighborhood you were taunted for reading, could get your ass kicked for writing poetry—we had access to Robert Stone, Joyce Carol Oates, JD McClatchy, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, Paul Auster, Stephen Wright, Edmund Keeley, James Richardson, Julian Jaynes, even, indirectly, Joseph Brodsky. What an excess of access we had there.

As Phil Lesh and friends were wrapping it up, I even found it possible to begin thinking about forgiving Galway after all those years. Here’s a first step, ending this with a devastating poem of his:

SHELLEY

When I was twenty the one true
free spirit I had heard of was Shelley,
Shelley who wrote tracts advocating
atheism, free love, the emancipation
of women, the abolition of wealth and class,
and poems on the bliss of romantic love,
Shelley, who I learned later, perhaps
almost too late, remarried Harriet,
then pregnant with their second child,
and a few months later ran off with Mary,
already pregnant herself, bringing
with them Mary’s stepsister Claire,
who very likely also became his lover,

and in this malaise a trios, which Shelley
had imagined would be “a paradise of exiles,”
they lived, along with the spectre of Harriet,
who drowned herself in the Serpentine,
and of Mary’s half sister Fanny,
who killed herself, maybe for unrequited
love of Shelley, and with the spirits
of adored but often neglected
children conceived incidentally
in the pursuit of Eros—Harriet’s
Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelley
and consigned to foster parents; Mary’s
Clara, dead at one; her Willmouse,
Shelley’s favorite, dead at three; Elena,
the baby in Naples, almost surely
Shelley’s own, whom he “adopted”
and then left behind, dead at one and a half;
Allegra, Claire’s daughter by Byron,
whom Byron sent off to the convent
at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five—

and in those days, before I knew
any of this, I thought I followed Shelley,
who thought he was following radiant desire.

--GALWAY KINNELL

In Paris, celebrate diversity, inclusion and our shared planet with June Events 2025 [By Tracy Danison]

“Eléctro-Tap”, duo, creation, Candice Martel. Photo © Marc Plantec

Take heart. In 2025, in addition to the 500 new pedestrian streets and new tree plantings announced by her really excellent Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, the Atelier de Paris’ dance performance festival June Events 2025 will come, not to bury, but to celebrate, diversity, inclusion and respect for our shared planet. Due perhaps to a rough and rather too-lengthy entry into the Age of Aquarius, June Events starts this year on 2 and ends on 20 June 2025.

Both an opportunity to learn about and to support new and emerging artists and a reminder how liberal theory works concretely to supply a better world than the Hobbesian Scientism of Vladimir Putin Corp.’s faux traditionalism. So, whether you’re proudly woke, like me, or just love dance performance, like me, this year’s June Events is, on a couple of heads, a cream-jeans event and worth planning a Paris visit around.

 

“Vagabondages & Conversations”, duo, creation, Gilles Clément & Christian Ubl. Photo © j2mc

The 2025 festival keeps up its tradition of including international artists. Featured artists this year hail from Brazil, Québec, Tunisia, Switzerland, Belgium and Australia, as well as France, and include among them many past collaborators, invited to celebrate the 25-year anniversary of the founding of the Atelier de Paris at the Cartoucherieperforming arts complex in the Bois de Vincennes.

Many of the featured choreographers and performers – just off the cuff, Rebecca Journo, Nina Santes, Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard and Marie-Caroline Hominal – have figured over the years in my public essays or whose work has been, like Ikue Nakagawa with her mannekins, or Rémy Héritier and his work with space and place, in my good books. There is a wealth of performance forms on offer: creations and premières, solos, duos, trios, quartets… even a fifty-strong group, all embodying the broader themes of diversity, inclusion and our shared planet – I hope to write more about these concepts as they apply to dance performance before and during the festival.

 

“Monga”, solo, creation, Jessica Teixera. Photo © Ligia Jardim

Venues include new and historic developers of emerging movement art north of the Seine and east of Châtelet, including Carreau du Temple, Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles Paris, Ménagerie de Verre, Théâtre de la Bastille and, at the Cartoucherie, the Théâtre de l’Aquarium and, of course, the Atelier de Paris.

Since 1970, the Cartoucherie, a reconverted small-arms ammunition factory, has been home to Ariane Mnouchkine’s still very much politically-engaged, and collaboratively-organized, Théâtre du Soleil, as well as of three other quality, innovative theaters (Théâtre de l’Epée de Bois, Théâtre de la Tempête and Théâtre de l’Aquarium). And since American-born Carolyn Carlson brought in her contemporary dance troupe in1999, the place has been home to the founder and sponsor of June Events, Atelier de Paris/CDNC, one of 15 national centers for dance development.

 

“(M)other”, quintet, creation, Jeanne Brouaye. Photo © Elma-Plaza

It is not far-fetched to think that supporting dance performance culture and enjoying the offer and environment of June Events this year can be a quiet affirmation of the concrete achievements of the liberal, woke, order. Consider, the way we treat children today: “Ulysse” – Josette Baïz and the gifts of today’s un-classic ballet. Consider also that in addition to its missions of encouraging the culture of movement arts and bringing contemporary dance to the broadest audience, Atelier de Paris has a special commitment to hearing-impaired and sign language-using artists and publics.

Any way you look at it, June Events 2025 is worth a ticket.

