The Best American Poetry

"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

The Prophecy of an Assassination: John Frankenheimer’s prescient 1962 film, "The Manchurian Candidate" [by David Lehman]

from The American Scholar /  January 22, 2022

When The Manchurian Candidate, based on the novel by Richard Condon, was released in 1962, Pauline Kael called it “the most sophisticated political satire ever to come out of Hollywood.” Six decades on, the judgment holds, and I’ll go further. With its mind-bending plot, its celebrated brainwashing sequence, and stellar performances from a cast led by Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey, and Janet Leigh, director John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece remains supreme in the field of conspiracy-theory celluloid.

An honorable but inevitably lesser effort, Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, lacks the air of Cold War menace, not to mention the queen of diamonds in a game of solitaire as the trigger for a sleeper agent. Also lost is the cinematic magic of the original. Frankenheimer makes exemplary use of montage dissolve techniques to convey altered states of consciousness and depict the experience of hypnotic mind control. And, in retrospect, his 1962 movie seems almost to have anticipated either the earth-shaking events of November 22, 1963, or their interpretation.

Political scientists used to define politics as the art of the possible. If it has morphed into the craft of manipulative paranoia, the change dates back to the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission’s report satisfied few skeptics, journalists, or serious historians, and the credibility of politicians (who used to be called “statesmen”) keeps ebbing.

The Manchurian Candidate, which presaged the change, presents a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate by long-range rifle during his party’s nominating convention in Madison Square Garden. The movie’s conceit was so scary that studio executives at United Artists felt the project had to be cleared with the White House. Frank Sinatra dutifully called JFK, who greenlit the film, which Sinatra believed in so strongly that he volunteered the use of his private plane for an early scene in the movie.

Talk about serendipity: On October 22, 1962, only two days before the picture’s release, President Kennedy announced to the nation that he had ordered a naval blockade to repulse Russian ships, equipped with missiles, heading to the Caribbean. The Cuban Missile Crisis has been seen ever since as the tensest moment in the 45-year Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and here was a movie advancing the thesis that a Communist assassination plan was in the works.

The Manchurian Candidate is wickedly satirical. Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), a demagogue in the manner of Joe McCarthy, is revealed to be an imbecile under the thumb of his ambitious, intellectually superior wife, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (the great Angela Lansbury at her best). What happened to her first husband? The movie, mum on the point, offers an Oedipal triangle in which Mrs. Iselin controls her war hero son, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), and gets him to eliminate her rival, his bride (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of Senator Iselin’s fiercest, most principled opponent (John McGiver). Lansbury was less than three years older than Harvey. In the novel, she seduces him; in the film, just a kiss on the lips, but it’s enough. She's the boss, a regal diamond.

What most distinguishes The Manchurian Candidate is its opening. If you miss the first five minutes of Hamlet, you can catch up (at the cost of some excellent verse), because the ghost does not appear to Hamlet until act I, scene 4 and doesn’t speak to the price until scene 5. But, as the movie’s theatrical release poster accurately proclaimed, “If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about.” The film begins in Korea, 1952. Betrayed by a guide, an American army unit is ambushed. After Saul Bass’s marvelous title credits, featuring the queen of diamonds on an oversize political campaign button, we go to an American airport, where Sergeant Shaw, survivor of the ambush, is honored with hoopla for the valor he is said to have displayed under fire.

In the following scene, the camera slowly approaches Shaw’s commanding officer, Major Bennett Marco (Sinatra), asleep beside an insomniac’s paradise of books, among them The Trial, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Ulysses. Marco, who nominated Shaw for his medal, slides into a recurring nightmare of what really happened in Korea.

The brainwashing sequence begins with the captive GIs in their army fatigues on a stage. The audience appears to the men, in their trance, to consist of dowagers in sunhats who have gathered to talk about hydrangeas at a suburban garden party in New Jersey. In fact, the ladies in the audience are Russian and Chinese bigwigs, and Frankenheimer switches us back and forth between alternating versions, the harmless if large old women and the malevolent Communists in suits or uniforms. Then we watch in horror as, under orders, Shaw kills two of his fellow POWs while the other soldiers look on, affectless.

Like Major Marco, Corporal Al Melvin (James Edwards) has recurrent nightmares culminating in a public murder committed by Shaw. And, like Major Marco, he is programmed to say, when asked, that “‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Everyone says so, and it’s odd, because Raymond is a singularly cold, humorless fellow whom the men dislike.

The buried truth—that the recipient of a Congressional Medal of Honor, feted with fanfare, is a secret, trigger-ready weapon concocted by the enemy—created a mental shock to anyone who saw The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. (I was 14 years old, and amazed.) The plot: to engineer the nomination of the clownish Senator Iselin for the position of vice president, then to kill the man at the head of the ticket, paving the way for Iselin’s rise to that position. The paranoid paradox: the extreme right-wing John Iselin is really a clueless Communist placeholder. The brains of the operation: Eleanor Iselin, as icily ruthless as Lady MacBeth.

Marco, the veteran suffering from PTSD who tries to save Shaw from his predestined fate, looks like a man having a nervous breakdown, but he must have something going for him, because the glamorous and beautiful Rosie Cheyney (Janet Leigh) is willing to break her engagement to her fiancé on the basis of a shared cigarette with Marco on the train between Washington, D. C. and New York City. Although Leigh is extraneous to the plot, I have published a poem contending that the only justification needed for Janet Leigh’s presence in the movie is that she is Janet Leigh. More creatively, Roger Ebert argues that in the paranoid universe of The Manchurian Candidate, Leigh may secretly be Sinatra’s controller.

I will not give away other surprises and speculations except to say that the guises assumed by the queen of diamonds will endow that particular card with a rare significance if you are a part-time poker player. An amusing scene takes place in Jilly’s, Sinatra’s favorite New York hangout. When the bartender, telling a story, says, “Go up to Central Park and go jump in the lake,” Raymond—a solitaire addict who has just encountered the trigger card—does as told. Marco has to fish him out.

The Manchurian Candidate has altered political discourse, and the very word brainwashing has acquired a stink. The evil mesmerist-in-chief, Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), crows that Raymond Shaw’s “brain has not only been washed, as they say; it’s been dry-cleaned.” In 1967, George Romney shot his presidential candidacy in the foot when he said he had supported the Vietnam War because US generals had “brainwashed” him. Recently, Donald Trump was depicted as a “Manchurian candidate,” allegedly willing to favor the Russians in exchange for lucrative real-estate deals.

But The Manchurian Candidate offers more than a linguistic afterlife, thrilling paranoia, and the cunning of Eleanor Iselin. It succeeds as well as it does because of the strong sense of the uncanny that informs it, as if we were watching our own history rendered as a spooky hallucination, delivered with the plausibility of a newsreel.

Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses. Copyright (c) 2022 by David Lehman.

"How Well Do You Know Your Hitchcock?" [by David Lehman]

from "How Well Do You Know Your Hitchcock? A Multiple-Choice Test for the Maestro’s Fans"

By David Lehman | January 19, 2024 / in The American Scholar

<<< Though he never won the Oscar for Best Director in his lifetime, Alfred Hitchcock enjoys an enviable posthumous existence. He may be the most revered of all film directors today. He is my own favorite. Time was, critics condescended to Hitchcock on the grounds that his movies were merely thrillers, and thus either less important or less serious than blockbusters like Ben Hur or message movies like To Kill A Mockingbird. But Hitchcock always used mystery genre conventions to explore themes of deeper significance; he relied on what he called “the MacGuffin,” the merest pretext, as the pivot for a plot involving crime or espionage and ultimately touching on the dialectic of guilt and innocence, good and evil.

