The Best American Poetry

"Whitman in the Eleventth Grade" [by Davd Lehman]

The following, part I of "Opening Shot," was written at the request of Sandy McIntosh, the brilliant and visionary publisher of Marsh Hawk Press:
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In high school I read “Song of Myself” in a course in American literature that began with the poets who had three names (William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Julia Ward Howe, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and never reached the moderns who went by their initials (T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden). In that context it meant something that Whitman used no middle name and only a shortened version of his forename. I liked this fellow who was “mad for it to be in contact with me,” whether “it” stood for nature, the grass, a particular person, a brook—that was how I felt, too, in my more uninhibited moments. I liked the anthology excerpts so much I bought, with fool’s luck, a thin paperback of Leaves of Grass that called itself the “original edition,” edited by Malcolm Cowley. To this day I maintain that the 1855 edition is the greatest version of this great American poem, which Whitman revised often and not always for the better.

Back in the eleventh grade, I didn’t dislike Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.” That poem gave me something to brood on. It appealed to me as a reader. Whitman, however, appealed to the poet in me, the part of me that I wasn’t aware of until then. Whitman’s language was the first thing that drew me to him, his diction, and then his caution-to-the-winds indifference to metrical models. The language of “Thanatopsis” was not the language I spoke, whereas every leaf of “Song of Myself” announced the birth of a new language, the American language, mine.

I loved Whitman’s extravagance. Everything about “Song of Myself” was extravagant, but perhaps most especially the self-celebrating “I” of the poem, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.”

This character, “Walt Whitman,” could fancy himself the poet of the body and the poet of the soul, the poet of the woman the same as the man. He was magnificent, magnifying, and magnanimous. He refashioned the American religion in the image of one who preferred the smell of his armpits to prayer, who beheld God everywhere yet could not understand who there could be more wonderful than himself. He was the poet of common sense and the poet of immortality. He was my grandfather, and he assured me there was nothing rank in copulation. Did he contradict himself? Yes, he admitted it freely. Why not? He was large enough to contain the crowd.

Most of all I loved the end of the poem. A summing up takes place here, a reassertion of the metaphoric element that ties everything together. “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,” he says. “If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.” The visionary Whitman has moments of ecstatic puzzlement when any language fails him: “There is that in me. . .  I do not know what it is. . . but I know it is in me.” In this mood he names happiness as a noble theme. I loved him as much for that as for his defense of the “barbaric yawp,” the untamed dialect of the tribe. And the freedom to contradict himself.

But what chilled me about the end of the poem, what chills me to this day, is its valediction — as if indeed a friend and not a book were departing, or as if that book had a voice and all the attributes of a man, and he was saying goodbye and god speed because he was about to die and he knew it and was not afraid. At the end of “Ode to a Nightingale” (which I had not read in high school) Keats pauses and salutes the departure of his vision. At the end of “Song of Myself,” Whitman says goodbye not to the vision but to the reader. Unlike Keats, he is not plaintive or forlorn. The poem and its author have merged entirely, and the reader has emerged as a new character, “you,” who exist as if in fulfillment of a prophecy. “You” witness the withdrawal of the vision but extend it at the same time, for “you” and “I” are one (“every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”). No period is needed at the end, because all ends are temporary, as death is a temporary condition for the poet who understands it is “lucky” to die and be reborn constantly in the form of a new reader. I was that reader, the “you” to whom he spoke when he stopped “some where waiting for you.” The knowledge that many others must feel similarly singled-out did nothing to diminish the glory.. >>>

For the rest of this essay, please click here.
https://marshhawkpress.org/david-lehman/

"Tunneling to Freedom": Notes on "The Great Escape" [by David Lehman]

Tunneling to Freedom

In The Great Escape (1963), the true story of a harrowing breakout from a GerPrevious Postman POW camp

By David Lehman | June 6, 2024

As the weather warms and air-conditioned living rooms beckon, you might find yourself in the mood for patriotic fi

As the weather warms and air-conditioned living rooms beckon, you might find yourself in the mood for patriotic films like Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) or Preston Sturges’s Christmas in July (1940). To these, I would add The Great Escape (1963), a masterly movie directed by John Sturges (no relation to Preston), which features a memorable Independence Day scene. To celebrate the holiday, American soldiers Hilts (Steve McQueen) and Hendley (James Garner) serve homemade hooch to their fellow prisoners of war, mostly British airmen, in a German prison camp. Laconic and cool, McQueen raises his glass and says, “To independence.”

By the time The Great Escape came out, Sturges had established himself as a master of the action epic with The Magnificent Seven, a Hollywood remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 tour de force The Seven Samurai. In Sturges’s film, Kurosawa’s seven swordsmen are gunslingers, but they have the same mission: to rescue a village of farmers from the bandits that prey upon them. Elmer Bernstein’s score is justly celebrated—and was appropriated in 1963 as the music for the famous “Marlboro Man” cigarette commercials.