____________

Artists and performances, June Events 2 - 20 June 2025

Candice Martel, “Électro-tap”, duo, creation 2025 ; Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard, “Mutual Information”, duo, creation 2021; Rebecca Journo, “Les amours de la pieuvre”, quatuor, creation 2024; Rosalind Crisp, “Performance” (provisional title), trio, creation 2025; Nina Santes, “Chansons mouillées”, solo, creation 2025; Marie-Caroline Hominal, “Numéro 0: scène III”, triskaideket (long dozen or 13), creation 2025; Dilo Paulo, “Ekesa Sando”, solo, creation 2024; Puma Camillê, “En rythme de résistance”, quatuor, creation 2025; Jessica Teixera, “Monga”, solo, creation 2024; Manuel Roque, “Le Vent se lève”, solo, creation 2024; Geisha Fontaine & Pierre Cottreau, “Mille et une danses”, for fifty non-professional performers, creation 2025, première; Joanne Leighton, “The Gathering”, decadet (ten), creation 2025; Louise Vanneste, “Mossy Eye Moor”, quintet, creation 2025; Rémy Héritier, “Un monde reel”, duo, creation 2025; Jeanne Brouaye, (M)other, quintet, creation 2025, première;  Ikue Nakagawa; “Kuroko”, solo, creation 2025; Mohamed Issaoui, “Ommi Sissi”, solo; creation 2024; Gilles Clément & Christian Ubl, “Vagabondages et Conversations”, duo, creation 2025

"Mystery and Solitude in Topeka" [by Mark Strand]

Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known, and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing.

from Almost Invisible. For other poems we have posted by Mark Strand, along with notes on them, click here and here.

Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known, and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing.

from Almost Invisible. For other poems we have posted by Mark Strand, along with notes on them, click here and here.

Must listening: Schubert's Rosamunde Overture

Heard on the Street

Schubert’s string quartet number 13
in A minor
also known as the Rosamunde Quartet
rose two pointson the quartet exchange today,

which differs from most markets
inasmuch as each point occurs in fourths
like a song with two choruses,
a bridge and a final chorus,

or like a football game,
two halves, two quarters per half.
The andante movement itself gained
an extra point in after-hours trading.

-- David Lehman

The quartet is from 1824; the overture from 1823.

"Life there is sweet / happiness complete" [song by the Gershwins]

Who wrote "The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers"?

Who wrote "The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers" (and if you haven't read it, here's a link)?

a) Andrew Marvell
b) John Ashbery
c) Marvelous Marv Throneberry
d) Andrew Jackson
3) Percy Bysshe Shelley
e) The Merry Widow
f) Barbara Stanwyck

Follow the links for the right answer. Bonus: Someone on this list who did not write the poem in question wrote a poem with a very similar title! The first person to name the poet and give the correct title of the poem will be absolutely right. -- DL

first posted September 23, 2012

a) Andrew Marvell
b) John Ashbery
c) Marvelous Marv Throneberry
d) Andrew Jackson
3) Percy Bysshe Shelley
e) The Merry Widow
f) Barbara Stanwyck

Follow the links for the right answer. Bonus: Someone on this list who did not write the poem in question wrote a poem with a very similar title! The first person to name the poet and give the correct title of the poem will be absolutely right. -- DL

first posted September 23, 2012

Two Poems by Dante Di Stefano

Dante Di Stefano's "Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen" was chosen by Dana Gioia for The Best American Poetry 2018. "Exodus," the second poem here, is of the same vintage. -- DL

Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen

In those days, my dreams always changed titles
before they were finished and I wanted
only to love in that insane tortured way
of poor dear Dmitri Karamazov.
Suddenly, I was speaking the language
of lapdog and samovar. This is
the ballroom, the barracks, the firing squad.
This is the old monk with the beard of bees.
This is the orange lullaby the moon
[of the moon] will sing you when it’s grieving.
This is the province you escape by train,
fleeing heavy snow and eternal elk.
This is the part where I take your hand in
my hand and I tell you we are burning.

Exodus

             It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father.

                        —Cid Corman

My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life.  I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca cola can.  There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.  Like Moses stuttering to the stones and scrub brush, his dictates turned me into a desperate Aaron, bewildered, dutifully translating the fire raging in a reed thicket into the voice of God.  He slept for days on end, dreaming apple orchards. He believed the smell of college elevator steel was sacred.  Once he pronounced the stars memory-less pickpockets. He decried windows.  He expounded upon the intractability of silverware. I fought him twice and both times he had the strength of the archangel ascending into heaven, swooping down the mountain. Birds were not his emissaries. Canaan, he would have us all know, was a broken dinner plate and asparagus-spattered walls. From the edge of his hospital bed, I finally saw him unfolding in time and I could almost see him. Last night, as he nodded in his recliner, weak from the new medicine he’s taking, I knew no staff would split this rock.

from the archives; first posted December 18, 2020

Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen

In those days, my dreams always changed titles
before they were finished and I wanted
only to love in that insane tortured way
of poor dear Dmitri Karamazov.
Suddenly, I was speaking the language
of lapdog and samovar. This is
the ballroom, the barracks, the firing squad.
This is the old monk with the beard of bees.
This is the orange lullaby the moon
[of the moon] will sing you when it’s grieving.
This is the province you escape by train,
fleeing heavy snow and eternal elk.
This is the part where I take your hand in
my hand and I tell you we are burning.

Exodus

             It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father.

