The Best American Poetry

"The Hard and the Soft": Catullus 60 [trans. by Susan Brind Morrow]

Catullus 60 has a sort of fairy tale beginning. Like Aslan in The Silver Chair, there is a lion on a mountaintop up in the clearest air,
and there is a monster that lives in the deep blue depths of the sea.

Catullus is setting up a vivid contrast of two living things in extreme environments. The monster is barking. It is Scylla, the giant squid, with multiple heads: the head-like swollen tips of tentacles on long stem-like arms. The giant squid on the surface of the sea makes a terrifying barking sound that can be heard miles away. This is a portrait of a living thing.

Within the deepest depths of the squid itself is the word in the next line procreavit; something has been created. 

A Grammatical Dictionary of Botanical Latin has the word Catullus uses to describe what is created, taetra, as having to do with smell: it is putrid, the softness brought on by decay and the smell of it. Although the thing is soft (setting up the expectation of comfort), it has  the repellent softness of the slime of rot. Something is rotting having to do with things in the sea, in the depths, and in psychology, because what is being described is the mind.

The word taetra at once calls to mind the softness of sea creatures rotting on the shore, and the softness of the brain itself, taken out of its shell, soft and wet and rotting. And that is what Catullus is after here.

Num te leaena montibus Libystinis
Aut Scylla latrans infima inguinum parte
Tam dura mente procreavit ac taetra
Ut supplicis vocem in novissimo casu
Contemptam haberas, ah nimis fero corde

A lion on the Libyan Mountains
or barking Scylla in its inmost part
created you-
with a mind so hard yet soft with rot
that you would have contempt
for the voice of a person in absolute crisis-
Oh you with an iron heart

This passage is eerily reminiscent of Alcman’s fragmentary passage about sleep (a passage Catullus may well have had in mind when he wrote this).

eudousin d’oreon koruphai te kai pharanges
prowones te kai xaradrai
phyla t’erpet’ osa trephei melaina gaia
theres t’oreskwoi kai genos melissan
kai knodal en benthessi porphureos halos
eudousi d’oiwnon phyla tanupterugon

The peaks and the valleys of the mountains
are asleep, the headlands and the bays
The tribes of every creeping thing
the black earth feeds:
the mountain-going beasts and race of bees
and monsters in the depths of the porphyry seas
and slender-winged birds are asleep

Iris Murdoch wrote about these mysterious lines in The Sea,The Sea, saying when is it that everything is asleep at the same time? It must mean everything is under a magic spell, at midday, frozen in the light as in Sleeping Beauty.

But that is doubtful. It is night. What both poems are really about is the presentation of vivid contrasts. Alcman begins with koruphai, roof, the mountaintop, the uppermost part, and pharanges, the Gorge, the deepest part, like pharanx, the gorge in the human body, the deep inner throat, infima inguinum parte.

(One remembers that the word for womb and stomach are the same in Greek: gaster).

The contrast is of high and low -- top and bottom -- and continues with what lives there --  theres d’oreskwoi, the mountain-going beasts, and then that wonderful line:

kai knodal en benthessi porphureos halos
the monsters in the depths of the porphyry seas.

There are wild beasts high in the mountains
And monsters deep down in the sea

It looks like Catullus is drawing on this beautiful poem with his lion on the mountaintop (like Pope’s in the fields of air) and monster implicitly in the deep, and in the depths of the monster is your mind, which has the quality of the lion, hardness, cruelty, the kind of cruelty that can tear a person apart, and the mind disinterred as the brain that has the softness of the decaying boneless sea life on the shore.

The word latrans, barking, is a word that brings up the mythic Scylla, a terrifying female monster who is dogs from the waist down but is not as terrifying as the real squid, which has been known to pull sailors off the decks of ships with its long creeping arms.

The first letters that begin each line form an acrostic: they spell something. What they spell is hard as bronze. The paradox of hard and soft is the subject of the poem: what should be soft (the heart) is hard, what should be hard (the durability of friendship) is soft.

And with this I think it is very clear that this poem is not addressed to a woman- especially with his use of the words supplicis vocem, which suggest a quality of formality having to do with help given in the public world. The poem is not about love. It is a sincerely felt expression of deep hurt written to a friend, someone Catullus trusted and thought was worthy of trust, and the trust is betrayed.

supplicis vocem the voice of someone who is begging for help at a critical moment

novissimo casu
in the ultimate crisis

The friend could be Caesar, a friend of his family, whom Catullus wrote about elsewhere. The founders of Rome were nursed by wolves, latrans, barking, the dangerous wild animal on the mountaintop, the mountain going beasts, the lion, the wolf.

Some have translated the word fero as feral- and it may have that double dimension- but I have always seen it as fero- iron. Iron, bronze, dura- hard- what could be harder than a heart that is physically soft and should have the quality of softness, of love and compassion-:

There is a trap that catches noblest spirits
That caught, they say, God when he walked
the earth

-- Translations of Catullus 60 and Alcman by Susan Brind Morrow

Daniel Borzutzky: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Or (For Isaac)

And he took his father to the flame and his father said

I am not a goat

And the boy said   no    you are not a goat

And the father said     where are the goats

And the boy said    you are a goat today or you will be a goat

The father thought about hybrid beasts and said nothing

He looked with love at the strange child he created

He thought about how hard it had been to keep the boy alive

And when the boy led him down the death path he kept thinking

I should be in charge   

But I am tired and I can’t do anything to gain control

I am crinkled, worn out, sick of seeing

Things get destroyed in my name

Do I mind that I might be turned into someone else’s burden?

Also, I admire my son’s determination

Someone, the voice of X, told him to take me to the flame

Someone serious, a credible character,

Told him to take me to the flame

It would have been perfectly reasonable to resist

To say look, son, this is not the kind of thing you should do to your father

But I was tired and the child was persistent and I wondered

How long will this thing go on?

It’s true, I am old now

I don’t actually want to live that much longer

But there are a few more things I have to do

Is it presumptuous to say there is a future that depends on me?

The earth has its own ideas

The sea has other ideas

And the sky has ideas

There are just a few bodies falling from the sky today

I think I recognize some of them

They are my children and one of them whispers to me

This is not the right way to live

And to live in the wrong way is to die in the wrong way

Who said that and what did they mean?

Before he takes me to the flame I tell my son

There is nothing left to do here on earth

I welcome the pain and I welcome my son’s audacity

I admire his fingers as they grip my shirt sleeve

In those fingers I feel sadness, tenacity, anger, hope

I feel the violence of the centuries filling up in his blood

I know how lonely it is in his body

The expectations of our people are extraordinary

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Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024) and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenún. [This poem originally appeared in The Atlantic, Feb. 2025.]

________________________________________________________________________________________

                        Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562, oil-on-panel (46 inches by 64 inches).

It's nice to go traveling. . .

 

David Lehman reveals all about his "Astrological Profiles"

Astrological Profiles: a Genre

Back in 2008, when the blog of the Best American Poetry was new, and the Internet itself still seemed a novelty, the editors of the blog – quickly getting used to daily deadlines – were hungry for content and welcoming to all manner of caprice.  That’s when I began writing astrological profiles, or astro-files as I came to think of them. Astrology had long appealed to me as a mnemonic device, a way to remember birthdays, and an ironically self-conscious icebreaker with a surprising connection to great classic myths, like the twin boys of Gemini or the girl who eluded a god by diving into a pool and turning into the fish of Pisces.

          Ever since then I have spent the occasional evening studying the horoscope of someone who interests me. I began with Dostoevsky, Graham Greene, Marlene Dietrich [left], and Keats [below rght]. At some point it occurred to me that I was constructing a private mythology.  The connections between and among the persons I wrote about increasingly suggested patterns to me. Was it mere coincidence that Louis Armstrong [whose chart is below, right] and Percy Bysshe Shelley share a birthday or that Marlene Dietrich died on the day Robespierre was born? The off-beat profile as a form appeals to me, and I wrote a few spurious astrological studies that friends seemed to like.

