Immanuel Kant's essay on this subject is nowhere near as famous and influential as those of Longinus and Edmund Burke, but it is a splendid piece of writing, showing an aptitude for dividing the world and everything in it in two -- a dichotomous impulse unrivaled by anyone until Auden took the reins and found the fork in every road.
Here is the "donnee" (as H. James would call it), the gift or the given, the material you have to work with, lifted from Kant's book (available in a slender paperback from Yale UP) : "Knowledge is beautiful, understanding is sublime."
I took off from there, and this is what I came up with:
On the Beautiful and Sublime
Knowledge is beautiful; understanding is sublime. – Kant
Radio is a hot medium; Television, a cool one.
A train ride in Russia is a novel. A train ride to Chicago is a movie.
A flight to Miami is a disaster movie. A yew tree is a poem.
A banyan tree is the prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
A woman’s undergarments (any epoch) are poetry. A man’s undergarments (any epoch) are prose.
Panties (white, silk, high rise) are beautiful. Jockstraps are sublime.
Paranoia is poetry. Insomnia is prose.
Death by lethal injection is prose. Death by hanging is infernal.
Death by firing squad is the noble sublime. Homer is the tragic sublime.
Cigarettes are sublime, especially Camels and Luckies. Cigars are sublime.
Pipes are beautiful. The Song of Songs is beautiful,
Genesis and Job are sublime. Isaiah is sublime. Samuel I and II are sublime.
Ruth is beautiful and sublime. Wordsworth is sublime. Keats is sublime and beautiful.
Knowledge is beautiful, Understanding is sublime.
Mark Bibbins, poetry editor of The Awl, posted this poem on September 6, 2012. If I find a picture of the philosopher I'll caption it, "Who says he Kant?" Well, let's see if I can. But perhaps I should close with a more heroic less wrathful Sandy than the ranting storm fiend that just wreaked havoc in our world.
That's my super storm Sandy. -- DL from the archive; first posted November 4, 2012
In a survey of the best public high schools in the country, my alma mater was ranked as the second best in the nation. When I went to Stuyvesant it was in the old massive neo-classical building sagging into the ground on Fifteenth Street and First Avenue. It's much more famous for science and engineering, but it's worth noting that alums include Jimmy Cagney Thelonious Monk, Henry Roth, Robert Alda, Ron Silver, and Robert Siegel, not to mention Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann, honored for his work in chemistry, who writes wonderful poems in his spare time. Its current building, from 1993, is on Chambers Street in the near vicinity of the World Trade Center. If it had been located there when I was a lad, it would have saved me a subway change at 14th Street adding 20 minutes to the trip. -- DL
Stuyvesant High School
Stuyvesant High School, located in Manhattan, New York City, consistently ranks among the most prestigious public high schools in the United States. Founded in 1904, this specialized high school is renowned for its rigorous STEM-focused curriculum and competitive admissions process.
Students gain entry solely through the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), making it one of the most selective public schools nationwide. The school boasts exceptional academic outcomes with nearly all graduates continuing to four-year colleges, including significant numbers accepted to Ivy League institutions.
Stuyvesant offers numerous Advanced Placement courses, research opportunities, and specialized programs in mathematics, science, and engineering. The school’s modern facility in Battery Park City features specialized laboratories, a swimming pool, and theaters to support its comprehensive educational approach. >>>
Imagine the money the Keats estate would have made if they could have copyrighted “negative capability” and charged permission fees for its use, nearly as pricey as Kant’s “categorical imperative,” which rests on the solidity of logic while “negative capability” stands for a destination you arrive at despite signs that say “dead end.” A letter Keats sent to his brothers Tom and George in 1817 is the ultimate authority, for it was there that he coined “negative capability” for being in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching for fact.” Consider King Lear. The poetry is sublime and we love it despite the ugly atrocities without denying they exist. And therefore “beauty is truth,” or “ripeness is all,” which, according to Yale’s Cleanth Brooks in The Well Wrought Urn, means pretty much the same thing.
<< This sheet music is for the song “They're Either Too Young or Too Old,” from the film Thank Your Lucky Stars. The music was written by Frank Loesser and composed by Arthur Schwartz, and the sheet music was published by M. Witmark and Sons of New York, New York in 1943. The cover features a blue and white striped inset that reads “Thank Your Lucky Stars” with portrait photographs of stars like Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, and Olivia de Havilland. >>
sung by Bette Davis in Thank Your Lucky Stars.
One of the greatest World War II songs. -- DL
They're either too young, or too old, They're either too gray or too grassy green, The pickings are poor and the crop is lean. What's good is in the army, What's left will never harm me.
