The Best American Poetry

"On the Beautiful and Sublime" [by DL]

Immanuel Kant's essay on this subject is nowhere near as famous and influential as those of Longinus and Edmund Burke, but it is a splendid piece of writing, showing an aptitude for dividing the world and everything in it in two  -- a dichotomous impulse unrivaled by anyone until Auden took the reins and found the fork in every road.

Here is the "donnee" (as H. James would call it), the gift or the given, the material you have to work with, lifted from Kant's book (available in a slender paperback from Yale UP) : "Knowledge is beautiful, understanding is sublime."

I took off from there, and this is what I came up with:

On the Beautiful and Sublime

                      Knowledge is beautiful; understanding is sublime. – Kant

Radio is a hot medium;
Television, a cool one.

A train ride in Russia is a novel.
A train ride to Chicago is a movie.

A flight to Miami is a disaster movie.
A yew tree is a poem.

A banyan tree is the prose
of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A woman’s undergarments (any epoch) are poetry.
A man’s undergarments (any epoch) are prose.

Panties (white, silk, high rise) are beautiful.
Jockstraps are sublime.

Paranoia is poetry.
Insomnia is prose.

Death by lethal injection is prose.
Death by hanging is infernal.

Death by firing squad is the noble sublime.
Homer is the tragic sublime.

Cigarettes are sublime, especially Camels and Luckies.
Cigars are sublime.

Pipes are beautiful.
The Song of Songs is beautiful,

Genesis and Job are sublime.
Isaiah is sublime. Samuel I and II are sublime.

Ruth is beautiful and sublime.
Wordsworth is sublime. Keats is sublime and beautiful.

Knowledge is beautiful,
Understanding is sublime.

Mark Bibbins, poetry editor of The Awl, posted this poem on September 6, 2012. If I find a picture of the philosopher I'll caption it, "Who says he Kant?" Well, let's see if I can. But perhaps I should close with a more heroic less wrathful Sandy than the ranting storm fiend that just wreaked havoc in our world.

That's my super storm Sandy. -- DL               from the archive; first posted November 4, 2012

Immanuel Kant's essay on this subject is nowhere near as famous and influential as those of Longinus and Edmund Burke, but it is a splendid piece of writing, showing an aptitude for dividing the world and everything in it in two  -- a dichotomous impulse unrivaled by anyone until Auden took the reins and found the fork in every road.

Here is the "donnee" (as H. James would call it), the gift or the given, the material you have to work with, lifted from Kant's book (available in a slender paperback from Yale UP) : "Knowledge is beautiful, understanding is sublime."

I took off from there, and this is what I came up with:

On the Beautiful and Sublime

                      Knowledge is beautiful; understanding is sublime. – Kant

Radio is a hot medium;
Television, a cool one.

A train ride in Russia is a novel.
A train ride to Chicago is a movie.

A flight to Miami is a disaster movie.
A yew tree is a poem.

A banyan tree is the prose
of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A woman’s undergarments (any epoch) are poetry.
A man’s undergarments (any epoch) are prose.

Panties (white, silk, high rise) are beautiful.
Jockstraps are sublime.

Paranoia is poetry.
Insomnia is prose.

Death by lethal injection is prose.
Death by hanging is infernal.

Death by firing squad is the noble sublime.
Homer is the tragic sublime.

Cigarettes are sublime, especially Camels and Luckies.
Cigars are sublime.

Pipes are beautiful.
The Song of Songs is beautiful,

Genesis and Job are sublime.
Isaiah is sublime. Samuel I and II are sublime.

Ruth is beautiful and sublime.
Wordsworth is sublime. Keats is sublime and beautiful.

Knowledge is beautiful,
Understanding is sublime.

Mark Bibbins, poetry editor of The Awl, posted this poem on September 6, 2012. If I find a picture of the philosopher I'll caption it, "Who says he Kant?" Well, let's see if I can. But perhaps I should close with a more heroic less wrathful Sandy than the ranting storm fiend that just wreaked havoc in our world.

That's my super storm Sandy. -- DL               from the archive; first posted November 4, 2012

"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 

>>>

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!