                        —Cid Corman

My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life.  I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca cola can.  There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.  Like Moses stuttering to the stones and scrub brush, his dictates turned me into a desperate Aaron, bewildered, dutifully translating the fire raging in a reed thicket into the voice of God.  He slept for days on end, dreaming apple orchards. He believed the smell of college elevator steel was sacred.  Once he pronounced the stars memory-less pickpockets. He decried windows.  He expounded upon the intractability of silverware. I fought him twice and both times he had the strength of the archangel ascending into heaven, swooping down the mountain. Birds were not his emissaries. Canaan, he would have us all know, was a broken dinner plate and asparagus-spattered walls. From the edge of his hospital bed, I finally saw him unfolding in time and I could almost see him. Last night, as he nodded in his recliner, weak from the new medicine he’s taking, I knew no staff would split this rock.

from the archives; first posted December 18, 2020

The Real Hero (Xanadu versus Khartoum)

(1) Who is the real hero of "Citizen Kane"?

a) Barry Kane
b) Marshall Will Kane
c) Charles Foster Kane
d) Xanadu
e) Captain Queeg

Name the three other relevant movie titles implied by the choices.

2) St. Patrick's Day special: When the hero played by Victor McLaglen (left) shouts "Frankie, your mother forgives me," he is referring to

a) Frankie Machine
b) Frankie 5 Angels
c) Frankie McPhillip
d) Fred Derry
e) General Frank Savage

Name the novel on which the movie is based.

3) Which of these characters does not figure in "Les Enfants du paradis"?

a) Garance
b) Baptiste
c) Pepe Le Moko
d) Jericho
3) Frederic Lemaitre

Who directed the movie?

4) Who says it? "I'm a businessman. Blood is a big expense."

a) Moe Green
b) Khartoum
c) Johnny Fontaine
d) Solozzo
e) Barzini

Did he also say, "You don't buy me out. I buy you out."

5) Which of these personages survives the bloody finale of "The Wild Bunch"?

a) Pike Bishop
b) Deke Thornton
c) Phyllis Dietrichson
d) Robert E. Lee Prewitt
e) Joel Cairo

True or false: "Pike Bishop" was Sam Peckinpah's sneaky way of predicting the disappearance of Bishop Pike in the summer of 1969.

a) Barry Kane
b) Marshall Will Kane
c) Charles Foster Kane
d) Xanadu
e) Captain Queeg

Name the three other relevant movie titles implied by the choices.

2) St. Patrick's Day special: When the hero played by Victor McLaglen (left) shouts "Frankie, your mother forgives me," he is referring to

a) Frankie Machine
b) Frankie 5 Angels
c) Frankie McPhillip
d) Fred Derry
e) General Frank Savage

Name the novel on which the movie is based.

3) Which of these characters does not figure in "Les Enfants du paradis"?

a) Garance
b) Baptiste
c) Pepe Le Moko
d) Jericho
3) Frederic Lemaitre

Who directed the movie?

4) Who says it? "I'm a businessman. Blood is a big expense."

a) Moe Green
b) Khartoum
c) Johnny Fontaine
d) Solozzo
e) Barzini

Did he also say, "You don't buy me out. I buy you out."

5) Which of these personages survives the bloody finale of "The Wild Bunch"?

a) Pike Bishop
b) Deke Thornton
c) Phyllis Dietrichson
d) Robert E. Lee Prewitt
e) Joel Cairo

True or false: "Pike Bishop" was Sam Peckinpah's sneaky way of predicting the disappearance of Bishop Pike in the summer of 1969.

“This is just the beginning,” from today's Wall Street Journal

from "Universities Sprint From ‘We Will Not Cower’ to Appeasing Trump"

By Maggie Severns

Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2025

University leaders, pinned between liberal faculty and the Trump administration, are quietly trying to make friends in Washington amid widespread concerns about research budgets, student aid and the White House’s quest to push academia to the right.

During his election campaign, President Trump vowed “to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left,” and he has moved quickly to target diversity, equity and inclusion programs, alleged antisemitism and anything perceived as “woke.” He has threatened to pull funding from universities that don’t comply. 

*

On campus, many faculty and staff still embrace the things Trump is trying to change. Many higher-education institutions still have senior-level officials focused on diversity, equity and inclusion. One lobbyist recalled a video call with university clients who listed their pronouns under their names, a practice many who work with the federal government quickly abandoned after Trump’s November victory.

*

Columbia University, which came under scrutiny for its handling of pro-Palestinian protests last year, gave in on Friday to a far-reaching list of Trump’s demands after he revoked $400 million in federal funding. Other schools closely watched the days of tense negotiations. Behind the scenes, Columbia officials have had a presence in D.C. in recent weeks, too, often asking lawmakers how to restore confidence in the university, according to people familiar with the meetings.

Critics say universities had this crackdown coming after failing to hold up their end of a longtime social contract. Faculty enjoy billions of dollars in government funding, tenure protections and academic autonomy, and detractors accuse them of indoctrinating young people with left-wing ideology rather than creating productive, patriotic citizens.

Lawmakers are expected to announce multiple hearings in the coming weeks on antisemitism. The move alarms universities still haunted by the combative 2023 hearing on the same subject, when the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dodged lawmaker questions and struggled to defend their institutions’ approach to campus protests following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Two of the three resigned within weeks.

Proposed tax and loan changes—such as raising and expanding a tax on college and university endowments that currently applies to only the wealthiest institutions—could also upend schools’ financial model. Yale Law School alumnus JD Vance has proposed increasing the tax on endowment income from its current 1.4% to 35%, and expanding the universities affected to include Columbia.