Hitchcock was born in London on August 13, 1899 (and when the 13th of August falls on a Friday, freaky things do happen). He made films for nearly two decades in Britain before moving to Hollywood in 1939, on the eve of World War II. His love for his adopted country shines through in some of his grand settings: the cliffhanger scenes at the Statue of Liberty (Saboteur, 1942) and at Mount Rushmore (North by Northwest, 1959), or the drowning scene near the Golden Gate Bridge (Vertigo, 1958). But we also have small-town America at its most innocent (Shadow of a Doubt, 1943), the intimate courtyard shared by Greenwich Village bohemians (Rear Window, 1954), a posh London flat (Dial M for Murder, 1954), and a lonely motel on a dark country road in the rain (Psycho, 1960).

He was prolific; he headlined Cary Grant, James Stewart, Gregory Peck, and a bouquet of beauteous and talented blondes, including Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Doris Day, Kim Novak, Janet Leigh, and Eva Marie Saint. Understanding his own singularity, Hitchcock signed his pictures with himself in a cameo. He might be the fellow sitting next to Cary Grant on the bus (To Catch a Thief, 1955), a musician carrying a violin case (Spellbound, 1945), or a passenger struggling with a double bass (Strangers on a Train, 1951). In Lifeboat (1944), in which all the action takes place on a small craft and is limited to the few survivors of a shipwreck, the master makes his appearance as the heavyset fellow in a newspaper ad for weight reduction.

I have named eleven of my favorite Hitchcock movies in this piece and yet have not even mentioned Notorious (1946) or The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), about either of which I would write a prose poem. That’s for later. For now, here’s a quiz I’ve devised that will appeal to aficionados or newcomers alike. Hover your cursor over the black box (or tap, on mobile) to reveal the answer.

1. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, who—or what—is Ambrose Chapel?

(A) Albert Hall’s younger brother
(B) The kidnapper
(C) A London church
(E) The “MacGuffin”
(E) A taxidermist

Answer: (C) a London church in the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much—but metaphorically, it is also (A) an anticipation of the film’s climactic scene at the Royal Albert Hall. Like Albert Hall, Ambrose Chapel is a name that can be taken to refer to a person, the way Dr. Benjamin McKenna (James Stewart) and his wife, the celebrated singer Josephine Conway (Doris Day), interpret it at first. (E) is the very epitome of a red herring, the completely innocent namesake Dr. McKenna tracks down. While (B) is incorrect, it is at least relevant, because the kidnapper is Ambrose Chapel’s main man of the cloth. As for (D), you know what a MacGuffin is, don’t you? Well, here’s Hitchcock’s explanation: “It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’  And the other answers,  ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.’  The first one asks, ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’  ‘Well,’ the other man says,  ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’  The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’  and the other one answers,  ‘Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!’  So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.”

For more of this multiple choice quiz designed to delight aficionado and novice alike, click here for the full article on the website of The American Scholar.

"The Trout Quintet," my answer of the day [by David Lehman]

The Answer

The Trout Quintet is my answer
to everything today which begins
with snow on the ground and lather
on my face. I will shave with my father
in the mirror and then go downtown,
get a haircut, buy a new shirt,
and say hello to the branch manager of the bank
wearing a herringbone tweed jacket;
and the wound on my face will have healed
by the time I come home. Thank you,
Franz Schubert, not only for your Trout Quintet
but also for your Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat,
which Kubrick used in Barry Lyndon
and often serves as my answer of the day.

-- David Lehman, from the current issue of Hanging Loose #114

Hanging Loose: Issue 114

Our 57^th year of continuous publication, with covers and an art portfolio by Amy Masters. It features a supplement of poems curated by Hanging Loose author R. Zamora Linmark and a remembrance of Jack Anderson, plus Jack’s last poem.

Others included in this issue are regulars such as Sherman Alexie, Rosalind Brackenbury, Bill Christophersen, Harley Elliott, Joanna Fuhrman, David Lehman, Stephen Lewandowski, D. Nurkse, Tim Robbins, Marty Skoble, and Tom Wayman, plus many poets new to HL, among them: Jennifer Barber, Ace Boggess, Shaune Bornholdt, Debra Cash, Paula Cisewski, Wendy Drexler, Helen Ivory, Laura Judge, Li Bai (translated by Arthur Sze), Lynette Ng, Beth Brown Preston, Derek Shirae, Montana James Thomas, Marc Vincenz, and Pui Ying Wong ; and poems by four outstanding poets of high school age.

                                                                           painting by Lois Dodd, "Window with Snow and Ice" (1983)

A Brief Digression on Critics and Cops [by David Lehman]

Why do award committees pin the tail on the horse’s ass? Because award committees combine a universal truth (“everyone’s a critic”) with an old punch line (“the committee in charge of designing a horse came up with a camel”).

What is a critic? According to the critic Kenneth Tynan, “the critic is one who knows the way but cannot drive the car.” According to Kierkegaard, the critic resembles a poet as one pea another except that he lacks the anguish in his heart and the music on his lips – that is, everything.

As Emerson, left, would say, "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." Ignore the critics. They are full of shit.

The record of mediocrity that is the history of prizes suggests that a critic is a committee.

When Annie Get Your Gun opened on May 16, 1946, with Ethel Merman as Annie and one of the most glorious scores ever written for the stage, the critic Ward Morehouse of the New York Herald-Tribune wrote that la Merman was “in her best form since Anything Goes” but that “Irving Berlin’s score is not a notable one.” Brooks Atkinson of the Times seemed to concur, characterizing the songs – "There’s No Business Like Show Business," "They Say It’s Wonderful," "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better," and the rest – as “routine composing.” But for dumbness after the fact, it is hard to top the assessment of Guys and Dolls that appeared in the London Sunday Times in May 1953 (three years after the show’s debut on Broadway). Quoth the critic: the show, “despite its striking, incidental merits,” is “an interminable, an overwhelming, and in the end intolerable bore.”

On the screen, the critic is depicted often enough as a venomous, haughty lout (Clifton Webb in Laura, left, between Dana Andrews and a portrait of Gene Tierney) or a conniver (George Sanders in All About Eve) or sometimes a guy who needs a drink because he has to choose between telling the truth and keeping his job (Joseph Cotton in Citizen Kane). But in song-and-dance movies with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly in them, the critic is transmuted into the figure of the cop who looks on the festive proceedings and glares skeptically (as at the end of Kelly’s performance of the title number in Singing in the Rain) or with amused toleration (as when Fred Astaire, sporting a boater, does his shoeshine number in The Band Wagon).

The cop is the reviewer saying, You’re not supposed to be having such a good time. Don’t you know there’s a war going on? Don’t you realize that life is serious and art must be the same? Art has a moral imperative. Literature is a criticism of life. To which objection, the best answer is the smile on Gene Kelly’s face as he wraps himself around a streetlamp and lets the rain pour down his face.