The Great Escape, an equally powerful action epic with a score from the same composer, is based on Paul Brickhill’s book of the same title, a true account of the mass escape by captured British airmen from Stalag Luft III in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1944.

The talented ensemble cast includes three of the hombres that formed The Magnificent Seven. McQueen plays ace pilot Hilts. Charles Bronson plays Danny, whose peerless digging skills have earned him the nickname “Tunnel King,” despite his being deathly claustrophobic. James Coburn plays a wily Australian named Sedgwick.

The Luftwaffe runs the POW camp, from which the prisoners believe it is not just their right but their duty to escape—while causing as much mischief as possible for their captors. The first half of The Great Escape depicts the planning of the escape, heroic in its ambition, a team effort capitalizing on each man’s aptitude. There is a comic element, as if the escape were a game, generating amusement as well as edge-of-seat excitement. The Gestapo puts an end to the fun in the movie’s more somber second half.

The cast is primarily British. Richard Attenborough plays Roger Bartlett, the chief architect of the escape, whose prior exploits have earned him the sobriquet “the Big X.” Donald Pleasence is Blythe, an expert forger. David MacCallum plays Eric, who figures out how to dispose of the sand produced by digging lengthy tunnels starting from beneath the men’s sleeping quarters; holes in the pockets of their trousers prove an excellent means of distributing sand on the campgrounds. Two Scots play important roles: Gordon Jackson is MacDonald, in charge of security, and Angus Lennie is Ives, Hilt’s buddy—separated from him by a wall—in solitary confinement, in “the cooler.”

Of the Americans on hand, we have Hendley, a skillful scrounger and charmer who outwits a guard into handing over a highly sophisticated camera, which Blythe uses to create plausible identity cards and passports. Danny’s mate Willie, played by John Layton, helps Danny to overcome his claustrophobia, at least temporarily.

The escapees run into more than one mishap. The Germans discover and shut down one of the tunnels. The nearsighted Blythe gradually loses his sight and becomes increasingly dependent on Hendley. Hilts, an insubordinate cuss, breaks down and is shot while trying to climb the camp fence in broad daylight. Despite the loss of their compatriot, the determined prisoners persevere.

When the big night comes, no fewer than 76 prisoners, dressed in civilian clothes and outfitted with the necessary accoutrements (civilian clothes, different for each man; forged documents; a travel case), traverse the tunnel one at a time on a sled-like trolley that runs from underneath their barracks to the outskirts of the barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp. The men take off by foot to the nearest villages, then try every means of transportation they can find.

Three escapees are completely successful. Danny and Willie get away in a rowboat en route to a steamer bound for Sweden. Sedgwick, who fabricated the tools for the escape, steals a bicycle, rides it into France, stops at a café, witnesses the Resistance ambush a trio of German officers, and heads to Spain.

The others aren’t so fortunate. Though Hendley and Blythe luck into a Luftwaffe training aircraft, which flight lieutenant Hendley lifts off the ground, the plane runs out of petrol just short of the Swiss border. They crash land on a hill overlooking a band of Nazi soldiers on the hunt for them. Hendley survives the encounter and is shipped back to the POW camp.

The most thrilling of all escape routes, albeit unsuccessful, is the one “Cooler King” Hilts takes, on the motorcycle he has nabbed from a German soldier—along with the soldier’s gray uniform. Hilts rides the motorbike past a roadblock and then eludes scores of uniformed pursuers over hill and dale before he is finally caught and returned to the camp.

Bartlett, MacDonald, and Eric are among those who try the train. One has a moment of glory (Eric), the other folly (MacDonald). Eric gives his life to create a diversion that will let two others go free. MacDonald falls for the same ruse that he warned the men against; after trying to pass himself off as French, he replies in English to a German officer wishing him “good luck.” The most harrowing atrocity the film records is the shooting of 50 unarmed escapees who were rounded up and caught by the Gestapo.

The Great Escape is one of four prisoner-of-war films on my short list, the others being Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953), and David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). William Holden stars in two of these pictures, embodying the American male ideal in the postwar era (see my January 2020 column for more).

Not the least compelling aspect of The Great Escape is that—to adopt (and adapt) Marshall McLuhan’s media categories—its chief hero, Hilts (McQueen), is precisely a “cool,” understated version of the “hot” Bill Holden. Each is a loner, with a strong independent streak. In The Great Escape, Hilts whiles away the time playing catch with a ball bouncing off the prison walls, his ever-present baseball glove an assertion of his American identity. He never blows his top or makes an impassioned speech.