They're either too old or too young, So, darling, you'll never get stung. Tomorrow I'll go hiking with that Eagle Scout unless, I get a call from grandpa for a snappy game of chess.
I'll never, never fail ya, While you are in Australia, Or otu in the Aleutians Or off among the Rooshians, And flying over Egypt. Your heart will never be gypped, And when you get to India, I'll still be what I've been to ya. I've looked the field over And lo and behold! They're either too young or too old!
They're either too bald or too bold, I'm down to the wheelchair and bassinet, My heart just refuses to get upset. I simply can't compel it to, With no Marine to tell it to.
I'm either their first breath of spring, Or else, I'm their last little fling. I either get a fossil or an adolescent pup, I either have to hold him off, Or have to hold him up. The battle is on, but the fortress will hold, They're either too young or too old.
PS There are many additional stanzas as you will hear if you listen to Bette Davis sing it.
Jimmy Dorsey's band, with Kitty Kallen's vocal .https://youtu.be/ai71VRXz48Q
To view all of the Poetry Pairings we’ve published in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation since 2010, and to find activity sheets to help with teaching them, visit our collection.
Editor of the influential literary magazine The Dial and author of several collections, Marianne Moore achieved both literary success and a degree of celebrity, famous for her tricorn hat and cape.
That Harp You Play So Well By Marianne Moore
From “Pouters and Fantails”
Oh, David, if I had Your power, I should be glad– In harping, with the sling, In patient reasoning!
Blake, Homer, Job and you, Have made old wine-skins new. Your energies have wrought Stout continents of thought.
But David, if the heart Be brass, what boots the art Of exorcizing wrong, Of harping to a song?
The sceptre and the ring And every royal thing Will fail. Grief’s lustiness Must cure that harp’s distress.
Maybe I dreamed it. Don Draper sips Canadian Club from a coffee mug on Craig Ferguson’s late-night talk show. “Are you on Twitter?” the host asks. “No,” Draper says. “I don’t” — he pauses before pronouncing the distasteful verb — “tweet.” Next question. “Do you read a lot of poetry?” Though the hero of “Mad Men” is seen reading Dante’s “Inferno” in one season of the show and heard reciting Frank O’Hara in another, the question seems to come from left field. “Poetry isn’t really celebrated anymore in our culture,” Draper says, to which Ferguson retorts, “It can be — if you can write in units of 140 keystrokes.” Commercial break.
The laugh line reveals a shrewd insight into the subject of “poetry in the digital age,” a panel-discussion perennial. The participants agree that texting and blogs will influence the practice of poetry in style, content and method of composition. Surely we may expect the same of a wildly popular social medium with a formal requirement as stringent as the 140-character limit. (To someone with a streak of mathematical mysticism, the relation of that number to the number of lines in a sonnet is a thing of beauty.) What Twitter offers is ultimate immediacy expressed with ultimate concision. “Whatever else Twitter is, it’s a literary form,” the critic Kathryn Schulz has written. True, the hard-to-shake habit causes its share of problems, “distractibility increase” and other disturbing symptoms. Nevertheless there is a reason Schulz got hooked on this “wide-ranging, intellectually stimulating, bighearted, super fun” activity.
The desire to make a friend of the new technology obliges us to overlook some major flaws: The Internet is hell on lining, spacing, italics; line breaks and indentation are often obscured in electronic transmission. The integrity of the poetic line can be a serious casualty. Still, it is fruitless to quarrel with the actuality of change, though in private we may revel in our physical books and even, if we like, write with pencil on graph paper or type our thoughts with the Smith-Corona to which we have a sentimental attachment. One room in the 2013 “Drawn to Language” exhibit at the University of Southern California’s Fisher Museum of Art was devoted to Susan Silton’s site-specific installation of a circle of tables on which sat 10 manual typewriters of different vintages. It was moving to behold the machines not only as objects of nostalgia in an attractive arrangement but as metonymies of the experience of writing in the 20th century. Seeing the typewriters in that room, I felt as I do when the talk touches on the acquisition of an author’s papers by a university library. It’s odd to be a member of the last generation to have “papers” in this archival and material sense. Odd for an era to slip into a museum while you watch.
The one-minute poem may not be far off. With its need for speed, Twitter’s 140-character constraint brings the clock into the game. Poetry — a byte-size kind of poetry — has been, or soon will be, a benefit of attention deficit disorder. (This prediction is not necessarily made in disparagement.) Unlike the telephone, social media relies on the written, not the spoken, word, and I wonder what will happen when hip-hop and spoken-word practices tangle with the virtues of concision, bite and wit consistent with the rules of the Twitter feed. On the other hand, it is conceivable that the sentence I have just composed will be anachronistic in a couple of years. Among my favorite oxymorons is “ancient computer,” applied to my own desktop.