* 
Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis—which is known to have a friendly relationship with Missouri Republican Jason Smith, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee—is sponsoring ads in Politico newsletters linking to a joint statement that pledges to avoid “political ideology” or “a particular vision of social change.” 

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/universities-trump-lobbyists-funding-washington-a2e5c77a

painting upper left by Albert York ("Woman and Skeleton," 1967)

“The Nakedness of Woman”: The new "Next Line, Please" post -- new prompts and the best of last month's poems

“The Nakedness of Woman”

By David Lehman | March 21, 2025

Detail of The Soul Hovering Over the Body from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, 1796 (Wikimedia Commons)

By March 5, a day after our deadline, the NLP team had produced 122 responses to our February 21 post (“Muse Circe Reclaims Her Lucre”) and its five new prompts, based on five infernal axioms from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell.” The new poems surprised and delighted this reader, and the critical exchanges between poets matched an ineffable generosity of spirit with expert analyses.

The poem “Beginning with a Line by William Blake” by the possibly pseudonymous Greg Chaimtov (whose last name combines the Hebrew words for “to life” and “good”) impressed me with its daring use of rhyme. It begins by endorsing Blake’s line (“The nakedness of woman is the work of God”) and follows through, for the next seven lines, on the argument that instinctive desire defeats reason. But then, as if the rhymes drive the content of the poem, images of beauty (“a maple-red dawn, / the first flakes feathering fallen leaves”) ensue before giving way to an inevitable “but.” The poem boldly concludes by rejecting its own initial premise:

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
How else to explain the desire to worship desire?
To drop to your knees as if a power higher
than any you’ve known has fought
its way past the defenses Reason
built for you over those many years
you devoted to getting through one season
to the next without ending in tears
at fireflies kindling lawns, a maple-red dawn,
the first flakes feathering fallen leaves,
or a songbird nestled under the eaves?
But then, when you cannot rise and go on
as you had before, you wonder if, after all,
Blake, mad as he was, was simply wrong.

 

For the rest of the post, and the new prompts, click here.
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-nakedness-of-woman/

Eneida P. Alcalde: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________________

Poetic Justice

 

The poem that needs to be written

            is not white.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            does not speak English.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            does not walk the halls of academia.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            does not seek publication.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            does not need the moon or a prompt.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            bites its hungry tongue in the land of state media.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            throbs in locked boxes hidden from clerics.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            fingers a gun in the rubble of war.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            swallows itself over and over.

 

The poem that needs to be written

            will be killed by the time this is read.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, Eneida P. Alcalde is the author of The Wealth We Surrendered, forthcoming from Ethel. [“Poetic Justice” first appeared in Poet Lore (Summer/Fall 2024).]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

An ouroboros in a 1478 drawing, from 15th-century Greek scribe Theodoros Pelecanos's manuscript of an alchemical tract attributed to Synesius, a 5th-century Greek bishop.

Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette. . .

The Last Cigarette — Cinema’s most seductive prop — By David Lehman

Every cigarette is the last cigarette.

In the black-and-white world of noir, cigarettes are everywhere. But then, they are ubiquitous in all movies, as in life, in the first half of the 20th century. Among great smokers I think of FDR with his holder tilted rakishly upward, as if to reinforce his smile, and Ike, who smoked four packs of unfiltered smokes a day before and after D-Day in 1944. Gregory Peck smokes fiercely as he types up his exposé of anti-Semitism in Gentleman’s Agreement, as if to say that smoking is an aspect of the writer’s job, a sine qua non, and that an ashtray full of butts is evidence that a writer has done his work. When New York replaced Paris as the world’s art capital, the art critics fell into two rival camps: Pall Malls for Harold Rosenberg, Camels for Clement Greenberg. Audrey Hepburn smokes stylishly in Charade. Marlene Dietrich smoked brilliantly, sometimes with a cigarette holder and furs. Bette Davis is in the smoker’s hall of fame, and not solely because of the end of Now, Voyager, when Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes, one for her and one for him, sealing their intimacy, and Bette has her famous line about settling for the stars if you can’t have the moon.

She’s got a cigarette between her fingers in All About Eve when she says “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Chesterfield ads of the 1940s and ’50s featured Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, and Rita Hayworth. Camels were advocated by Teresa Wright, Alan Ladd, John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, and a neon sign in Times Square that blew out smoke.

Some of the great jingles of the 1960s advertised mediocre cigarettes. Winston “tastes good like [sic] a cigarette should” (which gets spoofed by the scary Chinese villain of the original Manchurian Candidate), L & M has got the filter that unlocks the flavor. You can take Salem out of the country, but. To a smoker, it’s a Kent. The most famous of all Marlboro commercials used Elmer Bernstein’s music from The Magnificent Seven, and Yul Brynner, who played the leader of the pack, was a dedicated smoker (and made a public service announcement after he learned he didn’t have long to live). Nat King Cole credited the quality of his singing voice to cigarettes. Leonard Bernstein couldn’t live without them.

Addictive? A hardened criminal would rat on his best friend for a cigarette, even a bad one (Lark, Parliament, Viceroy) if he needed it. Reason not the need. Hell, the guy in solitary would smoke the butts off the floor if he needed a smoke.]. Read the opening chapter of Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno. It is titled “The Last Cigarette” and narrates the hero’s efforts to give up cigarettes and the lengths the addict will go to satisfy his or her craving. In Dead Again (1991), Kenneth Branagh’s ode to the noirs of the 1940s, the intrepid reporter played by Andy Garcia smokes and smokes, and when we see him as an old man, decades in the future, he has a tracheotomy tube in his neck. What does he ask for—what does he crave—in return for sharing information with the detective played by Branagh? A cigarette.