 

"Poem in the Manner of the 1950s" [by David Lehman]

a prose poem from Michigan Quarterly Review

Top of Form

Volume XLII, Issue 2: Mainly on the 1950s, Spring 2003

Poem in the Manner of the 1950s

Lehman, David

                         For Larry Goldstein

Meet Doak Walker, the last of the all-American glamour boys. Say a prayer for Gil Hodges, who went 0 for the World Series. There was one big secret that separated the men from the boys, and that was what a woman looked like without her clothes on. A naked girl in 1959 was not the same as a naked girl in 1939 or 1919, wasn't that true? It was indubitably true, but how would we get the girls to prove it? If one had pretty breasts we'd say she was "stacked" or had big "knobs." Of such remarks were many Friday night conversations composed. Rosemary Clooney cut a record with Bing Crosby covering "Brazil." Sinatra at the piano smoking a cigarette pointed out that it was great to "know your fate is / where the Empire State is." As nice as it may be to travel on the camel route to Iraq, it's a whole lot nicer to wander back. That was the consensus. The center fielder with the crewcut got the girl, Grace Kelly got the prince, and the heavyweight champ retired undefeated. Bill Holden blew up the bridge but died in the doing. There were no homosexuals yet one of them was expelled and no heroin addicts except jazz musicians and no card-carrying Communists except nondescript men in suits carrying briefcases with film canisters in them. The British meant well, poor suckers, but Europe was an old syphilitic with yellow teeth who smelled bad. We were the land of Captain Midnight and we took a correspondence course and we bought forty-eight commemoratives for twenty-five cents on a matchbook cover and the senators were Republicans, and Washington was first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League. The old general played golf and there were bungalow colonies in the summer and drive-ins with Deborah Kerr and Dugan's blueberry muffins and chicken chow mein at the Hi Ho or the Min Ju on Dyckman Street, and a red Coke machine dispensed green eight-ounce glass bottles, and Archie liked Betty but liked Veronica better, and there was a jukebox and there were hamburgers and chocolate malteds, all the things that made America great.

"Atonement" [by David Lehman]

Atonement

Let's say someone
phones you and says
how would you like
to fly to Japan and
play chess with a grand-
master near the cenotaph in
Hiroshima on September
30 and you say yes and
then it turns out that
the 30th is Yom Kippur
it does complicate your
feelings doesn't it and
you had planned to pray
with some insects down at
a secluded creek that day

-- David L:ehman

October 7 & after [by David Lehman]

October 7

If I were a general
expert at fighting the last war,
I would regard the coming invasion
with great trepidation.

If I were a cardinal
at the Vatican the night before,
would reject the explanation
after noble hesitation.

If I were to write a novel, I would call it
“Great Expectations,”
because I belong to an alien nation.

If I were to write a play, I would call it
“Great Temptations”
in praise of the saint who abandoned his station.

10 / 7 / 23;  from The NU Review, edited by Jordan Davis

October 7 is National Inner Beauty Day /  National Propane Day / and National Frappe Day

"We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it. " -- Bari Weiss

The 13 women who remain hostages are Romi Gonen, 24; Naama Levy, 20; Liri Albag, 19; Ofra Keider, 70; Shiri Bibas, 33; Inbar Hayman, 27; Emily Damari, 27; Karina Ariev, 20; Agam Berger, 20; Doron Steinbrecher, 31; Arbel Yehoud, 29; Daniella Gilboa, 20; and Judy Weinstein Haggai, 70.

By Michelle Boorstein

WASHINGTON POST

October 7, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

BALA CYNWYD, Pa. — American Jews are buying guns more often. They’re going to Shabbat dinners and synagogues more often. They’re debating about Israel and antisemitism — topics many had set to the side in recent decades — more often.

A year ago, Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel set off war in the Middle East. In the United States, the surprise assault and Israel’s countering invasion of the Gaza Strip prompted mass protests on city streets and at colleges across the nation. For many of the nation’s 7.5 million Jews, the year has led to concerns over whether they are securely woven into the fabric of American life. In the intense anger directed by protesters at the Jewish state and in some cases at Jews, many of the nearly three-dozen American Jews interviewed by The Washington Post saw antisemitism they thought had long ago subsided or at minimum wasn’t acceptable to voice.