Some World War II films don’t make much of a distinction between ordinary German soldiers and the thugs of the Gestapo and SS. The Great Escape does. The breakout from the POW camp creates an uncertain fate for camp commandant von Luger (Hannes Messemer), a Luftwaffe officer. Von Luger has been strict but not strict enough, and certainly not as sadistic and ruthless as the Nazis would have liked. Still, he has the film’s last word. As the Gestapo drives up to the camp, he tells Hilts, “It looks, after all, as if you will see Berlin before I do.”

https://theamericanscholar.org/tunneling-to-freedom/

What's the Scariest Poem in the English Language? [by David Lehman]

             What is the scariest poem in the language? I wager that many would select Poe’s “The Raven,” and it is unquestionable that Poe has the ability, in his verse as in his stories, to scare the devil in you or out of you. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" will get votes, as it should. It is possible, however, that Robert Frost -- Frost, who was once habitually misread as a genial Yankee sage -- has written the darkest and most frightening poems in our literature. The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal confessed himself terrified by the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces.” It is Frost who captures that silence.

            The brilliant sonnet “Design” – in which a spider makes a meal of a moth -- exemplifies the view of nature that informs Frost’s poetry. Nature at work is aesthetically satisfying; it has order, pattern, design; but there is nothing moral or ethical about it. Nature, as opposed to human nature, is indifferent to individual life. Put another way, nature feeds on itself, and life requires death, as the life of the spider requires the death of the moth.

            Humanity is stupid or destructive in Robinson Jeffers’s poems, which take the side of nature against human life. Frost doesn’t go that far, but in his poems the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Man is frail, and the loss of a man may be mourned, but the mourning lasts a mere moment. In Frost’s “Out, Out – “ a boy working with a buzz saw loses his hand in an accident. The results are surprisingly fatal: “No one believed. They listened at his heart. / Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.” But what truly shocks the reader is not the death but the moment when the boy, a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart,” pleads, “Don’t let him cut my hand off -- / The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!” We infer that brother and big sister lack parents, and this knowledge deepens the pathos. 

              The ending of “Out, Out –“ seems at first to indict humanity for its essential callousness. They – the same “they” that had listened at the boy’s heart – go right on living: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Callousness or realism? The ending is similar to the ending of Auden’s great “Musee des Beaux Arts,” in which Icarus, in Brueghel’s painting, falls from the sky to his death in the sea, “and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Both poems are superb, but Frost’s will give you the chills while Auden’s more analytical approach will make you ponder the thesis that humanity is necessarily indifferent to human suffering. Click here for my reading of Auden's poem.

             Among the scariest of Frost’s poems is “Desert Places.” Compare it to Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” Both poems are about “nothing.” It may be that Stevens’s poem is the stronger of the two; it certainly requires enormous attention and rewards numerous re-readings. But “Desert Places” has something that “The Snow Man” with its “distant glitter of the January sun” lacks. “Desert Places” has terror. Here is the final stanza:

            They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
            Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
            I have it in me so much nearer home
            To scare myself with my own desert places.

 Take that, Pascal.-- DL   from the archive; October 31, 2015

             What is the scariest poem in the language? I wager that many would select Poe’s “The Raven,” and it is unquestionable that Poe has the ability, in his verse as in his stories, to scare the devil in you or out of you. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" will get votes, as it should. It is possible, however, that Robert Frost -- Frost, who was once habitually misread as a genial Yankee sage -- has written the darkest and most frightening poems in our literature. The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal confessed himself terrified by the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces.” It is Frost who captures that silence.

            The brilliant sonnet “Design” – in which a spider makes a meal of a moth -- exemplifies the view of nature that informs Frost’s poetry. Nature at work is aesthetically satisfying; it has order, pattern, design; but there is nothing moral or ethical about it. Nature, as opposed to human nature, is indifferent to individual life. Put another way, nature feeds on itself, and life requires death, as the life of the spider requires the death of the moth.

            Humanity is stupid or destructive in Robinson Jeffers’s poems, which take the side of nature against human life. Frost doesn’t go that far, but in his poems the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Man is frail, and the loss of a man may be mourned, but the mourning lasts a mere moment. In Frost’s “Out, Out – “ a boy working with a buzz saw loses his hand in an accident. The results are surprisingly fatal: “No one believed. They listened at his heart. / Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.” But what truly shocks the reader is not the death but the moment when the boy, a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart,” pleads, “Don’t let him cut my hand off -- / The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!” We infer that brother and big sister lack parents, and this knowledge deepens the pathos. 