Happy birthday, Sandy Koufax (born December 30, 1935)

No self-respecting Dodger fan will want to overlook Michael Leahy's The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers (HarperCollins).Independent of the Dodger fan base, students of baseball history will find much to enlighten them here about such subjects as the glory days of Sandy Koufax, the ailments (physical and mental) that plague big-time ballplayers, and the relations of management versus labor when Walter O'Malley owned the Dodgers.

There are terrific anecdotes based on interviews the author conducted with Sandy Koufax ("simply the best," as the Yankees advance scout noted in 1963), Maury Wills (who stole 104 bases in 1962), Wes Parker (maybe the slickest fielding first-baseman ever), Lou Johnson (hitting hero of the 1965 World Series), second-baseman Dick Tracewski, catcher Jeff Torberg, the underrated Ron Fairly,and others.The only thing I am not crazy about is the book's title, and the author may not have liked it either. The book is at its weakest when trying to correlate the fortunes of the Dodgers as a team and as a group of individuals with the "turbulent" decade of war, riots, assassinations, uprisings and political movements.

The most compelling pages are on Koufax, a ferocious competitor who was the key to the Dodgers' two World Championships and three National League pennants in the four-year stretch from 1963 through 1966. A hero to the Jewish community for his principled refusal to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, Koufax is enigmatic to the extent that his modesty, shyness, and reticence seem to indicate hidden depths of complexity. Like the "no trespassing" sign that begins and ends Citizen Kane, Koufax's avoidance of publicity is an invitation to let speculation and multiple points of view determine our sense of the man.

The other Dodgers interviewed for the book speak of Sandy with respect bordering on reverence. I didn't know that there was an anti-Semitic strain in some newspaper articles in the mid-60s. "Some skeptics suggested [that] perhaps Koufax was less a ballplayer than a budding businessman and bon vivant." Moreover, "some stories cast him as a closet intellectual, always grounds for suspicion in professional stories." The stories may have been planted by management hoping to improve their bargaining position or their public image. Koufax was underpaid not only in comparison to today's players but by any criterion of the time. And as Leahy says, "there can be no reasonable doubt" that anti-Semitism lay behind the stereotypes provoked by "newspaper references to Koufax's supposed business shrewdness and inferences that Koufax might be less committed to the Dodgers than to getting more money." 

By staging a joint holdout in 1966, Koufax and Don Drysdale got the raises they deserved -- and helped pave the way for the free-agency revolution that Marvin Miller was about to engineer. It was never a secret that Koufax pitched despite intense pain from arthritis; that he had to prepare elaborately for each game, and that he quit baseball at the height of his fame, age 30, because he was told that if he continued to pitch, he may ultimately lose the arm. He is the primary hero of this book, and we see him only through others' eyes, because he agreed to speak with Leahy only about his old friend Maury Wills.

Wills suffered from old-fashioned racism. Fierce in his play on the field, someone whose commitment to winning was absolute (in the manner of Chase Utley or Hunter Pence), he felt manipulated by Dodger management, and disrespected. Part of the problem was Vero Beach, Florida, where the Dodgers held their spring training for many years.The town's hostility to blacks was palpable. But management treated the star shortstop with contempt during contract negotiations. Remembering Dodger games in which the only offense was provided by Wills (who would beat out a bunt, steal second, steal third, and come home on a fly ball), I agree with those who contend that he belongs in baseball's Hall of Fame. Wills revolutionized baseball. He brought back the stolen base as a weapon. His career prefigured those of Lou Brock, Ricky Henderson, and Davey Lopes.

One thing I did not know about Wills is that he apparently dated Doris Day.

There must be a technical term for the degree of insecurity that plagued Wes Parker. Lou Johnson's story is that of the veteran minor-leaguer who is about to hang up his spikes when he gets one last chance and makes the most of it.Johnson hit the decisive home run when Koufax shut out the Minnesota Twins in game seven of the 1965 World Series. The game was played in Minnesota. "You could hear a cat pissin' on cotton after I hit it," Johnson recalls. As for Parker, the affable Tim McCarver says that Parker made "the best play I ever saw made by a first baseman in a game I was ever in." 

Michael Leahy's affection for the team is evident and understandable. He was a teenage kid at Dodger Stadium when Koufax pitched his perfect game in 1965. That game was, Leahy says, "the apotheosis of Koufax" and it must have felt magical to be in the stadium. As Leahy suggests, Koufax stood in relation to the Dodgers of the 1960s as Joe DiMaggio stood in relation to the Yankees twenty years earlier. 

Among the many other things I learned from "The Last Innocents," I'll leave you with a few. One is that Buzzie Bavasi, the Dodgers' general manager, was not entirely the jovial guy I had imagined. He was a tough negotiator and employed  a variety of tricks to fool a player into signing a lowball contract. In 1964 Ron Fairly came in for his contract meeting. Bavasi said he had good news. Tommy Davis had just signed. The contract is on the desk. Then Bavasi invented an excuse to leave the room. Fairly took a look at the contract on the desk -- a bogus document -- gulped and lowered his financial expectations accordingly. (The GM bragged about the tactic to newspapermen.) Buzzie did have a jovial side, and some players speak of him with warmth. But first of all he was O'Malley's henchman at a time when ownership routinely exploited the players. It is a business now. It was a business then.

With rosters changing as rapidly as they do, and with management and labor so often at odds, one has to wonder about fan loyalty to teams. In Philosophy 101 the professor asks you whether it's still the same hammer if you replace the handle. Is it still the same hammer if you replace not only the handle but the metal head? It is the same with a team. The Dodgers of 2015 are completely different from the Dodgers of 1956 -- different owners, a different city, different personnel, Yet the fans are unwavering. They are the only constant. And one is a little nostalgic for the time when certain players -- DiMaggio and Mantle with the Yankees, Koufax with the Dodgers, Ted Williams with the Red Sox, Stan Musial with the Cardinals -- played their whole career with just one team. And yes, I am still furious with the Mets for trading Tom Seaver to the Reds for what Ira Gershwin would call "plenty of nuthin," and nearly forty years gone by since that ugly day. Seaver should have worn no other uniform than that of the Mets.

With just three exceptions (Koufax, Drysdale, and rookie pitcher Don Sutton, who was nursing a sore arm), O'Malley insisted that all Dodger players go to Japan for a few weeks of games with Japanese teams following the 1966 season. The players were exhausted and many did not want to go. They had played 162 regular season games plus four in the post-season. Leahy's dry comment: O'Malley "found it hard to imagine why anyone would wish to pass on a chance to see Japan, especially when he was paying each player $4,000 in addition to their travel expenses." Players who rebelled, as Wills did, got traded. So much for management's loyalty to the players who defined the team.

When manager Walt Alston was asked who would pitch the seventh game of the 1965 World Series, Drysdale, whose regular turn it was, or Koufax on two-days' rest, Alston said, "the lefthander." Make of that what you will.

I was also glad to acquire the answer to the question "who moved Burright?" This refers to the calamitous ninth inning of the third playoff game between the Dodgers and Giants in 1962. Had Larry Burright, the team's rookie second baseman, stood at his usual place, the team may have made a double play that would stop the Giants' rally. According to Leahy, it was Leo Durocher, then the team's third base coach, who gave the disastrous signal that moved Burright out of position. But, then, Leahy does't really approve of Leo the Lip ("Nice Guys Finish Last"). In any case it's hypothetical. The Giants won the game and took the Yankees to the ninth inning of game seven of that year's World Series before expiring while Tony Bennett sang the hit of that fall, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."

