The Best American Poetry

What makes an American “classic”?' [by Caterina Domeneghini and Claire Barnes]

A special issue of NEW AMERICAN STUDIES JOURNAL (© Göttingen University Press) devoted to a forum on the subject of "classics" and American literature includes

 

 

'What makes an American “classic”?' by Caterina Domeneghini and Claire Barnes, co-editors of the issue. <<< Abstract:  American “classics,” and “classic” definitions of America and its people, are often tied to an apparently inescapable, ineffable sense of greatness. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN has resurfaced as the mantra of 2025, with the newly elected President’s promise to restore a broken nation, elevating it above time, and in defiance of his own criminal record, even above the law. The slogan echoes some of the tones, if not the politics, of the preface of Leaves of Grass (1855), when Walt Whitman wrote, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem…>>>

 

<<< There is opportunity here, we feel, to approach the “classics” (with a large or a small “c”) with curiosity, with critique, and without a necessary impetus to valorize tellings of them which have been shaped by institutional pressures along the way. Can we acknowledge the influence of a piece of work without pushing it into the categorization of objective timelessness? Can we explore its impact using a more nuanced set of critical tools? Can we make the American Classic—and the conception of America itself—strange again? >>>

 

 

Constanze Güthenke’s essay ponders “what makes an American classicist?” by looking back to the nineteenth century and how the profession of classical scholarship developed in North American institutions. She considers the external influences apparent on the self-conscious self-fashioning of the discipline from the legacy of German Philhellenism to post-Civil War narratives of progress and decline. Constanze Güthenke is Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Oxford. 

 

Caterina Domeneghini, cp-editor of the issue, discusses the impact of today’s publishing culture with Edwin Frank, founder and editorial director of the New York Review of Books Classics. Frank comments on the rationale behind the series, the possibility of offering classic texts without canonizing, and attitudes to translation in America. Born in Boulder, Colorado, Edwin Frank is the founder and editorial director of NYRB Classics. He studied at Harvard College and Columbia University before venturing into publishing.Click here. for the interview.

 

Constance Everett-Pite, a doctoral candidate in Classics at the University of Oxford, then invites us to consider how the categories of “American” and “classic” are explored in the work of Amy Clampitt (1948–1994), setting the scene before interviewing poet and writer Willard Spiegelman about his 2023 book, Amy Clampitt: A Biography. As we read in the conversation, Clampitt poses “an important political/ecological question with heightened relevance in our current century: What is the meaning of ‘indigenous’? Who and what belongs where? Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English, Emeritus, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas Texas, and the longtime former editor-in-chief of the Southwest Review. 

 

Our Poetry section comprises three poems by poet and critic David Lehman, founder and series editor of The Best American Poetry. “Frost at Midnight,” “Negative Capability,” and “Bloomsday” all differently address canonical literary figures, with Lehman’s trademark playfulness.

 

https://nasjournal.org/NASJ

Great photo from Vivienne Maier [chosen by the late Robert Harbison]

Two Sonnets [Mitch Sisskind's Latest from "The Bonus Round"]

 

Kant Means Can’t

Kenneth Koch said that if something isn't
Working in a poem then do it more, like
If the word subtrahend isn't working
Then keep using the word subtrahend
And naturally the word minuend will
Appear which can be a beautiful thing.
But should that principle also be used
In other areas of life, like if you don't
Take a shower before a job interview
Should you never again take a shower?
Ha! Of course not because you can't
Impose Kant’s categorical imperative
On everyday issues of personal hygiene
So remember: Kant means can't! Ha!

Bullnose/Bernstein

Snifter is his favorite word but
How often in the course of a year
Does he hear snifter? Once? Twice?
It's much the same with nosegay,
Another word he loves. Or bullnose,
Except maybe four or five years ago
He heard a beautiful French woman
Say bullnose referring to the corner
Of a marble kitchen counter and now
Not a month passes without his thinking
Of Sylvie-Delphine, as Bernstein says
In Citizen Kane, except a month is far
Too long. Every week and every day
And every hour and every nanosecond!

Zoltan Farkas: The Baltimore Poems [Terence Winch]

 

ONCE LOST, BUT FOUND AGAIN

On February 22, 2018, I got an email from the poet Zoltan Farkas, someone I hadn’t heard from in more than 40 years. Here’s what he wrote:

        Dear Terry...

                              I've been remembering the wild days in DC in the 70's. 

        Thought I would try to re-establish contact.  Let me know if you get this email? 

        Now in my 80s, I've begun writing again... miraculous, when you think of it.

 

        Zoltan Farkas  (once lost, but found again)

        80 Mt. Desert Street, apt. 54

        Bar Harbor, Maine 04609

 

A few minutes later, I replied:

        Zoltan!  Welcome back. I often wondered what became of you.

        I also wonder what became of my copy of The Baltimore Poems, which I really dug.

        I'm glad you've started writing again. I still write, play music, etc. I have a 28-yr-old son

        named Michael who is a far better musician than I could ever be. And so forth.

        yrs,

        Terence

I never heard another word from him, and I’m sorry to say that I never followed up beyond my initial response to his email.

 

THE BALTIMORE POEMS

A few weeks ago, my friend and fellow poet David Beaudouin paid me a visit, and I asked him if he had ever heard of Zoltan and his chapbook, David being a Baltimore native and an authority on his beloved city. He said, no, he hadn’t. I immediately went to my computer and searched for Zoltan’s book, while David did the same thing on his phone. I got there first, ordering what seems to have been the last available copy of The Baltimore Poems, $10 from an Amazon seller. 

It arrived in the mail a week or so later. It’s a beautiful little work, published in 1967 by Goliard Press in the U.K.  Anselm Hollo (1934--2013) brought the book to the attention of the press’s founder, my old friend Tom Raworth (1938--2017), the acclaimed avant-garde poet. [below, left: Tom Raworth, photo by Allen Ginsberg; right: Anselm Hollo, 10 June 1965] 

Here’s a sample from the book:

        10. Sonnet

        Making the lonely passages.    Lips

        stitched shut.   A hollow ocean.