              The ending of “Out, Out –“ seems at first to indict humanity for its essential callousness. They – the same “they” that had listened at the boy’s heart – go right on living: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Callousness or realism? The ending is similar to the ending of Auden’s great “Musee des Beaux Arts,” in which Icarus, in Brueghel’s painting, falls from the sky to his death in the sea, “and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Both poems are superb, but Frost’s will give you the chills while Auden’s more analytical approach will make you ponder the thesis that humanity is necessarily indifferent to human suffering. Click here for my reading of Auden's poem.

             Among the scariest of Frost’s poems is “Desert Places.” Compare it to Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” Both poems are about “nothing.” It may be that Stevens’s poem is the stronger of the two; it certainly requires enormous attention and rewards numerous re-readings. But “Desert Places” has something that “The Snow Man” with its “distant glitter of the January sun” lacks. “Desert Places” has terror. Here is the final stanza:

            They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
            Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
            I have it in me so much nearer home
            To scare myself with my own desert places.

 Take that, Pascal.-- DL   from the archive; October 31, 2015

"Perfidia": the song (sung by Helen Forrest & Linda Ronstadt), and the poem

Perfidia

You don’t know who these people are, or what
They’ll do to you if you’re caught, but you can’t
Back out now: it seems you agreed to carry
A briefcase into Germany, and here you are,
Glass in hand, as instructed. You rise to dance
With the woman with the garnet earrings, who is,
Of course, the agent you’re supposed to seduce
And betray within the hour. Who would have known
You’d fall in love with her? Elsewhere the day
Is as gray as a newsreel, full of stripes and dots
Of rain, a blurred windshield picture of Pittsburgh,
But on the screen where your real life is happening
It is always 1938, you are always dancing
With the same blonde woman with the bloodshot eyes
Who slips the forged passport into your pocket
And says she knows you’ve been sent to betray her,
Or else it is seventy degrees and holding
In California, where you see yourself emerge unscathed
From the car crash that wiped out your memory,
Your past, as you walk into a gambler’s hangout
On Sunset Boulevard, in a suit one size too large
And the piano player plays “Perfidia” in your honor,
And the redhead at the bar lets you buy her a drink.

- David Lehman. From Operation Memory (1990).

Perfidia

You don’t know who these people are, or what
They’ll do to you if you’re caught, but you can’t
Back out now: it seems you agreed to carry
A briefcase into Germany, and here you are,
Glass in hand, as instructed. You rise to dance
With the woman with the garnet earrings, who is,
Of course, the agent you’re supposed to seduce
And betray within the hour. Who would have known
You’d fall in love with her? Elsewhere the day
Is as gray as a newsreel, full of stripes and dots
Of rain, a blurred windshield picture of Pittsburgh,
But on the screen where your real life is happening
It is always 1938, you are always dancing
With the same blonde woman with the bloodshot eyes
Who slips the forged passport into your pocket
And says she knows you’ve been sent to betray her,
Or else it is seventy degrees and holding
In California, where you see yourself emerge unscathed
From the car crash that wiped out your memory,
Your past, as you walk into a gambler’s hangout
On Sunset Boulevard, in a suit one size too large
And the piano player plays “Perfidia” in your honor,
And the redhead at the bar lets you buy her a drink.

- David Lehman. From Operation Memory (1990).

"Sonnet 73" -- Great Poems of the World. episode 2, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

Warning: around a third of the way through a HIATUS suddenly takes place. 
Don't be alarmed. The HIATUS doesn't go on for long. That's almost the 
definition of a HIATUS, isn't it? Something that doesn't go on for long. 
"The Godfather Part III" is not a HIATUS. 

 

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

A June 11 Playlist: Happy birthday to all who were born on June 11

Let's celebrate with Linda Ronstadt, Juan Diego Florez, Fats Waller, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra, Charlie Parker, Doris Day. . .

Shades of Thomas Gray & Contemporary Criticism

In a verse chronicle in the June New Criterion, William Logan excoriates James Tate ("a wisecracker. . . [who] giggled at his own jokes"), so what else is new; he pleads with the late C. K. Williams "to shut the hell up," and makes the astounding claim that "scarcely anyone reads James Schuyler or Kenenth Koch" these days.

He loses no time in making a false assertion with the confidence of a lobbyist. "One poem like Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" will drag you into anthologies forever, no matter how dull your other poems."  Dull? Has Logan read Gray's "Ode on a Distant Propsect of Eton College," or the sonnet on Richard West's death or his 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes'." I ask readers to judge for themselves. Here is a link to Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," with my gloss on it, written for the "classic poems" section of Slate along with the other two poems I've named. -- DL

<<<
I have read Gray’s “Ode” many times and it has never failed to astonish me. It begins conventionally enough with a description of Eton seen from afar. “Happy” are the hills, “pleasing” is the shade. We anticipate an idealized evocation of the life of boys on the playing fields of Eton (where, 70 years later, the Duke of Wellington would say that the battle of Waterloo was won). But even as Gray summons up the image of the boys at their games, we get hints that Eton remembered is what Frost called a “momentary stay against confusion.” The boys “snatch a fearful joy,” we learn in the fourth stanza. The fifth stanza states the enviable condition of youth: “the tear forgot as soon as shed.” But nothing prepares us for the change in intensity signaled by the opening of stanza six: “Alas, regardless of their doom,/ The little victims play.” At the sound of the words doom and victim, the reader is in the position of a batter who had expected a fast ball and looks in amazement and dismay as an off-speed pitch curves over the heart of the plate.
>>>

Click here for the full post. 

https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/classic_poems/2013/01/david_lehman_on_why_thomas_gray_s_ode_on_a_distant_prospect_of_eton_college.html

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44302/ode-on-the-death-of-a-favourite-cat-drowned-in-a-tub-of-goldfishes

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44305/on-the-death-of-richard-west

from "Hymn to Adversity":

Thy form benign, O Goddess, wear,
Thy milder influence impart,
Thy philosophic Train be there
To soften, not to wound my heart.
The gen'rous spark extinct revive,
Teach me to love and to forgive,
Exact my own defects to scan,
What others are, to feel, and know myself a Man.

Happy Birthday, Marilyn

On June the first, birthday of  the first Lady of Gemini

I have to catch my breath running

as a wide receiver catches a football,

shaking off tacklers and heading

for the goal line, progress unimpeded,

or like an angler angling for trout,

turning over phrases languorously

when I feel a tug, catch a bite, that’s

what this jolt of morning joe, like “joltin’

Joe” DiMaggio, has done to me but if

I could calm down long enough to stop

hurrying and concentrate on the lawn

in front of me the wind at my back the laughter

from Alexander Pope’s dagger-like couplets

still echoing from last night’s reading

of The Dunciad – or maybe just to clear

the mind of words, all of them, even

the honeyed sonnets of youth not

lost, just misplaced – if I could look

at the trees darkening as a cloud covers

the sun, look at the grass, the myrtle, the pine

needles and the maple leaves and the one

rhododendron the deer have not devoured,

what then? After ten minutes of bliss,

I shall return to my mind, and she will be singing,

“After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It.”

(June 1, 2013)

"When Love Is Not Love" [by David Lehman and William Wadsworth]

When Love is Not Love

Everything you do, you do in haste,
except when you make love to the one
whose mind, face, and heart at last
made you think twice and drop the phone.

A fool and his money get a slap on the wrist.
If the meaning of Capitalism is gin and vermouth.
the meaning of Bolshevism is vodka and lust.
On a tour of your assets from north to south,

I'd like to say that it starts with your mind,
but in truth the journey starts with your eyes
and their perfect view of the lay of our land.
Your lips come next, and how can I lose?

Easy. You lose what everyone else does.
Love is not love that alteration mends.
Our only future is the only all that is,
Our only hope, the tie that binds

us now. If the meaning of love is to sin
together, the meaning of lust is just a slap
on the butt.  A fool and his honey are soon
departed, and their only future is to sleep

apart, two disembodied voices on a phone.
What did you lose today? Mind, face, money?
The one you love belongs to you, not someone
else, but you better act fast, as gloria mundi

is gone tomorrow, and life makes short work
of love.  The angelic archer may shoot
his arrow, but his aim is just a shot in the dark,
and his target the foolish human, not some heartless bot.

[ipctured above: Bill Wadsworth]

Couplets, Previously Unpublished [from "The Two Davids," Shapiro and Lehman]

In February 2003, David Shapiro and I corresponded by couplets. Here's a sample from our exchanges. - DL

Re: love and the stickerist redesigns his heroes,       
Date:   2/8/2003 7:46:41 PM Eastern Standard Time
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

Lover

He wanted to be one of the many keys she carried.
Her face was a blow which he could never have parried.

He was not even one of the keys she carried.
He wasn't Prince Hamlet. He was already married.

He took out the garbage and let in the laundry.
He sculpted hysterical misery like a foundry.

He put green snakes on Arthur Rimbaud's blue eyes.
He launched Stealth planes out of Baudelaire's thighs.

He burst James Joyce with gifts he could not give.
He surrounded Franz Kafka's with hearts, pigs and jive.

He bit the flowers of Mondrian under quarantine.
And General Buster Keaton resigned from the Green.

His presents floated above the white birch lake.
The silk on Rimbaud's eyes began to shake . >>     DS, 2 / 8 / 03

 

Re: Agamemnon’s concubine after Achilleus left Priam’s tent
From:   DCLEHMAN    
To:       DaJoShap

She wished she could believe what he had said.
She feared the words he didn’t say in bed.