A Scary Prediction from June 2012 [by David Lehman]

On January 6, 2012, we ran this piece under the heading “A Scary Prediction -- China: Better Dead Than Red”:

<<<  Back in January 2008, when the media was fixated in Iowa, I predicted that Barack Obama would win the presidency and be re-elected. Stacey can confirm this prediction. Scarcely infallible, I picked Kerry to win in 2004. Nevertheless -- I think it's fun to go on the record with a prediction, and here is mine of the season:

I believe that in my lifetime the Unted States will go to war with China. And by war I mean military conflict -- to be fought primarily on the sea. It will require the shifting of our navy to the Pacific, which is under way, and our disengagement from the fruitless and basically irrational forays into Iraq and Afghanistan, which are winding down, as the Obama Administration replaces boots on the ground with drone strikes in Pakistan and computer hacking in Iran.

Since this is an interactive blog, I invite you to choose the Sarajevo or pretext for the naval battles to come in the ironically named Pacific Ocean:

(1) China's ancient cultural conflict with Japan rears its head. The Chinese interfere with a Japanese ship, and the loss of face in Japan is such that they ask the US to intervene.
(2) Chinese efforts to control North Vietnam spills over into South Korea
(3) China presses spurious claims to mineral-rich islands off Japan and the Philippines
(4) On the corporate level, China eats America's lunch because Chinese regulations put US firms at a decisive disadvantage
(5) A recession in China exposes the fundamental contradiction between the capitalism the Chinese practice and the government's repressive policies. Google makes its inroads. Riots break out among people whose consciousness has been raised. Among the rioters are parents dying to have more children than the government permits, laborers who feel exploited, and an intellectual class that learns there is a discrepancy between the government's official line and the truth -- as in: what were the real reasons the earthquake of May 2008 was so devastating?
Your pick, dear reader?  -- DL >>>

The collage is by David Lehman Copyright (c) 2012

Innisfree (eg. Greg McBride): Poems by David Lehman

Dutch Interior

He liked the late afternoon light as it dimmed
In the living room, and wouldn’t switch on
The electric lights until past eight o’clock.
His wife complained, called him cheerless, but
It wasn’t a case of melancholy; he just liked
The way things looked in air growing darker
So gradually and imperceptibly that it seemed
The very element in which we live. Every man
And woman deserves one true moment of greatness
And this was his, this Dutch interior, entered
And possessed, so tranquil and yet so busy
With details: the couple’s shed clothes scattered
On the backs of armchairs, the dog chasing a shoe,
The wide open window, the late afternoon light.

Click here for this special issue of Innisfree, edited by Greg McBride, with a portfolio of poems by David Lehman.

paintings by David Lehman. copyright (c) 2024 by David Lehman

See "Picnic" on Labor Day [by DL]

Hal Carter (William Holden), a football star in college and a failure at everything since, hops off a freight train with nothing but the ragged shirt on his back. He arrives at a last resort: the small town in Kansas where his fraternity mate, Alan Benson (Cliff Robertson), the well-to-do son of an industrialist, lives. It is Labor Day, 1955, and everyone has the day off, but Hal offers to do back-yard work for Mrs. Potts (Verna Felton), the kindly old lady who feeds him and obligingly offers to wash his shirt, thus giving us a look at his buff, shaven chest.

The “us” in that last sentence includes Benson’s girlfriend, Madge Owens (Kim Novak at her most stunning). At the town’s annual Labor Day picnic, Madge will be crowned the Queen of the Neewollah (Halloween spelled backwards). Many, including Millie (Susan Strasberg), Madge’s young sister, drink too much at the picnic, and Hal gets blamed for everything that goes wrong.

Neither Holden nor Novak is a natural dancer, but when they dance at the picnic to the tune of “Moonglow,” the sparks fly. Whereas Novak and James Stewart play out a passionate romance on the interior level of the psyche in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the physical attraction between Novak and Holden is electric. Benson castigates the “same old Hal” to whom he had earlier promised a job, albeit as a “wheat scooper” rather than the executive positon Hal had unrealistically hoped for. Hal leaves town the same way he arrived, only this time, Madge packs a suitcase and plans to take a bus to meet him in Tulsa.

Rosalind Russell and Arthur O’Connell give outstanding performances as the town’s frustrated schoolmarm and her reluctant suitor, who must settle for what small-town life can give them. Joshua Logan directed this film adaptation of William Inge’s Broadway play. See Picnic on Labor Day weekend if you can. It’s hot.

For recommendations on movies for Halloween (Arsenic and Old Lace) and Thanksgiving (Hannah and Her Sisters), click here  for my "Talking Pictures" feature that appeared in The American Scholar of August 28, 2021.

from the archive; posted Labor Day 2022

"The Desire to Paint" [by Charles Baudelaire]

Unhappy the man, but happy the artist who blazes with desire.