If Koufax fascinates you, if you're curious about the game in which Giants' pitcher Juan Marichal used a bat to clobber Dodger catcher Johnny Roseboro's head, or if you just want to relive the crucial contests of 1963 and 1965, this is the place to go.

-- David Lehman

 

In Favor of Thomas Traherne [by David Lehman]

The blessed babe in a divine Eden is a Romantic trope, but it received a pure exposition long before the age of Blake and Wordsworth. A shoemaker’s son from Hereford, Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) captured the radical wonderment of childhood in his poems. Educated at Oxford (Brasenose College), he published next to nothing in his lifetime, and for many years his poems were casually and mistakenly attributed to Henry Vaughan.

Not until the turn of the twentieth century was Traherne’s authorship of Poems (1903) and the prose Centuries of Meditation (1908) recognized. The latter comprises paragraphs of reflection that may be considered forerunners of the prose poem. Traherne wrote as one for whom angels were real. The child is “heir of the whole world,” able to converse with everything he sees. Clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars, he was born to celebrate creation: “the skies in their magnificence, / The lively, lovely air.”

From Centuries of Meditation:  “Once I remember (I think I was about 4 years old when) I thus reasoned with myself, sitting in a little obscure room in my father's poor house: If there be a God, certainly He must be infinite in Goodness: and that I was prompted to, by a real whispering instinct of Nature. And if He be infinite in Goodness, and a perfect Being in Wisdom and Love, certainly He must do most glorious things, and give us infinite riches; how comes it to pass therefore that I am so poor? Of so scanty and narrow a fortune, enjoying few and obscure comforts? I thought I could not believe Him a God to me, unless all His power were employed to glorify me. I knew not then my Soul, or Body; nor did I think of the Heavens and the Earth, the rivers and the stars, the sun or the seas: all those were lost, and absent from me. But when I found them made out of nothing for me, then I had a God indeed, whom I could praise, and rejoice in.”

Avid Reader: On Bob Gottlieb [by David Lehman]

Did you know that in college Richard Howard was known as Dick Howard? Or that Robert Gottlieb, one of the great names in American book publishing, got his first job (at Simon & Schuster) by writing, when asked to state why he wanted to work in publishing, that he found the task impossible "since it has never occurred to me to be in anything else"? These are among the facts and anecdotes that enliven every page of "Avid Reader," Robert Gottlieb's memoir of a life spent in publishing, which was published in 2016 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Though I feel like this book's ideal reader -- because, like the author, I went to Columbia, spent two post-graduate years in Cambridge (England), and have devoted my life to books -- I can recommend "Avid Reader" to anyone who would understand publishing as a profession and a business in the second half of the twentieth century and since. At S & S, Gottlieb was the wunderkind who revitalized the firm. He published a varied list ranging from William Shirer's monumental "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" to "Calories Don't Count." His great achievement was the publication of "Catch 22" by Joseph Heller, which was originally entitled "Catch 18" but had to be renamed because Leon Uris had come out with "Mila 18" about the Warsaw Ghetto. Gottlieb believes that Heller's "Something Happened," which disappointed the world, is even better than "Catch 22," so I promise to look for it next week at the Strand.

At Knopf, Gottlieb directed the list of the most prestigious (and "literary") of all New York houses, and for five years, he was at the helm of The New Yorker, succeeding William Shawn

If there is a moral to Gottlieb's memoir, it is that "personal conviction" is the most important thing that an editor brings to a book. The editor's job is not just to recognize the quality of the manuscript and to improve it but also to champion it, promote it, to share the good news. This is something that Gottlieb and his colleagues grasped before others did. But the anecdotes beat the morals.

Gottlieb has written on ballet and is co-editor of a volume of American songbook lyrics that I find indispensable. You will enjoy reading about "Dick" Howard, Lionel Trilling (whose generosity to the author was extraordinary),and Andrew Chiappe at Columbia; about F. R. Leavis and the Cambridge theatre scene in the 1950s; about "Mad Men" era New York; and about all the other arts in which Gotttlieb has a cultivated interest. (His favorite things include plastic handbags from the 1950s.) There are a lot of pointers that everyone in publishing ought to have: "Titles and covers can make all the difference." 

I loved learning that Bob Gottlieb liked reading till all hours and couldn't be bothered to attend morning lectures. I feel the same way. This is a sweet book.

from the archive; first posted September 2016

"Read Blake or go to hell" [by David Lehman]

for Nin Andrews

1.

Northrop Frye told all the English majors 
"Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world."
Of course he may have been exaggerating, but Blake did write
“Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained,”
sounding like a forerunner of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

How nice to be on a second-name basis with minds so far ahead of their time
as Frye, Blake, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche
and thus able to forecast the miserable future of the race,
realizing that "enough" could never catch up with "too much"
and so the road of excess would lead only to the cavern of privation
because the theory of Marxism prevailed over its practice.

2.

According to Frye, war was a species of auto-eroticism,
the youth of the privileged middle class
alone on a Saturday night dreaming of
shameless sex across the front bench of the car
before bucket seats were standard. 

The consequences for the fighter saved by the bell
from his inevitable doom on the canvas
were as predictable as the crisis we now face
because the theory of Marxism has prevailed
over its dismal history in practice.

3.

Passion yes, friendship not possible, ecstatic
the conjoining of selves,
because the difference
unanticipated by the tenured professors of desire
meant they understood the supreme importance of the orgasm
and could never be satisfied by anything less
even if, in the corrupt and blasphemous temples,
the theory of Marxism continued to prevail 

-- DL

Seven Terrific Anthologies [recommended by David Lehman]

* Louis Untermeyer, A Concise Treasure of American Poetry (Pocket Books). A peerless one-volume introduction to American poetry. Untermeyer's biographical notes and comments are exemplary. See the note on William Cullen Bryant.

* The New American Poetry edited by Donald Allen (Grove Press). In the 1960s battle of the anthologies, Allen’s -- which represented the counter-cultural, adversarial, and avant-garde alternatives to the academic poetry of the time -- won readers’ hearts and minds and gained legitimacy for the Beats, Black Mountain poets, and the New York School.

* The Viking Portable Poets of the English Language, edited by W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson. This attractive but sadly out-of-print five-volume set is a nostalgic lit major’s dream, covering English poetry from the Medieval and Renaissance periods through the Romantics, Victorians, and Edwardians. Alice Quinn, former poetry editor of The New Yorker, and I compared notes and discovered that both of us go to book sales and snap up a copy of any volume to give as presents.

* Dwight Macdonald's Parodies (Da Capo). This superbly entertaining book contains monuments of merriment by Max Beerbohm, Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, and Lewis Carroll -- as well as an inadvertent self-parody by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Da Capo Press reissued the book with an introduction by Veronica Geng in 1985: “If Parodies were a man, I’d marry it (him, them).”

* Reading Lyrics, ed Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball (Pantheon). Whether you consider them as poems or as occupying a field of their own, the best lyrics of Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Dorothy Fields, Oscar Hammerstein, Gus Kahn, Leo Robin, and many others amount to an American cultural glory full of wit and romance and charm. This is an indispensable book.

