The Best American Poetry

F. R. Leavis on Keats: A Close Reading

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    Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
    Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
    Or on the wealth of globèd peonies...

 The 'globèd' gives the sensation of the hand voluptuously cupping a peony, and it might be argued that this effect can be explained in terms of the isolated word. But actually it will be found that 'globed' seems to be with so rich a palpability what it says, to enact in the pronouncing so gloating a self-enclosure, because of the general co-operation of the context. Most obviously, without the preceding 'glut', the meaning of which strongly reinforces the suggestive value of the alliterated beginning of 'globed', this latter word would lose a very great deal of its luxurious palpability. But the pervasive suggestion of luxury has a great part, too, in the effect of the word; for what is said explicitly in 'wealth' (and in 'rich' in the next line) is being conveyed by various means everywhere in the poem.

The palpability of 'globèd' -- the word doesn't merely describe, or refer to, the sensation, but gives a tactual image. It is as if one were actually cupping the peony with one's hand.
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from the archive; first posted September 5, 2012

"Fantasia on Kierkegaard and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' [by David Lehman]

Back in 1983 I wrote a piece titled "Fantasia on Kierkegaard and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" that Laurence Goldstein published in the Spring 1984 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. Wonder of wonders, it is on the Internet, this effort to "conjecture, or 'make book,'" on what the Danish philosopher would have made of the great medieval romance.

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mqrarchive/act2080.0023.002/00000129

and here's my poem of the day, May 26, 1999:

May 26

by David Lehman

In Rotterdam I'm
going to speak about
the state of poetry
on a panel with a Pole
and a Turk. It's worth
being alive to utter
that sentence. A
German from Fürth,
my father's home town
and Henry Kissinger's,
will preside. His name
is Joachim Sartorius,
which sounds like a
pseudonym Kierkegaard
might use to condemn
the habits of his age
and ours when nothing
ever happens but the
publicity is immediate
and the town meeting
ends with the people
convinced they have
rebelled so now they
can go home quietly
having spent a most
pleasant evening

-- from The Evening Sun (2002)

and from an interview with Ace Boggess in The Adirondack Review (2020)

AB: Finally, an issue you writers face is doubt, both in themselves and their work. You’ve had a long and successful career so far. In spite of that, what doubts stick with you, and how have you adapted to them over the years?

DL: Doubt. I have a master’s degree in doubt. The reading list for my oral certification examination included three books by Kierkegaard, Freud’s “Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” Thomas Mann, Henry James, Kafka, Borges, Mark Twain, the Confessions of Augustine, and Emily Dickinson. (My thesis was on Dickinson’s conception of “despair.”) Financial doubt, which can be terrifying, can go away of its own accord, with no changes in your circumstances. On the other hand, doubt regarding the value of your work, whether as a poet or author or editor, endures, because there is no way to demolish it. You never overcome the fear that your work may be as mortal as your body. There are no guarantees. After a while, you don’t think about it. There are other risks you are running. Keats thought that to be a poet, you had to be comfortable with half-truths, contradictions, ambiguities, doubts. You never want to disagree with Keats on such matters.

Ace Boggess Interviews the Author of "Playlist"

Interview with David Lehman

by Ace Boggess

 

Q: You’ve been working on a new volume of daily poems like those collected in both The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun. An interesting year to do that. Your daily poems have a powerful sense of movement, not just in the narratives but in the vision of daily life you describe. How have you adapted your writing to the pandemic and forced stillness of quarantines and shutdowns?

 

A: I start the same way: turn on the music, think of something to say, and go. My brush with my own mortality when I went through cancer is like a light wind that grazes my cheek every once in a while. The virus that is on everyone’s mind has made me nervous. For good reason; I am at high risk. There’s been no shortage of bad news, alarming news, distressing news. While I figure that some aspects of the current situation will sneak into my poems, I don’t plan on it. It just happens.

The reason I turn to poetry is not to confront Satan’s universe of death but to affirm the opposite – to take the side of life, freedom, and the imagination.   

 

Q: Your work often meditates on or refers to classic films and songs (Playlist). Could you talk a bit about how these things inspire you and the place of pop culture in modern poetry?

  

A: By writing about what you love well, you enliven your poems, and so you have a better chance of catching the reader’s attention and holding it. The movies and music I love need to be perpetuated. Posterity can always use a helping hand. So I want to do my part to spread the word about, say, To Be Or Not To Be with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard in 1943, or Thelonious Monk’s “Monk’s Mood.” With luck I may be able to recruit new fans.