There is the cigarette of combat: According to Roger Ebert, Out of the Past (1947) is “the greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time.” Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas wage war by cigarette proxy. “The trick, as demonstrated by [director] Jacques Tourneur and his cameraman, Nicholas Musuraca,” Ebert writes, “is to throw a lot of light into the empty space where the characters are going to exhale. When they do, they produce great white clouds of smoke, which express their moods, their personalities, and their energy levels. There were guns in Out of the Past, but the real hostility came when Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoked at each other.”

https://americandigest.org/long-read-of-the-day-the-last-cigarette-by-david-lehman/

Mystery in familiarity: Marion Zurbach’s “Les Héritiers-x” happens [By Tracy Danison]

A couple of months ago, a neighbor over the street with whom Karine, my partner, has only ever had a nodding acquaintance, decided to move to Berlin, to be with her younger son. The neighbor, a 60-something mother also of two other grown children, a pretty fair hobby painter and who speaks only French remarks, “Why not? I’ve never been to Berlin”.

Emptying her apartment, the neighbor put at least the last 30 years of her many self-portraits, as well as portraits of friends and family, in the street for trash pickup. Coming back from a movie, Karine saw the portraits, and brought them all into her house. She has festooned the living room and mezzanine with them.

Now, I often find myself contemplating these portraits. There seems such mysterious familiarity in people! Whether they are familiar because over the years of being in the neighborhood I’ve actually seen or experienced these particular faces and their attitudes, or because the different seemings depicted in the portraits hold a mirror to my own seemings, or because there are only really such a small number of human types in the world that everybody and their portraits everywhere eventually become familiar, I just don’t know.   

All this come to mind because Marion Zurbach’s Les Héritiers-x (“The Inheritors-x”), which I saw the other day as part of the selection of the Festival Artdanthé 2025, deals in mysterious familiarities, too. Only not in human interactions, seemings or types, but the mysteriousness of human movement.

 

“Les Héritiers-x” by Marion Zurbach in collaboration with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

Zurbach’s piece is based on Orchésographie, said to be the first known manual of dance and the first instance of choreographic notation, too. Orchésographie has a priest teaching a lawyer pretty much all the types of dance step current in the 16^th Century. The symbolic relationship of priest and lawyer is “Auctoritas docet legem”: God informs the laws that govern people. The different dance steps represent the different human characteristics. So, at the Renaissance, at least, dance is a general declaration on the mechanics of life: Authority informs the law which interprets it into the different choreographies that create the dance of life here-below.

Something like that.

Except under Marion Zurbach’s auctoritas and the fine interpretation herself and her collaborator-performers Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton, Orchésographie’s rather recondite premise becomes a lively improvisation of a continuous flow of dance – a happening – that seems to have more to do with the relation of movement to environment to light to space to sound to symbolism and what we believe and suppose.

Here’s how i Les Héritiers-x rolled out for me, which, since happening comes on and carries a body along so early on, is not necessarily how it rolled out for anybody else, choreographer included. It seems to me that discrete things happen through little cues: add a bit of sound or attitude or both or a prop, or a light, or a gesture or, since Zurbach doesn’t use her inputs to imperialize, there’s room for the spectator to share the piece’s sensibilities.

 

“Les Héritiers-x” by Marion Zurbach in collaboration with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton. Photo © Arnaud Bouvier

At the back of the stage, by a woman in the front row calling moves and marking time, two performers, both imaginatively, but not outlandishly, dressed in gaudy corselets and short pants, are brought forward. They move by numbers, OK – But numbers of what nature? Are they really under instruction from that woman? Is the simpering and flustering part of it? Is this a game or a reconstitution or some sort of effort to get at an essence by a performing ménage à trois?  – with – what I suppose are proper facial attitudes – handholding and steps – I believe – are prescribed – by the manual Orchésographie. And then after what comes before, there’s jigs and part-singing and all sorts of prancing that I can’t recall because I kept putting my pencil down to watch.

Don't get the idea that my stream of broken consciousness hints at confusion in the performance. Not at all. It just un-stuck or de-stuck me in time: it’s hard to express a rational break up of narrative linearity into a happening or a form of the process of perception. Les Héritiers-x rather declares that past and present are of a piece.

The long and short of it is that Les Héritiers-x is both a Marion Zurbach-inspired early 21^st century love and dance show and an honest reconstitution of a (pretty-much imagined) Renaissance when Auctoritas et Legem freely cooed and simpered. Zurbach, with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton, create a happening that both carries me and enables me to carry forward and backward, around and through, the “inheritance” of Orchésographie.

Les Héritiers-x is satisfyingly dizzying dance, capital D.

_______

I saw “Les Héritiers-x” by Marion Zurbach performed by and in collaboration with Évo Mine Lambillon and Pierre Piton as part of Festival Arthdanthé at Théâtre de Vanves on 7 March 2025, with sound composition by Stélios Lazarou, dance coaching, singing and musical arrangement by Madeleine Saur, writing assistance by Arthur Eskenazi and costumes by Silvia Romanelli.  

Kenneth Koch at 100: A Celebration [by Mindy Aloff]

Left to Right: Kenneth Koch, David Lehman, John Ashbery (photo © Stacey Lehman)

On St. Patrick’s Day, The New School and Library of America put on “Kenneth Koch at 100: A Celebration.” The program featured thirteen speakers, all but one of whom knew Koch—that playful and continuously surprising leprechaun of American poetry—rather well. Our fearless leader at this website, David Lehman, wasn’t able to be there; however, he was remembered in the welcoming remarks.

