The Best American Poetry

Why should there be two happy as we? [from "Show Boat": music Kern, lyrics Hammerstein]

Charlie Parker and the Mrs. loved this song. . .

I'm in the seventh heaven / there's more than seven / my heart discovers. . .

Bukowski on His Birthday (August 16) [by David Lehman]

Many artists and writers gather their strength by opposing the established order, but sooner or later the successful ones are assimilated into the culture (Allen Ginsberg, the Beats, Black Mountain, San Francisco). Usually it happens belatedly but with hyperbolic claims as if to compensate for years of indifference or inattention. There are even times when the lag between rejection and celebration vanishes to nothing, as Gertrude Stein wrote in her brilliant lecture "Composition as Explanation." When the culture swallows the fashionable anti-establishment poetry of the moment, the result may be a mild case of indigestion. A good example is anti-war poetry of the 1960s, which was immediately accepted and glorified and is of absolutely no interest today.

The poet who has resisted assimilation longest and most strenuously is Charles Bukowski. Bukowski is the real thing, like Mexican Coke, a simile he would not have embraced, being a man who sets store by bourbon, whores with good legs, and the twenty-dollar window at the track. His poetry resists the mainstream as, say, even the radical Ginsberg of the 1950s doesn't.  Bukowski is as enamored of himself as anyone else but he takes himself less seriously as a literatus. He keeps his brain in the post office where he labors as one of the proles. This humility is one reason he appeals to readers, and he has genuine and ardent readers. Bukowski has long led the league in one important category: more of his books are stolen than those of any other author, an enviable distinction.

Read "The Continual Condition," the most recent of Bukowski's posthumous collections, and you will see how he manages to make the reader feel that what he is saying really happened and in just the way described. He uses his artistry to conceal his artistry. He depicts himself, in such poems as "Rejected" and "The Theory," as emphatically ugly -- and at the same time he insists upon his virility. In the former, an editor rejects a story on the grounds that "to infer that an ugly man your age / had sex with four women in one day / is simply infantile day-dreaming." So what does Buk do? He spends the rest of the poem fleshing out this very situation.

About poetry Marianne Moore wrote, "I, too, dislike it." Bukowski would revise that to read "I, too, shit on it." He had an outstanding bullshit detector, and his poems in scorn of the Beats and other celebrated authors ("Ginsberg was / brought in / petted and / dismissed. / Burroughs was / still o.k. / but hardly / interesting / anymore. / Mailer, well hell, / that's big publishing, and / Olson, you know, well, / those breath pauses were / out of date / but meeting him / was nice") are funny and, well, nice.

Bukowski's power lies in the fact that he acknowledges he is no better than anyone else and yet he remains the hero of his own life. His poems seem raw but are tightly controlled and secretly much more in the know than you might think. (Li Po and Catullus make sneak appearances in "as Buddha smiles"). I intend to write more about this fascinating , politically incorrect but irresistible personage but for now will leave you with these lines, the opening lines of a poem, which will arrest your attention and won't let it go: "the god-damned ants have come marching here / and are climbing into my wine, / I drink them down." –

DL

First posted on the BAP blog on September 23, 2011

 

Happy Anniversary, Stacey

Homage to Hitchcock [by David Lehman]

The multiple-choice form seems to suit a moviemaker as complex as Hitchcock:

(1) Which of the following did not play the male lead in a Hitchcock movie?

a) Sean Connery in Marnie
b) Cary Grant in Notorious
c) Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil
d) Laurence Olivier in Rebecca 
e) Robert Cummings in Saboteur

 Answer: c), Orson Welles, who directed and who dominates the screen in A Touch of Evil. Note the difference between Welles and the other four on the list. Each of the others is a non-method or pre-method actor; three are from Britain. Unlike Welles in his portrayal of evil as ugliness, at least three of the Hitchcock heroes named may be said to have an everyman quality in spite of the fact that three are very handsome, while the fourth has boyish good looks, and the same three may be said to be suave. Hitchcock can project versions of himself as Cary Grant, James Stewart, Rod Taylor, the young Gregory Peck, even Olivier as a toff. But it doesn't work with Monty Clift in I, Confess.and it wouldn't work with Welles or Brando.

(2) The title North by Northwest is a reference to

a) The Tempest and magic
b) Hamlet and madness
c) A popular route flown by Pan American Airlines in 1959
with change of planes at O'Hare and Mt Rushmore the final destination
d) Emily Dickinson's poem "After great pain a formal feeling comes"
e) Cary Grant's use of a road map as a disguise in the dining car 

Answer: b) Hamlet and madness. Hamlet says he is mad only "north by northwest," reinforcing the doubt that he is truly mad rather than calculatingly capable of an "antic disposition." The plot of Hitchcock's movie is mad, fantastic in the old-fashioned sense. Yet there is method in the apparent madness -- and there is as much comedy in this thriller as that category can hold. The title also encapsulates the movie's locations and its motion. This is a movie of movement: in taxicab, motor cars, train, plane, bus. Cary Grant's journey begins in New York City -- Madison Avenue, the Plaza Hotel, and the United Nations. Then the film takes a trip to the Midwest with its unending fields of corn and finally culminates on the top of Mouth Rushmore, which is north by northwest from New York City. Finally, there is a sense of playacting in the movie and the sort of temporary insanity that accompanies excursions into the absurd. From the moment Cary Grant, advertising executive, is kidnapped at the Plaza Hotel, each scene is more implausible than the scene preceding it. A prodigious amount of liquor is consumed by our hero, who reveals himself to be quite a resourceful, witty, charming, romantic, fast-on-his-feet character as the movie goes along -- whereas, at the start, he is merely adept at stealing a cab, playing the field, and reporting to mother.

(3) Identify Ambrose Chapel.

a) Albert Hall's younger brother
b) The kidnapper in The Man Who Knew Too Much
c) A London church
d) The MacGuffin
e) Montgomery Clift's parish in I Confess

Answer: c) a London church in The Man Who Knew too Much, but metaphorically it is also a) an anticipation of the Albert Hall, scene of the climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Like Albert Hall, Ambrose Chapel is a name that can also be taken to refer to a person, the way James Stewart and Doris Day approach it at first. While b) is incorrect, it is relevant. Only  e) is just plain wrong.

  (4) Hitchcock favored blond actresses because of

a) A childhood crush on Marlene Dietrich
b) Unresolved Oedipal issues
c) See (d)
d) Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Doris Day, Joan Fontaine, Lorraine Day, Priscilla Lane, and Tippi Hedren
e) The idea, which occurred to him with the force of an epiphany, that blond-versus-brunette mirrored the American power structure
f) The belief that in movies an actor's looks are more important than his or her talent.