* Harvey Shapiro, Poets of World War II (Library of America). The scariest war of the twentieth century produced memorable poems, some well-known (Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"), some little known or under-appreciated, including works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lincoln Kirstein, Kenneth Koch, and Yvor Winters. This is a very smart anthology edited by the late poet (and former editor of the New York Times Book Review) who flew 35 missions as an Air Force radio gunner in Europe during the war.

* The Oxford Book of American Verse edited by F. O. Matthiessen (1950). Professor Matthiessen's brilliant introduction and sagacious choices made this the American anthology of record in midcentury, and it still holds up. It served me as a constant resource when I edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry in 2006.

Ed. note: A version of this piece appeared in The Week in April 2007.

Trilling, Barzun, and the Colloquium on Important Books [by David Lehman]

Lionel Trilling, then an assistant professor at Columbia working on his thesis on Matthew Arnold, turned twenty-nine on July 4, 1934. That fall he and Jacques Barzun, 26, taught a seminar that convened on Wednesday evenings for the next twenty years. It was for seniors only and you had to have top grades to qualify. They called it "the Colloquium on Important Books." The name had changed by the time I took the seminar, in 1969, and the instructors were Rufus Mathewson and Edward Said. But the idea behind the class, the idea that there were great books that an educated person should read, remained strong - and needs desperately to be revived.

Think of it: Voltaire, The French Revolution (Burke, Carlyle), Schopenhauer, The Red and the Black, Madame Bovary, Hard Times, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Mann, Proust, Conrad's "Under Western Eyes," Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents."

Of Barzun I have written elsewhere - here, for example, and there, on the subject of espionage. Of his amazing erudition reflected in his magnificent "From Dawn to Decadence," there can be no dispute. He taught me much, and I shared with him a particular interest in the literature of detection and intrigue. He gave me great pointers that were invaluable when I wrote my book "The Perfect Murder." Consider this observation of his:

<< <<< The spy is imperturbable not by temperament or by philosophy, but from expertise. He is the competent man. Whether the need of the moment is to play bridge like Culbertson, speak a Finnish dialect like a native, ski to safety over precipices or disable a funicular, he comforts us with his powers no less than with the pedantry of the subject. He makes mistakes, of course, to keep us in countenance, but they are errors of inattention, such as killing the wrong man. We respond to this agreeable image of our scientific world, where knowledge commands power, where facts are uniformly interesting, and where fatalities appear more and more as oversights, professional faux pas. These results constitute the romance of the age; why should they not be translated into stories -- spy stories especially, since what we know as science comes from ferreting and spying, and since we care so much for truth that we are willing to drug and torture for it? >>> 

And now, a few quotes from Trilling, more pertinent today than ever:

<< We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian. >>

<< Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect. >>

<< Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process. >>

<< 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 objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. >>

<< It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. >>

See, too, these two poems of the day that quote Trilling.

And now, Mark Twain, on the Viennese Parliament in 1897: 
"As to the make-up of the House itself, it is this:
the deputies come from all  the walks of life and
from all the grades of society. There are princes, counts,  barons, priests,
mechanics, laborers, physicians, professors, merchants,  bankers,
shopkeepers. They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere,  devoted, and they
hate the Jews."  Lionel Trilling, who quoted this, added  that "This hatred of
the Jews was the one point of unity in a Parliament which was torn asunder
by the fiercest nationalistic and cultural jealousies."

What's Your Favorite Film Noir? (with Suzanne Lummis and David Lehman]

 What is the greatest noir movie?

Suzanne Lummis:
I think Double Indemnity of 1944 is seminal, though a couple of others before it have strong noir elements. But Double Indemnity’s got it all, a terrific script and story, thanks to director Billy Wilder; smart, cracking dialog, thanks to co-writer Raymond Chandler, master of the hardboiled detective novel; and the best (worst!) crime: Two Lovers Kill Husband Then Shoot Each Other. In the annals of immortal crimes, that one’s hard to beat. However, although John F. Seitz is credited with some innovations—such as the smoky look of certain interiors—I prefer the hard, almost glossy, contrasting shadow and light of John Alton and Nicholas Musuraca.  

David Lehman:
We agree. Double Indemnity is the ne plus ultra of noir movies, and if we were to give out noir awards on the model of the Oscars I believe it would win for best picture, best screenplay, best femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck), and best supporting actor (Edward G. Robinson). The underrated Fred MacMurray would get a nomination for best actor in a lead role but would lose to Robert Mitchum (Out of the Past). My favorite moments: Stanwyck as traffic cop, MacMurray as speeding motorist; Edward G. Robinson’s great speech on types of suicide; the movie’s last line (“I love you, too”). It’s a movie I watch at least once a year and could talk about it for an ardent hour.

---

On July 7, 2019, Suzanne Lummis and I initiated a weekly dialogue on noir. We sustained the exchanges until November. This was the first in the series. Herewith from the original announcement:

<<
Suzanne's film noir and poetry themed series, They Write by Night, can be found on YouTube and the website poetry.la, and features explorations such as "Damaged Women," "Separating the Dark from the Light," and "Are the Femmes Fatale?"  Her essays include "The Poem Noir--Too Dark to Be Depressed" in Malpais Review and "Never Out of the Past: Noir and the Poetry of Lynda Hull" in The Los Angeles Review of Books. Her most recent poetry collection, Open 24 Hours, won the Blue Lynx Prize.

Our columns will go up on Sundays at noon -- timed to coincide with the conclusion of Eddie Muller's noir movie of the week on TCM. Eddie, I like your period-accurate ties and your taste, and this, the first of our exchanges, is dedicated to you, with thanks for today's seventy-minute feature, The Tattooed Stranger, with the shootout amid the gravestones and with the detective and his botanist lady friend in Fort Tryon Park with the GW Bridge in the background. That -- Washington Heights --is where I grew up. >> - DL

Note: On Tuesday, December 5, at 6 PM, an all-star panel will consider Crime Novels of the 1960s, the two-volume Library of America set edited by Geoffrey O'Brien. You need to register. For more info click here.  

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/12/coming-up-on-december-5th-6-pm-all-star-panel-on-crime-novels-of-the-1960s.html

For another of our noir exchanges, please use this link.

 What is the greatest noir movie?

Suzanne Lummis:
I think Double Indemnity of 1944 is seminal, though a couple of others before it have strong noir elements. But Double Indemnity’s got it all, a terrific script and story, thanks to director Billy Wilder; smart, cracking dialog, thanks to co-writer Raymond Chandler, master of the hardboiled detective novel; and the best (worst!) crime: Two Lovers Kill Husband Then Shoot Each Other. In the annals of immortal crimes, that one’s hard to beat. However, although John F. Seitz is credited with some innovations—such as the smoky look of certain interiors—I prefer the hard, almost glossy, contrasting shadow and light of John Alton and Nicholas Musuraca.  

David Lehman:
We agree. Double Indemnity is the ne plus ultra of noir movies, and if we were to give out noir awards on the model of the Oscars I believe it would win for best picture, best screenplay, best femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck), and best supporting actor (Edward G. Robinson). The underrated Fred MacMurray would get a nomination for best actor in a lead role but would lose to Robert Mitchum (Out of the Past). My favorite moments: Stanwyck as traffic cop, MacMurray as speeding motorist; Edward G. Robinson’s great speech on types of suicide; the movie’s last line (“I love you, too”). It’s a movie I watch at least once a year and could talk about it for an ardent hour.