I never met KK, but I’d loved the poems of his I’d begun to read in the 1970s and remain enthralled by his two books on teaching children to write poetry, books that encouraged the founding of Poets in the Schools programs around the world. Like Arlene Croce (who quoted the following opening lines in one of her New Yorker columns) I also loved his poem to the New York City Ballet:

“Oh dancers of New York, arranged by Balanchine,

You are more beautiful than groves of evergreen!

You have aesthetic distance, like the blue-white sea

Outside the porthole--Agon or Symphony in C!”

In the event, I went to The New School to learn something about the poet, and I did learn about him from two sources: the speakers and the anthology of photos of him, which played continuously on a screen above the stage.

From the speakers:

-- He was as adept at improvisation as in formal writing, and his oeuvre includes many plays—embodying his high concept of “play” as a major principle of artmaking. Furthermore, as in his lamentation to Marina, he could be playfully sorrowful. He was funny (Tony Towle), but his idea of play went beyond the comic. It was a philosophical idea of how the universe worked.

-- "He was high avant-garde, yeah. It was unchecked modernism.” (Alex Katz, appearing by way of a video statement)

-- He was an avid tennis and ping-pong player. His papers are in the Berg Collection of The New York Public Library. (Jordan Davis)

-- Whatever the “New York School” of poetry was—spiritual institution grounded in Greenwich Village or a roving band of bards associated with The New School and Columbia plus a few smaller storefronts and bars--KK belonged to it. Some of his fellow travellers were Ron Padgett, Jane Freilicher, David Shapiro, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, Jim Dine (“We had the same rabbi, same temple, same summer camp”), Jim Jarmusch,  and, of course, Frank O’Hara. (Passim)

-- KK once, at a party, had a “pissing contest” with Leonard Bernstein about Shakespeare. (Jim Dine) He was “the Pied Piper of joy and pleasure, sensuality and fresh air,” and, during the ‘50s, he spent five days a week in psychoanalysis, which may or may not have have helped him to pipe it all. He was also a “charismatic teacher,” which is why Phillip Lopate refused to take KK’s popular courses at Columbia while, on his own, accruing neuroscientific detail concerning KK’s thoughts and motivations in the writing of prose fiction. (Phillip Lopate)

-- The legendary performer; editor of The Paris Review; agent; bittersweet muse to other legends; red-headed goddess of New York lit who still looks like a million; Maplewood, New Jersey native; and the only woman on the KK Celebration line-up, Maxine Groffsky, intersected with KK throughout many of her careers, including as a “real client” whom she represented--“15 %”—and whom she immortalized as the inventor of “Dog Baseball.” (Maxine Groffsky)

From the photos:

Has anyone ever taken so many pictures, in so many decades of life, that show the subject broadly smiling as KK took? He’s smiling next to John Ashbery and with Allen Ginsberg (who once declared that, next to KK’s fandom, he—the Bard of the Beats—had fallen into obscurity). He’s smiling while shaking the hand of the mayor: Koch on Koch. He’s grinning while being escorted (under arrest?) by an armed guard down stairs that look like some at Columbia. Yet one portrait photo, by Wren de Antonio (daughter of the documentarian Emile de Antonio and the third of his six wives), offered a unique glimpse of personal depth. From his Bob Dylan-hair style and leather jacket, it seems to have been taken in the ‘60s. KK is smiling, but not all the way, and his eyes look as if they come from another level of being, where tears are always going by. This was, by my lights, the handsomest photo of KK in the group—the one that offered up an individual I could believe wrote not only “Sleeping with Women” and “The Pleasures of Peace” but also both “Circus” poems (John Keane) and “Marina,” in which the poet, a quarter century after the fact, reflects on how he threw away his life with a lover in his helpless pursuit of what poets traditionally lust after: fame.

--Mindy Aloff

THE MOODY TEMPLE and A HUM-DRUM NOT KNOWING [by John Hennessy]

SIFNOS (c) IAN MACLELLAN

Psalm on Sifnos

By Stephen Yenser

One does not want,
O Lord, to heap
Up by still waters
Of words a cairn
But hopes to attend
A small covert
Of tamarisk
Whose leaves salty
Yet feathery
Will shed light over
A thickened plot.

One wants at last
To cede the field
To tamarisk
And mastic tree,
To olive and stone,
Stones in the fruit,
Seed in the stones.

    Like this poem by Stephen Yenser, a straight-razor-witted fellow Hellenophile I got to know on a visit here several years ago, the island is deceptive in its apparent simplicity. From the ferry, Sifnos looks denuded, its smooth volcanic peaks all sun firing across a yellow skull. Disembark, though, and you begin to see that flora here is cunning, vines shifting along every available crack in stone, tamarisks lining the beach, olive trees low and orderly up on the terraces digging their roots deep.

    The people living here are pretty clever too; over the last five thousand years they’ve developed an architecture and agriculture to survive in style. Their houses are all clean lines and square angles, a series of unfolding cubes, thick-walled to be cool in summer, warm in winter, and painted uniformly white, shutters a limited variety of blue, green, brown, and pink. The blue and white domes of churches—one for every day of the year, one for every sixth Sifnian—speckle each inhabited hillside. Shrubs, vines, and fruit trees surround the buildings: lemons, limes, oranges, figs, pomegranates, mimosas, almonds, cascading bougainvillea, shady grape arbors, banks of flowering capers and night-blooming jasmine, enormous geraniums, and on and on. Beyond the limits of each town there are farmers’ fields, orchards, and pastures, chickens pecking, goats grazing, the odd cow, pig, or sheep poking, donkeys, horses and mules performing their tasks or stalling in attitudes of sublime passive aggression.