She went to bed with a flower, not with a gun.
She posed for Picasso in the evning, for Matisse in the morning sun.

She played piano.for an audience of one, Ulysses in a beard.
When he was strapped to the mast, this is what he heard.

She sang beyond the sea as the Florida fat man
Transcribed, and shone like the moon on an ash can.

She was willing to accept her role in the play
if he agreed to take her to Denmark and Norway..

She was elected. She was not rejected. She came to the game.
She mastered the rules of the game and redefined fame.

She was asked what her son would get her for Mother's Day.
"A hard time," she said. Flowers surrounded her all day.

– DL, 2 / 9 / 03

 Agamemnon's concubine after Achilleus left Priam's tent   
Date:   2/9/2003 3:11:17 PM Eastern Standard Time
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

Who doesn't sulk in his tent like Mondrian.
When you sulk in Holland, it's spelled Mondriaan.

Who doesn't hope slaves be treated like tripods.
But some of them will be able to remove their kneepads.

I was embarrassed that the President undressed.
But, after all, he was brilliant to have confessed.

Agammenon shook, and all the siftings shook.
Whatever he saw he wanted, as in a book.

The old men wavered behind Helen's hook.
They said, "The war was worth it" and awoke.

Suddenly, in Egypt, Helen felt safer and slicker.
Her smooth “escape” couldn't have been more like a sticker.

The heroes sulked, and all their ankles broke.
Paris caressed the ghostly skin like a crook..   – DS, 2 / 9 / 03

 

Five Games of Blindfold Chess (Rimbaud,Fisher,Cage.Koch,duchamp)          

Date:   2/10/2003 5:52:32 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap
To:       DCLEHMAN

End Game

And someone said, Commuting is the fun part
Like Beckett's impotence, a cry of done art.

And dun art where the brown is excremental.
And I try the heroes' cloaks on‑‑in my tent lull.

The quiet stops. Hamlet walks with Pasternak.
The tiger is sheepish and the goat emits a quack.

Rimbaud and Kenneth Koch play chess at once.
Kenneth is the only one to treat Him like a dunce.

Bobby Fischer kibbitzes, says: Sacrifice queen!
Kenneth: That's near infinitude! What can you mean?!

Then sacrifice your sound, laughs old John Cage.
And Kenneth, more responsive, shouts: Oh, Act your age!

The game divorces all of them from their smirks.
They lost at chess, but we know them for their works.  – DS, 2 / 10 / 03

 

Re: The Hero's Horse and the Tyger, Mate in Three

from DCLEHMAN
to DaJoShap

Mate

What a clever fellow was our Kenny.
So sang the muses for whom he sang for pennies.

When I think of you, David Shapiro, I
Walk with ghosts on Riverside under a melting sky.

The tiger is brilliant and wiser than the didactic horse
Who stares straight ahead and never changes course.

We were wrathful young geniuses on a mission
Which ended as all movies do, with a couple kissing.

Thank you I said to him and he said thank you to me
And then we played more chess and drank more tea.  DL, 2 / 11/ 03

"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 it 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 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 it 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 Sandy. -- DL               from the archive; first posted November 4, 2012

The Day Doris Day Said Good Night [by David Lehman]

The great Doris Day, who died the other day [May 2019], was celebrated for her work in romantic comedies of the 1960s. She was box office gold with James Garner, Cary Grant, and Rock Hudson. But her real achievement was as a singer. In musical movies she gave outstanding performances as Ruth Etting (in Love Me or Leave Me in 1955) and as Mrs. Gus Kahn (in I'll See You in My Dreams in 1953). One of the finest of all Big Band vocalists, whose version of "Sentimental Journey" is a madeleine that can transport you to 1945, she sang with the Les Brown Orchestra when swing was king.

Maybe her biggest single hit was the Academy Award-winning song of 1956 in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much in which she played opposite James Stewart. In honor of Doris Day, "Che Sera, Sera" was sung at sing-alongs in smart clubs all over the nation yesterday.