 

Q: Is there a subject you’ve tried unsuccessfully to capture in poetry, or perhaps a better way to put it, what subjects do you struggle to get down on paper?

 

A: When I was a very young man the war in Vietnam was raging and, like all the other poets, I wrote anti-war poems. But the poems of that period that I prize the most – by Ammons, Ashbery, Schuyler, Koch, Merrill, Bishop – have little to do with the news of the day. I detest politics; Clausewitz’s famous dictum has it that war is the continuation of politics by other means, and that may remain true if you invert the terms.

 

Q: As series editor of Best American Poetry, you read much more poetry than most folks. What is the last poem you read that you wished you had written, and what was it that made that piece so powerful?

 

A: Mary Jo Salter is a poet I greatly admire. Two terrific poems from her book Nothing By Design, which I just read, are “No Second Try” and “Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.” I love many poems in God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike by Stanley Moss, a wonderful poet whose work is not nearly as well-known and celebrated as it ought to be.

 

Q: Finally, an issue young writers face is doubt, both in themselves and their work. You’ve had a long and successful career so far. In spite of that, what doubts stick with you, and how have you adapted to them over the years?

 

A: Doubt. I have a master’s degree in doubt. The reading list for my oral certification examination included three books by Kierkegaard, Freud’s “Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” Thomas Mann, Henry James, Kafka, Borges, Mark Twain, the Confessions of Augustine, and Emily Dickinson. (My thesis was on Dickinson’s conception of “despair.”) Financial doubt, which can be terrifying, can go away of its own accord, with no changes in your circumstances. On the other hand, doubt regarding the value of your work, whether as a poet or author or editor, endures, because there is no way to demolish it. You never overcome the fear that your work may be as mortal as your body. There are no guarantees. After a while, you don’t think about it. There are other risks you are running. Keats thought that to be a poet, you had to be comfortable with half-truths, contradictions, ambiguities, doubts. You never want to disagree with Keats on such matters.

 

from The Adirondack Review. For the seven recent daily poems accompanying Ace Boggess's interview-- all from late September, early October 2020 -- please click here.

Danusha Lameris Draws an Ace [by Ace Boggess]

EXPLORATION OF THE GRAND

“Dust” by Danusha Lameris

https://poems.com/poem/dust/
https://www.aprweb.org/poems/dust 

The universe or the smaller universe of subatomic particles, the heights of philosophy or the depths of psychic disruption and despair, divinities or absences, science or the unknown—the poems I love often ponder what’s beyond our grasp, or what holds us firmly in its. Tracy K. Smith’s book Life on Mars is filled with these meditative transcendences, as is Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In “Dust,” Danusha Lameris explores the Grand in the most common remnant of being. She shares wisdom from her grandmother and Gandhi, then fittingly ends with a question: “What could be more loyal, / more lonely, and unsung?” Any exploration of the Grand leaves the reader with new questions to replace those that have been answered on the way.

-- Ace Boggess

The poem appeared on the Poetry Daily  website on Friday, July 31, 2020.

Emily Alexander Draws an Ace [by Ace Boggess]

REVERENCE AND IRREVERENCE AT THE SAME TIME

“Meredith Is Crying and I Am Too” by Emily Alexander

http://www.glass-poetry.com/journal/2019/august/alexander-meredith.html 

One of the greatest things a poem can do is pull a surprise laugh out of the reader when solemnity is all that’s expected. Mark Halliday, Stephen Dunn, and Dick Allen are masters of this. The reader moves along in beautiful sadness, and then, suddenly, laughter. In Emily Alexander’s “Meredith Is Crying and I Am Too,” a richly detailed meditation on the Emergency Room, the serious tone stops to elbow readers in the side. “a bomb rib-lodged in a man’s chest / then two train commuters / skewered onto a hand rail so I shove / a spoonful of peanut butter in my mouth / to shut me up,” Alexander writes, and already the bleak moments feel lighter. Or: “I woke up to pee then I found / my keys drove home I barely made / a dent in night it dented me right / back.” This poem bares a moment, revealing both its tragic and comic sides: reverence and irreverence, existential absurdity … life.