Astrology is supposed to be flakey, and for a writer, that means liberty of content as well as a highly specific vocabulary.  I use the astrological terms on the cheeky assumption that the horoscope -- like the “haruspicate or scry,” “sortilege, or tea leaves,” playing cards, numerology, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the “preconscious terrors” of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's “The Dry Salvages” -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only “usual pastimes and drugs” but the means of poetic exploration. There is also, in astrology, an embrace of the anachronistic as a sort of gamble against scientific odds. I overheard two college kids talk about astrology. The girl was into it, the boy no. “It’s bogus science,” he said. “Yes, but it’s fun, like horse-racing,” she said. There’s a reason that tabloids devote pages to horoscopes.

Here is the atsrological profile I wrote for John Keats (leftt): https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2015/10/on-keatss-birthday-by-david-lehman.html.

Even sophisticates admit to the guilty pleasure. The poet Louis MacNeice, an important figure in the W. H. Auden circle, thought enough of the subject to write Astrology (1964), an introduction. Why did James Joyce insist that Ulysses be published on his fortieth birthday, February 2, 1922? Could it be that 02 /02/ 22 was too rare an occurrence for him, an Irish author (Aquarius with Capricorn rising) bedazzled with the occult, to overlook?

Or consider the writer Suzi Wong, who was well into her adulthood when she learned that she was not born on June 2nd, as she had thought and as false documents showed, but in April. She was heartbroken: “No longer a Gemini? I couldn’t believe it!” Wong grew up in the 1960s. “After years of blowing out birthday candles on June 2nd, I thoroughly bought into the zodiac icon of the Gemini twins,” she reports. “In my teens, I read the daily horoscope for Geminis before making plans and decisions. I believed everything I read about the typical Gemini: witty, charming, spontaneous, lively. Geminis are supposed to be good artists, linguists, diplomats, and journalists; while I was none of the above, I’d had several careers employing the typical Gemini’s skills in communication, relatability, and diplomacy. I thrived on multi-tasking, spinning projects and full plates mid-air with the Gemini’s renowned ambidexterity. I even instinctively loved opals and agates, the precious stones assigned to Geminis by astrological tradition. I couldn’t fathom the idea of identifying with the personality traits of an Aries or Taurus or wearing diamonds or emeralds, the gems associated with April babies.”[1] In the subtitle of her essay, Wong describes herself as “a fake Gemini.” As a true Gemini I sympathize with her plight.

Once you have a form and a conceit that can unify the enterprise, you’re in business if, like me, you’re a writer, addicted to writing, and looking for a way to indulge your curiosity while entertaining the discriminating reader. If in the profile I had a form, in astrology I had the conceit that licensed me to spend quality time with a mythic circle of actors and singers, philosophers and poets, each leading to the next, as Hamlet (“Denmark’s a prison”) led to Kierkegaard, who led to Kafka.

The mythology of William Butler Yeats (a June Gemini with Virgo rising and Libra as his Black Moon Lilith sign) has fascinated me since I read his poetry in college. It is nothing if not eccentric, having to do with phases of the moon, history conceived as a “gyre,” and figures from Celtic mythology (Aengus, Red Hanrahan, Cuchulain) and English folk songs (Crazy Jane). Yet his mythic heroes and heroines serve his poetry as well as Dante’s more orthodox vision of the cosmos serves his. The same is true of James Merrill’s Ouija board trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover. At first glance Merrill’s project may have seemed outlandish. The poem, we are told, is the record of a thousand and one evenings at the Ouija board; he can’t be serious, can he? But consider that Merrill (a March Pisces) has, of all modern American poets, the greatest formal ability – the greatest command of form, rhyme, meter, and poetic convention at the service of a theme. Doesn’t it make sense, then, to introduce a discrepancy between content and occasion, between the exacting calculations of poetic form and the element of chance introduced by the eccentric method employed to produce content?

If it is possible to love Dante’s Inferno without subscribing to the dogma undergirding it, surely, then, a communion of belief unadorned by irony should not serve as a major criterion of a work of art. Lord Byron [below left], in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, mounts the Romantic defense of astrology – and of the stars as metaphors:

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

If in your bright leaves we would read the fate

Of men and empires ‘tis to be forgiven

That in our aspirations to be great,

Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state

And claim a kindred with you; for ye are

A beauty and a mystery, and create

In us such love and reverence from afar,

That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star.

Of the twenty-five heroes and heroines I have written about so far, one was a drunkard, one a braggart, one a recluse, one a sadist; one had a lifelong identity crisis, one smoked weed every day; two died of overdoses, two of consumption, two in tragic accidents; one hanged herself; one was killed in a duel; one died of war wounds exacerbated by a killer flu; one felt guilty from the start and transgressed to justify the feeling; one faced a firing squad, survived and became a compulsive gambler; one was a chain-smoking depressive whose favorite reading was Superman comics; one was mocked unceasingly by the leading periodical of the day. The one who was guillotined I wouldn’t count as a hero. That leaves five, and I doubt I’d have to search hard to find fatal flaws in at least three of them.

On the other hand, you can present these twenty-five individuals as among the most fortunate, the most beautiful, most fascinating, most unusual, most glamorous marvels in a young man’s mind recollected years after they first beguiled him. 

[1] Suzi Wong, “Daughter of a Paper Son: True Confessions of a Fake Gemini,” The Georgia Review, Summer 2024, p. 321. https://thegeorgiareview.com/posts/daughter-of-a-paper-son-true-confessions-of-a-fake-gemini/

Two Poems: "Back from Vacation" and "Ex-Basketball Player" [by John Updike]

Back from Vacation

 

'Back from vacation', the barber announces,
or the postman, or the girl at the drugstore, now tan.
They are amazed to find the workaday world
still in place, their absence having slipped no cogs,
their customers having hardly missed them, and
there being so sparse an audience to tell of the wonders,
the pyramids they have seen, the silken warm seas,
the nighttimes of marimbas, the purchases achieved
in foreign languages, the beggars, the flies,
the hotel luxury, the grandeur of marble cities.
But at Customs the humdrum pressed its claims.
Gray days clicked shut around them; the yoke still fit,
warm as if never shucked. The world is still so small,
the evidence says, though their hearts cry, 'Not so!'

 

 

Ex-Basketball Player

 

Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,

Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth's Garage
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
Most days, you'll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.

Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—
Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.
One's nostrils are two S's, and his eyes
An E and O. And one is squat, without
A head at all—more of a football type.

Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In '46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.

He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,
But most of us remember anyway.
His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.
It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.

Off work, he hangs around Mae's Luncheonette.
Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,
Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.
Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods
Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers
Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.

Quel cirque! Contemporary European circus, the body, trauma, fate, explained [By Tracy Danison]

“Bestiaire/Vestiaire” by Antoine Linsale. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Earlier in the month, I went to see circus-act finalists and winners of this year’s Circusnext selection process. Circusnext is a Europe-wide organization that promotes “contemporary circus”. A professional affair, selection happens more in the sense of a break dance battle: immediate context and experience over judgment of best or better. The big idea is to get quality creators in front of as many programmers as possible.

Contemporary circus is “New Circus” with a thematic bent. New Circus, broadly, developed out of non-hierarchical and non-violent ways of thinking about human relationships with the world around that started to get a hearing in the 1960s and 70s. Bent or not, New Circus beats Traditional or Old Circus any day of the week and all over the map.

When it doesn’t send a body wobbling off like a broken top along a blank wall, youthful trauma is very often the Hand of Fate, the casual shove that “volunteers” a body for the Atemporal Entangled Combat Section of Star Fleet, now plumping for recruits in the wake of heavy fighting in the Hercules quadrant. Interesting, if not easy, times incoming!