The word means fleshy in a sensual, feminine way, though sometimes it just means extra large. It’s a word you may not know if you’re not from New York but from the heartland, the prairie, the plains. Let me illustrate. Michael, the Yankees’ play-by-play man, announcing a pitching change, says the reliever has “a zaftig ERA,” and the former player in the booth, a goyishe guy with a yiddishe name (Cone) has a puzzled look on his Kansas-in-August punim. “What,” Michael says, “you never heard of zaftig?” And Cone, humbled, mumbles, “Maybe in English class."
They're selling postcards of the hanging They're painting the passports brown The beauty parlor is filled with sailors The circus is in town Here comes the blind commissioner They've got him in a trance One hand is tied to the tightrope walker The other is in his pants And the riot squad, they're restless They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight from Desolation Row
Cinderella, she seems so easy "It takes one to know one," she smiles And puts her hands in her back pocket Bette Davis style And in comes Romeo, he's moaning "You belong to me, I believe" And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend You'd better leave" And the only sound that's left After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row
Now, the moon is almost hidden The stars are beginning to hide The fortune telling lady Has even taken all her things inside All except for Cain and Abel And the hunchback of Notre Dame Everybody's making love or else expecting rain And the good Samaritan, he's dressing He's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row
Ophelia, she's 'neath the window For her I feel so afraid On her 22nd birthday She already is an old maid To her, death is quite romantic She wears an ironed vest Her profession's her religion Her sin is her lifelessness And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking into Desolation Row
Einstein disguised as Robin Hood With his memories in a trunk Passed this way an hour ago With his friend, a jealous monk Now, he looked so immaculately frightful As he bummed a cigarette Then he went off sniffing drainpipes And reciting the alphabet You would not think to look at him But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin on Desolation Row
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world Inside of a leather cup But all his sexless patients They are trying to blow it up Now, his nurse, some local loser She's in charge of the cyanide hole And she also keeps the cards that read "Have mercy on his soul" They all play on the penny whistle, you can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough from Desolation Row
Across the street they've nailed the curtains They're getting ready for the feast The Phantom of the Opera In a perfect image of a priest They are spoon-feeding Casanova To get him to feel more assured Then they'll kill him with self-confidence After poisoning him with words And the phantom shouting to skinny girls "Get out of here if you don't know"
Casanova is just being punished for going to Desolation Row
At midnight, all the agents And the superhuman crew Come out and round up everyone That knows more than they do And they bring them to the factory Where their heart attack machine Is strapped across their shoulders And then the kerosene Is brought down from the castles by insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row
Praise be to Nero's Neptune The Titanic sails at dawn Everybody's shouting "Which side are you on?" And Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot Fighting in the captain's tower While calypso singers laugh at them And fishermen hold flowers Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row
Yes, I received your letter yesterday About the time the doorknob broke When you asked me how I was doing Was that some kind of joke? All these people that you mentioned Yes, I know them, they are quite lame I had to rearrange their faces And give them all another name Right now I can't read too good, don't send me no more letters, no
<<< The long New England winter is finally thawing, and here at The Common, we’re gearing up to launch our newest print issue! Issue 29 is full of poetry and prose by both familiar and new TC contributors, and a colorful, multimedia portfolio from Amman, Jordan. To tide you over, Issue 29 contributors DAVID LEHMAN and NATHANIEL PERRY share some of their recent inspirations, and ABBIE KIEFER recommends a poetry collection full of the spirit of spring. Click here for more.
Henry James’ short works; recommended by Issue 29 contributor David Lehman
I’ve been reading or rereading Henry James’s stories about writers and artists: “The Real Thing,” “The Lesson of the Master,” “The Death of the Lion,” “The Tree of Knowledge,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Aspern Papers,” et al. His sentences are labyrinthine, and you soon realize how little happens in a story; the ratio of verbiage to action is as high as the price-earnings ratio of a high-flying semiconductor firm. Yet we keep reading, not only for the syntactical journey but for the author’s subtle understanding of the artist’s psyche—and the thousand natural and artificial shocks that flesh and brain are heir to.
All that happens in “The Death of a Lion” may be the loss of a manuscript— or was it a theft?—at a time when there were no copying machines and the burning of a manuscript in a fireplace could mark the dramatic climax of a play. The paradox at the center of the story is that the author toiling in obscurity may produce masterpieces, but when they are recognized as such and he achieves belated success it comes with all the defects of celebrity: his time and solitude are taken from him. He dies two ways.