Answer: d) the actresses named. It must however be admitted that b) and f) are decided possibilities. As for both a) and e), each is random speculation. The birds' savage attack on Tippi Hedren is probably the worst ordeal any Hitchcock blonde endures, though the company is stiff. Kim Novak dies twice in Vertigo. Ingrid Bergman is poisoned to the brink of death in Notorious. And of course there's Janet Leigh's lifelong fear of showers, which originated with the one she takes as Marion Crane in Bates's Motel after she has decided to to return the money, concealed in a newspaper, to the bank from which she absconded with it

(5) Which of these did Hitchcock invest with uncanny significance, and what does that tell you?

a) A glass of milk
b) A shattered pair of eyeglasses
c) A giant Sequoia Redwood 
d) The key to the wine cellar
e) A burning mansion

Answer: Some would argue for symbolism. The shattered eyeglasses at the amusement park signify the death of the girl in Strangers on a Train. The key leads to the wine-cellar and its secrets in Notorious. You might say that the glass of milk in Suspicion, like the coffee cup and saucer in Notorious, accentuates the innocence that is menaced. The homely domestic objects contain lethal doses of poison; the threat of murder can be disguised in the least threatening of objects.

(6) Which of the following is not an authentic Hitchcock moment?

a) Grace Kelly cozies up with Harper's Bazaar while her beau, nursing a broken leg, takes a nap
b) Raymond Burr signs a contract to play first base for the New York Yankees after the death of Gary Cooper
 c) Ingrid Bergman offers her beau "a leg or a breast" as they stand on the terrace on a tropical evening
 d) With one exception, everyone watching a tennis match moves his or her head as the movement of the ball dictates
 e) Doris Day belts out Che Sera, Sera at a posh party peopled by diplomats in London

Answer: (b). Gary Cooper played Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees. Raymond Burr had nothing to do with it. In movies he played a minor character, usually a heavy, until he emerged as television's "Perry Mason." God bless his agent. Hitchcock would not have been interested in Lou Gehrig or any element of his story, which lacks a violent death, grounds for suspicion, murderous motives. There are foul balls but no foul play. On the other hand, each of the others is perfect: a) Rear Window, c) Notorious, d) Strangers on a Train, and e) The Man Who Knew Too Much, which is underrated, perhaps a natural consequence of having been made in a period of masterpieces on the order of Vertigo, Rear Window, and North by Northwest.

(7) In Vertigo

a) Who is real, Judy or Madeline?
b) Who is real, Johnny or Scotty?
c) True or false: The age difference between James Stewart and Kim Novak helps explain the nature of their relationship, which is passionate but not exactly sexual -- it is more like an event in the man's psyche, which he is destined to repeat.
d) What does Bernard Herrmann's music contribute?
e) Why does the detective reject fashion designer Barbara Bel Geddes?
f) Why are they both named Charlie, Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, and can you make the case that this, even more than Saboteur, is Hitchcock's most patriotically American movie?

Answer: You're on your own here. Go to town..

8) In the auction scene in North by Northwest, Cary Grant violates the hushed-room decorum by making wacky and contradictory bids in order to

a) attract attention because he is a certified narcissist who thinks he is Cary Grant
b) attract attention and get ejected because the cops were preferable to the kidnappers awaiting his exit
c) fulfill his part of the bargain with Ingrid Bergman, who has done her part by going to Brazil and enduring a near-lethal dose of poison administered slowly so it looks like sickness and not murder
d) warn about an imminent terrorist threat in a way that wouldn't panic the public because only one man present would understand the message
e) arouse the admiration of co-star Eva Maria Saint, who has aired her doubts about his skill as a comic actor

Answer: b) is correct. a) and e) are amusing fictions. d) is Borgesian. c) refers to the plot of a different movie, Notorious.

(9)  Which of the following does not qualify as a typical Hitchcock prank?

a) to cuff his hero and heroine during rehearsals, clear the room, and lock the door
b) to pose as the fat man in a weight-reducing ad that is espied if not read on a lifeboat full of the survivors of a shipwreck 
c) to employ Otto Preminger to play the commandant of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp
d) to suggest the act of fornication by showing a speeding train enter a tunnel
e) to kill Kim Novak twice, in both cases at the top of the church tower at Mission San Juan Batista in California

Answer: (c) Refers to Billy Wilder's movie Stalag 17. The rest are pure Hitchcock.

(10) To appreciate Hitchcock's movies,

a) you need to see them
b) You need to see them more than once.
c) you need to take into account that he was raised Catholic
d) you have to consider that he was born British but was American by choice
e) you have to acknowledge that the McGuffin is to plot as psyche is to drama and the dream
f) you must remind yourself that you, the viewer, are both the male and the female leads in the film

Answer: a) for sure, but a strong case can be made for each of the others.

Note: The multiple choice form, with which we are all familiar, is little used for the purposes of exposition. This is part of a little experiment. -- DL

a) Sean Connery in Marnie
b) Cary Grant in Notorious
c) Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil
d) Laurence Olivier in Rebecca 
e) Robert Cummings in Saboteur

 Answer: c), Orson Welles, who directed and who dominates the screen in A Touch of Evil. Note the difference between Welles and the other four on the list. Each of the others is a non-method or pre-method actor; three are from Britain. Unlike Welles in his portrayal of evil as ugliness, at least three of the Hitchcock heroes named may be said to have an everyman quality in spite of the fact that three are very handsome, while the fourth has boyish good looks, and the same three may be said to be suave. Hitchcock can project versions of himself as Cary Grant, James Stewart, Rod Taylor, the young Gregory Peck, even Olivier as a toff. But it doesn't work with Monty Clift in I, Confess.and it wouldn't work with Welles or Brando.

(2) The title North by Northwest is a reference to

a) The Tempest and magic
b) Hamlet and madness
c) A popular route flown by Pan American Airlines in 1959
with change of planes at O'Hare and Mt Rushmore the final destination
d) Emily Dickinson's poem "After great pain a formal feeling comes"
e) Cary Grant's use of a road map as a disguise in the dining car 

Answer: b) Hamlet and madness. Hamlet says he is mad only "north by northwest," reinforcing the doubt that he is truly mad rather than calculatingly capable of an "antic disposition." The plot of Hitchcock's movie is mad, fantastic in the old-fashioned sense. Yet there is method in the apparent madness -- and there is as much comedy in this thriller as that category can hold. The title also encapsulates the movie's locations and its motion. This is a movie of movement: in taxicab, motor cars, train, plane, bus. Cary Grant's journey begins in New York City -- Madison Avenue, the Plaza Hotel, and the United Nations. Then the film takes a trip to the Midwest with its unending fields of corn and finally culminates on the top of Mouth Rushmore, which is north by northwest from New York City. Finally, there is a sense of playacting in the movie and the sort of temporary insanity that accompanies excursions into the absurd. From the moment Cary Grant, advertising executive, is kidnapped at the Plaza Hotel, each scene is more implausible than the scene preceding it. A prodigious amount of liquor is consumed by our hero, who reveals himself to be quite a resourceful, witty, charming, romantic, fast-on-his-feet character as the movie goes along -- whereas, at the start, he is merely adept at stealing a cab, playing the field, and reporting to mother.