Hans, the hero of Heinrich Böll’s novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine, gets a fateful trauma and gains insight into people, especially his own folks. Hans feels fear and anger when he realizes that his mother has hectored Henrietta, his sister, into joining the local NationalSozialistichesMädchensPointlessSuicideBattalion. But fateful trauma happens when he witnesses the mother sawing off and chawing down a big hunk of the family’s black-market ham. It’s true: there are stains that don’t rub out, foul things that resist even judgment. This ham-chaw is one. Thus is Hans volunteered to play Banquo on the post-Nazi BundesRepublik’s stage: he becomes a Clown.

 

“Metaphoric Objects” - David Martin. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

The trauma of my first and last traditional circus performance is why I go to watch New Circus, why I am sitting through tryouts in Paris –  in France, by golly! –  why I have a record of enthusiastically recommending contemporary New Circus: Live Performance Pilgrimage, with Walkabout: Normandy’s Spring International Festival of New Circus.

The air, wet, chilly. Stinks of scared-kid, of that pink vomit-absorbent sawdust stuff, working stiff sweat, cheap beer: “Hey, Mabel! Carling Black Label”.

Dumb bunnies bunched in small knots, rough, rowdy and friendly-like, guarded, embarrassed, fearful. Dumb bunnies cowering, pointing fingers, cat-calling, guffawing. A couple of clowns near the big flap entry hunching together, taking big drags on fags, Chesterfields, Luckies. Shabby.

Already almost dark. Worn tents, red and white faded stripes. Naked light bulbs actinically bright. Chained lions, leopards, elephants, bears. A flabby zebra. Huge, unwashed, mangy. Cages. Bleacher seats.

No. No. No. No Old Circus.

 

“Ghetto” by Marcelo Nunes. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

I came across New Circus – a bright red big top not far from La Folie Titon, where the misquoted Reveillon had his wallpaper works and the Montgolfiers launched their globe aérostatique, hot air balloon – when my Son now 30 was still almost a tot.

No lions nor tamers. Clowns in civvies sans greasepaint doing stand-up. No elephants nor wranglers. Jugglers. No boa-ed, barefoot, busty chevalières leaping from horse to horse. Acrobats solo and en masse sensually swinging. German wheels and horizontal bars. High-wire bikes. No bears nor wrasslers. Unlikely moments and magicians. No flabby zebras.

If you ask my youthful trauma, the big thing about New Circus is that it’s other-species inclusive: other animals perform with but not under humans. As the brilliant horseman Bartabas puts it in the notes to Les cantiques du corbeau(“The Crow Canticles”), which is coming to Paris in mid-October 2025 for a run all the way to Christmas, “Horses [for instance] are no longer the saddles of human exploits or a [an anthropocentric] statement of ‘animal grace’”. Inclusiveness means that circus entertainment is in spirit a socially horizontal demonstration of exceptional individual and cooperative skill and daring, not unlike break or urban or hip hop dance or, indeed, contemporary dance since the 1980s.

To look at the literature and programming at Circusnext, contemporary New Circus is also performance + professional culture, local traditions and enduring social networks. In practice, an epitome of New Circus – again, on the model of break or hip hop or indeed, contemporary dance – is pretty much what can intrigue or wow circus professionals, fans and the public, who pick successes and failures and then, in complex interaction and over time, flail the wheat from the chaff.

 

“In Difference” by Jef Everaert and Marica Marinoni. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Finally, if Movement is the start point and Imagination the end point of dance performance, Body and Body Potential bring together all the different bents of circus into a single genre, a unique way of experimenting with possibles or, as creators of contemporary circus want to look at it, with the themes or stories or meditations that they bring into space time with an act.

My favorite piece – it won no prizes – among the Circusnext runners-up, independent circus artist Antoine Linsale’sBestiare/Vestiare, seems to me to straddle all the points I’ve made above without exemplifying any one of them in particular. Using on-the-ground acrobatics, fabric and dis-logic (capilotraction – “splitting hairs”) Bestiare/Vestiare is cabaret as fashion show in seven parts over three hours. Linsale twists and turns around camp and traditional imageries and absurd ditties dressed in really spiffy costumes and in an overall tone that vibrates seamlessly from Monty Python-style parody to drag show to Sesame Street. Visual joie-de-vivre with mind-food.

Th/os/e who remain by Marius Fouilland and Aimé Rauzier,  a Circusnext winner, uses on-the-ground acrobatics and life-size puppets to play with the idea of the other and dead body. The use of Body as vector for investigation of potential joins Fouillard and Rauzier’s piece to In difference by Marica Marinoni and Jef Everaert, in which apparent solos operate as a not-always-in-tandem duo on the Cyr or Mono Wheel.

 

“Ce(ux) qui Reste(nt)” by Marius Fouilland and Aimé Rauzier. Photo © Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Metaphoric Objects by David Martin, also a winner, uses juggling to segue into visual and verbal metaphor, developing insights that blaze out then fade off beyond words before I can quack out “Fearful Symmetry”. Objects is a demonstration of the sublime in the ordinary.

I’m not sure that my experience, and not the fleeting insights, is not the actual point of Martin’s shtick.

Salar la pena (“Pay the Price”) by Juan Carlos Panduro, a tight rope walker, uses fire-breathing to create a body poem on ecstasy. Ghetto by Marcelo Nunes, a fakir who clowns his way down from a trapeze for an active meditation on dopamine addiction while lolling, stamping, hopping and roiling in broken glass.

O scion of Bharata, you should understand that I am also the knower in all bodies, and to understand this body and its knower is called knowledge. That is My opinion. (Bhagavad-gita, Chapter 13, Verse 3)

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I saw Circusnext's 2025 tryout and winner representations on 22 May and 13 June 2025, respectively, at Théâtre de la Cité Internationale. Finalists included

“Hack the circus” - Cie Farö Céleste, with Justine Bernachon-Irisarri: tightrope, high wires. ·

“Insomnia” - Jakob Jacobsson: aerial rope

“In Difference” - Jef Everaert and Marica Marinoni: Cyr or Mono wheel

“Body Territory” - Cie Betterland, with Marion Coulomb and Pépita Car: aerial rope, knife throwing

“Ghetto” - Cie Dissociée, with Marcelo Nunes: trapeze, fakir, clown

“ES” - Cie Kimera, with Cecilia Alice Manfrini and Aivjà Pezza: on-the-ground acrobatics, tightrope, fakir

“Ce(ux) qui Reste(nt)” - Cie Inéluctable, with Marius Fouilland and Aimé Rauzier: on-the-ground acrobatics

“Salar la pena” - Juan Carlos Panduro: tightwire, poetry

“Bestiaire/Vestiaire” - Maison De La, with Antoine Linsale: on-the-ground acrobatics “Metaphoric Objects” - David Martin: juggling

“Des amoures chiennes aux amour-lichen” - Oriane Lautel: trapeze

“Arbo” - Cie !UKBUM!, with Jef Kinds & Mia Drobec: aerial straps, webbing

From "Can Literacy Be Saved?" [by M . D. Aeschliman]

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The central belief in “moral imagination” that inspired Burke, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, and Anglo-American humanistic educators such as Irving Babbitt, John Erskine (“the moral obligation to be intelligent”), F. R. Leavis [pictured left], Lionel Trilling, and Northrop Frye is now only a memory.

The consequences for high school and college literary studies are massive. Modernist literary classics are no longer “ethical” or “humanistic,” the words themselves sounding nostalgic and ironic; they are about self-expression as the summum bonum—“songs of myself” everywhere. Radically relativistic and skeptical French Nietzscheanism swept the academic and “high-cultural” West from the 1960s on; and, despite the fall of European communism in 1990, various highly moralistic forms of Marxist analysis have also sifted down to the masses of university students, augmented by militant ideological teaching, faculty conformity, and subsidized university-press publishing. Of course, Marx and Nietzsche are utterly contradictory and antagonistic to one another, but several generations of their disciples have shown that they can live together in the minds of their partisans (an astonishing feat).