        Destroyer.   Stretches past

        meat and bone.    Fire

        in the poem does not consume

        anything but paper.   The shores

        night shores vanish into it

        like something wished for.   Real fire

        burns, water chokes a waning man.

        But I've been thankful for the rain

        to cool my face and help me home.

His work is taut and mysterious, his use of language seeming to anticipate in some ways the work of the Language School, which became a significant force in the literary world in the 1970s and later.

            From no. 8:

        You can imagine a cliff

        somewhere in every poem, opens

        down. Pronouns confuse

        everything.

I made a PDF of the book and asked my friend Charles Bernstein, the great poet/scholar, if he could add it to the EPC Digital Library, which he kindly did. So, after almost 60 years, the BAP blog is making The Baltimore Poems available again—just click right here. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ONCE FOUND, BUT LOST AGAIN

A week or two ago, I went back to the 2018 email exchange and sent Zoltan a message inquiring after his well-being, but he has not replied. I assume that if he was in his 80s in 2018, he is somewhere around 90 now, if he is still alive. 

That’s what I haven’t been able to determine. In fact, after searching extensively online, I have not been able to find either a photo, a short bio, an obituary, or anything about him except for scattered references to the 1967 chapbook and a single mention of him in a poem of mine called “Three Addresses.” Otherwise, he seems to have left no footprint whatsoever over the past 50 years. Using the Maine address he provided in the 2018 email, I stumbled on what looked like a possible phone number for him, but when I called, a voice declared it was disconnected. Online, you will come upon several other Zoltan Farkases, but not the Zoltan I once knew.

With the help of Google Maps I drilled down a bit more. The address in Bar Harbor, Maine, that Zoltan included in his 2018 email turns out to be part of a low-income senior living housing site called the Malvern-Belmont Estates. I tried several phone numbers associated with this place, but with no luck. I found a contact form on one website that seemed connected to the umbrella organization in charge of Malvern-Belmont, and I tried to send an email inquiring about Zoltan, but when I hit "submit," a message in red repeatedly appears announcing "Cannot access Server."

I then called the Mount Desert Islander, the local newspaper, leaving a message on their voicemail and also sending an email requesting any information they might have. A staffer at the paper emailed me back the next day with this: “Thank you for your email and voicemail. After taking a look through our archives, I only come up with one hit, and that is where Zoltan Farkas was listed in the obituary of Sharon Riley in the Mount Desert Islander in the January 23, 2020 edition.”  So it seems Zoltan was still alive in 2020. I tried finding out more about Sharon Riley, thinking that maybe one of her connections might know something, but I struck out there as well.

I then searched for evidence of Zoltan in Tom Raworth’s and Anselm Hollo’s archives, both of which did include something from Zoltan, but this material is not digitized. I will try eventually to contact those institutions to see if they can supply the Farkas material.

 

A SURPRISING LETTER FROM 1976

Then it dawned on me that I should search my own archive at Boston College, and sure enough, there was something from Zoltan in there. I asked BC’s Christian Dupont if they could scan whatever it was I included from Zoltan, which I had no memory or copy of, and they graciously did. 

I was kind of shocked at what I got back from them—a warm, appreciative, neatly typed letter concerning a reading I apparently arranged in early 1976:

My shock derives from how personal and intimate Zoltan’s tone is, to the point of his even signing off with “you have my love.” I don’t remember being close with him at all. We were next-door neighbors in my apartment building in D.C. for a while, but I don’t recall ever hanging out with him. In his 2018 email he mentions “the wild days in DC in the 70’s.”  Yes, indeed: there were many wild days back then but I can’t picture any in my mind with me and him in the same frame. I also didn’t remember the reading he discusses, but I quickly figured that the “Simon” he mentions had to be Simon Schuchat, a very young poet back then, but already impressively accomplished. And the excellent sound had to be the contribution of my brother Jesse, who was the master of our band’s (The Fast Flying Vestibule) audio equipment in that era.   

After roaming the globe for many decades, Simon is back living in D.C.  I emailed him to ask if he remembered this reading from a half century ago. He replied, “I remember the name & I know of a flyer announcing a reading he & I gave at Folio in 1976 or so, but that is the sum total of my recollections.”  The Folio readings, a legendary series invented and run by my late dear friend Doug Lang, took place at the Folio Bookstore in D.C.’s Dupont Circle. In some ways, Doug’s series was inspired by a similar one started earlier by my best friend Michael Lally at the Pyramid Gallery, just down the block from Folio.

Then I wondered if my own journal, like my archive, might yield some clues. I’ve kept a journal very erratically over the course of my life, so it’s always an uncertain source of information. I wasn’t optimistic. 

My 1976 journal contains only contains only 10 or so pages of writing, but right there at the start I found this: “I’m running a reading at the Pyramid Friday night—Zoltan Farkas & Simon Schuchat. It should be good.” And that’s it. No later report on the reading itself.   When Michael Lally left D.C. for New York in 1975, much to my dismay, I dimly remember taking over the Pyramid Gallery reading series, though what else I presented besides the Farkas-Schuchat reading is lost to me at this stage. But at least this brief entry offers another little crumb of information.

AI STRIKES OUT TOO

Finally, I thought maybe AI could do a better job dredging up information from cyberspace. So I plugged the few bits of data I had into Bing’s CoPilot, and this is what came back:

I wasn't able to locate any definitive online bio, photo, or detailed information for a poet named Zoltan Farkas born in the mid‑1930s who was still alive as of 2018. The search results returned several individuals with that name—from an academic profile at Georgia Southern University (which clearly refers to someone born much earlier and who passed away in 2002) to a musician associated with the Hungarian metal band Ektomorf 2. None of these profiles match the description of a poet fitting your criteria. It’s quite possible that if a poet by that name exists, his work hasn’t received a broad digital footprint in mainstream English‑language sources.