    And of course there is the sea. Visible from virtually every inch of this island. It’s kind of blue.

    Our arrival on Sifnos was a happy accident. In the summer of 2000, we found ourselves between apartments—Sabina Murray, Nicholas, our first child, two years old at the time, and I. In September we were to move into free housing on the campus of Phillips Academy, Andover, where Sabina would serve as writer-in-residence for three years, but until then we had nowhere to go. We looked into summer sublets and seasonal rentals in Boston, Maine, southern New Hampshire, the Jersey Shore, all places near friends or family, but found nothing we could afford. It was actually cheaper, in the last years of the drachma, to go to Greece for a couple of months, than to stay in any of those local places. We moved around the Aegean that summer, but Sifnos was our favorite spot and we continue to return there when we can.

SIFNOS (c) IAN MACLELLAN

    Our apartment on Sifnos abuts the grounds of the chapel of Panagia Ouranofora, once a temple to Apollo, the god from whom our town, Apollonia, the island’s capital, takes its name. Lengths of marble column and fragments from the walls of the temple have been integrated into the more modestly designed church, and ancient marble blocks still provide a few of the long steps up from the steno, the path that cuts between a block of terraced white Cycladic houses and Mamma Mia, the popular Italian restaurant next door.

    I feel deeply moved by this site; I’m at home here.

    But why?

My wife likes to call New Jersey the old country. Peterstown, Elizabeth, Price Street and Seminary Ave. in Rahway—that’s it for you, she says. The old country.

    She’s more than half serious. I grew up there with my mother’s family from Sicily. Cusumanos, Catalanos, Frangiamores and Federicos. As it is with other émigrés, my old country, my New Jersey, is gone, colonized by time and change, made unrecognizable by a tyrant present. I wasn’t around to see it happen. To observe without noticing. I go back as often as I can, but I’m a shade there, almost as out of place as I am in Sicily, even though I visit family in both places. Before Elizabeth and Rahway, we’re from Agrigento, Akragas, an ancient Greek colony. According to my grandfather, our family house of worship began as an altar for Phoenician traders, sailors from the Eastern Mediterranean, some of the earliest visitors to the island. Later the Greeks raised a temple around that altar, offered their own sacrifices there. The temple was rededicated by the Romans when they colonized us, consecrated as a church after Constantine Christianized the empire, converted to a mosque in the time of Arab rule, and re-transmogrified into a Roman Catholic church under the Normans. Even if it is in the old old country, I pass many days feeling very much like that building.

***

    I prefer going to Greece because Sicily is fraught for me: I’m more of an outsider there even though I look like everyone in town. In Greece I’m an outsider, sure, but a kind of distant cousin. There’s a certain level of acceptance, even welcome, offered to me, attended by very low expectations. You’re here? Great, just don’t get in the way and we’ll all do fine.

    The same courtesy extends to my family. Sabina, who is half Filipina (Tagalog, Spanish, Chinese) and half Irish, is a chameleon: she looks Asian in Asia, South American in South America, Mediterranean here. Our sons also have friends of their own in Greece. Although our command of the language is limited to the most basic transactions, that seems to satisfy us. Until we open our mouths, we even pass for Greek.

    I don’t mind not understanding what people are saying. It reminds me of childhood—and I don’t just mean the English words and constructions that flew over my head. Between my family and neighbors there was always some unintelligible language being spoken: various Southern Italian dialects, Spanish from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the DR, Armenian, Yiddish, German, Ukrainian, and whatever the hell my buddy Paul’s grandfather McCarthy from Cork was firing from the side of his mouth. It was just a given that you couldn’t understand everything being said in your presence—even if you were the one being addressed. You moved from Dennis Rivera’s apartment to the Keossians’ to the Smiths’, you ate the food, played the games, took the physical and multilingual abuse from the older siblings, and you tried to keep your head down, avoid attention. There was nothing profound about this—it was the Negative Capability of the quotidian. A humdrum not-knowing.

(For a brief discussion of the Greek economy and links to articles on the Greek political situation, please see yesterday’s post.)

From the archive; first posted July 23, 2012.

The Poet, Amy Woolard (by Nin Andrews)

Every now and then, I come across a poet who makes my jaw drop, my heart skip a beat--my mind, too. A poet who surprises me line after line, poem after poem. They are like magicians who really do pull rabbits out of hats or make coins disappear or saw people in half. No matter how hard I try, I can't figure out how they do it. Amy Woolard is that kind of poet. Her debut book, Neck of the Woods, is a must-read, and I can't wait for her next collection. A former waitress and an accomplished Civil Rights lawyer, she probably doesn't have as much time to write as I would like her to. I find myself looking for her poems online whenever I need a hit of inspiration, a dose of awe, or that feeling, Oh wow, so that's what a poem can do. 