The stories are parables, but the lessons are ambiguous. That artists have defects, including egos that cannot bear the knowledge of their own mediocrity, is a subordinate theme of “The Tree of Knowledge,” a story about illusions. That the relationship between mentor and student may include an unexpectedly competitive element is one theme of “The Lesson of the Master.” At the end of both these stories, a major character is gobsmacked by actuality.
Anyone who imagines that scholars and biographers are admirably virtuous will not survive a reading of “The Aspern Papers.” Anyone contemplating a career as an English teacher will profit from the fruitless pursuit of the key to an author’s lifetime work in “The Figure in the Carpet.”
What happens when reality and appearance are flipped? In “The Real Thing,” the aristocratic couple hired to model for a portrait of an aristocratic model look less plausible than the married couple who has been hired as servants. Sooner or later the painter has little choice but to flip their roles. The poor pass as noble; their visual appearance conforms to the Platonic patrician ideal. The rich are content to serve them with tea. Is the point that reality and appearance are often at odds? Can we justify fakery as the means to accuracy, itself an illusion? Does the inversion of the classes in “The Real Thing” have a secret subversive meaning? I have long believed that a good essay can be written about this much anthologized story in relation to the greatest Coke commercial of all time, the one proclaiming the soft drink to be “the real thing.” If I were teaching the story, I would give that assignment.
We have too much exhibitionism and not enough voyeurism in poetry we have plenty of bass and not enough treble, more amber beer than the frat boys can drink but less red wine than meets the lip in this beaker of the best Bordeaux, too much thesis, too little antithesis and way too much New York Times in poetry we've had too much isolationism and too few foreign entanglements we need more Baudelaire on the quai d'Anjou more olive trees and umbrella pines fewer leafless branches on the rue Auguste Comte too much sociology not enough Garcia Lorca more colons and dashes fewer commas less love based on narrow self-interest more lust based on a feast of kisses too many novels too few poems too many poets not enough poetry
On April Fool’s Day, which marks the opening of both “the cruelest month” (T. S. Eliot) and, since 1996, National Poetry Month, I reviewed the previous week’s Next Line, Please entries with some wonderment. The prompt I’d proposed on March 24— to write a “coded dialogue poem,” in which the words memory, dream, and affair appear in code—was even more difficult than I had anticipated, in no small part because I had not been sufficiently precise in my instructions.
But poetic logic has it that the more difficult the task, the greater the opportunity for a poet to conceive of an ingenious poem—not from a lightning strike of inspiration, but from truly exercising the imagination, solving a puzzle of the sublime.
****
For next time, a new prompt: I call it “the ironic title.” Take the title of an existing work of art, make it your title, and write a poem (or prose poem) that veers as far away as possible from the work of art you are raiding. For example, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain may refer to an amusement park north of Los Angeles, and The Magnificent Seven may head a piece about last year’s high-flying tech stocks
Here are some titles that strike me as promising:
“The Lottery”
Persuasion
“The Necklace”
The Wings of the Dove
Under the Volcano
Light in August
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
The Beautiful and Damned
But, of course, feel free to choose one of your own.
Ideally your poem should have nothing to do—except perhaps obliquely—with the work whose title you have appropriated. Incorporate just one formal device, be it a rhyme scheme, a metrical line, an acrostic, or even a repeated word or phrase. If you run out of inspiration, go to a favorite book, open it at random, pick out a phrase, and remember what T. S. Eliot said: “Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.”
Deadline: Ten days from the day this post goes up. Thanks, everyone.
Returning from a walk across the Dug Road bridge and into the Ludlowville
woods, Joe carried some violets we had picked. An old man with a handsome
Labrador going in the opposite direction asked, “Are they for Easter?” “No,” Joe said.
“For Passover.” Joe was nearly four, I nearly thirty-nine.
In May of that year, 1987, Joe and I approached the Dug Road bridge, and there
was no one in our path. Joe whispered: “Go quietly over the bridge, so you don’t wake
up the geese.” The next day I repeated his words to him when we came to the place.
He immediately started singing. “Why?” “Because the geese are awake,” he said.
The day we went to the bird sanctuary at Sapsucker Woods, Joe made up a song,
“Fish Birds on the Sea,” to the tune of the verse introducing “Jingle Bells”: “Dashing
through the snow.” That night I asked him to tell me a story. “Okay,” he said. “Once
upon a time, there was a little boy named Daddy.
Then, out of the blue, “‘God made me,” he said.
How did this poem begin for you?
I seldom leave the house without a little notebook tucked into my jacket pocket or the back pocket of my trousers. Ideas, titles for poems I’d like to write, memories, overheard phrases, quotes, dreams, jests, anecdotes, lists of books I want to read, even mundane lists of errands that need doing may find their way into the notebook. With defunct notebooks, I can be careless. All the better when a lost notebook turns up and on one of its pages a cryptic phrase from 1987 summons a delightful memory. My son Joe made some arresting statements that year, and he even wrote (or dictated to me) a poem a day for several weeks. A phrase about the Dug Road bridge reminded me of walks he and I took that spring. That’s how I came to write “God Made Me.”
David Lehman is a poet and professional writer. He edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His recent books of poems include The Morning Line and Poems in the Manner Of.
When Kirk Gibson hit perhaps the most unlikely home run in baseball history – when, hobbled with injuries, he pinch-hit with two out and a man on first base, and the Dodgers were one pitch away from losing the game, and with one swing Gibson reversed the team’s fortunes – play-by-play man Jack Buck said “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Beautiful: a totally colloquial line of iambic tetrameter. Vin Scully, describing the same at-bat, let a few seconds of silence pass before saying, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened."
I am going from memory and I may have a word or two wrong there, but the point of this piece is an appreciation of play-by-play announcers and the memorable things they say. This (2016) is Vin Scully’s last year as the voice of the Dodgers, and I dedicate these musings to him, the red-headed gentleman who invites viewers to pull up a chair and join him in Dodger Stadium.
On Labor Day [2016], I watched the Dodgers trounce the Diamondbacks, 10-2, for the pleasure of watching the action under the guidance of Scully. The TV execs are smart enough to show us a lot of Dodger games called by Scully this year. Unlike most announcers, he does the whole game unassisted, unaccompanied by what used to be called a color man -- usually an ex-star who is articulate, amiable, and knowledgeable (e.g. Don Sutton with the Braves, Rick Monday on the Dodgers' radio broadcasts, Bill White with the Yankees in the 1970s, the late Ralph Kiner with the Mets). To go solo is quite a feat. Even experienced play-by-play men consider it a challenge. But Vinny, who has had excellent partners over the years, doesn't need one.
On Monday evening, Arizona's Socrates Brito stepped to the plate. Scully explained -- "for the kids, really" -- who Socrates was. Vinny had done his homework. We learned "what Labor Day is all about." It was in June 1894 that the first Monday in September was designated Labor Day. In 1916 the eight-hour working day became the norm and the obscenity of child labor was put to rest. Canada is said to have originated the idea of a holiday to celebrate the labor force. I didn't know these facts. But I did appreciate it when, after the history lesson, Vinny described Zack Greinke at the plate. Greinke, not an easy out, obliged the pitcher to make a lot of pitches. "And after all that laboring," Scully said, "Greinke goes down for the second out." Possibly my favorite moment of the evening came when: a wicked curve ball -- can't remember whose -- caused the batter to fall down like a knocked-down boxer "for a mandatory eight-count." It was "a genuflection for a great breaking ball."
Many anecdotes about Scully made the rounds as he completed his astounding career – having broadcast or telecast Dodger games since 1950. Everyone loves his call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. In October of that year, when Koufax on two days’ rest shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the World Series for his team, Vinny said, “Sandy, two days ago you said you felt like a hundred years old. How do you feel now?” “Like a hundred and one,” Koufax replied.
Every so often Scully will surprise you with a literary allusion, and he usually doesn’t repeat himself, though Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait” has served him well for years. When he broke the news of the untimely death of Don Drysdale, the great pitcher who had become his broadcast partner, Scully said, with simple eloquence, “Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one. And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart.”
Left: Sandy Koufax (center) and the late Tommy Lasorda at a ceremony honoring Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium, May 3, 2017
Added on August 4, 2022:
Vin Scully died this week, a year after his beloved wife passed. He was 94. The eulogists were justly extravagant in their praise of the Hall of Fame broadcaster, voice of the Dodgers from 1950 through 2016. Nor did the plaudits come exclusively fom Dodger fans. Honoring Scully, the team's bitterest rivals, the Giants of San Francisco, did something very classy prior to Wednesday's evening's contest between the two squads. Jon Miller, the Giants' lead broadcaster since 1997 and one of the best in the business, calls him "the greatest broadcaster there ever was." Miller does a tremendous impression of Vin - in English,Japanese, and Spanish!
Here's Vin's call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game on September 9, 1965. "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium is the loneliest place in the world right now" on 9:43 PM. Koufax ended the game with a strikeout; in fact he struck out the side in both the eighth and ninth innings. "Swung on and missed, a perfect game!" Andf then Vin had the wit to keep quiet and let the crowd noise take over "in the city of angels."
When the Sandy Koufax statue was unveiled at Dodger Stadium in June of this year, the great southpaw said “Vin Scully is the greatest of all time, period."
Some of Vin Scully's best lines, with thanks to Houston Mitchell of the Los Angeles Times:
“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theater, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!”
“He pitches as though he’s double-parked.” — on Bob Gibson
A Joey Gallo home run off Clayton Kershaw looked like "a marble" when it went way over the right field fence.
“He’s like a tailor; a little off here, a little off there and you’re done, take a seat.” — on Tom Glavine
“It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between the All-Star Game and an old-timers’ game.”
"Statistics are used the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination."
“Roberto Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pittsburgh.”
"Losing feels worse than winning feels good."
"Fernando ready, and the strike-two pitch is hit back to the box, dribbling to second, [Juan] Samuel on the bag, throws to first for the double play! Fernando Valenzuela has pitched a no-hitter at 10:17 in the evening on June three 29th, 1990. If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!"
Calling Hank Aaron‘s 715th home run: “What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. … It is over, at 10 minutes after 9 in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth. You could not, I guess, get two more opposite men. The Babe, big and garrulous and oh so sociable and oh so immense in all his appetites. And then the quiet lad out of Mobile, Alabama — slender and stayed slender throughout his career. Ruth, as he put on the poundage and the paunch, the Yankees put their ballplayers in pinstripe uniforms, because it made Ruth look slimmer. But they didn’t need pinstripe uniforms for Aaron in the twilight of his career.”
His final words as a Dodgers broadcaster:
“You know, friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a 67-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family, and now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you. May God give you, for every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every care, a promise; and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life seems, a faithful friend to share; for every sigh, a sweet song, and an answer for each prayer. You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know, in my heart, I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more than I can say. But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball. So, this is Vin Scully wishing you a pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.”
So pull up a chair and listen to the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's greatest pitching feat.
Sometimes the humor of play-by-play announcers is wonderful if unintentional. Michael Kay, the Yankees’ TV announcer, remarked that some pitcher had a zaftig ERA.” The color man, I forget who it was, a former player, David Cone maybe, looked blank. “What,” Kay said. “You don’t know zaftig?” The other guy said sheepishly that he may heard the word “in English class.”
The Mets at the moment have an outstanding trio calling their games on television: Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling. The versatile Howie Rose and Josh Lewin handle the radio. Columbia graduate Cohen (a government major) is like a one-man encyclopedia of Mets’ history. Here is his description of one of the greatest catches in Mets’ history, the catch made by Endy Chavez in the National League Championship Series in 2006, which the Mets ultimately lost to St. Louis:
“Edmonds at first and one out, and Pérez deals. Fastball hit in the air to left field, that's deep, back goes Chávez, back near the wall, leaping, and....he made the catch!! He took a home run away from Rolen! Trying to get back to first is Edmonds... he's doubled off! And the inning is over! Endy Chávez saves the day! He reached up high over the left field wall, right in front of the visitors' bullpen, and pulled back a two run homer! He went to the apex of his leap, and caught it in the webbing of his glove, with his elbow up above the fence. A miraculous play by Endy Chávez, and then Edmonds is doubled off first, and Oliver Perez escapes the 6th inning. The play of the year, the play maybe of the franchise history, for Endy Chávez. The inning is over.”
I savor "He went to the apex of his leap" followed by a sterling example of iambic pentameter: "and caught it in the webbing of his glove,"
All announcers have their signature phrases. When the Mets’ win, Howie Rose says, “Put it in the books.” The late Bob Murphy -- who could radiate enthusiasm when, in the September of a last-place season, the Mets turned an ordinary 6-4-3 double play -- would say, after every Mets’ victory, that he’d be back “with the happy recap” after the commercial break. At game’s end, Cohen says “and the ballgame is over,” accenting the “o” in “over.” Cohen’s home run call is “it’s outta here!”John Sterling, the Yankees' voice on the radio, stretches the phrase "the Yankees win!" -- and then repeats it -- with a kind of euphoria implying that God is in heaven and all is right with the world. Joe Nuxhall would sign off his Cincinnati Reds' broadcast by saying goodbye from the "old leftander, rounding third and heading for home." Nuxhall, who did Reds' games for forty years, was the youngest player ever to appear in a major league baseball game.