---

On July 7, 2019, Suzanne Lummis and I initiated a weekly dialogue on noir. We sustained the exchanges until November. This was the first in the series. Herewith from the original announcement:

<<
Suzanne's film noir and poetry themed series, They Write by Night, can be found on YouTube and the website poetry.la, and features explorations such as "Damaged Women," "Separating the Dark from the Light," and "Are the Femmes Fatale?"  Her essays include "The Poem Noir--Too Dark to Be Depressed" in Malpais Review and "Never Out of the Past: Noir and the Poetry of Lynda Hull" in The Los Angeles Review of Books. Her most recent poetry collection, Open 24 Hours, won the Blue Lynx Prize.

Our columns will go up on Sundays at noon -- timed to coincide with the conclusion of Eddie Muller's noir movie of the week on TCM. Eddie, I like your period-accurate ties and your taste, and this, the first of our exchanges, is dedicated to you, with thanks for today's seventy-minute feature, The Tattooed Stranger, with the shootout amid the gravestones and with the detective and his botanist lady friend in Fort Tryon Park with the GW Bridge in the background. That -- Washington Heights --is where I grew up. >> - DL

Note: On Tuesday, December 5, at 6 PM, an all-star panel will consider Crime Novels of the 1960s, the two-volume Library of America set edited by Geoffrey O'Brien. You need to register. For more info click here.  

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2023/12/coming-up-on-december-5th-6-pm-all-star-panel-on-crime-novels-of-the-1960s.html

For another of our noir exchanges, please use this link.

The Day that Kennedy was Killed [by David Lehman]

The day that Kennedy was killed
    Was the day before the Stuyvesant-Clinton football game.
    There was a rally in the auditorium
    And our coach who was from Texas or Oklahoma said slowly, carefully,
    “There isn’t a horse that can’t be bucked.”

    Meanwhile half the school was marching along
            Fifteenth Street to Union Square and then up to
            Forty Second Street and Fifth Avenue and some got up to
            Fifty Ninth, and they were parading,
            Yelling, “De Witt eats shit” until they were stopped by policemen.
                  I didn’t go.  I stayed in school.
                  That day I almost got into a fight
                  With a fellow twice my size on the stairway
                  And he laughed at me.  A friend of mine broke it up.

    In English the head of the Physics Department walked
    Into the room.  He said, “I think you are old enough
    To understand this.  The President was shot today in Texas.”
            I stand up.  I do not understand.  I say, “What”
            And I think, the President was shocked today in Texas.
            He leaves the room.  I am sorry.

    I leave early. The Clinton game is called off,
            And the series has since been discontinued.
    My French teacher is waiting for me.  Smiling shuffling his legs
            Touching his teeth with his tongue looking at me
            He says, “There is a rumor that Kennedy was shot.
            Do you know anything about that?”

    A week later I go to my cousin’s bar mitzvah
            Out in Long Island, and I bring a catalog with me
            From the Bernard Baruch School of City College.
                        I want to be a stockbroker.
    It is windy outside and we walk a mile or more
            To get to the bar mitzvah
    And as I walk I talk to my mother
    And I think carefully of what I am to say
    And I narrow my eyes.
    It is a cold and windy three days after Thanksgiving
    And I point my thumb to my stomach and chest
    And I brush my scarf against my face
    And I say, “I too want to become President.”

-- David Lehman, March 1967

Dostoevsky: Born on the 11th Day of the 11th Month [by David Lehman]

Born on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1821, a Scorpio with Sagittarius ascendant and the moon in Gemini, Fyodor Dostoevsky was, according to Father Zossima, a prophet greater than all his sons, including the immortal Karamazovs: the saintly Alyosha; the brilliant Ivan; and Dmitri, the sensualist, who is the customer that commercials have in mind when they advertise the happiness of bottles of beer on a beach.

Dusty taught Nietzsche a thing or two about suicidal nihilism and the mirage of total permission granted by an absent deity. In Crime and Punishment, he perfected the inverted detective story, in which the culprit commits the crime before our eyes and it’s only a matter of time before the detective nabs him and send him to Siberia.  The transcendent spirit of Christianity, known only to those compulsive sinners who have descended to rock bottom, pervades Dostoevsky’s novels. He has the craziness of the true believer. Murder is forgivable; a loveless marriage, isn’t.

Nowhere is the gap between the writer and the man wider than it is with the author of The Brothers Karamazov.  The books are sublime, but the man’s behavior was beneath contempt. Thomas Mann, who admired Dostoevsky’s work, wrote, “In foreign countries, in Baden-Baden and in Wiesbaden, where he had to flee from his creditors, he tried to ameliorate his impoverishment by gambling, only in most instances to complete his ruin. Then he would write begging letters in which he speaks the language of misery of the most depraved characters of his novels.” Somerset Maugham, another admirer, wrote, “Dostoevsky was vain, envious, quarrelsome, suspicious, cringing, selfish, boastful, unreliable, inconsiderate, narrow and intolerant.”

Strakhov said: In Switzerland, in my presence, he treated his servant so badly that the man revolted and said to him: “But I too am a man!"

Dostoevsky suffered from epileptic fits (see The Idiot) but did well in his examinations though he loathed mathematics. On April 23, 1849, the twenty-seven-year-old Dostoevsky was arrested for belonging to a group of crazy liberal loudmouth intellectuals. He was sent to Siberia, was sentenced to be executed, and faced a firing squad in the freezing rain. But it turned out to be a mock execution and Dostoevsky went back to his cell the shape and size of a coffin convinced that it is better and wiser to be a saintly fool in Siberia than to pimp in St. Petersburg. Released in 1854, he wrote Crime and Punishment in a hurry because he needed the money to cover his gambling debts. He was a compulsive gambler. He borrowed and lost thousands and thousands of Roubles. Confronted by Sartre on the matter of his anti-Semitism, he reminded the Frenchman that he was not alone in this particular vice, naming Ezra Pound and Edgar Degas as similarly stupid on the subject of Jews.

There are three key psychological facts to consider about Dusty:

(1) He could have died but didn't.

(2) Like the survivor of a game of Russian roulette, he became a gambling addict. He lost and lost and lost. He had no shame. He begged for money and promptly squandered it at the tables.

(3) The silver lining is that, to pay off his debts, he wrote his majestic novels.

Or, in the form of a tanka, two haiku conjoined by a two-line stanza, seven syllables per line:

In Siberia,
sixth in line to be shot, he
lived to tell the tale.

Life was a gamble and he
couldn’t stop gambling; he lost,

lost more, borrowed, lost           
most, wrote books to pay debts; lost,
debts, books, debts, books; debts.

There are, according to the Passover Haggadah, four sons: wise, wicked, simple, and clueless.  Dostoevsky amends that. The sons fall into four categories: the beautiful idiot, the intellectual who kills himself, the guy you’d like to have beers with, and the bastard who believes that the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.

Natasha Issacher likes to say you can understand the history of nineteenth century Russia by reading two books, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.  George Steiner observed that Tolstoy was epic, Dostoevsky, dramatic. Tolstoy believed in history, the people, and the crimson sunrise.  Dostoevsky believed in the soul of a peasant. Tolstoy arrived at humility by logic; Dostoevsky, out of desperation.