Now, one hundred thirty-five years after the onset of Nietzsche’s terminal madness in Turin, his histrionic literary hysteria, with its moralistic Marxist supplement, has become endemic. Radical subjectivism about knowledge and ethics nevertheless resorts habitually to outraged moral judgments, a paradox that Michael Polanyi called “moral inversion.” Our “high” academic and literary culture once thought of itself as “humanistic,” but that old literary humanism is now so remote from us as to remain only an archaeological phenomenon, what a contemporary Cambridge intellectual historian contemptuously calls “the nostalgic imagination."

If the preceding analysis is accurate—or at least plausible—the rapid decline in student interest in “humanities” and literature courses is made more explicable. A likely aspect of this decline is that students no longer see “pure fiction”—modernist, self-expressive, and aesthetic-imaginative—as particularly relevant, necessary, or credible. It is, after all, fiction. Add to this the emergence of AI, which is making the invigilation and evaluation of out-of-class writing assignments for their “originality” impossible. The central, “canonical,” “civilizing” role of high-school and college literary studies is increasingly only a memory of older generations. Twentieth-century critics as different as C. S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, Philip Rieff, Russell Kirk, and Jacques Barzun all saw this coming and wrote illuminatingly about it.

One potentially viable solution is to ally high school literary studies more frequently and explicitly with history. Dickens’s novel about the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), is arguably the most popular novel in the English language. Tolstoy’s novel of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, War and Peace  (1869), may be the greatest novel ever written. Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed (1827), set in Lombardy during a great plague, retains incalculable culture-forming authority in Italy and beyond it. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1975) describes the Soviet Communist world of slave labor camps in what is perhaps the most important literary work of the last hundred years. Contemporary novelists such as the Englishman Piers Paul Read and the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo (1923–1996) have written excellent historical novels.

In his great short poem “Jordan (1),” George Herbert asks,

            Who says that fictions only and false hair
            Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?

Herbert’s rhetorical-philosophical question has both lapidary force and contemporary significance. “Pure” fiction has manifestly failed to provide any stable center for the educational curriculum in Western high schools and colleges. History itself is now thoroughly contested and resented by epistemological skeptics and educational “progressives.” But mature, undeformed persons in all walks of life who have not been “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” know that major historical events have objectively taken place and identifiable historical individuals have actually existed.

Thus historical fiction, grounded in real events and persons, holds a different kind of credibility and authority from “pure” fiction, and it also counteracts speculative skepticism about the grounds of knowledge. As a civilizing antidote to contemporary confusion, it offers a saving hope of renewal, not least in a return to the common sense that was the bread and wine of thoughtful individuals from Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, and the American founders to Dickens, Lincoln, George Orwell, Martin Luther King Jr., and Solzhenitsyn.
>>>

from Modern Age https://modernagejournal.com/can-literacy-be-saved/251581/

M.D. Aeschliman taught at American, Swiss, and Italian universities for a half century. The new edition of his book The Restoration of Man was published in English in 2019 and in French in 2020 and he has edited paperback editions of novels by Charles Dickens and Malcolm Muggeridge.

A Review of Nin Andrews' Son of a Bird [by Dante Di Stefano]

Son of a Bird
Nin Andrews
Etruscan Press, 2025

A little more than a year ago, Nin Andrews asked me to write a blurb for her new book. This is what I wrote:

Son of a Bird confirms indisputably that Nin Andrews is the greatest living technician of the prose poem in America. Andrews ranks with Edson, Simic, Benedikt, and Tate, as a virtuoso in the form that calls all poetic form into question. Son of a Bird is a memoir unwinding in vibrant lyric shards, bravely exploring the racial dynamics, the sexual politics, and the disappointments and consolations of family life below the Mason-Dixon line. By turns staunchly bucolic, achingly painful, riotously funny, and ruinously alive, the world Andrews arrays around us in this book vibrates with curses and wishes, birdsong and shadow, sunlight and the black smoke of burning alfalfa fields caused by a cricket’s fiddling. Andrews speaks across time to her past self, to her gay father, to her autistic mother, and to the mid-twentieth century South—and in speaking thus, she enjoins her readers to scan the fields of their own pasts, hunting for “memories like scared mice scampering through the grass.” Like that other famous Southern genius, Andrews knows the past is never truly past, it just keeps piping away in the nest outside your living room. Son of a Bird reminds us to open all the windows, listen, and hum along.

A few months ago, the book arrived at my doorstep, a beautiful 5x7 copy, about the size of those City Lights Pocket Poets Series books that have turned on generations of readers to Ginsberg’s Howl and Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (Is there anything more synonymous with a wild youth in poetry than to read “Poem [“Lana Turner has collapsed!”]” on a rooftop from a Pocket Poets edition). All of that to say, I love the physical dimensions of Son of a Bird. Etruscan Press, a press that has published two books of mine, consistently puts out handsomely made poetry collections, and Son of a Bird continues that tradition. I’ve been carrying around this little gem of a book with me everywhere since its arrival, marveling at the way Andrews constellates a memoir across prose poems with such ease, velocity, and savoir faire. When I said in the blurb above that Andrews is the greatest living prose poet in America, I meant it, and this mighty little tome confirms it.   

Before the memoir even begins, Andrews acknowledges the slipperiness of the genre to begin with: “In any memoir there is so much one must leave out. And of course, all memory is flawed. As the youngest of six children, I have learned that each of my siblings tells a different version of our childhood.” The prose poem, as a form, which questions form itself, encourages the kind of slant-telling that the memoir inevitably slides into and embodies. Notably, Andrews begins the memoir with a lineated poem, “Dear Past Self,” in which she (the speaker? Nin?) revisits her childhood home and is greeted by a vision of her past self in the farmhouse window. The imagined past self continually writes journal entries to the future self, inside (and outside?) the poem. Past and future elide in the owl screech and swoop of the poem’s eternal present. Andrews ushers the reader into a world where words form on a page, in a sentence that resists enjambment, in the book of the body, in the mirror of a bygone day, and “drift away in schools of tiny black fish,” only to be reconstituted in the next prose poem. Among these apparitions and convolutions, Andrews’ childhood comes alive.

Andrews recounts a childhood full of phantoms and visitations, surrounded by farmhands and siblings and presided over by the quirks and kindnesses of her parents. During one of the many surgeries and illnesses that pocked her elementary school years, Andrews sees Death, a towering specter with the head and wings of a crow. In an even more astonishing turn, at the end of the first section, Andrews imagines the time before she was born, sitting in a limbo-like space with her unborn sisters and brothers, hoping not to be pulled into being. From the supernatural imaginary, Andrews daringly careens through her girlhood, gently examining the racial politics of her Southern upbringing through the figure of her Black nanny, Miss Mary, who dies when she is five, but whose presence radiates throughout the text (the idiomatic expression that titles the book, “Son of a Bird,” comes from her lips). Andrews also delicately examines her mother’s Asperger’s Syndrome, and her father’s homosexuality, against the familial and societal pressure to remain silent on these topics. Son of a Bird crescendos with Andrews’ suicide attempt and attendant psychiatric care for bipolar disorder during her college years. The subject matter sears, but, in Andrews’ hands, the bell jar never truly descends—Nin Andrews’ prose poetry is far too unruly and jaunty and soaring for that.  

Read this book. Dwell in the deep-down counter, original, spare, strange bravery of Nin Andrews’ prose poetry. You’ll find yourself mouthing “Little Pea” and “Son of a Bird” along the pastures and meadows and dirt roads of a numinous Charlottesville, Virginia, and you’ll be better for it.