The classic home run call is Mel Allen’s when with a straw hat and a smile he covered the Yankees of Mantle, Maris, Berra, and Ford. When Mickey launched one, Mel would follow the course of the ball and conclude “it’s going. . going. . .gone.” I cannot leave unmentioned Russ Hodges’ immortal call of Bobby Thomson’s home run off Ralph Branca in the 1951 playoffs. “The Giants win the pennant!” he exclaimed and repeated the sentence four times.
What prompted this post was my dissatisfaction with the national announcers on TV and the whole strategy of continual chatter interrupted by graphs, statistics, interviews, close-ups of fans in the stands. I hate such current catch phrases as "are you kidding me!" or "do you believe it!" I hate statcast and "redemption" and other artificial sweeteners. I hate the phrase "If the season ended today. ." and all the hypotheticals that follow. But I admit to a soft spot for this common play-by-play sentence: "And the Mets are down to their final out." I used that phrase with a big grin when I told my wife about the tenth inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series between the Mets and the Boston Red Sox. Roger Angell headed his brilliant New Yorker piece on that unforgettable post-season with a palindrome: "Not So, Boston." In danger of wandering off message I think of the greatest cover phrase in the history of Sports Illustrated. It was when Pete Rose, after playing for Philadelphia and Montreal, returned to Cincinnati. "Rose is a Red." Gertrude Stein couldn't beat that.
A heartfelt apology: There are so many great play-by-play men whom I haven't named. . .but only because time is finite. Red Barber, a longtime Dodger announcer, joined Mel Allen and Phil Rizzuto in the Yankee booth in 1957. I always liked Red’s way of describing a failed pickoff attempt. "Nothing doing.” Barber, who was Vin Scully’s mentor, advised him not to root openly for the home team and to keep to facts. Radio announcers have no choice but to concentrate on each play rather than on marginal elements. Often I turn off the sound and listen to a radio feed of the visiting team's play-by-play guys.
from the archive; first posted October 15, 2018, revised after the death of Vin Scully
The great Doris Day, who died the other day [May 2019], was celebrated for her work in romantic comedies of the 1960s. She was box office gold with James Garner, Cary Grant, and Rock Hudson. But her real achievement was as a singer. In musical movies she gave outstanding performances as Ruth Etting (in Love Me or Leave Me in 1955) and as Mrs. Gus Kahn (in I'll See You in My Dreams in 1953). One of the finest of all Big Band vocalists, whose version of "Sentimental Journey" is a madeleine that can transport you to 1945, she sang with the Les Brown Orchestra when swing was king.
Maybe her biggest single hit was the Academy Award-winning song of 1956 in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much in which she played opposite James Stewart. In honor of Doris Day, "Che Sera, Sera" was sung at sing-alongs in smart clubs all over the nation yesterday.
Doris gets her own day in my Playlist:
from Playlist (12 / 17 / 17)
I live in Hitchcock’s America What does that mean It means the ride always ends in an amusement park and a girl and her uncle can have the same first name Cary Grant is suave Jimmy Stewart has a broken leg or a bruised psyche Doris Day’s voice fills the house Even the Jews and the blacks are white Even the brunettes are blonde I confess I’m at the end of my rope, spellbound by the notorious master of suspicion maybe Janet shouldn’t have taken that dough or had that tryst Joel McCrea tells America that all Europe’s lights are out and Priscilla Lane recites Emma Lazarus’s lines atop the Statue of Liberty -- DL
Detail of The Soul Hovering Over the Body from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, 1796 (Wikimedia Commons)
By March 5, a day after our deadline, the NLP team had produced 122 responses to our February 21 post (“Muse Circe Reclaims Her Lucre”) and its five new prompts, based on five infernal axioms from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell.” The new poems surprised and delighted this reader, and the critical exchanges between poets matched an ineffable generosity of spirit with expert analyses.
The poem “Beginning with a Line by William Blake” by the possibly pseudonymous Greg Chaimtov (whose last name combines the Hebrew words for “to life” and “good”) impressed me with its daring use of rhyme. It begins by endorsing Blake’s line (“The nakedness of woman is the work of God”) and follows through, for the next seven lines, on the argument that instinctive desire defeats reason. But then, as if the rhymes drive the content of the poem, images of beauty (“a maple-red dawn, / the first flakes feathering fallen leaves”) ensue before giving way to an inevitable “but.” The poem boldly concludes by rejecting its own initial premise:
The nakedness of woman is the work of God. How else to explain the desire to worship desire? To drop to your knees as if a power higher than any you’ve known has fought its way past the defenses Reason built for you over those many years you devoted to getting through one season to the next without ending in tears at fireflies kindling lawns, a maple-red dawn, the first flakes feathering fallen leaves, or a songbird nestled under the eaves? But then, when you cannot rise and go on as you had before, you wonder if, after all, Blake, mad as he was, was simply wrong.