(3) Identify Ambrose Chapel.

a) Albert Hall's younger brother
b) The kidnapper in The Man Who Knew Too Much
c) A London church
d) The MacGuffin
e) Montgomery Clift's parish in I Confess

Answer: c) a London church in The Man Who Knew too Much, but metaphorically it is also a) an anticipation of the Albert Hall, scene of the climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Like Albert Hall, Ambrose Chapel is a name that can also be taken to refer to a person, the way James Stewart and Doris Day approach it at first. While b) is incorrect, it is relevant. Only  e) is just plain wrong.

  (4) Hitchcock favored blond actresses because of

a) A childhood crush on Marlene Dietrich
b) Unresolved Oedipal issues
c) See (d)
d) Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Doris Day, Joan Fontaine, Lorraine Day, Priscilla Lane, and Tippi Hedren
e) The idea, which occurred to him with the force of an epiphany, that blond-versus-brunette mirrored the American power structure
f) The belief that in movies an actor's looks are more important than his or her talent.

Answer: d) the actresses named. It must however be admitted that b) and f) are decided possibilities. As for both a) and e), each is random speculation. The birds' savage attack on Tippi Hedren is probably the worst ordeal any Hitchcock blonde endures, though the company is stiff. Kim Novak dies twice in Vertigo. Ingrid Bergman is poisoned to the brink of death in Notorious. And of course there's Janet Leigh's lifelong fear of showers, which originated with the one she takes as Marion Crane in Bates's Motel after she has decided to to return the money, concealed in a newspaper, to the bank from which she absconded with it

(5) Which of these did Hitchcock invest with uncanny significance, and what does that tell you?

a) A glass of milk
b) A shattered pair of eyeglasses
c) A giant Sequoia Redwood 
d) The key to the wine cellar
e) A burning mansion

Answer: Some would argue for symbolism. The shattered eyeglasses at the amusement park signify the death of the girl in Strangers on a Train. The key leads to the wine-cellar and its secrets in Notorious. You might say that the glass of milk in Suspicion, like the coffee cup and saucer in Notorious, accentuates the innocence that is menaced. The homely domestic objects contain lethal doses of poison; the threat of murder can be disguised in the least threatening of objects.

(6) Which of the following is not an authentic Hitchcock moment?

a) Grace Kelly cozies up with Harper's Bazaar while her beau, nursing a broken leg, takes a nap
b) Raymond Burr signs a contract to play first base for the New York Yankees after the death of Gary Cooper
 c) Ingrid Bergman offers her beau "a leg or a breast" as they stand on the terrace on a tropical evening
 d) With one exception, everyone watching a tennis match moves his or her head as the movement of the ball dictates
 e) Doris Day belts out Che Sera, Sera at a posh party peopled by diplomats in London

Answer: (b). Gary Cooper played Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees. Raymond Burr had nothing to do with it. In movies he played a minor character, usually a heavy, until he emerged as television's "Perry Mason." God bless his agent. Hitchcock would not have been interested in Lou Gehrig or any element of his story, which lacks a violent death, grounds for suspicion, murderous motives. There are foul balls but no foul play. On the other hand, each of the others is perfect: a) Rear Window, c) Notorious, d) Strangers on a Train, and e) The Man Who Knew Too Much, which is underrated, perhaps a natural consequence of having been made in a period of masterpieces on the order of Vertigo, Rear Window, and North by Northwest.

(7) In Vertigo

a) Who is real, Judy or Madeline?
b) Who is real, Johnny or Scotty?
c) True or false: The age difference between James Stewart and Kim Novak helps explain the nature of their relationship, which is passionate but not exactly sexual -- it is more like an event in the man's psyche, which he is destined to repeat.
d) What does Bernard Herrmann's music contribute?
e) Why does the detective reject fashion designer Barbara Bel Geddes?
f) Why are they both named Charlie, Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, and can you make the case that this, even more than Saboteur, is Hitchcock's most patriotically American movie?

Answer: You're on your own here. Go to town..

8) In the auction scene in North by Northwest, Cary Grant violates the hushed-room decorum by making wacky and contradictory bids in order to

a) attract attention because he is a certified narcissist who thinks he is Cary Grant
b) attract attention and get ejected because the cops were preferable to the kidnappers awaiting his exit
c) fulfill his part of the bargain with Ingrid Bergman, who has done her part by going to Brazil and enduring a near-lethal dose of poison administered slowly so it looks like sickness and not murder
d) warn about an imminent terrorist threat in a way that wouldn't panic the public because only one man present would understand the message
e) arouse the admiration of co-star Eva Maria Saint, who has aired her doubts about his skill as a comic actor

Answer: b) is correct. a) and e) are amusing fictions. d) is Borgesian. c) refers to the plot of a different movie, Notorious.

(9)  Which of the following does not qualify as a typical Hitchcock prank?

a) to cuff his hero and heroine during rehearsals, clear the room, and lock the door
b) to pose as the fat man in a weight-reducing ad that is espied if not read on a lifeboat full of the survivors of a shipwreck 
c) to employ Otto Preminger to play the commandant of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp
d) to suggest the act of fornication by showing a speeding train enter a tunnel
e) to kill Kim Novak twice, in both cases at the top of the church tower at Mission San Juan Batista in California

Answer: (c) Refers to Billy Wilder's movie Stalag 17. The rest are pure Hitchcock.

(10) To appreciate Hitchcock's movies,

a) you need to see them
b) You need to see them more than once.
c) you need to take into account that he was raised Catholic
d) you have to consider that he was born British but was American by choice
e) you have to acknowledge that the McGuffin is to plot as psyche is to drama and the dream
f) you must remind yourself that you, the viewer, are both the male and the female leads in the film

Answer: a) for sure, but a strong case can be made for each of the others.

Note: The multiple choice form, with which we are all familiar, is little used for the purposes of exposition. This is part of a little experiment. -- DL

The Case of Lizabeth Scott [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

The latest installment of the dialogue between Lehman and Lummis on film noir centers on this question:
What is your opinion of Lizabeth Scott as a noir heroine?