I burn to paint the woman who visits me once in a blue moon and always makes an abrupt exit, like the ghost in a hotel room, something the previous occupant left behind with her nightgown. It’s been a long time since I last saw her.

She is as beautiful as the black of her nocturnal dress.  Her eyes are two dark caverns where dim lights flicker and go out, but when she fixes you in her gaze they light up again, a blaze of light in the dark.

Shall I compare her to a black sun? I can picture a sky full of dark stars that have supplanted the lighted ones to which pursuers of happiness aim their prayers. But it is usually the moon that she makes me dream of. It’s the moon that acts on her, changes her; not the idyllic white moon that resembles a cold bride, but a sinister drunk-making moon suspended among clouds driven by storm winds at midnight; not the moon that presides over the devout dreamer’s slumber, but a moon ripped from the heavens, a small planet where revolutions follow conquests and even the witches of Thessaly dare not dance upon the ground.

In her brow you can see her undying hunger for prey. But her nostrils flare, she smiles a smile that glitters with grace, and when she laughs, her wide-open mouth, white teeth, red lips, make you dream of a flower that opens miraculously atop a volcano.

Some women arouse in you the unyielding desire to woo them and win them. But she makes you wish to die in her arms slowly as she watches, and flinches not.

Le desire de peindre by Charles Baudelaire; translated by David Lehman
first published in Conduit 

"Marx Was a Jew" [poem by David Lehman]

"Marx Was a Jew "

It’s the turning point of The Stranger (1946),
the moment Edward G. Robinson
wakes up in the middle of the night
knowing Orson Welles gave himself away
by saying “Marx wasn’t a German,
he was a Jew.” Only a Nazi
would make the distinction, he reasons.

On the other hand, in “On the Jewish Question” (1843),
Karl Marx wrote that money is the jealous god
of the Jews, turning men into commodities,
hucksters all, look at them haggle.
“The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew,”
he wrote, and the road to a free world requires
“the emancipation of humanity from Judaism.”

So are you saying that a Jew can be anti-Semitic?
Or that the Left has a love-hate history with the Jews,
the hate reserved for (or projected onto) Israel,
itself a concept in a cloudy world of concepts
rather than a state containing millions of souls?
And along comes a smartass academic pronoun to explain
Marx’s essay is actually a critique of anti-Semitism.

-- this poem first appeared on August 20, 2024, in Tablet magazine.

"El Greco’s Elongations" [by David Lehman]

from "Three Aesthetic Questions" (in Literary Matters:)

El Greco's Elongations

Do we agree with Roger Fry who
commended El Greco for “his complete
indifference” to what the public wanted?
Do we admire the artist’s uncompromising
self so much that “verisimilitude of texture”
ceases to be a virtue and any “harshness of
accent” or “crudity of color opposition” is OK
if necessary to the realization of an idea?
Fry wrote in 1920 in advance of any guard.
He influenced everybody, and I speak from
personal experience, because when
I started looking at art, the harder it was
to understand, the better I liked it.
In short: what is art?

See too "Schubert's Unfinished": https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2024/07/schuberts-unfinished-in-literary-matters.html

The Origin of "Cops" [by David Lehman]

How did the police acquire the nickname "cops"?

1) It's an acronym for the dread "Committee on Public Safety" that wreaked havoc during the French Revolution.

2) The initial shields worn by uniformed policemen in nineteenth-century New York were made of copper.

3) They got the name from David Copperfield -- the Dickens character, not the magician -- who aspired to a career in law enforcement, idealizing the day job of a decent and humane beat policeman, but was tragically prevented from reaching his goal by the machinations of Mister Macawber and Uriah Heep.

4) In 1876, a London bobby, also known as a peeler-- both names deriving from Robert Peele -- was sipping a concoction consisting of eight parts gin and two parts vermouth. This put him in such a good mood that, when the waitperson returned with a refill, the randy fellow smacked her bottom, "copped a feel," and went home sheepishly with a black eye. His wife asked him what happened. He lamely said he had walked into a door. "Rubbish," she said. "I bet you went to the local and copped a feel." The fame of the anecdote was legendary and the man on the beat never did get credit for the modern martini, which the bobby had accidentally invented. NB "copped" shortened to "cop" lives on.