For the rest of the post, and the new prompts, click here. https://theamericanscholar.org/the-nakedness-of-woman/
In the black-and-white world of noir, cigarettes are everywhere. But then, they are ubiquitous in all movies, as in life, in the first half of the 20th century. Among great smokers I think of FDR with his holder tilted rakishly upward, as if to reinforce his smile, and Ike, who smoked four packs of unfiltered smokes a day before and after D-Day in 1944. Gregory Peck smokes fiercely as he types up his exposé of anti-Semitism in Gentleman’s Agreement, as if to say that smoking is an aspect of the writer’s job, a sine qua non, and that an ashtray full of butts is evidence that a writer has done his work. When New York replaced Paris as the world’s art capital, the art critics fell into two rival camps: Pall Malls for Harold Rosenberg, Camels for Clement Greenberg. Audrey Hepburn smokes stylishly in Charade. Marlene Dietrich smoked brilliantly, sometimes with a cigarette holder and furs. Bette Davis is in the smoker’s hall of fame, and not solely because of the end of Now, Voyager, when Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes, one for her and one for him, sealing their intimacy, and Bette has her famous line about settling for the stars if you can’t have the moon.
She’s got a cigarette between her fingers in All About Eve when she says “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”
Chesterfield ads of the 1940s and ’50s featured Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, and Rita Hayworth. Camels were advocated by Teresa Wright, Alan Ladd, John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, and a neon sign in Times Square that blew out smoke.
Some of the great jingles of the 1960s advertised mediocre cigarettes. Winston “tastes good like [sic] a cigarette should” (which gets spoofed by the scary Chinese villain of the original Manchurian Candidate), L & M has got the filter that unlocks the flavor. You can take Salem out of the country, but. To a smoker, it’s a Kent. The most famous of all Marlboro commercials used Elmer Bernstein’s music from The Magnificent Seven, and Yul Brynner, who played the leader of the pack, was a dedicated smoker (and made a public service announcement after he learned he didn’t have long to live). Nat King Cole credited the quality of his singing voice to cigarettes. Leonard Bernstein couldn’t live without them.
Addictive? A hardened criminal would rat on his best friend for a cigarette, even a bad one (Lark, Parliament, Viceroy) if he needed it. Reason not the need. Hell, the guy in solitary would smoke the butts off the floor if he needed a smoke.]. Read the opening chapter of Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno. It is titled “The Last Cigarette” and narrates the hero’s efforts to give up cigarettes and the lengths the addict will go to satisfy his or her craving. In Dead Again (1991), Kenneth Branagh’s ode to the noirs of the 1940s, the intrepid reporter played by Andy Garcia smokes and smokes, and when we see him as an old man, decades in the future, he has a tracheotomy tube in his neck. What does he ask for—what does he crave—in return for sharing information with the detective played by Branagh? A cigarette.
There is the cigarette of combat: According to Roger Ebert, Out of the Past (1947) is “the greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time.” Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas wage war by cigarette proxy. “The trick, as demonstrated by [director] Jacques Tourneur and his cameraman, Nicholas Musuraca,” Ebert writes, “is to throw a lot of light into the empty space where the characters are going to exhale. When they do, they produce great white clouds of smoke, which express their moods, their personalities, and their energy levels. There were guns in Out of the Past, but the real hostility came when Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoked at each other.”
The Best American Poetry 2025, edited by Terence Winch, will be the last book in the BAP series under my supervision. That's thirty-eight annual volumes since 1988 plus two "best of the best" retrospectives, for a grand total of forty BAP books. Scribner has also published two anthologies I edited (Great American Prose Poems and The Best American Erotic Poems) and seven individual collections of my poems, including Valentine Place, The Daily Mirror, and When a Woman Loves a Man. It's been a great run.
People ask: "What do you plan to do once you become a time millionaire?"
Hard to answer that hypothetical, but I can affirm with some confidence that my staff and I will continue our BAP web site, our archive, our blog, and our weekly newsletter. An editor's job is never done. Besides which, I will continue to write poems and to play shuffleboard in warm weather. -- DL
For this book, Lehman set himself the task of writing a poem each day for a year. In a poem like this one, it’s almost like he was waiting for the poem to find him. And it did, in the form of Tricia. Poets, we should give this a try. An aside: this poem, from 2000, could never happen today, thanks to the curse of the omnipresent smartphone.
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark
