The Best American Poetry

On Henry James's Stories of Artists [by David Lehman]

<<< 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.

https://www.thecommononline.org/what-were-reading-april-2025/

On Coming to America [by Anne Lehman]

David and Anne Lehman

In observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, here is an excerpt from Anne Lehman's essay about escaping the Nazis and coming to America aboard the President Harding:

It was a nightmare to live in Vienna at that time. Every time the doorbell rang, we were afraid--they're coming for us!
...

 A friend of mine got me a permit to go to England as a mother's helper. This way I got out of Nazi Germany. These people, Wright was their name, lived in Southsea. He was a shipbuilder and she was a dentist. They treated me very well and he gave me English lessons every day. But I was lonely there, so after a few months I went to London, where I have some friends from Vienna. My friend Trude and I found work in the home of an English theatre producer by the name of French. Trude was supposed to be the cook and I was the parlor maid. Once Rex Harrison came to dinner. He was very friendly, a real gentleman. 
. . . 

But the American consulate finally opened its door again [having closed it in 1938] and I received my visa to go to America. How happy I was. Naturally I was worried to travel on an English ship, so my cousin from America sent me additional money and I changed my ticket to an American ship, the President Harding. I think it was the last Atlantic crossing it ever made. It took us ten days of the most terrible shaking. Everyone on board was sick and wanted to die. We were so sick that we weren't even afraid of hidden mines, and as in a dream we did all the safe drillings, etc. The last day was Thanksgiving. We had, and for me it was the first time, a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and all the trimmings, they played 'Oh, say, can you see,' and when I finally saw the Statue of Liberty, I was really grateful to God, that he let me live and see America. 

Find the complete essay in Yeshiva Boys, by David Lehman

A group of German and Austrian Jewish refugees  in New York on board the SS President Harding. New York, United States, June 3, 1939. (source: Holocaust Encyclopedia

(Ed note: Anne tried hard to get her parents to England from Vienna but "everything took so long," and by the time she had assembled the necessary documents, England was at war and she had no way of getting in touch with them to bring them to safety. She later learned that they were murdered by the Nazis in Riga, Latvia.)

-- sdl 

 

A Note on the Simile [by David Lehman]

Similes are as underrated in contemporary writing as Longfellow is underrated among his nineteenth century confreres. Well, maybe all rhetorical figures are underrated. The neglect of rhetorical devices, verse forms, rhyme, and other “adjuncts or ornaments” (as Milton would have it) is lamentable, but it does create a compelling opportunity for contemporary poets eager to embrace change and renew a past tradition. You can distinguish yourself from your peers just by making good use of similes.

 A great simile opens a poem or narrative in a vertical way—it doesn’t advance the argument or plot so much as it heightens or deepens it. Whether introduced by “like” or “as” or through some other means (“the size of a grapefruit,”"the length of a football field"), the simile adds a complicating element even as it appears to clarify matters. It can resemble a detour—or a shortcut. It should surprise and should not repeat expressions already in use. Paradoxically, the simile can work to illustrate a thought or image—which is, after all, its stated function—yet it can overshadow the thought or image to which it was supposedly a subordinate element. Like the bridge in a jazz standard, it can surpass in beauty or inventiveness the primary melody, as happens in “Body and Soul” and “Skylark.”

For brilliant similes, albeit in prose, I would recommend Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps—in which she tells us, for instance, that her heroine was the victim of a certain man’s “conscience, as Isaac very nearly was of Abraham’s.” The religious and philosophical concerns of this author are front and center in a sentence that very surprisingly uses scientific means to explain a moral proposition: “To know God and yet do evil, this was the very essence of the Romantic life, a kind of electrolytical process in which the cathode and the anode act and react upon one another to ionize the soul.” An enterprising professor could build half a college course around that sentence.

Nearly every page of A. J. Liebling’s great book on boxing, The Sweet Science, can boast a refreshing, inventive simile or two. Example: “But Attell, who looks at you with cold eyes around his huge beak that is like a toucan’s with a twisted septum, is not a sentimental man.”

from the archive; first posted May 12, 2015.