Suzanne Lummis:

I have a feeling I’ll enjoy hearing you talk about her. I like her fine, but I think the noir actresses who fare best within our contemporary understanding of acting, how spontaneous and authentic it should be, are Barbara Stanwyck and Gloria Grahame. Oh, and Claire Trevor. Back then, actresses especially were either permitted or required to be phony—and sometimes it sets my teeth on edge.  In The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers, where Scott's not a femme fatale but a friendless woman down on her luck, in one scene she did this thing that would be unthinkable for an actor on the screen today—out of the blue, she put her head in her arms on the table and made crying sounds.  Have you ever seen anyone do that in life, cry noisily face down on a table?  And in Dead Reckoning you can see the glycerin under her eyes.  It didn’t matter to audiences then, but our expectations have changed. I shouldn’t blame Lizabeth Scott; it was symptomatic of a larger problem re. how actresses (far more than actors) were trained. Also, I haven’t seen all her movies—I hear she did one with Dan Duryea that’s her best performance.  

David Lehman:

I became aware of a bias against Lizabeth Scott some time ago; she was disparaged as the poor man’s Lauren Bacall. Dead Reckoning is pretty terrible, but that’s not specific to her. On the other hand, her work in Too Late for Tears – the movie with Dan Duryea to which you refer – is marvelous. Eddie Muller showed it on TCM recently and she was, in her own blonde way, as superb a noir heroine as you could want, dispatching both Arthur Kennedy and Mr. Duryea and outfoxing a lot of other folks until she meets a bad end in Mexico. She is as ruthless, as narcissistic, as beautiful and blonde, and as exploitative of her gender as one could ask for in a noir heroine. 

Click here to read last week's installment and here for the whole series, of which this is #6 in the series.

Let’s Face the Music and Dance [by Ian Crouch]

from The New Yorker, January 28, 2010

<<<
Last Wednesday night, I was fortunate enough to be at the Allen Room in Frederick P. Rose Hall for "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," Hal Willner’s inspired rejiggering of the “Great American Songbook.” With the lights of New York forming an ideal backdrop through the venue’s glass back wall, Rufus Wainwright crooned Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” (1936). Sting emerged from the audience and lustily sang the Gershwin brothers’ “Love is Here to Stay” (1938), in what was likely the only time the standard had been performed by a man wearing cargo pants and a sleeveless T-shirt. And, following numbers by Shannon McNally, Marc Anthony Thompson, Van Dyke Parks, Jenni Muldaur, and Christine Ohlman, Lou Reed stomped his way through the great 1943 Harold Arlen / Johnny Mercer hit “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).”

The show was held in conjunction with David Lehman’s exceptional new book “A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs,” which inspired a freestyle narration by Ken Nordine, whose pre-recorded voice was piped into the room last night from on high, sounding like the received word from a better, more devious God.

Lehman’s central theme is that while the success of great popular composers and songwriters—Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II—owes much to their Jewish cultural heritage, the songs they wrote often served as a way to escape “their Jewish origins and join the American adventure.” (Philip Roth writes about this exact idea in several novels, perhaps most movingly in “American Pastoral,” and most histrionically in “The Plot Against America.”) Lehman’s foremost example of what he calls this paradox (Richard Rodgers actually attended Camp Paradox as a child), is Irving Berlin (born Israel Baline) [pictured left] who in writing such songs as “God Bless America” and “White Christmas,” was preaching a new religion, that of America itself.

Yet Lehman is both proud and protective of his own connection to these great songwriters, going as far as to cast himself as a fictional nephew to Uncle Jerry (Kern) and Uncle Harry (Arlen)[pictured right]. And he offers a clever turn on a famous line from “West Side Story” (Bernstein / Sondheim), noting that, “When you’re a Jew, you’re a Jew all the way.” His most intriguing argument is that even the songs by non-Jews of the era, “are in some fundamental way inflected with Judaism.” Lehman’s thrust is a cleaned-up riff on the classic Lenny Bruce Jewish/goyish bit: “If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish … Negroes are all Jews. Italians are all Jews. Irishmen who have rejected their religion are Jews.” The connection between Jews, blacks, and goys is not inconsequential: it forms one of the central components of music from the standards era, perhaps best exemplified by Frank Sinatra singing “Ol’ Man River,” [pictured right  on the radio in the 1940s] or as Lehman puts it, “the lean Italian dressed in white singing a song by Jews about the plight of blacks.” (It’s worth noting, also, that Lenny Bruce made an appearance last night, in the person of Steve Cuiffo, doing a version of the above bit. A crazy show!)

While navigating these elaborate and often fraught ideas, Lehman consistently applies a light touch, perfect for a book about songs with lyrics such as: “The eyes, the arms, the mouth of you,/ The east, west, north, and south of you.” That one’s from “All of You,” by Cole Porter [pictured left], a Midwestern WASP who went to Yale, yet who wrote lyrics that fit squarely into what Lehman understands as a tradition that “followed a Jewish imperative in their abundant humor, wit, and cleverness and in their ability to mix sadness and elation and to produce thereby the mysterious tingle of romance.” Porter was all about romance, and his songs “Let’s Do It,” “Let’s Misbehave,” and “You’re the Top,” can make even the most hardened stoic grin like a fool. If you’re not convinced, check out Bobby Short’s debonair version of “You’re the Top,” which includes such improbable rhymes as: “You’re a rose,/ You’re Inferno’s Dante,/ You’re the nose / On the great Durante.”

For all the fun of the pop song, however, there is an underlying sadness throughout the book. “An ode to the great songwriters is bound to turn elegiac,” Lehman writes. He includes a chronology at the end of the book that starts at 1,000 b.c., with King David (“a musician”) ruling over the Kingdom of Israel, and ends with Bob Dylan performing an electric set at the Newport Film Festival in 1965. (Interestingly, last night’s bassist was Tony Garnier, a longtime member of Dylan’s current touring band.) Lehman likes Dylan, and even links him to Harold Arlen and the other Jewish songwriters of an earlier era. But Dylan heralded, in many ways, the death of the popular standard. He—along with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—made the guitar king, and eliminated the composer/lyricist dynamic by doing it all himself. Additionally, folk and rock music communicated the anger and confusion of the time, rather than scoring points with cheeky internal rhymes and charming pathos. “The new music devalued cleverness and irony, not to mention the clarinet and the trombone,” Lehman writes.

The standards celebrated the American “good life,” something that in the nineteen-sixties suddenly seemed bourgeois, old-fashioned, or narrow. An example: As the boys in the Barry Levinson movie “Diner,” (set in 1959) argued about who was better—Sinatra or Johnny Mathis—Mickey Rourke, the beautiful young Mickey Rourke, ended the discussion, and the era, by naming “Presley,” as in Elvis, as his choice instead. That movie’s great opening scene at the dance hall now looks like a museum piece. The gentle notion of “romance” had turned to camp. Dancing was finished, and for those who have lamented the last fifty years of pop music, so was sophistication and style.

Which brings us back to last Wednesday, to Lou Reed and “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).” That killer interpretation, along with Marc Anthony Thompson’s gorgeous rendition of “Spanish Harlem,” suggested that at least for that moment—with the city lights shining in the distance, and the traffic inching cross-town—the old popular standard could live alongside rock, and that hits are hits no matter when they were written or how they are performed.

from The New Yorker, January 28, 2010. Pictured top left: George and Ira Gershwin. Bottom left: Rufus Wainwright and David Lehman after the concert.  See also the write-up that appeared in Tablet.

Percy Bysshe Shelley Goes Boating [by David Lehman]

Shelley was a classic Leo with Taurus rising. Born on this day (4 August) in 1792, he was the middle man in the greatest double-play combination of all time, Keats to Shelley to Byron. He had the vision of a prophet and the confidence of a madman and he was idealistic, with Saturn, Neptune, and Venus dominant among his planets and Libra, Leo, and Taurus among his signs. He shares his birthday with Barack Obama and Louis Armstrong, which gives you some idea of how he presaged the future of music, that art to which all others aspire, and the illusion of political change based on hopes that spring eternal in the human breast.

The symmetry in his natal chart is fearless. He is a man of heroic temper --  without Byron's lusty humor or Keats's morbid sensuality but with a power of breath equal to the wind. He died, fittingly, in a squall, at sea. The fire and earth in his chart were vanquished by the elements of water and air. His moon was in Pisces, his Venus in Leo.

Shelley made love to women sincerely, with attentive care, and wrote poems to her, whatever her name was, Jane or Mary or the third one. He didn't "hold" with monogamy. He went to University College in Oxford and got sent down for writing "The Necessity of Atheism." He was a strong swimmer, though this ability availed him naught in the end. His heterodox views made Shelley the hero of wannabe poets for a century after his death. To get a flavor of that old romantic aura, read Andre Maurois's wonderful bio, Ariel. Alas, Shelley's literary reputation took a hit from Arnold, an even more wounding thrust from Eliot, and then came the backlash in full intensity.

Everyone at the campfire had to tell a spooky story. Byron and Shelley had good ones, but Mary Shelley [right] won with "Frankenstein." They were in Switzerland. Who was Jane? He serenaded her with a guitar.The lyrics were lovely. She kept his picture in a locket along with a lock of his hair, and everything that he touched acquired posthumous value. Henry James's "The Aspern Papers" centers on the archive of a poet modeled after Shelley and what a single-minded professor will do to get at it. History has been kinder to Keats's reputation than to Shelley's, but it used to be that if you mentioned one you had to mention the other or you would have bad luck all day, the same as with James and Edith Wharton.

If Dante had been reborn as an Englishman, it would have been in the person of Shelley, who venerated Rousseau. Plato's parable of the cave could have been dreamed with Shelley in mind. He was probably the most complicated of the major romantic poets. Coleridge was his superior intellectually; Keats, always better loved, was Milton's true heir, able to pack as much sensual pleasure in a line of verse as pentameter allowed; Blake was crazier; Byron funnier; and Wordsworth captured, all in all, the spirit of the age more successfully than any of his contemporaries. But Shelley was the closest thing to a visionary in the lot.

When Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" sees a woman on the beach and composes a villanelle about her image, it is in the manner of Shelley. For a great poet Shelley wrote some really bad lines, in which he stumbles and falls and bleeds in his efforts to shed his corporeal self and merge his romantic soul with the wind that is the creative breath of God. His skylark sings to us less melodiously than Keats's nightingale, but that's paradox for you -- that Shelley, who was given to seeing things in retrospect, would oddly favor the bird of early morn.

On July 8, 1822, Shelley and his friend Edward Williams went out boating in Italy and drowned. Could Shelley swim? Perhaps not. But would he have survived the squall? Doubtfully. They were going to burn the bodies, but Shelley's heart defied the flames, refused to burn, and was rescued by Edward Trelawny. Byron said that his much misunderstood friend was the greatest man he had ever known. -- DL

Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.

The symmetry in his natal chart is fearless. He is a man of heroic temper --  without Byron's lusty humor or Keats's morbid sensuality but with a power of breath equal to the wind. He died, fittingly, in a squall, at sea. The fire and earth in his chart were vanquished by the elements of water and air. His moon was in Pisces, his Venus in Leo.

Shelley made love to women sincerely, with attentive care, and wrote poems to her, whatever her name was, Jane or Mary or the third one. He didn't "hold" with monogamy. He went to University College in Oxford and got sent down for writing "The Necessity of Atheism." He was a strong swimmer, though this ability availed him naught in the end. His heterodox views made Shelley the hero of wannabe poets for a century after his death. To get a flavor of that old romantic aura, read Andre Maurois's wonderful bio, Ariel. Alas, Shelley's literary reputation took a hit from Arnold, an even more wounding thrust from Eliot, and then came the backlash in full intensity.

Everyone at the campfire had to tell a spooky story. Byron and Shelley had good ones, but Mary Shelley [right] won with "Frankenstein." They were in Switzerland. Who was Jane? He serenaded her with a guitar.The lyrics were lovely. She kept his picture in a locket along with a lock of his hair, and everything that he touched acquired posthumous value. Henry James's "The Aspern Papers" centers on the archive of a poet modeled after Shelley and what a single-minded professor will do to get at it. History has been kinder to Keats's reputation than to Shelley's, but it used to be that if you mentioned one you had to mention the other or you would have bad luck all day, the same as with James and Edith Wharton.

If Dante had been reborn as an Englishman, it would have been in the person of Shelley, who venerated Rousseau. Plato's parable of the cave could have been dreamed with Shelley in mind. He was probably the most complicated of the major romantic poets. Coleridge was his superior intellectually; Keats, always better loved, was Milton's true heir, able to pack as much sensual pleasure in a line of verse as pentameter allowed; Blake was crazier; Byron funnier; and Wordsworth captured, all in all, the spirit of the age more successfully than any of his contemporaries. But Shelley was the closest thing to a visionary in the lot.

When Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" sees a woman on the beach and composes a villanelle about her image, it is in the manner of Shelley. For a great poet Shelley wrote some really bad lines, in which he stumbles and falls and bleeds in his efforts to shed his corporeal self and merge his romantic soul with the wind that is the creative breath of God. His skylark sings to us less melodiously than Keats's nightingale, but that's paradox for you -- that Shelley, who was given to seeing things in retrospect, would oddly favor the bird of early morn.

On July 8, 1822, Shelley and his friend Edward Williams went out boating in Italy and drowned. Could Shelley swim? Perhaps not. But would he have survived the squall? Doubtfully. They were going to burn the bodies, but Shelley's heart defied the flames, refused to burn, and was rescued by Edward Trelawny. Byron said that his much misunderstood friend was the greatest man he had ever known. -- DL

Why Poets Love Noir #5 [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis in dialogue]

What is the relationship between a Hitchcock movie and the noir genre?

Suzanne Lummis:

These days, for certain complicated historical reasons, the noir scholars maintain that film noir is not a genre— that most of these movies didn’t know they were “films noir” when there were being made. They thought they were “crime thrillers.”  On the other hand, Hitchcock movies are part of a genre. And that genre is called. . . Hitchcock. He’s one of a handful of directors with a subject area and style so consistent and distinctive that they became their own genre. (The way no one says, ‘I’m going to see a Swedish movie about suffering people searching for the meaning of their lives.’ They’re going to see a Bergman movie.)  In terms of similarity, both types of movies have crime at their center. However, Hitchcock was engaged in an almost clinical exploration of how the sense of suspense is created in the audience then exploded on the screen. The Psycho shower scene—78 camera set ups, 52 edits. Film noir isn’t as good in that area. Most were made quickly on a budget. Who had that kind of time?   

David Lehman:

The quick answer is that Hitchcock is in a category all his own. That said, some of his films are as noir as you get: Vertigo, where the hero loses his lover twice – and possibly his sanity; Psycho, where the terminal revelations, the solution to the case, are far from reassuring; The Birds, where nature erupts as if in a vicious rebuke of mankind; and the lesser Suspicion, where Cary Grant carries a glass of possibly poisoned milk up the stairs to Joan Fontaine, his timid wife quaking in bed. Others, too, have pronounced noir elements notwithstanding the feeling of relief, at movie’s end, once the culprit has been captured. The murderer dies in Shadow of a Doubt, but Teresa Wright does lose her uncle; Guy Haines in Strangers on a Train is now free to marry his true love, but the violent death of his wife was not the way he wanted it to happen; the jig is up for Ray Milland in Dial M for Murder, but how happy can Grace Kelly be, knowing her husband has tried to kill her? There are noir elements in Notorious, Spellbound, and Rear Window, but the very mention of these reminds me that Hitchcock is in a category of his own.

I’ve written an essay titled “Hitchcock’s America” that appeared in American Heritage. Maybe I should include a link. Or this poem from my new book Playlist, where I get to sneak in a mention of five Hitchcock titles in two of the lines.

I live in Hitchcock’s America
What does that mean
It means the ride always ends in an amusement park
and a girl and her uncle can have the same first name
Cary Grant is suave Jimmy Stewart has a broken leg
or a bruised psyche Doris Day’s voice fills the house
Even the Jews and the blacks are white
Even the brunettes are blonde
I confess I’m at the end of my rope,
spellbound by the notorious master of suspicion
maybe Janet shouldn’t have taken that dough or had that tryst
Joel McCrea tells America that all Europe’s lights are out
and Priscilla Lane recites Emma Lazarus’s lines
atop the Statue of Liberty

Click here to read last week's installment and here for the whole series. 

"Sometimes the cow puts her foot in the bucket" [David Lehman interviews A. R. Ammons (Part III)]

Self Portrait (c) A. R. Ammons 1977

David Lehman A. R. Ammons Interview Part III

Find Part II here.

Find Part I here. 

Self Portrait (c) A. R. Ammons 1977

David Lehman A. R. Ammons Interview Part III

Find Part II here.

Find Part I here. 

Self Portrait (c) A. R. Ammons 1977

David Lehman A. R. Ammons Interview Part III

Find Part II here.

Find Part I here. 

"To Summer" [by David Lehman]

Shall I compare a season to a day, 
a woman to a body like a violin?
Summer is the reason for my grin,
and on that violin I would play.

In the nave of her church I would pray.
Though summer’s lease hath all too short a date,
I shall fall into winter and spring to my fate,
and while you wait I’ll be frank and sing “My Way.”

But just as a whole is greater than the sum
of its parts, or `twere a bummer, rank indeed,
so a garden outlives its fiercest weed
to blossom under my green thumb.
On her I shall gaze from head to bum.
Where summer follows I shall lead.

Stacey posted this poem here on July 30, 2009. In a comment she said there was an interesting back story and Laura Orem asked me to spill it. The Moira in the anecdote, Moira Egan, was editing, together with Clarinda Harriss, an anthology of sizzling hot poems, Hot Sonnets, published by Entasis Press in 2011.

<<< OK -- I'll quote from the e-mail I sent to Moira [Egan] in answer to her question about the poem's publishing history. "To Summer" was written back in 1999 or 2000 when Nerve.com was a hot and heavy web site, a pioneer in the lit-clit cyber-sphere. Ross Martin, an editor at Nerve, who got me to write the parody of a personal ad in "When a Woman Loves a Man," was coordinating a contest for HBO, which was then promoting a series devoted to happy hookers. It was about how they were real people and what they did was consistent with feminist ideals of self-actualization and taking control of their lives. Contestants were shown photos of the lovelies and invited to choose one and write a sonnet to her. I chose the woman named "Summer," because of the season, and because summer and sonnets go together in my mind like summer and smoke in Hart Crane's. The line I lift from Shakespeare's sonnet 18 ("And summer's lease hath all too short a date") is among the most poignant I know. I feel it intensely now as we approach what I think of as high summer: hot and humid, good swimming weather unto it rains, and then the beauty of dark green trees in a haze, with the refreshment of white-flesh nectarines, and the crimson geraniums ready to sparkle when the sun returns. Anyway that's the secret of the sonnet. If summer is her name, you can't tell the tenor from the vehicle as they used to say before the New Criticism got old. The contest winner was going to get a dinner date with the lady. They decided I was ineligible. And, alas, the show wasn't a hit. But I had fun. -- DL >>>

Why Poets Love Noir # 4 [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

The soundtrack in noir movies, and the popular songs incorporated in them, whether in whole or in part, contribute significantly to the effect of the film. Which example(s) would you single out?  

Suzanne Lummis:

Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), has Dix Steele and Laurel Gray—Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame [see image on left] —sitting at a piano with other couples, listening to the silky smooth rendition of the lounge singer, vocalist and pianist Hadda Brooks, I was a lonely one, till you. I used to lie awake and wonder, if there was someone in this wide, wide world made for me…  He lights a cigarette for her, and she takes it in her mouth, such an intimate gesture. He whispers to her. They are so in love. And it will never be that good again. Nothing is going to be that good again, for either of them. If these characters had lives beyond the credits at the end, we know that each on their dying bed looked back and thought, ‘that's what happiness felt like.’  And because someone who unsettles their composure enters the club, that happiness didn’t even last the length of the song.  That’s noir. 

David Lehman

Like the cigarettes, the drinks, and the clothes -- the fedoras and trench-coats, the women's hats and hose -- the music is a critical part of the noir charm. You have composers on the order of Bernard Herrmann [pictured right] doing the soundtracks for Hitchcock's most noir films, Vertigo and Psycho. You have jazz soundtracks from Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder) and Miles Davis (Elevator to the Gallows). You have songs like “Put the Blame on Mame” in Gilda that seem to sum up an entire aspect of the noir attitude. (Click here for an enjoyable detour.) You have David Raksin’s “Laura,” without which that Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney classic would be a lesser work. You have these great American standards that show up almost as facilitators of the plot: “Tangerine” when Stanwyck and MacMurrary realize the jig is up in Double Indemnity; the same song on the car radio when Stanwyck is a spoiled heiress in Sorry, Wrong Number; “Too Marvelous for Words” when Bogart holes up in Bacall’s place in Dark Passage. (What else do these three songs , "Laura," "Tangerine," and "Too Marvelous for Words," have in common? Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics for all three.) You have unforgettable scenes. Sam Jaffe, mastermind of the jewel heist in The Asphalt Jungle, is caught because he can’t take his eyes off the teenage girl and boy dancing the lindy, enjoying themselves with the nickels he provided for the jukebox.

Note: Professor Frank Tomasulo recommends this essay, "Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir." http://www.f.waseda.jp/norm/filmnoir/visualmotifs.pdf

On JA's Birthday, Four Introductions to His Poetry

From Jacket here are introductions made by Richard Howard, Kenneth Koch, David Lehman, and Susan Schultz to poetry readings given by John Ashbery. Kenneth's is from 1963; Richard's from 1967; Susan's from 1996, and Lehman's from 2008.

Summer Camp Quiz [by David Lehman]

1) Bug juice is

a) an experiment conducted by the nature counselor
b) insect repellent for canoe trips
c) the fruit drink that is served at meals
d) none of the above

2) The song beginning "Great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts"  has all these words except

a) "mutilated monkey meat"
b) "chopped-up little birdies' feet"
c) "beetles and beets and other things unsweet"
d) "and me without my spoon"

3) A marine is

a) a John Wayne-type
b) a strict counselor
c) a humorless head counselor
d) a bed-wetter

4) When a waiter drops a full tray, the campers spontaneously sing

a) "You'll Never Walk Alone"
b) "What kind of Fool Am I?"
c) "He's a hero (he's an all-American jerk)"
d) the Notre Dame fight song

5) OD means

a) off drugs
b) on duty
c) O Delice, the name of a cheap condom stashed in a sleeping bag
d) an ordinary day

6) Color War is

a) an extension of finger-painting in Arts and Crafts (for the youngest bunks)
b) a week when the camp is divided into two teams competing in athletics, dramatics, music, and art (posters, stage scenery)
c) a recreation of a Civil War battle with everyone in either a gray or a blue uniform
d) the summer camp equivalent of war games in basic training (army)

7) Arts & Crafts was popularly known as

a) "Faigala Fiesta"
b) "Arts & Farts"
c) "Farts & Crap"
d) "A one-hour time out"

8) On Palm Sunday

a) the girl campers wear grass skirts and carry a palm branch while they dance to Neal Sedaka singing "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do."
b) even the irreligious attend services
c) the counselors (shirts) play the waiters (skins) in basketball
d) parents visit and counselors stick out their hands for tips

9) General Swim is

a) the nickname for the chief lifeguard, a veteran of secret ops
b) the time when everyone is in the pool (or lake) except the lifeguards
c) any group activity that is mandatory for all except those in the infirmary
d) the required weekly test of the buddy system

10) To keep bottles of Coke and Pepsi cold,

a) campers pool their resources to buy a mini-fridge
b) counselors bribe the cook for use of the kitchen refrigerator
c) campers stash the bottles in the back of the toilet
d) campers campaigned for the restoration of the soda machine outside the shed

On Frank O'Hara's Death [by David Lehman]

The critic says FOH was smart to die at forty
because “Death is often a good career move in poetry”

as if he committed suicide
when all he did watch the tide

drunk as in a Sung Dynasty tune
trying to embrace the moon

Elaine Equi equals everyday euphoria [by David Lehman]

For Elaine Equi on July 24, 2017

I know it's your birthday
on the fifth floor of the building
where both of us work
although we're not there now
we were there when
you told me the twenty-fourth
of July was the day I said no
kidding that's also the day my 
son Joe was born and now I'm
here (Ithaca) and you're there
(the city) and I hope your sublet
is nice remember we have 
Belmont to look forward to
(even in Boston they 
call New York the city)

--  Click here and here for more about this all-star.

"Glad to be Unhappy (with Hart Crane and Lorenz Hart)" [by David Lehman]

Today is July 21. Hart Crane was born today, so I reread his “Chaplinesque,” a poem inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Kid. Crane recognized Chaplin as a kindred spirit on an artistic mission like his own. The “we” in the poem stands for the two of them: “We can still love the world, who find / A famished kitten on the step.” In a letter Crane makes it clear that the kitten stands for poetry, and what the poem appears to be saying is that the redemptive nature of modern art makes it a Romantic enterprise, a secular version of a spiritual project.

These are magnificent lines: “We have seen / The moon in lonely alleys make / A grail of laughter of an empty ashcan.” The key phrase here, “a grail of laughter,” is a great example of a poetic image that defies logical analysis, for we instinctively grasp it as a figure of the sublime, though we know that a grail cannot be “of” laughter in any conventional sense. It is a poem I have read many times, and on one of these it dawned on me that Crane’s first name was a hidden subject in the stanza of the poem in which “you” may or may not stand for the world:

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on.

I am not sure how to construe these lines regardless of whether heart refers to the organ of the body associated with sentiment and romance or to the artist in general and Hart Crane in particular. Why would “blame” attach itself “to us” in either case “if the heart live on”? Who are “you” that we – the artist as embodied by Charles Chaplin and the poet in their separate realms – can evade? It is a difficult poem -- most of Crane’s are -- but then again, conventional meaning is not necessarily what one prizes in Crane’s poetry. Rather it’s the promise of a new meaning, ambiguous and elusive but full of possibility, as exemplified in such a triumphant phrase as “a grail of laughter.”