…MIRACULOUS, WHEN YOU THINK OF IT

One of my special interests in writing for the BAP blog has been to bring back to public attention the work and lives of poets I have known or am familiar with but who have slipped from view, among them Lee Lally, Diane Burns, and Jamie MacInnis. These poets published very little in their lifetimes, but their work is unique and valuable.  Zoltan Farkas is the most elusive of them all. I am very glad to have re-discovered his sole chapbook and the letter he wrote me in 1976. My hope is that this post will help bring forth more information on him and his writing. That would be a small miracle.

June Events 2025: diverse singularity in cultural continuity [By Tracy Danison]

“Electrotap", music to look at, dance to listen to by Candice Martel. Photo © Marc Plantec

What can dance do? It’s hard to say. But as, even in his precociously Victorian stiffness, Mr. Darcy knew dancing or dance performance is a universal art. As far as I know or Darcy knew, it may be the only one. Every brute dances, no need of the higher physics for it.

In that most famous book on looking for love, Darcy also learns that he has to learn people before he may love a person. A body has to learn dance, too, to appreciate dancing: exercise patience, take risks.

Indeed, I’ve taken an interest in dance over the years because it helps me understand people. So I think of the June Events dance festival, which opens this coming Monday, 2 June, as a sort of summer trimester in my annual continuing education program. This year, themes include “diversity, inclusion and living with the natural world (rapport au vivant)”.

As a culture professional, Anne Sauvage, director of the Atelier and responsible for the June Events program, told me she makes her choices within a framework of public entertainment, addressing public concerns and enabling access to culture for creators, learners and spectators alike. Especially, she says, she looks for “singularity”, specialness, not necessarily originality, asking herself what’s new and emerging in performance themes, as well as in dance esthetics. She cites Linda Hayford’s Processing #10 and Candice Martel’s Electrotap, musique à regarder vs. danse à écouter(“Music to watch vs. dance to listen to”) – without neglecting the long-term development of such performance artists, choreographers and creators as Marie Caroline Hominal, working out of Switzerland, and a consistently appreciated figure on the Paris dance performance scene.

Portrait of Linda Hayford, author of “Processing # 10”. Photo © Le Kabuki

Linda Hayford’s Processing #10, both a dance style (“Shifting Pop”) and a thematic framework (around identity) and clearly inspired by hip hop and the club scene, opens the festival. Hayford will be working a duo with the innovative artist Rebecca Journo, an innovative performance choreographer (see: How is Rebecca Journo’s “Portrait” like the proverbial hedgehog? It does tricks that count) and an Atelier associate for 2025 and 2026.

Hayford’s “Shifting Pop” style uses a radicalized break-dance movement called “popping” – sudden contractions and releases of muscles –  in a “battle” format (short, intense show performances that permit an audience to compare and appreciate a performer’s work). Performers “process” through different club dance styles, including funk, hype, locking or new style, self-exploring and enabling spectators to explore body movement.

Hayford’s aim, if I understand it, is to enable spectators to descry the underlying “fluidness” – a sort of wave entanglement or phlogiston – that informs what we think of as dance. The “processing/fluidness” idea also frames the artist’s meditation on identity.

“Numéro 0 / scène III”, performance by Marie Caroline Hominal. Photo © Gregory-Batardon

Hayford’s Processing # 10 is accompanied the same evening by Marie Caroline Hominal’s Numéro 0 / scène III, her first multi-performer piece – 10 dancers, three musicians. It seems to me that there’s always something of lurking irony and cognitive dissonance in Hominal’s work. When I saw her for the first time more than 10 years ago, she was solo and working on un-movement (I think I wrote light-heartedly about her performance as a sort of a case study for anti-elite culture warriors), so Numéro 0 will be for me and for many other spectators a whole new experience of her always well-thought through work.

Hayford on Hominal will make for a diverse singular evening.

Candice Martel’s Electrotap, a solo of “dance and body percussion”, i.e., tap dance 2025-style, on 12 June at Carreau du Temple, will mark the festival’s mid-point. Martel, who describes herself as a hybrid artist, notes that tap dance involves at least 300 hundred years of cultural braiding. In that spirit, by twisting around and under layers of electronica, splashing with dub and hurrying along with groove, her choreography is made to remind spectators that tap dance is dance and drumming, glide and percussion, rhythm as well as beat. She’s using work by Mikaël Charry of the Anakronic Electro Orkestra, leader of the (surely exploding) electro- klezmer scene, and the guitar of composer and producer Thomas Naïm to put pulsing muscle and blood into her Electrotap performance.

Workshops on tap dance led by the artist as well as public discussion complement the performances.

______

Other artists featured at June Events 2025

Click on the name to find out more about their June Events performance. Habib Ben Tanfous, Julie Botet, Jeanne Brouaye, Puma Camillê, Gilles Clément et Christian Ubl, Victoria Côté Péléja, Rosalind Crisp, Florencia Demestri et Samuel Lefeuvre, Simon Feltz, Geisha Fontaine et Pierre Cottreau, Cassiel Gaube, Yan Giraldou et Amélie Malleroni, Rémy Héritier, Mohamed Issaoui, Wanjiru Kamuyu, Daniel Larrieu, Joanne Leighton, Ikue Nakagawa, Alban Ovanessian, Dilo Paulo, Pierre Pontvianne, Manuel Roque, Nina Santes, Liz Santoro, Pierre Godard, Jéssica Teixeira, Vânia Vaneau, Louise Vanneste

 

Flaubert's Maxims

“[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” -- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary  

<< This should be the rule of conduct for an artist: that one's existence should be in two parts: you should live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-god.  >> Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet

The Argument [by Aaron Belz]

The Argument

I came at you like an off-duty sanitation worker.
“Where the hell is that stack of prescriptions I left on the counter?”
You replied not unlike a colloquium of professors
hedging their bets. “It’s in the hedge, I bet.”
I said, “You threw it out the window?” like a monk
staring at a half glass of warm water. “Not really,”
you effused, suffusing the room with aromatic post-lunch
exhalations. “They blew out when I ope’d the winder.”
I said, “You speak like that now?” You twisted up your face
like a tailor clutching the hem of a skirt while
holding back a fart. “I am just busy,” you explained,
the way my mom used to explain things. I replied,
“I’ll go look in the garden,” and began to trudge toward
the door, the way people trudge toward doors
when they’re on a mission to find their prescriptions.
“Good luck” you called after me, but I had already left,
was out of earshot, was out of patience, out of lists
of things to be out of, even. “Best wishes,” you shouted.
“Arrivederci,” I whispered, but I didn’t mean it.

from Nimrod

The New York School Diaspora: New Series [Part One] James Haug [by Angela Ball]

from Cloud Diaries

 

Each hour looked like something else. And, looking up, no one agreed on what that was, that it was fast and beautiful, or just loitered there like a rain cloud that had lumbered in from the west. Some thought of a memoir, a history, a memoir of history—life below the nimbuses. And the clouds, looking down, kept diaries too. Yet the entries bore little relation to one another—; and were they even entries, but extracts instead, so that the whole context was out of context, seriously adrift. Such a quandary, with its hairlike threads of ice, dissolved soon enough in the midday sun.

*

The town limped around town. It favored life in the old stores, and now the old stores were gone. After a while, the town began visiting other towns, running errands, little day trips, a long weekend, a ferry before sunup. It left a toothbrush and a shaving kit and a change of clothes in a bag behind the door and acquired a spare key. The town wrote it was dividing time between here and there. No one knew how it was that it made money, but it spent big-time on the road. It was spotted dolled-up cavorting in mixed company. Early one morning, a miraculous bounce to its step, the town lit out for a pack of cigarettes—: last seen upstate somewhere, mapping the interior of a cloud, specifically lenticularis, a disc-like formation often mistaken for a flying saucer.

-James Haug

 

James Haug’s most recent collections are Riverain (Oberlin College Press), Three Poems (Factory Hollow Press), and My Team Hates Friday (Press Brake). He publishes Scram Press in Northampton, Massachusetts, and drives a van for Riverside Industries.

James Haug’s immersive series of poems, “Cloud Diaries,” written in justified prose, is distinctly uncloudlike.  It stands to reason that clouds who write must steady their words. The two diaries I showcase here appear at different points in the series, the first one before the second.

At some point I believed that clouds came from outer space. This is highly untrue. The internet tells us that “Even though a cloud weighs tons, it doesn't fall on you because the rising air responsible for its formation keeps the cloud floating.” As part of our biosphere, these bodies (that might be called water-vapor boulders) come from and return to the surface and water table of land.  But while they are clouds they have a sweeping view of events: “Each hour looked like something else. And, looking up, no one agreed on what that was, that it was fast and beautiful, or just loitered there like a rain cloud that had lumbered in from the west.”  How surprising, how lovely, that “lumbered in,” vaguely reminding us of cloud elephants we may have known. If “each hour” looks like “something else,” and the same scene can be described as both “fast and beautiful” (a quasi-oxymoron) and ponderous, there’s no continuity. Only a constant vanishing, exact and ravishing: “Such a quandary, with its hairlike threads of ice, dissolved soon enough in the midday.”

Those viewing the clouds from underneath display diaristic impulses: “Some thought of a memoir, a history, a memoir of history—life below the nimbuses.”

Surely a memoir is distinct from a history—genres have their own houses, their own rules.  But do they, if they live “below the nimbuses”? What a wonderful title that would make for someone craven enough to steal from a cloud.

And the clouds, looking down, kept diaries too. Yet the entries bore little relation to one another—; and were they even entries, but extracts instead, so that the whole context was out of context, seriously adrift.

The above has captured the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. It is, after all, water in spirit form. The clouds’ own memories aren’t immune to the dissolution they enact and describe. Do the words from their diaries cohere, are they really “entries”?  Or merely “extracts”—squeezed-out essences?  It is often said that without cultural consensus, we inhabit what George W. S. Trow has called "the context of no-context."

It occurs to me that this early “diary” might be the poet’s introduction—in which case, obviously, its author is what Mayakovsky called himself: “a cloud in trousers.” Be that as it may, this particular cloud has captured the zeitgeist, the spirt of the times. It is, after all, water as spirit, spirit as water.

*

Our second cloud embodies a town with the kind of playful audacity we expect from, say, Kenneth Koch, whose interest in personification may have stemmed from Shelly’s apostrophes to natural forces and who often, in the spirit of a magically continuous childhood, presents objects as though they were alive, as in “One train may hide another.” There’s a difference, though. In Koch, objects do things. In Haug, they not only do, but commit their doings to writing. Perhaps there’s a bigger affinity with Frank O’Hara, whose sun (on loan from Mayakovsky) communicates via speech in “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.”

But only here have I seen such agency exhibited by an abstract collective. It seems awkward if not downright impossible. But Haug, obviously an expert at this kind of thing, simply muscles through. As one must, without listening to fussy inner objections about things not being able to turn themselves inside out:

The town limped around town. It favored life in the old stores, and now the old stores were gone. After a while, the town began visiting other towns, running errands, little day trips, a long weekend, a ferry before sunup. It left a toothbrush and a shaving kit and a change of clothes in a bag behind the door and acquired a spare key.

“The town wrote it was dividing its time between here and there” is a lovely parody of a mildly pretentious expression. Haug is a true literalist of the imagination. In other words, once the town has acquired human agency, there’s no limit to where or how it may live—a fact that astonishes onlookers—us and everyone.

The onlookers’ reaction--“No one knew how it was that it made money, but it spent big-time on the road. It was spotted dolled-up cavorting in mixed company”—exhibits enjoyment of insinuation (“no one knew how it was”), exaggeration (“but it spent big-time”), and sexual innuendo (“cavorting in mixed company”)—in other words, it has the panache of real gossip: no hard facts allowed.

The poem applies the familiar jargon of popular fiction to a situation that is anything but normal. Because denatured by context, these locutions zing with bright strangeness, like the unpromising photos in a Sebald novel. We might call this “cloud realism.” The town’s final departure from itself employs the classic trope of going out for cigarettes: “Early one morning, a miraculous bounce to its step, the town lit out for a pack of cigarettes—: last seen upstate somewhere, mapping the interior of a cloud, specifically lenticularis, a disc-like formation often mistaken for a flying saucer.”

What I’m calling realism, I think, actually resides not so much in familiar speech or situation as in vibrant detail: the toothbrush left “behind the door,” the “miraculous bounce,” and the stunning territory the town lights out for: the uncharted interior of a peculiar cloud, one shaped like a lens but “mistaken” for an alien spacecraft. The tone the poem leaves us with is scientific, rational, empirical—but this only throws its spectacular absurdity into higher relief. Our brief but sublime view of the phenomena that are James Haug’s clouds fittingly ends with an apparition of interplanetary travel—the cloud from outer space. -Angela Ball

Life in a State of Sparkle — The Writings of David Shapiro [by Michael Londra]

Life in a State of Sparkle — The Writings of David Shapiro
by Michael Londra
May 23, 2025

You Are The You: Writings and Interviews on Poetry, Art, and the New York School by David Shapiro. Edited by Kate Farrell, Foreword by David Lehman. MadHat Press, 332 pp, $23.95

While David Shapiro’s criticism is audacious, his interviews are self-deprecating and offbeat, filled with surprising reveals.

In On the Road, Jack Kerouac proclaimed that “the only people for me are the mad ones.” Nothing wrong with that; but I dig the sane smarties. Scroll YouTube for Charlie Parker interviews, for instance. You will encounter an intellect capable of parsing the most obscure disciplines. It should be no surprise that Bird’s polymath genius produced revolutionary music that spawned generations of copycats. Whether it’s Jimmy Page gushing over surf guitar or Quentin Tarantino motormouthing about grindhouse flicks — listening to superior artists talk about what they love lights up both their brains and ours. It’s not enough for a ‘creative’ to be sui generis. The best of the best are sui generous — communicating the naïve enthusiasm that generates artmaking and its appreciation. Poetry has its fair share of these charismatic omnivores. David Shapiro — poet, professor, critic, art historian — was one.

His posthumous, newly published collected prose, You Are The You: Writings and Interviews on Poetry, Art, and the New York School, assembles decades of reflections on a diverse range of subjects. Indeed, You Are The You is reminiscent of a career-spanning vinyl box set; there are a ton of grooves to dip into. Wherever you drop the needle, a stimulating thought emerges. And there are plenty of prime tracks. Effusive and uninhibited, Shapiro was never reluctant to express himself. Each of these essays and conversations reveals an eagerness to engage in brash debate. Joanna Fuhrman — who conducted one of the five interviews included here put it: “David Shapiro’s writing is simultaneously “earnest and explosive.” The volume showcases this heartfelt seriousness and take-no-prisoners intensity, a fire that burned inside someone who, at first glance, would seem to be anything but passionate, given the bookishly reserved expression that peers out from the Fairfield Porter oil portrait used for the cover.

This ferocity is never more evident than in Shapiro’s analysis of the New York School Poets, who were his mentors. Shapiro engaged these writers with sensitivity and unflinching honesty. Pulling no punches, Shapiro gives each his due without the blurb-crazed overpraise that often comes when one friend reviews another. The piece “Words in a State of Sparkle,” surveys an entire issue of the legendary magazine “C”: A Journal of Poetry. The probe covers a huge amount of aesthetic territory with dispatch, critiquing flaws and highlighting strengths. Shapiro was able to give Kenneth Koch his due praise in this essay, while silencing the poet’s haters with a ten-word mic drop emblematic of Shapiro’s trademark reviewing style. He wrote this line, according to Farrell’s footnotes, at age seventeen: “[Koch’s] humor has steel wires in it, as does Mozart’s.”

for more, click here.

Is this Bernstein's greatest song?

 

  as sung by the songwriters (Betty Comden and Adoph Green) and Nancy Walker

Twenty four hours can go so fast
You look around, the day has passed
When you're in love, time is precious stuff
Even a lifetime isn't enough

Where has the time all gone to?
Haven't done half the things we want to
Oh well, we'll catch up some other time

This day was just a token
Too many words are still unspoken
Oh well, we'll catch up
Some other time

Just when the fun is starting
Comes the time for parting
But let's be glad for what we've had
And what's to come

There's so much more embracing
Still to be done, but time is racing
Oh well, we'll catch up
Some other time

Didn't get half my wishes
Never have seen you dry the dishes
Oh well, we'll catch up
Some other time

 

Can't satisfy my  craving

Never have watched you while you're shaving
Oh well, we'll catch up
Some other time

[OZZIE]
Haven't had time to wake up
Seeing you there without your makeup
Oh well, we'll catch up
Some other time

Just when the fun is starting
Comes the time for parting. . .

Just when the fun's beginning
Comes the final inning
But let's be glad for what we've had
And what's to come

[CLAIRE, HILDY, CHIP & OZZIE]
There's so much more embracing
Still to be done, but time is racing
Oh well, we'll catch up
Some other time

Joanna Sit: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

___________________________________________

Other Than Longing

 

Every traveler knows a kind of despair other than longing
And waits by the gate of departure where other than longing

She thinks of a place she once knew–another country
Floating in a rose-scented air other than longing

Where the wild sparrow feeds on the sunflower’s heart
Then turns its eyes upward with a stare other than longing

Even the tourist can taste the bitterness of someone else’s salt
The desolation (climbing someone else’s stairs) other than longing

We are all orphaned islands the mountain left behind
Drifting across ruined seas broken spheres other than longing

Every exile knows the irreversible currents of the tailwind
That push the flight beyond a nightmare other than longing

Everything we can’t carry must be abandoned must be lost
And there is nothing to fear other than longing

At the end of the line we turn back for a final look
Take inventory of all that disappear other than longing

What in this world are we waiting for?
What else is there other than longing?

Every passenger at the gate answers the same:
I have nothing to declare other than longing

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joanna Sit was born in China and grew up in New York City, where she lives with her family. She studied poetry with Allen Ginsberg and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer at Brooklyn College and now teaches Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. She is the author of My Last Century (2012), In Thailand with the Apostles (2014), and most recently, Track Works. Her poem “Timescape: The Age of Oz” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2016. She is working on an ethnographic narrative called The Reincarnation of Red and another book of poems called Fantastic Voyage.  ["Other Than Longing" appears in LiveMag! 21.]

________________________________________________________________________________________

                        Hung Liu (1948-2021), Refugee--Strange Fruit: Comfort Women, Oil on canvas, 2001.

On "The Best Years of Our Lives"

Web Essays

from THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Souvenirs of War

Remembering The Best Years of Our Lives

By David Lehman | March 5, 2020

Everett Collection

I have a weakness for tearjerkers from the 1940s, films featuring Dana Andrews and Teresa Wright, and drunk scenes that end not in calamity but in self-awareness or an act of courage. All of these elements are present in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). You may want to have a handkerchief on hand for the wedding scene at the end. Two of the principal characters marry, two others plight their troth, a third pair blesses the scene with their presence, and Hoagy Carmichael plays “Here Comes the Bride” on the piano for a chorus of kids to sing along to.

Director William Wyler made a number of wonderful movies (Mrs. Miniver, Wuthering Heights), but this is an all-time great.

Three servicemen return to their small hometown after the end of hostilities in Europe and the Pacific in 1945. They represent the three primary divisions of military service and as many distinctions in socioeconomic class. Army sergeant Al Stephenson (Fredric March), a middle-aged man, holds an executive position at the local bank. In line for a promotion, Al is returning to his wife, Milly (Myrna Loy), and their two children, one of whom, Peggy (Teresa Wright), is old enough to witness a miserable couple and vow to “break that marriage up.”

As for the younger men, Air Force hotshot Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) displayed valor under fire flying sorties over Europe, and now has nightmares of bombing raids and comrades who were shot down. Sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), the youngest and lowest in rank, was a star quarterback in high school. But he will throw no more passes; he now has hooks for hands—as does Russell himself.

As an example of narrative brilliance, the movie’s presentation of the veterans’ first night back is hard to beat. Al has brought home souvenirs from the Pacific theater, but they seem to have lost their meaning on the living room table. When he, Milly, and Peggy go to celebrate at Butch’s, Butch (Hoagy Carmichael)—who happens to be Homer’s uncle—obligingly plays “Among My Souvenirs,” a marvelous song that a hungover Al will reprise in the shower the next morning. The integration of the song into the movie’s plot is exemplary.

Fred, who married Marie (Virginia Mayo) in an overnight romance before going overseas, joins the Stephensons that night at Butch’s because Marie is not at home and he doesn’t have the key to their apartment. The guys get plastered; Milly and Peggy are indulgent; and Fred ends up spending the night at the Stephensons’ apartment. When he cries out in his sleep, Peggy comforts him, and in the morning she makes him breakfast, foreshadowing a relationship to come.

The picture won its laurels as a sensitive treatment of the problems of returning service men. Courageous though he may be, Homer has taken quite a hit in the solar plexus of his self-esteem, and the awkwardness of people around him makes matters worse. Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell), his high school sweetheart, loves him, but it takes the better part of the movie for him to realize that her love really is “for better or for worse, in sickness or in health.”

The most affecting part of the story is Fred’s journey. A decorated Air Force hero who outranked Al in the military, Fred can’t get a job better than a soda jerk. He loses even that position when he slugs a smug customer who maintains that we fought the wrong foes in World War II and that Homer lost his hands for nothing. Between Fred and Marie there’s zero chemistry; she is stepping out on him and a divorce is inevitable. But Peggy’s folks are not exactly enthusiastic about her dalliance with a “slick” young fellow who happens to be hitched.

A great scene: lovesick Peggy confronts her parents, saying they can’t understand her because they “never had any trouble.” To which Milly responds, turning to Al: “We never had any trouble. How many times have I told you I hated you, and believed it in my heart? How many times have you said you were sick and tired of me, that we were all washed up? How many times have we had to fall in love all over again?”

I am always moved by a scene in which Fred climbs aboard a discarded bomber, his “office” during the war, which is now rusting in an aircraft boneyard. The scene has no words, just music, as Fred sits and stares into his turbulent past and blank future. This may be my favorite moment in the film, but there are others very nearly as affecting, including the one in which, at a formal dinner of bank officers and trustees, Al gulps down too many highballs but manages not to hiccup when he makes a speech that begins unsteadily but ends with eloquence.

The movie was a huge popular as well as critical success. There were detractors; there always are. James Baldwin felt it was “sentimental,” a fantasy. On the film’s release, The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther saluted the ensemble cast and felt the movie was a “beautiful and inspiring demonstration of human fortitude.” Most viewers concurred. The movie won nine Academy Awards, including a richly deserved Best Actor trophy for Fredric March.

For William Wyler, The Best Years of Our Lives was a highly personal movie. Like Fred Derry, he flew bombing missions in Europe and lost a friend who was shot down. Like Al Stephenson, he was middle-aged when he served. And like Homer Parrish, he came home with a wound that never healed (he lost hearing in one ear).

The last lines in the movie are spoken by Fred Derry to his bride-to-be in her stylish summer hat: “You know what it’ll be, don’t you, Peggy? It may take us years to get anywhere. We’ll have no money, no decent place to live. We’ll have to work, get kicked around.” Fred speaks in earnest, but the embrace and the tears of joy in Peggy’s eyes are all that matter.

Can't argue with Mozart

Why is Jerome Kern's picture here?

Because he and Mozart shared a birthday!

 

New directions or nude erections: the new "Next Line, Please" challenge

Next Line, Please

“The Jester’s Magma”

By David Lehman | May 19, 2025

Our new prompt:

<<< Errors, mistakes, and slips of the tongue and pen are, as Freud taught us, neither innocent nor devoid of meaning. Misunderstandings are inevitable, and in a sense—as Emily Winakur and Paul Michelsen suggested in a “Next Line, Please” entry back in 2017—it could be argued that metaphor itself is a sort of beautiful mistake that, for example, gives “rosy fingers” to the dawn. Sometimes one can get the momentum going for a poem just by changing a couple of words in a well-known phrase. Aping Polonius, one day, I found myself changing a few letters and transforming his classic line into “Neither a follower nor a leader be.” And how often have I typed “sue” when I mean to say “use”? You could even write “Ode to the West Wing,” leaving it unclear whether you mean Shelley’s magnificent ode or the TV show with Martin Sheen.

Thus, our prompt is to write a poem based on a mistake, a typo, a misunderstanding, a slip of the tongue (about which Freud has so much to say), or an error that results in something better than what was originally intended. To honor compression as a virtue, let’s have a 12-line limit. The lines can be a solid block, or you can divide them into stanzas, rhymed or unrhymed. Deadline: Ten days after this column is posted. Note: We hope soon to publish our NLP posts on a bi-weekly basis. Stay tuned!  >>>

Click here for the full "Next Line, Please" post!

"Rabbi Frankenstein" [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

That anyone could be named Rabbi Frankenstein
Seemed impossible but Rabbi Frankenstein was
Rabbi Frankenstein. That he had a glass eye also
seemed impossible but there it definitely was.

In the old days around1957 Rabbi Frankenstein used
to suddenly appear and I always wondered why but
Looking back on it I now understand that he wanted
A donation from my Pa to the temple and he never
Failed to get one either but I never knew how much.

To start the ball rolling Rabbi Frankenstein would
Always give me a gift like a small ceramic elephant
As Pa smilingly looked on and then they went
Into the library and talked for about 30 minutes
Although Pa just wanted to write the check already.

But he never spoke ill of of Rabbi Frankenstein,
He would just say "oy" or "oy vey" to himself
When Rabbi Frankenstein was finally gone!

from The Bonus Round, a new Substack featuring Mitch Sisskind.

Echoes of 1968: Anne Sauvage, Atelier de Paris, June Events, public goods and the right to culture [By Tracy Danison]

“Là Sextet” by Pierre Pontvianne, June Events 2025. Photo © cieparc

I had originally intended to put in a good word for “woke” with a chat about diversity, inclusion and living with the natural world (rapport au vivant) with Anne Sauvage, director of Atelier de Paris and chief programmer for the season-closing June Events dance festival. The Atelier is a “CDCN”, centre de developpement national chorégraphique, a national dance development center, one of 15 spread through the different regions of France and part of a much larger culture-services network set up from the 1990s.

June Events is the goldilocks of the dance programs that dot the Paris season, at least for me. It happens in the right month in the right place – deliciously warm and mostly in greenspace. June Events even has a right name. “June Events”, Les Journées de juin,1848. The reference recalls both meaningful historic drama: barricades, massacres, deportations as well as the reality that Historical Moments or not, we never stop navigating the sublime and the ridiculous. The fact is, it’s hard to tell the sublime and ridiculous, the historic and quotidian, important and not, apart.

But the idea that hilarious Fun and bloody History are joined at the hip made me reflect that cracking a snook in favor of “woke” might be dangerous. After all, the sublime and ridiculous doctrine dictates that “woke” is both a way of saying a body understands the evils of racial bias and doesn’t have the philosophical outlook of an SS guard. A damnable, cloudy look, you’ll agree. Cloudier yet, “woke” has become an acceptable term of abuse. Cloudiest of all, I’ve heard and read otherwise sensible people excusing themselves for sounding woke. So. No cracking snooks.

Also, my conversation with Anne Sauvage changed my attitude about the questions I had in mind: What has dance to do with diversity, inclusion and living in the natural world? And what can a mostly visual, mostly un- or non-narrative art form such as dance performance do with Big Issues such as who gets a voice, who gets access or how do we stave off mass species extinction?

I think it was when she was telling me that, for her part, dance was a passion that I understood that she assumes that culture – dance, music, visual art, words, the way people do with each other and with the rest of the world around, concerns with beauty and truth –  is a human thing, a fact about people, not necessarily a production. Somebody dancing with joy in the street is of equal culture with the Rockettes or Dr Strangelove. Culture and humans an exclusive and primal entanglement. Dance is a part of that. That is also what I believe.

 

“Mandinga do futuro, en rythme de résistance” by Puma-Camillê. Photo © Quântika Almeida

When Ann answers What can dance do? she cites what Atelier de Paris does: helping the widest variety and largest number of people who want it to access it, to learn it and to do it: outreach, education, dance performance, which correlate pretty much to this year’s festival theme of diversity, inclusion and the natural world: in short, access and public interest.

Broadly, access helps people optimize personal interest – Anne cites the Atelier’s long-time involvement with deaf children as a specific effort at inclusion in dance, but also in diversity of those who can participate in it. Dance performance programming is the public face of optimized public participation. Among other things, dance performance shows both the range of individuals involved and the way the public values dance.