Who am I? The dermatologists want to know

 

Next Line, Please: 2 new prompts on "The American Scholar"

Above the River of Your Longing

Two new prompts

By David Lehman | January 16, 2025

Kudos, all! Our last “Next Line, Please” elicited 88 comments. The most popular of the three prompts I offered in that column (“What a Strange Path”) was the one highlighted in the title and photo-illustration, both taken from Robert Bresson’s movie Pickpocket, which concludes with these words: “Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take.”

Pamela Joyce Shapiro hit the ball out of the park with “The Road to Lumière”:

Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take.
I raced through bridges with Jules and Jim, the stairs scaffolding love
above the river of your longing and your end. Jeanne, I have
been both man and woman to know your shadowed face, the serene
silence of your brow. And I have wrecked a train for the art of
your downturned mouth. Jeanne! I rode an elevator to the gallows
that we might be lovers in the night and climbed beyond the clouds.
Your murderous truth chimes at midnight. Ours is an immortal
story, a trial of sorts. Jeanne, I sought to marry, but the bride wore black.

Pamela took the liberty of identifying the “Jeanne” of the quotation as Jeanne Moreau. The poem weaves together the titles of numerous movies featuring the great French actress: Jules and Jim, Elevator to the Gallows, The Bride Wore Black, Lumière, Chimes at Midnight, The Trial, The Immortal Story and doubtlessly other titles I missed. The result is a wonderful and mysterious tribute to a wonderful and mysterious film star..

To read more, please click on this,link to The American Scholar.

Painting by Henri Matisse

"Blue-Collar Millionaire Athletes" [a word note by David Lehman]

When the literal meaning of a word disappears entirely into its figurative sense, it may become a dead metaphor or a journalistic cliché but may nevertheless be celebrated because it so aptly illustrates the way use ceaselessly modifies language. Such a word is blue-collar. It originated as a term for laborers who wore work shirts and no ties. They tended to work with their hands, or at a trade; toiled at a factory or a construction site rather than in an office; were underpaid relative to the executive class, and enthusiastically embraced the macho ideal. All that is in blue-collar, but the word long ago outlived its literal image. White collars, pink collars, blue collars – you can no longer tell anything from the color of anyone’s collar, but the words themselves say a lot about us. As pink is to the feminine, blue is to the masculine – which may help explain why blue-collar, detached from its original meaning, has acquired an extra layer of connotation. The word (or synonyms thereof) is now used often in the sports pages to describe a basketball team or baseball team of millionaires who play hard, are considered the good guys in a given contest and may make slightly less money than players on the most elite teams in the league. Game six of the 2003 American League Championship Series went in favor of Boston, and a beat writer wondered whether this meant that “the blue-collar Bosox finally stood up to the big, bad Yankees.” Another journalist, resisting such a formulation, opined that the “filthy rich” had defeated the “scruffy rich” when the Yankees prevailed. I have heard the Florida Marlins, the team that defeated the Yankees to win the World Series, described as having a “brown bag payroll.” That payroll consists of just under fifty million dollars divided, I believe, in twenty-five uneven ways. It’s true that the Yankees outspend any other team, but has blue-collar become so relative a term that it can modify the status of an infielder with a two-million-dollar salary or a middle-innings relief pitcher earning what used to be called “a cool million”? Yes, if only because of the term’s connotation. It connotes a tough work ethic, as if to say that, despite any temptation to loaf, these players are tough; they practice, prepare, and are, to use another term of the moment, “focused.”

When blue-collar was used regularly to describe the New York Knicks of Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, and Anthony Mason, it was a euphemism for “physical,” itself a euphemism for playing basketball as if it were hand-to-hand combat under the basket. But it also left the lingering sense that, riches aside, these guys play hard and are unafraid to get hurt, for deep down they remain the kids who played with daring and amazing energy on a playground in a neighborhood they’d like to forget.

Ed. note: This is one  of twenty "word notes" written in 2003 for The Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus (2004). David Lehman was one of a number of writers who contributed such notes.

from the LA Times, January 14, 2025:
<< Chargers players quietly packed up their lockers Sunday, collecting a season’s worth of Jim Harbaugh’s blue collar-themed gifts into plastic bags. They left signed jerseys in their teammates’ lockers like classmates inscribing yearbooks after the school year, except the end came much more suddenly than any planned graduation.>>

"The Banquet Years" (in 1998) [by David Lehman]

from "The Bennington Five-Day Diary" (January 1998) by David Lehman

Roger Shattuck, author of The Banquet Years, is here [at Bennington College] giving lectures on Montaigne, Chekhov, and Proust. Shattuck, 72, in white turtleneck under a mint-green V-neck pullover, looks trim and fit, like a genial Jack Palance in mustache and goatee. Shattuck speaks naturally in maxims. I like it when he says that “It’s impossible to paraphrase any successful poem or story, and therefore we must do it.” Our assignment is to write fifty-word summaries of two Chekhov stories. Nashvillean Anne Doolittle summarized “Mire” in fourteen words: “A woman of wit and intelligence makes a living the only way she can.” Competitive as ever, I come up with a twenty-word reduction of Ulysses -- “Every man goes out on an odyssey every day, but not every man has a faithful wife to return to” -- but keep it to myself because Chekhov didn’t write Ulysses.

At lunch Shattuck and I talk about how much we abhor the displacement of literature by critical theory. I must have made some crack or pun, because Shattuck turned to me and said, “Has anyone ever told you you resemble Woody Allen?” “No,” I lied. “You’re the first.” This prompted two other people to compare me to Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story, adding, once they saw the stricken look on my face, that they meant it as a compliment.

Inspired by Shattuck, who would outlaw “text” as a term for poem or story, George Packer thinks we ought to make up an index of forbidden words. He would ban “place” (as in “I’m coming from a different place”) and “voice” (“she has found her authentic voice”) in workshops. Tom Ellis despises “issues” (“there are issues of homophobia here”). As for me, the words I most hate hearing at a poetry reading include the verbs “cupped” and “cradled,” the noun “scrim,” and the three-poem-warning: “I’ll just read three more poems.” Tonight is my turn to read. I’ll be reading a bunch of short poems. I relish the moment when I can say, “Just thirty-three more.”

Last night I had to introduce the readers. This is always an odd assignment, since the persons to be “introduced” are already well-known to us. I like doing it in verse. “If I were a consonant looking for a vowel, / or Allen Ginsberg on the day he wrote `Howl,’ / or an employee of Bell & Howell, / tempted by the spoonerism Hell and Bowel, / I’d have exhausted nearly all the rhymes for Robert McDowell. / But I’ll not throw in the towel.”

Had meetings with two of the students I’m going to work with over the next six months. Very excited about some ideas for poems that Sloane Miller and I came up with together: a poem about forks; a prose poem called “Aida,” narrating the plot of the opera as imagined by a teenager watching a performance without preconception, preparation, or Italian; a poem beginning with the line, “This is the most serious poem I have ever written.”

For the time I’m here I’m using an office belonging to a faculty member on leave, who fearlessly annotates his books. About Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler”: “very weak book.” Much of “Ulysses” he considers confused, but at one point he interrupted his reading of “Dubliners” to exclaim with evident surprise, “three good stories in a row!”

PS The picture chosen to illustrate this piece has no evident relationship to the text. What does this prove? 

-- David Lehman (January 1998; first published by Slate)

See also https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2013/10/the-slate-diary-4-bennington-college-jan-14-1998-by-david-lehman.html

and https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/02/the-benington-diary-1-january-1998-by-david-lehman-.html

"Like a White Blouse": Couplets from "The Two Davids" [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

Happy birthday, David Shapiro  (born January 2, 1947)

These poems are from February 2003, when David Shapiro and I collaborated daily in couplets. - DL

Re: Like a white blouse, or like red crowds in a face 
Date:   2/17/2003 10:28:38 AM Eastern Standard Time       
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

The apparition of those snowflakes in a crowd:
Petals on a wet white black bough.