Poetic logic works in unusual ways, and it’s no accident that several of Robert Frost’s signature poems take place on cold winter nights, or that Hart Crane depicts the heart as inescapable and enduring, or that in a Rodgers and Hart song you can’t be in love unless your “heart stands still.” When Larry Hart writes, in My Funny Valentine, “you make me smile in my heart,” is there a clue here about the nature of the love Hart felt for Rodgers, which the latter could not reciprocate? (Here’s how Frederick Nolan concludes chapter two of his biography of Hart: “Poor Larry,” one of his close friends said. “What a shame he had to fall in love with Dick.”[1]) Could the song’s “unphotographable” but lovable individual, whose “looks are laughable,” be Hart himself? Picture Hart in the splendor of his wit and the sadness of his being the next time you listen to "With a Song in My Heart" or "My Heart Stood Still" and see if it makes a difference.

[1]  Frederick Nolan, Lorenz Hart (Oxford UP, 1994), p. 19.

Why Poets Love Noir #3 [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

This is part three of a dialogue between two poets who are hooked on film noir.

Do you believe "The Maltese Falcon" should be categorized as "noir"?

Suzanne Lummis:
It's a terrific movie but ultimately not as dark as others -- Noir Gris. But regardless of the quality of darkness, I'd feel funny about any poet of my generation, or the one following, who hadn't seen John Huston’s classic with the great Warner Brothers cast (Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha J. Cook). I'd wonder what else they hadn't seen, or read. Had they seen On the Waterfront? Had they read Orwell's 1984, or only read about it?  Et cetera. But re. Noir or Not, there's an undercurrent of pessimism that we usually feel from film noir and don't in The Maltese Falcon. However, it has many noir elements, the dialogue certainly, especially in the final scene where Bogart tells Mary Astor,  "I don't care who loves who. I won't play the sap for you! You killed Miles and you're going over for it. If you're lucky you'll get life and be out in twenty years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."   

David Lehman

The Maltese Falcon, one of my all-time favorites, is similar to a noir movie but not the same thing, mainly because the male protagonist does not succumb to the wiles of the femme fatale.  Compare Bogart in The Maltese Falcon to Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. The former belongs to a different genre, the detective story, in which justice, however much compromised, does prevail in the end.  Sam Spade refuses to “play the sap” for his femme fatale; that is alas exactly what Mitchum does with Jane Greer in Out of the Past. The division is epitomized in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. The detective stories such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter” stand on the one side, and the gothic horrors (“The Fall of the House of Usher”) on the other.  The detective story affirms the possibility of justice, of the restoration of order. The noir movie suggests the opposite and introduces the figure of a femme fatale to ensure that failure or death is the likely end of any criminal or questionable enterprise.

Beyond its antithetical relation to Out of the Past, there are plenty of reasons to consider this, John Huston’s first movie, in the context of noir.  Sam Spade is not unambiguously a servant of law, order, and ethical kashruth.  The brilliant Warner Brothers cast – Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook, Jr., and Mary Astor join Bogart – arouses noir expectations, and the status of the sculpted bird,  a fake responsible for at least three deaths, elevates the tale to the level of a parable about fortune, value, and desire.

There are a lot of other movies that I like to consider in relation to noir: Le Jour se leve [Daybreak] (Marcel Carne), if only because of the number of cigarettes that Jean Gabin smokes, and A Bout de soufflé [Breathless] (Jean-Luc Godard), primarily because of Belmondo’s imitation of Bogart. Neither is noir, but the former is like it, and the latter is an homage to it that testifies to the genre’s success. 

Click here for last week's exchange in which Night and the City and The Asphalt Jungle are discussed.

A Poem for Paul Violi, born today, 20 July

Romulus and Remus (for Paul Violi) [by David Lehman]

Look for Remus in the index of a book
And you are bound to get “See Romulus”
Which is perfectly logical but makes me wonder
About indexes, or indices, and why I prefer the former
As the plural except in a financial context, and how
An index to a book that may not exist may imply
A whole biography, as my friend Paul Violi
Showed in his poem “Index.” My late friend
Paul Violi, whom I still see in the street
Sometimes, walking along at an unhurried pace
So if I walk fast I will catch up to him at the corner
Before the light turns green.

IM Paul Viioli, 20 July 1944 -- 2 April 2011

Look for Remus in the index of a book
And you are bound to get “See Romulus”
Which is perfectly logical but makes me wonder
About indexes, or indices, and why I prefer the former
As the plural except in a financial context, and how
An index to a book that may not exist may imply
A whole biography, as my friend Paul Violi
Showed in his poem “Index.” My late friend
Paul Violi, whom I still see in the street
Sometimes, walking along at an unhurried pace
So if I walk fast I will catch up to him at the corner
Before the light turns green.

IM Paul Viioli, 20 July 1944 -- 2 April 2011

Half-Life (after Friedrich Hölderlin) [by David Lehman]

After Hölderlin

Yellow pears
wild roses
the lake
your swans
and kisses
your head
in water.

But where,
when winter,
is sunshine
and shadow?
The walls,
silent and
cold, clatter.

[from The Atlantic, October 2018]

My Mayakovsky (on His Birthday 7/19/19) [by David Lehman]

On my birthday, June 11, I write this
to salute the Russian poet born on this day,
this now future day commemorating the one
in 1893 when our hero sprang into life.

A statue of the poet stands in the square
facing the Moscow hotel where we stayed
which was once KGB headquarters
but now doubles as a casino
and offers the services of a brothel. 

"You see," the Russian professor said,
"We build statues of our poets." 
"But not before you kill them," I said.

For you, Vlaidimir, handsome, forever to be twenty-four years old,
who makes a bowtie, cigarette, and cap seem the ultimate in chic accessories,
I lift my glass of Russian Standard vodka. Nostrovia!
(Or as they say in Russian, Na Zdrovie.)

From The Cloud in Trousers (trans. David Lehman)

Maria, I want you
to ignore whatever they say about me.
I may have kissed a thousand girls
but you’re this madman’s favorite,
for I’ll gladly admit I’m a mad man,
mad about you.

Maria, I’d love it if you
and I took off all our clothes
and lie, naked and shameless,
or scared, if you prefer,
in bed.

Let me kiss you on the mouth.
On this May day come live with me
in the April of my heart.

Maria!
Poets write sonnets
to the souls of their lovers,
but I am every inch a man
and I want your body as much as
a devout Christian beseeches the Lord
to “give us this day our daily bread.”

Maria,
I confess I’m afraid I’ll forget your name
as a poet is afraid he’ll forget le mot juste
which he has looked for all his life,
the word born in a night to perish in a night,
while the soul glowed in rays of light.

Maria,
I promise you I will love your body
as much as a wounded veteran loves
his one remaining leg.

No? Why no?

But you say no.
Damn.

So once again I’ll have to carry my heart away
as a dog nurses the paw that was crushed by a train.

For more of the translation, go to LIT

For The Southern Revew, I recorded an excerpt:

https://soundcloud.com/lsupress_and_tsr/a-cloud-in-trousers-by