5) The coinage is John Milton's from Paradise Lost, Book XI, as Adam gratefully accepts the knowledge that his future offspring will redeem the race. "Peace returned / Home to my breast, and to my memory, / His promise, that the cops shall bruise our Foe; /  Which then not minded in dismay, yet now / Assures me that the bitterness of death / Is past, and we shall live."

from the archive; first posted August 16, 2016

How did the police acquire the nickname "cops"?

1) It's an acronym for the dread "Committee on Public Safety" that wreaked havoc during the French Revolution.

2) The initial shields worn by uniformed policemen in nineteenth-century New York were made of copper.

3) They got the name from David Copperfield -- the Dickens character, not the magician -- who aspired to a career in law enforcement, idealizing the day job of a decent and humane beat policeman, but was tragically prevented from reaching his goal by the machinations of Mister Macawber and Uriah Heep.

4) In 1876, a London bobby, also known as a peeler-- both names deriving from Robert Peele -- was sipping a concoction consisting of eight parts gin and two parts vermouth. This put him in such a good mood that, when the waitperson returned with a refill, the randy fellow smacked her bottom, "copped a feel," and went home sheepishly with a black eye. His wife asked him what happened. He lamely said he had walked into a door. "Rubbish," she said. "I bet you went to the local and copped a feel." The fame of the anecdote was legendary and the man on the beat never did get credit for the modern martini, which the bobby had accidentally invented. NB "copped" shortened to "cop" lives on.

5) The coinage is John Milton's from Paradise Lost, Book XI, as Adam gratefully accepts the knowledge that his future offspring will redeem the race. "Peace returned / Home to my breast, and to my memory, / His promise, that the cops shall bruise our Foe; /  Which then not minded in dismay, yet now / Assures me that the bitterness of death / Is past, and we shall live."

from the archive; first posted August 16, 2016

More on Marvell

Marvelous Poet

            Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) has been called “the greatest minor poet in the English language.” There’s plenty of competition for this curious distinction, but the case for Marvell is strong, especially if you like ambiguity and elegance in equal measure. Marvell happens to be one of the great mystery men of English letters. He had a gift for foreign languages, was an avid fencer, and lived a shadowy life on the continent that led to speculation that he was a spy or double agent. For twenty years he served as a member of parliament. He did not produce a large amount of poetry, but what he wrote was, as Spencer Tracey said of Katharine Hepburn’s anatomy, “cherce.”

            Probably Marvell’s most famous poem is “To His Coy Mistress.” Never was a declaration of lust more logical. Carpe diem: We won’t be young forever, so let us make merry while we can. But Marvell develops the argument as one would a syllogism. He begins with wild hyperbole. If we had “world enough and time,” he would woo the maiden “ten years before the flood” and not mind if she should turn him down until the second coming.

            But with the inevitable “but,” the tone changes drastically from genial to threatening: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” And now Marvell warns the lady that someday “worms will try / that long-preserv’d virginity” of hers – a grim image you’d not expect to find in a seduction poem. The stanza closes with a sarcastic couplet for the ages: “The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none I think do there embrace.”

            The third and final stanza clinches the argument as the lovers clinch. The image of  the lovers rolled into a ball concludes the poem in an outburst of violence. But the violence is contained; Marvell pushes the couplet to the breaking point: “Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life.” T. S. Eliot liked the image so much he lifted it for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

            When Oliver Cromwell returned to England after subjugating Ireland in 1650, Marvell greeted him with “An Horatian Ode” that set some sort of record for calculated ambiguity. This stately, grave ode can be read as straightforward praise of the conquering hero who had beheaded King Charles I and would, as the poem predicts, go on to suppress the Scots. But subtle critics have propounded the opposite interpretation, contending that the ode has a secret royalist agenda and is deeply critical of Cromwell. And so this mid-seventeenth-century poem became a perfect object lesson in mid-twentieth-century literary criticism.

           Read Marvell’s “The Garden” for his double vision of paradise lost and paradox gained. “Two paradises ‘twere in one / To live in paradise alone.” Before you declare your disagreement with this proposition, consider the mathematical metaphor Marvell employs. And then re-read the first three chapters of Genesis.

            Possibly no one, not even Pope, wrote couplets more complex and witty than those of Andrew Marvell.  -- DL

from the archive; first posted March 29, 2008. Click here for more on Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" contrasted with Donne's "To His Mistress Going to Bed"

for Lehman & Sisskind on Eliot's Prufrock, click here

for Lehman's essay on Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" click here