The apparition of some poison in a crowd:
Petals on a white black and blackened shroud.

The apparition of those crowds inside a crowd:
Crowds of petals on a wet white black snow‑plow.

The apparition of these apparitions in a wheelbarrow.
Yellow yellow yellow on a white black bough.

The apparition of these umbrellas meeting machines:
Faces on a white wet black blue‑green.

The apparition of our couplets in a crowd:
Metal on a wet white blue‑green black bough unbowed.

The chance encounter in a beautiful crowd:
Pages reduced to a white wet black blouse.  ‑‑ DS, 2 / 17 / 03

from: DCLEHMAN
to: DaJoShap

The apparition of these buds in the dark:
The eyes of a teenage American Jeanne d'Arc.

The petals of a crowd of strangers in the ground:
The buds in the blouse are pink on a white mound.

The apparition of snow as a black bird circles overhead:
The cars wait. The lights don't change from yellow to red.

The chance encounter of a mustache and a tear:
The accidental beauty of a desultory cheer.

Nothing's an accident, nothing's left to chance.
One girl sits in the corner while two others dance.

A blizzard of sparks from the sky and tomorrow
The white of the snow will blot out your sorrow.

Whatever you do, don't forget your gun.
And teach your son not to fly too close to the sun.   -- DL, 2 / 17 / 03

 

Re: Heroically incorrect, David Lehman receives the melancholy Couplet award  

Date:   2/19/2003 10:38:27 AM Eastern Standard Time       
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

The proper study of mankind is a crowd:
Duct tape on a white wet black shroud.

The chance encounter of convulsive love and chance:
Petals on David's first evening in Paris, France..

Says surgeon: I have stitched you and you're mine.
Umbrella squeaks. Sewing faints.  5 of 9.

Says Breton: I'm ship's doctor! What a chance!
Sewing Machine to Umbrella: Oh well, let's dance!

Says Artaud: You're cruel to pull wool over a crowd:
Says petal to petal: Let's come coming through aloud.

Says Edward Lear Umbrella: I'm not proud.
I've only stopped  rain falling on your shroud.

Says Umbrella to the Snark insider the park:
Spring's got nothing but Silence, and a Boojum's not a quark.   DS, 2 / 19 / 03

"The Right Ratio" [by David Lehman]

The Right Ratio

The birds in a V-pattern
and the denuded tree with a dozen mighty branches
skeletal against the light blue sky
three varieties of purple in the distance
as the sun sets, and the birds exchange notes.
My dog Johnny falls asleep at my feet
on the terrace. I sip my drink and think:
just as having an even tiny portion of your portfolio
in bonds can help your long-term performance,
so even a few drops of dry vermouth
will improve your martini.

from Literary Hub 
December 21, 2022 

"Matisse’s Open Window" [by David Lehman]

On Matisse's Birthday (December31)
Matisse’s Open Window

Do you believe that Matisse’s “Blue Nudes” (1952)

in its simplicity — one color, one fluid motion —

was easier to compose than his “Open Window” (1905),

a harbor of sails framed by the shutters

of his hotel room window in the bright fauve day?

Matisse didn’t have to think. He looked and knewt

he harbor is life, and blessed be the light

that results in such blossoms of color,

an exuberance that proves every seascape

is a lover’s state of heart. “Blue Nudes,”

a set of four lithographs, reflects Matisse’s “cut out”

method of composition, paper on paper, blue on white,

no paint at all. With this in mind, which

would you say was the more avant-garde?

https://www.literarymatters.org/16-1-three-aesthetic-questions/

Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!

while juicing an orange on tv

as a love song on the radio

Die Hard!

 

NEXT LINE, PLEASE "What a Strange Path: 3 New Prompts" [by David Lehman]

Next Line, Please Three new prompts

By David Lehman | December 16, 2024

Marika Green, left, and Martin LaSalle in Pickpocket, 1959

We headlined our previous poetry challenge with a line from Virginia Woolf: “I have had my vision.” And sure enough, the last sentences of To the Lighthouse provoked more poems than did our other two prompts: D. H. Lawrence’s surprising opening sentence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Maggie Smith’s role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Though the latter inspired the fewest number of poems, Millicent Caliban seemed to speak for the team when she wrote that the late actress “inspired awe and pride: a sense of self.”

Without further ado, Mary Jo Bang is the winner for best poem with “It Was Done”:

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision of Mary seated on the highest hill, quite possibly the highest hill ever invented, Mary stared at intently by Dante, a loyal Saint Bernard beside him, no snow in sight. Of course, in the picture at rest on the easel, she was and wasn’t Mary. “That’s how art works,” she said to her friend on the bed in the guest room. “You paint a mythic picture and put yourself in it, knowing Narcissus ends in the us that looks into and out of a mirror.” Compared to that, to and from seemed so simple, a never-ending echo of hello and goodbye.

That the “vision” is of Mary—whether the Virgin Mary or the author herself— as observed by Dante, comes as a complete surprise to the reader, even one who is aware that Mary Jo Bang has been translating the Divine Comedy. There follow the speculations regarding art and Narcissus. Terrific.

for the other winners and the three new prompts click here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/what-a-strange-path/

"On Sinatra's Birthday"

On Sinatra’s Birthday

Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.
But why try to change me now?
An Englishman is happy when he's fighting for his queen
and the dawn comes up like thunder.

What a guy. What a fool am I.
It’s a quarter to three. Fools rush in.
Why do I do just as you say?
You broke my heart, you took it apart.

That’s life.  I'm just a mess without you.
A lady doesn’t blow on some other guy’s dice,
those fingers in my hair, a whole gang of love,
and I laughed to think it might turn out that way.

When I bit off more than I could chew,
why should I cry over you?
My kind of people, too.
What a world, what a life, I’m in love.

-- David Lehman 12/12/12

"Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- Great Poems of the World, episode 15, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

 

Kubla Khan

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
   Down to a sunless sea..

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

 

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

   The shadow of the dome of pleasure

   Floated midway on the waves;

   Where was heard the mingled measure

   From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

 

   A damsel with a dulcimer

   In a vision once I saw:

   It was an Abyssinian maid

   And on her dulcimer she played,

   Singing of Mount Abora.

   Could I revive within me

   Her symphony and song,

   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

"In Reprise: Next Line, Please" -- 3 new prompts

<<< Last month, I announced the return of my “Next Line, Please,” column, which ran on The American Scholar's web site from May 2014 to September 2019. In that first reprise (read it here), I proffered up 15 quotations from books, plays, and movies, challenging readers to identify the source of the quotations. Here are the first three identified, plus a prompt to go with each. Choose one prompt and enter your effort in the comments field.

1. “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.” This is the opening sentence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover—perhaps a surprise to readers expecting something racy. The prompt: write a one-paragraph narrative prose poem that surprises the reader by ending with this sentence.
2. “It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.” Thus concludes Virginia’s Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The prompt: write a one-paragraph narrative prose poem that begins with these two sentences.
3. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life”: This may be the most memorable sentence uttered by the title character of Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The late Maggie Smith spoke the line in the brilliant 1969 movie adaptation. The prompt: write a short elegy for Maggie Smith, or a poem about either the book or the movie, quoting this line.

Please remember that, as a loquacious fellow once said, brevity is the soul of wit. It is also kinder on the eyes of the reader. There will be intangible prizes not only for the best entries, but also for the shortest.

The next post will reveal the winning entries—and will announce a new prompt.

Deadline: Monday, December 2nd,2024
>>>

See The American Scholar for official rules  A collections of prompts and poems from Next Line, Please was published under that title by Cornell University Press in 2018. 

On Hoagy Carmichael's Birthday: The Best Years of Our Lives

Dana Andrews ("Fred") left, and Teresa Wright ("Peggy"), steering the wheel, in The Best Years of Our Lives.

 Born today (November 22), Hoagy Carmichael plays the wounded sailor's Uncle Butch, the piano player who performs  "Among My Souvenirs" as Al (Fredric March) and Millie (Myrna Loy) dance and Fred meets Peggy at Butch's bar in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)..

https://youtu.be/L20LQTrUgUo

And he's thinking: if only I could get a good job. 
And she's thinking: when I think that he's married, I sob. 
And he's thinking: I married a stranger.
And she's thinking: a divorce would be a game-changer.
And he's thinking: wait till my friend gets married and I'm the best man, Okay?
And she's thinking: Okay.
Well, it's been a long war. . .

[dialogue as rewritten to the tune of Frank Loesser's "Been a Long Day:" in How to Succeed]

See, too, this piece in The American Scholar.

Hoagy Carmichael's songs include "Stardust," Skylark,""Baltimore Oriole," and "How Little We Know," which Lauren Bacall sings while Hoagy plays piano and Bogart watches in To Have and Have Not.

How the Title of the Song Came to Him (one line at a time)

Why be at the dune?
I see the juice of prune.
Sigh me until June.
My Lai to the wound.

Try tea on the mound.
Guy way, or the ground.
Fry bee to the sound.
Highway not too soon.

Live free in cartoon.
Lie, flee to the ruin,
Zero at the bone.

Hero in the zone.
Free me to the tune.
Fly me to the moon.

--  DL

Fact-checker: Bart Howard wrote the wong in1954 under the title "In Other Words."

"Zaftig" [by David Lehman]

Zaftig

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 goyische 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.”

-- David Lehman

photo from Mad Men: Christine Hendricks and Elizabeth Moss.

From Pity to Wisdom to Coercion [by Lionel Trilling]

<<<

Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

from The Liberal Imagination 

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I would like to read an essay that takes us link by link from "enlightened interest" to pity, then to wisdom, and finally to the dictatorial will of the arrogant intellect. The essay should note that the writer includes himself in the liberal community he criticizes; his use of "we," "us," and "our" are not projections of a self that would speak for all; on the contrary, Trilling implicates himself in the tendency he addresses. It is possible that no one could be less in fashion than Trilling, but I turn to him now, as to very few others, in my effort to grapple with seemingly incomprehensible events. I find his essays go far to elucidate, ahead of time it seems, some of the crises that have dealt our culture blows that feel fatal.  -- DL

from the archive; first posted by The Best American Poetry on September 09, 2019 at 09:28 AM.

<<<

Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

from The Liberal Imagination 

>>>

I would like to read an essay that takes us link by link from "enlightened interest" to pity, then to wisdom, and finally to the dictatorial will of the arrogant intellect. The essay should note that the writer includes himself in the liberal community he criticizes; his use of "we," "us," and "our" are not projections of a self that would speak for all; on the contrary, Trilling implicates himself in the tendency he addresses. It is possible that no one could be less in fashion than Trilling, but I turn to him now, as to very few others, in my effort to grapple with seemingly incomprehensible events. I find his essays go far to elucidate, ahead of time it seems, some of the crises that have dealt our culture blows that feel fatal.  -- DL

More Unpublished Couplets from "The Two Davids" [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

David Shapiro and I corresponded by couplets in February 2003. Here are some previously unpublished exanmples. And here is a conversation with David Shapiro conducted by Kent Johnson http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-shapiro-d-ivb-kent.shtml

Subj:    Kenneth said: We always make our own mayonnaise          
Date:   2/12/2003 11:22:50 AM Eastern Standard Time       

From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

Good couplets make their point almost at once.
Like kicking a habit or calling your children runts.

The evil is done, and you are flawed forever.
But the couplet keeps returning, like Shelley's river.

An off‑rhyme doesn't daunt it, not the couplet.
We know whose dog we are, we rise and shit.

We could have said "we urinate" but we didn't.
The couplet seems to end with "Good riddance."

Oh Kenneth loved the couplet in Al Pope.
He said my taste at fifteen gave him hope.

Oh Janice, he said once, make mayonnaise.
This genius likes his Pope‑‑what higher praise.

I was fifteen‑‑had never downed such stuff.
His home‑made mayonnaise was strange enough.  DS, 2 / 12 /03

 

Re: The consistency of the couplet: each couplet consists
2/14/03
From: DCLEHMAN
To: DaJoShap

[Sometimes six suffice]

Each couplet consists of an adult and a child.
I shall bring my lunch pail and dine in the wild.

Each couplet consists of a woman and a man,
But which is which? Who’s the European, who the American?

From the time we are teens we attempt to link
With others who exist because they think.

So I walk to the edge and I walk back alone
Except for the chirp of a cell phone.

Each couplet composes a contradiction
And resolves it like an uncanny prediction.>> DL, 2 / 14 / 03

 

My wife's mother is dying, innocent And who scapes whipping in this Tenement  

Date:   2/13/2003 9:01:09 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

<< A couplet comes down on you like death's storm.
Afterwards, Dave, you're never quite so warm.

A couplet edges downwards like black snow.
But so dramatic! like snow in a Noh.

My mother's wife is dying‑‑innocent.
But who ‘scapes whipping in this Tenement?

You were a couplet, Lady, all day long.
At evening, you're a chorus for no song.

Then you were born, or was it just red clay?
Where are you? is the question of our day.

My wife's sweet Mother lay there without mind.
Was it a home, a hospice? Were we blind?

We want our beds to change, but our disease?
My wife could drive us home, like a white rose.    >> DS, 2 / 14 / 03

 

Re: Like a white rose, or like red clay

from: DCLEHMAN
to: DaJoShap

I speak of my mother who called to console
Me when Sinatra died at 82. She said he wasn’t old.

In May ‘98 my mother was eighty three
Though she liked to tell people she was eighty, only.

After the female moon departed, leaving blood
In the snow, we left our nostalgia for the mud.

I have a new song, and it’s not a blues song,
You wake up, it’s spring, and you can’t go wrong.

What happened to that song? Where did it go,
That dream in a shabby dress I used to know?

We’ve got a right to sing the blues, to sign
The picture we can’t finish, to dash off the line.

Youth is the place where you greet the day with lust
And pledge your trust, but thence in the end comes disgust.  DL, 2 / 15 / 03

 

Re: away, so I claim "eight" expansively: Protest and Fiona Shaw  
Date:   2/15/2003 6:17:18 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

I forgive you David Lehman for being away.
Now write a couplet or I'll protest, pray.

I forgive you Lehman deep in jet lag or leg.
I saw the protests early and disagree to beg.

Billionaires for Bush was witty: a few others.
Susan Sarandon, Poitier, a few mothers.

I tried to get my young son arrested.
But his mother took him to Medea‑‑busted.

Medea spritzed big droplets on her Jason.
I bowed my head to the Irish‑Greco version.

I wouldn't want the part of bloodied child!
Psychoanalytically, I think it wild.

I want the part of the princess, off stage.
Pretty, burnt to death, welded to Dad in old age.

What a death! Have you heard of anything like it?
Or is it just napalm, our old friend Ike that.  – DS, 2 / 15 / 03

photo by Chris Felver; copyright (c) 1999 by Chris Felver.

A "Next Line, Please" Reprise: Name that Line!

 

 

From 2014 to 2019, David Lehman helmed one of our most popular columns: “Next Line, Please,” which resulted in a finished, crowdsourced poem every week. Lehman’s prompts attracted professional writers and amateurs alike, who contributed sonnets, haiku, sestinas, centos, and other formal poems. Eventually these pieces were published together in an anthology, “Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers.” Five years have elapsed since Lehman’s “valediction forbidding mourning,” but fans of the column have held out hope that it would return. Today, Lehman finally brings it back—with a twist. 

https://theamericanscholar.org/in-reprise-next-line-please/

Click here to take part!