Dante Di Stefano's most recent book is The Widowing Radiance (Bordighera Press, 2025)

"Go Youth" [by James Tate]

Go Youth

I was in a dreamstate and this was causing a problem
with the traffic. I felt lonely, like I’d missed the boat,
or I’d found the boat and it was deserted. In the middle
of the road a child’s shoe glistened. I walked around it.
It woke me up a little. The child had disappeared. Some
mysteries are better left alone. Others are dreary, distasteful,
and can disarrange a shadow into a thing of unspeakable beauty.
Whose child is that?

(1994)

Four Short Poems by Howard Nemerov

The God of This World

He smiles to see his children, born to sin,
Digging those foxholes there are no atheists in.

A Sacrificed Author

‘Father’, he cried, after the critics’ chewing,
‘Forgive them, for they know not what I’m doing.

Power to the People

Why are the stamps adorned with kings and presidents?
That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.

Mystery Story

Formal as minuet or sonnet,
It zeroes in on the guilty one;
But by the time I’m told who done it,
I can’t remember what he done.

Duke Rhino Speaks [by Mitch Sisskind]

The Words of Duke Rhino

1.

Never in his life had he said ipso facto
Nor quid est demonstratum had he
Ever spoken but one time he said viz.
It was after a night of smelt fishing
When we were just laying about and
He said to me, "When I was young
"I planned to snabble 1000 women
"Viz, Flo Eubanks, Karen Rozanski,
"Tina West, but I quit after 700 when
"I could not remember their names."
That was the only time he said viz.
As long as I knew him but one time
He said in toto about the smelt when
He said, "How many smelt in toto?

2.
He used to say things of that nature
And he also said and stuff that way
At the end of many sentences like
If he said, "Baseball, football, and
"Things of that nature" or if he said,
"It gets clogged up and polluted
"And stuff that way." Oh, he said
Things of that nature and stuff
That way so much that I started
Keeping track of which one he
Said more and it turned out that
Things of that nature won the prize
So to speak and he actually said
So to speak quite often as well.

3.
Often he spoke euphemistically about
Going to the bathroom like if we were
In the company of ladies he would say
"I have got to see a man about a dog"
Whereupon he would excuse himself
From the table or wherever it was.
He would say whipping your mule
If the subject of male self-gratification
Arose and he liked to say that he had
Achieved coitus rather than employ
One of the long-worn-out vulgarities;
But once when a guy said the beast
With two backs Duke Rhino put him
Into next Wednesday for saying that

(The picture above is a self-portrait by Edward Hopper)

The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Three: Joseph Richie [by Angela Ball]

Dewpoint

Hold this that has grown
It takes to your hand
As if learning in the ways of tension
Through the acolytes of water
But since the sodden beams
Can for you resume
Overwhelm them
With your fastness
In mass grounding
Of friction.
                 -Joseph Richie

Joseph Richie (b. 1990) is a freelance editor, music critic, translator, and interpreter.  His poetry and translations have appeared in Cimarron Review, La Traductière, Minetta Review, and Maximalist.  He is the author of four chapbooks, including Nothing Left Open Can Keep You from Factory Hollow Press, and Fathom from Gnosis Press, from which this poem is excerpted.  Also from Gnosis is a forthcoming full-length collection, Species of Thirst.  He lives on Long Island, NY.

Photo by Lena Zycinsky

The New York School Diaspora (New Series) Part Three: Joseph Richie

Joseph Richie’s “Dewpoint” is supremely engaging. The poem’s brevity, its compactness, makes it our true intimate. With it at its “point”—its moment of greatest saturation--we see and hear it all at once.

It begins with a command. We are to hold something “that has grown”—that Is, arrived from nothing. We don’t take it. It “takes to” us, like a newborn to its mother or a duck to its imprint.

What is an acolyte? Someone who assists in a service.  Perhaps I’m an acolyte for this poem. Perhaps every reader is. A useful celebrant. A proponent of mysteries. The speaker is instructional, the poem’s brief duration made durable with strong stresses. It supports only two adjectives: “sodden” and “mass”—the second seeming already halfway to nounhood.

We find ourselves “acolytes of water.” Whelming is done by water—to “Overwhelm” is to do water one better.

Every day there’s the question, what are we to do? Perhaps the answer is to help in the furtherance of something.

It might be useful to revisit the poem’s occasion, the moment of change its title announces. In Kenneth Koch, the boiling point is serious for water. For William Carlos Williams, in Spring and All, spring begins when things “grip down.” What we witness and join is a crisis, an arrival.

What are the poem’s “sodden beams”?  Disintegrating architecture? Strands of light after rain? Why must we resist them? Perhaps because it’s imperative is to keep living, to resist the passive, the “sodden.”

We may think of the forces we learned in grade school—the teeter-totter lever, the planetary tether ball--thinking to leave them behind with Dick, Jane, and Spot in their world where everything has one career.

This poem is not a goodbye but a “mass grounding.”  This poem doesn’t fan out at the end. It clenches.

What is our fastness? Most often it is a thing of mountains.

Hold fast, we are sometimes told. How can a static gesture be “fast”?

Friction is the poem running counter to the usual motive of language, to provide intelligence.  The poem frustrates expectation so as to arrive at something more interesting. It is not obfuscation to resist paraphrase, the way a sky diver might resist a parachute.

We are invited to think of the elemental, how water is urgent when we die, when we give birth.

Friction seems a mechanical thing, happening when machinery needs oil. But it is first of all natural: the shrug of one tectonic plate against another.

At the end of Joseph Richie’s fascinating poem, we not only have our instructions, but feel the power to implement them. With friction as ally, who can lose?  We can be glad to have this poem as our teacher, demonstrating mystery and meaning.

At the dew point, humidity is 100%. Water in the air liquifies onto the ground, onto plant life, windows, car hoods. It becomes what an old song calls “the foggy foggy dew.” The internet tells us that “Foggy Dew" or "Foggy, Foggy Dew" is an English folk song that migrated from the South of England to the Southern United States. On all that it touches, dew leaves a silvery sheen. I think the song does, too. And this poem, dew itself. -- Angela Ball

"Silence" [by Marianne Moore]

Silence

My father used to say,
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat—
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth—
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
Nor was he insincere in saying, “Make my house your inn.”
Inns are not residences.

Questions of Travel with John Kenney and Elizabeth Bishop [by Nin Andrews]

There are two kinds of folks in this world, my father used to say.  Those who like to travel—they like to move fast, the faster the better, like your mother, and those who want to stay in one place forever, like me. He would often elaborate: I don’t even like vacations. I would rather every day be just like yesterday, ending with a Bourbon and a quiet sit out on the patio on a summer evening with nothing to do but listen to the insect songs.  I am thinking about that now as a I pack for Maine, feeling the familiar sense of dread rising with the realization that I will leave home on the farm soon.  My favorite days are the dullest ones with nothing to do and nowhere to go, when the hours ahead are like a sea of blank pages to fill with any dream or no dream at all.

The worst part of course is the long drive. Thinking about it, I am reminded of those dreadful family trips we took when my parents packed the family into our huge station wagon with no AC. Those trips happened only a few times before my dad put a stop to them.  I am pretty sure he would relate to the speaker in this poem, “Family Town” by John Kenney, which I read on George Bilgere’s Poetry Town. As usual, George Bilgere's comment is priceless: 

Why I Chose This Poem

And so the season of summer begins, along with that summer staple universally dreaded by all parents: the car trip. My parents took me and my two sisters on many such trips—one of them might have involved Mount Rushmore—although by now they have all blurred into one endless ordeal of car sickness, frequent stops at Stuckey’s, and the question we uttered every ten minutes: Are we there yet? I can’t remember if we ever made it to Mount Rushmore. I hope so...

On a more contemplative note, I am also reminded of Elizabeth Bishop's famous poem: 

Questions of Travel

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
—For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tear stains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep traveling, traveling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theaters?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
—Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
—A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
—Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
—Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
—And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveler takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

A.E. Stallings: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

______________________________________________________________________

Empathy

My love, I’m grateful tonight

Our listing bed isn’t a raft

Precariously adrift

As we dodge the coast guard light,

And clasp hold of a girl and a boy.

I’m glad we didn’t wake

Our kids in the thin hours, to take

Not a thing, not a favorite toy,

And didn’t hand over our cash

To one of the smuggling rackets,

That we didn’t buy cheap life jackets

No better than bright orange trash

And less buoyant. I’m glad that the dark

Above us is not deeply twinned

Beneath us, and moiled with wind,

And we don’t scan the sky for a mark,

Any mark, that demarcates a shore

As the dinghy starts taking on water.

I’m glad that our six-year-old daughter,

Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor

In the bottom bunk, and our son

With his broken arm’s high and dry,

That the ceiling is not seeping sky,

With our journey but hardly begun.

Empathy isn’t generous,

It’s selfish. It’s not being nice

To say I would pay any price

Not to be those who’d die to be us.

__________________________________________________________________________________

A.E. Stallings is an American poet in Greece. She has published four volumes of verse and a selected poems (This Afterlife), the last with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the U.S. and Carcanet in the U.K. She has also published three volumes of verse translation, most recently an illustrated The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice with Paul Dry Books. A prose book, Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon, is just out with Paul Dry Books. Stallings is currently the Oxford Professor of Poetry. [Author photo by Kostas Mantziaris.]
_______________________________________________________________________________

                       Théodore Géricault, The Raft of Medusa (1818–19), oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris

“Where Ignorance Is Bliss, Tis Folly To Be Wise”: David Lehman on Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”

from SLATE 

JAN. 22 2013 9:19 AM

“Where Ignorance Is Bliss, Tis Folly To Be Wise”

David Lehman on why Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” is an overlooked poetic masterpiece.

By David Lehman

 

Favorite examples of poetic endings include the interrogatives of Shelley (“If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”) and Yeats (“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”), the declarative Milton (“They also serve who only stand and wait”), the ecstatic Coleridge (“For he on honeydew hath fed/ and drunk the milk of paradise”), the reiterated premonitions of Robert Frost (“And miles to go before I sleep”).

In this company belongs Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (written in 1742, published five years later), an overlooked masterpiece from the most underrated century of English verse. Gray’s ode ends, “Where ignorance is bliss,/ Tis folly to be wise,” an assertion that has attained the status of a proverb and can be discussed for many fruitful hours on its own or in relation to the Garden of Eden in Chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis.

In his Short History of English Literature, George Saintsbury says Gray was “probably the best-read man of letters of his time in Europe.” What he lacked in originality and inspiration he made up for in fastidious craftsmanship. His poetic output was small but choice. He subscribed to the idea, popular in the century of Alexander Pope, that excellence of expression trumped originality of concept. Gray felt, too, that true poetry was incompatible with the discourse of the tribe, and it is his artificial diction that earned him an attack from Wordsworth in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth quoted the whole of Gray's sonnet mourning the death of his friend Richard West saying that only five lines were worth keeping. Gray’s best-known poem remains his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” which even Samuel Johnson, no fan of the poet, praised: “The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

The “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” in its general contours, is a romantic poem of return, with some similarities to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”  In both poems the poet returns to a place after an interval of years; he feels the change as a loss; he recollects the past and looks to the future. Wordsworth’s poem travels from melancholy at the passing of youth to the compensations of maturity. But Gray’s poem is more radical, the poet less willing to talk himself out of his gloom.

I have read Gray’s “Ode” many times and it has never failed to astonish me. It begins conventionally enough with a description of Eton seen from afar. “Happy” are the hills, “pleasing” is the shade. We anticipate an idealized evocation of the life of boys on the playing fields of Eton (where, 70 years later, the Duke of Wellington would say that the battle of Waterloo was won). But even as Gray summons up the image of the boys at their games, we get hints that Eton remembered is what Frost called a “momentary stay against confusion.” The boys “snatch a fearful joy,” we learn in the fourth stanza. The fifth stanza states the enviable condition of youth: “the tear forgot as soon as shed.” But nothing prepares us for the change in intensity signaled by the opening of stanza six: “Alas, regardless of their doom,/ The little victims play.” At the sound of the words doom and victim, the reader is in the position of a batter who had expected a fast ball and looks in amazement and dismay as an off-speed pitch curves over the heart of the plate. [on left: illustration by William Blake]

There follows an unrelenting list of pains, grievances, ailments, and sufferings—a catalogue without parallel in English lyric poetry. The vision of the life of man is grim, as grim as in Hobbes (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”), but the writing is so controlled and has such authority that one finds it delicious despite the dispiriting content. The balanced clauses reveal a subtlety of distinction—between, for example, the tender-hearted who feels “another’s pain” while “the unfeeling” is mired in his own.

Do we agree with Gray’s conclusion? Do we want to know the doctor’s bad news? Do we cherish our illusions rather than choose what Freud prescribes as “an education in reality”? Would Eve and Adam have been “wise” to reject the fruits of knowledge? These are different questions—not variants of the same question—and their urgency speaks to the epigrammatic power of what Gray wrote.

"Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College"

By Thomas Gray

Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy Shade;
And ye, that from the stately brow
Of Windsor's heights the expanse below
Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among
Wanders the hoary Thames along
His silver-winding way.

Ah happy hills, ah pleasing shade,
Ah fields beloved in vain,
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales, that from ye blow,
A momentary bliss bestow,
As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.

Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race
Disporting on thy margent green
The paths of pleasure trace,
Who foremost now delight to cleave
With pliant arm thy glassy wave?
The captive linnet which enthrall?
What idle progeny succeed
To chase the rolling circle's speed,
Or urge the flying ball?

While some on earnest business bent
Their murmuring labours ply
'Gainst graver hours, that bring constraint
To sweeten liberty:
Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry:
Still as they run they look behind,
They hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy.

Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed,
Less pleasing when possessed;
The tear forgot as soon as shed,
The sunshine of the breast:
Their buxom health of rosy hue,
Wild wit, invention ever-new,
And lively cheer of vigour born;
The thoughtless day, the easy night,
The spirits pure, the slumbers light,
That fly the approach of morn.

Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond today:
Yet see how all around 'em wait
The ministers of human fate,
And black Misfortune's baleful train!
Ah, show them where in ambush stand
To seize their prey the murtherous band!
Ah, tell them, they are men!

These shall the fury Passions tear,
The vultures of the mind,
Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear,And Shame that skulks behind;
Or pining Love shall waste their youth,
Or Jealousy with rankling tooth,
That inly gnaws the secret heart,
And Envy wan, and faded Care,
Grim-visaged comfortless Despair,
And Sorrow's piercing dart.

Ambition this shall tempt to rise,
Then whirl the wretch from high,
To bitter Scorn a sacrifice,
And grinning Infamy.
The stings of Falsehood those shall try,
And hard Unkindness' altered eye,
That mocks the tear it forced to flow;
And keen Remorse with blood defiled,
And moody Madness laughing wild
Amid severest woe.

Lo, in the vale of years beneath
A grisly troop are seen,
The painful family of Death,
More hideous than their Queen:
This racks the joints, this fires the veins,
That every labouring sinew strains,
Those in the deeper vitals rage:
Lo, Poverty, to fill the band,
That numbs the soul with icy hand,
And slow-consuming Age.

To each his sufferings: all are men,
Condemned alike to groan;
The tender for another's pain,
The unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/classic_poems/2013/01/david_lehman_on_why_thomas_gray_s_ode_on_a_distant_prospect_of_eton_college.html

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

Ozymandias:
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

Emily Dickinson
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html

Tintern Abbey
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/06/a-trip-to-tintern-abbey-by-david-lehman.html

To His Coy Mistress
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/08/seizing-the-moment-on-andrew-marvells-to-his-coy-mistress-by-david-lehman.html

Ben Jonson's "My Picture Left in Scotland"
https://marshhawkpress.org/commentary-by-david-lehman-ben-jonsons-my-picture-left-in-scotland/

Baseball-Music Quiz [by Alan Ziegler]

Which one does not belong with the others?

How does a human fly? Dilo Paulo knows [By Tracy Danison]

Dilo Paulo dances his solo piece, “Ekesa Sanko”. Photo courtesy June Events 2025 © Dilo Paulo

Dilo Paulo, born in Angola but now working from Brazil, did a solo dance show called Ekesa Sanko for June Events 2025. “Ekesa Sanko” is a man who has lost his past. He decides to wander and, as a wanderer, renew his sense of where he comes from, understand his present and decide his future. A story with just enough irony to makes sense.

Strong and frankly beautiful African body glistening with thick white greasepaint tattoos – pips like pearls arced over large eyes, Fibonacci spirals on the breast, a thick arrow up the spine, long lines streaked down the arms – Dilo Paulo dances inside a mix of stirring ballads and Martin Luther King’s I-have-a-dream speech. I remember that speech, remember watching it on TV, remember some of us heard a unusual wave slop on the hard sand of a faraway beach – Times They Are A-Changin’.

 

Dilo Paulo dances his solo piece, “Ekesa Sanko”. Photo courtesy June Events 2025 © Dilo Paulo

Dilo Paulo makes his body the sinew of perception. Every tick of the man, every kick, every reach, every crouch uncovers new views, reveals. That man can dance! I think, choreographer Amala Dianor should make Dilo Paulo Christ in the former’s hip hop shot at Carlo Gesualdo’s darkly baroque Tenebrae Reponsoria (Passion of Christ). Then – just a second has passed since I wandered – Dilo Paulo breaks in. Out on the meadow, he is showing how he flies.

On the strain of his powerful muscles, Dilo Paulo rises off the yellow-green grass.

In the force of Paulo’s elegance, I see how a human does it.

They plunge against the air, plunge against the grasp of the earth. There’s no hope of teasing the sun, let alone of breaching the stars. They stay aloft not even the blink of an eye, yet a human’s flight is clean, clear and, especially, right. As Dilo Paulo’s feet slap the earth, how perfectly, perfectly true, a human may fly.

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I saw Dilo Paulo’s “Ekesa Sanko” inside the Atelier de Paris performance space on 7 June and again on 10 June 2025 from a picnic table in the meadow in front of the Théâtre de l’Aquarium. Both places are part of the Cartoucherie grounds in the Bois de Vincennes. “Ekesa Sanko” was part of the June Events 2025 program and jointly produced with Saison Brésil-France 2025, an international culture program that features work from one of 100 countries every two years.

Dilo Paulo performed “Ekesa Sanko” assisted by Lenna Siqueira, artistic director of the dance troupe Corpus Entre Mundos, and producer Sergio Bacelar of Movimento Internacional de Dança et Instituto Bem Cultural. Along with Lenna Siqueira, Dilo Paulo – in 2011 named best dancer in his native Angola – is founder of the dance exchange program Intercâmbio de Dança Angola e Brasil. He today lives in Brasilia, where he manages the dance platform Ngangu Dance.

Other June Events 2025 performers

Click on the name to know more: 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, Linda Hayford, Rémy Héritier, Marie-Caroline Hominal, Mohamed Issaoui, Rebecca Journo, Wanjiru Kamuyu, Daniel Larrieu, Joanne Leighton, Candice Martel, Ikue Nakagawa, Alban Ovanessian, Dilo Paulo, Pierre Pontvianne, Manuel Roque, Nina Santes, Liz Santoro et Pierre Godard, Jéssica Teixeira, Vânia Vaneau, Louise Vanneste

Expect, suppose or avoid: the novel's universal gambit? [By Sean Ashton]

Cover, "Massive Massive Oil Slick". Courtesy Sean Ashton

To anyone who has never tried to write one, novels might seem like they are conceived whole: a glittering prize that the author just had to reach out and grasp. In reality, it’s more like starting fire with a flint.

A novel can be sparked by a tiny detail: a remark overheard on a train, the wording of a public announcement.

Massive Massive Oil Slick is the second of what will eventually be a trilogy of novels written to constraints. The first was Living in a Land (2017), a fictional memoir written in sentences constructed only in the negative.

Massive Massive Oil Slick consists entirely of sentences that begin with the verbs “expect”, “suppose” or “avoid”. It first took shape when I was coming down the motorway and saw this electronic sign:

EXPECT DELAYS

Something I’d seen a hundred times suddenly glowed with literary potential. I pictured a string of scenarios, all conveyed in the same imperative mood:

EXPECT DELAYS

Expect major delays and minor delays: three-mile tailbacks, slow-moving traffic,

temporary lights on the outskirts of Norwich.

Expect an accident,

an accident approaching Welwyn Garden City,

a chemical spillage over all three lanes, speed restrictions between junctions seven and twelve.

In theory, you could programme that electronic sign to say anything.

I imagined what might happen if a fiction writer was at the helm, spewing out thoughts to passing motorists:

Expect anger.

Expect joy, joy interspersed with anger,

anger with joy,

anger and joy in equal proportions,

 till joy is eclipsed by anger, or anger by joy.

Expect decline.

Expect steady and sudden decline,

in fortune and wellbeing,

a decline in wellbeing in places as far afield as Corby and Inverness,

London, Manchester, and Yorkshire.

I found I’d segued directly from traffic to human emotion, as though they were part of the same spectrum.

I continued, broaching social unrest, love, relationships, weather, all in a generic, automated voice that had now become unaccountably human. To accentuate the voice’s authority, I moved the ‘action’ to an institutional setting, a seminar room called ‘411B’, addressing my audience in a continuous monologue that was beginning to sound like a prophecy.

How the audience got there, why they came, is a mystery. All I know is that the reader of Massive Massive Oil Slick is one among them.

At some point, the voice became less generic. I started hearing the words in a Liverpool accent. A female voice, tangy, strident, like disinfectant cutting through grease.

It was Josie Jones’s voice.

Josie Jones was one half of the band Big Hard Excellent Fish, best known for their 1990 song Imperfect List, in which she narrates a litany of her and bandmate Pete Wylie’s most hated things:

Fucking bastard Thatcher…the Poll Tax…the sending off of Len Shackleton…

Scouse impersonator…massive, massive oil slick ...

“Massive, massive oil slick” seemed to describe the torrent of mind fluid that my “expect" constraint had let loose, so I chose it as a title for whatever it was I was doing.

 

Oil slicks on Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela. The image’s water and land components were processed and stretched separately then “stitched” back together into one image. On land, the red colour indicates vegetated areas, the bluish areas show paved surfaces and the browns are bare land. Image courtesy NASA Earth Observatory

Josie Jones’s voice would cut in only now and then, like an intercepted transmission. I heard it when I got angry and welcomed it as a counterpoint to my own somewhat guarded delivery. That voice must have lain buried in my subconscious for 30 years, dormant until I embarked on a project that had a paratactic affinity with Imperfect List.

When the verb “expect” got too monotonous, I introduced “suppose”, a milder imperative that was perfect for smuggling in non sequiturs:

Suppose

there is no more snow.

Suppose

there is no snow at all

but a substantial increase in misogyny…or

a decrease in misogyny

and an increase in violence.

“Avoid” came later.

Avoid

cider

was the first injunction.

Avoid

artichokes

was another.

Why “expect”, “suppose” or “avoid”?

I wonder if it’s because these three verbs comprise the basic overture that all novels make to the reader?

A novel raises our expectations by setting a scene. But suppose these expectations aren’t met? Why has the author avoided them? Probably in order to tell a different story from the one that first seemed to be unfolding.

Massive Massive Oil Slick has no plot. Not in the sense of a sequence of events that happen to people.

But things do happen – just not to any characters.

In the absence of characters, the reader becomes the protagonist, invited to participate in various imagined scenarios, thought experiments that encompass themes both profound and mundane: homelessness, drug trials, extra-terrestrial intelligence, Brazil nuts, carveries, social exclusion…

As with Living in a Land, the first novel in the trilogy, the intention of Massive Massive Oil Slick is to portray how a mind gets from one thing to another. The more idiosyncratic the moves, the more tenacious the logic.

This second novel’s tropes are borrowed from stand-up: call-backs, repetition, the rule of three, and – above all – the observational comic’s tendency to appoint themselves official investigators of social phenomena.

But Massive Massive Oil Slick is only intermittently funny. Much of the time it is menacing.

And the entity doing the monologue – part-official, part absurd; part-automated, part-human – doesn’t know when it is being funny and when it is being menacing. It cannot read the crowd. It barely looks up at them.

Except when someone arrives late to 411B.

_________

“Massive Massive Oil Slick” (ISBN 978-1-7385079-5-5) is the second in poet and novelist Sean Ashton’s projected trilogy of novels "written to constraints”. Published by Ma Bibliothèque, it is now available on-line. An official launch of the book will held at South London Gallery on 23 July 2025. Other recent works by Ashton include “The Way to Work” (2023) and “Sampler” (2020).

Earlier “The Best American Poetry” essays on literary creation by Sean Ashton include “Performance art meets literary étrangeté: Lina Lapelytè’s “The Mutes” makes my uncanny familiar” and “On the ideal novel: Latent in every sentence is an alternative”. Sean Ashton lives in London.

NYSP::IOU – Elinor Nauen / David Beaudouin

NYSP :: IOU is a series devoted to exploring a single question: how has the New York School of Poetry (NYSP)—its aesthetics and shenanigans—influenced contemporary poetics in general and certain poets in particular?

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Elinor Nauen

 

This month, we are chatting with poet Elinor Nauen, who landed in New York City in November 1976 on the advice of another poet, Joel Oppenheimer. They had met through a chance encounter in Maine, where Nauen was then living. “Joel told me I should move to New York and be a poet. So, I did! There wasn't any thought. There wasn't any planning. I had a hundred dollars and a car. What else did I need?” Almost 50 years later, she still lives in the same East Village apartment she found soon after her arrival.

 

DB: Can you talk about those first few months in New York City?

EN: The first thing that happened a week after I arrived was that I attended a reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. The occasion was to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Frank O'Hara. And the only reason I went was because the one name I recognized on the poster was Allen Ginsberg. Soon after, I started signing up for poetry workshops at the Project. My first one was led by the poet Jim Brodey, who would play Debussy or Chopin, then we'd write poems and read poems. It was there I met my lifelong friend and fellow poet Maggie Dubris.

 

Allen Ginsberg reading - the Frank O'Hara Memorial Reading at the Poetry Project, November 1976

 

DB: How did your own sense of poetry, and your own poems, evolve from there?

EN: In an essay I wrote for a 2012 conference at the National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine, on “Poetry and Poetics of the 1980s,” I said this:

“We weren’t—or felt we weren’t—under scrutiny. So here was a freedom that fueled a lot of poetry. We weren’t distracted by career possibilities. We didn’t imagine a career in poetry—even those with great ambitions didn’t see how that might work out. There was definitely the feeling that you had to choose between poetry and a ‘straight’ life.”

A good example of that was in 1977, when Maggie, her roommate Rachel, and I began calling ourselves the Consumptive Poets League. We decided to do a group reading, so I put an announcement in the Village Voice and added, “KOFF Magazine will be available,” which I made up on the spot. When I told Maggie and Rachel that we had to do a magazine, they were like, oh, okay, we'll do a magazine!

I often tell young poets to start a reading series and invite somebody you want to read with and who you want to hear your work. Then do a magazine and publish people you like, along with your own work, so they get to know you. Very quickly, that's exactly what we did.

DB: It sounds like what you learned right away was not so much an aesthetic as an attitude!

EN: In a way, yes, not an aesthetic but: anything goes, everything goes. if I had any aesthetics about poetry, it was that I really liked having a posse, having a party. And to feel like this is fun and exciting and worthwhile. If you start out with an assumption about how a poem is going to work, you're doomed to fail. You can start out with that assumption, but you have to pretty much leave open the very plausible chance that it's going to write itself quite differently. Whoever writes a poem and gets to the end and goes, yep, that's exactly the last line I was expecting, they’re just reciting Tennyson or something.

DB: You have mentioned that the poetry scene then was tilted, with more men than women poets at the time. Was that an issue?

EN: Not really. At that time, nobody particularly cared if they went to college and had a career. So, the women of my generation found this really sweet spot of doing whatever we wanted, and nobody was paying much attention to us. It had that drawback of, you know, if you wanted a career, but it also gave us the freedom, as O’Hara wrote, to go on your nerve, and on your whim! As women poets, we could resist, hang out with friends, and take chances. 

DB: What about influence? I’m sensing that everyone was influencing everyone else.

EN: I feel like there's 50 answers to that question, because each one was important. Everyone and everything served as an influence. We all were collaborating, listening to, and competing with each other. In the early 80s, the atmosphere of poetry in our scene was at least as important as any particular poem—that we were all poets, doing poetry all the time. My poem, "Hooray to Poetry" speaks to this. If we had a theory, it was that everyone was a poet, or could be and should be, and that art was produced by the many, not the individual. It's the "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” kind of thing. Once you make it yours, it becomes yours.

I feel like I've collaborated with people who don't even know who I am. By writing 600 stanzas of ottava rima in my book, So Late into the Night, I've collaborated with Byron. Maybe that's what influence is, whether you use the word or not. It is figuring out how to continue.

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Hooray for Poetry

 

Poetry is a great big party

            for all your friends.

As you know them all by name

            you put them in the poem.

Hi Maggie Hi Rachel Hey Greg Hi Ei Hi.

The New York poets should play musical

            lives with the rest of the world.

                        Then everyone would have a penpal.

Poetry is golden oldies

            let’s go to the hop

                        have dinner & take a walk with you

                                    steamy August, with thighs & eyes to match

Poetry is a home movie

            of your mouth & fingers & heart

Poetry is talking till 4 a.m.

            hanging up having accomplished a great deal

going to the movies

            sitting in the front row

                        turning round to see who you know that’s there

hanging out at the bar

            talking about everyone

                        who isn’t there or who is & balling

                                    all the rest

running into people on the street

            telling them to tell someone else to call you

wearing a terrific reedy shirt from 14th street.

Poetry is a great big party.

            I think we should invite as many people

                        as know my name.                                                       

 

         - Elinor Nauen  [1981]

 

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Elinor Nauen’s books include The Alphabet’s Dilemma, Now That I Know Where I’m Going, Snowbound (a dos-à- dos book with Stephen Willis), My Marriage A to Z, So Late into the Night, CARS & Other Poems, American Guys and, as editor, Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women writers on cars & the road and Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women writers on baseball. Her work has appeared in New American Writing, FICTION, Exquisite Corpse, The World, KOFF, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Aethlon, Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, National Endowment for the Humanities Magazine, American Book Review, and other magazines and anthologies. She edits Julebord with Maureen Owen and for 12 years co-hosted, with Martha King, the reading series Prose Pros. Elinor hails from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and for many years has lived in New York’s East Village with her husband, the novelist Johnny Stanton, and their cat Lefty, who recently advised her in a dream that when they are out in public she should refer to him as Mr. Money.

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