Doris gets her own day in my Playlist:

1 / 4 / 18

Doris Day is a great screen name because
of Oscar Levant’s witticism  (he knew Doris Day
“before she was a virgin”) but mostly because
of the voice of Doris at break of day or when
driving on Rte 17 and listening to  her sing
“Sentimental Journey” with Les Brown (“and
his band of renown”) and “Dream a Little Dream
of Me” or “Someone Like You,” “A Hundred Years
from Today,” or “Love Me or Leave Me,”
the face cherubic, the flip side of Sinatra’s
brooding in Young at Heart, blonde
and relentlessly upbeat, but there is sex in that voice

from the archive; first posted May 15, 2019

Happy Mother's Day

To be a Guest on the Grace Cavilieri Show

To be a guest on the Grace Cavilieri show 

is better than having a banana split

on 59th Street, even better than hot chocolate

after skating on thin ice while Kierkegaard cheers,

better, even, than going to Denmark

in melancholy solidarity,

even better than the first time you memorized

whole paragraphs from Either / Or and Fear and Trembling

in those days when it was easier to memorize sonnets and soliloquys

and recite them before an adoring audience

even better than that

Anna Karenina in Fifty-Two Words [by David Lehman]

Anna K.

1.
Anna believed.
Couldn’t delay.
Every Friday
grew heroic
infidelity just
knowing love
might never
otherwise present
queenly resplendent
satisfaction trapped
under Vronsky’s
wild x-rated
young zap.

2.
Afraid. Betrayed.
Can’t divorce.
Envy follows
grim heroine,
inks judgment,
kills lust.
Mercy nowhere.
Opulent pink
quintessence radiates
suicide trip –
unique vacation –
worst Xmas,
yesterday’s zero.

-- David Lehman

from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman (Scribner, 2013). Photo: Vivien Leigh as Anna Karenina (1947)

Note: All posts by David Lehman are copyright (c) 2024 by David Lehman. All rights reserved.

Academic Festival Overture [by David Lehman]

 

O, for a quaff of Provence

after the fun of Brahms’s

“Academic Festival Overture"

as conducted joyously

by Leonard Bernstein

baton in hand

as if he’s dancing

bringing back college days

and drinking songs

on bassoons and clarinets:

it always lifts my spirits:

ten merry minutes

culminating in the all-time greatest

rendition of Gaudeamus igitur.

 

-- David Lehman

"Identity Card" [by David Lehman and William Wadsworth]

Identity Card

Identity may be difficult to define.
It equals itself, as a rose is a rose.
Tell me your name. I’ll tell you mine,

Though if I do, don't take that as a sign
That I am someone whom anyone knows.
Identity is not so easy to define.

Don'tt lose that card, or you may find
Another plays your hand.  Anything goes.
The name of the game is Anyone's, not mine.

Forensic science may underline
Our DNA, but family history shows
Identity ain’t so scientifically defined.

Released from history, nameless, a wine
Of no known vintage seduces my foes.
Tell me your name. I'llll tell you mine.

“I am who I am,” says the voice we've assigned
To God, but thanks to the dice he throws,
Our identity is impossible to define.
What's your name? Is it the same as mine?

-- David Lehman and William Wadsworth

 

For extra credit, what is the relation of the picture atop the page to the verse below?

Who Remembers Les Keiter? [by David Lehman]

Les Keiter recreated West Coast baseball games for heartsick New Yorkers bereft of the Dodger and Giants after they moved to LA and SF at the end of the 1957 season. It's the same job Ronald Reagan performed in the 1940s.

How well I remember lying in bed listening to my black Zenith radio with the lights out as the clock moved toward midnight on a September night in 1959. The Giants and Dodgers were battling for first place. In the opening inning, Don Drysdale walked the first three Giants to face him. Then he proceeded to strike out the next three. The Dodgers won, ended the season tied for first with the defending champion Braves, then of Milwaukee. The ex-Brooks prevailed in a two-game playoff, copping the NL pennant. Then they beat the Chisox in six. It was the last hurrah of Messrs. Snider, Hodges, and Carl Furillo, my father's favorite. I was eleven.

Alone in the radio studio, or maybe he had an engineer, Les Keiter would get the teletype, make an appropriate sound with a rudimentary noisemaker, and call the play. The teletype would say: Gilliam singles. Keiter would say: Antonelli goes into his windup . . .the pitch. . . a fastball down the middle . . .Gilliam swings. . .and hits a scorching line drive. . . just out of McCovey's reach. . .into right field. . .Gilliam makes the turn. . .and. . .  holds at first with a single." The next day you'd learn that Gilliam had actually beaten out a lazy roller to the left side.

Les Keiter was at his best on a close play at the plate. A sacrifice fly became a big dramatic moment. The tap of a drum stick indicated the meeting of bat and ball: Ron Fairly or Don Demeter lifted a shallow fly to center field, which Willie Mays patrolled with the efficiency of DiMaggio. Maury Wills, tagging up on third base, broke for the plate when Mays made the catch. Then: "Here comes Wills. . .Mays throws . ..and. . .and. . .he beat the ball, he beat the ball!" The crowd noise always sounded the same but that was radio for you.

Les Keiter died on Tuesday in Hawaii at the age of 89.

from the archive; first posted April 16, 2009.

"Quentyn Metsys" [by David Lehman]

Quentin Metsys

Eat a cheap peach, drink iced tea, ache kind,
Throw dice worth each system of Metsys, Quentin,
Painter trained in the north, throne of rain.
What law, O muse, old hat, new heater,
Doll's house absent wall, beats all?
Can fuse or refuse, clean lace, escape landscape,
The pear we reap, not rape, theater of satin?

O saint, my sin, no stain but dire,
There's my ride, no time to emit
On eve of every sacred dare, scared stiff,
Declared if read, dear to me, Aunt Em,
A meal of tuna salad fit for a lad, a nut, lame:
I, male, nod, don words, drowse
in an inn or a poem, not to mope
in a tub but to note a tone.

-- Ed, note: The picture at the top of the page is called "The Money Lender and His Mirrors." Who painted it? Hint: the painting below it is by the same Flemish master.

The Spirit of Parody [by David Lehman]

Who doesn't love the parodies Lewis Carroll inserted in the Alice books? What student of the late Henry James wouldn't laugh at (and with) Max Beerbohm's "Mote in the Middle Distance"? A chapter of Ulysses recapitulates the evolution of English prose styles via parody. There are delightful self-parodies, conscious (Oscar Wilde) or unconscious (Dwight D. Eisenhower). Jane Austen made her debut with a novel that parodied the Gothic novel then fashionable. In one sonnet J. K. Stephen captures both the majesty of Wordsworth at his best and the sinking feeling you get when he is at his worst. Henry Reed's parody of T. S. Eliot,  pitch perfect as it is, is true to the spirit of the author of Four Quartets: "As we get older, we do not get any younger."

The last great anthology of Parodies was compiled by Dwight Macdonald and published by Random House in New York and by Faber in London in 1960.  Veronica Geng's blurb graced a paperback edition: “If Parodies were a man I'd marry it.” In 1981 and `82 I was assisting Dwight toward a new edition of the book. He died not long after and I have little left of the project but notes. Dwight's papers are in the Beinecke Library at Yale and there's bound to be a file.

Back in 1981 I made a list of possible additions that included

Anthony Hecht's "The Dover Beach" (re Matthew Arnold);
the Ern Malley poetry hoax in Australia;
Kenneth Koch's "Variations on a Theme by WC Williams";
Nabokov's parody of Agatha Christie in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight;
The parody of Hemingway in Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely;
Wendy Cope's rendition of The Waste Land  in the form of five limericks;
Prudence Crowther, "Insanity Fair" -- parody of Tina Brown (TNR, 11/4/91)
Woody Allen "The Kugelmass Episode" (The New Yorker, May 2, 1977)
Woody Allen's parodies of Martin Buber and Flaubert
John Ashbery's "To a Waterfowl," the cento as implicitly a parody of the canon
Veronica Geng’s parody of Pauline Kael (NY Rev of Books, 1975)
Tom Disch, parody of A. R. Ammons, Poetry magazine, 1978
May Swenson parody of Dorothy Parker

I'm writing without notes relying just on memory. In 1981 I had been writing parodies of writers from Christopher Smart to Thomas Hardy. Dwight liked them, and he approved also of the historian John Clive's parodies of Gibbon, Carlyle, and Macaulay, which I brought to his attention from an issue of the Times Literary Supplement.

I believe that the most successful parodies reflect more affection than contempt for the lampooned subject. There are a fair number of parodies in my book Poems in the Manner Of (2017).

The parody as a genre is a fertile one. The whole category is undervalued. It's as if, these days, the mind is too busy having a nervous breakdown to allow for a random laugh.  

Readers are invited to bring to our attention, in the comments section, parodies in verse well-worth reading. -- DL

"Rhode Island is Famous for You" (if You are Denise Duhamel) [by David Lehman]

From the new issue of The Common:

Rhode Island is Famous for You
for Denise Duhamel

The blue forest, chilled and blue, like the lips of the dead,
show life when brought to the public eye in June,
the month of twins who divide their lives in two
or spend hours pursuing the ghost of a lover. Stacey
and I drive to the swimming pool and Blossom Dearie
sings “Rhode Island is Famous For You,” which always
makes Stacey think of Denise Duhamel, born this day
in Woonsocket, R. I.  Other children of June 13 include
Yeats, Pessoa, and Tony Towle, each of whom is a cousin
of yours, Denise, pursuing the arrow of greatness, but of none
of them is it true that Rhode Island, smallest
and possibly most underrated state, is famous for you.
And the lips that were cold and blue when this poem
began have the warmth of June and the charm of a kiss.

6/13/23
David Lehman

https://www.thecommononline.org/march-2024-poetry-feature-new-poems-by-our-contributors/