For many, for example, if dance performance is entertainment, both dance and dancing have therapeutic and educational value. Anne cites choreographer, dance performer and chiropractor Julie Nioche, whose Qui est outsider – around teen sexual violence – and Une Echappée – “Escape!” around building the imagination. Both pieces straddle therapy, education and performance.

Dance and dancing can be, like writing or sculpting, part of a toolkit for addressing concerns and expressing opinions. Anne cites Rosalind Crisp, a choreographer from Australia whose legendary Crocodiles interactive performance – focuses on improvisation. Joanne Leighton, who is a longtime associate of the Atelier, pursues her Les Veilleurs, “The Watchers”, participative performance project. Les Veilleurs calls attention to community solidarity. Anne also notes that the Atelier takes an interest in Leighton as an independent operator.

 

Joanne Leighton, choreographer, June Events 2025. Photo © Fabrice Gaboriau & Plaine-Commune

And, as we talk, I remember the “right to culture”:

Loi d'orientation du 29 juillet 1998 relative à la lutte contre les exclusions : Article 140 : L'égal accès de tous, tout au long de la vie, à la culture, à la pratique sportive, aux vacances et aux loisirs constitue un objectif national.

… “Equal access to culture for life” …

 Culture has been part of education since Jules Ferry founded the current education system – that’s why the “for life”. Basically, this law defines culture, and dance with it, as a public good, essentially, like water, to which everyone has a right. Culture and water both are private goods in the United States. In other words, in France, the things of people, productions such as music, dance, art and gym are an integral part of education, not an (burdensome) “extra”, even when everybody whines about how expensive they are.

A restaurant or café has to give you a glass of water if you want it. In the same way, Anne Sauvage’s job is to ensure everybody who wants it gets access to dance performance. Atelier is part of a system deliberately put in place in the post-war period onward to make culture in general and dance in particular accessible to everyone.

Looked at this way, Anne and the institution she runs look a lot more like products of one of those less flashy but no less profound revolutions of ’68. Veteran choreographer-entrepreneur such as Josette Baïz (“Ulysse” – Josette Baïz and the gifts of today’s un-classic ballet) doesn’t just run an organization that teaches kids to dance, she embodies a whole new way of understanding children and their social role. Similarly, the “diversity, inclusion and living with the natural world” that Anne Sauvage calls the themes of June Events 2025, through public culture institutions such as the one she runs, echo 1968’s founding vision of a world where the right to culture goes without saying.  

Mahler's 1st

 

I like to be in America [from "West Side Story")

 

2025 Yetzirah Jewish poetry conference: June 24-27, 2025

 2025 Yetzirah Jewish Poetry Conference with Sharon Dolin, Edward Hirsch, Dana Levin, and Victoria Redel:

 If you’d like to join us online: This year, we’re trying something new for our online events. We’ll have ONE Zoom link for all events, with suggested donation amounts based on how many events you think you’d like to attend. As the conference is our single biggest programming expense of the year, we appreciate your support at the highest level that feels right to you and, if you’re so moved, with a little extra to help support our choice to make these events accessible to those who cannot afford to donate anything.
You can register to join us online here.

If you’d like to join us in-person: Similar to our online events, if you’d like to get your tickets in advance, for all events we’ll have suggested donation amounts based on how many events you think you’d like to attend. As the conference is our single biggest programming expense of the year, we appreciate your support at the highest level that feels right to you and, if you’re so moved, with a little extra to help support our choice to make these events accessible to those who cannot afford to donate anything. 
You can register to join us in-person here. (all events will take place in the Highsmith Student Union, Blue Ridge South: HIG203)

PUBLIC EVENTS:
Tuesday, June 24
1:30-2:45 ET, A Conversation & Reading with our Keynote Speaker: Edward Hirsch, in conversation with Danny Kraft 

8-9:30 ET, Tuesday Fellows & Faculty Reading: Alicia Ostriker, Elizabeth Jacobson, Judith Chalmer, Jared Harél, & Victoria Redel

Wednesday, June 25
1:30-2:45 ET, Favorite Poets: A Lineage of Jewish Poetry: Hadara Bar-Nadav, Owen Lewis, Patty Seyburn, & Jared Harél 

3:15-4:30 ET, On Writing Trauma: Joanna Chen, Judith Chalmer, Dina Elenbogen, & Hadara Bar-Nadav 

5-6:30 ET, Scholars & Offsite Faculty Reading: Ayelet Amittay, Hannah Butcher-Stell, Robin Rosen Chang, Olga Livshin, Lonnie Monka, Hila Ratzabi, Kathy Schorr, Donna Spruijt-Metz,  Betsy Fogelman Tighe, & Yehoshua November

Thursday, June 26
1:30-2:45 ET, Writing Contemporary Midrash: On Poetry Inspired by Sacred Texts: Alicia Ostriker, David Ebenbach, Eve Grubin, & Elizabeth Jacobson 

3:15-4:30 ET, Translation as a Jewish Act: Phil Terman, Joanna Chen, & Dan Alter 

8-9:30 ET, Thursday Fellows & Faculty Reading: Eve Grubin, Owen Lewis, Dina Elenbogen, David Ebenbach, Hadara Bar-Nadav, & Sharon Dolin

Friday, June 27
1:30-2:45 ET, Contributors Reading: Pearl Abraham, Rachel Davies, Leah Falk, Laurel Kallen, Kyra Lisse, Shir Lovett Graff, Lior Maayan, Robert Manaster, Melissa Rosen, Carly Sachs Jane, Saginaw Lerer, Ma’ayan Seligsohn, Rona Shaffran, Elisabeth Weiss, & Laura Hodes Zacks 

5:30-7 ET, Friday Fellows & Faculty Reading: Dan Alter, Patty Seyburn, Philip Terman, Joanna Chen, Rodger Kamenetz, & Dana Levin

We could not do any of this without your support. Thank you.

But I'm gonna love you come rain or come shine. . .