 

Delivery

 

Paper pusher, I’ll tell you what it feels like
To spend the exact cash you make the same

Night you make it. That sky velveted as
An empty ring box. Disintegration coming out

Of the speakers again. Neck-deep in the quarry swimming
Hole. This thing between us like snapping a bar of cold

Chocolate. I like wading into my weakness &
Treading there like the final girl. This life no

Bigger than a drugstore makeup aisle, than waking
Only to learn of the late-night car accident. Who said

To stitch shut is to mend. Each morning the dogs kept
Us alive, even when we hadn’t planned it. The room slow

Spun the way the water had moved around us, & the bare
Light on the water, those apparitions—our love’s

Strategy, a deer tendering into the kitchen through
A back door left open, through the rooms where we

Undressed. Bring me to myself & sew the horizon
Into place. Out of the winedark that sun we like

Was coming back into style. What we borrowed
We know we cannot return. I held your jaw

Like a piece of fruit. Your hand rested on the warm
Animal between us, running in its sleep.

Published in The New York Review

Late Shift 

Those days I could only love someone who was ashamed
Of their teeth. The way the dogs will always sleep in the spots

They know I’ll need to step. The things we do so not to lose
Each other. So as to lose something every day. Church key,

Bar rag, the obscene puckered red of maraschino, the wrecked
Line cook in the walk-in. His chilled kiss. How it tastes like a future

Eviction. Thieves in the temple of our bodies. Years later I will
Still feel most at home when I eat standing up. When I settle up

In cash. When I barter for your attention. Fingernail of heat
Lightning tapping the tabled sky. A broken pint glass

In the ice bin. Every shift Sinéad sings This is the last day
Of our acquaintance. There are nights I give up on the world

But not my body. How in the Bruegel, if you didn’t know
The title you might not look for Icarus at all, a paper lantern

Giving its wish back to ground long after we’ve left. Push
A fork into a fish & what you get is a meal. Push a knife into

A knuckle & what you get is to be changed. Like Icarus, what I want
Is to start over but not do it all again. Like Icarus, I wanted the light

To love me back. How in my lungs still nests the fur of every animal I
Ever kept. Years later the gods will have me cough up a snow leopard.

I thought the main selling point of breathing was we didn’t have to
Be reminded to do it. I never wanted children but I always liked the one

About Athena pouring full-grown from Zeus’ forehead. How did we survive
Before Advil, love. Before the armor of us glinting in the closed kitchen

Dark. The way a creaky floorboard’s one job is to wait. Service means
The spoon appears before you know you need it. The water looks

To refill itself. The napkin calls a truce. When something is soft we believe
We deserve to touch it & so we do. When something is sharp we long to

Perfect it. Nothing belongs to us until last call: one more &
Then no more. The lights go on & it’s time to cough up

What’s owed. Build a cathedral in the dead of night & then give it
A shift meal, a smoking section, a cover charge, a swinging door, a till

To reckon. Those days we didn’t have a prayer, separated our love
From each other like cupping a yolk between the cracked half

Shells back & again until it’s perfect. Forgive ourselves. Give
Ourselves the tenderest title & call it a day. How could we ever

How could we not. Baby, draw the spoked sun in the corner
Of our afternoon sky. Wake us in its slow-cooked gaze.

 

Published online and in the print edition of the March 18, 2024, issue of The New Yorker

"Sex with a Famous Poet" [by Denise Duhamel]

Sex with a Famous Poet

 

I had sex with a famous poet last night

and when I rolled over and found myself beside him I shuddered

because I was married to someone else,

because I wasn't supposed to have been drinking,

because I was in fancy hotel room

I didn't recognize. I would have told you

right off this was a dream, but recently

a friend told me, write about a dream,

lose a reader and I didn't want to lose you

right away. I wanted you to hear

that I didn't even like the poet in the dream, that he has

four kids, the youngest one my age, and I find him

rather unattractive, that I only met him once,

that is, in real life, and that was in a large group

in which I barely spoke up. He disgusted me

with his disparaging remarks about women.

He even used the word "Jap"

which I took as a direct insult to my husband who's Asian.

When we were first dating, I told him

"You were talking in your sleep last night

and I listened, just to make sure you didn't

call out anyone else's name." My future-husband said

that he couldn't be held responsible for his subconscious,

which worried me, which made me think his dreams

were full of blond vixens in rabbit-fur bikinis.

but he said no, he dreamt mostly about boulders

and the ocean and volcanoes, dangerous weather

he witnessed but could do nothing to stop.

And I said, "I dream only of you,"

which was romantic and silly and untrue.

But I never thought I'd dream of another man--

my husband and I hadn't even had a fight,

my head tucked sweetly in his armpit, my arm

around his belly, which lifted up and down

all night, gently like water in a lake.

If I passed that famous poet on the street,

he would walk by, famous in his sunglasses

and blazer with the suede patches at the elbows,

without so much as a glance in my direction.

I know you're probably curious about who the poet is,

so I should tell you the clues I've left aren't

accurate, that I've disguised his identity,

that you shouldn't guess I bet it's him...

because you'll never guess correctly

and even if you do, I won't tell you that you have.

I wouldn't want to embarrass a stranger

who is, after all, probably a nice person,

who was probably just having a bad day when I met him,

who is probably growing a little tired of his fame--

which my husband and I perceive as enormous,

but how much fame can an American poet

really have, let's say, compared to a rock star

or film director of equal talent? Not that much,

and the famous poet knows it, knows that he's not

truly given his due. Knows that many

of these young poets tugging on his sleeve

are only pretending to have read all his books.

But he smiles anyway, tries to be helpful.

I mean, this poet has to have some redeeming qualities, right?

For instance, he writes a mean iambic.

Otherwise, what was I doing in his arms.

From The Star-Spangled Banner, Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.