In War and Peace, the growth of Pierre’s consciousness begins when he overcomes his youthful enthusiasm for Napoleon.  But the Corsican military genius who crowned himself emperor remained the model for young men who believed that success proceeded not from lineage but from will. If neither the army nor the clergy allowed him to rise, he would nevertheless climb ladders to reach his lady’s boudoir; he might be poor but theoretically he could be a genius, whose every act is justified because it was he who committed it.  Behind the formation of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, as behind Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, stands the Little Corporal who equaled the French Revolution itself in importance. Napoleon made the whole century happen either in his name or against it.

Dostoevsky's birth pattern -- a full house, with only one empty chamber -- is replicated exactly on the second day of August 1914. On this slender bit of stellar evidence, Lucy Garnet spun out Backstory, the six-part series based on the fantasy that World War I was a bloody allegory of the Gotterdammerung that hangs over every page of The Brothers Karamazov.  

The celestial mechanics of Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto intimate that Dostoevsky’s birth would coincide with the end of a war, and indeed, the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, which would have been the novelist's ninety-seventh birthday.  From the last page of Garnet’s Backstory:

The men crowded around the ashtray. The bloodshed had ceased. The flu that succeeded it was deadly. The ambassador fumed. If only the ministers of war and culture had heeded the warnings of The Grand Inquisitor. Peace would have come four years sooner if, in the prison of his days, the free man had learned to praise. The mood was grim. The German minister smoked a Turkish cigarette in a jade holder. "Nothing ever happens in Brussels," he shrugged.

The more you learn about Dusty, the less savory he is: a reactionary; an anti-Semite. He betrayed you, me, anyone. To Turgenev, who had lent him money, he said, “I despise myself profoundly,” but couldn’t resist adding, “‘But I despise you still more.” What an asshole. Nevertheless the pathos was real; he understood that a widow might make her children dance on the street for an extra kopek. The sphere of the novelist’s soul exceeded that of his consciousness. In Papa Karamazov he devised the universally despised victim, the ideal corpse. Which of the three brothers did it, or was there a fourth?

E. M. Forster wrote that George Eliot was a preacher while Dostoevsky was a prophet. As proof, he focused on a singular moment in The Brothers Karamazov. Dmitri Karamazov, accused of killing the old man, has strange dreams that leave him oddly refreshed and grateful to his prison captors who made him comfortable when he slept. It is (though Forster doesn’t put it this way) at this precise moment that Dostoevsky takes over your mind and fills it with the most paranoid impulses soothed by the benevolent kiss of a woman with the heart of a whore.

Therefore, on the day of Dusty’s death, in graveyards in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, in Latvia and Estonia, I urge school children in tatters to join me and shout, "Hooray for Karamazov!"

-- David Lehman

 

Bobby Darin sings Beyond the Sea (studio version & in performance)

Here's the extended version from 1973, all ten minutes of it:

the studio version:

1959:

"The Joy of Poetry" [by George Spencer]

From Columbia College Today, Fall 2023

"David Lehman ’70 marks 35 years of celebrating the best American verse."

By George Spencer

Poet David Lehman ’70 has a habit he shares with Emily Dickinson and Robert Browning: He writes a poem a day. He challenged himself to do so from 1996 to 2000 and resumed the practice during the pandemic, starting in August 2020. “You might write a sonnet on Monday. The next day you might write a poem about the dinner you had. Some days I write two poems,” he says.

With nearly 60 books to his name — including 11 poetry collections — Lehman, 75, may be best known as the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. An indispensable text in college literature courses since 2006, the 1,132-page tome collects the verse of 210 poets from the 17th century to the present, including previously overlooked female poets such as Josephine Miles and Anne Porter, blues singers like Bessie Smith, and rocker Bob Dylan.

Poetry aficionados know Lehman as the driving force behind the annual Best American Poetry series. Its 36 volumes (including two retrospectives) have celebrated the nation’s most sublime, witty and sobering poems since 1988 [Photo below from 1988].

“David has without any question been one of the most influential people in American poetry for the last 40 years — not simply as an anthologist but also as a poet, critic and intellectual presence,” says poet Dana Gioia, a former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. “As an editor, he has been inclusive in every sense of the word — culturally, politically and aesthetically. No one matches his record.”

“Poetry is personal,” says Lehman, reflecting on its diminished role in modern times. “It’s not written to effect social change. It’s written to add to the store of knowledge and to enhance our sense of the beauty of creation. It’s an act of celebration. Sometimes it’s an act of mourning. It’s fundamental to the human heart.”

Lehman, who was an assistant professor of English at Hamilton College, has also written 11 wide-ranging works of nonfiction. These include 2019’s One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, an account of his four-year battle against bladder cancer (he is now cancer-free), and 2015’s Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World.

Like Sinatra, whose signature song is “My Way,” Lehman also crafted a career his way. Early in his freshman year at the College, he got “passionately” involved in writing poetry. “I thought it was one of the highest callings. I was very taken by some of the fellows who had embraced the aesthetics of the so-called New York School of Poetry,” he says.

One of the youngest and last members of that school, he was influenced by poets Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery GSAS’50, according to Gioia. “But he has always been his own man as a poet,” he says. “He is witty and erudite but never in a way that loses his readers. He is very funny and very serious at the same time.”

A native of the Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood who graduated from Stuyvesant H.S., Lehman won the College’s Van Rensselaer Prize for “the author of the best example of English lyric verse” in 1967; later, he became co-editor of The Columbia Review. Yet even with that early success, Lehman had to work hard to achieve his goals. “It never occurred to me that I’d make a living that way or in any way as a writer. I just did it.”

For years he wrote freelance articles for The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek and The Washington Post and also served as a contributing editor of Partisan Review. Money worries dogged him until he was nearly 40. “Your work gets noticed. Somebody gives you a grant, and then at some point, your money anxiety vanishes,” he says.

All the while poetry remained his life’s love. “It’s so much more fun to write a poem than to do most other things that are obligations,” he says. “With poetry, there is pretty much nobody you have to please. You have a real sense of freedom and control.”

But artistic adventure has also had its allure. In 2015 Lehman crowdsourced a sonnet for The American Scholar magazine. He wrote the first line and picked the remaining 13 from online submissions. “I’m a great believer in gamesmanship and competition and challenges,” he says.

When he taught at Hamilton  -- and at NYU, in a freshman honors seminar uncompromisingly called "Great Poems" -- he had his students learn to recite a poem a week. “If you memorize a poem, you own it,” Lehman insists. “You can ride the subway and it can feel crowded and awful, but in your mind, you’re hearing ‘Let me not to the marriage of two minds / Admit impediments…’.”

Lehman divides his time between Manhattan and Ithaca, N.Y., where his office affords him a view of sugar maples, Eastern red cedar, hemlocks and pines. A self-professed workaholic, he says his morning ritual is “I wake up, kiss my wife, pet our dog, Johnny, drink coffee, chat a little, then head to my desk.”

Besides working on the 2024 installment of Best American Poetry and conjuring a poem a day, he is writing stories — “very, very, very short stories, some as brief as a paragraph.” His hobby for years has been painting abstract and realistic works, typically in a postcard-sized format. He shares finished pieces only with friends.

Pushing paint around has much in common with writing poetry, according to Lehman. “You’re doing something that’s completely free and autonomous. It is a gratuitous act. If you walk, you’re walking usually in a purposive way. You want to get from point X to point Y. But if you dance, you’re dancing for the sheer pleasure of dancing and perhaps frolicking or flirting with a partner, but it’s not purposive. Poetry is like that. You do it for the joy of it.”

To read dozens of Lehman’s poems, visit poetryfoundation.org.

George Spencer is a freelance writer based in Hillsborough, N.C.

David Lehman ’70’s Top 10

“Unfortunately, the list is too long,” poet David Lehman ’70 confesses when asked to name his favorite poems.   Still, with encouragement, he managed to whittle it to 10 (arbitrarily excluding poems not written in English and poems written by poets born after 1923). 

W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”

Emily Dickinson, “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun”

John Keats, “When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be”

John Milton, “Lycidas”

William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”

William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

"When asked for my favorite jazz standards, I realize that what I  say today will be different from what I say tomorrow.  Which Harold Arlen would I choose, 'Come Rain or  Come Shine' or 'That Old Black Magic'? Which Rodgers & Hart, 'The Lady is a Tramp' or 'My Funny Valentine'? On any given day I'll give you a completely different list." For example: "Ode to a Nightingale," Byron's Don Juan,  Stevens's "The Snow Man," Eliot's "The Waste Land," Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, Ben Jonson's "My Picture Left in Scotland," Blake's "Auguries oi Innocence," Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," Donne's "The Good Morrow," Wyatt's "They Flee from Me."

https://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/issue/fall-2023/article/joy-poetry

Nov 2, 2023, at 7:30 PM: The Best American Poetry 2023 launch reading

The Best American Poetry 2023 launch reading will take place via ZOOM on Thursday, November 2, 2023, at 7:30.

 

Elaine Equi (left), who edited the volume, will moderate. These are the poets who will read their poem in the volume:

 

Rae Armantrout

Martine Bellen

Charles Bernstein

Lee Ann Brown

Maxine Chernoff

Boris Dralyuk

Amy Gerstler

Paul Hoover

Patricia Spears Jones

Vincent Katz

Miho Kinnas

Wayne Koestenbaum

Michael Lally

David Lehman

Katha Pollitt

Jerome Sala

Tim Seibles

Diane Seuss

Mitch Sisskind

Jack Skelley

Amanda Smeltz

Terence Winch

 

The website page for complete information:

https://www.greenlightbookstore.com/event/best-american-poetry-2023

 

The registration link to sign up for the event:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Dp80gab8TZaBfSTSmLNdkg#/registration

 

The book buy link:

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Missed the Game [by David Lehman]

Missed the game until the top of the eighth
at the Knickerbocker the sound off the TV
I ordered a vesper and a burger
and the Mets fan on my left, a chess instructor,
filled me in, and when the game ended
I wandered over to the piano where Ehud
played Kern ("The Last Time I Saw Paris")
and Berlin ("I Used to be Color Blind" with
its tricky bridge) and it was half past
midnight, and did I want a third vesper?
No, bed was the right place for me
but unfortunately the war in Vietnam
was still going on and I had to go or
figure out how to dodge that bullet

-- DL

from the archive; first posted October 16, 2013

Louise Glück, 1943-2023 [by David Lehman]

Last week, on Friday the 13^th, Nobel laureate Louise Glück, wonderful poet and friend, died at the age of 80. Louise edited The Best American Poetry 1993, and the experience of working closely with her— primarily by old-fashioned mail and the occasional phone call – was unforgettable. She took on the job despite a natural inclination to remain “on the sidelines, preferably the very front of the sidelines.” In a moment of moral clarity characteristic of Louise, she recognized that “continuous refusal to expose my judgment to public scrutiny seemed vanity and self-protection.” When the year began, Louise clamored for literary magazines, “like a person in a restaurant banging the table for service,” in her words. They came, so many you could fill a small office with them.

Louise proved herself to be a peerless close reader of poems, and when I said this to her, she, usually distrustful of compliments, seemed genuinely touched. She chose the contents of the volume with “the generosity on which exacting criticism depends.” And she paid me the compliment of treating me like a partner in the enterprise; her decisions were final, but she welcomed discussion, and it was fun exchanging views. The book contains great poems: A. R. Ammons’s “Garbage,” John Ashbery’s “Baked Alaska.” W. S. Merwin’s “The Stranger,” the excerpt from Mark Strand’s Dark Harbor that appeared in The New Republic. The book was daring: there were outstanding poems by a truly diverse group of poets, if by “diverse” we mean a variety of means, tones, metaphors, forms, voices, and visions. We had Charles Bukowski, Adrienne Rich, and John Updike at their best; Billy Collins and Denise Duhamel before readers were familiar with their names; exceptional work from Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Jane Kenyon, Ron Padgett, James Tate; marvelous posthumous poems by Tim Dlugos and Laura Riding.

In a biographical note written for the Nobel Prize committee, Louise wrote that growing up she was good at school, not so good at “the social world,” and that during adolescence she felt “ostracized” everywhere but summer camp. As a student at Columbia she came under the influence of Stanley Kunitz, who championed her work. His “endorsement of high ambition” continued to inspire her, though there was a “there was a deep fissure” with her erstwhile mentor when she strove to banish figurative language from the poems in her 1990 book Ararat.  It signaled a new direction for her, and it was precisely the poems in Ararat and in the volume that succeeded it, The Wild Iris, that made me feel Louise was writing the best poems of her life and that we would be lucky if she agreed to take the helm of the 1993 edition of The Best American Poetry.

I want to honor her memory by posting her poem “Vespers,” which Charles Simic chose for the 1992 volume in the series:

Vespers

In your extended absence, you permit me

use of earth, anticipating

some return on investment. I must report

failure in my assignment, principally

regarding the tomato plants.

I think I should not be encouraged to grow

tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold

the heavy rains, the cold nights that come

so often here, while other regions get

twelve weeks of summer. All this

belongs to you: on the other hand,

I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots

like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart

broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly

multiplying in the rows. I doubt

you have a heart, in our understanding of

that term. You who do not discriminate

between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,

immune to foreshadowing, you may not know

how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,

the red leaves of the maple falling

even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible

for these vines.

from The Wild Iris (1992)

"The Birth of Tragedy" [Nietzsche's opening shot]

<<

Much will have been gained for aesthetics once we have succeeded in apprehending directly -- rather than merely ascertaining -- that art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollonian - Dionysian duality, even as the propagation of the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflicts and periodic acts of reconciliation.

>>

A great opening, the first sentence in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy states the thesis of the book, introduces a critical distinction ("apprehending directly" as superior to "merely ascertaining"), and illustrates the main point with a complex simile, ostensibly a subordinate clause but one that threatens to eclipse all that preceded it. Before you have quite begun to grasp the idea of the "duality" between Apollo and Dionysus, and its significance for understanding why Aeschylus is superior to Euripides, we're asked to accept the casual observation that the sexes are in constant conflict. No wonder a couple in the heat of love concludes its quarrels with nothing resolved but the force of sexual attraction triumphant.

-- DL

"Knight's Gambit" [by David Lehman]

The black knights were symmetrically placed

Same rank, opposite file

Which is where the phrase comes from

Rank and file, I mean

Now I know what you're thinking

You're thinking I'm going to say

Chess is like war or like politics

or like a road map for succeeding

in your future endeavors

but it is none of those things it is just

a game though a most ingenious one

with the underrated pawns leading the attack

and the white knights prepared to move

in two directions at once -- DL

from the archive; first posted September 3, 2012.