Keegan Lester Draws an Ace [by Ace Boggess]

HIGH ENERGY AND MOVEMENT

“a river chipped with stars,

night continues on without me.” by Keegan Lester

http://www.poolpoetry.com/poet-keegan-lester.html

What first drew me to David Lehman’s daily poems twenty years ago, and more recently the books of Matthew Lippman, is the pure kinetic energy of them. These poems travel great distances in just a page or two. They are like taking a trip from New York to Florida but winding up in California, while depicting all the stops along the way. Keegan Lester’s poem “a river chipped with stars, / night continues on without me.” does this (as do so many of his poems). This poem spins, spirals, sidesteps, dances. It dovetails a bit, yet leaves the reader in a new and unfamiliar place by the end.

Kaveh Akbar Gets an Ace [by Ace Boggess]

A SENSE OF CONNECTION TO THE FAMILIAR (BUT STRANGE TO OTHERS)

“Portrait of the Alcoholic, with Craving” by Kaveh Akbar

http://bostonreview.net/poetry/NPM-2016-kaveh-akbar-portrait-alcoholic-craving 

We can’t all be doctors, lawyers, convicts, or carnies. But some of us can be those things. We have our own stories, and when they overlap with the stories of others in verse, a strong bond develops. There are many of us who can relate to addiction. Kaveh Akbar’s poem “Portrait of the Alcoholic, with Craving” makes that connection for me from the opening line: “I’ve lost the unspendable coin I wore around / my neck.” It places me, as a recovering addict, immediately in the world of 12-step meetings and relapses in the same way poems from Reginald Betts’ book Felon leave me meditating on my post-prison life. Not every poem connects with such intimacy and immediacy. Those that do are the poems we, as writers also, wish we had written.

Kenzie Allen Draws an Ace [by Ace Boggess]

Ace Boggess launches this, the first of five mini-reviews, with this prefatory note: 

<<
When David Lehman asked me to do a handful of mini-reviews of poems that have stuck with me, I realized that I’ve read far too much poetry, so much that I remember little of it. Even poems I immediately love or believe to be brilliant fade from my thoughts like weather forecasts from last week. What is it, I wondered, that makes a poem linger like a favorite song in my memory? Here is the first of five poems that I will post on the BAP blog followed by thoughts on what it is that I find so compelling — the same things I always look for in the poems I consider great, or more to the point, those I reread and remember.

A Sense of Connection to the Strange

“Dress Like Pocahontas, Then Let’s Make Love” by Kenzie Allen

https://dialogist.org/v2i4-kenzie-allen

We can’t all be doctors, lawyers, convicts, or carnies. We come from different backgrounds, cultures, races, religious beliefs. We have our own stories. My favorite poems are those that convey the poet’s (or narrator’s) story in a way that allows me to connect with it and understand it at least somewhat as if I’ve lived it. Kenzie Allen’s poem “Dress Like Pocahontas, Then Let’s Make Love” has this effect on me. I’ve reread the poem a dozen times and always find some new way to relate to it, although it belongs to an identity foreign to me. It’s a similar effect to reading Terrence Hayes’s “Talk” (BAP 2006), another poem filled with the powerful dissonance between cultural identity and the desire to fit in. This sense of connection to the strange allows me, as reader, to empathize, learn, and in a sense, become.

Dress Like Pocahontas, Then Let’s Make Love

Tell him, you have not previously undressed
this notion. Your mother would say
“how cute,” perhaps “the older guy?”
or “now remember to call it regalia—
they yell at me when I say costume.”
You didn’t object to Indian Girl for the
fourth grade costume ball, a Hobby-Lobby
approximation, hair in braids, be-feathered.
Did you see the new carpet, black-veined
marble and baked haddock in the casino
buffet? Did you hear Barbara in HR
finally wrote up Gene? Wolf clan can’t eat
wolf meat, and if we ever got hold of turtle,
you must apologize, leave that portion
and take extra of bear. No beadwork
would mention this; no fancy shawl captures
what cannot be claimed. The tribe pays
for your birth control. The tribe offers a flu shot
every time you visit; you are mayor of Oneida,
hash-tag native. Namegiver she loved me, she took
my hand, smudged sage like oil drops straight
to the ceiling. You are trying to say your own name,
but can’t pronounce it; you are afraid your skin is turning
translucent. Wear bronzer. Go on and braid your hair.
You are not enrolled, and it is only a costume.

-- Kenzie Allen

Kenzie Allen is a Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and is a descendant of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin.